The God of the Philosophers

          When a philosopher tells me that an uncaused cause made the world, I encounter several theological problems.  First is the concept the world-whole, which views the world as “a thing,” not as “all things.”  When all things came into existence, it was not “a thing” that was made, but “all things” that were made.   By so speaking and arguing, the philosopher is seeking a singular cause to a singular thing, which might not be the case at all, either with all things or with their making(s).  The Biblical account of creation is not a singular making, but a series of makings that is progressive and in stages -- the makings of several things, not one.  The philosopher’s alleged making of “one thing” (world) is different from the series of makings of Biblical creation.  Further, the “one thing” thus made is finite and to explain the origin of a finite effect requires only a finite cause, which is not the God of the Bible.  Second, when the philosopher mentions “making,” the making alluded to here is a making within a causal nexus, the sort of making with which our cause/effect analysis has normal connection.  Normally, when we talk about making, we talk about making out of pre-existing matter, as when a sculptor makes a statue out of pre-existing granite, employing a hammer and a chisel to do so, or as when a contractor builds a house out of wood, glass, shaped metal, rubber, etc.  When we speak about cause and effect of this sort, we are not speaking about Biblical creation, which does not entail pre-existent matter.  While our cause/effect reasonings and explanations always entail some material cause, Biblical creation does not.  Cause/effect, as we normally employ it, is irrelevant to Biblical creation which is a creating, not a making, and to which our cause/effect explanations (as normally employed, and as the philosopher employs them here) are something very different.  Creation out of nothing is not what we normally mean when we invoke cause and effect, which stand at the root of the philosopher’s argument.  To get philosophically to God creating the world, we must have a cause/effect sequence without a material cause, but we do not.  Our explanations yield no such results, nor can they.  Third, the “cause” thus allegedly reached is not the God of the Bible -- the infinite, articulate, multi-Personal Elohim Who, in His unsearchable plurality-in-unity, spoke the universe into existence.  All we get, if we get anything at all, is a mere finite, inarticulate, impersonal cause.  In short, with the philosophical conclusion that an uncaused cause made the world, I object to the philosopher’s use of the words “cause,” “made,” and “world,” none of which seem properly commensurate with Biblical doctrine and usage.

           To paraphrase Emil Brunner, any god reached by reason is a mere reason-god, which is always an idol.   Unlike the God of the Bible, Aristotle’s god does not speak, love, or feel.  It cannot become flesh, is not multi-Personal, and did not exist before the world.  To Aristotle, remember, the world is eternal.

Paul in Athens (part 3)

The general tone and tenor of Paul’s Areopagus speech was one of condemnation and opposition.  In Corinth, it continued.  Paul was not looking for common ground.  He was not building bridges.  Pagan beliefs and practices were his target, not the object of his affirmation.  The perverse beliefs of the Greeks are what separated Paul from them.   Their beliefs were not a truth they and he both owned, but the foolish and wicked errors he intended to correct.  He did not reach out to them on the basis of their beliefs.  He condemned their beliefs.  They returned the favor.

Paul knew the options that fallen life gives us in this regard:  Either we worship God or we worship things that are not God.  To worship God, requires the mediation of Jesus Christ -- a mediation both of knowledge and of salvation -- of which the Greeks philosophers had neither.  In order to fill that staggering lack, Paul determined to know nothing among them except Jesus Christ and Him crucified.  In this regard, just as it was with Jesus Himself, nothing about the god of Aristotle or Plato crossed Paul’s lips.  At the shocking sight of idolatry surrounding him on all sides, Paul’s spirit convulsed and wretched within him, just as ours ought to do within us.

But rather than wretch and convulse, some Christian theologians and apologists attach themselves to Greek errors both for apologetic purposes and for theological method.  Paul did not.  Rather than attaching his preaching and his apologetic to their idolatries, he pointed out to them their superstition and their ignorance and, in order to heal what ailed them, he directed them to Christ and the resurrection.

Paul’s speech was iconoclastic.  Because the Athenian marketplace reflected the hearts of those who made it and who frequented it, Paul cast down their gods, not from pedestals made of marble, but from pedestals in the human heart.  Paul knew that their invocation of an unknown god was a sham and a pose.  He knew it was a suppression of the truth.  It was an evasion of their obligations before the one God Who is.  It was a substitution of a false god for the real God.  It was not innocent; it was as wicked as it was false.  Suppression, evasion, substitution:  It was what Cornelius Van Til said it was: “culpable ignorance” (Van Til, Paul at Athens, p. 11).  In Paul’s own words:  “Where is the wise:  where is the scribe?  where is the disputer of this world?  hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?  For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God it pleased God through the foolishness of the preaching to save them that believe.” (1 Cor. 1: 20, 21).

Do not miss Paul’s point:  The wisdom of God decreed that, by means of the wisdom of the world, the world could not know God.  Natural theology simply does not lead to knowledge of God.  To say otherwise is to oppose both Paul and God.  Human wisdom, whether Aristotle’s or someone else’s, is more than merely challenged; it is exposed, debunked, and rejected.  The Greeks, known for their supposed wisdom, could not locate even its beginning (Psalm 111: 10).

Rather than endorsing their natural theology, from verses 24 onward, Paul used it as a weapon against them, resisting them and refuting them, sometimes with their own words and ideas.  He directed them to seek God (v. 27), implying quite clearly that by their philosophy and religion they had missed Him.  Paul told his Greek listeners that, despite their excessive religiosity (v. 22), they failed to know God, and that they were ignorant (vv. 23, 30), in response to which he placed before them the resurrected Jesus as Lord.  Concerning Jesus, Paul mentioned that He is fully human and, as such, is subject to death, and that he is Judge of the world (v. 31).  Apart from knowing that, they could not and did not know God.  No one can.  They were estranged from God, and, by rejecting Paul’s message, remained so.  They demonstrated that amusement and novelty (v. 21) are not the same as the pursuit of Truth.  When the Truth Himself appeared in Paul’s speech, they mocked it and turned away (v. 32).  That was where their natural theology led them.  That is where it always leads.  Nevertheless, despite their failing and their rejection of the truth, even when it was proclaimed directly before them, the Greeks thought they offered God authentic worship.  Paul, in order to puncture their bubble of delusion, highlighted their ignorance.  By limiting himself here primarily to highlighting their ignorance, Paul declined to trace out in fuller details the whole litany of their evils and errors the way he did in Romans 1.

According to F. F. Bruce, Paul “does not argue from ‘first principles’ of the kind that formed the basis of various systems of Greek philosophy; his exposition and defense of his message are founded upon the biblical revelation and they echo the thought, and at times the very language, of the Old Testament writings.  Like the biblical revelation itself, his speech begins with God the creator of all, continues with God the sustainer of all, and concludes with God the judge of all” (Bruce, Paul: Apostle of the Heart Set Free, p. 239).  To be sure, Paul finds his preaching text in an altar dedication.  But that they know they do not know God, and that he knows they do not know God, is hardly an endorsement of their natural theology.  Rather, their ignorance offers him a chance to explain to them the history of salvation, which, in this speech, finds its climax in Christ, just as it does in Paul’s epistles.

Paul in Athens (part 2)

(Yesterday I posted a brief introduction to Paul's speech in Athens from Acts 17.  Today I give a verse-by-verse explanation of that speech.  I strongly recommend reading the Biblical text along side its explanation.  Tomorrow I plan to articulate the theological implications of Paul's speech.)

 

Upon entering Athens, Paul’s spirit stirred within him (v. 16).  The word translated here as “stirred” is the Greek word from which we get our word “paroxysm.”  Athenian idolatry made Paul shudder.   He was appalled at the extent to which they worshipped the work of their own hands.  He was in a city full of idols the way a forest is full of trees.  The tense of the Greek verb here indicates that, for as long as Paul continued to behold the idols that surrounded him on all sides, his revulsion and disgust continued along with it.  His response was no mere passing emotion or superficial reaction, but a deep and abiding state of mind triggered by the collision of his theological commitments with the pagan surroundings.  What he saw, he “looked upon with abhorrence.  They were to him impersonations of everything evil; they expressed the deification of lust, cruelty, revenge, fraud, malice, and falsehood, and the deification of those evil things, not in the far-off past, but now at the moment enthralling and debasing the souls for which Christ died; so his spirit was stirred, the spirit of the faithful and devout Jew, on whose heart was written that law of God, ‘Thou shalt not make to thyself any graven image, thou shalt not bow down to them, nor worship them.’ . . .  No matter how divine the beauty, their use was accursed” (Sadler, Acts of the Apostles, p. 328).

“What will this babbler say?”  the Greeks around him asked (v. 18).  The word for “babbler” is “seed picker,” which is “a small finch, here standing for those gossip mongers who scuttled about the agora picking up news, novel ideas, they could pass on to other “chattering parasites” (Plumptre, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 27).  Their description of Paul in such terms, of course, was evidence of their contempt and ridicule.

The Greeks leveled against Paul the same sort of charge leveled earlier against Socrates:  He seemed to them to set forth strange gods (v. 18).  Conversely, they seemed to Paul to do exactly the same.  They were no more respectful of his views and his God than he was of theirs.  They thought as they did about Paul because he preached Jesus and the resurrection (v. 18), a notion they considered bizarre and impossible.  They themselves called it “strange,” which tells us that, to them, Paul’s gospel was not a mere continuation or supplement to their pre-existing beliefs, and they told him as much.  Their view of the relation between their beliefs and Paul’s is quite distant from the view held by modern advocates of natural theology and the way they tend to meld biblical theology and natural theology indiscriminately together.

According to some commentators, because the Greeks employed the plural word “gods” here, they believed that the anastasis (resurrection) which Paul preached in conjunction with Jesus, was itself a separate deity (cf. Sadler, Acts of the Apostles, p. 330) a fact indicative of the depth of delusion to which their minds had become habituated by their worship of false gods, and not an indication of how their false gods prepared the way for the gospel.  For bringing up these  “strange things” (v. 20), Paul was brought to Mars Hill, where he was given the chance to explain himself.

Perhaps because he rankled at their arrogant depiction of his teachings as “certain strange things” (which is the sort of demeaning epithet Greeks might use of barbarians), and because of his abiding disgust at their idolatry, Paul addressed that idolatry first:  “I see that you are excessively superstitious” (v. 22), he said, an opening not well-suited to win their approval.  Nor was it intended to win it.  Paul was not at all tolerant of those who rejected the resurrection:  Against such views Paul was vehemently opposed, calling those who thought that way “fools” (1 Co. 15: 35, 36).

Paul’s use of confrontation here is not unique for him.  A man who called even his own Galatian friends and converts fools (Gal. 3: 1), and who corrected the apostle Peter himself in front of his friends (Gal. 2: 11ff.), would not, and did not, shy away from pointing out to the Athenian philosophers who came to hear him speak that they were “excessively superstitious,” a tactic fully in keeping with his clothes-rending rant against idolatry earlier in Lystra (Acts 14: 8ff.) and his subsequent denunciation of what passed for wisdom in Corinth (1 Cor. 1: 17 – 2: 8).  His blunt, confrontational style was sometimes considered “contemptible” (2 Cor. 10: 10).  Perhaps his Greek auditors thought it so this time.

To Luke, the author, the degenerate condition of Greek thought and religion was obvious:  The pursuit of truth in Athens had shrunk to nothing more than a frivolous chase for novelty, he says (v. 21).  With that polluted and shrunken context as the background, Luke explains that, to Paul, Athenian religion was a religion of ignorance (v. 23).  But Paul was there to dispel their ignorance, and he told them so.  He was there to declare to them the truth about the God of whom they were so shamefully ignorant, the God Whom both the Greeks and their renowned philosophers did not know.  To Paul, their religion was characterized by “ignorant reverence” (v. 23), and ignorant reverence is not real worship, and it is not knowing God.

Naturally, his explanation was not well received.  As Plumptre explains, “That any human teacher should have power to proclaim that ‘Unknown God’ as making Himself known to men, was what neither Epicureans nor Stoics had dreamt of” (Plumptre, The Acts of the Apostles, p. 284).

But to Paul, the case was completely different.  He knew what they did not know and could not know:  He knew God.  He knew God because he knew Jesus and the resurrection -- without which God remains unknowable and unknown.

Of course, Paul was not always so.  When confronted by the Lord Himself while on the way to Damascus, the first thing Paul asked was “Who are you?” (Acts 9: 5).  He had to ask because, like the Athenians to whom he now was speaking, he simply did not know.  He did not know even though he was “circumcised on the eighth day, of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrews; in regard to the law, a Pharisee” (Phil. 3: 5), none of which brought knowledge of God, and all of which his Athenian hearers lacked.

In addition to attacking their ignorance, Paul attacked (1) their temples, (2) their worship, and (3) their arrogance.   Surrounded on all sides as he was by buildings dedicated to false gods, Paul told the Athenian philosophers that God does not dwell in temples made with hands (v. 24), something he heard personally from Stephen, the Christian proto-martyr, over whose execution Paul had presided (Acts 7: 48).  In his statement against their temples, Paul employs the words of Isaiah 42:5.   Then, echoing Psalm 50: 9-12, Paul further insisted that God is not worshiped with the work of human hands, as if He needed anything (v. 25).  Interestingly, the word Paul uses here for “worship” he also uses in Romans 1: 25, in reference to worshiping the creature more than the Creator, and in 2 Thess. 2: 4, in reference to worshiping the man of lawlessness.  Finally, Paul tells them that God has made of one blood all nations (v. 26) -- a view to which no self-regarding Athenian could consent.  The distinction between the barbarians and themselves seemed too radical, too obvious, and too persistent for the Athenians to overlook.   They thought that overlooking that distinction was to think of themselves as no better than benighted slaves.  But to Paul, these alleged distinctions were meaningless (Gal. 3: 28).  He undercut their arrogance by including them in the same boat as all other peoples and all other nations.  By explaining that God had made all nations of one stock, and had set their national and historical limits, Paul was drawing upon the Genesis account of creation and, it seems, upon Deuteronomy 32:8 and Job 12:23.

Paul then re-emphasized his contention that under God we all are in the same condition.  God has made us all one, Paul said, and He has providentially laid out his plan for the nations -- where they should live and when they should flourish -- as well as the reason for it all:  that under his guidance we might grope after him (vv. 26, 27).  That is, God controls the history of all nations.  Because He does, human history is a school, a vale of soul making, in which we all must detect the impossibility of ever satisfying the longings and “gropings” (v. 27) of the human heart with the gods of our own making.  They should “seek the Lord,” he told them (v. 27), as well as how that seeking and groping ought to be done (vv. 30, 31).  By explaining to his hearers some of the things God does in human history, Paul is distancing himself quite radically from the Epicurean god, who is detached and aloof from human life, a god absorbed in nothing so much as sloth and cosmic disregard.  

Having hit them twice, once with their own ignorance and once with their likeness to all other persons under God, Paul hits them again, this time with their own writers:  Quoting Aratus (from Paul’s own home region of Cilicia), and perhaps Cleanthes’ hymn to Jupiter, Paul asserts that we all live in the light of God’s omnipresence, because we all are his children (vv. 28, 29).  But because God is who He is, and because God does what He does, to worship humanly devised images and idols is ignorant and irrational (v. 29).  So, despite all their providentially bestowed advantages, they were still ignorant.  In His mercy and patience, however, God momentarily overlooked their universal ignorance and postponed judgment.  He has done so, Paul tells them, with the purpose of eliciting their repentance (vv. 30, 31).   Had God not mercifully and momentarily overlooked their ignorance, his justice long ago would have crushed them under the weight of their own idolatry.  Now, absent their repentance, nothing was left but judgment.  The historical evidence of God’s plan in all this is the resurrection from the dead of the very man who will be universal judge (v. 31). 

At the mention again of bodily resurrection from the dead, the Greek philosophers had had enough.  They mocked.  They subjected Paul to derision.

Paul left. 

From Athens, Paul traveled to Corinth, where his stance toward the alleged wisdom of Greek philosophy remained the same as it was in Athens and before:  antagonism and opposition – a stance notably distant from the theological implementation and apologetic incorporation practiced by contemporary natural theology devotees.

Lifting God's Burdens

         Perhaps to teach us all a lesson, Simon of Cyrene was compelled to help bear the burden of God Himself, the cross on which He died.  In so doing, Simon enacted a deep truth about Christian spirituality:  Just as God took upon Himself the burdens of our sin, we can take upon ourselves some of the burdens of His love, burdens that, in His grace, He deigns to share with us.  Not that He needs our help, and not that He cannot do the job all on His own.  Of course He can.  But He is a sharing God, and He rarely does all on His own things the doing of which He can share with his creatures.

         To say that, like Simon, we might share in the Savior’s burden and help lift it in the way that He shared ours and lifted it, is not to imply that in any way there exists between Him and us an equality.  There does not.  I speak not of equality but of mutuality, of the exchange of love between unequals, indeed between those who are unequal in every way.  Inequality does not prevent mutuality.  Inequality is simply the context in which the mutuality of love between God and us is worked out in all its historical details.  By means of this unequalness in love and exchange, we are in much the same relation to God as a dog might be in licking its master’s face when it knows the master is hurting.  Of course, the master will pull through even without the lick.  But still, in its own peculiar way, it helps.  The unequalness in that lick is part of the beauty and depth of the relationship depicted or enacted.  A bridge of affection spans the gap not only between dog and human, but also between human and God.  We look up to God and see His suffering, and offer Him our version of a gentle lick; and from it He somehow derives Divine pleasure.  To be sure, He, not we, built the bridge of mercy that connects us to Him.  But we are free to cross it, and to offer mercy in return.  When He draws us to Himself, and when we obey that drawing, it gives Him joy. 

         Picture a large and strong man, bearing two, three, or even more, heavy bags of produce on his stooped shoulders.  Standing near him, his child, seeing the father’s burden, and loving him, says, “Daddy, can I help?”  The father, understanding well the child’s imperfect love and meager strength, but loving the love that prompted the offer, says, “Yes, child; take this potato.”  And with more effort than would have been expended bearing it all himself, he shifts the tiniest of burdens onto the child, and both he and his child are heartened in the exchange.  The image of it all is captured well in Wordsworth’s beautiful poem “Michael,” wherein the child Luke’s effort to share his father’s work turned out to be “something between a hindrance and a help.”  Yet, meager as that help was, Luke received his father’s praise, and the father received joy.

         I am saying, among other things, that the strange and alien notion of an impassible god is not something we learned from the Bible.  In both Testaments, we learn of his anger, his pleasure, his love, his suffering, his frustration, and even his mirth.  Such feelings, such passions, are not anthropo-morphisms in Him, but theo-morphisms in us.  We feel them at all only because He felt them first and made us like Him.  We would have known that about God and ourselves all along if Greek philosophy had not spoiled us.

The Bible and the Liberal Arts (reposted)

     Because the Bible God inspired is a historical and literary artifact, you can't understand the history and literature of the Bible unless you already have read and understood vast amounts of other history and literature.  That necessity yields this observation:  A prior revival of languages and literature is the precursor for a recovery or revival of Biblical understanding and Biblical truth.
          Because learning precedes theological recovery, the Reformation could not have happened until the Renaissance had re-discovered the classical tools of learning and culture, thus making a more accurate reading of the Bible possible.  Enlightened theologians like Erasmus, a Catholic, and Calvin, a  Protestant, thereby were enabled to transcend the blinding myopia and constrained techniques of the medieval schoolmen.  Those schoolmen were beholden to, and misguided by, slavish obeisance to Aristotle (among other things).  Fealty to Aristotle and his truncated methods is not the same as acquiring the wide-ranging historical, literary, cultural, and theological knowledge needed to read and apply the Bible properly.  That is the case whether you are a philosophical realist like Thomas Aquinas, or a nominalist like William of Ockham, or neither.   After all, you'll recall that Jesus and Paul, pretty fair theologians in their own right, were neither, and that neither of them employed Aristotle's methods or rubric in their explication or application of Scripture to life in a fallen world.  Nor should we, at least if we want to have the mind of Christ, as we are commanded.

          To be rightly educated for theology is be educated in a way both deep and wide.  Deep and wide go together and are mutually corrective.  You must not have one without the other.  Deep without wide is tunnel vision; wide without deep is peripheral vision.  Alone, neither one is full and integrated sight.  Even at their best, the medieval schoolmen were subject to tunnel vision.  They thought that Aristotle's shrunken methods, rubric, and conclusions were the key to understanding the Bible, theology, and apologetics aright, as if being ignorant of history, language, and literature were no small hindrance to insight, a failure Erika Rummel has detailed admirably in her The Humanist-Scholastic Debate in the Renaissance and Reformation (Cambridge:  Harvard, 1995).  Outside the narrow confines of scholastic dialectics, the schoolmen were desperately under-informed.  Because they were, they did not know the damage they were inflicting upon theology by mainstreaming Aristotle and his pagan methods and presuppositions into western religious thought.  They did not recognize the vast difference, and frequent incompatibility -- in worldview, content, or intellectual technique -- between, say, the ancient Jews, on the one hand, and their ancient pagan contemporaries, on the other.  Put differently, you cannot move seamlessly back and forth between Isaiah and Aristotle, David and Avicenna, or Elijah and Averroes.  Nor, for that matter, can you do so between Plato and Moses or Epicurus and Peter, as if worldviews and their attendant implications in all directions were nothing significant.

          Evangelical Protestants, of all theologians, ought to be most grateful for the Renaissance breakthrough, for its movement back to the sources and its ardent embrace of the humanities.  But judging from their books, their class syllabi, and their lecture notes, they are not.  Almost immediately after Calvin, Reformed theologians reverted to the scholastic methods of their medieval predecessors, as the language, the structure, the arguments, and the content of their systematic theologies clearly indicate.   Gone is the narrative unfolding of God's mighty works in history.  The inspired words that reveal the meaning  and significance of those events, and the narrative and literary format in which we find those explanatory words, have been displaced by the wooden and alien framework of Greek metaphysics and its rubric of abstraction -- as if one could and should replace divine character (which captivated the Jews) with metaphysical characteristics (which did not).  The methods of the Protestant scholastics are alien to the the ways and means of Scripture, and distortive of them.  You might as well try to interpret Dickens' Tale of Two Cities with the methods of modern archaeology as to filter the Bible through the sieve of the dialectical method.  Thomism is not the key to sound Biblical hermeneutics.  It is sometimes its worst enemy.  Biblical theology is not simply philosophy you do about God, and its techniques and procedures are not those of the schoolmen, of either the nominalist or the realist stripe.
          Nevertheless, scholasticism endures even among the Protestants:  (A) If you follow their arguments and their nomenclature, you find they the are the arguments and nomenclature of the scholastics, not of Scripture, even when they quote Bible verses and claim the Bible only is the word of God and ought to be understood on its own terms.  (B) If you check the table of contents and the index of the most popular and widely used Evangelical or Reformed systematic theologies, you find no chapter or set of chapters, no extended explanation, and no precisely and systematically articulated implementation of either history or of literature within them -- as if theology could be well understood and wisely applied without them, and as if Christ were not properly the Lord of literally all things, theology and hermeneutical method included.  They do not do theology in His way, but in the way of the medieval schoolmen. Almost any allusion to history, literature, or art those books employ is tendentious, triumphalist, and polemical at the root.  Catholic systematics, of course, are no better, their invoking of a severely truncated and misleading version of Christian history and tradition being a case in point, especially as it entails a commitment to Thomist methods and conclusions.  In other words, the failure to which I allude is not limited to one church or another.

           Despite the characteristics of the Bible itself, systematic theologies are typically devoid of historical and literary expertise.  Their wooden and pedestrian articulation reflects that damning fact.  Nor do they have chapters on art, being artless themselves.  They are written by, and assigned as textbooks by, persons who are not historically astute, not literarily, artistically, or scientifically aware, and not impressively and memorably articulate -- even though the authors who write them and the teachers who assign them say they value the liberal arts and think we ought to require them.
        Judging from their theological textbooks and their methods, the liberal arts do not enter into it all. 

           

Easter Dawns in the Laboratory

In the middle ages, we called science "natural philosophy" because we understood that science was the application of a particular philosophy to our understanding of the natural world.  The philosophy then employed was the philosophy of Aristotle, with its mixed bag of insight and nonsense.

Science still is natural philosophy, even though we’ve dropped the name.  The philosophy it now employs -- empiricism -- is exploded.  Even though the finest philosophers now rarely advocate empiricism, modern science still insists on being its laboratory application.  Someone needs to tell the scientists that the rest of the world has junked the scientists’ philosophy and might have been right to do so.

If bad ideas have bad consequences, and if empiricism is a philosophically bad idea, then one wonders what bad consequences flow from the bad philosophy that sits as the bedrock of modern science and is the engine of its movement.

Worth considering, that.

When challenged on the point, these otherwise empirical scientists often take resort to pragmatism:  “We use empiricism because it works.”  Pay no attention to the fact that as a worldview pragmatism has its own set of fatal flaws.  Simply notice that a moment earlier the scientists were talking as if science yielded truth and empirical facts.  Now they don’t.  They move seamlessly yet schizophrenically back and forth between supreme confidence and self-effacing mealy-mouthedness, depending upon which one serves their purposes best at the moment.   

The same nonsense holds true with the scientists’ faulty theology, which says that God, if He exists at all, is and ought to be irrelevant to scientific endeavor, that we can proceed quite nicely without Him, thank you very much.  Put on this lab coat and leave your Bible at the door.

That's perfectly bad theology, pure and simple.

It might be well for scientists to consider Wolfhart Pannenberg’s hypothesis that God is not only a field of force without limitations of time or extension, but that He is the field of force and, if so, then the scientists have been dealing with Him all along in one way and another yet never once realized it because their suffocating worldview made such recognition simply impossible. 

I'm not saying that the alternative to modern science is the bastardized nonsense that one gets at some Christian colleges, but neither ought it to be the bastardized nonsense one gets at shamelessly secular enclaves like Harvard or Oxford, as if Richard Dawkins, not John Lennox, John Polkinghorne, or Michael Polanyi were the master of interdisciplinary thinking on this subject (or any other).

All this academically myopic, self-congratulatory, under-informed, scientific delusion happens because we have divided human knowledge up into discreet and externally impenetrable academic disciplines, each with its own private set of presuppositions and methods, and each with the freedom to do as it sees fit without regard to the knowledge gained in other disciplines.

But it’s utterly unreal.  It’s utterly a rejection of things as they really are:  We don’t have, say, a mathematical universe alongside a historical universe, alongside a philosophical universe, alongside a chemical universe, alongside a theological universe, alongside a sociological universe, alongside a rhetorical universe, alongside a political universe.  We have but one world, and the answers we offer to life’s fundamental and enduring questions need to be true across the board.  Regarding origins, for example, it cannot be that (A.) the universe and matter are eternal and also that (B.) we have reached today -- any today.  Why not? Because it is impossible to traverse infinity, and if the universe is infinitely old, then you can’t get from infinity past to here.

Yet, here we are.

Some scientists, I am pleased to say, have escaped this prison and its “mind-forged manacles.”  They work at places like the Discovery Institute; they also have serious doubts about evolutionary theory and the very unpristine data concerning global warming.  

The prominence of contemporary scientific silliness is the by-product of academic segregation; it's just Jim Crow in charge of the curriculum:  “Separate (disciplines) but equal,” which means, we all know, separate but unequal.  No scientist I know thinks we ought to give equal weight to science and to Karl Barth’s intellectual earthquake, which brought down the towers of natural philosophy and natural theology, or to the first Christians’ discovery of the empty tomb on Easter morning.  If, indeed, the tomb was empty, if Spirit reversed physical death -- doing what matter could never do -- then the scientific presupposition that only matter matters, and that only matter-based hypotheses are acceptable is simply false.  In such a world, science misses out on some of the most important, perhaps even the most important, explanatory principle in or out of the universe:  God.  Easter has dawned in the laboratory and no one there even noticed.

That’s because scientists don’t really think that Theology yields knowledge, that Theology is really an academic discipline that needs to be heard and taken into account.  But they do think the theologians ought to listen to the scientists.  They also think that the traffic between the two disciplines, if it exists at all, ought to be a one-way street from the laboratory to Jesus’ gravesite, not the other way round.

They think that Theology must sit in the back of the bus.

We Serve a Talkative God

We serve a talkative God.

From before the beginning of time, He has carried on an intimate, personal, and unending conversation within Himself -- Father, Son, and Spirit.  That eternal trialogue is the overflowing mutuality and love among the Persons of the Trinity.

Eternal and three-sided as it is, that conversation is not internal only.  It carries on outside God as well.  By it, He speaks worlds into existence.  His mighty Word is the powerful and creative force that made the world and that made us:  “Let us make man in our image,” He said (Gen. 1: 26).  By His creative external Word arose all things -- light, animals, fish, oceans, dry land, day -- everything (John 1: 3)

From the creation account in Genesis, we learn that God is a communal, articulate maker, and that we are to be like Him.  We are to be creative word users who live in community.

As Genesis 1 makes clear, God created us not only by his Word, but for his Word. We were made to receive God’s Word. We were made to hear Him, to contemplate Him, to respond to Him, to accompany Him, to love him, and to reflect Him. We were made sometimes even to speak for Him, as Adam did when he named all the animals (Gen. 2:19). We were intended for dialogue with God. We are able to respond to God, and He to us. We become fully the persons God intends us to be only when we receive and reflect something from God, namely his Word, whether you think of God's Word as his Son or as his message. We are to receive and respond to both. We are properly and fully human only so far as God’s Word echoes in our hearts and renews and reforms our minds, only to the extent that we resemble his Son, the Word, into whose likeness we are being transformed.

            We serve a talkative God.

Does Aristotle?  Not so much.

But sometimes I do wish Aristotle more fully reflected his silent god.