If you’ve been paying attention then you’ll have noticed this already:
If this trend continues for another year then I will close the blog down officially. It’s not guaranteed that that will happen, but it seems to be the way that things are going. I still often get ideas for substantial posts, but no longer have the time to follow up on them.
Michael Jensen, Lecturer in Doctrine and Church History at Moore College in Sydney, has recently completed a series of blog posts on writing theology essays. I think what he has written is relevant for anyone doing theology for him/herself (which should be every Christian), and for everyone who writes essays in the humanities. People who actually write theology essays will, of course, find the advice particularly useful.
The following quotation from Liz Feldman is doing the rounds on Facebook at the moment:
Personally, I am very excited about “gay marriage”, or as I like to call it, “marriage”. Because I had lunch this afternoon, I didn’t have “gay lunch”. And I parked my car, I didn’t “gay park” it.
This is inexpressibly stupid. Do you want to change the law so that you can be married to more than one person at a time? Try this argument:
Personally, I am very excited about “polygamous marriage”, or as I like to call it, “marriage”. Because I had lunch this afternoon, I didn’t have “polygamous lunch”. And I parked my car, I didn’t “polygamous park” it.
Or maybe you want to go ancient Egyptian and marry your sibling?
Personally, I am very excited about “incestuous marriage”, or as I like to call it, “marriage”. Because I had lunch this afternoon, I didn’t have “incestuous lunch”. And I parked my car, I didn’t “incestuous park” it.
Just in case it really needs to be said: I am not equating homosexuality with polygamy or incest. I am showing the stupidity of one very stupid argument by pointing out what else it would justify.
The 10-year anniversary of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center just brings up an enormous number of emotions and questions. One is addressed in this excerpt from Andrew Marr’s interview with Tony Blair about his memoirs last year (the discussion of nine eleven starts at 10:00 in):
At 11:40 we hear the following:
Blair: This movement [that was behind the attacks] is still there. It is, I’m afraid, still strong. It has a narrative that reaches into a far larger part of the population that is to do with the West and Islam and so on…
Marr: But is it partly strong because of the nature of our response? Because we went in so heavy, we went in so hard…
Blair: That’s the debate, Andrew, that is absolutely the heart of the debate. And the West has got to resolve this debate: is the reason why they’re like that because of us, or is it actually because of them? Now, my view in the end is, we should stop being in a situation where we think we’ve caused this. We haven’t caused this!
Thoughts?
The noise about the question of whether or not Richard Dawkins will debate William Lane Craig this autumn has gotten me thinking about what sort of arguments Dawkins might use if he does show up. Will he repeat his Ultimate Boeing 747 gambit from The God Delusion? If so, he had better have taken notice of the many criticisms of this argument – which Dawkins himself called ‘unanswerable’ at the time – since The God Delusion was published. The following comes from Thomas Nagel’s review of the book, which is very balanced and well worth reading in its entirety even if its formatting has somehow gone haywire on the New Republic website.
Let me first say something about this negative argument. It depends, I believe, on a misunderstanding of the conclusion of the argument from design, in its traditional sense as an argument for the existence of God. If the argument is supposed to show that a supremely adept and intelligent natural being, with a super-body and a super-brain, is responsible for the design and the creation of life on earth, then of course this "explanation" is no advance on the phenomenon to be explained: if the existence of plants, animals, and people requires explanation, then the existence of such a super-being would require explanation for exactly the same reason. But if we consider what that reason is, we will see that it does not apply to the God hypothesis.
The reason that we are led to the hypothesis of a designer by considering both the watch and the eye is that these are complex physical structures that carry out a complex function, and we cannot see how they could have come into existence out of unorganized matter purely on the basis of the purposeless laws of physics. For the elements of which they are composed to have come together in just this finely tuned way purely as a result of physical and chemical laws would have been such an improbable fluke that we can regard it in effect as impossible: the hypothesis of chance can be ruled out. But God, whatever he may be, is not a complex physical inhabitant of the natural world. The explanation of his existence as a chance concatenation of atoms is not a possibility for which we must find an alternative, because that is not what anybody means by God. If the God hypothesis makes sense at all, it offers a different kind of explanation from those of physical science: purpose or intention of a mind without a body, capable nevertheless of creating and forming the entire physical world. The point of the hypothesis is to claim that not all explanation is physical, and that there is a mental, purposive, or intentional explanation more fundamental than the basic laws of physics, because it explains even them.
All explanations come to an end somewhere. The real opposition between Dawkins's physicalist naturalism and the God hypothesis is a disagreement over whether this end point is physical, extensional, and purposeless, or mental, intentional, and purposive. On either view, the ultimate explanation is not itself explained. The God hypothesis does not explain the existence of God, and naturalistic physicalism does not explain the laws of physics. [...]
I agree with Dawkins that the issue of design versus purely physical causation is a scientific question. He is correct to dismiss Stephen Jay Gould's position that science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria." The conflict is real. But although I am as much of an outsider to religion as he is, I believe it is much more difficult to settle the question than he thinks.
My feeling is that Nagel has definitely hit on something here. Dawkins really seems to think that when Christians (for example) talk about God they mean a ‘supremely adept and intelligent natural being, with a super-body and a super-brain’, rather than ‘a mental, purposive, or intentional explanation more fundamental than the basic laws of physics, because it explains even them’. Perhaps he doesn’t even understand the latter, and can’t bring himself to imagine how it could be that ‘not all explanation is physical’. This reflects something that a former pastor of mine has said:
unbelief too often arises not from an informed awareness of the evidence, but from a completely closed imagination that cannot conceive of the universe having the added Godward dimension, and so is incapable of giving the matter serious consideration
Pete Lowman’s article is an exploration of how C.S. Lewis sought to combat this by giving his reader a ‘baptism of the imagination’.
As part of this talk, the second of a three-part series on the love of God, Mike Reeves explains what it means to talk about God’s glory.
Christians use this sort of language a lot, I find. People talk about ‘glorifying God’ and wanting to ‘bring glory to him’ in what they do. That sort of language is used a lot, and quite often I’m not entirely sure what is meant by that. I know we all sort of nod along and say ‘Yes, yes, we want to glorify God’, but what do we mean by that, exactly? Is it pious blather? Well, it is if you don’t understand it, anyway. And so I’m not sure what people do mean, quite often. Usually, and especially when we’re in thinking of God as a law-giver mode, we tend to associate glory with ‘power’ words, words like ‘fame’ and ‘honour’, as if that’s what God is really interested in. Now, when that happens, when you think that’s what glory is, then God’s concern for his glory – which is a biblical theme – does start sounding rather selfish. What is God concerned with? ‘His own power and status’.
Well, what is glory, biblically? That’s what I want us to see now. Well, the word ‘glory’ literally means ‘heaviness’ or ‘weight’ – which is something I love because it means I’m more glorious than you. The glory of something is its mass, its substance, its bulk, its essence, it’s what makes it up, it’s its main thing. So God’s glory, then, is his essence, what he’s most essentially like, what he is. Which means that glorifying God is not about bigging him up, because you can’t! Glorifying God: when you give God the glory, you simply ascribe to God what is already his. In other words, you proclaim and make known and declare him to be as he truly is, in all his beauty. That is to glorify him.
He then cites the following passages that talk about God’s glory in terms of brilliant light:
Ezekiel 1:28
Ezekiel 10:4
Ezekiel 43:2
Isaiah 60:1-2
Luke 2:8
Revelation 21:23
So, the glory of God is like light shining out, and that is what God in his innermost being is like. He is a sun of light, warmth, life, always shining out. In other words, in his innermost being God is, beautifully, love.
In a recent, helpful and accessible article on the perspicuity (clarity) of Scripture, Wayne Grudem writes the following under the heading ‘Scripture affirms that it is able to be understood but not all at once’:
A useful analogy, then, might be to picture the clarity of Scripture as a journey to a distant mountain that we see clearly from afar but see in more detail—and understand more of what we see—as we journey toward the mountain over many months and years. We can see it from the beginning of our Christian lives, and we truly see and understand something about it, but a lifetime of seeking deeper understanding will be repaid with a lifetime of growth in knowledge and wisdom.
We might even imagine various signs on the mountain. Some, like “believe in the Lord Jesus Christ and you will be saved” (Acts 16:31), are written in huge font that can be seen from a great distance. Other signs become visible shortly after the journey has begun, and teach us to trust God and obey him daily. Yet other signs appear in small font, not visible at first, and when we come close enough to read them, they announce topics such as “predestination” and “millennium” and “the future of Israel” and “preaching to the spirits in prison” and “the relationship between God and evil.”
And even when we can read those topics on the signs, we find that a partial explanation is in yet smaller print, and a fuller explanation is in tiny print. And then at the end of that tiny print we find statements that say, “But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, ‘Why have you made me like this?’” (Rom 9:20). “The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but the things that are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law” (Deut 29:29). “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? Dress for action like a man; I will question you, and you make it known to me. Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding” (Job 38:2–4). And then we say with Job, “Behold, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but I will proceed no further” (Job 40:4–5).
HT: Robert Slowley, a.k.a. RobHu, whose blog I’m sad to see has been deleted.
