Christianity Archives - Page 8 of 12

Nietzsche and the Apostle Paul

Nietzsche doesn’t get invited to many Christmas parties.

Something about declaring “God is dead” has made him persona non grata at gatherings of Christians.

But, before dismissing him, let us first note that his most famous aphorism was, in fact, correct.

By the late 19^th century, in European intellectual circles, God was, indeed, dead. It wasn’t always so; look back at the writings of earlier generations and you find a plethora of Christian intellectuals. Even the non-Christian intellectuals made nods in the direction of God. But, by the 1870s, all that God-talk had largely vanished. God, who sed to be the center of European intellectual discourse, was no longer there are all. God, the idea and relevance of God to the intellectual arguments of the late 19^th century, was indeed quite dead.

Nietzsche looked out at the godless landscape, and what did he see? A true curiosity. While nobody wanted to talk about God anymore, everyone still had all these moral codes which looked a whole lot like the Christian moral code. “Why?,” Nietzsche asks.

That is a really good question. It is the sort of question both Christians and non-Christians ought to be asking. If there is no God, why exactly should I love my neighbor? If I am strong enough, why shouldn’t I kill my neighbor and take all his stuff?

When I ask students this, they inevitably immediately reply, “Well, you don’t want someone to kill you, do you?” They announce this proudly, like it is the ultimate answer. But, it is, of course, just a sign of their weakness. If I am strong enough, why would I worry that others will kill me? Only weak people worry about that. So, again, why shouldn’t I kill my neighbor?

If there was a God who did not want me to murder my neighbor, then that gives me an answer. But, if there is no God? Why not then? Here Nietzsche comes in with an answer. His answer sprawls among a great many books, but the easiest place to start is The Genealogy of Morals.

Once upon a time, the strong could kill their neighbors. Those were the good old days. In those days, there was only the strong and the weak. The strong were good; the weak were not good. The weak did not like being preyed upon by the strong, so they banded together to create a moral code which would constrain the strong. Don’t be strong, said the weak. Be weak like us.

That lambs dislike great birds of prey does not seem strange: only it gives no ground for reproaching these birds of prey for bearing off little lambs. And if the lambs say among themselves: “these birds of prey are evil; and whoever is least like a bird of prey, but rather its opposite, a lamb—would he not be good?” there is no reason to find fault with this institution of an ideal, except perhaps that the birds of prey might view it a little ironically and say: “we don’t dislike them at all, these good little lambs; we even love them: nothing is more tasty than a tender lamb.”
To demand of strength that it should not express itself as strength, that it should not be a desire to overcome, a desire to throw down, a desire to become master, a thirst for enemies and resistances and triumphs, is just as absurd as to demand of weakness that it should express itself as strength

Thus began the slave revolt in morality. Henceforth all expressions of strength will be called “evil.” All expressions of weakness will be called “good.” The Church arises to impose this new moral code on everyone, constraining the strong and elevating the weak. These new Priests of Weakness, the tarantulas, have gradually poisoned everyone to the point where nobody can see the truth any more.

A predominance of mandarins always means something is wrong; so do the advent of democracy, international courts in place of war, equal rights for women, the religion of pity, and whatever other symptoms of declining life there are.

Even Science has led us further down the same path. Once upon a time, Humans were the Masters of the Universe, ruling the World. Now, we are mere animals, pathetic little creatures acting like a virus on a small planet which is no longer the center of anything at all.

Has the self-belittlement of man, his will to self-belittlement, not progressed irresistibly since Copernicus? Alas, the faith in the dignity and uniqueness of man, in his irreplaceability in the great chain of being, is a thing of the past—he has become an animal, literally and without reservation or qualification, he who was, according to his old faith, almost God (“child of God,” “God-man”).

All this was the history of the world when Nietzsche wrote. But, he warned, it was about to get worse, much worse.

What happens when people become aware that the moral codes they have been using are not actually True? What happens when Truth itself gets called into question?

As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness—there can be no doubt of that—morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe—the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles.

The great spectacle: world wars, genocide, mass killings…all in the name of power. If the 20^th century has shown us anything, this Will to Power in the absence of any Truth is a very ugly thing. Nietzsche was right.

Should that surprise us? Well, not if we have read the Apostle Paul.

Nietzsche may be the most perceptive commentator on the writings of Paul which the world has ever produced. Paul and Nietzsche completely agree on one thing: in a world without God, there is no moral code, and people behave abominably.

In the absence of God, Paul and Nietzsche fully agree that there is no check upon the wickedness of man. In the absence of God, there is no reason that strength should not express itself as strength. In the absence of God, the Christian Church is just imposing a moral code in an attempt to restrain these natural inclinations we all have. Paul notes the wickedness at the heart of all humans; Nietzsche explains the implications of Paul’s observation about human nature.

If there is no God, then we do in fact live in that the Nietzschean world. Prepare yourself for another century of horror. Get used to the Will to Power being the only Rule of Law. If you want to dream, then dream with Nietzsche that maybe the Overman, the Superman, will arise to lead us out of this dark pit.

How do we escape the Nietzschean horror? Easy. If the premise is wrong, then the conclusion is wrong. If there is a God, then weakness and love are indeed good.

Paul and Nietzsche lead to the same place. Both look forward to a redemptive moment in the future to save us from our plight. And both agree on this: if we assume the absence of God, Nietzsche is entirely correct. There is no moral code; there is only power. And if you don’t think that conclusion is True, then maybe it is the assumption that needs modification.

Chesterton and the Elves

Are elves real?

(Yes, I hear your groan. Bear with me a second.)

Are you sure about your answer? Why are you so sure?

G. K. Chesterton raises this question in Orthodoxy. (There is even a chapter entitled “The Ethics of Elfland”!) This tells you everything you need to know about what a curious book Orthodoxy is.

At one level, the book looks like it is an attempt to prove the truth of Christianity. Chesterton certainly spends a lot of time explaining why he thinks Christianity is true. But when you look closely at what he is actually arguing, he is not doing anything at all to convince you, the Reader, that his beliefs are right.

Instead, he is doing something more radical. He is trying to convince you, the Reader, that his views are not necessarily wrong, that there is nothing about the Christian faith that is unreasonable or inconsistent with either the external world or its own internal logic. He also has a merry time showing the internal and external failings of alternatives to Christianity.

The set of people who come in for the greatest mockery are those who insist that they are being rational and reasonable and that they will only accept things which have been proven to be true by reason. These people reject Christianity because it is not reasonable, or because there is no proof of the existence of God, or because accepting anything at all on faith is inherently silly.

Enter the elves. Why do you reject the existence of elves? I read this book with a reading group and asked that question, which has resulted in even more conversations since then as other students have heard about this odd professor who seems perfectly willing to posit the existence of elves. I have thus heard an array of answers to the Elf Question.

First and foremost is the retort, “There is absolutely no reason to think elves are real.” Ah, but there is. We have a massive number of historical records reporting the existence of elves. People throughout time and around the world have reported the existence of elves. Indeed, it is unquestionably true that more people in this world have said they have seen elves than have said they have seen Socrates or Julius Caesar. Moreover, the people who say they saw Socrates or Julius Caesar were all located in a single location at a single period of time. People who have seen elves have come from all over the world throughout time. Is it more believable that a small number of people in the same location at the same time could be mistaken or that people from all over the world and at every time have been mistaken? So, why do you believe the first set of people, but not the second?

In other words, if your proof of existence is reports of eyewitnesses, we have an incredible amount of evidence that elves exist.

“Ah, but if there are elves, wouldn’t there be some tangible evidence of their existence? Elf bodies or elf bones or abandoned elf buildings?” That question has made a fundamental mistake about the nature of elves. Elves are magic. Their corpses and structures vanish upon the demise of the elf. So, of course there is no physical evidence; there can’t be physical evidence.

“Ah, but there is no such things as magic.” Really? How do you know that? Are there no unexplained phenomenon in the world? ‘Well sure, there are things we have not explained yet. But they are explainable using perfectly normal physical laws.” And do you know all those physical laws? Why isn’t it possible that one of the physical laws is that elf bodies disappear, they turn into pure energy, when the elf dies? Do you even have the ability to test that theory? So, why do you reject it?

Anyway, you get the point. It is a very merry conversation. The conclusion? Chesterton describes it perfectly when discussing whether miracles can occur.

But my belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism— the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is—that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.

Why does this matter? It points to a conclusion which is so obvious that it is stunning that it is so widely rejected. Every philosophical or theological system, every world view, ultimately rests on faith. The Christian has faith that Jesus Christ is God and died on a cross to provide redemption for the world. The believer in elves has faith that there are magical creatures in the woods. The believer in materialism has faith that nothing immaterial exists. The believer in Reason has faith that Reason reveals true things about the world, that it is a trustworthy tool to uncovering Truth.

I have faith in the first and last of the propositions in the previous paragraph. Others have faith in the third. Still others have faith in the second. But in the end, we all have faith. There is no proof that any of these things in which we have faith are true or false. You can no more prove the existence of elves than you can prove that we exist in a real world and not a dream state or that Americans really did land on the moon. You have faith that there are no elves, that the world is real, and that the moon-landing actually happened. I share your faith. But, good luck trying to prove any of these things to someone who believes differently. Good luck trying to prove to a believer in elves that they don’t exist, to a believer that we are brains in a vat that the world is real, or to a conspiracy theorist that the moon-landing was not an elaborate hoax. You will fail to prove it to the thoughtful person with faith. And similarly, they will fail to prove the opposite conclusions to you.

Faith, in other words, is the starting place for our views on the world. This is true for everyone whether they believe it or not.

So, what is conversation between people with different faith systems? Well, it would look a lot like Orthodoxy, a rather fun book where you get to think along with Chesterton about what it would be like to have a belief system like Chesterton’s. You learn something reading a book like this whether you agree with Chesterton or not. Indeed, a book like this is a perfect example of what a good conversation is like. You not only learn things, but you get to think about why you believe the things you believe. Indeed, there is no better way to figure out what you actually believe than to read books with which you disagree and constantly ask, “Why do I think this argument is wrong?”

Maybe after reading enough about elves, you will decide your faith in their nonexistence was wrong. At a minimum, reading Chesterton will give you a good excuse to talk with other people about elves. What could be more fun that talking about whether elves are real? Well, how about figuring out if Santa is real?

Narrative Apologetics

Imagine a 1000 page book explaining Christianity. You don’t have to imagine every page, but think for a minute how you would structure it.

What comes first? What do you explain in it? How do you make it persuasive?

Now, ask yourself this: how similar is the structure of the book you just imagined to the structure of the Bible? Did you have lots of genealogies? Or the whole section of the Law? Or the minor prophets?

Most importantly, how many stories were there in your book?

Alister McGrath wants to convince you that you need more stories in your book. Narrative
Apologetics is a clever, short book trying to convince you that if you want to talk about the gospel, you really need to learn to talk about and tell good stories.

The starting point for thinking about this is the shock of realization from the thought experiment above. When most people imagine explaining Christianity, the default is a theological or philosophical set of propositions and arguments. But, when the Bible sets out to explain Christianity, the default is stories. Indeed if you think about the story to philosophical argument ratio in the Bible, it is really high. Why is that?

McGrath argues that we have been thinking about apologetics all wrong.

Apologetics is not primarily about persuading people that a certain set of ideas is right, although the demonstration of the truth and trustworthiness of the Christian faith is clearly important. It is more about depicting its world of beauty, goodness, and truth faithfully and vividly, so that people will be drawn by the richness and depth of its vision of things.

This actually explains something that has been bothering me for some time. I have grown quite weary of all the attempts at apologetics which claim to offer Proof of the Truth of Christian Doctrine. It is a bizarre thing when Christians say, “We are saved by faith in God, and now let me prove by rational means that God exists and is who He says He is.” Take your pick—are Christians saved by faith or by reason? The problem here is that many Christians have forgotten what the word “faith” means.

As McGrath notes, this type of apologetics is fraught with problems. For example:

There is a danger that apologetics becomes fixated on questions about the historical reliability of the Bible and in doing so fails to set out its powerful vision of truth, beauty, and goodness.

So, if we are going to start thinking more broadly about apologetics, why narratives? The most obvious answer is that narrative is the way the Bible tells the story, so there must be something about the narrative form which is compelling. Again, we instinctively know this at one level. If someone came up to you to ask which book of the Bible would be a good first book to read, would anyone really suggest Romans? Aren’t the gospels the most obvious starting place?

A narrative is not some kind of literary embellishment of the basic ideas of Christian theology; rather, it is generally the primary form of disclosure of God’s identity and character, which gives rise to those ideas.

That is the key insight of this book. Christians tend to treat the narrative portions of the Bible as a flawed vehicle for communicating truth. We treat the narrative as perhaps a way of making a theological or philosophical truth memorable, but it is the underlying message which is the main point. The story itself is a purely a device for delivering the real content. Think about every sermon you have ever heard. How often is it just a story? If a preacher simply read a narrative story, offering no explanation or elaboration, would you feel satisfied with the sermon?

McGrath argues that Christians would have a more powerful witness, be more effective in communicating the gospel, if they would earn how to use narratives.

We are called to out-narrate the dominant stories that shape our culture, by exposing their weaknesses or showing how they are enfolded by our own or how they are eclipsed by more luminous and compelling story.

The bulk of McGrath’s book is giving examples of how narratives can be a better means of communicating truth than a theological treatise. He uses lots of examples, but let’s think about the chapter he devotes to C.S. Lewis. The Narnia tales are obvious Christian allegories. Once you know that, you are tempted to try to map the Narnia tales onto Biblical accounts. The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe seems like an easy translation. The Magician’s Nephew is also pretty simple. The others? Well, not so much. When I was much younger, I tried really hard to believe The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was meant to imitate Acts; I always knew that was a silly comparison, but onto what else could it possibly map?

McGrath, however, ably demonstrates that looking for such one-to-one mappings misses the point of Lewis’ use of the story. Instead, Lewis is using stories to communicate larger truths.

Which truths? And here is where McGrath gets into trouble with his argument. He sets out to explain what Lewis is arguing. His explanations are interesting, to be sure. I suddenly saw things I wonder how I never noticed before. But, now that someone has read McGrath’s explanations, do we still need Lewis’ stories?

And therein lies the problem with narrative apologetics. It sounds great. There is no doubt that stories are powerful means to communicate truth. But once we hear the story, do we need to have it explained? After Jesus explains the parable, do we still need the parable? Why?

At this point, we realize McGrath’s argument is less an explanation of the power of narrative apologetics and more a suggestion that maybe he is on the right track. McGrath’s argument is quite powerful in demonstrating the limits of thinking of apologetics as a series of logical proofs. McGrath is extremely persuasive that there is some virtue in narratives themselves. But, what exactly are those virtues? Why is narrative explanation more powerful than theology? McGrath’s initial forays into answering these questions are suggestive, not definitive.

Something in our souls suggests that narrative matters; something in our souls longs for a good story. Why? Why are we constructed to long for truth in the first place? Why are we constructed to long for the narrative form?

I don’t know the answer to that. But, McGrath convinced me that the answer is more likely to be found in Genesis or the gospels than in Romans or Hebrews.

Tartuffe, Kanye, and Saul of Tarsus

Consider Tartuffe, Moliere’s play about a scoundrel who pretends to be a pious man in order to convince a wealthy dupe to hand over all his wealth.

The play is funny, which you knew became Moliere wrote it. It raises some interesting questions about what it means to be dishonest.

If I act better than I am, does that mean I am dishonest? Suppose I am a terrible person, but in public, I act like a good person. Is that bad? Hard to say Yes to that.

We read this in one of my reading groups. Consider the following situation. Someone befriends a very wealthy person and then spends years being the best friend the wealthy person could ever have. The wealthy person lives and dies very happy to have had such a truly wonderful friend, and then leaves the entire estate to this good friend. That is a great story, isn’t it? But, the friend was only pretending to be a friend in order to get the money. Does that change the story? Is that morally acceptable? The wealthy person really was happier having such a good friend and never discovered the deceit. Yet, the students in the reading group were nearly unanimous that this person pretending to be a friend would be doing a terrible thing.

Curious. Does intention or action matter more?

But, while that is what we talked about in the reading group, what I thought about during and after reading the play was…Kanye West. I realized that the current national discussion about Kanye is highly related to the plot of Tartuffe.

As I recently noted in a blog post, I have been convinced for a couple of years now that if Kanye decides to run for President, he cannot be beat. The last couple of weeks has been a perfect example of why.

Yet, part of the national discussion is whether Kanye is being serious with this album. It appears that many people have a sneaking suspicion that this is all some elaborate scam, that Kanye has not really converted, that this is just another money grab by a guy who has grabbed a lot of money in his time.

Kanye, as you know unless you live under a rock, just released a new album, Jesus is King. I listened to it expecting a sort of mild nod to Christianity. I was wrong to expect that. Kanye, who goes all in on everything, has gone all in here. This is a good old-fashioned gospel album. The lyrics aren’t subtle at all; this is Billy Graham Crusade levels of overt Christianity. You could play this album in a fundamentalist Baptist church and not be able to tell the difference between the content of the lyrics and the content of the sermon.

Why? Why would anyone doubt that Kanye is serious here? It is because we have all been culturally conditioned by plays like Tartuffe to equate expressions of religious belief with charlatans.

Now I understand why people outside the church would think like that. If you do not realize the truth of Christianity, then there is no way you could understand the notion of a life-changing conversion to Christianity.

But, what if you are inside the church? One of the foundational stories of the church, one of those stories we tell each other all the time, is the story of Saul of Tarsus being blinded by the light of Christ and turning from being the Church’s greatest persecutor into its greatest evangelist. Christians believe in conversion. It is central to Christian doctrine. So, why doubt Kanye?

Kanye talks about exactly this phenomena on the album itself:

Told the devil that I’m going on a strike
I’ve been working for you my whole life
Nothing worse than a hypocrite
Change, he ain’t really different
He ain’t even try to get permission
Ask for advice and they dissed him
Said I’m finna do a gospel album
What have you been hearin’ from the Christians?
They’ll be the first one to judge me
Make it feel like nobody love me

What are you hearing from the Christians indeed. Isn’t it a part of Christian doctrine to accept the convert at his word? Isn’t it part of the role of the church to accept the prodigal son with open arms? Doesn’t finding the lost coin or the lost sheep bring great joy in heaven? Yes, we know that sometimes people enter the church on false pretenses, but what gives anyone in the church the right to prejudge another’s conversion?

We get called halfway believers
Only halfway read Ephesians
Only if they knew what I knew, uh
I was never new ’til I knew of
True and living God, Yeshua
The true and living God
(Somebody pray for me)

A guy puts out what could easily become one of the top selling gospel albums. Every song is a testament to Christ and the significance of conversion and the importance of belief and an explanation of the life we should lead. And people in the church doubt him? Imagine an album with lyrics like this:

Everything that hath breath praise the Lord
Worship Christ with the best of your portions
I know I won’t forget all He’s done
He’s the strength in this race that I run
Every time I look up, I see God’s faithfulness
And it shows just how much He is miraculous
I can’t keep it to myself, I can’t sit here and be still
Everybody, I will tell ’til the whole world is healed
King of Kings, Lord of Lords, all the things He has in store
From the rich to the poor, all are welcome through the door
You won’t ever be the same when you call on Jesus’ name
Listen to the words I’m sayin’, Jesus saved me, now I’m sane
And I know, I know God is the force that picked me up
I know Christ is the fountain that filled my cup
I know God is alive, yeah
He has opened up my vision
Giving me a revelation
This ain’t ’bout a dead religion
Jesus brought a revolution
All the captives are forgiven
Time to break down all the prisons
Every man, every woman
There is freedom from addiction
Jesus, You have my soul
Sunday Service on a roll
All my idols, let ’em go
All the demons, let ’em know
This a mission, not a show
This is my eternal soul
This my kids, this the crib
This my wife, this my life
This my God-given right
Thank You, Jesus, won the fight

Or how about this message for the culture?

Get your family, y’all hold hands and pray
When you got daughters, always keep ’em safe
Watch out for vipers, don’t let them indoctrinate
Closed on Sunday, you my Chick-fil-A
You’re my number one, with the lemonade
Raise our sons, train them in the faith
Through temptations, make sure they’re wide awake
Follow Jesus, listen and obey
No more livin’ for the culture, we nobody’s slave

You really want say this isn’t a Christian album?

OK, some of the lyrics are a bit groan inducing

The IRS want they fifty plus our tithe
Man, that’s over half of the pie
I felt dry, that’s on God
That’s why I charge the prices that I charge
I can’t be out here dancin’ with the stars
No, I cannot let my family starve

Yeah, Kanye, without charging high prices, Kim Kardashian would surely starve.

But the point remains. Kaye isn’t perfect. That too is part of Christian doctrine. Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. Why assume Kanye is like Tartuffe instead of like Saul of Tarsus?

And note, if (well, when) Kanye does run for President he will be the most explicitly Christian candidate for President since Pat Robertson. Imagine uniting Christians and aficionados of rap music and reality TV into a giant coalition. Who is going to win against that?

Keeping up with the Kardashians: The White House Years. Gonna be a big hit.

Bondage of the Will

Martin Luther is rather obviously one of the Great Polemicists.

Indeed, if the standard of greatness is influence, then he is inarguably the Greatest Polemicist.

His most important works inaugurate the Reformation. Those works are fun to read; he goes for blood. Consider the title alone of one of them: The Babylonian Captivity of the Church. In that essay, Luther draws on the Old Testament narrative to argue that the Pope and his minions in Rome are the equivalent of the Babylonians who captured and enslaved God’s people. Jeremiah seems tame compared to Luther.

Great Writer. Important writer. We can all agree on that.

So, now explain Bondage of the Will.

The thesis is remarkably simple:

If then the prescience and omnipotence of God be granted, it, naturally follows, as an irrefragable consequence that we neither were made by ourselves, nor live by ourselves, nor do anything by ourselves, but by His Omnipotence. And since He at first foreknew that we should be such, and since He has made us such, and moves and rules over us as such, how, I ask, can it be pretended, that there is any liberty in us to do, in any respect, otherwise than He at first foreknew and now proceeds in action!

You have now read the whole argument. The book is 400 pages long, however. What are the other 399.75 pages doing?

Erasmus, the darling of the sophisticated intellectual Renaissance Christians, wrote a book attempting to refute Luther’s views on predestination; in it he argued that people have free will. Luther responded in a stereotypically Lutherian fashion with Bondage of the Will.

The structure of Luther’s book is the following:

Statement 1: Erasmus says verse X (choose 1):

a) proves there is free will, or
b) seems to oppose free will, but really does not.

Statement 2: Erasmus is a fool.

If statement 1 was option a): The verse actually opposes free will as anyone with even a small amount of reading ability and common sense and intelligence will obviously recognize.
If statement 1 was option b): The verse actually opposes free will as any idiot can obviously see.

Repeat. Ad nauseum.

In other words, this is an odd book, to put it mildly. The paragraph quoted above which states the thesis is actually philosophically interesting. In a well-written book, it would be good to add maybe a couple dozen pages of explanation and examples. In what world does anyone need 400 pages of the same?

Luther is like one of those lawyers who just keeps talking and talking until you finally cry out no mas and then he raises his hand in triumph.

This does not make you want to read the book. You may thank me at your leisure.

Setting aside the books stylistic failings, the question of determinism or predestination is, and has been for a very long time, fascinating. Luther isn’t the first to wrestle with this, obviously. Oedipus Rex is entirely about this problem. Homer wrestled with it before Sophocles did. What Luther brings to the table is an argument that Scripture answers the question. Decisively.

Is he right? In one of those ironic moments, we now have a wide swath of philosophers and scientists arguing that free will is dead. If you take a philosophy course these days, you will encounter a whole string of modern arguments that there is no will, that everything you do is done for purely deterministic reasons. Brain imagery suggest that you actually make decisions before your cognitive self is even aware you made them; all our cognitive selves are doing is rationalizing the decisions we have already made.

Luther would have loved these modern arguments. He would say they illustrated his point completely. (He would not say they proved his point, because Luther was certain that Scripture already proved his point.) The next time you meet someone who believes that free will is done and buried, ask them if they have read Bondage of the Will. When they say they have not, recommend they get a copy because it says exactly the same thing. The walk away merrily.

Is this actually a really important question? Once upon a time, I thought it was. Indeed, I thought it was the single most important question. If you had talked to me during my sophomore year of college and asked what theological problem was the one the Church most needed to instantly resolve, I would have said, “It needs to realize predestination and not free will, is the Truth.” If you had cared enough about me in that conversation to gently chide me, you might have suggested that perhaps the Nature of Christ was a bit more important, but I would have airily dismissed your suggestion with a, “Well, everyone in the Church knows the Truth about Christ; that stuff is child’s play—we need to talk about real theology.”

My undergraduate self was not a very sophisticated thinker. One might even have called me sophomoric.

Over the years, I haven’t really changed my theology on this point all that much. But, I have discovered that it really is a very boring debate. We simply cannot reconcile predestination and human agency. Scripture clearly says God predestined us for adoption as his children. Scripture also clearly indicates the existence of human agency and responsibility for our decisions. It is hard to reconcile those passages cleanly; lots of people have reconciled them, but the fact that there are ever new attempts to reconcile them suggests that nobody is really persuaded that there is not a seeming contradiction.

The problem with all this debate is that it is attempting to reason out something that is, quite possibly, completely beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend. If we can’t understand time (and we can’t), then it is a fairly simple logical step to realize we also can’t understand predestination and human agency. It is one of those mysteries, comprehensible in the mind of God, but not in the human mind.

What then? This makes predestination one of those subjects which often fails to be an interesting subject of conversation because people don’t understand that every conversation is not a debate. If your goal in a conversation about predestination and determinism and free will is to prove your point so that the other party will be convinced by the force of your argument, then the conversation will be rather dull because in the end, this is a matter of faith, not reason. However, if the point of the conversation is to discuss the idea, not to convince people, but just for the simple exchange of ideas on it, then it is an incredibly fascinating conversation.

Problem left as an exercise for the reader: Was I predestined to write the above or was it my decision to do it?

The Structure of Confessions

Augustine’s Confessions has a curious structure. It is divided into 13 chapters. The first nine read like autobiography; Augustine tells the story of his life concentrating on all the sins he has committed. He confesses them, and then he points constantly to God who is the real object of Augustine’s attention. Lots of things we can learn and ponder from these nine chapters.

But, then, in Chapter 10, the book takes a rather stunning turn for those reading it for the first time. Chapter 10 is all about memory. Chapter 11 is about time. Chapter 12 is about Creation. Chapter 13 is an interpretation of Genesis 1. Then Confessions abruptly ends.

It isn’t hard to see why the first nine chapters are the popular part. Much faster pace and it is easy to figure out where it is all going. What is with chapters 10-13, though? Why are they there?

My reading group discussing this book was puzzled by exactly this question.

Consider “Time.” Really. Actually consider the nature of time. What is time? Does time exist? Does the present exist? Does the past exist? If the past exists, where is it existing? If the past no longer exists, then how can we remember it and ask about it? The same sort of thing applies to the future. The longer you think about it, the weirder time is.

Is time a created thing? Did God create time or did time predate God? Seems clear that time must be a created thing. So what happened before time was created? That question is, when you think about it, nonsensical. There can’t be a “before time was created.” Before implies time. So if something is before time is created then time is before time is created. The mind reels.

So, if God is outside time, then is God in the present only? Obviously not. God sees all time simultaneously. For God there is no past or future. We can’t describe “God’s time” because time is that thing God created and observes. (I am not sure what observes means either because it implies a location different than the location in which God exists, but space was also created by God, so God is not in a location.)

So, if God is outside time, when I pray for the future, then God knows the future when I am praying for the future. But, God knows the past equally well. For God, there is no difference between future and past. So, can I pray for the past? Can I pray that God will help George Washington make wise decisions? Is that weird? When George Washington was alive, God knew about my prayer for Washington. Why is this weirder than praying for the future? From God’s perspective, praying for the past and praying for the future must be identical.

The longer I puzzle over Augustine’s discussion of time, the more bewildering it gets. T.S. Eliot captured the same thing—this poem (Bunt Norton) could be called the Spark Notes version of Confessions

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.

All time is eternally present. That is the key.

Think about the idea of Augustine confessing his past sins. Those sins are not really past in God’s view. They are eternally present to God. So, Augustine repenting of stealing pears 30 years earlier is not repenting of something that happened 30 years ago for God. It is something that always is existing for God.

In this world, we cannot say, “I sinned in the past.” We can say, “I am a sinner.” And it makes no difference which sins you contemplate; your past sins, present sins, and future sins are all the same from the perspective of God.

And suddenly, chapters 10 and 11 of Confessions seems inseparable from chapters 1-9. When time and memory collapse into the realization that thinking about the idea of memory of his past life leads to the thinking about the idea of time and the realization that “past” time is not really past, then our impression of the autobiographical portion changes. Augustine is not confessing his past sins at all. The sins he committed when he was an infant or teenager or last month are not just things in the past. Augustine is not saying “I used to be a sinner.” He is saying “I am a sinner.”

All time is eternally present. All time in unredeemable. If Augustine is a sinner, not was a sinner, but is, then what hope does he have? That is where God walks in. Augustine is spending the whole book noting that it is not exactly true that God has forgiven him for his past sins. Instead, God is forgiving him for his very nature as a sinner.

What then is going on with the last two books of Confessions? Augustine seems to go off track again, by spending many pages thinking about how to interpret the creation account in Genesis. He notes there are obviously many different interpretations of Genesis, and people spend a lot of time arguing about the right way to interpret it.

But, Augustine argues, God is very clever. What if He intended it to be written in a way that there are multiple true interpretations of the text? If so, then if your interpretation of the text leads to a conclusion which is true, and my different interpretation of the text leads to a different conclusion which is also true, we do not need to argue about whose true interpretation is correct. All interpretations which bring glory to God are true.

Thus you may want to read Genesis as a factual account of the mechanism of Creation. If that is how things were created, then Augustine has no problem with that reading. But, Augustine is more interested in the allegorical readings, the readings in which the structure of the first verse and the first chapter of Genesis reveal an extraordinary number of things about God.

At one level, these last two chapters of Confessions are a very useful description of the modern debate about seven day creationism.

But, what is this discussion of how to read Genesis 1 doing in Confessions?

How do we read Confessions? Our temptation is to read it as an autobiography. Augustine has no objection to us reading it in that way because it is, in fact, a true autobiography. But, then Augustine slyly notes in the final two chapters, this is just one way to read the book. After demonstrating that Genesis 1 can be read for the figurative lesson it offers, Augustine implicitly is inviting us to ask another question: is there a figurative reading of the book you just read?

Of course there is. This is not just the story of Augustine and his life. Indeed, for Augustine, that reading may be the least interesting reading of it. It is also a book about the majesty of God, the nature of sin, the work of Christ, the eternal design of God’s plan, and on and on and on.

The last four chapters of Confessions are extraordinarily clever. You thought you were reading an autobiography. But, oh, it is so much more than that. Once you realize it is a deep book, a very deep book, it makes you want to reread it. Again. And again.

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