What #Putin is Doing and what the West is Not Doing At All

My newest post at Intellectual Takeout:

This weekend's Wall Street Journal featured an interesting article about Hungary, a former Soviet bloc country that fled to NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union, and is now moving closer to Putin's Russia. As the article mentions, it is one more example of the break up of the Cold War anti-Soviet alliance, and another diplomatic victory for Putin.

But more importantly, it returns us to the issue of why it is that the West is experiencing this long, slow breakup--and what Putin is doing right.

Here is what Putin is doing right and what the West is--not doing wrong--but not doing at all: First, he is providing his people with a transcendent meaning and purpose through an official religion, that of Christianity, while the West thinks it can keep cultural cohesion through meaningless secular liberal abstractions.

Read the rest here.

A big thinker at Big Think engages in Small Think about religion

One would think that at the Big Think they would know how to do it a little better than this. But this is always the thing with atheists (or skeptics or rationalists or whatever else they call themselves): they don't actually engage in rational thought or discourse; rather, they strike a rationalist pose.

I just want to know when we're going to see these great rational atheistic thoughts we're always being promised instead of the disappointingly vague and logically questionable pronouncements we keep getting.

Derek Beres, one of the resident Big Thinkers, in his "Is Religion the Problem?", writes about the role of the religious mindset in the recent Baton Rouge police shootings:

In many ways, religion is born out of this idea: the soul is what really matters; eschew the physical and focus on the moral prescriptions arising from your prophet (or the ‘voice’ inside your own head).

Well maybe some religions do this, but strangely enough, the most major major world religion, Christianity, is certainly not born out of this idea. Apparently Beres forgot that part about the resurrection of the body and the new Heaven and earth.

But somehow, in some vague sense never actually identified by Beres, the belief in an afterlife constitutes an "ideology" that has some bad influence on people:

... a body is necessary for consciousness to occur. While it is not only our brain producing it, without a body what we term ‘consciousness’ does not exist. Neuroscientists and researchers quibble over what that term actually defines. They do not argue about an ethereal version of it ‘out there’ invading what is ‘in here.’

How could he possibly know that a body is necessary for consciousness? Because all the consciousnesses he knows inhabit bodies? If there was a consciousness that existed outside a body, how could he know it? This reminds me of C.S. Lewis' dialog in which one of the characters asks another how a scientist could possibly know anything about what or whether anything existed outside of nature, given the fact that the only thing scientists study is nature. How can you pretend to know anything about something you, by definition, do not study?

There is also the problem that anyone who denies the existence of anything metaphysical has to have a physical account of consciousness. Well, good luck with that. We're still waiting for some clever materialist to come up with a purely physicalist account of something that is, by definition, not physical.

Don't hold your breath.

He says:

A metaphysical philosophy on what we are always ends in disappointment and, too often these days, violence. The meat and bones of our being is the reality of the planet we share.

Umhmm. Is there, like, any evidence that metaphysical systems are any more conducive of disappointment or violence than non-metaphysical systems? If so, does this evidence include Marxism and Nazism?

And I'm not exactly sure of what we're talking about when we start using expressions like the "meat and bones of our being" being the "reality of the planet." It's not a bad metaphor, but it's not exactly clear what it means. It sounds like some sort of attempt to talk about being (a metaphysical concept) in some physicalist way, but unfortunately, the thought is stillborn.

Again, yes, #Christianity and #Islam DO worship the same God

The question about whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God got hashed out pretty well a year or two ago, and I gave my opinion that, whatever their differences (and there are crucial ones), Christians and Muslims do worship the same God.

But I notice Alan Schlemon at Stand to Reason has another post in which he gives another argument against this position. Stand to Reason appears to be a blog engaged in popular apologetics. It says it "trains Christians to think more clearly about their faith." If that is the case, then, on this issue, at least, it seems to have fallen below its own self-stated standards.

It seems to me that there has been enough intelligent Christian defense of the position that, in fact, Christians and Muslims do worship the same God in any meaningful sense that a popular apologetics blog should by now, if not have acknowledged this itself, at least have come to terms with the arguments made by people like Edward Feser, Frank Beckwith, and James Chastek. The second problem is that his arguments on the other side of this issue just aren't very good.

In an earlier post Schlemon says,

Do Christians worship Jesus as God? Yes. Do Muslims worship Jesus as God? No. Therefore, Christians and Muslims don’t worship the same God because they don’t both worship Jesus.

The first problem with this is logical. Here are the two premises:

All Christians worship Jesus as God

No Muslim worships Jesus as God

But logically the only thing you can conclude from this is that "No Muslim is a Christian." The conclusion "Therefore, Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God" quite literally is not an option.

The second problem is that, on the same grounds you would conclude (illogically) from these premises that Muslims don't worship the same God, you would also have to conclude that Jews do not worship the same God as Christians. I don't know if Schlemon believes that, but his logic here would demand it. This was one of Beckwith's telling points. Are we to believe that the God Abraham worshiped is not the God of the New Testament? 

Shlemon then argues on the basis of his distinction between the use of the term "God" as a title and as a person:

It’s helpful to think of it as a public office. The president, for example, is the title of a position, but a unique person occupies that office and fulfills its duties.

In the same way, God is the title of the position or office. Both Christians and Muslims believe in the same what – a God whose duties include things like creating, receiving worship, and judging. They differ on who they believe is the person who occupies that position. Muslims believe that person is Allah and Christians believe it is Yahweh.

Again, this seems to me entirely unconvincing. It is, in fact, a distinction without a difference--at least for purposes of this issue. There can be no separation between the person and the office when you are talking about God. They are one and the same--there is no God (office) who is distinct from God (the person) and vice-versa. The only usefulness of that distinction is within the nature of God himself (the Trinity). For this issue, however, it can serve no purpose.

James Chastek's argument still holds:

Asking whether Muslims and Christians believe in the same God is the same as asking whether geocentrism and heliocentrism are descriptions of the same universe.

... If you’re asking whether contrary theories to explain the same fact are about the same fact, then the answer is (analytically) yes.

In an interesting way, the denial that Christians and Muslims worship the same God is a denial of the denial that Christians and Muslims worship the same God, since, if in the statement "Christians and Muslims do not worship the same God," the term "God" does not refer to the same thing, then Christians and Muslims could not differ in their worship of Him.

If you do not agree on what you disagree about, then you can't disagree about it.

And, again, Schlemon's argument would implicate the Jewish God at the same stroke.

These arguments are from an earlier post. His new post adds this argument:

Claiming that Muslims and Christians worship the same God is an expression of Islamic theology, not Christian theology. But why affirm an Islamic teaching? It’s the Qur’an that claims that the God of Islam is the same God in Christianity (Surah 2:139, 29:46). That means you affirm the Qur’an is correct when you claim Muslims and Christians worship the same God.

If Nazis brush their teeth, should we knock ours out? The assumption here is that whatever Muslims affirm the Christian must deny. That assumption is mistaken on the face of it. But let's also see where it would lead us:

That God is omnipresent is a thing Muslims affirm

All things Muslims affirm Christians must deny

Therefore, All Christians must deny that God is omnipresent

It also assumes that if we affirm anything the Qur'an affirms, we ipso facto affirm the Qur'an. But we affirm many things the Qur'an affirms (God's omnipresence among them). Even Schlemon wouldn't assert that it's wrong at every single point. 

This seems to me to be rather sloppy reasoning all around.

Again, Islam is a Christian heresy. A heresy is a system of believe which deviates from orthodoxy by deducing certain beliefs from it. Islam has deduced the concept of the Trinity from the concept of God. That does not make for a system of belief that is entirely contradictory to Christian, just one that deviates from it in important respects.

In regard to its concept of God, the result is not an entirely different God, just a very flawed one.

What IS the Christian Worldview?: An Introductory Book List

An excerpt from my post on "What is the Christian Worldview?" at Exordium, the blog of the Classsical Latin School Association:

There is something deeper than just our surface beliefs that partly dictates what those beliefs will be. I think this is more reflective of what we mean by a worldview.

If you really want to get a grasp on what a Christian worldview is, you’re going to have to devote yourself to reading a little philosophy and literature, with an emphasis on the history of ideas. I will say, however, that there are some great writers and great resources out there to get you started on this endeavor. What follows are the books I have recommended to my youngest son, who is now a philosophy major at the University of Kentucky. I think he would tell you that they have benefited him a great deal. For the most part they are books that simplify a lot of the main issues involved in the question of why we think what we think. But, also for the most part, they avoid oversimplification.

Read more here.

Is Christianity just another Myth? A discussion with an athiest

UPDATED 10:55, See below.

Following is the discussion today between me and atheist writer John Loftus at Debunking Christianity in the comments section of a post in which he says, "Anyone who looks into the historical evidence for Yahweh, Satan, hell, virgin births, incarnations and resurrections will see these beliefs come from the ancient mythological past. The best way to kill such barbaric and utterly ignorant beliefs is to look at their mythological origins, and no appeal to the genetic fallacy can help the honest believer here." I will update this post with any additional discussion.

Martin Cothran • 2 days ago
I realize this post is meant to just refer the reader on to books that delve into this more deeply, but (not having immediate access to the sources referred to here) I'm wondering what basic form the argument "linking it [any miraculous religious belief?] to the mythological past would take. Could you give a simple example of this?

John W. Loftus Mod  Martin Cothran • 7 hours ago
Hi Martin, I offered an example in Jaco Gericke's chapter. Here are a few more. Before looking into the coherence of the incarnation, let's see how many virgin births of gods there were in the same era. Before looking at how hell is compatible with a good God, let's first look into the history of hell to find it was accepted by others in the mythological past. Before looking at the coherence of a being who rebelled against God named Satan, let's see his history among the other cultures of that same era.

Martin Cothran • 6 hours ago
So is your argument that a miracle claim can be disproven merely by pointing out that other miracle claims have been made?

John W. Loftus • 5 hours ago
Not disproven. But why were so many other famous people believed to be virgin born semi-gods or divine?

Martin Cothran  • 5 hours ago
I'm trying to think of what the logical structure of this argument would be, and particularly what major premise one would have to employ in order to make it work. Here's a stab at it:

No claim of the truth of an historical event can be considered true if there are other, similar claims made asserting other, similar historical events. 

A miracle is a historical claim to a historical event similar to other claims about similar historical events. 

Therefore, a miracle claim cannot be considered true.

If the major premise I have provided is not the one you would employ, I would be curious to know what it should be.

John W. Loftus • 5 hours ago
No disproof is intended. If I were to structure a probabalistic argumemt though, it would go like this: if so many essential features of a religion look like they are culturally generated then the religion itself is probably culturally generated. Or, if it looks like a duck and walks like a duck it probabally is a duck.

Martin Cothran  • 2 hours ago
Okay. I get that. So it's sort of an intuitive point, a rhetorical, rather than a logical, one? But does the point have any rhetorical force with the people for whose ears it is intended? In fact aren't you using the term "probabalistic" in a very analogous sense? You don't, for example, have statistical evidence of what percentage of miracle claims are true, since that is the very point in question. Does this argument have any force outside the body of unbelievers who already have a prejudice against the possibility of the miraculous? Why should those who have the opposite prejudice find this point intuitively appealing?

And why is this point any more intuitively obvious than the point made by thinkers such as C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and G. K. Chesterton, who maintained that, to quote Chesterton, "If the Christian God really made the human race, would not the human race tend to rumours and perversions of the Christian God? If the center of our life is a certain fact, would not people far from the center have a muddled version of that fact?"

In fact, Chesterton makes an observation that seems to me to get to the heart of the problem with this line of argumentation: that what this position "really amounts to is this: that because a certain thing has impressed millions of different people as likely or necessary therefore it cannot be true."

John W. Loftus • 2 hours ago
No one is saying it cannot be true, so CS Lewis is wide of the mark. No one is saying this will convince everyone either. For it is possible that all Christian theology was borrowed or stolen from ancient superstitious cultures and still true. One cannot precisely calculate the odds. It's just extremely strange to many of us that Christian theology looked indistinguishable from ancient pagan cultures in its inception.

Martin Cothran • 15 minutes ago
And it would seem strange to some others of us that the beliefs of many pagans WOULDN'T look similar to Christian theology if Christian theology really reflected the nature of reality--a reality that man has had access to since the beginning of thought. That was my main point, but I don't think you contest that.

One other relevant belief of the thinkers I mentioned was that the main problem with paganism was not that it was wrong, but that it was incomplete. This is why the main stream of Christian theological and philosophical thought did not reject paganism wholesale, but accepted and incorporated many of its beliefs and modes of thought. That went for the meaning it saw expressed in their mythologies (which appealed to human imagination) as well as the truth expressed by their philosophers (which appealed to the intellect)--two streams of thought (the imaginative and the rational) that Christianity fused together.

In fact, this was the whole reason C. S. Lewis became a believer: His belief that the mythologies were meaningful but false, and history true but without meaning, was reconciled by Tolkien's thesis that Christianity was a myth that had entered actual history. This line of thought is explained in Chesterton's "Everlasting Man."

UPDATE: 3:16 p.m.

Phasespace

And it would seem strange to some others of us that the beliefs of many pagans WOULDN'T look similar to Christian theology if Christian theology really reflected the nature of reality--a reality that man has had access to since the beginning of thought.

Perhaps, but what if the nature being expressed isn't what you think it is? For example, what if any similarities that there are between Christian and pagan beliefs aren't due to an underlying truth about the reality of the universe, but rather a truth about how humans see and perceive the wo rld around us. Under such circumstances, the similarities between Christian and pagan beliefs don't necessarily reflect a truth about the existence of any sort of supernaturalism or the true nature of the universe, it merely reflects a truth about human psychology.

Without good evidence suggesting that the supernatural is real, how do you presume to know that the supernatural assertions of the religious are not merely a product of human psychology? And how do you arrive at the conclusion that paganism is just incomplete?

UPDATE: 3:45 p.m

Martin Cothran • a few seconds ago
I have no particular comment on your "what if" hypothetical scenario in your second paragraph. Yes, if Christianity and paganism (where they overlap) don't accurately reflect the nature of reality, then they don't reflect the nature of reality. But then, that is sort of tautological, isn't it?

As for your third paragraph, if there were no good evidence that the supernatural is real, then, again, they may, in fact, be the product of human psychology. Your conditional statement is likely true. But one would have to affirm your antecedent--that, in fact, there is no good evidence for it. If ~P, then Q, ~P, therefore Q. But I have no good reason to accept ~P, and accept what seems to me good evidence for P (that the supernatural is real).

As to your last question, all I was referring to is that Christianity accepted many of the Greek and Roman beliefs. There is a great amount of overlap between the meaning expressed in many of the myths and truths expressed by many of the philosophers on the one hand, and the theology later developed by the early Christian fathers and the medieval theologians and philosophers. Christianity took that and ran with it. For example, the Greeks and Romans figured out the four cardinal virtues,(prudence, temperance, fortitude and justice), which are completed with the three theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity); and Plato and Aristotle figured out the basic metaphysical structure of the world, which was built on and transformed by St. Thomas Aquinas. That sort of thing.

UPDATE: 10:55 p.m

Doubting Thomas • 7 hours ago
Reality is reflected in religion. The reality is that humans made them up. All of them. As for C.S. Lewis, why wouldn't paganism be true and Christianity just one more false religion that points toward the truth?

Martin Cothran  • 6 hours ago
Those are very bold definitive statements. I would be interested in seeing an argument for them. As to your question, again, I don't make strict dichotomy between paganism (either in its mythological or rational form) and Christianity. There is actually a lot of overlap. I could certainly conceive of a state of affairs where what you suggest might be true. The only problem is that I have no reason or evidence that convinces me that it is.

Phasespace  • 6 hours ago

As for your third paragraph, if there were no good evidence that the supernatural is real, then, again, they may, in fact, be the product of human psychology. Your conditional statement is likely true. But one would have to affirm your antecedent--that, in fact, there is no good evidence for it. If ~P, then Q, ~P, therefore Q. But I have no good reason to accept ~P, and accept what seems to me good evidence for P (that the supernatural is real).

I think this is the meat of the issue. I don't think it falls under the rubric of deductive logic, it falls under logical inference and probability. I have no good reason to accept the assertions of supernaturalism if psychology sufficiently explains human behavior with respect to religion (which I think it does), and the evidence in favor supernaturalism is at best sketchy, open to multiple interpretations, and adds additional complications that don't seem to be necessary, when psychology does so sufficiently and efficiently. The law of parsimony wins the day in my book.

Note: This doesn't disprove supernatural belief, but it does leave me wondering about its applicability to many of the issues that it concerns itself with.

Martin Cothran  • an hour ago
Again, my main point here was not to prove Christianity, but to point out that the whole mythological argument is not very convincing. But as to your point about the evidence for supernaturalism being "at best sketchy," are you saying you do not believe in entities or forces beyond the physical? And what makes materialism or the disbelief in the supernatural the default position?

A Hierarchy of Religious Truth: Another answer to the question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God

As a former student of mine, Laurabeth Long, reminds me, Peter Kreeft, a Catholic philosopher, addresses the question "Aren't all religions the same, deep down?" this way:

Allah, of course, is God—the same God Jews and Christians know and worship. Islam is not only a Western, theistic religion rather than an Oriental, pantheistic religion, but it bases itself explicitly on the historical revelation of the God of the Jews, tracing itself to Ishmael, Isaac's brother, to whom God also promised special blessings, according to Genesis. (Fundamentals of the Faith, p. 85)

This follows on his discussion of the hierarchy of religious truth, which he describes this way:

By Catholic standards, the religions of the world can be ranked by how much truth they teach. Catholicism is first, with Orthodoxy equal except for the one issue of papal authority; then comes Protestantism and any "separated brethren" who keep the Christian essentials found in Scripture; third comes traditional Judaism, which worships the same God but not via Christ; fourth is Islam, greatest of the theistic heresies; fifth, Hinduism, a mystical pantheism; sixth, Buddhism, a pantheism without a theos; seventh, modern Judaism, Unitarianism, Confucianism, Modernism, and secular humanism, none of which have either mysticism or supernatural religion but only ethics; eighth, idolatry; and ninth, Satanism. To collapse these nine levels is like thinking the earth is flat. (Fundamentals of the Faith, p. 75)

What is the difference between philosophy and theology?

I was reading Hans Urs Von Balthasar's Glory of the Lord today as part of my Sunday reading. In the very first volume of the series which he calls a "theological aesthetics," he starts by discussing what word he wishes to begin with. The word, he says, is "Beauty."

It is a word, he says, that philosophers end with, but that theologians should begin with. This made me think of the relation between philosophy and theology, which some Protestants I have run across (not all certainly, and probably not even most), on the grounds of Colossians 2:8, think is a relation of opposition. Of course, that is a bad interpretation of the verse. But what, in fact, is the relation between the two?

Philosophy is, generally speaking, the attempt to attain truth through human reason. Theology, on the other hand, extrapolates from Divine revelation an understanding of truth—philosophy travels from the lower to the higher, theology from the higher to the lower.

And when both human reason is working properly, and Divine revelation is interpreted rightly, philosophy and theology meet in the same truths.

 

The thought I had about the relation between the two, sparked by Balthasar, was this: The difference—perhaps even the chief difference—between philosophy and theology is that, while philosophy ends in truth, theology begins with it.

A rational answer to the question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God

Once again James Chastek (who has the advantage over most other people that takes advantage of the wisdom of St. Thomas Aquinas) nails it on an issue on which a lot of nonsense is being written:

Hypothesis: Asking whether Muslims and Christians believe in the same God is the same as asking whether geocentrism and heliocentrism are descriptions of the same universe.

He explains:

The question is not best seen as followed by an instruction to check the yes or no box. If you’re asking whether contrary theories to explain the same fact are about the same fact, then the answer is (analytically) yes. If you’re asking whether contrary theories to explain the same fact are the same (i.e. not contrary) then the answer is (again, analytically) no. Rather, the question becomes interesting when we ask what relation contrary accounts have to the thing they are accounting for.

My only question here is why we couldn't make the same argument about, say, about Mormonism. It seems to me that Mormonism is a different matter than Islam in this regard. While Islam is a Christian heresy—in that it came out of Christianity and retains enough of the Christian conception of God's essential nature to be considered a wrong belief about the same God, Mormonism seems to deny every essential feature of the Christian God, constituting a conception of God completely alien to the Christian one. 

Of course, this assumes a legitimate distinction between God's essential features and his accidental ones, but I believe that could be done.

In any case, Chastek's post is here.

Ten Great Christian Novels (and a few others you might to check out)

Here is the introduction to my list of great Christian novels at Memoria Press' site:

The following is a list, not of the ten greatest Christian novels, since I haven't read all the novels ever written, but at least ten of the greatest. Any one of these would make a great Christmas present for the reader in your family (hopefully there are more than one). These are not children's books, of course, but they are books that an adult or even a well-read, classically educated highschooler could read for profit and enjoyment. They are also books that warrant spending a little extra money on and getting a nice, hardback edition, maybe one with nice illustrations—one someone could hand down to his children or grandchildren. I have included in each case a comment on a good audio version of each book, where this is one, but I do not intend this as a substitute for reading the book. I find it helpful—with books that one should read more than once (and all these books meet that criterion)—to both read and listen to them. These are two quite different experiences and you will notice quite different things about the story. 

See the list here.

Things for which you don't need scientific evidence in order to believe

I was reading the first volume of Pope Benedict's Jesus of Nazareth today, and he quotes the second century Church father Theophilus of Antioch, in his book Ad Autolycum ("To Autolycus") , "But if you say, 'Show me your God,' I would reply, 'Show me yourself, and I will show you my God.'"

 

Benedict was highlighting Theophilus' argument that just as there were physical eyes, there are eyes of the soul, and just as physical eyes can be blinded, so can the eyes of the soul, making it difficult or impossible to see God. But it also made me think of the challenge I hear from the scientoids about what they argue is the lack of hard and fast evidence for God. "Show me your God," is the general point, and you are expected to produce scientific evidence for the belief in God.

The next time you are asked to do this by your atheist friend, ask him "Show me your self," or "Show me your mind," or "Show me your consciousness."  Atheists use these terms all the time and no one is expected to give scientific evidence for the things they signify--largely because there isn't any. 

The point being that there are things for which you don't need scientific evidence to believe.

Catholic bishop prevent LGBT group from using church for meeting

Philadelphia Archbishop Charles Chaput has prevented a pro-LGBT group from using St. John the Evangelist Church's parish center during the World Meeting of Families. Since when did the Church start limiting the use of its facilities to, like, things it actually supports?

Pretty soon the Church will start refusing the use of its facilities by Muslims, Hindus, and Wiccans. The ban could end up extending to atheists and pagans. Pro-abortion groups could be excluded, fortune-telling banned, and idols prohibited. Eventually, even child sacrifice could be disallowed.

Oh, wait. We already mentioned abortion, didn't we?

No telling where it could end.

Why even the children of evangelicals don't understand traditional marriage.

There is an excellent article in the new issue of First Things magazine by a Christian college professor, Abigail Rine, who relates her experience in her "gender theory" class. Exactly why anyone at an Christian college would think it necessary to have a "gender theory" class at all is not mentioned. Maybe alchemy is also taught there too. Or astrology. In any case, her account is interesting:

A few weeks ago, I assigned the article “What is Marriage?” to the students in my gender theory class, which I teach at an evangelical university. This article presents an in-depth defense of the conjugal view of marriage, and I included it on the reading list as part of my efforts to expose students to a range of viewpoints—religious and secular, progressive and conservative. The goal is to create robust civil dialogue, and, ideally, to pave the way for thoughtful Christian contributions to cultural understandings of sex and gender. The one promise I make to my students at the beginning of the course is that they are guaranteed to read something they will find disagreeable, probably even offensive.

I'm not sure whether to feel good or not about the fact that Christians have made "contributions" to this alleged academic discipline, but she goes on:

When I first began teaching this course, my students were certainly curious about questions of gender, sexuality, feminism—the various “hot button” issues of our cultural moment—but they were nonetheless devout, and demonstrated, more or less, a Christian orientation to these topics. It wasn’t hard to find readings that challenged students’ shared values and assumptions, considering the secular bent of contemporary gender studies. 

In just five years, however, this has changed. Students now arrive in my class thoroughly versed in the language and categories of identity politics; they are reticent to disagree with anything for fear of seeming intolerant—except, of course, what they perceive to be intolerant. Like, for example, “What is Marriage?” 

My students hated it, as I suspected they would. They also seemed unable to fully understand the argument. As I tried to explain the reasoning behind the conjugal view of marriage and its attitude toward sex, I received dubious stares in response. I realized, as I listened to the discussion, that the idea of “redefining” marriage was nonsensical to them, because they had never encountered the philosophy behind the conjugal view of marriage. To them, the Christian argument against same-sex marriage is an appeal to the authority of a few disparate Bible verses, and therefore compelling only to those with a literalist hermeneutic. What the article names as a “revisionist” idea of marriage—marriage as an emotional, romantic, sexual bond between two people—does not seem “new” to my students at all, because this is the view of marriage they were raised with, albeit with a scriptural, heterosexual gloss.

This is what happens when the teaching in our Sunday Schools and our Christian education institutions at the elementary and secondary level goes little beyond informing us that sex outside marriage is bad and chastity is bliss (rather than a sacrifice or a hard discipline, which is what it really is for anyone who not delusional).

The problem, in other words, is us:

As I consider my own upbringing and the various “sex talks” I encountered in evangelical church settings over the past twenty years, I realize that the view of marital sex presented there was primarily revisionist. While the ideal of raising a family is ever-present in evangelical culture, discussions about sex itself focused almost exclusively on purity, as well as the intense spiritual bond that sexual intimacy brings to a married couple. Pregnancy was mentioned only in passing and often in negative terms, paraded alongside sexually transmitted diseases as a possible punishment for those who succumb to temptation. But for those who wait, ah! Pleasures abound! 

There was little attempt to cultivate an attitude toward sexuality that celebrates its full telos: the bonding of the couple and the incarnation of new life. And there was certainly no discussion of a married couple learning to be responsive to their fertility, even as a guiding principle. To the contrary, the narrative implied that once the “waiting” was over, self-discipline would no longer be necessary. Marriage would be a lifelong pleasure romp. Sex was routinely praised as God’s gift to married couples—a “gift” largely due to its orgasmic, unitive properties, rather than its intrinsic capacity to create life.

Same-sex marriage is the result not only of bad teaching in our Christian schools and churches, but of the de-coupling of sex from procreation which happened with the acquiescence of Protestants (and many lay Catholics, although not the Church itself) since the 1930s.

The consequences of not knowing why we believe what we believe is to find ourselves eventually not believing it anymore.

Of course, the other problem is that many Christians continue to send their children to public schools where the silly teachings of "gender theory" are now taught as dogma. When we let our children be trained by the enemy, we shouldn't be surprised when we find that their loyalties have shifted away from us.

Read the rest of Rine's article here.

Should Catholics leave the Church when the going gets rough?

My friend Rod Dreher at the American Conservative has a post today which discusses the San Jose, California diocese’s new "traveling LGBT Mass". The exact nature of it is not fully described, but there is enough to tell that it is probably another work of those who see there mission as the world's missionaries to the Church rather than the Church's missionaries to the world.

Rod asks this question for his readers: 

I would like to ask the orthodox Catholics (not liberal Catholics, not Catholic dissenters, not ex-Catholics) in the room what you would do if you lived in that diocese. What advice would you give that reader on how to hold on now that she has been disillusioned? If you were to evangelize non-Catholics in that diocese, how would you go about it?

Here was my answer to at least the first question:

Why would I renounce my Church for its shortcomings any more than I would renounce my country for its shortcomings–or my family for its sins?

The Church is one of those things that Chesterton called “primary loyalties,” which include our civil community and our family. They are things we not only should defend, but have no choice but to defend–even, and perhaps especially, from their internal enemies.

Yes, the Church is in trouble. It is always in trouble. But that doesn’t mean it needs us less, but that it needs us more. Our country is in trouble. So do we pack up and leave it for a less troubled country? Do we renounce our family because its imperfections and join another, less imperfect one?

Why would we do anything else with the Church?

Would it be easier to go to some other church where you don’t have to fight for what’s right? Sure it would. But that’s the thing about standing up for what’s right: It’s hard. It takes effort. It takes time. It is not pleasurable.

I marvel at the shallowness of commitment among modern people. As soon as the going gets rough, instead of staying and fighting, we start looking for a means of escape. Because, after all, it’s all about me and my needs, isn’t it?

If we believe the Catholic Church is THE Church, then there is no option but to stay and try to reform it. There is simply other place to go. And if we don’t believe that the Catholic Church is THE Church, then we’re part of the very problem in the Church that you bemoan, since the Catholic position is that it is the one, true Church.

If the Church can’t count on those of us who continue to hold to its teachings and tradition, then who can it count on? If the Gates of Hell ever were to prevail against it, those of us who left her in her time of need would need to ask ourselves who was to blame–and it wouldn’t be those who are corrupting it, but those who chose an easier course than to fight the corruption.

A response to David Quine on why the Greeks and Romans got God wrong (and it's not what he thinks)

I have been in a debate in the comments section of another post with Christian curriculum developer David Quine about whether the Christian worldview is in fundamental conflict with the classical (or "Graeco-Roman") worldview. This is part of a larger disagreement over whether classical education is appropriate for Christian educators. 

David argues that the "Graeco-Roman worldview" is in opposition to the Christian worldview and because classical education reads and studies Greek and Roman authors as a part of its program, classical education is not a legitimate part of Christian education. 

As I do occasionally here at Vital Remnants, I am bringing this debate on a previous post back out to the main blog.

He also claims that this is the Reformation position, which it most definitely is not, since the Reformers were unanimous in their use of Greek and Roman authors in their works and in the systems of education they themselves took and often taught to their students (and in Luther's case, recommended) . But I am dealing with this in another set of posts.

In his most recent comments in an earlier post, the reason Quine gives for believing that the classical and Christian worldviews are in conflict is that the Greeks and Romans held to certain erroneous beliefs about 1) God, 2) origins, and 3) truth.

It seems to me there are several problems with this argument. We can see these by just considering the Greek's erroneous view of God, although it is the same problem with the issue of their beliefs about origins (I will talk about truth in another post).

Were the flawed classical beliefs about God due to a bad worldview?
First, his assumption is that the worldview of a culture is flawed if the beliefs of that culture about God are flawed (David may not think this is sufficient, but he seems to think it is necessary). But how do we know this? How could you ever know that it was specifically the Greek's worldview that was the origin of their flawed theology? The only way you could say this is if you believed that it was possible for people to whom God did not reveal themselves to have a correct view of God.

I would be surprised (in fact, shocked) if David believed this, since what it would require is the belief that you could come to a knowledge of God through reason. And I know David does not believe that.

If, in order to have a correct view of God, you have to have it revealed to you, then how could the Greeks have had a correct view of God, since it was not revealed to them? In other words, the obvious reason they had a flawed view of God was that they had no divine revelation. And if that's the case, how can Quine attribute their incorrect theology to their worldview?

We can no more blame the classical world's flawed theology on a bad worldview than we can praise the Hebrew's correct theology on a good one. If you believe that the only factor in the correctness of a culture's view of God is its worldview, then we would have to conclude not only that the Greek worldview was bad, but that the Sumerian worldview was good (since Abraham was from Ur of the Chaldees).

The Greeks could have had a perfect worldview and never attained a correct view of God because the only way you can have a correct view of God is for God to tell it to you. But, in accordance with His inscrutable will, God didn't do that.

David says that the Christian view of truth is based on divine revelation, and the Greek's view of truth was based on human reason. To say that reason is somehow in conflict with the Christian worldview is, needless to say, completely inaccurate, but I'll get to that in a later post. But the relevant question here is, without divine revelation, what else did the Greeks and Romans have but reason?

In his post on truth he says that sometimes the Greeks sought knowledge from a god through oracles such as that at Delphi, but more often through their own reason.

That means that either the Greeks sought their truth through divine revelation from the only gods they knew, which on Quine's view would constitute a good worldview practice (even though the gods they were seeking it from happened to be the wrong ones), or they sought it through human reason, which, having no real divine revelation, was the only thing they could do (In the absence of divine revelation, what were they supposed to use?).

Therefore, either the Greeks used a good worldview practice or they did the only thing they could do. I'm trying to determine why I should think badly of the Greeks for this. And, since I am only using Quine's assumptions here, I'm wondering how he can either.

Why the Greeks believed what they believed about God
The Greeks were all over the map on their beliefs about God, a phenomenon that would be hard to account for if there were some underlying worldview dictating their religious beliefs. The Greeks were searching and using the only tools they had at their disposal: reason and imagination. That is why there seem to have been two general categories of such beliefs among them, one based on imagination, and the other on reason.

Chesterton talks about the first of these in his book The Everlasting Man. He points out that classical pagan polytheism was the result of the practice of trying to make sense of the world solely on the basis of the human imagination:

Certainly the pagan does not disbelieve like an atheist, any more than he believes like a Christian. He feels the presence of powers about which he guesses and invents. St. Paul said that the Greeks had one altar to an unknown god. But in truth all their gods were unknown gods. And the real break in history did come when St. Paul declared to them whom they had worshipped. The substance of all such paganism may be summarized thus. It is an attempt to reach the divine reality through the imagination alone.

... Mythology, then, sought god through the imagination; or sought truth by means of beauty.

The second kind of classical religious thought was that of the philosophers. Here, rather than imagination being used as the sole avenue to knowledge of God, it was reason. As Chesterton points out, one of the problems with the Greeks was that the thought traditions based on imagination were disconnected with the thought traditions based on reason. There was a conflict between their priests and their philosophers and it was only the larger, deeper thought system of Christianity that could bridge the divide.

It is vital to view of all history that reason is something separate from religion even in the most rational of these civilisations. It is only as an afterthought, when such cults are decadent or on the defensive, that a few Neo-Platonists or a few Brahmins are found trying to rationalise them, and even then only by trying to allegorise them. But in reality the rivers of mythology and philosophy run parallel and do not mingle till they meet in the sea of Christendom. Simple secularists still talk as if the Church had introduced a sort of schism between reason and religion. The truth is that the Church was actually the first thing that ever tried to combine reason and religion. There had never before been any such union of the priests and the philosophers.

For now I'll just point out that the religious mistakes made by the Greeks and the Romans were not the result of something bad they possessed (a mistaken worldview), but of something good they didn't possess (divine revelation).

I'll address some other issues that I think Quine gets wrong, including the issue of the relation of revelation and reason.

Newsweek writer's "jaw-dropping ignorance" of the Bible

Every Christmas I write a post about how every Christmas the old weekly news magazines write an article that poses as a intellectually responsible treatment of the Bible but is actually a low-grade amateur attempt at historical research and literary analysis. So here we are again.

With mind-numbing regularity, Time, Newsweek, and their ilk publish an article about the traditional Christian belief about how the virgin Birth of Christ and other traditional Biblical beliefs are outmoded by "modern" Biblical scholarship. And the way they do it is to quote scholars on one extreme end of the scholarly spectrum who, far from being modern, are still stuck in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Karl Heinrich Graf (1815-1869). Julius Wellhausen (1844-1918). Check it out.

Liberal theologians are a bit like those Japanese soldiers hiding out in the jungle on isolated Pacific Islands who finally wandered into villages where they were informed that World War II had been over for 30 years.

Methods that were abandoned long ago in other literary disciplines are bandied about in contemporary liberal biblical circles as the brand spankin' newest thing. They survive only by virtue of a naive materialist rationalism fashionable in Germany 100 years ago which has been largely abandoned by everyone except a few American seminary professors who have yet to be informed that that we are living in the 21st century now and whose chief occupation seems to be taking calls from equally ignorant mainstream journalists looking for their annual Easter or Christmas cover story.

Who was it that said that America is where old German heresies come to die?

Justin Taylor at Sojourners makes the appropriate observations:

It is a tradition in American journalism as predictable as Easter and Christmas itself: a cover story purporting to reveal the true story behind the Bible we thought we knew.
...Even with a generous 8,487 words, Eichenwald reveals he is out of his depth for this subject matter. Though he doggedly advances his predetermined thesis from a mishmash of angles, experts quickly showed online that Eichenwald has not really done his historical homework or read his Bible carefully.

Read the rest here.

Culturally illiterate New York Times unaware of most basic Christian belief

I remember hearing a few years ago that a skyscraper in downtown Singapore featured, in its Christmas display, a manger scene featuring Jesus, Mary, Joseph, and the seven dwarfs. Now the nation's most prestigious newspaper has stepped in it about as badly.

This is utterly priceless. The New York Times printed an article on Israeli tourism which contained a reference to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, "marking the site where many Christians believe that Jesus is buried."

Huh?

The Times, apparently, is blissfully ignorant of the fact that the central belief of Christianity, a religion which boasts some 2.2 billion adherents worldwide and is intimately bound up in our own history and culture, is that Jesus was resurrected. Other than the cross itself, there is no more comprehensive symbol of Christian belief than the empty tomb.

It's sort of like not knowing that baseball involves hitting a ball with a bat or that milk comes from cows.

Here's Rod Dreher at the American Conservative on the Times' major gaffe:

I can understand someone living in Pakistan, or Sichuan province, not getting that all of Christianity, in its many versions throughout the ages, rests on the resurrection of Jesus. I don’t understand how an educated American, whatever his beliefs, can not know that. Yet that story got through several layers of editing at the Times before making it into print. It’s staggering.

As Dreher points out, it's one thing to disagree with this belief, but to simply be ignorant of it is inexcusable for the nation's most prestigious newspaper.

Read the rest here. HT: Rick Garrett at Mirror of Justice.

Phillip Carey on what Genesis says about men and women

Christian philosopher Phillip Carey is in the midst of a series of posts at First Thoughts on what the Book of Genesis tells us about men and women (under the assumption, apparently, that they are different—is this allowed anymore?):

It’s striking—or it should be—that Genesis does not mention “male and female” until it comes to the human creation (1:27). Before that there’s seed bearing fruit and the blessing of procreation, “be fruitful and multiply,” which establishes the sexual reproduction of the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. In that sense it’s obvious that male and female are present before the creation of Adam. So why is it first mentioned then?

Read the rest of the excellent series here.

Catholic Beach Party

The decline of religion, much in the news, continues at a rapid  pace, with large numbers of people leaving the church. As if to underscore the problem, huge crowds of Brazilians fled to the beach to avoid the Roman pontiff, who was making a visit to the South American country.

The large crowds ...

Uh, wait a minute ... Scratch that: It was 3.2 million people flocking to see the pope.

Never mind.

T. S. Eliot's comment on the U. S. Supreme Court's same-sex marriage ruling

"The world is trying to experiment with attempting to form a civilized but non-Christian mentality. The experiment will fail, but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserve alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide."

—T. S. Eliot, Thoughts After Lambeth, 1931

The real reason the educational elites are against teaching formal grammar

The following article will appear in the upcoming spring issue of The Classical Teacher, of which I am editor:

In Leo Tolstoy’s great Christian novel Anna Karenina, an after-dinner conversation turns to the subject of which European civilization is more developed—the English, the French, or the German. Karenin, Anna’s husband, argues that that civilization is most influential which is the most “truly educated.” However, the argumentative Pestsov, another guest, asks Karenin, “But what should we consider to be the signs of ‘true education’?”

It is 1870, or thereabouts, and the phenomenon of “modern education” has only just dawned on the consciousness of the class of people that tend to populate Tolstoy’s novels—the ruling aristocratic upper class.

“I see no clear proofs that a classical education should be preferred to a modern education,” says Pestsov. He argues that a purely scientific education [modern education] has just as great an “educational and mind-developing influence” as a classical one.

“I can’t quite agree with you,” answers Karenin:

It seems to me that we must admit that the process of studying the forms of a language has in itself a beneficial effect on spiritual development. Besides it is impossible to deny that the influence of the classics is in the highest degree a moral one, whereas unfortunately with instruction in natural science are connected those dangerous and false teachings which are the bane of the present times.

At this, another dinner guest, Koznyshev, intervenes. The question of what “true education” is would be a difficult question, he suggests, “had there not been on the side of classical education that advantage which you [Karenin] have just mentioned: the moral advantage, … the anti-nihilistic influence.”

The “anti-nihilistic influence.” What does this mean? In what way is classical education’s emphasis on grammar spiritual and moral? In what way is it “anti-nihilistic”?

When Karenin refers to “studying the forms of language,” he is clearly referring to grammar. Grammar is the formal study of language. What is interesting is that some eighteen years later, the philosopher whose name is associated most closely with nihilism, the atheist Friedrich Nietzsche, adds his own spin on this conversation about this formal aspect of language.

“I am afraid we have not gotten rid of God,” says the great nihilist philosopher, “because we still have faith in grammar.”

In other words, even the modern era’s most prominent atheist, like the Christian characters in Tolstoy’s after-dinner conversation, recognized that the very foundations of grammar were spiritual and moral, and that, if grammar is anti-nihilistic by nature, then the rejection of it is inherently nihilistic.

Why should this be?

Nietzsche makes his remark about grammar in the context of his indictment of Western philosophy in general. He believed that Western philosophers since Socrates had been taken captive by what he calls the “prejudice of reason”—the idea that there is an objective and rational metaphysical order that underlies reality. It was the idea that underlay the traditional belief that things in this world had meaning and purpose and that we ignored this order at our cultural peril.

“Where God clings to our culture,” says literary critic, George Steiner, summarizing Nietzsche’s point, “he is a phantom of grammar, a fossil embedded in the childhood of rational speech.” Our faith in grammar is the shadow of belief still cast on language by a dead God. And Nietzsche, who famously declared that God was dead, believed that we must destroy "even God’s shadow."

Nietzsche wasn't against grammar per se; he was against it because of what belief in grammar implied. It implied, he thought, that there was a rational order behind it—a rational order that was appealed to in Christianity. John’s Gospel identifies this order with God himself: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

The word used for “Word” by John in this passage is the Greek word Logos, a term replete with philosophical implications, among the chief of which is the rational order underlying reality.

What Nietzsche was most fundamentally against was not grammar itself; what he was against was the Logos.

The Western view of language does indeed betray this prejudice. It is the assumption that behind our speech and our writing is an underlying order, an order that, being universal, is the foundation and operative principle of every human language—the assumption that the universe at bottom is fundamentally rational because it was authored—and is ruled—by a rational God.

“[A]ny coherent understanding of what language is and how language performs,” says Steiner, “… any coherent account of the capacity of human speech to communicate meaning and feeling is, in the final analysis, underwritten by the assumption of God’s presence.”

Nietzsche saw that the intellectuals of his time (the late nineteenth century), while they rejected the Christian God in their rhetoric, clung to the underlying linguistic assumptions of theism. The continuing confidence in grammar, he believed, was symptomatic of the failure of modern thinkers to take their atheistic notions to their logical conclusion.

In other words, if atheist intellectuals were consistent, they would not only reject God, but the grammar that assumes his existence.

But Nietzsche’s ideological descendants have been much more faithful to their master.  As Alan Bloom pointed out in his book The Closing of the American Mind, the origins of the postmodern regime that  now jealously rule our educational establishment are fundamentally Nietzschean. The hostility to the teaching of grammar is a consequence of this. The National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) as well as almost every university department of education are, officially or unofficially, opposed to the formal teaching of grammar.

Many of our educational elites cannot tell you precisely why they have such a dim view of what used to be a fundamental part of learning. They will cite various bogus studies, and appeal to questionable “research.” They may even believe the evidence they cite. But their ideology is fundamentally nihilistic.

There are Nietzschean underpinnings to their anti-grammar ideology that most of them don’t even know they have.

Nietzsche, the atheist, is in fundamental agreement with the Christian aristocrats at Tolstoy’s dinner party on the underlying assumptions of grammar.  The difference between the two is that, while Nietzsche’s atheism drives him ineluctably away from a belief in grammar, Karenin and Koznyshev believe in God, and therefore they cling to grammar all the more, realizing that it is the working out of that belief in language.