RSSWhat is Christianity?
Bill Edgar identified four things (at least that I can find) as being unique Christian contributions to politics. Earlier Bill wrote: “Do we bring anything to this discussion that unbelievers do not? Yes. We bring two things: a correct view of man as noble, fallen, and some of them redeemed in Christ, and the knowledge that God and his law reign supreme in the cosmos.” Later, that: “The teachings of Christianity, however, are quite germane to resolving the issue that has roiled American politics more than any other issue over the past 33 years, abortion. Here is Christianity’s teaching: murder is immoral because it unjustly destroys a person made in God’s image. (Gn 9:6) Furthermore, it is the state’s God-given responsibility to restrain evil men who kill children before they are born and to use force to do so. (Romans 13) Christianity’s contribution to this American political issue is to tell the civil authorities to do their God-given job and enforce God’s law against murder.”
To summarize the argument, Christianity uniquely contributes the following principles which have political implications:
1) There is a god and he dictates normative laws governing the cosmos
2) Man is created in god’s image, yet is fallen
3) Murder is wrong
4) The state has a divine mandate to restrain murderers
I do not think that any of these principles are uniquely Christian. That is, they flow primarily out of the neotic experience of all men, rather than out of the specific pneumatic experience of the Church under the authority of special revelation. This is the nub of the question, so far as I can tell.
To put it another, perhaps more provocative way, Christians interested in the political implications of their faith would do well to consult more Aristotle and less St. Paul.
Caleb Stegall
March 26th, 2007 at 9:22 am
That was me …
Caleb Stegall
March 26th, 2007 at 9:25 am
Nevermind, I see it says that now …
W.H. Chellis
March 26th, 2007 at 9:34 am
I think we are begining to flesh out the major difference of emphasis. Does the term Christianity suggest the redemptive order of grace or can Christianity refer to the whole creation order: created, fallen, redeemed, and consummated.
If that second option is acceptable then all truth must be Christian truth redeemed and subservient to Christ… including Aristotle.
If this is true, we can find agreement with Darryl Hart on the spirituality of the church (the realm of the holy) while demanding that Christ’s Lordship extends beyond the holy to include the secular.
While I agree with Darryl that the holy and the common realms should not be confouned, I would maintain that neither can they be disconnected.
W.H. Chellis
March 26th, 2007 at 9:35 am
Caleb, I edited in your name.
Caleb Stegall
March 26th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Bill C. wrote: “If that second option is acceptable then all truth must be Christian truth redeemed and subservient to Christ… including Aristotle.”
Frankly, I don’t know what that means. Truth is truth. This sounds to me like what I have regularly experienced in these discussions which is a rhetorical move (often not even well understood by those who employ it) to de-legitimate any truth that might arise from a “non-Christian” source until it has been thoroughly “Christianized” and “made subject” to Christ.
Again, speaking frankly, I regard this kind of move as arising from a mind closed to the noetic experience and gripped with a need for a massively possessive experience of the truth, which is in actuality a derailment of the truth.
Caleb Stegall
March 26th, 2007 at 10:12 am
I should add that this phenomena is most pronounced these days in and among the popularity of “worldview studies” which is the neocalvinist-inspired Evangelical attempt to convince themselves that they are making all truth “captive to Christ.” It is, of course, a load of hooey.
W.H. Chellis
March 26th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Caleb,
Agreed. Yet, truth is not distinct from the full reality of the Logos. There is no truth outside of the Triune God. I take Christianity to be the true faith flowing from the reality of the Triune God. Thus, Christianity includes all that is true and nothing that is true stands outside of Christ’s Kingship. Grace does not destroy nature but perfects it (or as R. Scott Clark would have it restores it).
BC
W.H. Chellis
March 26th, 2007 at 10:55 am
As an example. Aristotle taught a great deal of truth. So did Plato. Yet, to be used by Christians, much of their work had to be augmented. For instance, contra Aristotle, matter is not eternal. Contra Plato, eternal forms do not exist in a realm beyond the mind of God. Special revelation precludes such ideas.
Yet, this does not mean that what Aristotle and Plato understood rightly should be despised or rejected by Christians. In God’s light we see light (Psalm 36:9). I take this to be true for the regenerate as well as the unregenerate.
Caleb Stegall
March 26th, 2007 at 1:31 pm
Bill C. wrote: “Christianity includes all that is true and nothing that is true stands outside of Christ’s Kingship.”
You have, shall we say, gotten the cart a bit before the horse. Such pieties which may be appropriate if used as a kind of mortification towards personal virtue and self-denial but they will become self-congratulatory and ominously closed sentiments when directed outward.
How will the discussion continue from this point? The divine mandate for rule is sealed and the cultural field (if not the actual battlefield) is prepared for a battle of all against all.
Caleb Stegall
March 26th, 2007 at 1:50 pm
There is a real danger here of what Voegelin (sorry DH) called “extracosmic contraction” It is a species of Marcionism in that it neglects the noetic presence of the “Unknown god” in the pre-Gospel world, and neglects its presence still in the undifferentiated backdrop of reality, the truth of which has been differentiated by the irruption of the “Unknown God” in the person of Christ.
In other words, is the “Unknown God” known or unknown to the primary noetic experience of man in the cosmos? If unknown, then the Son of God becomes an extracosmic god who contracts the cosmos via irruption into a reality in which he had previously been unknown. If the extracosmic pneumatic revelation of this god becomes the only truth that matters then the primary experience of the cosmos along with its gods and history and noetic symbolisms of truth take on the existential character of untruth. For Marcion, this became particularly true of the Yahweh of Israel.
What does this have to do with the discussion? Again, I think Bill Edgar’s characterization of Christianity’s unique contribution to political theory is historically in error and philosophically dangerous as it leads to the kinds of extracosmic contractions that leave the essentially questing nature of politics without recourse to basic noetic truths and therefore invests it with an escatological significance which it does not have (to bring the whole discussion back around to where it began).
Caleb Stegall
March 26th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
The historical counter-example can be found many places in the early church. Justin, for example, construed the Christian logos as the same logos of the Greek philosophers but simply at a later stage of historical expression. So the logos is opperative in the whole history of the cosmos, and all men who lived according to its movement or pull were in some sense Christians whether they were Greeks, Hebrews, or pagans. We can consider also Clement of Alexandria who nearly insisted on making Greek philosophy as a second book of the Old Testament.
As a response to the problem of the Unknown God making the leap of being into the Son of God, the Christ, consider these contrasting examples:
Augustine and his concept of historical patience and two cities (I have already described this in detail earlier in this discussion) vs. Protestantizing speculations which enact some kind of eschatological event through the construction of a particular, historical system (see also whiggish histories and the desire to point the arrow of history in a perferred or divinely mandated direction).
Or, as concerns the future, compare the Johnine vision of the Angel of the Lord ushering in the millennium in Revelation 20 with the millennial asperations of a Cromwell or a Lenin.
Bill Edgar
March 26th, 2007 at 3:35 pm
Caleb nicely pulls out 4 contributions I suggest that Christianity makes to our political discussion that unbelievers do not. The word “unique” is his, but not unfair. My context for “unbelieveers,” however, is the contemporary West, not philosophy or political thought back to the ancient Greeks, or even the minority voices which agree with Christianity on one point or another, e.g. Lesbians for life, ect. I agree that what may be known of God, his power, divinity (Ro 1:20), and goodness (Ac 14:17) is knowable from the Creation. However, we live in a time when unthankful men have suppressed what may be known of God, turning the truth into lies, and declaring evil to be good. In this noetic (jargon!) context, in our actual political debates and decisions, it is primarily Christians who insist on 1) the divine foundations of civil order, 2) the three-sided nature of man as a little lower than the angels, with kinship to the animals, and all suffused with sin — yet with redemption in Christ, 3) the clear task of civil government to protect all innocent life, so that 4) murder by abortion is wrong and should be illegal. We insist on these things informed partly by our human experience as thinking beings, but mainly as readers of the Scriptures which teach these things specifically. One reason why God has republished the law, etc. in his Scriptures is exactly the propensity of man to deny the truth knowable from natural revelation, so it is our privilege to say to the world on these matters, “See, what the Scriptures plainly teach is what you also know at some level in yourselves to be so.”
Caleb Stegall
March 26th, 2007 at 4:39 pm
Bill, I appreciate what you are saying. Even so, such arguments will depend on extra-biblical arguments and/or assumptions that may or may not be “christian” and certainly won’t be exclusively christian.
It is very difficult, for example, to make a biblical argument against abortion from within the classical christian noetic experience that does not also prohibit voluntary sterilization. How these ethics relate to government rule is yet another question. Otherwise, the Bible becomes the sort of positivist tract that many Cromwellian types take it to be.
The bible does not present a positivist system of ethics or law.
Clear and specific language is not jargon in any sense other than that it may rely on terms of art that represent complex ideas which take some effort to grapple with.
Bill Edgar
March 26th, 2007 at 6:51 pm
Caleb, we are not restricted to the “classical christian noetic experience,” and yes, in all argumentation we use all the knowledge that we possess, and, yes, the Bible does not provide a Justinian’s law code. Regarding sterilization, I observe, that our knowledge of human reproductive biology has advanced (that is the right word) from a man depositing his seed in the woman’s womb in analogy with planting a field to the union of one out of millions of sperm with an egg, each contributing half the chromosomes necessary to make up a new human being. (By the way, I am a traductionist, not a creationist where the human soul is concerned.) We can therefore distinguish between the murder of a young human in its mother’s womb and the prevention of a person’s conception by voluntary sterilization and remind the state, whether it is a democracy, monarchy, or aristocracy (No, we don’t seem to be able to escape Aristotle’s categories, and yes the Christian Church has never fully committed itself to one form of government!) that it has a God-given calling to protect innocent human life. So I continue to insist that in our present context, where we are called to do battle (see Luther), Christianity through Christians individually and the Church itself has some definite things to say about some of the issues that our politics now deals with. It is not so that Christianity is virtually useless politically.
Caleb Stegall
March 27th, 2007 at 4:43 am
Bill, this is a good example, because it draws out the point I am attempting, perhaps unsuccessfully, to make.
I find your argument regarding the difference between birth control and post-conception abortion unconvincing and ontologically weak, not to mention nowhere Biblically sanctioned. In order to make it, you have to rope in a modern, scientific and instrumentalist understanding of “life” that I find contrary to the bulk of what I am calling the “Christian noetic experience.” And as that is the case, I think this goes a very long way towards explaining and understanding why the “Christian” argument against abortion over the past 70 years has been such a spectacular failure.
The point is not to debate birth control. The point is that neither of us can present a purely biblical argument. So perhaps we have reached a refinement of the Hart thesis something along the lines of: “The Bible by itself is virtually useless politically.” But then this requires us to rope virtually all of our notions of what Christianity requires ethically into the term “Christian” and exclude those who hold contrary views from that category, and it further requires an appeal to an extra-biblical authority rather than a pure appeal to scriptural authority. This, of course, gives us multiple christianities and churches, plural, rather than singular.
I am actually not all that uncomfortable with such a result, however it needs to be openly acknowledged.
D Hart
March 27th, 2007 at 8:03 am
I love watching Covenanters fights.
I also think Caleb should have written A Secular Faith, minus the Voegelin. That is because I agree with him, whatever Voegelinian bits mean. (I am, after all, a simple boy from Levittown.)
Caleb Stegall
March 27th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Ahh, I see Darryl’s latest comment on the pervious thread has confirmed what I say above.
I agree with what he says in this regard.
Caleb Stegall
March 27th, 2007 at 9:41 am
“I love watching Covenanters fights.”
It is the only time we win.
“I also think Caleb should have written A Secular Faith”
Flattery will avail ye naught.
Doesn’t being a simple boy from the prairie trump the complexly anguished soul of post-war Levittown?
MarkPele
March 27th, 2007 at 10:18 am
The modern science is very helpful, but we need to look no further than the Bible. Luke 1:15 says “For he will be great in the sight of the Lord; and he will drink no wine or liquor, and he will be filled with the Holy Spirit while yet in his mother’s womb.” Luke 1:41-44 demonstrates the truth of 1:15 - “When Elizabeth heard Mary’s greeting, the baby leaped in her womb; and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. And she cried out with a loud voice and said, ‘Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb! And how has it happened to me, that the mother of my Lord would come to me? For behold, when the sound of your greeting reached my ears, the baby leaped in my womb for joy.’”
So, we have here clearly that John the Baptist was separate person with a body and spirit. Elizabeth having an abortion the day after Mary’s visit would clearly be wrong (I would say murder, but that would be presumptuous).
Arguing from this point, it is clear that at least some abortions are wrong. Now the question is how to argue the point where abortion becomes wrong. The state perspective is “viability”, yet we don’t see viability in scripture. We see conception and birth. So, if there is a line to draw from the Bible, it must be conception, because we know that John the Baptist was a real, separate person even before birth.
Caleb Stegall
March 27th, 2007 at 10:49 am
Mr. Pele makes a tremendously weak argument that illustrates nicely what happens when one attempts to make an authoritative appeal to scripture only in these cases. Why must the “line drawn from the Bible” be conception? Why not the sexual act itself? In fact, using the Bible only as an authoritative statement of positive law, you can draw neither line. However, the overwhelming weight of Christian tradition and experience (which posits “life” as a process of creative and fertile partnership between man and God carried through the Solomonic rythms of growth and decay which places man in tension between the poles of existence: life and death, beginning and end, past and future, etc.) weighs in favor of drawing the line at the sexual act.
(As an aside, I realize that many here will get a noxious whiff of Papistry from these comments, however, it need not be so, and indeed, historically was not so.)
Again, the point is not to debate birth control. It is to suggest that a conception of the Bible as a socially/politically authoritative text tends to let all kinds of noetic assumptions (which may or may not be grounded in the historical experience of noetic openness stretching back through the classical Christian experience to the various greek and pagan “christianities”) about man, God, and the cosmos in the back door, all the while denying that this is going on.
W.H. Chellis
March 27th, 2007 at 11:18 am
It is on Caleb’s final point that I wish to agree and disagree. I agree with your assessment of Mark’s argument. I agree that appeals to the authority of Scripture include “all kinds of noetic assumptions.” No need to deny it. Do we thereby make such arguments illegitimate? Or do we simply renew our sense of humility and the understand that the limited good that can be accomplished through the political process will always be relative general fallness of this age? It seems to me that this humility about politics and recognition of the need to limit our vision of earthly political grandeur should define our theory of Christian civil government.
Caleb Stegall
March 27th, 2007 at 11:33 am
Bill, now we are getting somewhere. Certainly such arguments from noetic experience are not illegitimate. Not at all, they are in fact our primary tool in the “age that is passing away” as Augustine had it.
I am arguing for a recognition of these argument for what they are, because the primary danger comes when they are dressed up in revelatory garb which tends towards an epistemic triumphalism.
So yes, epistemic humility is what I have been pushing all along (see the stuff on Augustine way back at the beginning of this blog). And this will, as I said earlier, “force [the Christian], when considering temporal arrangements, to [do] the ordinary noetic work of openness to the truth of the cosmos through proper orientation of the spirit to the divine [logos] via the disciplines of virtue [and piety].” This is also why I suggested we consult Aristotle, for a while, at least until we shake the positivist hangover we have when it comes to the Bible.
Jim
March 27th, 2007 at 12:38 pm
Caleb,
How do you know whether your noetic assumptions right? What is your standard to measure such assumptions?
Caleb Stegall
March 27th, 2007 at 1:51 pm
Jim, great question. I think the scripture confirms what earlier philosophers speculated: that “knowing we are right” is the wrong standard.
For examply, Plato in his parable of the puppet (what Plato calls an “alethes logos,” a true story) describes man’s quest for truth as existing within the tension between two drawing forces, the pull (helkein) of the divine (nous–hence “noetic”) and the counterpull (anthelkein) of self-love. Man “lives in truth” as he enters the movement of openness towards the divine pull and his existence slides into untruth as he resists the divine nous. Similarly, John’s gospel presents the differentiated alethes logos in very Platonic terms. Christ says he will draw (helkein) all men to himself (Jn. 12:32). This drawing power is from God who draws (helkein) man (Jn. 6:44). John’s summary in 17:3 of the alethes logos is that salvation is to know God and to know Christ. But this knowing is never of an external, discreet “object” about which man can make “true” statements: it is a movement of consciousness/soul/spirit which responds faithfully to the loving drawing of the father through and to the saving Word.
St. Paul refined this concept in order to preserve it from early gnostics who would abuse the gnosis of John 17:3 and treat it as an object to be possessed. Paul writes that the God who made light also shines in our hearts to make our hearts luminous/resplendent (photismos) with the knowledge (gnosis) of Christ (2 Cor. 4:6). As we are made luminous, we turn into the image reflected (2 Cor. 3:18). This luminosity is the result of following the divine pull. For we may possess knowledge “gnosis” yet this is not good enough Paul tells us, for we must love, which is the equivalent of being known by God (1 Cor. 8:1-3). Paul reminds us that the only knowledge (gnosis) that can exist without distorting reality is the gnosis of God for man as he draws man in the movement for truth which will make man’s heart luminous for/towards the divine nous with which man participates. See also Gal. 4:8-9 where Paul corrects the gnostic, “know God” with the correct (and Platonic) “known by God.”
This is the noetic core of both Greek philosophy and the NT.
This suggests that the noetic experience becomes “luminous” or achieves a state of “luminosity for the truth” as it is drawn by the pull (helkein) of reality of which it is a part, in particular by the drawing of the divine nous (mind) with which it participates. The Gospel clarifies this experience, not be altering its substance or its means of apprehension, but by differentiating this truth specifically in the person of Christ (the “theotes” of Col. 2:9). Paul makes this explicit in the Areopagus by proclaiming Christ the fullness of the “Unknown God” who knows us because, as the Greek poets had it: “in him we live, and move, and have our being.”
The final symbol we are given to understand how we “know,” or rather are known, is, of course, faith. “Faith” is the symbol given the experience of man’s consciousness as it is drawn and thus becomes luminous for the truth. It is self-ratifying, self-proving, self-executing. Faith is its own standard. Yet faith is likewise a movement of being drawn (helkein) by God (nous/theotes). It subsists in openness and becoming known and therefore becoming like the knower. Faith is a “pathos” of the spirit.
W.H. Chellis
March 27th, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Caleb, could you flesh out how you view the special revelation of God given in the Holy Scriptures working within your framework? Does it reveal “propositional truth” that can be known?
Caleb Stegall
March 27th, 2007 at 2:10 pm
In case anyone wonders how this plays out politically (though I imagine the dominate opinion at present is: “When is that guy going to shut up?!”), at least in my case, the most concise expression I have written is this:
“Ours can largely be summed up as a localist, decentralist, anarcho-Christian and authentically conservative approach to politics and culture. As we have written previously, we believe that to suffer one’s place and one’s people in the particularity of its and their needs is the only true basis for finding love, friendship, and an authentic, meaningful life. This is nothing less than the key to the pursuit of Christian holiness, which is the whole of the Christian adventure: to live in love with the frailty and limits of one’s existence, suffering the places, customs, rites, joys, and sorrows of the people who are in close relation to you by family, friendship, and community–all in service of the truth, goodness, and beauty that is best experienced directly. The discipline of place teaches that it is more than enough to care skillfully and lovingly for one’s own little circle, and this is the model for the good life, not the limitless jurisdiction of the ego, granted by a doctrine of choice, that is ever seeking its own fulfillment, pleasure, and satiation.”
from http://www.newpantagruel.com
I’ll shut up now for a while.
Caleb Stegall
March 27th, 2007 at 2:12 pm
Bill, another good question, but as I have just said I was going to shut up for a while, I’ll let it linger a while.
But I promise I’ll return to it …
W.H. Chellis
March 27th, 2007 at 2:16 pm
A fine ending with which to let us linger… thanks Caleb.
Caleb Stegall
March 27th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Bill wrote: “Caleb, could you flesh out how you view the special revelation of God given in the Holy Scriptures working within your framework? Does it reveal “propositional truth” that can be known?â€
Well, it’s been two hours, so I’ll jump back in! (Actually I find it hard to stop once I have up a head of steam, so may as well play it out.)
So let me try to answer Bill’s question. First, there are the problems of defining or understanding the symbols used in the question, particularly, the symbols “proposition,†“truth,†and “known.†The interplay between these symbols in modern usage tends to produce an underlying “ground†of opinion something along these lines: There is a reality and there is my mind and reality exists as a discreet object outside of my mind. My mind can know the truth of reality if it possesses propositions that correctly describe that reality. This posits a relatively strict subject/object dualism, followed quickly by a fact/value dualism.
This Cartesian epistemology is bankrupt and is both anti-Christian and anti- what I have been calling the “noetic experience†or the classic experience of reason. (Milton’s Paradise Lost is a brilliant portrayal of Satan as the perfect Cartesian).
So no, I do not think scripture reveals propositional truth that can be known according to the terms as described above.
To fill in some of the blanks, let me turn to a thinker that may not generate as many snorts—C.S. Lewis. Here is something Lewis wrote which explains in a round-a-bout way his approach to Scriptural truth:
“Scripture doesn’t take the slightest pain to guard the doctrine of Divine Impassibility. We are constantly represented as exciting the Divine wrath or pity—even as “grieving†God. I know this language is analogical. But when we say that, we must not smuggle in the idea that we can throw the analogy away and, as it were, get in behind it to a purely literal truth. All we can really substitute for the analogical expression is some theological abstraction. And the abstraction’s value is almost entirely negative. It warns us against drawing absurd consequences from the analogical expression by prosaic extrapolations. By itself, the abstraction “impassible†can get us nowhere. It might even suggest something far more misleading than the most naive Old Testament picture of a stormily emotional Jehovah. Either something inert, or something which was “Pure Act†in such a sense that it could take no account of events within the universe it had created. … For our abstract thinking is itself a tissue of analogies: a continual modeling of spiritual reality in legal, or chemical, or mechanical terms. Are these likely to be more adequate than the sensuous, organic, and personal images of Scripture—light and darkness, river and well, seed and harvest, master and servant, hen and chickens, father and child? The footprints of the Divine are more visible in that rich soil than across rocks or slag heaps.â€
For Lewis, scripture is more encountered/experienced, than “known.†It is comprehended by a consciousness enmeshed in the process of understanding through an endless “tissue of analogies†which ultimately does not take us beyond the most basic engendering experience of encountering the visceral word itself. In other words you cannot get “outside†scripture to a vantage where “propositional truth†might become “knowable†any more than you can get “outside†of language itself.
Lewis explains all of this pretty explicitly in his discussion of what he calls the “tao,†which is another symbol for the “divine nous†or the “noetic experience†or the “classic experience of reason.â€
Lewis writes: “From propositions about fact alone no practical conclusion can ever be drawn. ‘This will preserve society’ cannot lead to ‘do this’ except by the mediation of ‘society ought to be preserved.’ We must therefore … confess that judgments such as ‘society ought to be preserved’ are not mere sentiments but are rationality itself, [or we must give up the Tao.]â€
Then Lewis makes an argument against contraception as an innovation against the Tao. And then: “the truth finally becomes apparent that neither in any operation with factual propositions nor in any appeal to instinct can [man] find the basis for a system of values. None of the principles he requires are to be found there: but they are all to be found somewhere else.†Then Lewis sites Confucius, the Stoics, Jesus, and Locke for taoic (or I would say noetic) insights which are drawn from the experience, as I said earlier, of existence as a process of creative and fertile partnership between man and God carried through the Solomonic rythms of growth and decay which places man in tension between the poles of existence: life and death, beginning and end, past and future.
A modern epistemic posits that these principles (or other principles) are arrived at by reason or authority and are propositions about which we can assign a value like true or untrue. Lewis rejects this and says that these are the very substance of reason itself, which is found in an experience of the cosmos, the Tao. This noetic experience, the Tao, is the “sole source of all value judgments. If it is rejected, all value is rejected.†Lewis then describes how the Tao “admits to developments from within†as those from Confucius to Jesus. This is, of course, akin to my earlier claims regarding the gospel’s “differentiation†of a previously existing yet “undifferentiated†truth.
Lewis: “Those who understand the spirit of the Tao and who have been led by that spirit can modify it in directions which that spirit can modify it in directions which that spirit itself demands. … From within the Tao itself comes the only authority to modify the Tao.†Those men with exceptional spirits may reach new insights differentiating truth as it becomes luminous to them in ways inaccessible to others. See Jeremiah’s spiritual insight regarding the “new law†written on “the heart.â€
I note some irony here, for many will perceive the above as an attack on “absolute truth†and therefore as relativism. Of course, it comes in Lewis’s classic anti-relativist tract “The Abolition of Man.†I would simply note that in combating relativism, Lewis’s concern was not with the “abolition of truth.â€
Instead he warns against a degraded and closed spirit which conceals, by substituting an abstraction, the engendering experience that is awakened by the immediacy of the mystery of transcendence which flowers when the soul participates with existence as it becomes luminous for a truth which if “known†and “possessed†would be lost.
Bill Edgar
March 27th, 2007 at 8:52 pm
Caleb, I can get to this only once a day and can’t begin to find time to match your output. So I’m going back a number of comments.
I agree that the dominant Christian tradition ties conception and abortion closely together, but I think that it does so on the basis of a now discarded Aristotelian biology. We work from within the world of previous Christian thought, but we do and must amend it when appropriate. Contraception, in my opinion, is morally doubtful for a number of reasons, but that it amounts to murder is not one of them. Modern biology makes that clear.
Which brings us back to Christianity’s part in modern politics. It is not whether its teachings on politics are unique that is important, let alone that it answer every question about politics, or even that it makes its arguments using the Bible only, but teachings it has in its storehouse are important and needed at the present time — for example, civil authority has divine origin, its task among others is to protect people made in God’s image from murder, God judges nations that disregard his law, and Christ reigns over all things for the sake of his church. These (and other) teachings are what Christianity brings to today’s politics. I make no claim that any arguments on these points must be “exclusively Christian” or that arguments be purely Scriptural. I do claim that these teachings come from the Christian Scriptures and past thought on politics, and I do claim that our country needs them. Hence, I continue to find Hart’s assertion that Christianity is politically useless quite misguided.
Finally, the failure of Christian argument against abortion these past 70 years, as you put it, reflects the continuing loss of political and cultural power of the Church in the West. The defeats on the issue of abortion have many sources, but I think that the post World War I Protestant separation of the issues of contraception and abortion is one of the lesser ones.
Daniel Howe
March 27th, 2007 at 9:29 pm
Go epistemic humility! There comes a point when we commit ourselves to ethical and theological standpoints that are simply the best we can do: we must refuse ratiocinate ourselves into inaction. I was struck this evening when reading the last chapter of Joshua with my kids that at the end of his life Joshua just “called out” the people of Israel and told them to choose, “this day”, whom they would serve - the Lord or other gods. To refuse to choose, to refuse to take a stand, reflects a lack of faith. Yes, we bring our noetic freight to exegesis when we look for wisdom - by the truckload. No, this does not excuse us from making the right decisions. The complexity of human motivation and experience makes you really pause in the face of omniscience … God lays bare the motives of the heart. “Choose this day whom you will serve.”
Anthony Cowley
March 27th, 2007 at 11:53 pm
Excellent discussion, Bill, Bill, Caleb and Dr. Hart.
Allow me to dive in here without having read everything on the De Regno Christi discussion.
Caleb - I love the CS Lewis quote - especially over against an extremist “proposition head” approach to life, as if God ought to have written an encyclopaedia instead of a story.
However, while there is an initial appeal to Caleb’s epistemology of luminosity, due to its humility and his seeming to “Grok” everything whole, somehow mixing it into his approach, I find that he is still employing arguments which are reducible to propositions. Of course, he was asked about what the Bible does. While we cannot, may not, and must not reduce the Scripture to merely propositional content (it is story, but not mere story, it is a relationship between persons, between a personal God and the people of God, individually and corporately, with many wonderfully ‘messy’ details that resist systematization), these things are given to us for our instruction (1Cor10; 2 Tim 3). The Apostles’ hermeneutics allowed them to draw out applications, morals, propositions and encouragements for the real life situations of their own days.
I recently read a book which I thought was going to be about the New Perspective on Paul - however, it was not about the NPP movement. It was about Paul’s world of discourse in the classical setting. It was about relationships. It seems to fit well with Caleb’s perspective. Here is a quotation:
BOQ-
Paul’s portraits of God stood in start relief to Graeco-Roman theology. Nevertheless, it is remarkable how quickly subsequent generations conformed his message to the theological patters of the philosophers. While Justin Martyr and others for the most part presented Christ in a manner congruent with Paul’s message, the abstraction inherent in Greek theology drove upon them a pressing new need to uncover the essence of Christ that lay behind the story. Little more than a hundred years after Paul, the God of Christian apologia resembled Plato’s Demiurge more than the one “who is rich in mercy”: “We have brought before you a God who is uncreated, eternal, invisible, impassible, incomprehensible, and infinite who can be apprehended by mind alone, who is encompassed by light, beauty, spirit, and indescribable power, and who created and now rules the world through the Logos who issues from him” (Athenagoras Embassy for the Christians 8-9). (p. 124-5).
EOQ
What is the book? Mark Strom’s _Reframing Paul: Conversations in Grace & Community_ (IVP, 2000).
What contributions does the Bible have for Politics? For Society?
Another quotation:
–BOQ–
The various patterns of Paul’s thought that we have surveyed – Jew-Gentile, Adam-Christ, flesh and spirit, dying and rising – did not function as hierarchies of concepts within an ordered theological system. Each was a perspective, a way of seeing, a means of framing a particular concern around Christ. These perspectives were largely interchangeable. Each could be reworked into the others. Paul did not employ them according to a preset formula or as components of a system of theology. He provoked a knowledge of Christ and a response to him that simultaneously upheld a long tradition and *turned traditional expectations and identities inside out*.
Evangelical conversations may be as hindered as they are helped by so-called theologies of Paul. Our conversations around Paul do not need more “objective†scholarly abstractions of his life and thought. We need portraits of a flesh-and-blood Paul, engaged with his Christ and with the cut and thrust of his social milieu. We need portrats of Paul that invite engagement, not armchair reflection. This is the continuing challenge before us in parts three and four (p. 99).
–EOQ–
I found a good bit in this volume to be highly stimulating and helpful. He had, however, an axe to grind against hierarchy and ordination which I found seriously flawed when Paul’s whole corpus is taken into account.
Nevertheless, even on Strom’s approach, Paul subverted the world order of Greco-Roman society, and planted seeds by way of his stories and relationships (his Churches) which had and have the power to turn the world upside down. (Actually, this is much of Strom’s point).
Does Christianity have much to say to politics? Yes, much of it is along the lines of John Howard Yoder’s _The Politics of Jesus_. But, much of it is also along the lines of the writings of James M. Willson and James R. Willson - radical Covenanter dissenters. And, we oughtn’t dismiss Justinian’s code (I don’t read Bill Edgar as dismissive) and the accomplishments of establishmentarian Christiandom. (Pace: Yoder and Strom).
What Caleb is reading as epistemological triumphalism (yea, let it be so!) has been called by others “spoiling the Egyptians.” If we reduce the Western Tradition to the Classical thinkers, apart from the Christian use of their thought, we are not spoiling the Egyptians, but becoming Egyptians.
While there are some flaws in how various presuppositionalists like VanTil and Clark and Schaeffer (a progressively less and less presuppositionalist list) have encountered and tried even to subvert the Western tradition (evidentialism, empiricism, Natural Law), I don’t find the work of John Frame and some others, like Bahnsen, useless. While I’ve rejected Theonomy as an over-correction to anti-nomianism (and as false on various exegetical grounds), the theonomic impulse (thanks, R.J. Neuhaus) is really not something that can be removed from Christian endeavor whenever we interact with society.
We are people of the Book. We have often butchered the book as we’ve tried to apply it. Much of what Caleb has written has appeal here. But, the realm of Law and Jurisprudence is under Christ’s claimed realm. The Lord (Jehovah) is our Judge, our Lawgiver, our King. While Natural Revelation and Natural Law do speak to these things, the Scriptures are not an embarrasing appendage to natural law. They are binding revelation. They are the living Word (not apart from illumination of the Spirit and the embodiment of the Church). God uses them to silence the whole world. We must listen to them.
Please forgive my awkwardly jumping into the flow of the conversation. I’m sure you’ve covered much of this ground. I’m probably restating the obvious.
Thanks for listening.
Blessings,
Tony Cowley
D Hart
March 28th, 2007 at 6:25 am
Caleb wins. The prairie trumps suburbia. But we knew that going into the contest.
This noetic and epistemological stuff sure is complex and I’m not certain either the original settlers of Kansas or the developers of Levittown could have made sense of it. But I would add that my thinking on religion and politics has been motivated by — dare I say to the real and closet Kuyperians — the dualism of the apostle Paul who wrote, “the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” The work of the state is provisional, the work of the church much less so. And to try to make Christianity relevant to politics is to go down the road of making the unseen take a back seat to the seen.
Caleb Stegall
March 28th, 2007 at 9:47 am
Tony, I appreciate what you are saying here. I wasn’t familiar with the term “grok,” but after a quick wikipedia detour, I like it! I have always been partial to the Miltonian notion of “quaffing immortality” which is the kind of anamnetic experience of God through encountering his Word/logos.
I do not think what I am arguing is reducible to “propositions” in the formal sense. Certainly it is reducible to language, which always has a “propositional edge” if you will, due to its representational aspect. If the edge becomes too sharp through reification of the symbol itself, the symbol may lose its ability to anamnetically recapitulate the originary engendering experience and therefore lose its luminosity for the truth that lies behind it. Here my good Covenanter iconoclastic blood is showing.
I agree that it is very foolish to “reduce the Western Tradition to the Classical thinkers, apart from the Christian use of their thought.”
Aw shucks Darryl, us clod-hoppin’ folk may be pure and innocent as the hills, but we ain’t no dummies!
Actually, I find Darryl’s appeal to the Pauline dualism of 2 Cor. 4 intriguing. Because the interplay between these symbols “seen†and “unseen†or “visible†and “invisible†are very important as Paul endeavors to work through the complexities which arrive with the radically transformed noetic core which was received through the Greeks but turned on its head by Jesus. For the noetic experience of the philosophers, the divine nous/mind was fully present in the cosmos. The cosmos is the image (eikon) of the Eternal (see the Timaeus). In Romans 1 Paul uses strikingly similar language saying that the invisible God (theiotes) is knowable (gnoston tou theou) by the mind (nous) through the “things that are made†(cosmos). In some ways, however, this is an unsatisfying resolution of the problem because it may leave in place all kinds of pagan idolatries. The compact Greek symbols require further differentiation because of the irruption of Christ. No longer is the divine most present in the cosmos, but rather is fully present in Christ who is the image (eikon) of the unseen God or “Unknown God†(agnostos theos) of Col. 1:15 and of the Areopagus.
Thus, the later Pauline neologism “theotes†(Col. 2:9) to supplement and differentiate from the more compact “theiotes†of Romans. The theotes is the “whole fullness in flesh†of the divine theiotes which is invisible. Paul works up this whole symbolic language of seen and unseen as a way to deal with the problem. So the 2 Cor. passage is concerned with setting off the pneumatic (spiritual) law which is “seen†as the heart is made luminous by the drawing of God through Christ against the “unseen†or “veiled†law of Moses which exists in a more compact form. This new and yes, uniquely Christian, set of symbols is drawn by Paul out of earlier compact forms he seems to be wrestling through in Romans 1. Colossians and 2 Corinthians extracts a distinction between the invisible divine nous and the visible irruption of Christ.
This gives us the much discussed “desacrilizing†of the Cosmos which the historical impact of Christianity politically. No longer is a “cosmological†polis acceptable. Various aspects of the cosmos can no longer contain the divine invisible (whether they be Caesars or idols). Only Christ is the full image (eikon/theotes) of the divine. Christ is now “seen†through spirit and sacrament. But the old cosmological world of theiotes and gods which gave man a fully sacralized sphere does not easily give up its hold, and thus historically we get a playing out of this radical reformation of the noetic core. The effort of resymbolization begun by Paul takes centuries and centuries of work culminating in Augustine.
All of which is to say that I agree with the sage of Levittown in his conclusion, but I admit to being somewhat troubled by the end of 2 Cor. 4 and the way DH is using it, for it does not seem to accord with the rest of the Pauline symbolism of visible things and invisible things. I would argue that it is those who wish to return to a cosmological/Mosaic world who seek to resacralize the temporal sphere who are returning the “veiled†and “unseen†gods of the older, more compact system of symbols prior to Christ’s irruption. The gospel brings the unseen god into sight, lifts the veil on the Mosaic cosmos, and thus desacrilizes the sphere of the “age that is passing.†Paul seems to reverse this symbolism when he begins to apply it to the Christian life in this political age that is passing at the end of 2 Cor. 4. He encourages those who undergo persecution and seems at least to conflate/confuse the symbolic “seen/unseen†with the historical “temporal/eternal.†I might speculate that this has to do with the way that Paul does not abolish the “unseen†cosmological world of the pagan noetic experience, but merely relocates it through the revealing of the seen Christ out of the temporal and into the eternal, when we shall all become the image (eikon) of God in the age to come, thus positing an eschatological “re-sacrilization†of the cosmos.
Caleb Stegall
March 28th, 2007 at 11:08 am
Let me inject something of a different approach to this discussion. I think it very important for American Christians grappling with these issues to be very clear-eyed about our history. The American experiment, particularly in its New England Puritan form was, perhaps, the noblest and most pure, and therefore most doomed, attempt to resacralize the cosmos since Christ. The man who became its prophet extraordinaire was Walt Whitman. Listen to his iconic “Song of the Open Roadâ€:
AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune;
Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, 5
Strong and content, I travel the open road.
The earth—that is sufficient …
Here is the test of wisdom;
Wisdom is not finally tested in schools;
Wisdom cannot be pass’d from one having it, to another not having it;
Wisdom is of the Soul, is not susceptible of proof, is its own proof, 80
Applies to all stages and objects and qualities, and is content,
Is the certainty of the reality and immortality of things, and the excellence of things;
Something there is in the float of the sight of things that provokes it out of the Soul.
Now I reëxamine philosophies and religions,
They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the spacious clouds, and along the landscape and flowing currents. 85
Here is realization;
Here is a man tallied—he realizes here what he has in him;
The past, the future, majesty, love—if they are vacant of you, you are vacant of them.
Only the kernel of every object nourishes; …
Allons! the road is before us! 220
It is safe—I have tried it—my own feet have tried it well.
Allons! be not detain’d!
Let the paper remain on the desk unwritten, and the book on the shelf unopen’d!
Let the tools remain in the workshop! let the money remain unearn’d!
Let the school stand! mind not the cry of the teacher! 225
Let the preacher preach in his pulpit! let the lawyer plead in the court, and the judge expound the law.
Mon enfant! I give you my hand!
I give you my love, more precious than money,
I give you myself, before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me? 230
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?
[Whole thing is here: http://www.bartleby.com/142/82.html
As the Christian content of the Puritan resacralization of the cosmos is stripped away (as it must be—because Christianity is fundamentally at odds with a resacralized world), one is left with the truimphalist optimism of a Whitman which has defined the American character of “fresh starts†on the “open road.â€
To use the new term Tony taught me, Whitman wants to “grok†the entire universe, and believes he can.
Now observe the gospel of Whitman in its most accomplished and penetrating latter-day interpreter, Bruce Springsteen.
In his “Born to Run†and “Thunder Road†the Boss gives the most poignant, tragic, and moving account of American brokenness, isolation, dislocation, disenchantment, and alienation that I know of. It remains wrapped up in the Whitmanesque language of the road, but it is no longer a triumphal march, but a desperate plea flung into a cosmos that the speaker knows in his heart can no longer hear him and will not answer his prayer.
From Thunder Road:
You can hide `neath your covers and study your pain
Make crosses from your lovers, throw roses in the rain
Waste your summer praying in vain
For a saviour to rise from these streets
Well now I’m no hero, that’s understood
All the redemption I can offer, girl, is beneath this dirty hood
With a chance to make it good somehow
Hey what else can we do now?
Except roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair
Well the night’s busting open
This two lanes will take us anywhere
We got one last chance to make it real
To trade in these wings on some wheels
Climb in back, Heaven’s waiting on down the tracks
Oh-oh come take my hand
We’re riding out tonight to case the promised land …
… so Mary climb in
It’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling out of here to win.
And Born to Run:
In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway american dream
At night we ride through mansions of glory in suicide machines
Sprung from cages out on highway 9,
Chrome wheeled, fuel injected and steppin out over the line
Baby this town rips the bones from your back
Its a death trap, its a suicide rap
We gotta get out while were young
`cause tramps like us, baby we were born to run …
Will you walk with me out on the wire
`cause baby Im just a scared and lonely rider
But I gotta find out how it feels
I want to know if love is wild, girl I want to know if love is real …
The highways jammed with broken heroes on a last chance power drive
Everybodys out on the run tonight but theres no place left to hide
Together wendy well live with the sadness
Ill love you with all the madness in my soul
Someday girl I dont know when were gonna get to that place
Where we really want to go and well walk in the sun
But till then tramps like us baby we were born to run.
[Listen to them here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zsykNMK11lU and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mfzov0Cq90o
In a post-cross universe, it is impossible to return to a world “full of gods†in which everything is sacred. The temptation is ever present, especially in the American context, and it calls to us with the romance of Satan in Paradise Lost and soaring songs of Whitman but ends in the despair of broken boys from Jersey (or Levittown).
Thus the connection to the Christian political vision I sited earlier.
Daniel Howe
March 28th, 2007 at 11:22 am
I have to suggest to Caleb and everyone else a helpful resource on the Noahic covenant and its universal ethics: Jewish Law in Gentile Churches by Markus Bockmuehl. Does a great job analyzing ancient Jewish and Christian sources and the law they believed Christians were held to: turns out eating blood sausage is right up there with the murder commandment, and that many of the rabbis believed that worship was a universal mandate. Early Christians appear to have agreed on the whole. Check it out.
D Hart
March 28th, 2007 at 4:02 pm
I sure wish Paul didn’t sound like Voegelin. But that’s what happens when a Levittown film-studies major matches wits with a prairie political philosopher.
I’m glad Caleb is intrigued by my appeal to 2 Cor. 4. And I can appreciate much of what he says about the pre-Christ logos and the desacralizing that comes with the Messiah. But my reading of Paul in this chapter has less to teach about the noetic or pneumatic and more to say about the ministry of the apostles and by extension the ministry of the church. The church is not outwardly glorious but its ministry is still of eternal significance. It comes in earthen vessels but its effects are lasting. I’d say the reverse is true of the state and that’s why I resist the efforts of Christians to glom their faith on to the affairs of politicians, police and soldiers. It is unbecoming.
Caleb Stegall
March 28th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
DH wrote: “I sure wish Paul didn’t sound like Voegelin.”
I think I have been rebuked! Ah well, it was probably deserved and to be expected as I am the upstart among his bettors.
In any case, I was not trying to make Paul sound like Voegelin. I have hardly mentioned (not at all in fact) Voegelin since the first few quotes, though obviously my thinking is influenced by his work in this area. I am merely trying the grapple with the symbols chosen by Paul (and brought up by Darryl) as he (Paul) grapples with the change wrought by the Gospel and seeks to both use, and depart from or develop, earlier symbolic orders. I find the argument compelling, and I have tried to make it from a variety of sources. Though I am happy to listen to the counter-argument, or be ignored, I suppose, I do not think the self-abasing “it’s too difficult for me” posing can stand in place of a response indefinately, and it is not quite ignoring either.
I must say that the sprint to status of “simple man” can be an entertaining pantomime for a while, but it has to be admitted that it is also a protestantizing rhetorical move developed over centuries to protect various ideas from heavy scrutiny. The simple man with a simple faith and his KJV is a protestant icon tending, it has often been remarked, heavily towards an anti-intellectualism and anti-ecclesialism, no? I have heard Darryl refute this me-and-my-bible-ism on occasion, so it is a bit awkward getting a version of it from him. Especially when I agree with him!
D Hart
March 29th, 2007 at 10:07 pm
In comparing Voegelin to Paul I was being serious — a lot of eschatology going on there — and I was trying to be self-deprecating for not knowing Voegelin better. All the same, I wish Voegelin were an easier read, not because the Bible is easy, but because of my slothful ways.
D Hart
March 30th, 2007 at 6:16 am
For some reason my comment from last night didn’t show up. So if this gets redundant, pardon me.
My point about Voegelin and Paul was not to suggest a kind of biblicism but to observe that eschatology must matter since both men spoke volumes about it. The other aspect of my point was one of self-deprecation since I am a slothful person who should probably spend more time with Voegelin than I have. On the other hand, I wonder if Caleb has a glossary.
Caleb Stegall
March 30th, 2007 at 8:12 am
Darryl, sorry I didn’t catch your proper meaning.
No glossary, but I do have an exhaustive index to the collected works, of which I have read about half.
Anthony Cowley
March 30th, 2007 at 9:45 pm
Well, this here De Regno thing is so much fun it could become a full time job. Problem is I already have two “full time” jobs (like Bill E. and a few others of you). But, I appreciate Caleb’s appropriation of “Grok”. I swiped it from someone who explained it to me once, about 8 years ago. I’m not following all the sacralization and desacralization going on round here. I think I know what is meant by the Puritan re-sacralization of life. The “secular married monk” thing - they have the same intensity as a monastic, but fully engage in the marketplace. That’s one aspect. The other may be the triumphalism of bringing Christ into all of life (he’s already there, but you know what I mean).
Caleb - yes, not proposition in the technical sense. We can’t reduce everything to ‘aristotelian’ logical terms. Systematics is important, and seems to be what is going on here. As you put it:
CALEBKSLAWYER:
Certainly it is reducible to language, which always has a “propositional edge†if you will, due to its representational aspect. If the edge becomes too sharp through reification of the symbol itself, the symbol may lose its ability to anamnetically recapitulate the originary engendering experience and therefore lose its luminosity for the truth that lies behind it. Here my good Covenanter iconoclastic blood is showing.
CALEBKSLAWYER/end
That’s just how I would have put it, if I were you. But, I’m not. The scary thing is that I’m starting to understand you.
But, I need further reflection on the 2 Cor and Col 2:9 material you’ve presented. I suppose I’ve not let go of the sacralization thing. GOtta run.