Putting first things first

Dear Theophilus,

Thank you for writing, and for sharing your struggles and doubts so openly. Let’s be honest: being a Christian is an ongoing negotiation. To confess is to wrestle, to discover as we live life, questions, crosses, and thanks be to God, worship. To confess is to wrestle and not turn away.

As you've talked here with me and with others, I see that you are wrestling, and that you are not turning away from your questions--and yours are good questions. You say you feel foolish. You say, “my ignorance must shine out to those who are better educated.” Actually what shines out is courage and tenacity, and to that I respond that "no temptation has come upon you that is not common to all" whether formally educated or not. Remember that some come at a question early in our Christian life which may only confront others later, or not at all. A PhD in theology may, because of their own story, find themselves wrestling in an area that a teenage parishioner has already come to terms with. And daily life may cause that faithful teen to revisit her question in greater depth later--questions moving up and over and around each other in a giant ascending corkscrew the steps of which go from one glory to the next.

Now before we address some of the questions you mention below, there is something you should well consider. This formation or corkscrew or ladder or path we find ourselves on, this is a theological path, not a philosophical one. The difference is important.

Philosophy is the effort human beings make to inquire about the world using all available skills--mental and physical. It is a discipline that in our era is a pursuit of reason and the mind. Theology, on the other hand, has an element of life and death to it, in that we are personally, ethically, socially, morally, physically involved in its questions and its answers because theology is done coram Deo, in the presence of God.

The theologian can do philosophy, but the philosopher cannot do theology. A philosopher can ask so-called theological questions, but it is a scholastic exercise. Theology bleeds. Said in another way, a philosopher can play with theology but doesn't fear for his life. A theologian (and all Christians are theologians because they all wrestle) cannot afford such a luxury. "The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom," says the proverb. And as Martin Luther said in his Heidelberg Disputations, "Arrogance cannot be avoided or true hope be present unless the judgment of condemnation is feared in every work."

The philosopher cannot ascend to heaven. Human reason cannot of itself and upon its own presuppositions arrive at worship of the triune God. "Where is the wise man? Where is the scholar? Where is the philosopher of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world" (1 Cor 1.20)? And Luther again: "Man must utterly despair of his own ability before he is prepared to receive the grace of Christ." Luther had a wonderful phrase for philosophers who attempted through their dialectic to grasp at theological knowledge. He called them theologians of glory and said they were trying to climb up and get a peek at the naked God.

Over against them, Luther taught a theology of the cross. "He deserves to be called a theologian," he wrote, "who comprehends the visible and manifest things of God seen through suffering and the cross." Jesus crucified is who God is, he maintained. Jesus is the beginning of theology and the very true proclamation of God's truth. But it is a truth whose truthfulness is confessed rather than arrived at.

Yet how can someone confess what he or she is unsure of? One may as well ask, "How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother's womb?" And the answer is the same: "That which is born of Spirit is spirit." Our minds, our selves, were at one point chaotic, dark, and demonic. But then the Spirit came, hovering upon us, overshadowing us, and we came alive and confessed. Now we see by resurrection light, and no longer with the sputtering candle of philosophy. Light is now ours, the true light that gives light to everyone. "For God, who said, 'Let light shine out of darkness,' has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ" (1 Cor 4:6).

Now the point I'm getting at is this. Our friend is correct who said that the historicity of Scripture is an important part of the confession of the Christian, giving him confidence and an answer to cultured despisers. But historicity is not the foundation. The foundation is that by the will of the Father and the quickening illumination of the Spirit one has beheld Jesus, and having beheld him, nothing else will ever truly matter ever again. "The [way, the truth, and the] life was made manifest, and we have seen it, and testify to it and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was with the Father and was made manifest to us" (1 Jn 1.2). And now "the Spirit himself bears witness with our spirit that we are children of God" (Rm 8.16).

This “bearing witness with our spirits that we are children of God” means that, beholding the cross, we are called beyond the doubt and skepticism of the philosophers to embrace a holy inquiry. This holy inquiry is called by St. Anselm fides quaerens intellectum, or faith seeking understanding. Augustine put it this way: "Understanding is the reward of faith. Therefore do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe so that you may understand." He then quotes John 6:29: "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent.”

So, Theophilus my friend, if you long to know without doubt that there is an incredibly loving, interactive God who created you, cares for you, understands you, and encourages you to know him, then examine your heart. And if the Spirit does not testify within you so that you cry "Abba, Father!" then call upon the name of the Lord. He will give you a new heart, and put a new spirit within you. He removes the heart of stone and gives back again a heart of flesh. It is the good pleasure of the Father in heaven to give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him. This is the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead, the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation. As you seek, remember that God is light; in him is no darkness at all. His presence will go with you, his wisdom instruct you, and he will give you rest.

There is no confession apart from his rest, and what theology exists is only a theology of glory which calls evil good and good evil, adding sin to sin so that one becomes doubly guilty. Therefore the struggle with which we began is not the struggle of a slave, but of an heir. And it is not a struggle of the solitary, but the awestruck, happy liturgy of the redeemed people of God ascending as incense from every tribe, tongue, time, and nation to the throne of God.

This, then, is the proper foundation to begin asking about the Scriptures and their interpretation. Without it, we fall under the condemnation of the Pharisees to whom Jesus said, “You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me, yet you refuse to come to me that you may have life” (Jn 5.39-40).

I hope you do not feel I am dismissing your questions by asking you first this most important of all questions. That is not the case. Instead, by asking I face you open-handed as seriously and as soberly as I can.

Warmest regards,

On Phantasie

A friend and I were talking yesterday about something I call phantasie. That is my word for a lifestyle of illusion, where one's activity and thoughts swim in dreamy reveries and stories, swallowing hours, days, even years if indulged. Phantasie numbs the heart and mind against the real quiddity of the world outside, so that one goes willing into the invisible prison of one's own imagination.

When I think about phantasie, I think about three things.

First, we want phantasie because it distracts us from the void. While it has us, we do not feel meaningless or absurd or bored. We do not fear endings or death because we are waking dreamers whose world is alive with drama and color so long as we remain in the dream.[1] But we sleep in Dorothy's poppies. We sleep unto death, and the cross is our only hope.

Only the cross permits us to look into the void without fear. Only the cross prevents us from the duty to shoulder the heavy angst and absurdity inevitable for the existentialists.[2]

The gospel--and this is the second thing--is a gracious summons to real life, a life peopled with real bodies, an acceptance of our bodies, and a respect for words with real meanings. The gospel calls us to resist phantasie. The living God calls us to love him and to love our neighbor.[2]

The third part of my thinking about phantasie specifically refers to its challenge to the doctrine of revelation. I was raised in traditions that encourage a kind of mystical connection with Jesus through public and private worship, parallelled by an individual and devotional hermeneutic in the case of scripture. It was only when I began reading the Reformers (primarily Martin Luther and John Calvin but also statements such as those in the Book of Concord) that I began to gather the tools to challenge this tradition and to step out onto a path by which the Spirit, rather than speaking in an inner voice to us, has inspired and now illumines/opens our ears to hear the voice of scripture, "he who has ears, let him hear." The tedious ordinaity of reading, of thinking over a historical context, asking grammatical questions, toying with how authors are using words, etc.--the banality of these things becomes the human side of a simultaneously divine relationship.[3]

Phantasie is a prison of feeling that turns our own psychology into a little god whose introspective self-doubt distracts us from the judge and redeemer of the Real. Because it numbs us to reality, it prevents us from owning our relationship to the truth of things--it is an enemy of the truth. Thus, it is sin and bondage. Thus, it is what is being put away in this age, and it will not go into the next.

I struggle with phantasie. It is easy and beautiful and exciting and as available as my phone, TV, or laptop. It is a subtle and private opponent. No one talks about it, and especially as our culture is so obsessed with make believe, but you can spot its victims easily enough: smart, creative people who, for one reason or another, retreat from real life and real human community and relationship into the world of films, TV, books, etc. Don't we know these people well enough? Haven't we been those people on occasion? I've lost years to phantasie. Years of being drugged without realizing one is drugged. And so susceptible am I to its power that I'm shy of such things even today.

Ours is a culture addicted to phantasie, to its amusements, to its escapes. We exist simultaneously as citizens free of its dominion by grace, waiting in hope for our full deliverance into the Real. We daily struggle against it and sometimes give in altogether. For us, confession and repentance is a daily discipline. We must everyday to ask God to help us remember that we are real, our families and communites are real, our neighbors are real, and for them give him our daily gratitude and praise.

__________

[1] See my post "Blue Longing or Yellow Laziness".)

[2] See my discussion of Emile Cioran.

[3] For where this is positively headed, see my post "A Few Paragraphs on the Doctrine of Vocation."

[4] See my posts "You are Removing God from the Everyday" and "A Response to C.S. Lewis's Lecture 'The Inner Ring'."

Science's crisis of faith

MIT physicist and novelist Alan P. Lightman has said too much for the priestly class to let him live. It is too bad, because Lightman can do the math and the metaphor at the same time. We need people like him. We need watchmen who are wide awake. Because if he is correct, the epistemological authority of our sciences could be eroding. Should it give way, public discourse and reason may well collapse, and civilization will be at the mercy of lawlessness.

Some may doubt the existence of a priestly class. First-world nations especially pride themselves in their technological ubiquity, public and private secondary and post-secondary educational opportunities, and free and democratic values. Nevertheless, someone has to commune with gods and communicate their demands to mortals. Someone has to decide what truth is and how it can be known. Someone has to demarcate what fundamental ideas will be allowed to shape the legal and political discourse of a culture.

The question is not whether a priestly class exists--every culture has to decide what it is and what it is not. The question is who makes the decision? Who is in control of the public square? French historian Georges Duby divides medieval society into those that prayed, those that fought, and those that worked. It doesn’t take long to sort out who is in the latter two classes. So who, then s in the former? Who are the priests? Here are a few characteristics that may help answer the question.

One trait that characterizes a priestly class is jargon. Priestly classes always have their own languages. Everyone is familiar with the monastics of the middle ages, chanting the psalms for hours at a time and saying mass at lip-lynching abracadabra speeds because it was in Latin. Medieval Latin was the JavaScript, C++, Python, XML, and Ruby on Rails of its time, invented by and for the priestly class. Today priestly discourse is in abstract mathematics. Consider the following comment by author and social philosopher George Steiner:

Science is becoming inaccessible to us. Who can understand the latest innovations in genetics, astrophysics and biology? Who can explain them to the profane? Knowledge no longer communicates; writers and philosophers in our day are incapable of enabling us to understand science. At the same time, the scope of imagination in science is dazzling. . . . I am concerned by what it means to be literate today. Is it possible to be literate if you do not understand non-linear equations?

Another demonstrable trait of a priestly class is a penchant for isolation and pageantry. Priests live ensconced in their temples and institutions. But when they emerge, they spin myths of fantastic speculation and drama. Priests use the most sophisticated technologies of the day to awe the public and further cement their offices as mouthpieces of the gods and the arbiters of all wisdom. It is the priestly class that brings fire from heaven to earth. (One best not forget that because they've been known to burn, torture, imprison, and silence men, women, children, nations, and peoples to maintain their power.)

There are others traits as well. For example, a priestly class demands sacrifice. It attracts members from and nurtures the future of the political bourgeois, whereas it needs and fears the military. It has an identifiable costume that sets it apart from others. And given enough time, it will undermine its own foundations.

Given these few characteristics, the argument can be made that the West’s priestly class is made up of practicing scientists. Take for example the half-a-lifetime of painful and expensive mathematical hazing it takes to even come abreast of what is current in the field, thus barring we plebians from real understanding. (We understand at the level of myth.) Or consider the role, and cost, of universities. Undergraduate education is a court of the gentiles; masters degrees the court of the women. Gown and mortarboard mark the initiates. And who can argue but the university system of our day, bloated and fat on the blood of the middle-class, regulates status, income, and mate-selection using impenetrable matrices to separate the sheep from the goats.

So then, having identified our priests, we return to our watchman, Dr. Alan P. Lightman. “The history of science,” he says, “can be viewed as the recasting of phenomena that were once thought to be accidents as phenomena that can be understood in terms of fundamental causes and principles.” Humanity has measured the heavens with the span of its calculus and dispelled the old gods of nature and chaos before the daylight of scientific certainty. Reason reigned--until now. Now “this long and appealing trend may be coming to an end.”

Read the second part of this article, Alan Lightman Sounds the Alarm, or read the whole thing as a document.

Heraclitus's chiasmus as a philosophical step toward sacrament?

Philosopher Patrick Lee Miller of Duquesne University was interviewed recently on the blog The Immanent Frame on the basis of his recently published book, Becoming God: Pure Reason in Early Greek Philosophy (Contiuum, 2011). It is an excellent interview. Miller uncovers layers of possibility in the deep strata of Western foundations where they are torn between the pressures of Heraclitean philosophy and Parminidean metaphysics. And Miller himself is of interest, as his influences are Charles Taylor and Alasdair MacIntyre. In what follows, I'm going to piece together chunks and bits from the interview—a style that I really hate, but that occasionally works as a kind of personal notebook for later review. Anyone wishing to cite Miller should use the original post. The reason I'm doing this is because Miller is getting at what seems to me to be a natal but real philosophical option for discussing sacrament that departs from the absurdities of Aristotle. So here it is then:

NS: What is at stake in the questions of time and consistency that you’re probing through your inquiries into ancient philosophy?

PLM: If you’ve ever lost someone you loved, or ever deeply regretted something you’ve done, then time is a problem for you. We’ve all longed for the past, whether to be with someone or to be without some deed. Nietzsche expressed this very clearly in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where his hero says that our impotence before “greedy time” makes us resentful of it. To cope with this resentment, we dream of hinterworlds outside of time, eternities that promise to redeem us from its greed. There, everything will be made whole, every beloved will live again. So goes the dream. The sort of rationality pioneered by Parmenides—consistency—makes time impossible, and so when Plato combined it with the philosophical religion of Pythagoreanism, the result was a moralized rejection of time. We can cope with greedy time, for Plato, by seeing it as not only unreal, but evil. Our real life is not here, but there, among the Forms in eternity. If that’s so, however, why not commit suicide and get there immediately? This is a serious problem for Platonism. To avoid its nihilism and affirm our life in this world, we need a way to understand time as fully real. I argue in the book that Heraclitus offers this way.

Time is inconsistent if it is composed of moments. Thanks to the paradoxes of Zeno, Parmenides’ student, Aristotle saw this very clearly. If time is composed of moments, each one must come into being and then pass away. But when? A moment cannot be born in itself, nor can it die in itself, without violating the principle of non-contradiction. Neither can a moment be born or die in another moment, for that, too, would be contradictory. So, the principle of non-contradiction forbids moments, as Aristotle saw, yet it also requires them—a consequence he did not recognize. “The same thing,” he writes, “cannot both be and not be in the same respect at the same time.” Now, referring to fire’s relation to its fuel, Heraclitus called it “need and satiety.” Consistency demands that we analyze this apparent contradiction by distinguishing the duration of fire’s burning into different times. But no matter how finely we do so—ultimately, to the point of moments without duration—the contradiction persists. And likewise for other temporal processes; fire is just a particularly vivid illustration of the problem.

Although philosophers today overlook it, Hegel thought this problem serious enough to develop a new logic. British Hegelians were thus also worried about it. Bertrand Russell began in this tradition, but later rebelled against it to found analytic philosophy—which would venerate, not coincidentally, a logic without tense.

Parmenides's consistent reason fails to accommodate time, whereas the Heraclitean alternative succeeds. Heraclitus was the ancient alternative to Platonism. Where Platonism, indebted as it is to the Pythagorean devotion to reason as consistency / non-contradiction, sees an unquenchable rivalry between transcendence and immanence, Heraclitus synthesizes the two. He can do this because his understanding of reason included analysis—the separating out of things to understand them—and synthesis—putting things together. Heraclitus thus sublated the antithesis between time and eternity. Paying close attention to time and any process in time, we have to acknowledge that it is contradictory at every moment. There should therefore be a higher-order logic that accounts for the operation of reason whenever it thinks about time or itself. This is what I call chiasmus.

Chiasmus is a way of thinking. Whenever we wish to understand anything as temporal, including ourselves, chiasmus is needed. Using chiasmus we can see the difference in time and feel the summons of eternal unity; eternity is present at every moment of time.

Christianity blends the eternity of Platonism with the temporality of the Hebrew bible. Time can be holy. Think of the liturgical calendar. Augustine wrestles with this in the Confessions in order to make sense of the Incarnation. From antiquity, chiasmus has been used as a symbol for Christ.

Christianity is like baseball

There is an article that has stayed with me for quite a while now. The article is "How Baseball Explains the Nature of Language" by Alva Noë. Noë is a philosopher of perception at UC Berkeley. He is also a member of the Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Center for New Media, and he blogs on NPR's science blog 13:7 Cosmos and Culture, where this article was published.

Now I've been asking methodological questions about theology for over a decade now. What is theology? What makes theology good or bad? Does theology mean anything? Does it have purpose? Is it useful? What is appropriate to it and when could it be said to go off the tracks? Is it a craft or a science? How do you know if you are doing theology versus, say, sociology, psychology, political theory, writing protest songs, or abandoning oneself to phantasie under the illusion of piety? What are its basic moves, its tools, its core principles? How can one define its edges and sort out its territories? Is theology native to confession or imported (or worse) into/onto it?

Nearly all of these sorts of questions are simply assumed by surveys and the literature (though not by Barth who plows right in from the start), and so I've been forced to work backward into the questions, which is my usual and oh-so-efficient method. Nevertheless, I have made slow, imperceptible progress. My hypothesis is that theology is not akin to philosophy or a philosophical system, but resembles more a craft, something that is made by human beings and that also makes them back.

So if theology is a craft, then what structures and orders it? What are its tools? I've been around the block long enough to have heard a bit about Ludwig Wittgenstein's language games, and I own a copy of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Philosophical Investigations. But his work outstrips my abilities--and Noë's article enters the picture at exactly this point, meeting low-brow abilities like mine with exactly the sort of metaphor this citizen of Red Sox Nation can respond to: baseball.

A fundamental of Noë's argument is that context governs meaning. The phrase "home run" is meaningless outside of the context "baseball". Baseball creates a space in which meanings like home run, triple play, our grand slam can come to be and make sense. (Wittgenstein put it like this in the first proposition of the Tractatus: Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist / The world is all that is the case. Think also of Heidegger’s Dasein—that we are thrown (Geworfenheit) into this world. Dasein ist geworfener Entwurf.) But what sort of activity is baseball?

Baseball is based on rules, but it far transcends them. Baseball includes all of these actions—throwing, hitting, catching, how to steal a base, how to bunt—and all of this new grammar—double-play, foul ball, home run. But it also includes a higher-order discussion of how it is best played and what makes for the best team and the best game. “Baseball people are concerned not just with how you play, but with the very question of how one ought to play baseball.” And it also brings with it an ethic: “When you are initiated into the baseball world, you learn to care about such things as stolen bases and pick-off attempts.”

Baseball is a human space. And this space is not just system, but a practice, a game, an activity which by definition is participatory, social, and makes as much as it is made. "To learn baseball," writes Noë, "is to come to be able to see and feel and be motivated in ways that are meaningless to strangers of the game. Baseball is more than a system of rules, it is a practice."

Noë says that there is a class of actions that human beings practice, a class based on rules, but that can’t help but transcends rules. A class that always has both first-order activities (what is done) and second-order activities (how we evaluate what is done). He calls these “baseball-like practices” and practices whose “ontologies are practice relative” and includes in these other social practices such as dance, art, law, speech, and language.

As a philosopher of language, Noë is taking linguistics to task. Linguists, he says, want desperately to be descriptive and evaluate only what is there. But they cannot do that, he maintains, because language is one of those class of actions that cannot be described from the outside. We live inside language; we can’t examine it from some removed and untouchable location. “We are so deeply embedded within and at home in the language world (compare: the baseball world) that we find it difficult to believe in the practice relativity of our convictions and commitments.” And because of that language is not only a first-order practice, like chemistry or geology, which can be comfortably described and dissected, but always and everywhere a second-order practice which can’t help but comment and critique itself.

And so I say that Christianity is a baseball-like practice whose ontology is practice-relative. It is a human practice, and that means a social, a political practice. It is based on rules (law), but those rules create a space of actions and activities and words and meanings and, almost instantly, the second-order discussion of how this should all work called theology. But going deeper than that, it is a revealed religion, which means it is based in language (Word) and, because language is a baseball-like practice, then by definition it must have grammar, it must have ethics, it must have theology.[1]

Coming the long way around, then, Christianity is a practice-specific, a baseball-like ontology that exists along the first-order—its practices (liturgy, public and private)—and the second-order—the ethics generated by and for those practices as well as the metaphysics, the theology that questions the fitness of the whole.

Well, I’ve thrashed around in this for a while. Such thrashing is not Noë’s fault. His article isn’t about Christianity, after all, but an intramural jab at linguistics. There is something lex orandi, lex credenda (the law of prayer is the law of belief) about it. And there is something of Plato’s Paradox of the Meno and previous discussions on this blog about the epochē that are here as well. I’m dissatisfied as this last point I’ve neglected altogether in this description. At any rate, I’d better post.

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[1] "I belong to a generation of furniture makers to whom woodworking initially presented itself as a lost art from a more authentic time. When I turned my first clear pine board into a crade, and for many years thereafter, I was beguiled by rediscovering the how of the craft. How do you sharpen a chisel? How do you cut a sliding dovetail? How do you make a chair comfortable? Eventually, though, I also began to wonder about the why. What is craft and why does it matter? Why do we make things? Or, more specifically, why do we choose the spiritually, emotionally, and physically demanding work of bringing new objects into the world with creativity and skill?

The answers I have found -- through considering the work of my own hands, through the practical education of a life in craft and through the shared experiences of others -- all seem to lead back to one fundamental truth: we practice contemporary craft as a process of self-transformation." ~ Peter Korn. Why We Make Things and Why It Matters. David R. Godine: 2015, 7. Korn goes on to mention Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Richard Sennett's The Craftsman, and Matthew Crawford's Shop Craft as Soulcraft.

To break or to be broken

And so this American experiment and the quality of the Americans it produces comes down to this word "freedom". Do we break upon its surface, or will we be broken? Is it a politic or a pathway? Will I measure out freedom by the span of my arms, or will I measure it by the outstretched arms of Another?

. . . . . . . . . .

Along this same line, consider the following juxtaposition in a quote from a Cardus op-ed piece by Jane Clark:

"Dr. Anthony Esolen, professor of Renaissance Literature at Providence College, says that throughout literature, the word "villain" simply indicates a person who does not respect things as he ought. Villains are brutes, louts, cowards, petty criminals. They do not appreciate and treasure the small, sacred things, but instead tromp through the world like Jack's ugly giant, crushing everything tender and innocent. Small boys smashing butterflies are villains, as are fathers beating their children. They are intentionally ignorant (note the etymological root: ignore) of the right ordering of the world, which requires tenderness and thoughtful care for the small and weak things.

It is helpful to consider villainy alongside its opposite: virtue. Virtue is the habit of paying proper deference, which can include reprimanding evil as we encounter it. In many ways, virtue is synonymous with respect. It seeks the true nature of things and strives to deal with them as they ought to be dealt with."

A word about the historical-critical method

R. R. Reno made this comment in the June/July issue of First Things. Printing it here is a public admission of personal doubt--perhaps just a small one, a question, a confusion, or perhaps not--concerning the interpretive method of my schooling, namely this historical-critical (grammatical) one. Reno says,

For more than two centuries, the tradition of historical-critical study of the Bible has sought authoritative readings of the Bible that distill key normative theological concepts out of many studies of particular strata of the biblical text and it's history. Because of the mathematics of conditional probability, these efforts cannot succeed. Historical judgments about discrete portions of texts and slices of ancient Israelite history can discipline and enrich our larger-scale, traditional interpretations of the Bible. But the techniques of modern historical analysis that provide critical insight lack the creative, synthetic power to generate canonical readings. (7)

I am not an expert in hermeneutics or in the interpretive tradition, but I have had a little schooling. I know enough to know that Neoplatonism and the four-senses tradition were put aside, when Enlightenment science picked humanity from the navel of the cosmos. History replaced metaphysics. And method overcame genius, pragmatic wisdom, or contemplative and mystical insights. German criticisms sometimes hilariously gave us the historical-critical method and conservative scholarship wiped out the critical part and replaced it with the word "grammatical"--as much a political as academic move. It has held an easy peace in the burned over landscape of dead trees and souls that remain after the total war between fundamentalists and modernists, a war presided over by the janus god Modernity. This peace has held for nearly half a century, but, today, that peace is slipping. There is R. R. Reno's observation, above, but the sensibility behind it can be observed in growing calls for theological exegesis. I should observe that R. R. Reno is general editor of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible.*

Where I am concerned, I have long wondered how to make the "well, if you understand the historical situation" results of exegesis and the well-worn "Bible says" truisms stand together. Paper after paper and commentary after commentary discover new readings based on historical and grammatical science--findings that are shared in the classroom and discussed at conferences but rarely--at this point--make it into pulpits and sunday school curricula. These finding are not hostile to the text, as were the assaults of the Tuebingen school, but they are different, nevertheless. And, slowly but surely, they will collectively reshape confession.

I am mostly glad. Perhaps we are seeing the fruit of the Reformation--the gospel message restored to the church after so much cultural accretion. But if these results are based in history alone, if these results are arrived at by a method born of science, then how can they be completely trusted as dependable by the church of Jesus? This method removes the Bible from the churches. It is the Bible of the schoolmen--no matter how devout. Can this Bible be trusted? Does God call ministers without first making them historians? To ask such questions sounds like American anti-intellectualism. It is not. Mine is a question about the role of the Spirit and a growing certainty that Jesus's reign should extend even to method.

* In the interest of full disclosure, I now own every volume of the Brazos Theological Commentary on the Bible and mourned the day the series was canceled. The entire perspective of this post baffles me today (writing September 2022). R. R. Reno went on to be the editor of First Things magazine, which sucked an irenic journal into dismal conservatism so that not a word was spoken against the Trump disaster for his entire four years. Therefore, I canceled my subscription ages ago and, until Reno is gone, I will not be resubscribing.

Get a Sensei Q&A

The following is a FAQ I put together for some friends recently as part of a longer discussion on personal theological development. I had made the point that one of the things you must do is to choose a sensei to guide your development, and followed it up with this.

Q: I have no idea where to begin.
A: Ask someone who can give you guidance and, chances are, you have a book on your shelf now. Learn to glance over foot/endnotes and bibliographies. Do not lose sight of your question. Senseis are asking their own questions. They may overlap with yours, and sometimes yours is swallowed up into theirs, but, eventually and in the end, it is always your question. Consider the advice of English theologian Oliver D. Crisp, "Often theologians are formed through apprenticing themselves to the work of one or more past masters in the great tradition of Christian doctrine. It is a good way to define and develop one's theological sensibilities. Working closely with the texts and thought of a historic theologian leaves an indelible impression upon the work of those who follow in their footsteps."

Q: What if I choose a sensei I cannot understand?
A: This is not uncommon. To some degree, the best senseis are bewildering and frustrating long before they become enlightening. Nevertheless, if you are really in over your head, know your limits and choose a lesser light or a book or article or video or talk guided toward a popular audience. Sometimes senseis are intentionally obtuse for various reasons. An example is the Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga, who teaches at the U of Notre Dame. Plantinga started his career by intentionally skewing as difficult as possible. He would give talks that no one would understand . . . and he did that for years. Eventually he earned the fearful respect of the philosophical community. And only after that did he begin to speak understandably.

A quick word about vocabulary. Runners have their time. Stocks have their performance against the market. Ideas have vocabulary. You know you are making progress when your vocabulary grows. If what you are reading etc. never challenges your vocabulary, then you are not in the presence of a sensei. Also, there are times you just skip the vocabulary. You can’t know everything. You are the one asking the question, after all, and they serve your ends, not the other way around.

Q: I’m afraid of finding a sensei. After all, I don’t know enough to judge whether they are orthodox or not. What if they lead me into bad ideas? (or the variant, “My tradition hates this person and has taught me to avoid them for the sake of keeping my salvation.”)
A: This is quite right. You should be afraid. The best senseis think so far ahead of you that you have agreed to their assumptions long before you are ever aware they have made any. And often your frustration with them and the bewilderment you are feeling is only proof that you are a novice and undeveloped in a topic (goodbye pride!). Most are not like that. But a strategy of beginning with a sensei who is anathema to your tradition has its merits. Again, a personal example, I am reading Karl Barth’s Church Dogmatics right now, and already the line between what I think and what he thinks has blurred beyond the point of knowing for sure which is which. But I’ve spent a long time preparing for this, so I’m not wholly afraid of never coming out on the other side.

Q: Why take this trouble?
A: I apologize if this sounds like some kind of occult art. It isn’t. It flows quite naturally from asking your question. If it is a question you really care about, then you want to hear an answer. If you don’t care enough to follow through, then I might ask if you are really asking your question at all. You should go back and ask why you are afraid of your question. Maybe you have never really asked a question before in your life. Just because someone can use a question mark at the end of a sentence doesn’t mean they can ask a question. Positively, though, there are moments where things fall together. There are moments where what was impenetrable before this time falls open as easily as a storybook tale. There are moments where you see past your assumptions, the bedrock cracks, and you see you were standing on something more connected than before. There is nothing like that experience. It is so affirming, so empowering, so humbling, and so exciting.

Q: I’m not a reader / I don’t really like academic stuff.
A: These are really two questions, but they are so close that I’ll address them together. Some people are not readers. There are learning styles. Thankfully, in our day, there are videos and MP3s, and sometimes you can go meet a sensei. Nevertheless, here’s the truth: leaders read. Our culture still exalts reading as the primary vehicle of intellectual exploration and growth. Often you will find that a sensei has long-form and short-form pieces. I’ve often wondered, for example, why people don’t read sermons. There are usually books of, say, Wesley’s sermons or von Balthasar or Bonhoeffer or St. Gregory of Naziansus or Van Til or Hauerwas or Barth or Augustine etc. People also write journal articles. These short-form pieces are often better ways of getting at an idea than the long-form books (which often contain unnecessary linguistic, citational, or other forms of what amounts to showing off).

As for not really liking academic stuff. I totally get that. We Westerners have so exalted the university system that it has become its own nation of priests and Levites. And, theology too has been unnaturally split between “church theology” and “academic theology” so that pastors are now taught counseling techniques while biblical and scholarly languages and the philosophical challenges of our traditions and our age are left as the inconsequential playthings of egg headed ivory-tower brainy types.

That is a complete and utter lie. Doesn’t every Christian have the Holy Spirit? And if so, isn’t that Christian beloved of the father and enveloped in the life of the Trinity? That is the very foundation of theology, is it not? One’s question(s), then, are the real beginning of theology for you, and this is spiritual discipline, not the accumulation of an academic degree or indulging in a proclivity for libraries.

Stop thinking of books and such as academic stuff. Some is. You can ignore that stuff, but don’t ignore what speaks to your question. That isn’t academic, it is about you. And, where it speaks to your question, it is the most relevant and practical dialogue on the planet.

Q: Is there any other way of dividing up senseis?
A: Yes. Do it not just by subject but historically. Every Christian, IMHO, should know three things. (a) the Bible (b) the creeds (by which is a meant having some clue of basic dogma) (c) church history. If you know nothing about church history, then you should get yourself an accessible survey like Church History in Plain Language or Gonzales’s accessible surveys and learn the story of the family. Do a little genealogy. We are all the newest members of the church triumphant spread out over time and space.

Q: How long should I stay with a sensei?
A: Until that sensei has taught you his or her five-point exploding heart technique. Sensei’s are normally classified by one or more signature moves. The more important the sensei, the greater the number of signature moves. But the real mastery comes when the many collapses into the one, and you can see the unity of intent that makes your sensei unique. When that happens, you can anticipate their moves and choreograph their catalog. Your own unity will strengthen and you will know that it is time to seek a new sensei. With practice, you will be able to sense the unifying force underneath senseis you have only just met, and you will see that it is the quality of that unity which separates skilled warriors from the heroes of legend. “A movement is learned when the body has understood it, that is, when it has incorporated it into its ‘world’.” (Maurice Merleau-Ponty) Please note that this question presumes your faithfulness to your own question. Not that you can’t learn from anyone. You can. But few of us have the luxury of time or patience to learn at the feet of someone whose teachings do not speak to our needs.

I’m sorry this went too long. And perhaps I have been too extreme or unnecessary. Perhaps, too, a caveat should be made that says that none of this is necessary for salvation or for an admirable life of witness, service, and devotion. But, in saying that, please don’t think I’m saying that it is okay to shirk responsibility. As the quotes says, “I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” And again, “The mind, once expanded, never returns again to its original shape.” (That latter one is a pilgrim’s prayer and a good saying against hard times.)

Church Dogmatics 1.1.3 Preaching as "the audible sacrament"

This section was a complete challenge to me. Barth not only discusses preaching, but he discusses why preaching exists, how it is arrived at by an ecclesiology that is itself immersed (baptized) in revelation.

Preaching has always been a given from my youth. We read the Bible. We talk to others about what we’ve read or hear from them what they’ve read. Preaching is this same thing but broadcast out with greater authority due to the calling of the preacher and the deference of the community of hearers.

Yet, this isn’t a preaching supported by dogmatics, rather sociology or cultural anthropology. This is an emotional or intellectual appeal. Not that the preachers from my youth have not been sincere men. Not that they did not understand their own ministries dogmatically--they may have and probably did. No, I mean my understanding was largely a shallow one.

Later Reformed theology taught me to respect the Word preached, but the dogmatic apparatus was still missing.

Now I completely see the oversight; “in this dogmatics preaching is not only assigned less importance, but virtually no importance at all“ (65)! And without the confessional apparatus, how can one truly address oneself to or urge the church on to attend to proclamation? How can one understand what should be preached and why? “Proclamation along these lines can only end with its dissolution. Proclamation as self-exposition (read, oh twenty-first century, the term “authentic” or “authenticity”) must in the long run turn out to be a superfluous and impossible undertaking” (64). Indeed, without preaching the church is either the mystery of performance or a center of social justice practiced by human beings “alone in and with (the) world” (Ibid).

And now I am left to wonder about proclamation as a sacrament. “The Word is the audible sacrament and the sacrament, the visible Word” (71). I may be instructed by preaching, but do I receive grace in the hearing--a grace that allows for the “hearing of the promise” and for “obedience to it” (67)? So is grace available--I speak as if it is a substance--as a punctiliar judgment once-for-all applied or is it an ever flowing stream “whose waters make glad”?

Church Dogmatics pp 25-44: the Church Emerging

Here are a few disconnected thoughts puffed and wheezed at the summit of the slight but sheer face of Barth’s prolegomena.

Having established his presuppositions in the previous section, Barth fixes the task before him, namely to overcome Modernity (Pietism) and pre-Vatican II Roman Catholicism in favor of a (miraculous) Evangelische Theologie. The whole forms a scholastic Quodlibet. It is dialectical and masculine. We feel the direct, interested squint of the sportsman. The leaning in and warming to an argument from one who likes nothing better. “If this faith falls” he says, by which we may understand the two forms of faith aforementioned, “so does this interpretation of faith, so too the presupposition of an anthropological prius of faith, and so finally the possibility of prolegomena of this kind” (39)

Barth’s agenda follows in the footsteps of the Reformers by emphasizing the fallenness of humanity and the unmerited grace of God. First, he puts the error in both of these dogmatic emphases at the feet of any definition of faith which finds traction in humanity, in “human possibility” (38). That, he says, cannot be, recalling the doctrine of human depravity. Similarly, the correct definition is one that centers itself not on human possibility or decision, but only (sola) on the free (gratia) revelation of the triune God in the person of Jesus Christ.

Barth’s attitude toward Reformation emphases does not cease there, however. As I’ve said before, he seems to take up Reformation emphases without fear and explore them, twentieth-century feet soldiering about in sixteenth-century boots. The result is a Christologic prolegomena out of which an ecclesiology emerges. Let me just throw this against the wall.

Sacraments: “In, with and under the human question, dogmatics speaks of the divine answer” (12). Barth’s discussion of the necessity of faith for dogmatic work is working with the same tools as form the doctrine that the efficacy of the sacrament is not bound by the worthiness of the priest who administers: “The time has come to go back with a new understanding to pre-Pietist doctrine of the theological habitus in virtue of which the theologian is what he is by the grace of God quite irrespective his greater or lesser likeness to [Kierkegaard’s existential awareness]” (20). Note especially Barth’s trouble with the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation whereby “that which is beyond all human possibilities changes at once into that which is enclosed within the reality of the Church . . . Roman Catholic faith believe this transformation (emphasis mine). . . . It affirms an analogia entis . . . the possibility of applying the secular ‘There is’ to God” (41). This hints at a much more existential sacramental theology perhaps to come.

Community: "The results of earlier dogmatic work, and indeed our own results, are basically no more than signs of its [truth’s] coming. They are simply the results of human effort. As such they are a help to, but also the object of, fresh human effort. . . . Our dogmatic labors can and should be guided by results which are venerable because they are attained in the common knowledge of the Church at a specific time. Such results may be seen in the dogmas enshrined in the creeds. (15)” “To be in the Church . . . is to be called with others by Jesus Christ. To act in the Church is to act in obedience to this call. This obedience to the call of Christ is faith” (13).

Spiritual Disciplines. Prayer as “the attitude without which there can be no dogmatic work” (23). “We do not speak of true prayer if we say ‘must’ instead of ‘can’. According to Romans 8.26ff., the way from ‘can’ to ‘must’ is wrapped in the mystery at the gates of which we here stand” (23-24). Penitence. “Dogmatics must always be undertaken as an act of penitence and obedience” (22). Confession. “There can be success in this work . . . on the basis of divine correspondence to this human attitude: ‘Lord, I believe; help thou mine unbelief’” (24).

The Great Commission. This is the substance of preaching, the need to test what one preaches, and a warning against apologetics which gives unbelief an ontological hold on the argument that it neither deserves nor has.

Election underlies the entire enterprise. Election is the event. The free work of God. To bind God’s freedom is to bind his election. (And what affect will this have on Barth’s doctrine of baptism?)

Church Dogmatics 1.1.2

You say what you are. That’s what Barth is getting at in this section. Perhaps “are” is the wrong term, as it presupposes a metaphysic of being (and the personal jury is still out as to whether Barth’s is a metaphysics of ontology). Nevertheless, Barth’s doctrine of revelation--what you say--is dictated by what you are. Say, then, that you are God, then Truth is what you are. So what you say of yourself, what you reveal of yourself, is Truth. Say, then, that you are a human being. Limited. A created thing. A creature. Your “saying” is also limited and created, encompassing at best only a world of created things.

But when the Church becomes--when it is elected in God’s providence for faith in the God-man, Jesus of Nazareth, then it confesses what it knows to be there, but with created lips. And so Truth erupts eschatologically into the world through its confession--a confession it is given, not one it has appropriated, a confession born of seeking not of obtaining. “It does not have to begin by finding or inventing the standard by which it measures [what is true]. It sees and recognizes that this is given within the Church. It is given in its own peculiar way, as Jesus Christ is given, as God in His revelation gives Himself to faith. But it is given” (12).

There are two levels of knowledge, even as they are two levels of what can be expressed. Because it is Jesus who speaks, and because Jesus is the incarnate Son, and because the Son enjoys the pure agape of trinitarian fellowship with the Father, then his word can be trusted. His word, he himself, is an analogia fidei (τὴν ἀναλογίαν τῆς πίστεως) which is a true canon. “He is the truth, not merely in Himself, but also for us as we know Him solely by faith in Jesus Christ” (12).

The one level is a level of perfect comprehension and speech--a “charismatic theology from within” whose characteristic theologian in Paul. The other is steps out after, asking and fumbling according to the ontology of those who ask. “As the Church accepts from Scripture, and with divine authority from Scripture alone, the attestation of its own being as the measure of its utterance . . . (16 emphasis mine). This is a “theology from without” whose characteristic theologians are the second-century apologists. “It alone creates fellowship and can be ecclesiastical and scientific” (22). Nevertheless, it is “always undertaken as an act of penitent obedience” and its chief method is prayer born of faith that the Spirit “will guide you into all truth” (Jn. 16.13 ESV). It believes that “in, with and under the human question [note the inference to Luther’s doctrine of the Eucharistic presence] dogmatics speaks of the divine answer” (12).

I should note, as well, that this two-layered matrix of speech, the Truth and the questions that point to the truth, is very reminiscent of the scholastic argument that the efficacy of the sacrament was not bound to the piety of the officiant, or lack of it.

I like that Barth is not content to set out on beaten paths. He goes to foundations and comes back with a doctrine of revelation that I’ve heard lampooned and spoken against my whole life. Barth’s theology can make a dead dog into divine revelation. He denigrates the scriptures, they say, and dissolves revelation into subjectivity.

Most of these criticisms and the critics that wield them have not read Barth, or, if they have read him, have not attempted to understand him--at least that is my governing hypothesis. I do not think he denigrates church history, the creeds, or the scriptures. They are, in fact, the matrix upon which his Dogmatics is built. So the truth of the matter is more subtle.

I have the feeling Barth is not out to change the accident but the substance of theological activity in the world. And I have a feeling he is wresting the podium from the hands of confident rhetoricians and reminding everyone, “Do not put yourself forward in the king’s presence or stand in the place of the great” (Prv. 25.6 ESV). The self-revealing of the Triune God is a power beyond the epistemological dictates of scientific reductionism, and He is coming into the world.

And I wonder if Barth is reading Calvin better than Calvin has been read in a very long time. I wonder if Barth is breathing the spirit/Spirit of the Reformers and grasping the true sense of ecclesia reformata, semper reformanda, the church reformed and always reforming, and therefore calling subsequent comfortable Protestant-scholasticism what it is.

Karl Barth; revelation; analogy of faith; election

Church Dogmatics 1.1.1

Why does Barth care about science? Right away, with this obsession with science, we twenty-first century readers realize we’ve crossed over into a different way of things. Einstein yet lives. Science has shoved the epistemology of the West under the iron lid of its own method. What concord should Jerusalem have with Athens? Why does Barth care about science?

Earlier today, I commented on Daniel Owen’s blog Beginning Barth that it seems to me as if “Barth is offering theology on the altar of post-enlightenment scientism.” But having read the whole of this section, I do not think this is the case. Barth does flirt with science, but the word and thing are not identical to what is commonly understood. Theology can be called a science in that it has internal consistency that is defined according to its object (Sachlichkeit). But it cannot be called a science if it must submit to “the idea of unity, the possibility of myth, and the humanistic relevance of Christianity” (Arthur Titius, Berlin 1932. Note Barth's attentiveness to the scientific pronouncements of his day).

What emerges is a taking up of the term “science” as an act of solidarity, an act done from forgiveness and for evangelical hope (or judgment). That which is not assumed cannot be atoned for, and theology extends an invitation to every other science, saying, “come and be assumed.” Theology is no different from them. It also is a flawed, human discipline. And it is weaker than they, for rather than being fixed solidly in this age, theology hovers in gossamer fragility between the times. “It cannot think of itself as a link in an ordered cosmos, but only as a stop-gap in a disordered cosmos.” There is a signpost here pointing decades forward to Jürgen Moltmann’s assertion that eschatology is the only foundation of dogmatics. And there is also a statement made about the possibility of natural theology. It is possible, if I understand Barth, but it is improbable. “Might it not be that Jer. 31.34 is in process of fulfilment? . . . There might be such a thing as philosophia christiana.” “Now if God be wisdom (sapientia Deus est), as truth and scripture testify, then a true philosopher is a lover of God” (Augustine. De Civitas Dei Chap 8 Sect 1).

The difference between those sciences and this theological one (Augustine’s de divinitate ratio sive sermo), is the central principle. Those other sciences judge “the utterance of the Church about God in accordance with alien principles” whereas theology has its own principle: Jesus Christ, the “basis, goal and content” of the Church.

Barth’s treatment of Christ the Center is amazingly apophatic. Biblical theology (Does Christian utterance derive from Him?), practical theology (Does it lead to Him?), and dogmatic theology (Is it conformable to Him?) are three circles overlapping in a venn diagram from whose center one respectfully turns “it is well neither to affirm nor to construct a systematic center”. The threefold pattern of theological disciplines, its questions, and the three-fold adjectives he uses of Christ (basis, goal and content), loosely correspond and together beat the tempo of a trinitarian schema to come. The apophatic Christology of a center that is “neither affirmed nor constructed” and the apophatic nature of the one ousia at the center of three hypostasis. This is poetic metre. Aesthetically pleasing, yes, but is this a truly necessary trinity? Did Barth begin with science and end with . . . worship?

Karl Barth; Church Dogmatics; science; apophatic theology; Augustine

Preparing to Read Karl Barth

So it seems that I and a dozen or so other bloggers have answered J. R. Daniel Kirk's invitation to read through Karl Barth's Church Dogmatics (CD). And you would think that, having written lengthy reviews on several "how to read Barth"-style books, and having read a bit of Barth over the years myself, that this would be an enthusiastic undertaking. Nevertheless, I'm terrified.

Blogging takes time. Thus the long falling off since Caleb was born. Two kids don't translate into T-I-M-E. Can I find time enough to write again and stay with it?

Interpreting Barth correctly is a kind of cottage industry among Barthians. Will I understand him? Will I miss some fundamental foundation and read a thousand pages in the wrong direction? And, in so doing, will I embarrass myself?

Barth himself was not kindly received by thinkers from the traditions of my youth, namely Southern fundamentalism and conservative Reformed. Based on their reading, Barth is the quickest way to undermine every sure plank of doctrine. His is the hand to topple unwary young minds into the slough of liberal despond.

And then there is the simple difference in time. The first volume of the CD was written in German in Switzerland in the 1930s. That means that Barth's interlocutors, his enemies, his politics and, indeed, his language require interpretation beyond bare cogitation.

In the face of these difficulties, the presence of a community of, at this writing, strangers comes as great comfort. I have no doubt that they will educate me more than I them. It feels right to be climbing in to the CD in the presence of a congregation (ekklaesia).

Finally, something Ezra Pound said in his book The ABCs of Reading stays with me. Pound said that a student should study masters. "It is my firm conviction," he said, "that a man can learn more about poetry by really knowing and examining a few of the best poems than by meandering about among a great many."

Barth himself is, undoubtedly, a master. And with him comes a community of masters; indexed citations cluster around Anselm, Aquinas, Augustine, Calvin, Schleiermacher, and, most prevalently, Luther. Who can hang back in such a company? And so, friends, let us begin!

Karl Barth; Church Dogmatics

Theology as craft

Theology is not who you have read most recently. It is not the newest jewel in your cap of jargon. It is not the recognition that the argument has been better traced by another. It is not understanding of the history of ideas. It is not the playground of the leisure class. Theology does not require your razor wit or applicable metaphor. It is not necessary for it to prove anything, nor does one who needs proof go to it. It does not swell with victory over its enemies, nor is it threatened by them. It fills dogma as a vessel. Yet, dogma does not exhaust it. If one learned the Summa by rote for recitation, would it make one a theologian? Doesn’t the Devil quote the Bible chapter and verse?

I have degrees. What did I learn?

I have spent. What did I buy?

I have read. What did it profit?

I should know better, and yet have so often regressed.

I should be a teacher, but do footnotes teach?

What is theology, then? I deny it as a footnote or a name. I forbid it to be bound hand-and-foot by historical situation. I forbid it to be owned. And so, if not philosophy or taxonomy, it must be something else, something ignored and of little account in modernity. Ah, yes, it is that thing behind the work of self-discipline--that is the way. Theology is rules that engender ways of being. In short, it is a craft.

Channeling Napoleon Hill

What follows is a comment made to a post that my pastor, Father Jody Howard, made following an article in the Living Church about the challenges facing the Episcopal Church. At the end of the article, Rev. Dr. Neal Michell, canon for strategic development in the Diocese of Dallas, writes, “The problems facing our church are spiritual in nature. We have not been faithful enough disciples of Jesus Christ. We have not reached out to those around us with the Good News of Jesus Christ.” My response is as follows:

Brueggemann's call for a return to personal discipleship is definitely part of the solution; however, that is simply not enough. That may become a vibrant monasticism or fundamentalism, (which may be the option that best exemplifies God's design for the church in the world. For me, the jury is still out on that one. And if it does come down here, I choose monasticism over fundamentalism.) but it will not solve the puzzle of why there simply isn't traction in the culture. In my mind, this is a problem with language and with anthropology. Language because there is simply no longer a common linguistic "game" that allows people to talk about religious ideas. (And, one might say, this is part of a broader problem: that the public square has so collapsed that even talking about ideas of public consequence has been reduced to grandstanding, party politics, and the manipulation of conspiracy theories.) Anthropology because the formula for a whole human being living a human life no longer includes the habits and practices of faith as a necessity but has relegated it to, at best, an app that can be downloaded and run on the software of the self if one so chooses, for reasons that are highly personable but lend themselves to the psychotic, the aesthetic, the social/political, or even the pragmatic--but certainly not the necessary. Western human beings are practical atheists, one and all, and it is a struggle even to be religious for the religious. The church catholic in the West has ignored these extremely thorny philosophical problems and applied, instead, Western and especially American ideas of individualism and success-through-right-action (channeling Napoleon Hill).

theological anthropology; Walter Brueggemann; missions; culture; atheism; modernity

GEB 2: strange loops and the back end of materialism

GEB is a series of rooms, locks, and keys, and the first of these keys is the concept of a strange loop. Discussing the central musical idea of the work, the “Canon per Tonos” of J. S. Bach's Musical Offerings, Douglas Hofstadter writes,

What makes this canon different from any other [is that] it is so constructed that [its] ending ties smoothly onto the beginning. . . . These successive modulations lead the ear to increasingly remote provinces of tonality, so that after several of them, one would expect to be hopelessly far away from the starting key. And yet . . . the original key of C minor [is eventually] restored.

This mobius strip of a thing, traveling further and further from a point only to arrive there again, Hofstadter calls a strange loop. It is a phenomenon that “occurs whenever, by moving upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system [a tangled hierarchy], we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.”

Strange loops occur in different ways. Hofstadter finds them in the work of M. C. Escher in, for example, “Ascending and Descending” or “Waterfall.” But implicit in all of them, he says, whether they encompass a dozen steps or only one, is the concept of infinity. “What else is a loop,” he writes, “but a way of representing an endless process in a finite way.” The representation of strange loops through modulation of musical keys or in the optical illusion of a waterfall existing on two and three dimensions at once is paradoxical—the conflict between finite and infinite. It smells like a higher mathematics and is, as he continues, a kind of translation of the Epimenides paradox or liar paradox, namely “All Cretans are liars,” when Epimenides himself was from Crete. Epimenides gives us a linguistic paradox. A self-referential statement of language which is neither true nor false. What is it?

Hofstadter goes on quite a while discussion twentieth century mathematician Kurt Gödel's discovery of a strange loop at the heart of mathematics. His description is hard to feel, being read today at the end of a continuum that begins with special relativity, quantum mechanics, and the literary term. Nevertheless “Gödel showed,” he says, “that provability is a weaker notion than truth, no matter what axiomatic system is involved.” If I understand him correctly, he is saying that Gödel discovered at the base and heart of mathematics itself that disorder is the beginning even if order is the end: that language shouldn't make sense, but does. That Escher shouldn't be able to draw his waterfall, but there it is. That Bach can write a canon without end, a canon that cannot be written by formula, a canon whose every note makes sense only as it is nested in a network of contexts and relationships, that “there is something deeper” than “mere fugality.” He scrawls a question mark across Euclid's planes and then asks how it can be done.

So what is Hofstadter after? Why paint a picture of the mystery of meaning arriving from an infinite variety of tangled disorder? Hofstadter is after one mystery: the mystery of intelligence. Where does intelligence come from? And can it arise from systems of logic when such systems exist only as they bracket acceptable possibilities—a bracketing unavailable to real intelligence. Life, the context of human intelligence, is not a bracketed thing. Life is messy and random—infinitely so. There are rules, and then there are rules about rules, and then there are rules for constructing new rules, and so on and so forth. “Sometimes the complexity of our minds seems so overwhelming that one feels that there can be no solution to the problem of understanding intelligence.” And, lest it be missed, Hofstadter is a materialist . . . a materialist face to face with the question of the meaning of life and the challenge of transcendence—which, for him, is not an option. He's painted himself into a metaphysical corner, how shall he escape?

J. S. Bach; intelligence; meaning; Kurt Gödel

NYT, Elif Batuman, and theology

Elif Batuman scored a review of her book The Posessed in the February 10, 2010 edition of the New York Times. Not that I am much of an aficionado when it comes to especially contemporary fiction. Nevertheless, there is a part of Dwight Garner's review that caught my eye.

Ms. Batuman’s search for something more from literature than “brisk verbs and vivid nouns” led her, swooning but alert, into the arms of the great Russian writers: Tolstoy, Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov, Babel.

And it led her to write this odd and oddly profound little book, one that’s ostensibly about her favorite Russians but is actually about a million other things: grad school, literary theory, translation, biography, love affairs, the making of “King Kong,” working for the Let’s Go travel guidebook series, songs by the Smiths, even how to choose a nice watermelon in Uzbekistan. Crucially and fundamentally, it is also an examination of this question: How do we bring our lives closer to our favorite books?

Now, I ask you. Why can't theology do that? Why can't theology talk about grad school, love affairs, The Queen is Dead, and "our favorite books"?

I believe that as much as it was the printing press and mercantile politics and nationalism and justification by faith, as much as it was all of these, it was also the readability of the Reformation that made it so dangerous and so popular. How many of the church fathers were rhetoricians, trained in the subtle and liquid power of the spoken word? Why is it that the Bible not only can be literature, but is literature?

Our schools produce schoolmen, and their grammar is exactly so. And how many today read John of Salisbury or settle in with a bit of Duns Scotus? Are these inspiring or do they serve as foils for the construction of the endless paper parcels that make for an academic career?

I've said it before, I think to a large degree that the appeal of deconstructionism was a loosening of the corset of tenure for the sake of a little literary imagination. God, I wish theology would take the hint.

Elif Batuman; theology as literature; boredom; scholasticism

GEB 1: stumble trip

Douglas R. Hofstadter, now a professor of cognitive and computer science at Indiana University, wrote Goedel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid in the late seventies. Today, it is a Pulitzer Prize-Winning book and something of a cult classic. Reading it gains one admission to a worldwide fraternal order. I hadn't known that. What I did know was that it asks questions about the self, about what “I” means, and about the origin of meaning and thought—and that it suggests answers. “In a word,” write Douglas R. Hofstadter, “GEB [Goedel, Escher, Bach] is a very personal attempt to say how it is that animate beings can come out of inanimate matter.”

epistemology; Douglas R. Hofstadter; materialism; subjectivity

a universal dual

I have been struggling for three years or more to escape from one universe into another. Wandering and flailing in the dark, gathering snatches of truth from rumor and hearsay, leaving the familiar paths of habit--catchphrases and methods--and striking out into the woods after this or that light or landmark.

When I say universe I'm speaking of a universe of meaning: familiar symbols, habits, and assumptions that fix the stars and horizons that make up the mental furniture of daily life. Human beings exist in a meaning universe more directly than the physical one. Ask the reductionist-materalist how difficult it is to truly cleave to the "nothing but" of things and then watch them realize that this, too--this arrival at the bare whatness of objects in the physical universe is just another shaping of the mental universe of meaning. That's the double-edge of Kant's great divide: even the scientist is a phenomenologist.

I didn't furiously start and break into the forest chasing after a new universe. You don't realize you've left a path until it is long behind you. It starts with tiny deviations. "Look at that over there!" Then a quick investigation to get a better view. Soon you've left the trail behind.

The first steps were quite simple: the resolution that matter is not of itself a sinful thing. The body too can hope. An eschatological lean toward the Postmillenial end of Amillenialsm. A strict habit of avoiding material notions about godself so that the triune being is not a thing among things. A denial of the present-day urge to use the doctrine of providence as a divining rod. A realization that it is modernity that values authenticity, this baptized in "God has a plan for my life" (the kingdom of God recruits worshipers for God's sake, not for the sake of a realization of one's inner you.) Leaving Anabaptist traditions behind and joining an Episcopal church. These all taken together slowly lead away from that universe that others have called the enchanted universe.

Just naming the darn thing took years. The enchanted universe--yes! I've blogged about this before. This is the universe in which the Christianity of my youth dwells. Naming the other universe has taken nearly as much time. I'm an alien and a stranger to it after all. Moving in large rooms by candlelight. Nothing is familiar. This is the sacramental universe.

I've not fully arrived in the latter. And so much of the habits of mind and the phrases that go with being a Christian go with the former, it has been an odd process of sorting it all out. The brits have pants but call them trousers. Both universes have the word "worship" but mean very different things. It is a repatriation.

Here are a few things I've discovered: One fundamental difference between the two is the way each understands the relationship between God and the world. The god of the enchanted universe is far away, though invoked and expected in the smallest parts of daily life with great fervency. Matter in the enchanted universe is hopeless, the world will burn up and the soul will one day put aside the body and go on to a better realm. The god of the sacramental universe is astonishingly close, though far less invoked and expected in daily life. One expects laterally, the way that plants grow or time flows in unnoticeable continuity that evades the most intense awareness. Matter has hope, the world will be redeemed and transformed, and human beings will go into the new creation as embodied persons, transformed, yes, but still human beings. The eschatologies are different, and so is the drama. Warfare characterizes the former; wonder the latter--at least in my experience.

The way religion and science relate to one another is also very different depending on which universe you inhabit. In the former, science is a helpful maker of comforts but is not allowed to say anything of real importance. In the latter, science is taken seriously. It is not embraced, but it becomes a partner in dialogue. If one is a Christian coming up in an enchanted universe, the only option available if you take the scientific route is to put things in tight boxes, otherwise there is no motivation to engage in the mental and physical rigor of scientific investigation. If one grows up in a sacramental universe, there is a great deal of motivation to pursue the sciences, perhaps more motivation than if one grows up an agnostic.

At any rate, the doctrine of revelation is far different in the two universes. In an enchanted universe, revelation is immanent and pregnant in all things, what is necessary are the keys to its discovery. It is personal, and so God is personal. In a sacramental universe, revelation is restricted to word and sacrament: and perhaps even to word through sacrament (word governed by sacrament). It is largely impersonal, though one's person is caught up in the story. God became a person, and so what is confessed is a God in three persons. The self is wholly at the center of the enchanted universe; God's redemptive purpose at the center of the sacramental one. Faith is also differently understood. In the former faith is a Kierkegaardian leap full of the will and human drama; in the latter it is a signpost planted by the Holy Spirit sticking stubbornly from one's own rocky heart, sometimes a beacon but most times a nuisance.

science and religion; enchanted universe; sacramental theology; Christianity

Science & Religion: a second and historical look

Turns out, Christianity and science have walked further together than apart, at least that is the message of Profs. David Lindberg and Ronald Numbers. Taking on directly the popular and prevalent view that science and religion have always been at war with each other, Lindberg and Numbers maintain that historical investigation suggest otherwise. “Although it is not difficult,” they write, “to find instances of conflicts and controversy . . . recent scholarship has shown the warfare metaphor to be neither useful nor tenable.”[1]

The thread of antagonism they trace back to an American historian named Andrew Dickson White. White taught at the University of Michigan and served in the New York Senate before assuming the presidency of Cornell University, where he refused to impose any religious examination of students. He wanted to create an asylum for science, and some pious citizens did not approve. Therefore, in 1869, a thirty-seven year old White began a white-hot, lifelong anticrusade on behalf of science and against dogmatism, culminating in his two-volume History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.

History of the Warfare has been amazingly successful in the intervening century. Translated into German, Italian, French, Swedish, and Japanese, it is still in print today. Not only, but modern historians still defend its conclusions. Bruce Mazlish, for example, has written in favor of White’s conclusions, saying that they are “beyond reasonable doubt,” a declaration to which the Harvard historian George Sarton would agree. Sarton went so far as believe that White’s thesis should be levied against non-Christian cultures.

Nevertheless, despite its dazzlingly dense references and “military rhetoric,” History of the Warfare is eisegetic in its interpretations. White was wrong, and Lindberg and Numbers are out to prove him so.

White claimed that Christianity “arrested the normal development of the physical sciences for over fifteen hundred years” crushing its appearance under the boot of superstition and ignorance. Is this true?

Lindberg and Numbers, beginning with the church fathers, find a more complicated truth. As it turns out, the church fathers took on the approach toward science that characterized the pagan cultures in which they lived. Some ignored science. Others believed that it had its place. Augustine, for example, believed that, though science could not dictate dogma, it should be respected in its sphere.[2]

It frequently happens that there is some question about the earth or the sky or the other elements of this world, the movement revolutions or even the size and distance of the stars, the regular eclipses of the sun and the moon, the course of the years and seasons; the nature of the animals, vegetables and minerals, and other things of the same kind, respecting which one who is not a Christian has knowledge derived from the most certain reasoning or observation. And it is highly deplorable and mischievous and a thing especially to be guarded against that he should hear a Christian speaking of such matters in accordance with Christian writings and uttering such nonsense that, knowing him to be as wide of the mark as . . . east is from west, the unbeliever can scarcely restrain himself from laughing.[3]

Christian apologists also found science useful—and their use of it helped preserve and extend what science was available in often tumultuous times. Science aided theology. Science was its handmaiden—a position far different from White, who would say they were enemies. As it is, “Christianity was not the enemy [of science], but a valued (if not entirely reliable) servant.” They worked in tandem with each other, and often the exchange was beneficial.[4]

One benefit of the relationship was that science gave Christianity categories which allowed it to dialogue with the world. “The notion that any serious Christian thinker would even have attempted to formulate a world view from the Bible alone is ludicrous.” Theologians could adapt parts of a worldview that are, well, worldly from the natural philosophy at their disposal. In the thirteen century, for example, theologians busily integrated Aristotelian categories, taking on it physical, metaphysical, and cosmological and integrating them with creedal fundamentum. This synthesizing process culminated in the condemnations of 1270 and 1277, whereby theologians and philosophers were forbidden to pursue certain Aristotelian positions, such as pure determinism.

Interestingly enough, Lindberg and Numbers deny that these condemnations prove intrinsic warfare. They maintain that the condemnations allowed thought to run outside the shadow of Aristotle. Fourteenth century attacks on Aristotelian dogma led to new questions, such as the rotation of the earth on its axis. Questions which otherwise may have languished. Further, the authors state the the condemnations also turned scientific questioning away from fruitless rationalism.

A central concern of the condemnation was the desire to preserve the sovereignty of God over creation. God is omnipotent over the material world, and this means that the physical laws that govern it are subject to the will of their creator and can be changed if necessary. And that meant that an investigation into underlying causes could very well be a fool’s errand.

The condemnations generated a certain skepticism about the ability of the human mind to penetrate with certainty to the underlying causes of observed events; this attitude encouraged the view that science should restrict its attention to empirical fact. . . . Four hundred years later, the idea of God’s absolute sovereignty and its corollary, the total passivity of matter, became central features of Isaac Newton’s mechanistic world view.”[5]

Lindberg and Numbers pursue their argument into the affairs of Copernicus and Galileo. In the case of Copernicus and the publication of his system in 1543, there was no reason for religion to attack Copernicus and every reason to hear his voice as one of many. The rotation of the earth had already been proposed by Nicole Oresme, a bishop of the fourteen century, and Nicholas of Cusa, a cardinal of the fifteenth. Various members of the church, including a bishop and a cardinal, urged Copernicus to publication, and his manuscript was dedicated to Pope Paul III. A young Lutheran mathematician, Georg Jachim Rheticus, saw it through the printing process. And the theologian Andreas Osiander wrote its preface. Organized Catholic opposition to Copernicus didn't appear until the seventeenth century. “The church,” they say, “had more important things to worry about than a new astronomical or cosmological system.” Up-and-coming mathematicians “adopted Copernicanism simply as a mathematical reform, offering a better way of predicting planetary positions, while overlooking or rejecting the radical thesis that the earth really moves.”

Where Galileo was concerned, the issue was not science versus religion but politics and the question of Scriptural interpretation. Galileo and his telescope came on the scene amidst the wagon-circling activities of the Roman Catholic church during the Counter-Reformation. The Protestant Reformation had waged a now seventy-year-old argument with Roman Catholicism on many fronts, one of the most divisive being biblical interpretation. The Council of Trent (1545-1563) forbid scriptural interpretation on any matter of faith or practice “contrary to the sense determined by the Holy Mother Church.” And Galileo’s teaching did just that. Galileo argued that nature and scripture were two organs of divine revelation, and that reason was their proper interpreter, not the Church. When questioned, his science was not unique enough to support his hermeneutics; other natural explanations, such as that provided by Tycho Brahe, served well enough and did not run afoul of orthodoxy. At best Galileo raised questions about the relationship between reason and revelation. At worst, he acted imprudently by mixing scientific observation and hermeneutical method. Nevertheless, as Lindberg and Numbers state, the Galileo affair is an ecclesial one. Everyone involved identified themselves as Christian and acknowledged the centrality of the Bible. The struggle was between opposing theories of biblical interpretation: Trent’s conservative position versus Galileo’s liberal one. Both positions could claim an intellectual tradition, but neither existed apart from militant politics in Galileo’s day; his flair for cultivating powerful enemies notwithstanding.

The story of Charles Darwin and The Origin of Species falls along similar lines to those of Copernicus. Once again, the publication of Darwin’s ideas finds a religious atmosphere eager to dialogue with or even absorb his views. “Clergy were among the first to embrace and popularize [Darwin’s] hypothesis.” Nevertheless, Andrew White brings up the matter of Samuel Wilberforce, the Bishop of Oxford, and so it is helpful to look closer at what Wilberforce actually said.

It is a bit of a history-of-science, isn’t-Darwinism-fantastic chestnut that, on June 30, 1860, in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Wilberforce condemned Darwinism for contradicting the Bible. He is reported to have said, “that he was not descended from a monkey.”

Upon hearing this remark, Darwin’s friend the zoologist Thomas Huxley shot back: “If I had to choose, I would prefer to be a descendant of a humble monkey rather than of a man who employs his knowledge and eloquence in misrepresenting those who are wearing out their lives in the search for the truth.”

As legend has it, the Bishop shot back and asked Huxley whether it was “on your grandfather or grandmother’s side that you claim descent from the apes.” To which Huxley rejoined, “I would rather be descended from an ape than a bishop.” (The authors note that J. R. Lucas and others have demonstrated this story to be apocryphal.)

What White fails to mention is that Bishop Wilberforce had earlier written that he would be willing to embrace the theory of natural selection if it proved correct.

If Mr. Darwin can with the same correctness of reasoning [as Newton] demonstrate to us our fungular descent, we shall dismiss our pride, and avow, with the characteristic humility of philosophy, our unsuspected cousinship with the mushrooms . . . only we shall ask leave to scrutinise carefully every step of the argument which has such an ending, and demur if at any point of it we are invited to substitute unlimited hypothesis for patient observation. . . . We have no sympathy with those who object to any fact or alleged facts in nature, or to any inference logically deduced from them, because they believe them to contradict what it appears is taught by Revelation.[6]

Darwin said the Bishop’s review was “uncommonly clever,” and said that Wilberforce “picks out with skill all the most conjectural parts [of the Origin], and brings forward well all the difficulties.” Wilberforce was no idiot.

Lindberg and Numbers outline several different theories that attempt to understand the subsequent conflict over Darwinism. I will list them here:

(1) James R. Moore says that the Darwinian debates occur not between scientists and theologians, but in individual minds struggling to come to terms with the new paradigm, a “conflict of minds steeped in Christian tradition with the ideas and implications of Darwinism.”

(2) Neil C. Gillespie argues that the conflict was between competing systems of science or “epistemes.” “Because the new episteme for science differed from the old in having within it no place for theology, serious questions were thereby raised that made the conflict” very real. The conflict rose from transformations within science, not as a result of a war between scientists and the religious.

(3) Frank M. Turner sees the conflict as a result of a change in priestly class. The authority and prestige of one group of intellectuals was passing to another, including political control of education and the social power of religious dogma and explanation. In Turner’s view, the conflict is as much a social and political as intellectual.

In the end, the picture Lindberg and Numbers paint between religion and science is a human one. People in the day-to-day struggle to come to terms with what they know and how they know it: religious ideas and scientific ones bleed, inform, and bump each other as a reflection of the minds of the people and the cultures that contain them. “Christianity and science alike,” they conclude, “have been profoundly shaped by their relations with each other.” What is needed is an ideological history that refuses the simple—and thus seductive—answers of White and warfare and commits itself to the difficult, nuanced, but worthwhile retelling of the story.

__________

The above largely taken from the article by David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers. “Beyond War and Peace: A Reappraisal of the Encounter between Christianity and Science.” Church History 55 (1986): 338-54. A similar article appeared as the introduction to God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounter Between Christianity and Science. University of California Press, 1986.

[1] As a critique to the warfare metaphor, the authors also cite James R. Moore, The Post-Darwinian Controversies: A Study of the Protestant Struggle to Come to Terms with Darwin in Great Britain and America, 1870-1900 (Cambridge, 1979), 19-122. See also Ronald L. Numbers, “Science and Religion” in Historical Writings on American Science, ed. Sally Gregory Kohlstedt and Margaret W. Rossiter, Osiris 1, 2d ser. (1985): 59-80.

[2] Augustine, Enchiridion 3:9.

[3] Augustine. De genesi ad litteram 1.19; trans. Meyrick H. Carre, Realists and Nominalists (London, 1946), 19. For another translation, see Augustine, The Literal Meaning of Genesis, trans. John Hammond Taylor, S.J., 2 vols., Ancient Christian Writers 41-42 (New York, 1982), 1:42-43.

[4] See also David C. Lindberg, “Science and the Early Church” in God and Nature, 19-58.

[5] For a good account of the effects of the condemnation, see Edward Grant, “The Condemnations of 1277, God’s Absolute Power, and Physical Thought in the Late Middle Ages,” Viator 10 (1979): 211-44; reprinted in Edward Grant Studies in Medieval Science and Natural Philosophy (London, 1981), article 13.; Gary Deason, “Reformation Theology and the Mechanistic Conception of Nature,” in God and Nature, 181-85.

[6] J. R. Lucas, “Wilberforce and Huxley: A Legendary Encounter,” The Historical Journal 22 (1979): 313-30. See also Sheridan Gilley, “The Huxley-Wilberforce Debate: A Reconsideration,” in Religion and Humanism, ed. Keith Rommins, Studies in Church History 17 (Oxford, 1981), 325-40.

science and religion; David Lindberg; Ronald Numbers; history of ideas; Augustine; Christianity; history; Andrew White; church history; Nicolaus Copernicus; Galileo Galilei; Charles Darwin; Samuel Wilberforce; James Moore; Neil Gillespie; Frank Turner; natural philosophy

Plantinga pulls a Samson

Alvin Plantinga throws out a nearly adorable argument against naturalism, or reductionism, in the July/August 2008 issue of Books & Culture. It is quite a straightforward move, almost syllogistic, and it goes like this: "Naturalists say that science proves their position, and in particular evolution. Plantinga disagrees. “Evolution and naturalism are not merely uneasy bedfellows,” he writes. “One can’t rationally be an evolutionary naturalist.” Now why does he say this?

Here’s the critique: if the mind has arrived by means of evolutionary processes, forces conditioned by history and the larger cosmological context, then how do we know that what it thinks is true is true? Plantinga quotes Darwin:

With me the horrid doubt always arises whether the convictions of a man’s mind, which has been developed from the mind of the lower animals, are of any value or at all trustworthy. Would anyone trust in the convictions of a monkey’s mind, if there are any convictions in such a mind?[1]

He goes on to say that for the naturalist, beliefs, along with other mental states, are caused by neurophysiology. And evolution says that this equipment has been adapted, and is still adaptive for the purpose of genetic reproduction. I like his quote from Francis Crick, “Our highly developed brains . . . were not evolved under the pressure of discovering scientific truth, but only to enable us to be clever enough to survive and leave descendents” (from The Astonishing Hypothesis). Natural selection doesn’t care about truth, it cares about sex, and if false beliefs mean more sex, then that is fine.

Plantinga, with the help of a math buddy, asks, then, what is the chance that any one proposition is true? Out of one hundred beliefs, how many will be false and how many will be true. Answer: not even a handful, and there’s no way to tell one way or the other.

Evolutionary naturalism, then, is self-refuting. Or, as he says, “One who accepts evolutionary naturalism has a defeater for the belief that her cognitive faculties are reliable: a reason for giving up that belief, for rejecting it, for no longer holding it.” What this means is that evolution spoils naturalism of its epistemological power. The reductionist is the one in danger of falling into an unholy skepticism (although Plantinga points out that Aristotle, the Stoics, and Hegel managed to be atheists without simultaneously embracing naturalism.) And what about the Christian? Well, is there any need to explain it? Get thee, saint, to Augustine and read his de Magistro, and get thee to the imago Dei, the doctrine of the logos, of creation, and of general revelation.

POSTSCRIPT: August 2019

Discussing the hypothesis of emergence, author Russell Howell writes, "This approach has been debated extensively. For example, Alvin Plantinga's celebrated essay, "An Evolutionary Argument against Naturalism"[2] claims that rationality is very unlikely a quality produced by survivability. Plantinga's approach, as he acknowledges, is similar to that found in C. S. Lewis's Miracles. (Lewis's argument, incidentally, was recently enhanced by Victor Reppert in his book C. S. Lewis's Dangerous Idea.) The thrust of their thinking here is that you cannot get (or are very unlikely to get) rationality out of a causally closed system that works solely on the basis of blind chance physical interactions operating in accordance with a "survival of the fittest" paradigm.[3] (cf Pattern 83: Opening a Closed Circle.)

[1] Letter to William Graham (Down, July 3, 1881, in The Life and Letters of Charles Darwin, ed. Francis Darwin (London: John Murray, 1887), Volume 1, pp. 315-16. "The eternal mystery of the world is its comprehensibility." ~ Albert Einstein

[2] This essay has appeared in various forms. See, for example, Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), Chapter 12. Fruitful research can be made in to the Naturalism debate between C. S. Lewis and G. E. M. Anscombe. Considered along a timeline, Plantinga's argument is either a repetition of or a development of the Argument from Reason. See Lewis's Miracles at http://stefangillies.wordpress.com/c-s-lewis-2/

[3] Russell W. Howell "Does Mathematical Beauty Pose problems for Naturalism?" Christian Scholar's Review 35:4 (Summer 2006): 498-499. Also Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York, NY: Basic Books, 2001). Howell: "Any theory that would combine evolutionary explanations for rationality with naturalism "would still run up against the arguments of Mark Steiner . . . Strictly speaking, Steiner's argument attempts to refute "non-anthropocentrism" rather than naturalism. But if Steiner is correct, the naturalist should not take comfort. For any form of naturalism, Steiner muses, is ipso facto non-anthropocentric, n that it would disallow a privileged status for humans in the scope of the universe. If, as Steiner argues, the success of mathematics can be shown to put humans in some sort of privileged position, then naturalism has some problems to sort out. . . . mathematicians and scientist . . . rely on human notions of beauty and symmetry in the development of their theories. In fact, such activity has been a longstanding and consistent strategy" (500).