Sexual Revolution: Defend It, If You Can

This is a brilliant article, which argues from good old-fashioned ethics that the sexual revolution has been and continues to be a Bad Thing. Here's his conclusion - I'd love to see an attempt at a response from someone who disagrees...

In other words, let the sexual revolution be justified on grounds of the common good. I believe it fails that test miserably, with evidence that is weighty, obvious, manifold, logically and anthropologically deducible, and clearly predictable by wisdom both pagan and Christian. Let them make their case, rather than asserting a principle that, in reality, would destroy the very idea of the common good. For if we cannot appeal to the common good in a matter so fundamental, I do not see how we can appeal to it in any other.

It's worth adding that I know we are now living after the sexual revolution, and there's no point trying to pretend otherwise.

God, Stephen Hawking and the BBC

The currently most-read article on the BBC website has this headline "Stephen Hawking: God did not create Universe". As a Christian who has studied a fair bit of physics, I'm going to discuss that. Quick summary of my conclusions: Hawking has got it a bit wrong, but the media are over-sensationalising it as usual. And in the process, they are providing a massive amount of free advertising for Hawking's new book.

It's worth pointing out that I haven't read Hawking's article, because it's behind the Times' paywall, or Hawking's book, because it hasn't been published yet. But at this stage of his career, Hawking is far more a populariser of ideas than an original thinker, so I've got a pretty good idea where he is coming from on this...

The BBC quotes Hawking as writing:

Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing.

Spontaneous creation is the reason there is something rather than nothing, why the universe exists, why we exist.

It is not necessary to invoke God to light the blue touch paper and set the universe going.

Science and Religion

It's worth explaining a few things from these quotes. Firstly, Hawking's philosophy of how God acts in the universe. Hawking seems to have a kind of "God of the gaps" idea going on here - he only sees it as "necessary to invoke God" when there is no other explanation for something.

Of course, Hawking isn't stupid enough to go down the classic God of the Gaps line. He'd probably draw a distinction between when it is "necessary to invoke God" - i.e. when there is no other explanation for something, and when it is possible to invoke God - i.e. when there is an explanation for something that includes the possibility that God is behind it. The Christian answer - that science describes the way that God chooses to run the world - would be treated as when it is possible to invoke God rather than when it is necessary to do so.

Hawking is still wrong though. Rowan Williams is better (quoted on the front of the Times Online today):

Belief in God is not about plugging a gap in explaining how one thing relates to another within the Universe. It is the belief that there is an intelligent, living agent on whose activity everything ultimately depends for its existence.

In other words, Rowan Williams (correctly IMO) asserts that God's existence and action is necessary for science to keep working at all. God and Science aren't competing explanations for the same phenomenon.

Of course, the journalists seem to have even less understanding of this, and think that because Hawking says it isn't necessary to invoke God, he's denying God was involved at all. That's partly because it sells more papers or gets more people looking at the website, and partly because they don't have sufficient understanding of the topic to report accurately on it.

Creation and Quantum Fluctuations

The other thing that is worth explaining is what it means for Hawking to write that "Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing."

In quantum physics, things do sometimes just appear out of nowhere, and then vanish again. But when they do, the total amount of energy involved multiplied by the time they last for has to be less than about 10^-34 Js. So an electron / positron pair, for example, could only last about 10^-21s - one thousand billion billionth of a second. And something bigger would last even less long. So we don't see them very often and they don't usually make much difference to the universe on a big scale.

But that is the only known way of getting something out of nothing. So if the universe wasn't created - it just happened - that's the only known way for it to happen. The problem with that of course is that the universe has lasted quite a while - roughly 14 billion years. Therefore, in order for this theory to work, it needs to have almost exactly zero total energy.

The only known way of having a sufficiently large amount of "negative energy" is through gravity. Imagine that there is a lump of rock a very long way from the Sun, and it isn't moving. Now imagine that it falls towards the Sun, and in doing so it speeds up. It has clearly gained kinetic energy because it is moving. At a year 7 level, we'd say it has converted Gravitational Potential Energy (GPE) to Kinetic Energy (KE). But at the start, its total energy was zero, and at the end its KE is positive, therefore its GPE must be negative.

It's often asserted in astrophysics circles that Black Holes have zero total energy, because all the negative GPE cancels out the positive energy from their mass. And therefore it is possible to get something out of nothing if the something is a black hole because it has zero total energy. On the other hand, I've done a masters course in astrophysics, and I've never once seen that calculation done, or even referenced. Personally, I don't believe it, and I believe it even less when it comes to saying the universe as a whole has zero total energy, but am happy to change my mind if given a good reference that doesn't just assert it.

If it was true, it should mean that you get black holes popping into existence and staying there quite often, and we don't see that happening.

But the idea here is that many cosmologists think that that is what happened with the universe - it popped into existence as a kind of unstable black hole with zero total energy that then exploded. And that's what Hawking means by saying that gravity allows the creation of something from nothing.

(Images from NASA)

Randy Pausch - Last Lecture

This video is really interesting...

Randy Pausch, a popular lecturer and expert in virtual reality, gives a lecture about what he wants to pass on, knowing he had only a few months to live.

As wordly wisdom goes, it's pretty good and interesting stuff. It's also over an hour long.

The Danger of Certainty

Apologies for not posting more at the moment.

One of the things I've been thinking about this term is the nature of knowledge, and more to the point, how we can know things. Of course it's very important in science and in theology, but isn't studied enough in either.

It's wrong to be certain about a fact

The first point I think it's worth making is that it's wrong to be certain. We can never know all the possible information about something. Nor can we ever be sure that our reasoning is right. The traditional answer is that certainty is only possible in maths, but I don't think it's possible even there because human reason is fallible. I can make mistakes. So can anyone else. So can everyone in the whole history of humanity.

Because of this, if people say they are absolutely certain of something, I find it very offputting. If someone says they are certain that climate change is caused by human activity, or that humans evolved from the same ancestors as apes, or that Paul did or didn't write 1 Timothy, that makes me think they are delusional and overstating their case. In my opinion, people should state their case and present their arguments, but not overstate it.

We can know things

But at the same time, it's stupid to say that we can't actually know anything. I am sitting on a chair at the moment. Can I prove that? No. Can I even prove it to myself? No. But all the evidence I have got suggests it. Maybe I am having a vivid dream, or am a brain in a jar or something, but the idea that I am sitting in a chair perfectly fits all of the evidence, so I'm going to say that it might as well be true, even though I can't be totally sure of it. And yes, if things happen that make me question the nature of my assumed reality (as in The Truman Show), then I'm willing to change my opinion.

Tom Wright describes the situation very well by talking about stories. We all try to find the story that best describes the world around us. If there are things that don't fit, it might be that we need to add some small details to our stories; it might be that the stories we tell need to be changed completely. Other people's stories of how the world works might well be different because they have been designed around different bits of information. A perfect story will fit absolutely everything into it and help us to see what we should be doing in life. But because we can never know absolutely everything, we can never see whether we've actually got the perfect story or not.

In fact, not only can I know things, I can know things with enough confidence to bet my life on them. So when I get onto a plane to fly to the US, I'm willing to bet my life that the plane will make it across the Atlantic, and I'm willing to bet that on the basis of the evidence. If I'm feeling worried about it, I'll reassure myself with stuff like a knowledge of how aircraft work, the fact that lots of planes fly across the Atlantic and almost all of them make it with no problems, and so on. If the journey was a lot more dangerous, whether I did it or not would depend on how important it was.

In exactly the same way, I'm willing to bet my life on the trustworthiness of the God and Father of Jesus. Tom Wright goes on to ask how the life, death and resurrection of Jesus fits into our stories, and argues that they can only fit in if our stories end up built around them. That doesn't mean that I'm absolutely certain of everything - I have doubts. Everyone does. It doesn't mean I understand everything - I don't. It means that I know God well enough to trust him with my life.

I love the old hymn by Daniel Whittle:

I know not why God’s wondrous grace
To me He hath made known,
Nor why, unworthy, Christ in love
Redeemed me for His own.

But I know Whom I have believèd,
And am persuaded that He is able
To keep that which I’ve committed
Unto Him against that day.

I know not how this saving faith
To me He did impart,
Nor how believing in His Word
Wrought peace within my heart.

Refrain

I know not how the Spirit moves,
Convincing us of sin,
Revealing Jesus through the Word,
Creating faith in Him.

Refrain

I know not what of good or ill
May be reserved for me,
Of weary ways or golden days,
Before His face I see.

Refrain

I know not when my Lord may come,
At night or noonday fair,
Nor if I walk the vale with Him,
Or meet Him in the air.

Refrain

Does God Suffer? Part 4

Sorry for the infrequent updates. I've been very busy lately - I've got a lovely girlfriend who takes priority over blog posting and I'm helping to run a quiz tournament. Back to God and suffering...

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3

We need to reflect first on what it means for God to act in history before we can reflect on what it means for Jesus to suffer in history. The Bible strongly affirms that God does not change, but clearly also states that he can and does act in history, which seems to conflict with a naïve notion of what change is. In 500BC, God was not incarnate. In AD20, he was. And yet God is unchanging. Grudem summarises the Biblical evidence well:

God is unchanging in his being, perfections, purposes and promises, yet God does act and feel emotions, and he acts and feels differently in response to different situations. This attribute of God is also called God's immutability.

Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology

I think Grudem is unhelpful when he says God feels emotions. God feels love, anger, compassion and so on, but when God feels them they don't change, they aren't wrongly motivated, they're always totally consistent with his character. I would say they're like emotions, but it's truer to say that emotions are a bit like them. But otherwise, Grudem's about right

Grudem also clarifies the Bible's teaching on divine eternity well:

God's eternity may be defined as follows: God has no beginning, end or succession of moments in his own being, and he sees all time equally vividly, yet God sees events in time and acts in time.

Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology

If we combine Grudem's conceptions of what it means for God to be unchanging and eternal, a conceptual model of God starts to emerge which allows him to be both transcendent in the sense that the impassibilists affirm and suffering in the sense that the cross and human experience seem to require. It is further aided by the insight from General Relativity that time and space are so strongly interconnected that to be outside one would require being outside the other. If then, God transcends both time and space yet can act into time in exactly the same way that he can act into space, the way starts to become clearer.

God's changing emotions as presented in the Bible could then be seen to be true expressions, though also accommodations to our understanding, of unchangeable “themotions”, which change only because our position in history changes, and therefore we see some aspects of God's unchanging nature more clearly at different times, because our situation is different.

So God acts into history and therefore can and does suffer in history. And yet what is true of God in history is also true of God in eternity. God suffers in eternity because of what he chooses to experience in history.

So does that mean that suffering wins? If suffering goes on into eternity, doesn't that mean it's won? No.

For in God taking suffering into himself in eternity, yes, suffering itself becomes transcendent, and yet God transcends it, because the centre of the Christian faith is not Moltmann's Crucified God, but the Crucified and Risen Christ. Suffering is transcended because it is defeated and exceeded by the glory of the Resurrection.

Does God Suffer? Part 3

Sorry about the delay in writing this bit. One of the hazards of having a life is that it sometimes gets in the way of blogging ;)

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 4

Christ on the Cross - Traditional Views

The key for any theological answer to the question of whether God suffers is how it handles the crucifixion of Jesus. Of course, if God can't suffer and Jesus is really God and suffers, there's a problem.

Arius used that problem as one of the main reasons he decided Jesus wasn't God, and it was an important challenge for the Church. The answer they came to eventually was that Jesus was one person, both fully human and fully divine, and that his human and divine natures were distinct. So Jesus suffered in his human nature, but not in his divine nature. Christians could even say that God suffered in the humanity of Jesus.

On one level, that's a really important statement to make. I was rightly asked after my last post about pastoral responses to suffering, and one really important point to bear in mind is that God does suffer in the person of Jesus. He isn't a God who is immune from suffering.

Problems with the Traditional Answer

However, the Greek philosophy underlying us talking about Jesus as having two distinct natures has pretty much fallen away. We can rightly say that he is fully human and fully divine, but I don't know anyone who could actually tell me what it means for God to suffer in the person of Jesus but not in himself.

In addition, there are plenty of references in the Bible to God seeming to suffer because his people are suffering or because they are sinful.

How can I give you up, Ephraim?
How can I hand you over, Israel?
How can I treat you like Admah?
How can I make you like Zeboiim?
My heart is changed within me;
all my compassion is aroused.
I will not carry out my fierce anger,
nor will I turn and devastate Ephraim.
For I am God, and not man—
the Holy One among you.
I will not come in wrath.

Hosea 11:8-9, NIV

It seems so much simpler to say that God can and does suffer, though that suffering is because of us and because he chooses to love us. Choosing to love someone often leads to pain, especially when they aren't perfect...

But that then raises the questions about how an eternal God can suffer in time, and whether an eternal God suffering means that suffering wins in the end...

Does God Suffer? Part 2

Part 1 | Part 3 | Part 4

Dealing with Traditional Philosophy

In part 1, I described the traditional philosophical view of why God can't suffer. The problems with that are twofold.

First, God isn't ontologically dependent on us - we can't make God suffer, but he can choose to suffer for us and because of us. This is actually just the doctrine of grace.

The LORD did not set his affection on you and choose you because you were more numerous than other peoples, for you were the fewest of all peoples. 8 But it was because the LORD loved you and kept the oath he swore to your forefathers that he brought you out with a mighty hand and redeemed you from the land of slavery, from the power of Pharaoh king of Egypt.
Deuteronomy 7:7-8, NIV

God didn't choose Israel because he had to - he did it because he wanted to. There wasn't anything about Israel that forced him to do it. In the same way, there isn't anything about us that can force God to suffer. But God can still love us, by his own choice, and that might well affect whether he suffers.

The second problem is that suffering doesn't imply the sort of change that God doesn't do. The Bible teaches that God doesn't change, but also that he acts and that he was incarnate. In 500BC, God wasn't incarnate as a man. In AD20, he was. When we say that God doesn't change, if we are being true to the Bible or to the idea of the Incarnation, then we need to be careful what we mean by "change".

Wayne Grudem describes what the Bible teaches about God's unchangingness as follows:

God is unchanging in his being, perfections, purposes and promises, yet God does act and feel emotions, and he acts and feels differently in response to different situations. This attribute of God is also called God's immutability.
Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology

I think Grudem is unhelpful when he says God feels emotions. God feels love, anger, compassion and so on, but when God feels them they don't change, they aren't wrongly motivated, they're always totally consistent with his character. I would say they're like emotions, but it's truer to say that emotions are a bit like them.

When we have that understanding of what it means for God to be unchanging, it starts to become clear that it doesn't actually mean that God can't suffer. There's also the possibility that God might suffer eternally - I'll discuss that more later.

Jurgen Moltmann

I've avoided talking about dead Germans up until now. But Moltmann is really important here because if you read any modern books on God and suffering, they always spend a lot of time discussing his views, which have been very influential. And in true Monty Python style, he isn't dead yet either.

Moltmann effectively centres his whole theology on the question of God and suffering, even on the question of what it means for God to be with us in our suffering. Here's probably his most famous passage, which starts with a quote from a Holocaust survivor.

“The SS hanged two Jewish men and a youth in front of the whole camp. The men died quickly, but the death throes of the youth lasted for half an hour. 'Where is God? Where is he?' someone asked behind me. As the youth still hung in torment in the noose after a long time, I heard the man call again, 'Where is God now?' And I heard a voice in myself answer: 'Where is he? He is here. He is hanging there on the gallows...'”

Any other answer would be blasphemy. There cannot be any other Christian answer to the question of this torment. To speak here of a God who could not suffer would make God a demon. To speak here of an absolute God would make God an annihilating nothingness. To speak here of an indifferent God would condemn man to indifference.

Moltmann sees the idea of God being crucified as central, even to the point where it twists large chunks of the rest of his theology. He also sees the answer to the problem of suffering as being that as God is crucified, he takes into himself all the suffering in the whole world, past, present and future. So God is seen as sharing in and participating in the suffering of the world.

Along with many modern theologians who put God's suffering central, Moltmann tends to end up in panentheism - the belief that God is in everything and everything is in God.

In part 3, I'll look at the traditional understanding of how / whether God suffered when Jesus was on the cross, and whether it's enough.

Does God Suffer?

I wrote an essay on this recently. Here's part 1 of a summary, without all the references to dead Germans that are so much a part of theology essays, and with a slightly better understanding as a result of arguing about it with other people.

Part 2 | Part 3 |Part 4

Why Can't God Suffer?

The traditional understanding of God in Christianity is that he is impassible, though since the World Wars, most Christian theologians say that God is passible instead. One big problem is that the words passible and impassible have slightly different definitions depending on who you speak to, and the definitions make a big difference, so I'll ignore the words altogether.

None of our pictures of God ever manage to be exhaustively accurate. But it's very easy in this sort of topic to end up with a picture of God that gets important bits wrong, especially when it comes to keeping God's transcendence. It's important to affirm that:

• God is not part of creation and creation is not part of God.
• God is ontologically independent of us. We can't, in and of ourselves, make any difference to God whatsoever. We can't hurt him, we can't make him happy, we can't cause him pain, unless he decides to let us.

• God does not change. The big question that raises is what it means for God to act, given that he doesn't change. I'll discuss that later.

The traditional philosophical understanding of suffering means that it needs God to be ontologically dependent on us - if he suffers because of us, that means we can hurt him. It also means that God changes - he goes from a position of not suffering to a position of suffering. I think the traditional philosophical understanding of suffering is wrong in both respects....

Omnipresence?

From time to time, I find it helpful to question things which are often assumed in Christianity. I don't mean things that have been discussed and agreed on, like the Nicene Creed or the Chalcedonian definition or anything, I mean things we always take for granted because we're always taught them, like "Jesus wept" being the shortest verse in the Bible (it isn't; it's three words in Greek; 1 Thess 5:16, 17 are each only two words in Greek, and 1 Thes 5:17 is two words in most English translations as well, though 1 Thes 5:16 is shorter in terms of letters). Sometimes I change my mind partly as a result of thinking it through, like I did with Soul sleep, (mind change).

Anyway - omnipresence. Here's what I think at the moment:

The Bible doesn't teach that God is omnipresent. It teaches he is with believers whereever they are. It teaches he can see everywhere, he can act everywhere and anywhere, but it doesn't teach that he actually is everywhere.

In fact, the idea of God being spatially located in that way doesn't actually make a lot of sense to me. I think it's a leftover from Greek philosophy, and has a nasty tendency to head towards panentheism. Anyone want to argue / agree?

Soul Sleep

This is one of those areas where I'm aware that I disagree with the majority and yet my position seems so obvious I can't understand why the opposing point of view is so widespread among thinking people... I think it's also one of the areas where Christianity still carries too much baggage from Greek philosophy.

The Greeks (well, the Platonists anyway) believed in the immorality of the soul. They drew a distinction between the physical, which they saw as imperfect, changing and decaying, and the world of ideas, which they saw as perfect and eternal. A human being was a physical, decaying body, united with a perfect, eternal soul, which had always existed and would always exist. In later Gnostic thought, the soul was even seen as imprisoned in the body and wanting to be released.

The Hebrews and the Apostolic Church, however, didn't see things that way. They certainly used the language of “souls”, but they didn't seem to have much conception of them as separable from bodies. The future hope of the early Christians was not in the soul living on after the body died, but of resurrection of the body. Certainly the new body would be different to the old one – in 1 Corinthians 15 Paul uses ψυχικος – “soul-like” or χοϊκος – “dust-like” of our present bodies and πνευματικος – “of the Spirit” for the resurrection body. He sees Jesus' resurrection body as the model for the resurrection body of the Christian, and that was very much physical – he could walk and talk and eat, but more than just physical in the way that our bodies are – he seems also to have been able to go through walls and so on. (As C.S. Lewis pointed out, that makes him more solid than the wall, not less. Gases can't generally go through solids too well, but solids can move through gases.)

As I've discussed elsewhere, there doesn't even seem to have been the common conception that the soul was necessarily immortal. Certainly some Old Testament writers seem to have the idea that death is the end. And Paul writes

Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed. For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality. When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written: "Death is swallowed up in victory."
1 Corinthians 15:51-54, ESV

So if the hope for the Christian is the resurrection of the body rather than the immortality of the soul, what happens between death and the resurrection?

The Bible never directly addresses the question, but drops plenty of hints.

And many of those who sleep in the dust of the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and everlasting contempt.
Daniel 12:2, ESV

But we do not want you to be uninformed, brothers, about those who are asleep, that you may not grieve as others do who have no hope. For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. For this we declare to you by a word from the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, will not precede those who have fallen asleep. For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the voice of an archangel, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first.
1 Thessalonians 4:13-16, ESV

It therefore seems that we can make the following statements about the state of Christians between death and resurrection:

• They are described as “asleep” or “dead”
• They are still in Jesus. Death does not separate them from Christ.
• They will be raised from the dead.

My suggestion therefore is this:

It seems to me that the most likely state of Christians between death and resurrection is that they are unconscious, as if sleeping, until they are raised from the dead.

The Bible does not seem to know of consciousness without a body. And if they were conscious, what would the need be for the resurrection?

Biblical Counter-Arguments

There are three passages I hear often used against this. Two of them are very similar – Jesus saying to the thief on the cross “today you will be with me in Paradise” (Luke 23:43) and Paul saying that he desires to die and be with Christ, which is better than living (Phil 1:23). However, both of these can be simply explained by pointing out that in my understanding, for the believer, the next experience after death is resurrection, as when we wake up after sleeping and do not know how long it is since we went to sleep, or as with someone coming out of a coma after a while.

The third is the Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus in Luke 16:19-31. However, this parable is notoriously difficult to use for talking about life after death, because that is nowhere near the main point of the parable, and Jesus was not beyond inventing fictional stories, characters and countries in his parables to make a valid point.

A fourth passage, which I haven't heard used in arguments, but which it is worth thinking about anyway is Revelation 6. In Revelation 6, the souls of martyrs are seen and cry out to God for vengeance. However, the fact that the souls can be seen itself tells us that this is one of the many symbolic passages in Revelation. Neither does crying out for vengeance require consciousness; Abel manages to be “still speaking” in Hebrews 11:4, because of his faith, which doesn't require him to be conscious, simply remembered. In the same way, the mere existence of the souls of the martyrs cries out for vengeance.

Further Reading

Wikipedia has a fairly helpful page. Note that none of the passages they list as being against soul sleep is actually against it.

Calvin argues strongly against my position here. Note that none of his arguments seem to address the question of whether the soul is conscious after death; only that it is alive. I say it is in Christ, but probably not consciously so, like me when I'm alseep. A sleeping person is still living.

Disinterested Good?

I wrote some background to this post here. Lots of bits of Greek philosophy have got picked up by Christians over the years, and it takes a long time to get rid of them. One of the bits which is still hanging on in there is the idea that if we're doing something because we enjoy it, then it can't be good.

So, for example, some people think that it's wrong to follow Jesus with the aim of going to heaven.

Compare that with the Biblical attitude:

By faith Moses, when he had grown up, refused to be known as the son of Pharaoh's daughter. He chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. He regarded disgrace for the sake of Christ as of greater value than the treasures of Egypt, because he was looking ahead to his reward.
Hebrews 11:24-26, NIV

The key to doing what is right isn't acting against our own interests - it's acting by faith. Faith is recognising that it is more in our interests to follow Jesus than not to.

Then he called the crowd to him along with his disciples and said: "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me and for the gospel will save it. What good is it for a man to gain the whole world, yet forfeit his soul?
Mark 8:34-36, NIV

A major motivation the Bible gives for being a Christian is consistently self-interest. But it is a self interest that has faith, and sees that the only way to save our lives is to lose them, and that it does us no good to gain the world yet forfeit our souls.

And I know this is very Piper-esque, but that's because he's right on this.

Greek Philosophy and Christianity

This is part 1 of 2. I started trying to write something about the idea of disinterested good, but realised I needed too much background. This is the background (here's the main point).

One of the big problems that the Church struggled with (largely unconsciously) for hundreds of years was the relationship between Christianity and Greek philosophy. Greek philosophy, in various forms, was widely and popularly held in the Roman Empire when Christianity was growing and spreading. It was easy for Christians to see that they should reject worshipping Caesar or Artemis; it was harder for them to see that there was a problem with Greek philosophy or to see what to do about it.

To create a huge generalisation, the Church in the Eastern Roman Empire, especially Alexandria, where Greek philosophy was strongest, tended to try to integrate philosophy and Christianity. In the West, they tended not to, spurred on by Tertullian's famous rhetorical question:

What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?
Tertullian of Carthage

The influence of philosophy on the early church wasn't wholly bad, but it did have lots of major problems. Almost all of the early heresies were caused by people putting their philosophical considerations ahead of what the Bible said. Early Church History (patristics) often concentrates on the East, because that was where most of the big arguments were. On the big questions that they argued about - how the Father, Son and Spirit could all be one God and how Jesus could be both human and divine - Tertullian in the West was hundreds of years ahead of the East. Even by 451, at the Council of Chalcedon, the big arguments in the East were only settled when Pope Leo of Rome wrote a letter explaining what they'd believed in the West for hundreds of years, which was what they ended up agreeing on. And then the arguments rumbled on even longer in the East, with the Syrian and Egyptian churches rejecting the compromise and splitting off.

But Rome wasn't immune either. During the Middle Ages, the western church got more and more influenced by Greek philosophy, especially Aristotelian metaphysics and physics and Ptolemaic astronomy to the point where they came to assume the place of dogma. Some of the difficulties in the Reformation with Luther et al and most of the difficulties in the Scientific Revolution with Galileo et al were because of the way that Aristotelianism had become entrenched as orthodoxy, and so to argue against it was seen as heresy.

Some of it is plainly wrong. The idea, for example, that God cannot suffer ("divine impassibility") is straight from Platonism rather than Christianity. If someone read the Bible with a mind open to the possibility of God being able to suffer, they would almost certainly conclude that God suffered in the person of Jesus. And yet through so much of the history of the church, that last sentence would have been immensely controversial.

All of which goes to show that it's easy for us to confuse parts of the surrounding worldview with the gospel, and then to end up elevating them as the truth. In part 2, I look at one bit of Greek philosophy that is still hanging on today.

The Historical Jesus, Liberalism and Faulty Metaphysics

One of the topics I've recently had to do quite a bit of reading about is the so-called "Historical Jesus" movement. Basically, some people don't like Jesus claiming what the gospels claim he said and doing what the gospels claim he did. This is usually because they realise that if Jesus did what he did and said what he said, then they really ought to obey him, and they don't want to do that.

So they come up with all kinds of interesting but ultimately rubbish ideas for how to come up with an idea of Jesus who didn't say the things the Bible says he said or do the things the Bible said he did. Most of the ideas involve going against how historians say you should do history when working with sources and end up with a Jesus who often looks very like them and who couldn't possibly have given rise to the early church. The early church, of course, seemed to have as its core lots of people who were in a position to know what had happened with Jesus and were willing to die for the belief that he rose physically from the dead.

Those people who say Jesus was just a normal bloke are pretty easy to disprove - Tom Wright does it very well (and at very great length), for example, in The New Testament and the People of God, Jesus and the Victory of God and The Resurrection of the Son of God. Alternatively, you could sit and think about it for a few minutes or have some fun and read CS Lewis's Fern Seed and Elephants.

But the people I'm more interested in are the Christians who go along with that kind of thing - like Marcus Borg. They tend to be coming from the point of view that Christianity is still in some ways true but that miracles don't happen.

The problem with that is twofold. The first is that it's really stupid to look at whether something happened by assuming before you start that it didn't, especially when it involves saying that God couldn't do something.

The second is that people usually say that you can have a genuine experience of God but that God can't intervene physically in the universe. That's a problem because if God can't intervene physically in the universe, there's no way of having a genuine experience of him. Our physical bodies can't just relate to something spiritual unless that spiritual thing has in some way some ability to control the physical. But if God doesn't have that, then we can't have a genuine experience of him.

I'm waffling now. I'd better stop.

Christian Epistemology and Hermeneutics

The more I think about it, the more I become convinced that this is a key question for the church, and the more surprised I am that there is so little being written about it (at a popular level, at least). What I'm writing is very much provisional, could doubtless be expressed better and needs thinking through more.

Epistemology is the study of how we become persuaded of things or why we believe what we believe. (πειθω / peitho is the Greek for “I persuade”, which leads to πιστυω / pistuο for “I believe”). How do Christians decide what is true about their faith and what isn't?

Note that this is a very different question from how people come to be Christians in the first place or why non-Christians believe what they believe. I don't actually think there is a solid epistemology that works for non-Christians beyond asserting some stuff and saying “this seems to work for me”.

Christian Epistemology is a huge question, and everything I write here is in one sense an oversimplification and in another sense a searching. I'm not yet convinced I've got it right – I'm still trying to articulate the question...

I guess there are three commonly articulated views, and all were present to an extent during the Reformation.

Church-delimited epistemology

As far as I can tell, a common view before the Reformation, which is still current in places, especially in Eastern Orthodoxy, is that we are free to believe what we want to believe, within the constraints of the Church. The Church as a whole has met together several times, most famously at Nicea in AD325 and at Chalcedon in AD451 to discuss what it believed.

What it is essential to believe was decided at the Ecumenical Councils. However, our beliefs should of course be shaped by the tradition of the church, by what people who have gone before have taught us, especially in and from the Bible.

Essentially, we should believe what the Church as a whole has said it believes, and where the Church as a whole hasn't said anything, there's room for disagreement.

The Problem

The reason that that broke down was partly because there were some issues that were very important that the church as a whole hadn't discussed and come to a firm conclusion on. This meant that there were some people within the church who were believing things that (in retrospect) were very clearly wrong and dangerous to believe, and doing things that were very clearly wrong, because the church had not explicitly forbidden them. The obvious example is people's attitude to how they were saved – there were lots of people in the church thinking that they were saved by buying indulgences, or paying for masses to be said for them.

It became very difficult for the church to meet to condemn some of the abuses, partly because the people in power were often the people who were profiting from the abuses of power. And when people spoke out against that, the reaction of those in power was often to try and get rid of them.

Attempted Scriptural Epistemology

The solution that the Protestants came up with was essentially a Scriptural epistemology. They said that we should believe what the Bible says, which sometimes contradicts what people within the Church said. Lots of protestants today still say this, but the big problem with it is the question of who interprets the Bible – the problem of hermeneutics. Actually, saying that we know things because the Bible says them is just shifting the epistemological problem to be a hermeneutical problem.

The most common idea among the Protestants is that it's my idea about what the Bible means that is right and other people who disagree with me are wrong. This led to a few influential teachers (e.g. Melanchton, Calvin) essentially writing books to tell people how to interpret the Bible correctly. And quite a lot of people followed them, and denominations were born. So Lutheranism was essentially people who interpreted the Bible the same way that Luther and Melanchthon did, Calvinism was people who interpreted the Bible the way that Calvin and Beza did, and so on. Yes, it's more comple than that, but that's the general idea. People like Luther and Calvin agreed on quite a lot of issues (like how to be saved), but disagreed on some (like what happens at Holy Communion).

On the other hand, there were also lots of people who didn't want to go along with what the teachers who ended up running denominations said and stuck with their own interpretation – they were the radicals, including the Anabaptists, Unitarians and so on. Because they essentially had an individualised epistemology, it was very easy for one little group to disagree with another little group and so split from them. That's the kind of thing that still seems to happen a lot in their spiritual descendants in the USA. All it takes for a split is two people with different interpretations of what the Bible says who are both sure in their own minds that they are right and the other person is wrong.

Some people go so far as to claim to interpret the Bible to mean the opposite of what a lot of people think it obviously means. The problem is that with an individualised hermeneutic, there's not much you can do about it. As a result, some people are heading back towards saying that we interpret Scripture as the Church has always interpreted it, which is essentially heading back to church-delimited epistemology.

Magisterial Epistemology

One way out of this was the imposition of magisterial epistemology - you believe what you believe because the people who run the Church say that you should believe it. The pope (or whoever) has the power to say what is right and what isn't because he has the ability to interpret the Bible. This is the way that, for example a lot of Roman Catholics take.

Most of the Protestant denominations ended up claiming to have a Scriptural epistemology, but had an essentially magisterial hermeneutic – the Bible was their authority, but the Bible needed to be interpreted according to the rules of the denomination, whether Calvin's Institutes or the Augsburg Confession or the 39 Articles, or whatever. And there isn't actually much difference in practice between that and the Catholic magisterial epistemology.

The Problem for Protestants

The problem for protestants then is that we need a way to be able to have a definite heremeneutic without resorting to saying that the Church as a whole is right, because we've seen that the Church as a whole can be wrong with the Roman response to the Reformation.

A Way Forwards?

My suggestion of a way forwards is what I call a hermeneutic of brokenness. It's probably very unoriginal, but I don't know where I lifted it from. In practice, lots of people seem to do it anyway.

The idea is that we can only interpret the Bible correctly if we come at it completely broken and without any presuppositions. Of course, we can't do that perfectly, but the more broken we are, and the more we reject our presuppositions and let them be changed by the Bible, the closer we get to a correct interpretation. It's like in science, where we can never know if we've actually got the right interpretation – we can only know that our theories fit all the available data. But as our theories enable us to get better data, so we can re-evaluate and modify them. Just like that, we allow our views to be changed by Scripture, then re-read Scripture with our changed views and understand it slightly better.

Because all interpretations are ultimately provisional, it means that we are much more generous towards people that disagree with us – we listen and try to understand their point of view, being willing to change our mind if what they say fits better than what we say. But where they seem to be putting their pride or their cultural presuppositions first, then we can legitimately disagree with them or point out where they are doing that. And if they don't listen to dialogue, it suggests they aren't broken enough yet.

Effects

Having a hermeneutic of brokenness would mean that we were much less likely to splinter into more denominations and much more likely to be in dialogue with people of different traditions. It would mean that we wouldn't be confessionally defined, as confessions would not be necessarily true in the same sense as the Bible.

It does however make the question of defining heresy more difficult...

Synthesis

When I was (quite a bit) younger, I used to think that if something was true, that was it. A different statement about the same facts couldn't be true as well.

And I read someone else summarising Hegel, with his ideas about one person coming up with an idea - a thesis, then someone else reacting to that with an opposite idea - an antithesis, and then eventually the two end up coming together - a synthesis. I don't know how much of that is actually what Hegel said or wrote, but it's what I understood this person who was trying to summarise Hegel to be saying. I guess reading Hegel is one of the things I'll do some other time.

Anyway, Hegel is obviously wrong in some respects. Either 2+2=4 (in Euclidean space) or it isn't. You can't have someone coming up with the thesis "2+2=4", then someone else coming up with the antithesis "2+2<>4" and then them somehow working that into a synthesis. It's rubbish - it doesn't work.

But some of the time, especially when we are using metaphors and discussing ideas and stuff, Hegel has a point. Take, for example, these ideas:

1. Jesus died on the cross to take the punishment that we deserve for our sins.
2. Jesus died on the cross so that Christians, who are united with him through faith, can die to sin but rise to new life
3. Jesus died on the cross to defeat Satan
4. Jesus died on the cross as an example for us of what it means to lay down our lives in following God
5. Jesus died on the cross to incorporate Christians into God's covenant community

Now, as far as I can tell, all of those are taught by the Bible, and all are true. The actual true and complete reason Jesus died on the cross is kind of a synthesis of all of those (and more). That's not to say that any of those explanations isn't true, nor is it to say that any of them is more true than the others. One of them might be a lot more useful than the others, or a lot more relevant than the others to a particular situation, but all are true.

So why am I saying this? Because I can see two opposite dangers that people seem to fall into. One is to say that all truth is like that - that, for example, Jews and Christians and Muslims and Zoroastrians and whatever are all following the same God and that they are all just different aspects of the same truth. But that doesn't work, because it comes down to the question of who Jesus is. He can't be both God (as the Christians say) and not God (as the rest say).

On the other hand, some people say that Hegel's idea never works. So they'll say that Jesus dying for our sins is the only true explanation of why he died. That's also a load of rubbish - the Bible teaches all of those.

I think this is at the root of some of the arguments over NT Wright (and others). He tends to emphasise the last one of those explanations, whereas a lot of conservative Christians tend to emphasise the first one (and FWIW, I think the second is probably the dominant idea in Biblical thought). So people disagree with him. But at the end of the day, a lot of what he says is just a different way of looking at the same truths.

Carson - Hermenutical Constraints

One of the most important hermeneutical constraints one should adopt in order to avoid such reductionism is this: Permit the various attributes and characteristics of God to function in your theology only in the ways in which they function in Scripture; never permit them to function in your theology in such a way that the primary data, the data of Scripture, are contradicted. Thus one must not infer fatalism from the sweeping biblical data about God's sovereignty; one must not infer that God is finite from the constant biblical portrayal of God personally interacting with finite persons. From God's knowledge and sovereignty we must not justify prayerlessness; from the exhortations to pray and not give up, we must not suppose God is coerced by our much speaking (compare Matt. 6:7-8 and Luke 18:1). Precisely because God is so gloriously rich and complex a being, we must draw out the lessons the biblical writers draw out, and no others.
D.A. Carson

Relativism and Atheism

It's important to be clear what we're talking about. I'm using the following definitions:

atheism - the belief that God does not exist

relativism - the belief that no one point of view is more valid than others

agnosticism - not being sure whether God exists or not

When two or more people have a discussion or an argument, they are usually coming from different points of view. Each of them will have their own experiences; each of them will have their own backgrounds; their own reasons for believing what they believe. Sometimes one point of view will be "better" or "more valid" than another For example, the view of a professor of engineering on how a car engine works is probably going to be better than the view of a six-year old child, because they have had more opportunity to become well-informed, and to experience the car engine itself.

But sometimes neither person is in a better position to know, and then it just comes down to people's background, what they assume and what they believe. If we find ourselves in that situation - where the only reasons for disagreement are background and assumptions, then it is a good idea to admit that at the end of the day we don't know, we can just have an opinion.

If God doesn't exist, then no-one can have a "better" or "more valid" experience of God than anyone else, which means that we are all groping in the dark. We could have two people meeting one another and one of them believed in God, and one didn't believe in God. Neither of them could have any real evidence for their claim; they would both be believing things entirely on the basis of their backgrounds and assumptions. But that means that we couldn't tell who was right.

At the end of the day, the only way that Atheism cannot explain why many people do believe in God is by saying that people sometimes believe wrong things because of their experiences, or because they want it to be comfortable to them, or something. But whenever they admit that, they are cutting the ground from under themselves, because if those reasons can make other people wrong, it can make them wrong too.

If an atheist is being logically consistent, they can never be sure. They can never say categorically "God does not exist" - it can only ever be "I can't see how God can exist" or "I don't think that God exists". But I wouldn't call that atheism; I'd call that agnosticism, as it's saying that at the end of the day, you're not sure.