Normophobia by Mary Harrington | Articles | First Things

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/04/normophobia

19th Century Origins and the Power of the History of Ideas

“From Chapter 4 of Rosaria Butterfield’s “Openness Unhindered: Further Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert on Sexual Identity and Union with Christ” (Crown and Covenant Publications, 2015)

The concept of sexual orientation was first used by Sigmund Freud (1856–1939), and its effect, if not intent, was to radically resituate sexuality from its biblical/creational context to something completely new: the foundational drive that determines and defines human identity. Nothing short of personhood was at stake. By defining humanity according to sexual desires and segregating it according to its gendered object, Freud was—intentionally or not—suppressing the biblical category of being made in God’s image, male and female, and replacing it with the psychoanalytic category of sexual identity. In both intent and language usage, Freud took aim at the Bible’s authority to diagnose gender and sexuality dysfunctions and prescribe solutions for them.”

Read the whole thing, from The Aquila Report.

James Anderson on the Court’s [sleight of hand] Reasoning in Bostock

From James Anderson’s blog:

How then does the Court argue the point? First, it articulates a sufficient condition for violations of Title VII:

If the employer intentionally relies in part on an individual employee’s sex when deciding to discharge the employee—put differently, if changing the employee’s sex would have yielded a different choice by the employer—a statutory violation has occurred. (p. 9)

Having established this condition, it proceeds by way of illustrative examples to show that any SOGI discrimination will inevitably meet this condition and thereby violate Title VII. Here are the two paradigmatic cases offered by the Court:

Consider, for example, an employer with two employees, both of whom are attracted to men. The two individuals are, to the employer’s mind, materially identical in all respects, except that one is a man and the other a woman. If the employer fires the male employee for no reason other than the fact he is attracted to men, the employer discriminates against him for traits or actions it tolerates in his female colleague. Put differently, the employer intentionally singles out an employee to fire based in part on the employee’s sex, and the affected employee’s sex is a but-for cause of his discharge. Or take an employer who fires a transgender person who was identified as a male at birth but who now identifies as a female. If the employer retains an otherwise identical employee who was identified as female at birth, the employer intentionally penalizes a person identified as male at birth for traits or actions that it tolerates in an employee identified as female at birth. Again, the individual employee’s sex plays an unmistakable and impermissible role in the discharge decision. (pp. 9-10)

So here’s the reasoning in the first case. Both employees have the trait attracted-to-men. Only one is fired, and the reason he’s fired is because he’s a man. The other employee has exactly the same trait, but she keeps her job because she’s a woman. Ergo, the first employee was discriminated against based on his sex, which Title VII prohibits.

The problem with the example, though, is that it prejudicially describes the situation so as to deliver the conclusion that there was sex-based discrimination. Suppose we say that the relevant trait is not attracted-to-men but rather same-sex-attracted. Under that description, the biological sex of the employee turns out to be irrelevant: “changing the employee’s sex” would not have “yielded a different choice by the employer.” Presumably what the employer objects to is homosexuality as such, regardless of whether it’s male or female homosexuality. (I suppose there could be cases where an employer discriminates against male homosexuals but not female homosexuals, or vice versa, but obviously such cases aren’t in view here.)

Note in particular the reference to “the employer’s mind” in the excerpt above. What is the objectionable trait in the employer’s mind? Is it attraction to men? Or is it same-sex attraction? Clearly the two are not logically or conceptually equivalent. But the entire argument hangs on the first being the relevant trait rather than the second. Yet it’s most plausibly the second that serves as the basis for the discrimination. If that’s the case, the Court’s argument collapses.

The same analysis can be applied to the second example. In the decision of the employer, is the relevant trait identifies-as-male? Or is it identifies-as-other-than-birth-sex? If it’s the second, then there’s no discrimination based on sex, because “changing the employee’s sex” would not yield “a different choice by the employer.” Again we see that the example has been prejudicially constructed so as to ‘trigger’ the Court’s test for sex-based discrimination.

That’s not quite the end of the issue, however. Notice that the Court’s test asks whether “the employer intentionally relies in part on an individual employee’s sex when deciding to discharge the employee” (emphasis added). Gorsuch anticipates the kind of rebuttal I gave above and offers a response to it, namely, that an employer cannot determine whether an employee is homosexual or transgender without reference to the employee’s sex. Thus, for example, Frank can’t tell whether Andy is gay without knowing that Andy is male, and so Frank would have to “rely in part” on Andy’s sex in any decision to hire or fire him on the basis of Andy’s sexual orientation.

Here’s how Gorsuch tries to make the argument, again by way of example:

There is simply no escaping the role intent plays here: Just as sex is necessarily a but-for cause when an employer discriminates against homosexual or transgender employees, an employer who discriminates on these grounds inescapably intends to rely on sex in its decisionmaking. Imagine an employer who has a policy of firing any employee known to be homosexual. The employer hosts an office holiday party and invites employees to bring their spouses. A model employee arrives and introduces a manager to Susan, the employee’s wife. Will that employee be fired? If the policy works as the employer intends, the answer depends entirely on whether the model employee is a man or a woman. To be sure, that employer’s ultimate goal might be to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation. But to achieve that purpose the employer must, along the way, intentionally treat an employee worse based in part on that individual’s sex. (p. 11; italics original, bold added)

The point is clear: the employer’s decision to fire the “model employee” depends in part on his recognition that the employee is female. Thus, reasons the Court, the discrimination “relies in part” or “is based in part” on the employee’s sex. The employer is quite self-conscious about this. The employer knowingly (and thus intentionally) reaches his decision partly on the basis of the employee’s sex.

The flaw in this argument is that it conflates two distinct things:

1. discrimination on the basis of X
2. discrimination on the basis of Y, with reliance on X in the process

That one has to take X into account in order to discriminate on the basis of Y simply does not entail that one is thereby discriminating on the basis of X. It’s entirely possible to adopt a normative stance with respect to Y (favoring some Ys over other Ys) without adopting any normative stance with respect to X, even if one has to take X into account when determining Y.

To make things more concrete, consider this scenario. George owns a store that sells shoes for both men and women. He hires two people as store clerks, Andy and Barbara. Over time, George notices that some of his stock is going missing. Based on good evidence, he concludes that one of his two employees has been stealing items. As he further investigates, he discovers that all the stolen items are men’s shoes. Reasoning that a man would be far more likely to take men’s shoes than a woman, he concludes that Andy is the culprit and fires him.

Now clearly George’s decision “relied in part” on Andy’s sex. It was “based in part” on the fact that Andy is a man rather than a woman. Moreover, George’s reliance on that fact was quite intentional. But should we conclude that George is guilty of discrimination based on sex? Did George violate Title VII?

If you think so, I doubt anything else I could say would persuade you otherwise. The “reliance on sex” in George’s decision-making is clearly benign, yet it parallels the “reliance on sex” in Gorsuch’s hypothetical scenario above. What was the relevant trait or action in George’s decision to fire Andy? Was it male-shoe-stealing or was it simply shoe-stealing? What was George’s motivation for firing Andy? Did it involve any prejudice regarding Andy’s sex? The answers to these questions should be obvious.

Enough has been said, I trust, to demonstrate the fallacious nature of the argument at the heart of the Court’s opinion. Even granting what the Court claims about “the ordinary public meaning” of the Title VII statute, the notion that “discrimination based on homosexuality or transgender status necessarily entails discrimination based on sex” is just flat-out confused. It’s a bad ruling that will have very harmful consequences (and not just for religious employers).

If you have the time and patience, I would encourage you to read all three opinions (the majority and the two dissents). Alito’s dissent is devastating; he completely dismantles Gorsuch’s arguments and lays bare the many problematic implications of the Court’s decision.

June 15, 2020, was not a good day for the Supreme Court of the United States.

Ryan Anderson on Gorsuch’s Reasoning

Sum: “Justice Gorsuch’s position would either require the elimination of all sex-specific programs and facilities or allow access based on an individual’s subjective identity rather than his or her objective biology. When Gorsuch claims that “transgender status [is] inex¬tricably bound up with sex” because “transgender status” is defined precisely in opposition to sex, he presumes the very sex binary his opinion will help to further erode.”

Read it all from The Public Discourse

Can political liberalism and religious liberty (accommodation) coexist?

Can political liberalism and religious liberty (accommodation) coexist?

Similar argument made in Smith’s game-changing book Pagan and Christian in the City: “The Supreme Court might soon address this issue. Four Supreme Court justices (led by Justice Samuel Alito) began 2019 by suggesting their willingness to revisit a landmark decision with stark views on this question. In the 1990 case Employment Division v. Smith, a five-justice majority (led by Justice Antonin Scalia) made it virtually impossible to secure, under the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause, religious-based exemptions to laws that apply to everyone and do not overtly or covertly discriminate against religion (what lawyers call “neutral laws of general applicability”). The Smith decision presumes a deep tension between religious exercise and the common good. In Smith’s view, the democratic process must almost always resolve that tension. Courts, therefore, almost always deny religious accommodation requests. Justice Alito and his colleagues, however, said Smith “drastically cut back on the protection provided by the Free Exercise Clause,” and effectively invited requests to reverse it.

Revisiting Smith possesses significant cultural salience. Many of today’s progressives, conservatives, and libertarians share — knowingly or not — Smith’s critical shortcoming: a failure to explain why religion in particular and religious exercise in particular should shape the common good, even when they go against the grain of secular visions adopted in law. Revisiting Smith provides an opening to address this shortcoming. The Court should take it, as this oversight puts the American tradition of self-government at stake.

Smith and many elements of the modern American left and right possess this shortcoming because they evaluate the social worth of religious pluralism against some set of liberal values that, in their view, should supersede religious duties. For Smith, the superseding value is majoritarianism: Religious pluralism is good when democratic majorities decide it is worth their solicitude. For progressives, religious pluralism is good to the extent it supports what law professor Mark Movsesian calls “equality as sameness.” Any religious practice, institution, or tradition that understands equality differently is publicly unacceptable. For some conservatives and libertarians, religious pluralism is good simply because self-expression is good. On this view, religious liberty deserves protection simply because self-expression deserves protection — nothing particular to religion here does any work. Finally, for other conservatives who dispute that the common good is served by diverse religious expression, religious liberty is part of the common good only to the extent it establishes a particular religion’s orthodoxy.

It is not surprising that what Stanford’s Michael McConnell called “the most thoroughly liberal political community in the history of the world” would strive to define even religion around liberal ideals — but it is problematic. Liberal democracy, as Alexis de Tocqueville observed, is “particularly liable to commit itself blindly and extravagantly to general ideas.” This is partly because liberalism is, as Samuel Huntington put it in Conservatism as an Ideology, an “ideational” ideology. It “approach[es] existing institutions with an ‘ought demand’ that the institutions be reshaped to embody the values of the ideology.” This “ought demand” is present in social-contract theory, and it poses a particular problem for religious liberty. More often than not, religious exercise is manifested in rituals and institutions that are prior to — and claim to outlast — political liberalism. Reshaping religious exercise around liberal values can therefore dilute religion.

The consequences of dilution are not limited to religion. As our founders recognized, diluting religious exercise poses a problem for political liberalism; self-government presupposes certain moral virtues that religion cultivates and liberalism does not. In a culture that does not appreciate a distinct contribution from religious exercise, engagement with religion, both personally and in public life will erode — along with the corresponding cultivation of religious exercise’s personal and public goods.”

Read the rest from National Affairs (and definitely read Smith’s book Pagan and the Christian in the City).  Smith argues that there has been and always will be a vying for supremacy between the transcendent religion of Christianity and the immanent religion of modern paganism.  Compromises in the name of political liberalism are at best short-lived and at worst preferential towards modern paganism.  Any worldview that finds meaning and purpose and epistemological grounding in this world rather than another will always marginalize the transcendent religionists to the outer periphery of society (it’s a logical necessity of sorts).

Predestination and Church History (prior to Calvin)

From Professor Shawn Wright writing for Desiring God:

Luther’s and Calvin’s Catholic contemporaries argued against Reformed doctrine because it disagreed with the teaching of Rome. The Reformers argued, first, that their doctrines agreed with Scripture, but they also appealed to church history. Predestination and the other doctrines of grace were, according to them, not novel teachings, but teachings held as far back as the church fathers — especially Augustine.

Full article

The history of the Science vs Religion Myth

From The Gospel Coalition:

Ronald Numbers grew up as the son of a fundamentalist Seventh-day Adventist minister, attending Adventist schools and being taught young-earth creationism until adulthood, where he lost his faith and became an agnostic. Today he is perhaps the world’s leading scholar on the history of the relationship between science and religion.

If you were to ask Professor Numbers for the “greatest myth” about the historical relationship between science and religion, he would respond that it’s the idea the the two “have been in a state of constant conflict.”

Timothy Larsen, a Christian historian who specializes in the nineteenth century, agrees: “The so-called ‘war’ between faith and learning, specifically between orthodox Christian theology and science, was manufactured . . . . It is a construct that was created for polemical purposes.”

If these two historians—one an agnostic, one a confessional Christian—both agree this is a manufactured myth, then who is to blame for inventing it?

That distinction falls to American scholars from the nineteenth century: (1) Andrew Dickson White (1832-1918), the founding president of Cornell University, and (2) John William Draper (1811-1882), professor of chemistry at the University of New York.

Read the rest

Critique of National Geographic Transgenderism claims

From The Public Discourse:

The January 2017 issue of National Geographic is dedicated to exploring what it calls the “Gender Revolution”—a post-Sexual Revolution movement that seeks to deconstruct traditional understandings about human embodiment, male-female sexual dimorphism, and gender. In an article titled “Rethinking Gender,” Robin Marantz Henig cites evolving gender norms as a justification for the Gender Revolution. But Henig’s argument is not only unpersuasive, it’s also based on a radical proposal about human nature that is at odds with both natural law and biblical anthropology.

The purpose of this essay is not to address every facet of gender that Henig explores. Rather, our goal is to address some of the more glaring errors in the piece. Many of the criticisms below apply not only to Henig’s article, but to the broader philosophical problems inherent within the transgender movement.

Gender Identity, Category Confusion, and Moral Inconsistency

First (and most problematic): Henig offers no substantive argument for why one’s internal, self-perception of his or her “gender identity” ought to determine one’s gender or have authority greater than one’s biological sex. The essay offers testimonies of people who say that their gender identity is at odds with their biological sex. But testimony is not sufficient. Asserting a claim does not demonstrate the authenticity of that claim. Readers are given no explanation for why we ought to regard the claims of one’s gender identity as reality rather than a subjective feeling or self-perception.

Indeed, this is the crux of the matter that plagues the transgender movement. It is based not on evidence, but on the ideology of expressive individualism—the idea that one’s identity is self-determined, that one should live out that identity, and that everyone else must respect and affirm that identity, no matter what it is. Expressive individualism requires no moral argument or empirical justification for its claims, no matter how absurd or controverted they may be. Transgenderism is not a scientific discovery but a prior ideological commitment about the pliability of gender.

Secondly, Henig commits a fallacy of composition by linking intersex conditions with transgenderism. These are very different categories. “Intersex” is a term that describes a range of conditions affecting the development of the human reproductive system. These “disorders of sex development” result in atypical reproductive anatomy. Some intersex persons are born with “ambiguous genitalia,” which make sex determination at birth very difficult.

It is precisely on this point that intersexuality is very different from transgenderism. Those who identify as transgender are not dealing with ambiguity concerning their biological sex. Transgenderism refers to the variety of ways that some people feel that their gender identity is out of sync with their biological sex. Thus, transgender identities are built on the assumption that biological sex is known and clear.

Original Link

Does religion make good people do bad things? Without God, is such a judgment even intelligible?

From Steve over at Triablogue:

Steven Weinberg says: “Religion is an insult to human dignity. Without it you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

To which Freeman Dyson parried, “And for bad people to do good things–that takes religion.”

i) Dyson makes a good point. Good religion prompts some people to do good things they wouldn’t do if left to their own devices.

But I’d like to address Weinberg’s allegation on its own terms.

ii) There’s no such thing as “human dignity” given atheism.

iii) There’s a certain paradox in saying good people do evil things. Does Weinberg mean they are still good at the time they commit evil? Or does he mean people who’d otherwise be good become morally warped by religion?

iv) Weinberg thinks his slam against “religion” is devastating, yet there’s a sense in which a religious believer might agree with him. That’s because Weinberg is attacking religion in general. As an atheist, he thinks all religion is bad. But, of course, religionists are typically more discriminating. For instance, I think Islam inspires “good” people to do evil things. Likewise, the Bible says paganism inspires “good” people to do evil things.

Here I’m using “good” in the sense that false religion can make people morally twisted. Of course, there’s another sense in which bad religion is the product of morally twisted people. Those aren’t mutually exclusive explanations. Rather, they feed on each other. Bad people invent bad religion, while bad religion makes people worse. They imagine they have an absolute duty to commit evil.

v) Weinberg is arbitrarily selective. Secular ideologies can inspire “good” people to do evil things. Take Communism. A utopian, idealistic ideology that inspired torture, mass murder, &c.

vi) For that matter, some otherwise “good” people do bad things because they find themselves in a coercive situation. Take men conscripted to fight in unjust wars. If they refuse, they will be shot. So they do what’s required of them, although they may do the bare minimum.

vii) A final problem is that Christian ethics is incommensurable with secular ethics. Weinberg deems some actions to be evil which Christian ethics deems to be good; Weinberg deems some actions to be good which Christian ethics deems to be evil. There’s not much common ground.

What has Augustine to do with Neoclassical Economics?

From John Mueller (full article):

I’m grateful to my old friends at the Tocqueville Forum and the Society of Catholic Social Scientists, Patrick Deneen and Steven Brust, and pleased to join John Médaille and Barry Lynn for this discussion of “Economics at the Crossroads.” Though also disconcerted to find myself on this side of the podium. I’ve attended the Tocqueville Forum so often that Tara Jackson said she was surprised I had never submitted an IRS W-9 form. Yet, as Walker Percy warned in Lost in the Cosmos, “a charade was being played” with “William Faulkner, doing a morning’s work, then strolling in the town square to talk to the farmers and have a Coke at Reed’s drugstore…. Though Faulkner went to great lengths to pass himself off as a farmer among farmers, farmer he was not.” Or take “Søren Kierkegaard, who, every hour, would jump up from his desk, rush out into the streets of Copenhagen, and pass the time with shopkeepers. . . ..[B]y his own admission, he was playing the game of being taken for an idler at the very time he was writing ten books a year.” Now I too must admit, every month, by jumping up from my desk, rushing out into the streets of Washington, and passing the time at the Tocqueville Forum, to have been playing the game of being taken for an idler, at the very time I was churning out a book every ten years!

The thesis of my book is straightforward: The most important element in economics is missing, and its rediscovery is priming a revolution the likes of which has occurred just three times in more than 750 years.

I must begin with a simple but widely overlooked fact: the logical and mathematical structures of scholastic, classical and neoclassical economics differ fundamentally. Yet few economists today are aware of the differences because American university economics departments, led by the University of Chicago in 1972, abolished the previous requirement that students of economics master its history before being granted a degree. This calls for a brief, structural history of economics.

What is economics about? Jesus once noted — I interpret this as an astute empirical observation, not divine revelation — since the days of Noah and Lot, people have been doing, and until the end of the world presumably will be doing, four kinds of things. He gave these examples: “planting and building,” “buying and selling,” ‘marrying and being given in marriage,” and “eating and drinking” (Luke 18:27-28). In other words, we produce, exchange, give, and use (or consume) our human and nonhuman goods.

That’s the usual order in our action. But as St. Augustine first explained, the order is different in our planning. First we choose For Whom we intend to provide; next What to provide as means for those persons. Finally, Thomas Aquinas latter added, we choose How to provide the chosen means, through production (always) and exchange (almost always), both of which Aristotle had described.

So, economics is essentially a theory of providence: it describes how we provide for ourselves and the other persons we love, using scarce means that have alternate uses. Human providence is a synonym for the cardinal virtue of prudence. Aristotle had divided moral philosophy into ethics and politics. But he also aptly described humans as “rational,” “matrimonial,” and “political animals.” So Aquinas redivided moral philosophy into three, distinguishing personal, domestic, and political prudence — or equivalently, “economy” — according to the social unit described.

Scholastic ‘AAA’ economics (c.1250-1776) began when Aquinas first integrated these four elements (production, exchange, distribution, and consumption) into an outline of personal, domestic, and political economy, both positive and normative, organizing Aristotle’s contributions according to Augustine’s framework. The scholastic economic theory was taught at the highest university level for more than five centuries by every major Catholic and (after the Reformation) Protestant economic thinker before Adam Smith — notably Lutheran Samuel Pufendorf, whose work was used by Adam Smith’s own teacher to teach Smith economics, and also highly recommended by Alexander Hamilton.

Classical economics (1776-1871) began when Adam Smith cut these four elements to two, trying to explain what he called “division of labor” (specialized production) by production and exchange alone. Smith was addressing the main drawback of scholastic economics, which lay not in the theory itself, but the routine assumption that the economy did not grow in the long run — which had been true on average for about two millennia. To explain growth, Smith and classical followers like David Ricardo undoubtedly advanced the two elements Smith retained. But it was on oversimplification.

Neoclassical economics (1871-c.2000) began when three economists dissatisfied with the practical failure of Smith’s classical outline independently but almost simultaneously reinvented Augustine’s theory of utility, starting its reintegration with the theories of production and exchange.

Thus Adam Smith’s chief significance is not what he added to, but rathersubtracted from economics. As Joseph Schumpeter noted in his History of Economic Analysis, “The fact is that the Wealth of Nations does not contain a single analytic idea, principle or method that was entirely new in 1776.”

Neoscholastic economics (c.2000-). I argue that Neoscholastic economics is already and will continue to revolutionize economics in coming decades, by replacing its lost cornerstone, the theory of distribution.

This historical analysis offers a framework for analyzing other schools of economics. But I will not pursue these lesser differences unless someone asks.

Since Smith essentially “de-Augustinized” economic theory, a re-evaluation is overdue and quite likely for Adam Smith but especially Augustine. So I’ll consider Augustine’s contribution to both scholastic and today’s neoclassical economics, then give an example of the problems in today’s neoclassical economics caused by the failure to restore them, and close with a word about the world views implicit in each theory.

A. Positive scholastic theory. To explain the Two Great Commandments, Augustine had started from Aristotle’s insight that “every agent acts for an end” and his definition of love — willing some good to some person. But Augustine drew an implication that Aristotle had not: every personalways acts for the sake of some person(s). For example, when I say, “I love vanilla ice cream,” I really mean that I love myself and use (consume) vanilla ice cream to express that love (in preference, say, to strawberry ice cream or Brussels sprouts, which reflects my separate scale of utility). Augustine also introduced the important distinction between “private” goods like bread, which inherently only one person at a time can consume, and “public” goods (like a theater performance, national defense, or enforcement of justice) which, at least within certain limits, many people can simultaneously enjoy, because they are not “diminished by being
shared.”
In other words, Augustine’s crucial insight is that we humans always act on two scales of preference — one for persons as ends and the other for other things as means: personal love and utility, respectively. Moreover, we express our preferences for persons with two kinds of external acts. Since man is a social creature, Augustine noted, “human society is knit together by transactions of giving and receiving.” But these outwardly similar transactions may be of two essentially different kinds, he added: “sale or gift.” Generally speaking, we give our wealth without compensation to people we particularly love, and sell it to people we don’t, in order to provide for those we do love. Since it’s always possible to avoid depriving others of their own goods, this is the bare minimum of love expressed as benevolence or goodwill and the measure of what Aristotle called justice in exchange. But our positive self-love is expressed by the utility of the goods we provide ourselves, and our positive love of others with beneficence: gifts. Hate or malevolence is expressed by the opposite of a gift: maleficence or crime.

The social analog to personal gifts is what Aristotle called distributive justice, which amounts to a collective gift: it’s the formula social communities like a family or nation under a single government necessarily use to distribute their common (jointly owned) goods. Both a personal gift and distributive justice are a kind of “transfer payment”; both are determined by the geometric proportion that matches distributive shares with the relative significance of persons sharing in the distribution; and both are practically limited by the fact of scarcity.

That’s “positive” scholastic economics in a nutshell: describing what is, not necessarily what ought to be.

B. Normative” scholastic theory. We naturally love ourselves, Augustine pointed out. All other moral rules are derived from the Two Great Commandments because these measure the degree to which our love is “ordinate”: rightly ordered. If a good were sufficiently abundant we could and should share it equally with everyone else. But with such goods as time and money, which are “diminished by being shared” (i.e., scarce), this is impossible. Therefore “loving your neighbor as yourself” can’t always mean equally with yourself: “All men are to be loved equally. But since you cannot do good to all,” Augustine concluded, “you are to pay special regard to those who, by the accidents of time, place, or circumstances, are brought into closer connection with you.”

The (neo-) scholastic model is a powerful tool of analysis. In the book I suggest several important applications, which I’m willing to discuss at the drop of a question. In view of our severe time limits, though, I will focus here on one simple and striking example: the inverse tradeoff between fatherhood and crime.
In a famous paper co-authored with John J. Donohue and later featured in his book (and now movie) Freakonomics, Steven D. Levitt argued that after abortion was legalized by several states starting in the late 1960s and nationwide by Roe v. Wade in 1973, millions of fetuses were killed who, when old enough, would have been disproportionately likely to commit crimes. Abortion’s culling of them should therefore have lowered crime rates. To prove this, Levitt and Donohue looked at crime rates 15-18 years after Roe and claimed to have found the drop they had predicted.

However, Levitt and Donohue actually found their results indistinguishable whether they used 1970s or 1990s abortion rates to try to explain overall ’90s crime rates. When both were included the models went statistically haywire (“standard errors explode due to multicollinearity”). Failing to uncover any statistically valid evidence for either a 20-year lag or for no lag, Levitt and Donohue replaced the missing facts with an arbitrary assumption: “Consequently, it must be recognized that our interpretation of the results relies on the assumption that there will be a fifteen-to-twenty year lag before abortion materially affects crime.”
They justified their assumption by quipping that “infants commit little crime.” But nearly all violent crime is committed by men (women are equal only in nonviolent crime) precisely the ages of the fathers of aborted children. In short, the missing variable is “economic fatherhood.” (“Economic” fatherhood is defined not by biological paternity nor residency with but provision for one’s children.) The relationship between economic fatherhood and crime is a straightforward application of Augustine’s personal “distribution function” to the most valuable scarce resource of mortal humans: our time.

Including “economic fatherhood” as a variable not only invalidates Levitt’s claim but reverses it. As far back as data exist, rates of economic fatherhood and homicide have been strongly, inversely “cointegrated” — a stringent statistical test characterizing inherently related events, like the number of cars entering and leaving the Lincoln Tunnel. Donohue and Levitt’s correlation is thus shown to be a “spurious regression,” which was misspecified by omitting a crucial variable: the one describing Augustine’s personal “distribution function.” Legalizing abortion didn’t lower homicide rates 15-20 years later by eliminating infants who might, if they survived, have become murderers: it raised the homicide rate almost at once by turning their fathers back into men without dependent children-a small but steady share of whom do murder. The homicide rate rose sharply in the 1960s and ’70s when expanding welfare and legal abortion sharply reduced economic fatherhood, and it dropped sharply in the ’90s partly due to a recovering birth rate, but mostly because welfare reform and incarceration raised the share of men outside prison who were supporting children. [This scenario didn’t occur to Levitt not because of a lack of ingenuity or data but because of the inherent weakness of the theory he was trying to apply, which Nobel Prize-winning economists George J. Stigler and Gary S. Becker, Levitt’s mentor, called the “economic approach to human behavior.” Levitt was unable to see the true correlation between abortion and crime because he was among the first victims of the epic change in the teaching of economics orchestrated by Stigler with Becker’s support].

The choice of 1776. What I call “Smythology” (with two y’s) is the myth that Adam Smith invented or is somehow indispensable to understanding economics. By far the most influential piece of “Smythology” was Milton Friedman’s linking in Free to Choose of “two sets of ideas — both, by a curious coincidence published in the same year, 1776…. the economic principles of Adam Smith…and the political principles expressed by Thomas Jefferson.”Like many others, I found Friedman’s argument persuasive and incorporated it into my own views, until I discovered that the “choice of 1776” was actually a divergence, not a convergence, and of three, not two world views. The third event of 1776 was the death of Smith’s dear friend, the Epicurean skeptic David Hume.

When the Apostle Paul preached in the marketplace of Athens (probably in 51 A.D.), he prefaced the Gospel with a Biblically orthodox adaptation of Greco-Roman natural law. The evangelist Luke tells us that “some Epicurean and Stoic philosophers argued with him” (Acts 17:18). The same dispute has continued ever since, particularly among scholastic, classical, neoclassical, and now neoscholastic e
conomists.

In (neo-) scholastic natural law, economics is a theory of rational providence, describing how we choose both persons as “ends” (expressed by our personal and collective gifts) and the scarce means used (consumed) by or for those persons, which we make real through production and exchange. By dropping both distribution and consumption, Smith expressed the Stoic pantheism that viewed the universe “to be itself a Divinity, an Animal” (as he put it in an early but posthumously published essay), with God conceived as its immanent soul, so that sentimental humans choose neither ends nor means rationally; instead, “every individual…intends only his own gain…and is led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.” By restoring consumption but not distribution, neoclassical economics expresses the Epicurean materialism that claims humans somehow evolved in an uncreated world as merely clever animals — highly adept at calculating means but not ends, since “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions,” as Hume put it. The three theories provide three views of both human and divine nature, but only the anthropology and theology of the scholastic theory are compatible with Christian orthodoxy.

As historian of economics Henry William Spiegel noted of the “marginal revolution” that ended classical and launched neoclassical economics in the 1870s, “Outsiders ranked prominently among the pioneers of marginal analysis because its discovery required a perspective that the experts did not necessarily possess.” I don’t underestimate the time or effort it will take. But I confidently predict that in coming decades, neoclassical economists now advocating the “economic approach to human behavior” will either become or else be supplanted by “neoscholastic” economists — who will find full employment rewriting neoclassical theory because they understand the original “human approach to economic behavior” of Aristotle, Augustine, and Aquinas.

John Mueller is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, D.C.

The Truth About Inherit the Wind by Carol Iannone | Articles | First Things

http://www.firstthings.com/article/1997/02/002-the-truth-about-inherit-the-wind–36

Even if we have what they wrote, can we trust it? NT Reliability

I’ve written and taught on the issue of textual criticism of the bible (do our many manuscript copies of the bible reflect the original autographs; just search ‘textual criticism’ in the blog search engine). But there is the other question that must be addressed.  Can we trust what these copies say?  Can we trust the gospels?  Two lectures are worth your time on this from two NT scholars: Craig Blomberg and Peter Williams.

 

Guy Waters on the New Perspective on Paul

Stephen Nichols: We are visiting again with our good friend Dr. Guy Waters. Dr. Waters, welcome back.
Guy Waters: Thank you, Dr. Nichols.
SN: Most of the time we look to the past in the church but church history is being written. But it’s being written today. And I suspect if the Lord were to tarry, that as the church history books are written, one of the things they will talk about of the early twenty-first century is the New Perspective on Paul. You’ve written a number of books on the New Perspective. Would you tell us, what is the New Perspective on Paul?
GW: The New Perspective on Paul is not as new as it used to be. It’s been around forty years or so, but it is an epochal movement in the study of Paul. It begins with the reevaluation of the Judaism contemporary to the New Testament writers. It argues that we need to understand that Judaism was a religion of grace. If we think of it as a religion of works we have misunderstood what it was about. Now that raises a question, of course, because if Judaism is a religion of grace, then why does the New Testament take issue with Judaism? If Judaism was a religion of merit or of works, and the gospel is a gospel of grace, then we understand the difference. But if they’re both promoting grace, then where’s the difference?
The New Perspective argues that the real difference between Judaism and first-century Christianity lay in a couple of areas. One, of course, was Christianity’s conviction that Jesus is the Messiah. But beyond that, the New Perspective argues that Christianity was advancing inclusivism, that is to say, that the people of God included not only Jews but also Gentiles. That becomes significant in the way in which the Apostle Paul’s teaching on justification comes to be reenvisioned. Justification is no longer understood to be the way in which a sinner is declared righteous on the basis of the imputed righteousness of Jesus Christ and received through faith alone. Justification is said to speak of God’s declaring a person, Jew or Gentile, to be a member of His covenant people, His church, because of that person’s faith. Faith is that person’s badge, his identifier, his identify marker, not works of the law, not Sabbath or circumcision or other distinctively Jewish ordinances. So justification has historically been understood in the church to answer the question of the Philippian jailer—”What must I do to be saved?” And the New Perspective says, “That’s the wrong question. Justification as Paul advances it is not really concerned to answer that question.”
SN: It seems like if you want to have the gospel you need to have the doctrine of justification, and behind that you need to have the doctrine of imputation. Is that what’s at stake here?
GW: The problem is that when they do begin to talk about the salvation of the sinner, it’s done in such a way that there’s no place for imputed righteousness and it becomes Christ’s work on the cross plus the work of the Spirit in me, my good works as a Christian. These combine so that I can be just or accepted on the day of judgment. And there’s nothing new about that. That’s precisely the position that the Protestant Reformers were protesting against at the time of the Reformation.
SN: Dr. Waters, thank you for helping us understand this crucial departure from the orthodox understanding of the gospel.
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Sigh. Answering again: Did Jesus Ever Exist?

Well, its that time of year.  Christmas is almost a week away and we are already seeing various media channels releasing stories, articles, and documentaries on Jesus.  And when the dust settles, they all make the same point: the real Jesus is a lot different than you think.

As some might recall, this same sort of thing happened last Christmas with Kurt Eichenwald’s Newsweek article, “The Bible: So Misunderstood It’s a Sin.”  You can read my two part response hereand here.

This Christmas it is happening again with an article by Valerie Tarico, “Here are Five Reasons to Suspect Jesus Never Existed.”  But she takes things even further than most other Christmas articles on Jesus.  Rather than suggesting Jesus is different than we think, she is arguing that Jesus never existed at all.

I suppose that might put a damper on some people’s Christmas.

Before I respond to her five reasons below, it may be helpful to understand how unusual articles like this really are. The reason most Christmas articles simply want to rewrite the story of Jesus is because virtually all scholars agree–liberal and conservative alike–that there is little reason to doubt his existence.

Indeed, so convinced are scholars that Jesus certainly existed, that it is difficult to even find scholars who might argue otherwise.  The most notable modern example is no doubt Richard Carrier and his book, The Historicity of Jesus.

And incredibly, even the consummate biblical critic, Bart Ehrman, has responded to Carrier in his book, Did Jesus Exist?  I must say, it is an unusual experience reading Erhman when he is actually defending (to some degree) the historicity of the Gospel accounts!

So, can Tarico (a psychologist by training) overcome the vast scholarly consensus in favor of Jesus’ existence?  Here are her five arguments:

Read the rest

A privileged species

Documentary from the Discovery Institute:

World Religions scholar Dr. Timothy Tennet discusses peace within Islam

Helpful.  He breaks it down exegetically, historically, and how modern Muslim scholars re-interpret jihad passages.

Link to the audio: From Biblical Training Lecture Series on Islam

 

On being Intellectually Honest in the Political Islam discussion

Shadi Hamid, Muslim and scholar of Political Islam at Brookings, writes a good piece on the discussion surrounding Islam, democracy, and groups like ISIS.  In a day where even asking the question about whether Islam is compatible at its core with democracy and whether ISIS can be quickly dismissed simply as a departure from Islam, his article is poignant.

I’m not a scholar of Political Islam, but in my own area (Christianity and Political Theory), I know it to be intellectually dishonest for me to say that liberal democracy arose in the West despite orthodox Christianity and in no way because of it.  From what I know of political Islam and what we observe in history, it is not implausible to say that liberal democracy will arise in the Middle East despite orthodox Islam and not because of it.  That is an intellectually honest statement on my part, but it invites charges of bigotry.  I will have to live with that.

The reason why the charge of bigotry is sure to follow a statement like that is because of the postmodern liberal fallacy that all religions are the same.  They are all equally compatible with liberal democracy or they are all irrelevant to it.  Religions are infinitely malleable and can be molded into whatever shape we want.  In other words, religions are like cars.  They are basically the same, take you to the same places (in this life or the next), and only differ really in furnishings and brand names.  But when we buy into this fallacy, we analyze religion and politics using only half our brains.

No, it can be the case, and it isn’t bigotry saying so, that some religions are more or less compatible with liberal democracy than others.  It can be the case, and it isn’t bigotry saying so, that some religions require little adjustment for the teachings of their core central figures, sacred texts, to accommodate liberal democracy than others.  It can be the case, and it isn’t bigotry to say so, that some religions will need to recover its orthodoxy in order to embrace liberal democracy (I think this is what the Reformation did in church history) while others will need to depart from that orthodoxy and invent something radically new in order to do so.

Hamdi writes:

Every time the Islamic State commits yet another attack or atrocity, Muslims, particularly Western Muslims, shudder. Attacks like the ones in Paris mean another round of demands that Muslims condemn the acts, as if we should presume guilt, or perhaps some indirect taint.

The impulse to separate Islam from the sins and crimes of the Islamic State, also known as ISIS, is understandable, and it often includes statements such as ISIS has “nothing to do with Islam” or that ISIS is merely “using Islam” as a pretext. The sentiment is usually well-intentioned. We live in an age of growing anti-Muslim bigotry, where mainstream politicians now feel license to say things that might have once been unimaginable.

To protect Islam – and, by extension, Muslims – from any association with extremists and extremism is a worthy cause.

But saying something for the right reasons doesn’t necessarily make it right. An overwhelming majority of Muslims oppose ISIS and its ideology. But that’s not quite the same as saying that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam, when it very clearly has something to do with it.

If you actually look at ISIS’s approach to governance, it would be difficult – impossible, really – to conclude that it is just making things up as it goes along and then giving it an Islamic luster only after the fact.

It is tempting, for example, to look at the role of former Saddam-era Baathist party officers in the organization’s senior ranks and leap to the conclusion that religion can’t matter all that much. Yet many younger Baathists came up through Saddam Hussein’s late-period Islamization initiative, and, in any case, just because someone starts as a Baathist – or any other kind of secular nationalist – doesn’t mean they can’t, at some later point, “get” religion.

There is a role for Islamic apologetics – if defending Islam rather than analyzing it is your objective. I am a Muslim myself, and it’s impossible for me to believe that a just God could ever sanction the behavior of groups like ISIS.

But if the goal is to understand ISIS, then I, and other analysts who happen to be Muslim, would be better served by cordoning off our personal assumptions and preferences. What Islam should be and what Islam is actually understood to be by Muslims (including extremist Muslims) are very different things.

For scholars of Islamist movements and Islam’s role in politics, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, there should be one overarching objective: to understand and to explain, rather than to make judgments about which interpretations of Islam are correct, or who is or isn’t a “true” Muslim.

In addition to being a Muslim, I am an American, as well as a small-l liberal. I have written about how, even if we personally believe liberalism is the best available ideological framework for ordering society, that should not be allowed to distort our understanding of mainstream Islamist movements such as, say, the Muslim Brotherhood and its analogues across the region.

It makes little sense to compare Islamists to some liberal ideal, when they are a product of very different contexts than our own.

The “is ISIS Islamic?” debate can seem circular and exhausting. But it’s an important one nonetheless. Islamic apologetics lead us down a path of diminishing the role of religion in politics. If the past few years of Middle Eastern turmoil have made anything clear, it’s that, for Islamists of various stripes – mainstream or extremist – religion matters.

 Original Link from the Washington Post

Cheer up Bill Nye, I don’t think you are just a speck

Bill Nye insists that he is just a meaningless speck, living on a speck, surrounded by other specks. Don’t despair Bill, neither science nor revelation agrees with you.

How comprehensive does God intend gender complementarity to be? Cherney: “Are Women Real?”

Most evangelicals are gender complementarians (equal but different). But some limit that complementarity to the church and home. But how comprehensive does God intend gender complimentarity to be? Thorny issue on which reasonable Christians disagree. Here is one take.

“From Lily Cherney (Are Women Real?):

Growing up as a secular person, as a materialist, I didn’t have any category in my world for the existence of real categories, of “natures.” All was one, or all was bits and pieces, or whatever—it was all just matter in motion. The idea that there is some real thing called human nature, and moreover that it gets even more complicated than that and there is a feminine nature and a masculine nature—those were supernatural ideas, as floridly and extravagantly supernatural as unicorns or resurrections or Narnia. That they also, strangely, matched my actual experience of the world more accurately than the materialist story—that they seemed to come with better evidence—was… spooky.”

Read it all

Nietzche’s restless heart, and ours

From RR Reno (clip):

Nietzsche’s almost unwilling final affirmation of the ascetic impulse echoes St. Augustine’s basic insight into the human condition. Our hearts are restless. The human animal wishes to give itself to something higher. It is a need more basic than our instinctual urges. It is a nature more fundamental than everything our age wishes us to affirm as natural.

Our restless hearts suggest that the real dangers of the present age are not to be found in an open-ended, nihilistic non-judgmentalism that encourages us to imagine our world devoid of compelling truths. Such possibilities are abroad, but, as anyone who has been exposed to our educational establishment knows, it requires the constant infusion of disciplinary energy to keep young people from actually believing something.

Instead, if Nietzsche is right, the danger we face may be idolatry. Deprived of a God worth worshiping, we will find substitutes, even to the point of ­prostrating ourselves before birds or animals or reptiles that our modern minds have transformed from graven images into shrill moral imperatives and brittle political causes.

The last century’s graveyards testify to the reality of this danger. Turned away from something truly greater than ourselves, we do not come to rest in a modest ­loyalty to humanity. Instead, as Nietzsche’s and Augustine’s insights into the human condition warn us, we fall into a devotion to subhuman primal powers that reward our service with debasement.

Read it all

The Secularization of the Christian Mind

An original goal among the secular social reformers of education was not only to provide public education (uniformity of method) but also secular education (uniformity of secular thought).  That is, they sought to capture the minds of the public school classroom to see to it that the next generation only thinks, explains, analyzes, critiques, understands using secular or naturalistic categories.  Most secular reformers were perfectly content to leave God on the walls of public school classrooms (10 commandments) so long as He was no longer the foundation of the public school classroom (the standard and foundation for knowledge).  I’ve noticed this among students today, even Christian students.  They are thoroughly socialized and secularized to explain all things in the world by interpreting them through purely secular or naturalistic grid.  This is what Nietzsche meant by God is Dead.  Not that no one believes in Him, but that modern man no longer uses Him (revelation) to make the world intelligible any more.

Consider Political Theory.  If you ask students where government gets its power or where government comes from, you will see the evidence of secularization even among the Christians. If they provide any answer at all it will likely be a secular theory of government, not a Christian one.

Theologian Robert Lewis Dabney in presenting the Christian view of human government could not be accused of being unfamiliar with the secular view.

Dabney on the Civil Magistrate:

According to Enlightenment philosophers, “one traces [the powers of the civil magistrate] to a supposed social contract. Men are to be at first apprehended, they say, as insulated individuals, separate human integers, all naturally equal, and each by nature absolutely free, having a natural liberty to exercise his whole will, as a “Lord of Creation.” But the experience of the exposure, inconveniences, and mutual violences of so many independent wills, led them, in time, to be willing to surrender a part of their independence, in order to secure the enjoyment of the rest of their rights. To do this, they are supposed to have conferred, and to have entered into a compact with each other, binding themselves to each other to submit to certain rules and restraints upon their natural rights, and to obey certain ones selected to rule, in order that the power thus delegated to their hands might be used for the protection of the remaining rights of all. Subsequent citizens have given an assent, express or implied, to this compact. The terms of it form the organic law, or constitution of the commonwealth. And the reason why men are bound to obey the legitimate commands of the magistrate is, that they have thus bargained with their fellow-citizens to obey, for the sake of mutual benefits…
The other theory may be called the Christian. It traces civil government to the will and providence of God, who, from the first, created man with social instincts and placed him under social relations (when men were few, the patriarchical, as they increased, the commonwealth). It teaches that some form of social government is as original as man himself. If asked, whence the obligation to obey the civil magistrate, it answers: from the will of God, which is the great source of all obligation. The fact that such obedience is greatly promotive of human convenience, well-being and order, confirms and illustrates the obligation, but did not originate it. Hence, civil government is an ordinance of God; magistrates rule by His providence and by His command, and are His agents and ministers. Obedience to them, in the Lord, is a religious duty, and rebellion against them is not only injustice to our fellow-men, but disobedience to God. This is the theory plainly asserted by Paul in Roman 13, 1 Peter 2…. [However] while we emphatically ascribe the fact of civil government and obligation to obey it, to the will of God, we also assert that in the secondary sense, the government is, potentially, the people. The original source of power, the authority and the obligation to obey it, is God, the human source is not an irresponsible Ruler, but the body of the ruled themselves, that is, the sovereignty, so far as it is human, resides in the people, and is held by the rulers, by delegation from them…
[The secular social contract theory] is atheistic, utterly ignoring man’s relation to his Creator, the right of that Creator to determine under what obligations man shall live; and the great Bible fact, that God has determined he shall live under civic obligations.

From his Systematic Theology (pp. 862-866)

ISIS vs other Sunni interpretations of the role reason plays in Islamic thought

From Robert Reilly:

Why does the Islamic State (ISIS) behave in the strange ways it does? What inspires it to rampage through the libraries and museums of Mosul, Iraq, destroying priceless manuscripts and artifacts? Why does it take jackhammers to priceless archaeological relics from the Assyrian Empire? Why does it line up Coptic Christians on a beach in Libya, face them north across the Mediterranean, and then slit their throats? Why is it so keen on reestablishing the caliphate? Why, in short, does it behave sounreasonably?

Of course, one can answer these questions by simply quoting ISIS spokesmen and repeating their justifications, which are laced with quotations from the Qur’an and the hadith (the canonical accounts of the sayings and doings of Muhammad). But that is not a great help, because other Muslims have lived under the same injunctions without wreaking the havoc that ISIS does. There must be a deeper reason.

And there is.

ISIS and its al-Qaeda predecessor are incomprehensible to most Westerners because they are unaware of a pivotal theological struggle waged within Islam more than a millennium ago. It was a battle over the nature of God and the role of reason—and the side of irrationality won. The resolution of that conflict has had profound consequences for much of Sunni Islam—and the rest of the world—ever since.

Read the rest

Anti-Evangelical Bigotry in Academia; by the numbers

From ARDA:

The one finding I would most like to share after more than a quarter-century of traveling throughout this country reporting on issues of faith is how similar people are in their basic desires and ambitions.

Talk to people of faith of all ages in any region of the U.S., and what they are basically searching for is a sense of transcendent meaning that provides hope, optimism and purpose in the face of the struggles associated with being human.

They want to become better versions of themselves, more caring and loving friends, neighbors, parents and spouses. And they see in their faith both the support networks and community rituals and the interior resources such as prayer and meditation a path to a better life.

Yet there remains a disconnect in popular culture, and in many media and academic settings, between the preoccupation with the most radically polarizing figures speaking in the name of religion and what goes on in your neighborhood church, synagogue or mosque.

That disconnect would be comical if it were not so damaging to some of our most vulnerable populations.

So why do we have so many signs of becoming an increasingly polarized nation, where we are willing to apply negative stereotypes to entire groups of people, whether they are atheists or evangelicals, Muslims or blacks?

It is not because such indiscriminate attitudes have a strong basis in science. Behavioral and social scientists increasingly are finding evidence of how individual characteristics – a person’s image of God, the depth of their prayer lives, the number of friends they have in a congregation – transcend faith categories in predicting the impact of religion in people’s lives.

A recent study indicating widespread bias toward conservative Christians by college and university teachers provides some possible answers.

The unpleasant truth supported by this and other research: It is easier to judge people we do not know, and inhibitions about expressing prejudice tend to fall away if enough of your colleagues have the same beliefs.

Selective bias

Those who teach in higher education are relatively OK with some religious groups, according to a study based on a 2012 online national survey that drew 464 complete responses.

Asked to assess religious groups on a “feeling thermometer” of 1 to 100, Jewish people, mainline Protestants and Catholics all achieved an average score of 65 or higher, researchers led by University of North Texas sociologist George Yancey reported in an online article in the journal Sociology of Religion.

Next to the bottom, just slightly above fundamentalists, were Protestant evangelicals with an average score of 48.

Based on the rankings and other survey responses, researchers Yancey, Sam Reiner and Jake O’Connell classified nearly half of the participants as “conservative Protestant critics,” those with negative attitudes toward evangelicals.

The greatest sin of evangelicals: A perceived intolerance toward the academic critics own political views and belief systems.

“They tend to be intolerant of others with different points of view or political positions,” one health care professor said. An English professor said evangelicals were attempting “to change the U.S. from a secular to a religious state.”

In contrast, just 17 percent of the academic respondents were classified as “theological definers,” a group describing conservative Protestants in more neutral, academic terms.

Substituting hostility with more scholarly assessments made a major difference in attitudes, researchers noted.

Thus, while critics gave evangelicals an average score of 41 on the feeling thermometer, theological definers gave an average score of 63.

Bias is easy

Of course, bias among majority groups or those with higher degrees of status, power and influence is not limited to any one social or professional group.

Just how much we judge many minority groups is easily seen in national surveys where atheists and Muslims tend to fall toward the bottom in terms of trust and acceptance.

The work of Yancey and other researchers, however, is helping to provide a greater understanding for such polarization.

For example, the study of academic attitudes toward conservative Protestants suggests some more universal grounds for bias:

They are not like us: Research has indicated academics in general are less religious and more politically liberal than most Americans, and that conservative Protestants are substantially underrepresented on university faculty. Conservative Protestants are also viewed as being less educated and low status, separate from the elite status aspired to by many academics in higher education. In several ways, conservative Protestants may be considered the “quintessential out-group for academics,” Yancey, Reimer and O’Connell noted.

Don’t know them, don’t want to know them: In the study, the harshest academic critics of conservative Protestants were the ones with the least contact, and least likely to seek to establish relationships with evangelicals. Those who took a more neutral academic approach were most likely to have evangelicals in their social network.

“Despite bad press, my (many) dealings with evangelical Protestants remind me that most of those with whom I’ve worked sincerely try to lead lives marked with loving kindness and good will,” one “theological definer” reported..

Easy to pick on, harder to defend: The study also found academic critics felt free to use harsh, emotional language when describing conservative Protestants; more neutral observers largely confined themselves to academic, dispassionate assessments. The open hostility of critics “may produce a silencing effect which keeps conservative Protestants ‘in the closet,’” study researchers said.

Another set of new studies suggests that belonging to a tightly knit and unified group not only tends to legitimize prejudice against others, but also gives permission to be openly hostile to those opposed by a majority of their own group.

Membership in a group where bias is acceptable appears to give individuals a license to “express prejudices they would otherwise keep to themselves,” researchers from the London Business School and New York University reported.

The good news is attitudes can change.

But change requires humility.

And intellectual humility, the ability to understand the limits of one’s own knowledge and to be open to new ways of understanding, seems to be in short supply, even, or perhaps in some cases especially, among academics.

Image by David Keddie at English Wikipedia [Public Domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Image by DaKohlmeyer, Trinity Evangelical Free Church [CC BY-NC 2.0]

Americans, lawmakers, sometimes ignore or overrule science. That’s a good thing.

From Dr. Adam Seagrave

The feature article of the March issue of National Geographic attempts to explain the results of a January 2015 Pew Research Center report that demonstrates how many Americans seem to be out of step with the triumphal march of modern science. Not only are decreasing percentages of the American public expressing positive stances toward science in general, but many are rejecting outright the scientific consensus on several key issues. When it comes to topics such as evolution, climate change, vaccination, population growth, and GMOs, large numbers of ordinary people in the US seem to think that they know better than the scientific community. How could so many people—a substantial number of them highly educated, no less—be so backward?

According to the article’s author, it’s because “the scientific method leads us to truths that are less than self-evident, often mind-blowing, and sometimes hard to swallow.” “The scientific method is a hard discipline,” requiring us to repress the “naïve beliefs” to which we tend to cling like a child does to a tattered and useless blanket. “Science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be,” jolting us awake from our intuition-induced and religion-reinforced stupor. The conclusion to which the author is led is that “scientific thinking has to be taught.” Ordinary Americans must be dragged out of the cave of naïve pre-scientific thinking and brought into the light of day where they can see and understand what scientists have been trying to tell them.

Scientist-Kings?

The cave analogy is particularly apt here, for the argument represented in this article (and repeated in many other places) is not merely that science is valuable because it furthers our understanding of the world in which we live. The scientific method that characterizes the scientific profession is, in fact, the onlyway to really understand the world in which we live, and as such should be “our only star and compass” (to paraphrase Locke) when formulating public policy. Science education isn’t important the way taking a child to a local discovery museum is important; it’s important the way Plato’s philosopher-king is important.

The crux of the argument is far from new, and was put best by Plato millennia ago:

Until [scientists] rule as kings in their cities, or those who are nowadays called kings and leading men become genuine and adequate [scientists] so that political power and [science] become thoroughly blended together . . . cities will have no rest from evils . . . nor, I think, will the human race.

Of course, Plato speaks of “philosophers” rather than scientists, but in the self-presentation of modern science these amount to the same thing. “Science” simply means “knowledge,” and “wisdom”—the Greek “sophia,” from which we get “philosopher”—means knowledge of the highest things or of the whole. And so we are brought to the real exposed nerve of the modern scientific method and the myriad modern scientists it has spawned: namely, that this scientific method presents itself as the way of knowing absolutely everything there is to know. Of course, the ultimate goal of knowing everything may never be reached—the same way “philosopher” means “lover of wisdom,” not “possessor of wisdom”—but the scientific method is offered to us as the only avenue of approach to this goal.

As the modern guardians of all knowledge, scientists wield a tremendous amount of power. And like Plato’s philosopher-kings, some scientists have engaged in the dissemination of “noble lies” for the purpose of aligning public policy with their judgments of what is desirable for all of us. As the author of the National Geographic article admits, even scientists are susceptible to “confirmation bias,” or the tendency to tailor their interpretations of the evidence to the theories and predilections they unavoidably bring to their work. Scientists are human beings too, subject to precisely the same “will to power” Nietzsche ascribed to philosophers.

This danger has become evident in recent years in the cases of embryo science and climate change. In the case of embryo science, as is shown in a 2006 exchange Patrick Lee and Robert George had with Lee Silver, it is clear that at least some policy-minded scientists distorted key scientifically-established facts in order to further the political agenda of embryonic stem cell research. And in the case of climate change, the Climate Research Unit of East Anglia University has been twice embroiled in scandal over the release of numerous emails that clearly belie the usual story of an objective scientific consensus on the issue.

Power corrupts and knowledge is power, and so it should come as no surprise that some scientists succumb to the temptation to use their position as the gatekeepers of knowledge to further their political influence. Political influence, moreover, often translates into economic advantage, another universally potent motivator for human beings. Dishonest scientists exist and should be exposed; but what of the many honest, competent scientists? Should they be treated as scientist-kings?

Can Science Know Everything?

Science is often juxtaposed with religious belief in popular discourse as the two primary—and opposed—pathways to understanding the world. Religious believers argue that the scientific method runs up against a limit in its quest to know everything, and that this limit marks the starting point of faith. Scientists tend to bridle at this proposed limitation. Perhaps this is because the objects of religious belief—God, Heaven, Hell, the Devil, Angels, etc.—would, if they did exist, obviously be more important and compelling than the objects of scientific knowledge.

I would argue, though, that this sort of argument regarding the limitations of the modern scientific method already concedes far too much to scientific pretensions. One need not even go beyond the realm of mundane, ordinary, everyday human life to see clearly that the reach of modern scientific knowledge stops well short of what is most important to human beings. Modern science might have the teeth, and certainly the roar, of a T-Rex, but it also has its arms.

Take the recent movie Gravity. This film provided the most stunning widely-viewed visual depiction ever seen of outer space, perhaps the most widely intriguing object of modern science. The stars of the movie, though, were not the actual stars, but, rather, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney. Nor, moreover, were Bullock and Clooney of interest because of any of their scientifically-accessible features, such as the physical composition of their bodies, the chemical reactions going on inside them, or their medical health.

Bullock and Clooney were of interest because of their relationship with each other, their relationships with those they had left behind on Earth, and their relationships with themselves. They cared about each other. They experienced happiness, despair, hope, and love. When Clooney’s character was lost, much more had been lost than his physical-chemical existence; he even reappeared to save Bullock’s life after this scientifically-analyzable aspect of his existence was presumed to be long gone.

There is a reason why these elements of the movie were the most compelling ones to most viewers, and it’s not that most viewers are “naïve” and deficient in scientific education. Things like happiness and love are simply much more important to human life than astronomy and astrophysics, as “mind-blowing” as these undeniably are. People care much more about being happy, finding love, fighting for justice, and securing peace than they do about the chemical composition of the atmosphere—and they should. The scientific method can certainly tell us quite a bit about the physical, chemical, or otherwise material epiphenomena surrounding the things that are most important to our lives as human beings, but it can’t even begin to analyze or understand these things in themselves.

Upon seeing a loved one, for example, there are all sorts of scientifically measurable and analyzable chemical and physical changes in one’s body. These changes captured by the scientific method and understood by the scientist, though, aren’t themselves the love that is experienced. If one remains steadfast in claiming that such scientifically accessible properties are in fact constitutive of love, then one is merely claiming that what we mean to signify by the term “love” doesn’t exist—a claim that is ridiculous on its face. And such is the case even more clearly for more abstract concepts such as justice or peace. Because these things aren’t made of stuff that the scientific method can get its hands on, does that mean they don’t exist? Or that we can’t know anything about them?

Science and Public Policy

This brings us back to the puzzlement of the National Geographic article’s author, who cannot comprehend the failure of Americans to allow scientific facts and the various consensuses of scientists to dictate public policy on issues such as climate change, evolution education in schools, GMOs, population growth, or vaccination.

Perhaps it isn’t the ignorance or naiveté of ordinary, non-scientific Americans that prevents them from accepting what scientists tell them; perhaps it’s their knowledge of and experience with realities which they rightfully judge to be more important than the objects accessible to modern science. Perhaps it isn’t that “scientific thinking has to be taught” to non-scientists; perhaps it is scientists who should learn from the rest of us.

Adam Seagrave is an assistant professor of political science at Northern Illinois University and author of The Foundations of Natural Morality: On the Compatibility of Natural Rights and the Natural Law.

What of a society as “sexless as the bees”?

From Dr. Susan Hanssen Alexis de Tocqueville called “the strength of American women” the great secret of the strength of the American republic. Likewise, strong women were the backbone of the Adams family and its contribution to the political integrity of the American republic. The letters of John and Abigail Adams were first published by their grandson, Charles Francis Adams (President Abraham Lincoln’s ambassador to Britain). The diaries and letters of John Quincy Adams’s wife, Louisa, have just been published this year, a project explored by their grandson, Henry Adams. Henry Adams—who called Tocqueville’s Democracy in America the “bible of my own private religion”—worried that American men and women were losing their appreciation for the complementary strengths and gifts of men and women. He thought the best remedy was to hold up for Americans the image of his grandmother. Part of the charm of John and Abigail Adams’s letters (which are frequently addressed with terms such as “Dear Miss Adorable” and “My Dearest Friend”) is the way that the two weave a life-long conversation about universal human virtue into their ongoing inquiry into their complementary contributions to mothering and fathering their “little flock” of children. Louisa Adams had a hard act to follow in such a renowned mother-in-law, but her journals reveal a woman of profound reflection—on the meaning of piety (filial, patriotic, and religious) and her role as daughter, wife, and mother. The Only Perfectly Balanced Mind in the Adams Family Louisa Adams is the only American First Lady to have been born in a foreign country. Her American parents were living in London when she was born, and during the Revolution she was educated in a French convent school. She married John Quincy Adams during his diplomatic work, and the two immediately set off for Prussia, where he was stationed. She had already endured a number of difficult miscarriages and given birth to her three sons—little George Washington, John II, and Charles Francis—before she made her first visit to her “native” land. She was soon called on to leave her two oldest sons behind and accompany her husband to Russia with her youngest child. In Tsarist Russia, she endured a very personal “winter”: painfully separated from her older children, she lost her only infant daughter, received news of her own mother’s death, and had to travel alone from St. Petersburg to Paris in the midst of the Napoleonic wars. Late in life, she bitterly reproached herself for having left her oldest sons behind while she accompanied her husband on his diplomatic mission to Russia. Both of those sons were deeply troubled youths, impregnating women before wedlock, and dying young from drink or suicide. Only the son whom she had kept close to her carried on the family tradition of public service, political integrity, and a lifelong happy marriage with many children. In fact, his sons marveled at Charles Francis Adams as a man “singular for mental poise.” It seemed to them that it was the influence of his mother who had balanced the analytical tendencies of his father, which often led members of the Adams family to deep depression, bitterness, and drink. With a good dose of both mothering and fathering, he struck his sons as “the only perfectly balanced mind that ever existed in the name.” Sexless as the Bees When her grandson Henry Adams read Louisa’s diary, he was inspired to compare Russia to Woman, Woman to Russia—the two conservative forces at the beginning of the twentieth century. Russia acted as a conservative political force in Europe comparable to Woman as a conservative social force in America. Perhaps with the help of Russia the threat of an imperial Germany could be contained. Perhaps with the help of Woman the threat of a corroding materialism might be contained. Each was powerful, but each powerfully directed its forces internally. Russia, he argued, had its axis of rotation around the Church and around agricultural production to feed its enormous population. It had not yet turned its forces toward industrialization and modernization. If Russia’s forces were ever to be ripped from its axis by, let’s say, an atheistic modernizing revolutionary regime, Adams wrote in 1905, it might destroy all of Europe. But if Woman were to be torn from her axis of rotation around the cradle, it wouldn’t just destroy Europe—it could destroy human society. In his wide-ranging third-person autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, Adams observed: The woman’s force had counted as inertia of rotation, and her axis of rotation had been the cradle and the family. The idea that she was weak revolted all history; it was a palæontological falsehood that even an Eocene female monkey would have laughed at; but it was surely true that, if her force were to be diverted from its axis, it must find a new field, and the family must pay for it. So far as she succeeded, she must become sexless like the bees, and must leave the old energy of inertia to carry on the race. In this context of a Tocquevillean fear of whether Russian absolutism or American freedom would triumph in the coming century and whether the American triumph would indeed be a victory for liberty or for the incessant pursuit of petty and paltry pleasures that “enervate the soul and noiselessly unbend its springs of action,” Adams held up, at the beginning of The Education, the image of his grandmother. Education by Grandmothers Henry Adams recalled his grandmother as the very portrait of religious peace. She was “a peaceful vision of silver gray” presiding over her old president, her china tea set, and her box walks. She was refined, gentle, fragile, delicate, and remote. As a boy, Adams “knew nothing of her interior life” but he sensed that she was “exotic”—that she did not belong wholly to the political world of Boston, with its confidence that a political utopia could be achieved on earth. After “being beaten about a stormy world” and enduring a life of “severe stress and little pure satisfaction,” it was clear that she placed her hopes in eternity. The political world believed that absolute democracy, state education, and total freedom of speech would usher in the end times of history. The political creed was that “Human nature works for the good and three instruments are all she asks—Suffrage, Common Schools, and the Press.” All doubts of this creed were political heresy. From his grandmother, Henry Adams gleaned his sense that there were values beyond the negotiable values of politics. Without her, his education would have been all Mars and no Venus—a purely political education with no religion—all war and no contemplation of beauty, all work and no genuine leisure. In the “Boston” chapter of the Education, Adams wrote: The children reached manhood without knowing religion, and with the certainty that dogma, metaphysics, and abstract philosophy were not worth knowing. So one-sided an education could have been possible in no other country or time, but it became, almost of necessity, the more literary and political. As the children grew up, they exaggerated the literary and the political interests. Without religion, the poetic imagination became utopian, and the political imagination became utilitarian. Americans worshipped “the Dynamo”—of the physical and mental energy of man—and were utterly lacking the cult of “the Virgin”—the contemplation of the laws of Nature and Nature’s God, and openness to the grace needed to fulfill them. Louisa Adams always felt herself a fish out of water in a culture that gave more attention to the virtues of equality than to the virtues of piety and pity. She saw her role as wife and mother as that of an educator in the refined art of deference and condescension—the discernment and acknowledgment of realities of inequality, weakness, strength, power and infirmity, and a careful attunement to the unequal duties such differences gave rise to. She considered a culture that saw nothing but equal duties, equal rights, and relations of convenience and mutual interest as a tyranny against her own nature. “My temper is so harassed and I am I fear so imbued with strange and singular opinions, and surrounded by persons with whom it is decidedly impossible for me to agree,” she exclaimed. “I feel that I have strange exaggerated ideas on most subjects which must be utterly incomprehensible but are utterly impossible for me to eradicate.” One of her most ineradicable ideas was the sacredness of the bond between parents and children, the most palpable bond of piety and pity. She wrote: It has been the fashion to say that as Children were not born to please themselves, no real ties bind them to their parents; and that blood relationship, should exact neither affection or gratitude—To my mind there is no truth whatever in such an assertion . . . From the moment of the birth, we incur a vast debt of gratitude which a life cannot repay . . . There must be a great dereliction in that mind which could for a moment shrink from the acknowledgement of so vast a debt: founded in the weakest of all vanities, self idolatry! Louisa Adams herself attributed the deepening of her sense of piety and pity to her experience of motherhood. She wrote that her religious opinions and sentiments had “‘grown with my growth, and strengthened with my strength’ though until I became a Mother; perhaps not properly weighed and considered; one more of precept, habit, and example than of meditated reflection.” Adams worried that as Americans pursued a culture that was “sexless as the bees,” the complementarity that had produced the remarkable personal poise of his father—the balanced judgment, the eye for both contractual duties, and the more delicate bonds of affection—would be lost. To his mind, the proper education of the young American required both father and mother, grandfathers and grandmothers. Susan Hanssen is an associate professor of history at the University of Dallas.

Copyright © 2015 The Witherspoon Institute, all rights reserved.

Fact Checking Dan Barker (atheist apologist) on historicity of Jesus

From Dan Wallace’s blog:

Fact Checking Dan Barker: From our Recent Debate June 6, 2015

Posted by Daniel B. Wallace on 1 August 2015 in Uncategorized

This is a guest post by Dr. Justin W. Bass regarding his recent debate with well-known atheist, Dan Barker. The debate topic was “Jesus of Nazareth: Lord or Legend?”

“I discovered that there is no evidence for Christianity” –Dan Barker (Losing Faith in Faith, 69).

Dan Barker wrote these words in 1992 in his first book Losing Faith in Faith recounting his de-conversion from a fundamentalist Christian pastor to a promoter of atheism and free-thought.

Dan first came out publicly as an atheist on the Oprah Winfrey show in 1984. Since that time he has been a preacher of atheism and free-thought as a kind of “reverse penance” (Losing Faith, 10), he says, for all the years he proclaimed the gospel.

At 15, he accepted a calling from God to live and preach for Jesus Christ. He was a self-admitted fundamentalist from the beginning believing “every word in the Bible is God-inspired and inerrant” (Losing Faith, 28). He was also taught that liberal and atheist writers were “evil servants of Satan attempting to distract believers from the literal truth of the Bible” (Losing Faith, 29-30). He describes a fundamentalist (himself at the time) this way: “A true fundamentalist should consider the English version of the Bible to be just as inerrant as the original because if we admit that human error was possible in the translation, then it was equally possible in the original writing.” (Losing Faith, 176-77).

Dan ended up attending Azusa Pacific College majoring in Religion. He describes Azusa Bible College as a “glorified Sunday school” (Losing Faith, 22). In the one apologetics class he took, he admits, “I don’t remember that we delved very deeply into the evidences or arguments for or against Christianity” (Losing Faith, 22).

Although Dan states it was the lack of evidence that convinced him Christianity isn’t true, it seems, from his own admission, that he was not exposed to Christianity’s hard “evidences or arguments” before he turned to atheism.

Dan and I debated the topic: “Jesus of Nazareth: Lord or Legend?” on June 6^th of 2015 sponsored by The Bible and Beer Consortium. After that 3+ hour debate, reading all of Dan’s books, and watching at least 40 of his other debates, I have come to the conclusion that Dan is still rejecting the same “glorified Sunday school” version of Christianity that he rejected over 30 years ago.

I am grateful to know Dan; I’ve found him to be kind, brilliant, and an experienced articulate speaker. I appreciate his willingness to come to Dallas to debate. We had a great time at dinner together the night before the debate. We asked our waitress who she guessed was the atheist and who was the Christian. She thought Dan was the Christian and I was the atheist!

While I like Dan as a person, for over 30 years he has been fighting against a fundamentalist caricature of Christianity and misrepresenting many of the facts surrounding Jesus of Nazareth and one of the primary purposes of this article is to correct many of those misrepresentations.

Dan’s “glorified Sunday school” version of Christianity is highlighted throughout his arguments in Losing Faith in Faith (1992), Godless (2008) and his most recent book Life Driven Purpose (2015). Just for a moment, let’s consider the sources he cites in these books.

In his discussions of Jesus and Christianity, Dan cites only two scholars who are credentialed and professionally teaching in the field of early Christianity: R. J. Hoffman and Bart Ehrman. In contrast to these two sources, Dan questions Jesus’ existence. He parts ways again with Bart Ehrman, arguing that the Jesus story was cut from the same cloth of pagan religions.

In writing on Jesus and Christianity, Dan cites only these other sources: John Remsburg, J. M. Robertson, W. B. Smith, Barbara Walker, G. A. Wells, Randall Helms, John Allegro, Hugh Schonfield, Earl Doherty, Robert Price and Richard Carrier. A review of their credentials quickly reveal that the majority of them are inadequate sources for Jesus and early Christianity.

Just to give one example: Barbara Walker is included in Dan’s “other scholars” (Godless, 270-72) and is his primary source when arguing in Losing Faith and Godless that the Jesus story is a fanciful patchwork from other pagan religions. Walker though only has a degree in Journalism and publishes other books on knitting. In fact, James White challenged Dan in their debate on using Walker as one of his chief sources on Jesus and Dan agreed he would remove her from later editions of Godless.

That was very honest of Dan to admit that he erred in using Walker as a source, but why did Dan not cite anywhere in his books James Dunn, E. P. Sanders, John P. Meier, N. T. Wright, Paula Fredricksen, Dale Allison, Martin Hengel, Richard Bauckham, or really any of the other 6000+ scholars professionally teaching in relevant subjects of early Christianity?

With sources like the ones Dan relies on, you can see why so many facts get misrepresented in his writings and speaking regarding Jesus and ancient history.

Let me just give 7 examples from our debate where Dan got his facts wrong about Christianity and/or ancient history. I have provided clips below for the relevant exchange for each one of these 7 examples. I recommend watching the exchange first and then reading my comments.

1.) Did Nazareth Exist during the Lifetime of Jesus?

Debate Exchange 1 (1:19:41–1:25:44)

From the beginning of his opening speech, Dan stated that the city of Nazareth did not exist at the time of Jesus, to support his case that Jesus was a legend. Dan also made this argument back in 1992 in Losing Faith in Faith (p. 191) that Nazareth didn’t exist before the second century. However, archaeological discoveries have definitively proven that Nazareth did, in fact, exist at the time of Jesus. Bart Ehrman says, “Many compelling pieces of archaeological evidence indicate that in fact Nazareth did exist in Jesus’ day and that, like other villages and towns in that part of Galilee, it was built on the hillside, near where the later rock-cut kokh tombs were built. For one thing, archaeologists have excavated a farm connected with the village, and it dates to the time of Jesus… Jesus really came from there, as attested in multiple sources” (see morehere and in Did Jesus Exist? 191-97).

The first argument Dan made that Jesus is legend was completely at odds with the facts.

Read the rest

How did Christians lose their position in the academy?

From Mathew Tuninga:

Rosaria Butterfield was a professor of women’s studies who specialized in Queer Theory at Syracuse University. A practicing lesbian, she was an activist in the gay and lesbian community until she converted to Christianity in 1999. She is now a Reformed Presbyterian.

Given such a story, you might expect Butterfield to have an interesting perspective on the relationship between Christians and the academy. And you will not be disappointed. Only seven pages into her book, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert, Butterfield declares that she maintains her appreciation for the university and her respect for feminism:

Although I live my life now for Christ and Christ alone, I do not find myself in like-minded company when my fellow Christians bemoan the state of the university today. Feminism has a better reputation than Christianity at all major U.S. universities and this fact really bothers (and confuses) many Christians…

But how has the church responded to this truth? Too often the church sets itself up as a victim of this paradigm shift in America, but I think this is dishonest. Here’s what I think happened: Since all major U.S. universities had Christian roots, too many Christians thought that they could rest in Christian tradition, not Christian relevance.

These words accurately capture many Christians’ bewilderment about what has taken place during the past few decades. The academy, leading the culture, has abandoned Christian teaching about gender and sexual ethics wholesale. Not only are sexual promiscuity and divorce widely accepted, not only have traditional gender roles been widely jettisoned, but the very normativity of sexual complementarity has lots its persuasive power. And it has lost persuasive power not only to a few fringe radicals in the academy, mind you, but to the very people who determine the highest law of the land. Christians are not shocked because they do not expect to witness evil in this life. They are shocked because these developments defy what Christians think are the most basic common sense assumptions possible about the differences between male and female.

Butterfield’s words confirm what many Christians are only beginning to realize. Our worldview – our moral paradigm – is not nearly as intuitive or persuasive as we have imagined it to be. The authority of our churches and our sacred texts is nowhere nearly as widely respected as we thought it was. We are quite out of touch. We have not been engaged. We have been resting on the laurels of more than a thousand years of Christendom. As Butterfield puts it,

Too often the church does not know how to interface with university culture because it comes to the table only ready to moralize and not dialogue. There is a core difference between sharing the gospel with the lost and imposing a specific moral standard on the unconverted. Like it or not, in the court of public opinion, feminists and not Bible-believing Christians have won the war of intellectual integrity.

A few points jump out at me from Butterfield’s reflections.

1) Attempting to impose our moral framework on American law is not the same as being engaged in the nation’s moral conversation. We have too often confused political activism with thoughtful engagement. If we can’t even persuade the country to uphold marriage at a civil level, what does that say for our ability to witness to the need for the gospel at a moral and spiritual level?

2) Preaching at people – proclaiming the truth – is not the same thing as communicating. We need to proclaim the gospel, of course, but we have too often confused the bare declaration of various messages found in Scripture with the thoughtful engagement that comes from wrestling with what the word of God has to say in light of what we learn from observing, listening, loving and conversing with our neighbors and fellow citizens. We prefer to imitate the way the apostles confronted the covenant people of God (i.e., Acts 4) rather than the way they witnessed to the Gentiles (i.e., Acts 17). We mimic the way Jesus confronted the Pharisees (Matthew 23) rather than the way he ministered to “tax collectors and sinners” (Luke 14-15). But America is not the covenant people of God and Americans are not – by and large – Pharisees.

3) Our inability to wrestle with the way the word of God speaks to contemporary culture in a thoughtful, humble way communicates a lack of integrity on our part. Why? Because a tendency simply to preach at people as if they share our basic assumptions about life – while ignoring the fact that they don’t – shows that we do not respect them. We do not take them seriously. We are not willing to learn from them, let alone grant them equality in a conversation. What we think is faithfulness looks to the world an awful lot like arrogance. And Christians, of all people, should know that this is a problem. The Christian tradition has a lot to say about the evil of pride.

We have a lot of work to do, and not primarily at the political level. As James Davison Hunter argued several years ago in his book, To Change the World, we need to be less focused on politics and more focused on culture, less focused on power and more focused on people, less focused on winning and more focused on witnessing.

I think our situation is a little bit like that of a husband and wife whose conversation has gradually escalated to the point where they are talking past one another and each is equally frustrated that the other person is not listening – no doubt willfully. It is time to step back, do some real soul-searching, and think about what and how we are communicating. Communication does not simply consist in declaring what you think and feel is true. Communication is a two-way street. Messages must be received and understood, not simply delivered. And that can only happen in contexts of respect, friendship, and trust.

As in a marriage, if we think the fault is all on the other side we are sadly deluded. In that case, the road ahead will be quite rocky indeed.

What does “only” mean?

If written words and their contexts have ascertainable essential meanings to you, then this will be illustrative.  If the meaning of words, written texts, is indeterminate to you (you are a postmodern literary deconstructionist), then the placement of the word “only” here is meaningless (the sentences mean whatever you want them to mean).

From Keith Burgess-Jackson

Notice how the meaning of the following sentences changes as the word “only” is moved:

1. Only Professor Wu claimed that Socrates wrote poetry. (Meaning: No one else claimed it.)

2. Professor Wu only claimed that Socrates wrote poetry. (Meaning: She didn’t prove it; she only claimed it.)

3. Professor Wu claimed only that Socrates wrote poetry. (Meaning: She claimed nothing else.)

4. Professor Wu claimed that only Socrates wrote poetry. (Meaning: She claimed that no one else wrote poetry.)

5. Professor Wu claimed that Socrates only wrote poetry. (Meaning: She claimed that Socrates didn’t read poetry; he only wrote it.)

6. Professor Wu claimed that Socrates wrote only poetry. (Meaning: She claimed that Socrates wrote nothing besides poetry.)

Liberals and conservatives both cite ignorance of levitical law as evidence that the other side is biblically illiterate. They are both right.

From Tim Keller:

I find it frustrating when I read or hear columnists, pundits, or journalists dismiss Christians as inconsistent because “they pick and choose which of the rules in the Bible to obey.” Most often I hear, “Christians ignore lots of Old Testament texts—about not eating raw meat or pork or shellfish, not executing people for breaking the Sabbath, not wearing garments woven with two kinds of material and so on. Then they condemn homosexuality. Aren’t you just picking and choosing what you want to believe from the Bible?”

I don’t expect everyone to understand that the whole Bible is about Jesus and God’s plan to redeem his people, but I vainly hope that one day someone will access their common sense (or at least talk to an informed theological adviser) before leveling the charge of inconsistency.

First, it’s not only the Old Testament that has proscriptions about homosexuality. The New Testament has plenty to say about it as well. Even Jesus says, in his discussion of divorce in Matthew 19:3–12, that the original design of God was for one man and one woman to be united as one flesh, and failing that (v. 12), persons should abstain from marriage and sex.

However, let’s get back to considering the larger issue of inconsistency regarding things mentioned in the Old Testament no longer practiced by the New Testament people of God. Most Christians don’t know what to say when confronted about this issue. Here’s a short course on the relationship of the Old Testament to the New Testament.

The Old Testament devotes a good amount of space to describing the various sacrifices offered in the tabernacle (and later temple) to atone for sin so that worshipers could approach a holy God. There was also a complex set of rules for ceremonial purity and cleanness. You could only approach God in worship if you ate certain foods and not others, wore certain forms of dress, refrained from touching a variety of objects, and so on. This vividly conveyed, over and over, that human beings are spiritually unclean and can’t go into God’s presence without purification.

But even in the Old Testament, many writers hinted that the sacrifices and the temple worship regulations pointed forward to something beyond them (cf. 1 Sam. 15:21–22; Pss. 50:12–15; 51:17; Hos. 6:6). When Christ appeared he declared all foods clean (Mark 7:19), and he ignored the Old Testament cleanliness laws in other ways, touching lepers and dead bodies.

The reason is clear. When he died on the cross the veil in the temple tore, showing that he had done away with the the need for the entire sacrificial system with all its cleanliness laws. Jesus is the ultimate sacrifice for sin, and now Jesus makes us clean.

The entire book of Hebrews explains that the Old Testament ceremonial laws were not so much abolished as fulfilled by Christ. Whenever we pray “in Jesus name” we “have confidence to enter the Most Holy Place by the blood of Jesus” (Heb. 10:19). It would, therefore, be deeply inconsistent with the teaching of the Bible as a whole if we continued to follow the ceremonial laws.

Law Still Binding

The New Testament gives us further guidance about how to read the Old Testament. Paul makes it clear in places like Romans 13:8ff that the apostles understood the Old Testament moral law to still be binding on us. In short, the coming of Christ changed how we worship, but not how we live. The moral law outlines God’s own character—his integrity, love, and faithfulness. And so everything the Old Testament says about loving our neighbor, caring for the poor, generosity with our possessions, social relationships, and commitment to our family is still in force. The New Testament continues to forbid killing or committing adultery, and all the sex ethic of the Old Testament is re-stated throughout the New Testament (Matt. 5:27–30; 1 Cor. 6:9–20; 1 Tim. 1:8–11). If the New Testament has reaffirmed a commandment, then it is still in force for us today.

The New Testament explains another change between the testaments. Sins continue to be sins—but the penalties change. In the Old Testament sins like adultery or incest were punishable with civil sanctions like execution. This is because at that time God’s people constituted a nation-state, and so all sins had civil penalties.

But in the New Testament the people of God are an assembly of churches all over the world, living under many different governments. The church is not a civil government, and so sins are dealt with by exhortation and, at worst, exclusion from membership. This is how Paul deals with a case of incest in the Corinthian church (1 Cor. 5:1ff. and 2 Cor. 2:7–11). Why this change? Under Christ, the gospel is not confined to a single nation—it has been released to go into all cultures and peoples.

Once you grant the main premise of the Bible—about the surpassing significance of Christ and his salvation—then all the various parts of the Bible make sense. Because of Christ, the ceremonial law is repealed. Because of Christ, the church is no longer a nation-state imposing civil penalties. It all falls into place. However, if you reject the idea of Christ as Son of God and Savior, then, of course, the Bible is at best a mishmash containing some inspiration and wisdom, but most of it would have to be rejected as foolish or erroneous.

So where does this leave us? There are only two possibilities. If Christ is God, then this way of reading the Bible makes sense. The other possibility is that you reject Christianity’s basic thesis—you don’t believe Jesus is the resurrected Son of God—and then the Bible is no sure guide for you about much of anything. But you can’t say in fairness that Christians are being inconsistent with their beliefs to follow the moral statements in the Old Testament while not practicing the other ones.

One way to respond to the charge of inconsistency may be to ask a counter-question: “Are you asking me to deny the very heart of my Christian beliefs?” If you are asked, “Why do you say that?” you could respond, “If I believe Jesus is the resurrected Son of God, I can’t follow all the ‘clean laws’ of diet and practice, and I can’t offer animal sacrifices. All that would be to deny the power of Christ’s death on the cross. And so those who really believe in Christ must follow some Old Testament texts and not others.”

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This article originally appeared in Redeemer Presbyterian Church’s monthly Redeemer Report.

Pascal’s apologetic and evangelistic method

Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is.

Blaise Pascal was a brilliant 17th-century French mathematician and physicist who had a dramatic Christian conversion experience and thereafter devoted much of his thought to Christianity and philosophy. He began to assemble notes and fragments he hoped would be woven into a book called The Defense of the Christian Religion, but he died just two months after his 39th birthday and it was never written. Those fragments, however, were published as Pensees (“Thoughts”), and it has become one of the most famous Christian books in history.

One of the most interesting of Pascal’s Pensees is the one quoted above. Here Pascal looks holistically at how to present the Christian message to those who do not believe it. He begins with the psychology of non-belief. He says that people are not objective about religion (here meaning Christianity). They really despise it and don’t want it to be true—yet fear it may be true. Some of these are fair-minded people who see good, well-thought-out reasons Christianity is not true. Others are not so fair-minded, and they just vilify and caricature it. But no one is neutral. People know instinctively that if Christianity is true they will lose control, and they will not be able to live any way they wish. So they are rooting for it not to be true, and are more than willing to accept any objections to the faith they hear.

How should Christians respond? Pascal thinks there are basically three stages to bringing someone on the way to faith. First, you have to disarm and surprise them. Many people hope Christianity does not make sense on any level. They especially enjoy hearing about professing Christians who are intemperate, irrational, and hypocritical—this confirms them in their non-belief. When, however, some presentation of Christian faith—or simply a Christian believer’s character—comes across as well-informed, thoughtful, sensible, open-minded, helpful, and generous, then this breaks stereotypes and commands a begrudging respect.

After this, Pascal says, we should be somewhat more proactive. “Next make it attractive, make good men wish [Christianity] were true.” We might object to the term “make” and suggest that Christianity is already attractive, but that’s to miss Pascal’s point. Of course he isn’t saying we should make Christianity into something it’s not; rather, we should reveal, point out, and expose its existing features. But the phrase “make good men wish it were true” gets across that this takes determination and ingenuity. We must know our culture—know its hopes—and then show others that only in Christ will their aspirations ever find fulfillment, that only in him will the plot lines of their lives ever have resolution and a happy ending.

I’m glad Pascal calls for this because, understandably, in these conversations we want to talk about sin and the barrier it creates between God and us. Pascal isn’t arguing against that. Certainly he isn’t telling us to hide that. But do we take time to talk about the manifold and astonishing blessings of salvation? Do we give time and effort to explaining the new birth; our new name and identity; adoption into God’s family; the experience of God’s love and beholding Christ’s glory; the slow but radical change in our character; a growing freedom from our past and peace in our present; power and meaning in the face of suffering; membership in a new, universal, multi-racial counter-cultural community; a mission to do justice and mercy on the earth; guidance from and personal fellowship with God himself; relationships of love that go on forever; the promise of our own future perfection and glorious beauty; complete confidence in the face of death; and the new heavens and new earth, a perfectly restored material world?

If we do this, Pascal gives us a very specific outcome to shoot for. If we’ve pointed out such things in an effective way, then some (though surely not all) will say, “If Christianity really can give that, it would be wonderful. Yes, it would be great if it were true. But of course Christianity isn’t. What a shame!”

Only then will most people sit through any kind of substantial presentation of the evidence and reasons for the truth of Christianity. Now Pascal says to “show that it is [true].” If they have not been brought through stage 1 (being disarmed and surprised by the lives and speech of believers) and stage 2 (seeing the great and attractive promises of God in Christ), their eyes will simply glaze over if you begin talking about “the evidence for the resurrection.” They will still expect Christianity to be at best useless and at worst a threat. But if Christianity has begun to make emotional and cultural sense they may listen to a sustained discussion of why it makes logical and rational sense. By “emotional sense” I mean that Christianity must be shown to be fill holes and answer questions and account for phenomena in the personal, inward, heart realm. By “cultural sense” I mean that Christianity must be shown to have the resources to powerfully address our social problems and explain human social behavior.

Original link

Only if their imagination is captured will most people give a fair hearing to the strong arguments for the truth of Christianity. Let’s appeal to heart and imagination as well as to reason as we speak publicly about our faith in Jesus.

Editors’ note: This article originally appeared in the newsletter of Redeemer Presbyterian Church.

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After Obergefell: Catholic, Protestant, Jewish scholars review

From First Things (well worth your time):

How should we respond to the ruling by the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges that there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage? What’s next?

These are the question that we asked the following contributors—male and female, gay and straight, Christian and Jewish, Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox—to answer in this First Things symposium. –Ed.

Full Article

Postmodern Privilege

From Peter Johnson:

Inspired by Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” which has become required reading on college campuses across the country: “I was taught to see oppression in every human act and artifact, not in the occasional individual acts of meanness.”

Daily Effects of Postmodern Privilege
I decided to try to improve myself by identifying some of the effects of postmodern privilege in my daily life. I have chosen to explore the most popular categories of personhood (race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexual orientation), rather than those factors that might complicate my postmodern worldview (reason, truth, beauty, virtue, free will). As far as I can tell, my rational and religious acquaintances with whom I come into frequent contact cannot count on most of these conditions:
I am not told that my deepest moral convictions must be relegated to my home.
I can be pretty sure that an argument with a colleague of another ideology won’t result in an organized campaign of harassment that threatens my livelihood.
I can avoid spending time with people who openly disagree with me because those who harbor divergent opinions are often labeled rapists, homophobes, and bigots.
I can go shopping without fear that a sanctimonious hipster will harass me for not buying fair trade or certified organic products.
I can turn on the television or look at the front page of the paper and be sure to find praise for people who think like me and unabashed disdain for those who don’t.
When I am told about our national heritage or about “civilization,” I can be fairly sure that most scholars agree with me that these are pejorative terms, synonymous with colonization, exploitation, and oppression.
If I want, I can be sure to find a publisher for this piece on postmodern privilege, especially if I reference Jacques Derrida.
I can be casual about whether to listen to dissenting opinions because it is easy to label other ideas as microagressions.
I can go into a music shop and count on the most popular musicians being as elitist as me.
I can be influenced by artists and scholars from diverse backgrounds without people saying I am engaging in cultural appropriation.
I can criticize free enterprise while still benefitting from said economic system without the fear of being seen as a hypocrite.
I do not have to teach my children how to talk about religious principles in secular language in order to avoid public ridicule.
I can use sophisticated language and wear a suit and tie without derision because it is assumed I do so only ironically.
I can speak in public to powerful government agents without having my tax-exempt status put on trial.
I can do well in a challenging situation without people saying I ought to “check my privilege.”
I am never asked by reporters to speak to whether everyone in my particular religious group might hypothetically be open to providing goods or services at a gay wedding.
I can be pretty sure that if I ask to talk to a government official she or he will share my ideological convictions.
I can easily see people in sitcoms, movies, news programs, and public-school textbooks who share my guilt for living in a prosperous nation.
If I declare there is a racial issue at hand, or not, my ideological affiliation will lend me more credibility than someone who believes in “evidence” and “proof.”
Major media outlets do not falsely accuse me or my children of fostering rape culture for simply engaging in traditional courtship rituals at wealthy southern schools.
I can seek wealth without being seen as greedy or self-serving, especially if said wealth is accumulated by means of redistribution.
I can take a private jet across the country to attend a conference of environmental activists without fear of my colleagues branding me a fraud.
If a day, week, or year is going badly, I need not ask if it is my fault; I know it is someone else’s.
I can think of many options—regarding my gender identity, gender expression, or sexual orientation—without being bound to reason, tradition, or nature.
I can be late to a meeting without it reflecting poorly on me because it is assumed that I commute by bike so as to reduce my carbon footprint.
If I cannot rely on the power of influence, I can be relatively certain that government coercion is an option for me to get my way.
I can easily find academic courses and institutions that are slavishly devoted to my nihilistic, neo-Marxist philosophy.
I can expect figurative language and imagery in all postmodern art and literature to be either opaque or so exceedingly obscure as to advance my status as a highly sophisticated member of the intelligentsia.
I have no difficulty fomenting discontent in neighborhoods where people have traditionally been largely satisfied with their lives.
I will feel welcomed and “normal” wherever vehement expression of sentimentality triumphs over “reason.”
Peter Johnson studied postmodernism in both the English and philosophy departments of New York University. His deep understanding of what George Will described as the “degenerate egalitarianism of the intelligentsia” made him an exceptional candidate for the Peace Corps, where he taught beekeeping to subsistence farmers in rural Paraguay, despite having no previous experience keeping bees.

After the Peace Corps, he lived in Senegal for a year, where he cavorted with a bunch of Fulbrighters who enjoyed a yearlong subsidized vacation abroad in return for writing obtuse academic papers reaffirming postmodern scholarship. He now works for the Acton Institute in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where he is being vigorously deprogrammed by natural-law philosophers, theologians, and a Catholic priest. You can find him on Twitter @ActonPete.

Peter Johnson is an external relations officer for the Acton Institute. He has held various positions with the National Capital Area Council and Boy Scouts of America.

Why the alleged discovery of a 1st century Gospel of Mark fragment may be very significant

An interesting hush has occurred over the field of NT textual critical scholarship. Textual criticism is the science of trying to ascertain what original manuscripts in the NT (or any ancient manuscript for that matter) actually said initially (when it left the pen of the author). There are some scholars how are skeptical that we can accurately retrieve the original wording of the NT (Bart Ehrman is a scholar of this sort, but also a popular speaker/author promoting NT skepticism). It must be said, however, that most textual critical scholars are not skeptical or at least not as skeptical as Ehrman. One such non-skeptic NT scholar is Dr. Dan Wallace, handles these manuscripts on a regular basis and believes that they contain the original wording and that NT textual critics like himself can retrieve it with relative ease. After all, less than 1% of ‘textual variants’ (instances where a passage/word in one ancient manuscript disagrees with that of another) fit the description of being ‘meaningful and viable’ (meaningful means that that the meaning of the passage would change depending upon which copy/manuscript is used for the translation; viable refers to the difficulty of ascertaining the original wording). Yet Ehrman insists that this fact does not fundamentally challenge his overall thesis, which is that without 1st century manuscripts, the copying process simply can’t be trusted to deliver to us the original wording. Well, Wallace and Ehrman had a public debate about this in 2012. In that debate, Wallace disclosed information about the discovery of a 1st century manuscript from the gospel of Mark. He said that that the details of it would be published in 2013, but for reasons not yet known, the publisher has only this year moved forward with the publication (should be out by the end of 2015). In the meantime, it sets up for an interesting wait-and-see situation. If the manuscript is in fact as old as Wallace says the first paleographers have said (1st) and if it contains enough passages to make for a good comparison, then the situation is looks like this: if Ehrman is right about the copying process, then this manuscript should look significantly different than later copies (earliest we currently have of Mark is late 2nd century). If Wallace is right, then it should significantly duplicate later copies. What does that matter for you? Your bibles are translations of copies of manuscripts from antiquity (if you use the KJV, then the copies used were relatively young, like 9th and 11th century or so; if you use a modern english translation, like the NIV or ESV, then they are based on much older manuscripts discovered after the King James translators did their work). In a word, the discovery will either add confidence to one’s reliability of the NT or detract from that confidence. We will see… Some of the information about the discovery has been allegedly leaked online and Dr. Craig Evans (another NT scholar) speaks to it here.

On the place of non-Christian thought in the intellectual life of the believer.

I love philosophy, particularly political philosophy. Being a Christian does not mean that non-Christian thinkers offer nothing beneficial to me or mankind. But non-Christian thought lacks something that, as a believer, makes it insufficient. Holy Scripture. Scripture must be the lens through which all thought is read and critically analyzed. When the general revelation, graciously granted to non-believers, is combined with and interpreted through the special revelation of Scripture, the knowledge gleaned is rightfully awed and wholly trustworthy. But there can be no substitute for the glorious truths contained in Holy Scripture. Many learned men, well versed in non-Christian thought, find that when God sovereignly stooped down, humbled them, redeemed them, opened their eyes to the gospel of Jesus Christ, and granted them an insatiable love for and use of scripture in their intellectual endeavors, they find their minds have finally been truly and indescribably awakened, never learning, thinking, the same way again. They are able to see what they couldn’t see before. This is precisely what happened to John Calvin, a former humanist, lover of Seneca and Cicero. But upon his conversion, which was both spiritual and intellectual, he was never the same as he discovered the truth and utility of scripture in the great and noble work of human philosophy and thought. Calvin did not stop reading and thinking about non-Christian thought. It’s just that he placed philosophy in the service of theology, which is the only role it may play in the intellectual life of the believer. He placed Athens in the service of Jerusalem. Here’s how he put it: “Now this power which is peculiar to Scripture is clear from the fact that of human writings, however artfully polished, there is none capable of affecting us at all comparably. Read Demosthenes or Cicero; read Plato, Aristotle or any other of that class. You will, I admit, feel wonderfully allured, delighted, moved, enchanted. But turn from them to the reading of the sacred volume and whether you will it or not, it will so powerfully affect you, so pierce your heart, so work its way into your very marrow, that compared with the impression so produced, the power of the orators and philosophers will almost disappear; making it clear that the Holy Scriptures breathe something divine, which lifts them far above all the gifts and graces of human industry.”

Thy word is a lamp unto my feet and a light unto my path.

Was the doctrine of substitutionary atonement known among early Christians?

From Dr. Michael Kruger:

Skeptics commonly criticize core Christian beliefs by claiming that they were not really held by the earliest Christians. Instead, we are told, these beliefs were invented post facto by the institutional church.

The classic example of such an argument has to do with the divinity of Jesus. The earliest followers of Jesus didn’t really believe that Jesus was divine, this argument goes; it was only the later institutional church, under political pressure from Emperor Constantine, that insisted Jesus must have divine status. Thus, some argue, the belief that Jesus is God is not really, well, Christian.

Substitutionary Atonement

This same sort of argument has also been applied to other doctrines, particularly the substitutionary nature of the atonement. Critical scholars, led by the classic work of Gustaf Aulén, have long argued that the earliest Christians did not believe that Christ died as a substitute for sinners. Instead, they say, these Christians believed what is known as the “Christus victor” view of the atonement—the idea that Jesus’s death on the cross (and resurrection) conquered the Devil and other forces that held people in bondage. On this view, Christ did not die in place of rebellious sinners but instead rescued victims from a fallen world.

If Aulén is correct, then when did the substitutionary view of the atonement arise? Peter Carnley embodies the typical critical approach when he says that the substitutionary view “was not known before Anselm’s time.” Thus, Carnley claims, it was not until the Middle Ages, when Anselm wroteCur Deus Homo (Why the God-Man?), that Christians began to believe Christ died in place of sinners.

No doubt these sorts of scholarly arguments can explain why alternative theories of the atonement have gained popularity in recent years, while the substitutionary view continues to be vilified as un-Christian. Rob Bell does precisely this in his book Love Wins, where he roundly rejects the substitutionary view in favor of other options.

But is it really true that the substitutionary view of the atonement was not found before the Middle Ages? Not at all. Such a claim can be readily refuted merely by examining the writings of the New Testament itself—particularly the letters of Paul. However, it is also worth noting that key elements of the substitutionary view were held by some of the earliest Christian writers. One example is the author of the Epistle to Diognetus from the early second century. The Epistle to Diognetus was written by an unknown Greek author as an apology for Christianity. Below are some excerpts from the author that affirm key aspects of substitutionary atonement,

Seriousness of Sin

The author writes:

And when we had demonstrated that we were powerless to enter the kingdom of God on our own, were were enabled by the power of God. For our unrighteous way of life came to fruition and it became perfectly clear that it could expect only punishment and death as its ultimate reward. (9.1-2)

Here is a clear affirmation of human inability to save ourselves (akin to total depravity), and a full acknowledgement that sin deserves the ultimate penalty of death.

Grace and Love of God

God demonstrated his love for sinners through his atoning death. The author writes:

But then, when the time arrived that God planned to reveal at last his goodness and power (Oh the supreme beneficence and love of God!), he did not hate us, destroy us, or hold a grudge against us. (9.2)

God’s response to our sin, though deserving of death, is not to bring judgment but to show mercy. Notice that the author is amazed by God’s mercy. The author recognizes that God’s natural response, due to his holiness, would be to destroy sinful people.

Christ Bore Our Sins on Himself

Here is where we get to the crux of substitutionary atonement:

But [God] was patient, he bore with us, and out of pity for us took our sins upon himself. He gave up his own Son as a ransom for us, the holy one for the lawless, the innocent one for the wicked, the righteous one for the unrighteous, the imperishable one for the perishable, the immortal one for the mortal. (9.2)

This is a remarkable passage. Undoubtedly, the author views the work of Christ on the cross as an exchange of the righteous for the unrighteous, that we might be saved; Christ is a substitute.

Even more the author says, “God took our sins upon himself.” Presumably the author has God the Son in view here, or is simply saying that God (in Christ) took sins upon himself. Either way, the phrase “upon himself” certainly suggests bearing sin. This is confirmed in the fact that Jesus is described as a “ransom,” a payment of some sort. His work on the cross pays some debt.

And notice the personal language: “our sins.” Jesus did not just die for a cause, or for an idea, but for individuals.

This entire combination suggests that Jesus took the sins of individuals upon himself as a payment. A payment for what? Given the author’s earlier statement that we deserve “punishment” from God for our sins, it seems reasonable to conclude that Jesus paid this penalty we deserve. He satisfies the justice of God that would otherwise fall upon us.

Christ’s Righteousness Covers Us

Incredibly, the author of the Epistle to Diognetus even seems to affirm what Reformed theologians refer to as the doctrine of imputation. This doctrine says that our justification is not only about having our sins taken away, but also having Christ’s positive righteousness cover us.

This doctrine has also come under attack in recent years. Some scholars have suggested that the Reformed view of justification, which includes a robust understanding of imputation, was largely invented by the Reformers in their overreaction to Rome.

There is not space to respond fully to such claims here. But the author of the Epistle to Diognetusarticulates a view that sounds close to the Reformed understanding of imputation:

For what else could hide our sins but the righteousness of that one? How could we who were lawless and impious be made upright except by the son of God alone? Oh the sweet exchange! . . . That the lawless deeds of many should be hidden by the one who was upright, and the righteousness of one should make upright the many who were lawless! (9.3-5)

This is a significant passage because it doesn’t dwell merely on our sins being taken away, but deals substantively and primarily with the righteousness of Christ. And what does that righteousness do? It hides our sins. It “makes upright” the lawless. And this happens in a “sweet exchange.” If we are looking for an ancient writer who describes the doctrine of the imputation of Christ’s righteousness, this author comes awfully close.

The Epistle to Diognetus shows that the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement and the imputation of Christ’s righteousness are not wholesale inventions of later Christians, but were present, at least in seed form, early in the history of Christianity. Did some Christian groups hold other views of such matters? Sure. But the continuity between the teachings of this epistle and the writings of Paul himself (see especially Romans 5) make it evident that the substitutionary atonement/imputation view goes back very early indeed.

Michael J. Kruger is professor of New Testament at Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the author of Canon Revisited: Establishing the Origins and Authority of the New Testament Books (Crossway, 2012). He blogs regularly at Canon Fodder.

What does Jesus really think of homosexuality?

From Kevin DeYoung:

Crossway has done a great job putting together a number of resources related to the new book on homosexuality.

Here is a general page giving basic information, including endorsements and other links.

Crossway has also put out a free 36-page sampler which includes the Table of Contents, the Introduction, and Chapter One. A free study guide is also available for download.

Recently, I gave an hour long message covering a few of the themes in the book. Following the message I sat on a panel with Justin Taylor, Jackie Hill-Perry, and Josh Moody to continue the conversation. Both of these videos are embedded below.

 Further:On a recent episode of “The Good Wife” a wedding planner, who refuses to take on a gay couple as a client, is asked two questions.  “Did Jesus ever condemn homosexuality?”  She replied “No.”  She was then asked if Jesus condemned divorce.  She responded that he had.  The point of the attorney was that her religious discrimination was ‘selective’ because she was willing to do a wedding for a divorced heterosexual couple but not a homosexual couple marrying for the first time.

Sigh… Where to begin?

First, the wedding planner claimed to be a Christian, not a follower of a religion based exclusively on the spoken words of Jesus as he walked the earth.  I’ve never heard of such a religion, in fact.  Second, I don’t think we would like such a religion, since it would have a hard time condemning incest, rape or bestiality, also subjects that Jesus did not address explicitly in his earthly ministry as contained in the four gospels.

But Christianity does not teach that all theology and all morality is contained only in the words of Jesus found in the four gospels.  Seriously, the claim that Jesus had no opinion on the subject of homosexuality is simply laughable (as bible scholars left and right know).

Here are just some of the reasons, first from Robert Gagnon (leading expert on the Bible and sexuality):

Q: Speaking of Jesus, some argue that because Jesus said nothing about the matter that it was not an important issue for him. What do you think?

There is no historical basis for arguing that Jesus might have been neutral or even favorable toward same-sex intercourse.

All the evidence we have points overwhelmingly to the conclusion that Jesus would have strongly opposed same-sex intercourse had such behavior been a serious problem among first-century Jews. It simply was not a problem in Israel.

First, Jesus’ alleged silence has to be set against the backdrop of unequivocal and strong opposition to same-sex intercourse in the Hebrew Bible and throughout early Judaism. It is not historically likely that Jesus overturned any prohibition of the Mosaic law, let alone on a strongly held moral matter such as this. And Jesus was not shy about disagreeing with prevailing viewpoints. Had he wanted his disciples to take a different viewpoint he would have had to say so.

Second, the notion of Jesus’ “silence” has to be qualified. According to Mark, Jesus spoke out against porneia, “sexual immorality” (Mark 7:21-23) and accepted the Decalogue commandment against adultery (Mark 10:19). In Jesus’ day, and for many centuries before and thereafter, porneia was universally understood in Judaism to include same-sex intercourse. Moreover, the Decalogue commandment against adultery was treated as a broad rubric prohibiting all forms of sexual practice that deviated from the creation model in Genesis 1-2, including homoerotic intercourse.

Third, that Jesus lifted up the male-female model for sexual relationships in Genesis 1-2 as the basis for defining God’s will for sexuality is apparent from his back-to-back citation in Mark 10:6-7 of Genesis 1:27 (“God made them male and female”) and Genesis 2:24 (“For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh”).

These are the same two texts that Paul cites or alludes to in his denunciation of same-sex intercourse in Romans 1:24-27 and 1 Corinthians 6:9. For Jesus, marriage was ordained by the Creator to be an indissoluble (re-)union of a man and woman–two complementary sexual others–into one flesh. Authorization of homoerotic unions requires a different creation account.

Fourth, it is time to deconstruct the myth of a sexually tolerant Jesus. Three sets of Jesus sayings make clear that, far from loosening the law’s stance on sex, Jesus intensified the ethical demand in this area: (a) Jesus´ stance on divorce and remarriage (Mark 10:1-12; also Matthew 5:32 and the parallel in Luke 16:18; and Paul’s citation of Jesus´ position in 1 Corinthians 7:10-11); (b) Jesus´ remark about adultery of the heart (Matthew 5:27-28); and (c) Jesus´ statement about removing body parts as preferable to being thrown into hell (Matthew 5:29-30 and Mark 9:43-48) which, based on the context in Matthew as well as rabbinic parallels, primarily has to do with sexual immorality.

Simply put, sex mattered to Jesus. Jesus did not broaden the range of acceptable sexual expression; he narrowed it. And he thought that unrepentant, repetitive deviation from this norm could get a person thrown into hell.

Where then do we get the impression that Jesus was soft on sex? People think of his encounters with the adulterous woman in John 7:53-8:11, the sinful woman in Luke 7:36-50, and the Samaritan woman who had many husbands in John 4.

What the first story suggests is that Jesus did modify the law at one point: Sexual immorality should not incur a death penalty from the state. Why? Not because sex for him did not matter but rather because stoning was a terminal act that did not give opportunity for repentance and reform. Moreover, all three stories confirm what we know about Jesus elsewhere: that he aggressively sought the lost, ate with them, fraternized with them. But the same Jesus who could protect an adulterous woman from stoning also took a very strong stance against divorce-and-remarriage.

We see a parallel in Jesus’ stance toward tax collectors, who had a justly deserved reputation for exploiting their own people for personal gain. We do not conclude from Jesus’ well-known outreach to tax collectors that Jesus was soft on economic exploitation. To the contrary: All scholars agree that Jesus intensified God’s ethical demand with respect to treatment of the poor and generosity with material possessions. Why then do we conclude from Jesus’ outreach to sexual sinners that sexual sin was not so important to Jesus?

Do our duties extend beyond our consent?

From Randy Barnett:

[In my Am I “imperiling” originalism? A reply to Joel Alicea, I offered to post any response he may have. What follows is his reply.]

I am grateful to Professor Barnett for offering me the opportunity to respond to his criticism of my recent essay in National Affairs, as well as for the very kind comments at the beginning of his post. Professor Barnett’s criticism is characteristically thoughtful and probing, and I think it helps sharpen the points of agreement and disagreement between us.

We agree that the legitimacy of written law requires an answer to the question, “Why should we, the living, obey those long-since dead?” And we agree that there are circumstances under which one can rightly refuse to obey the dead. Barnett thinks that these commonalities render our approaches “not fundamentally different.”

But both of these areas of agreement are mere starting points from which we take radically different paths. That we ask the same questions does not mean that we reach the same answers. I believe the obligation of the living to obey the dead inheres in a regime of written law, especially one based on notions of popular sovereignty. But, more fundamentally, I think it inheres in the nature of an ordered society, which is man’s natural state and which comes with attendant obligations and duties to our forebears. Barnett misunderstands me, then, when he says that my purpose in the essay was to “defen[d] constitutional originalism against the common legal academic trope that it consists of adherence to the ‘dead hand of the past.’” My purpose was not to defend originalism against the dead hand of the past; my purpose was to justify the dead hand of the past. Or, as the title of the essay terms it, the rule of the dead.

This is a foundational disagreement between us. Barnett’s theory begins byrejecting the rule of the dead; he disclaims any right of the dead to bind the living. Rather, Barnett thinks that the living—quite apart from any duties to the dead—should obey the past only insofar as (1) the living affirmatively consent to such authority or (2) the decisions of the dead are necessary and proper.

This divergence in views is rooted in different conceptions of man and his relationship to society. In my view, man is, by nature, a social animal born with reciprocal duties and responsibilities that he does not affirmatively choose. I argue in my essay that the best and most traditional accounts of written law and originalism assume these premises. Barnett, by contrast, sees each individual as his own sovereign, a mini-society unto himself. Obligations must be consented to or, at least, not be an affront to one’s sovereignty.

Read the rest

Is the Southern Baptist bookstore, Lifeway, really committed to the sufficiency of scripture?

From Tod Pruitt

Lifeway, a publishing arm of the nation’s largest Protestant denomination will no longer be promoting and selling Heaven tourism books. This is good news. If you are unfamiliar with the term, Heaven tourism refers to books like 90 Minutes in Heavenand Heaven is for Real in which the authors claim to have died and visited Heaven only to be returned to earth. The defenders of the immensely popular books claim that they help bolster their belief in Heaven. Of course this begs the question: why are the Scripture’s promises concerning the afterlife not sufficient to bolster faith?

During its June 2014 meeting in Baltimore, MD the Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution affirming the sufficiency of Scripture (that God speaks to His people through the mediation of His Word) over subjective personal claims of heavenly visitations. That was an encouraging development. But of course the books on heavenly tourism are not the only problem lining the shelves of Lifeway. They continue to sell Sarah Young’s Jesus Calling and all of its various editions (I stopped counting at 10). Ironically, Jesus Calling represents a far more egregious attack on the sufficiency of Scripture than do the fanciful tales of people’s trips to Heaven.

Also, Lifeway may want to ask Beth Moore about her understanding of the sufficiency of Scripture. A well known Southern Baptist, Mrs. Moore frequently claims to be given direct messages from God outside the Scriptures. Yet, her books and curriculum remain the most prominent of all the Lifeway products. And as withJesus Calling I believe Beth Moore’s materials do far more to undermine the sufficiency of Scripture than do the heavenly tourism books.

Lifeway promotes a host of books and studies that purport to help people hear the voice of God. Many of these books list Scripture as just one of many ways that God speaks to His people. Clearly there are Christians who do believe that God still gives direct revelation outside the mediation of his Word. This is foundational to Pentecostalism, for instance. But the SBC has more than once approved rather robust statements affirming the sufficiency of Scripture. So why is it that the arm of the SBC which produces and sells books and curriculum is producing and selling so many products that clearly contradict the SBC’s stated doctrinal positions?

A quick perusal of the Lifeway Christian Bookstore website reveals that the vast majority of their products are of a highly experiential and therapeutic variety. There are precious few studies of the biblical text and Christian doctrine. Astonishingly, Lifeway is still selling books by oneness Pentecostal (denies the Trinity) and prosperity preacher T.D. Jakes. How can this be? Why is the Southern Baptist Convention promoting books and other materials from a false teacher who regularly distorts the Word of God? I would plead with Lifeway to consider the difficult position in which this places SBC pastors. Many of these men labor to bring doctrinal health and unity to their churches. When Lifeway promotes books that sow confusion or undermine sound doctrine the SBC pastor is left in a position of opposing leadership in his own denomination.

I fear that the answer to this question has less to do with lack of discernment (which is bad enough) and more to do with money. The fact is, the majority of Christians consume bad books. They don’t desire careful expositions of the Scriptures and studies of Christian doctrine. And instead of seeking to whet the appetites of Southern Baptists for sound doctrine Lifeway seems content to sell them books which contradict historic Christian orthodoxy and the stated doctrines of the their own denomination.

The case for the harmony between the Jesus of history and the Christ of faith

By Dr. Craig Keener:

Does the command to love my neighbor mean that I should attend/cater a celebration of their sin?

This meme is making its way around facebook and the blogosphere.  Here are my thoughts on it:

Jesus commanded his disciples to love their neighbors. If by that he meant that they should participate in and celebrate the sinful behavior of their neighbors, then Jesus and His disciples did not love their neighbors. But of course, this isn’t what Jesus meant at all. Jesus loved his neighbor perfectly, and apparently that love included not only mercy, service, sacrificial death, but also convicting truth about their sin which was met with hostility and offense (e.g., Zacchaeus, the rich young ruler or the woman at the well). No, the command to love your neighbor is preceded and superseded by the “first” and “greatest” commandment of all, love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, and soul (Matt. 22:37). That is, the second and lesser commandment is controlled by, informed by, and limited by the first and greater commandment.

So men will command Christians to love their neighbor by celebrating their sin, but like Peter, the believer will love and obey God rather than men (Acts 5:29). Jesus ate with and befriended sinners (he befriended me after all!), but he did not participate in or join in a celebration of their sinful activities, nor did he fail to acknowledge and rebuke their sin in love (e.g., the woman at the well). Indeed, as a carpenter, Jesus would have crafted chairs for pagans to sit in (that’s loving your neighbor), but he would not have crafted idols for them to worship (that’s loving God more, since making idols for the purposes of idolatry is forbidden in the Law, Lev. 26.1, and he obeyed the law perfectly, Heb. 4:15). You see, he did what he instructs the believer to do. First, before anything else, love and obey God with all your heart, mind, and soul. Then, love your neighbor. Loving your neighbor in scripture never meant (nor did Jesus and his disciples practice) indifference to or celebration of sin. Quite the contrary, the followers of Jesus are to “come out from among them” for they are of a different order: 2 Cor. 6.

The biblically illiterate will be duped, stumped, humored, or convinced by memes like this, but faithful believers need not be troubled by them at all. Twisting scripture is a trick of the devil, the fundamentalist, the heretic, and the bible skeptic, and those who want to transform Jesus into their own image, but not the disciples of Jesus Christ who are prepared to let God be true and every man be a liar (Rom. 3:4).

Comments….

• Someone asked me this in the comments: “So, an act like “serving pizza” would fall under your example A whereas a church choosing not to marry a same-sex couple would fall under example B, correct?”
• My response: Of course. You aren’t loving your neighbor if you refuse to deliver pizza on the doorstep of a divorced person, Hindu, or adulterer. You are just being a self righteous jerk, completely ignorant of the gospel or your own sin. But you aren’t loving God if you don’t hesitate to cater a two hour party at a legal brothel. That kind of discrimination is required as disciples of Christ and “progressives” may call them bigots or backwards or whatever insult makes them feel superior. The believer will have to just take it knowing that they mocked Jesus and he promised that his disciples would fare no better.