Pilate thereupon—as would most Christians nowadays, instead of setting about being true—requests a definition of truth, a presentation to his intellect in set terms of what the word ‘truth’ means; but instantly, whether confident of the uselessness of the inquiry, or intending to resume it when he has set the Lord at liberty, goes out to the people to tell them he finds no fault in him. Whatever interpretation we put on his action here, he must be far less worthy of blame than those ‘Christians’ who, instead of setting themselves to be pure ‘even as he is pure,’ to be their brother and sister’s keeper, and to serve God by being honourable in shop and counting-house and labour-market, proceed to ‘serve’ him, some by going to church or chapel, some by condemning the opinions of their neighbours, some by teaching others what they do not themselves heed.

George MacDonald (from his sermon “Kingship”, published in Unspoken Sermons, Series 3, 1889)

The post Pilate and the modern Christian (Mondays with MacDonald) appeared first on Undeception.

For one thing, it’s common to hear someone point out that the reciprocity principle behind the Golden Rule did not begin with Jesus as though this in some way impugns Jesus’ wisdom or authority for not having been the first to teach something like this. There is an understandable tendency among Christians to expect Jesus as the Word of God incarnate to have taught things that were entirely new and unique, before his time; no doubt that is true, but of course, laying aside that the version attributed to Jesus seems to have been his own special take on the concept (positive rather than negative), surely no one would expect everything he taught to have never occurred to anyone before him. And then there are those who doubt Jesus said it because, characteristic and distinctive as it is, we only have record of Jesus teaching it in one of the Gospels (Matthew). Who knows–but as you’ll see below, it’s obvious why it got attributed to him, and why he almost certainly wouldn’t mind it being attributed to him.

Another criticism regards the ethical implications of the Golden Rule itself. The idea is is that acting on this rule requires us to presume a compatible set of moral preferences between ourselves and the “others” involved, even where that presumption is not valid. Most us can probably remember scenarios in which someone has attempted to do something for our benefit that we wish they hadn’t: maybe someone in an unfamiliar environment tries very hard to engage you because they don’t want you to feel awkward, but it’s being paid all the attention that makes you feel awkward in the first place. And so on. The practical outworkings of the reciprocity principle are based on the supposition that what you would “have them do to you” is actually something they would have you do unto them, and we know that is by no means universally true.

Sometimes this sort of invalid projection of our preferences onto others really does happen, but it’s hardly through a conscientious effort to enact the Golden Rule per se; indeed, the rule of reciprocity when followed completely would actually prohibit such impositions on the grounds that we ourselves generally dislike being imposed upon. If those we can remember inconveniencing or bothering us by projecting their own desires on us out of the best of motives had actually put enough effort into empathizing (the more fundamental Christian ethical principle behind the rule), they would have avoided doing that thing that bothered us.

Moreover, the scope of this behavioral guideline was probably not intended to extend beyond the most basic and universal of preferences, such as pain avoidance, fairness, etc., and the people we typically interact with share those basic preferences.

The purpose of the Golden Rule is therefore not to serve as a fundamental law of ethics but to inform our ethics with the principle of empathy. This principle of empathy as modeled by Jesus is the hallmark of the Christian faith.

The post How golden is that rule after all? appeared first on Undeception.

In my last post I began discussing this thorny question by ruling out the claim that the tension between the Old and New Testament conceptions of God’s nature is only apparent; while it is certainly not nearly so decisive that Marcion’s two rival gods solution begins to seem tenable, it is very real.

I then launched into a demonstration of at least one case where Scripture shows God expecting us to use our moral intuitions to inform our ethics, namely the Golden Rule, the basis of which is using our own sense of ethics to demonstrate our love for neighbor (which of course is tied to showing our love for God). If Jesus instructs us to consult our will, preferences, and our sense of right and wrong when dealing with one another, I can’t imagine a good reason we should expect that our sinfulness and creaturely estate are prone to thoroughly obscuring and distorting our understanding of good and evil.

But how can we even trust our moral intuitions, you ask, considering how corrupt and sinful we are?

First off – and this is necessary to consider – if you are asking that question, please realize that you have taken for granted some things that you probably feel are essential to Christianity that actually warrant further scrutiny. Those assumptions are not a clear, straight-forward reading of biblical testimony; they are not even an unrefracted reading of the important church father, St. Augustine, whose teaching is usually given credit for formulating the concepts. Rather, the assumptions behind the question, known as the doctrine of total depravity or total inability, are almost wholly dependent on the Reformers’ unique reading of Augustine.

According to that teaching, we are so broken by the Fall that we can’t see straight; in fact, more often than not (according to this view), we see things completely backwards.

“No matter how I word this next part, someone will inevitably be depraved enough to misuse it.”

It must be recognized here that the Reformers did not take up St. Augustine’s actual views without significant modifications, as Catholics in particular have been keen to point out. This uniquely Protestant articulation of total depravity contrasts with the other fathers of the Church who insist that the image of God imbued to us at creation remains intact, obscured but viable, functional albeit invariably dulled by the ailments of our fallen state. Both branches of the tree from which Protestants shoot, the Church of Rome and the Eastern Church, have roundly rejected Calvin’s conviction that the image of God in which we were created is now so twisted that we “cannot conceive, desire, or design anything but what is weak, distorted, foul, impure, or iniquitous…” The Church of Rome’s Council of Trent was not inventing a new teaching when it placed an anathema on those who taught that “the free will of man is lost and extinguished”; on the contrary, it was continuing the teaching that the imago dei, which includes free will, remains as part of what makes us human.

To be sure, living in this world and lacking wisdom, even when we try we will certainly not always be able to discern the best choice in particular circumstances, and we may indeed have exceptional difficulty living up to what we know is right, but the problem is not with an essential inability to recognize goodness and evil when we see it. We pursue our own ideals instead of God’s, but not because we don’t recognize what God’s ideals are; rather, we are culpable specifically because we know what is right and put it away from us. To put it another way, our wills remain essentially free to choose, but are prone to choose poorly because they are led astray by our selfish minds.

To say that humanity is not totally depraved is not to deny that everyone is fallen and in a state of sin from which we need God to save us. It just means that our sin doesn’t so compromise our make-up as humans that we’re stuck never being able to trust our judgment about what is wrong and right. In fact, in my previous post I already showed that claim to be problematic just by considering our Lord’s own instruction. If we become overconfident in making judgments about good and evil – and I know this does happen – it is not from total inability but from prideful lack of caution. Contrariwise, we can become overconfident in our understanding of Scripture in any direction.

Even if you lay aside the issue of the imago dei and make an argument that unbelievers are likely to misapprehend and misrepresent true, big-g Goodness, the beauty of the author of Hebrews’ description of the New Covenant is that the law of God is engraved upon the hearts of believers: we are empowered to be moral agents acting on principles we do have indelible access to, deep within us. That itself would suggest that it should be quite the norm for us to make judgments about what constitutes moral behavior, and following from that is how important it is for the sincere believer to evaluate others’ claims about God’s character and actions, and to do so with reasonable accuracy. “Taste and see that the Lord is good.” At that point, it’s axiomatic that if God is described as performing acts that even some of those people we deem to be the closest to God’s likeness are troubled to explain, we should at very least not make acceptance of that description a tenet of faith.

It seems likeliest that those I’m conversing with here would at this point insist that when weighing the questionable judgment of unbelievers who see God’s depiction in the Old Testament as monstrous against the judgment of the believers who are confident that God can still be good while doing evidently monstrous things, those believers who agree with the unbelievers over against Scriptural depictions are clearly likelier to be wrong. Many will make the appeal to total depravity or other shows of humility in saying that we should avoid reading Scripture apart from certain dogmatic rubrics, chief of which is the presumption that the biblical authors were never mistaken in any theological teaching they intended to convey.

But the sticking point for those of us who disagree with inerrantists on this subject cannot be dismissed as merely the hubris of humanity in rebellion. For those of us who have pledged ourselves to be taught primarily by Christ as the image of the invisible God, we find such uneasiness with other biblical descriptions of God to be the only response that is truly faithful to our teacher. Indeed, as St. Augustine wrote, “Whoever, then, thinks that he understands the Holy Scriptures, or any part of them, but puts such an interpretation upon them as does not tend to build up this twofold love of God and our neighbor, does not yet understand them as he ought.” Could it be that a reading more faithful to the heart God engraved within us is one that doesn’t uncritically accept each biblical author’s own spin on theology wholesale?

Perhaps the reason God did not edit our Holy Scriptures to exclude misunderstandings of Himself and His ways is that their imperfection demonstrates just how “depraved” our minds can be.

When seeking to understand God’s nature, as always when reading Scripture, we have no default revelation that we can just put definitive quote marks around as so commonly wished for. We have no choice but to interpret, and to do so faithfully we must use all of the tools He built within us, limited and imperfect as they may be. But thankfully, we don’t have to shake off all of our bedrock assumptions about such fundamental concepts as right and wrong when we look at God. We would not recognize that we were looking at Him – could not be judged for missing Him – if we were not fitted to recognize Him. We must not sear our consciences and drag God’s good name through the mud in the interest of upholding our demands for inerrant revelation, especially under the veil of a false humility.

Related articles

• Does God play by the same rules?

The post How fallen are our wills? appeared first on Undeception.

I’ve talked about this problem extensively in the past, but I return to it again because, as we’ve seen time and again, flimsy walls of apologetics constructed to hide the issue tend to result in an exit door being blasted through people’s faith. That’s why I’m devoting this post and the next to the topic.

When we talk of tension between pre-Christ and post-Christ depictions of God, defenders of inerrancy will frequently counter with observations about God’s goodness in the Old Testament and Jesus’ wrathful warnings of judgment in the New Testament. Gladly granted, there is not a sharp, uniform discontinuity between the Old and New Testament’s portrayal of all aspects of God’s nature, so we should expect to see God’s lovingkindness extolled in the Old Testament just as in the New we find assurances of a divine reckoning on oppressors. It is because of His lovingkindess that God will take drastic measures to wrest the downtrodden from the grasp of those who use His name to excuse the neglect and exploitation of His people. But we cannot contentedly ignore the obvious: the divinely enacted, sanctioned, or commanded decimation of entire people groups in the Flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Canaanite conquest, etc., and the hopeful anticipation of such divine violence crystallized in the frequent imprecations in the Hebrew psalter–all of these stand in dramatic contrast to Jesus’ insistence that his followers love their enemies, pray for their persecutors, avoid calling down fire from heaven on those who reject God, etc.

The other standard response to this has been that we as fallen humans, warped by the Fall, just don’t have the equipment necessary to judge right and wrong. We must leave it up to God to tell us what’s good and bad, and even when everything that’s within us and in our scope of understanding screams that God is being described as committing evil acts, we must say, “No, it must be good, because God is doing it.” Because the Bible says it and the Bible is inerrant, of course.

This popular understanding was well articulated a few years back in the promo video for Francis Chan’s book, Erasing Hell. Critiquing the idea that humans would deny that God has done something on the grounds that we deem it to be immoral, Chan responds:

I’m like a piece of clay trying to explain to other pieces of clay what the potter is like. Think about that for a second! It shows the silliness for any of us to think we are an expert on Him. Our only hope is that He would reveal to us what He is like, and then we can just repeat those things.

And of course folks like Chan believe that such a revelation from God is exactly what we have in the Bible. I have offered several critiques against this view of the Bible in earlier blog posts, often calling to attention the impossibility of magically knowing exactly “what it says” without having to account for the myriad assumptions we bring to the table. But for people who believe as Chan does, we must not only consciously and resolutely affirm everything attributed to God within Scripture, no matter how abhorrent to our consciences, but we had better not fail to call it “good”!

In my next post I will address the question of whether we as fallen humans actually have the equipment to make valid moral judgments. But whether or not we can make good judgments, it appears we are exhorted by the authors of Scripture to make those judgments anyway.

Consider the Golden Rule:

By teaching the Golden Rule, Jesus was instructing humans to take seriously their own (fallible) observations and preferences when determining what is right and how to behave. Pay attention: when Jesus advised his followers in the way we are to treat one another, telling us how to go about fulfilling the second greatest commandment, we don’t see him saying, “Read the Bible” or “Ask the Holy Spirit to guide you.” Rather, he instructed you to consult your own will – your undoubtedly human, self-interested desires about how people should be treated – in order to determine the best course of action. Not only that, but this instruction was not reserved for the renewed, sanctified minds of the Christian elect: Matthew records this teaching to the general audience of the Sermon on the Mount. This goes even further than telling us to ask, “What would Jesus do?” It’s saying, “What would you do?”

Based on this, wouldn’t it seem that someone who obeys Jesus in this way would stand a pretty good chance of pleasing God? To my mind, the prohibition against “imposing” our desires and opinions about morality on God because of our fallenness was not on Jesus’ radar.

If you’ll pardon the blatant anachronisms for sake of principle, if an Israelite had heard Joshua’s command to “kill everything that breathes” and disobeyed that order either because he knows good and well that he wouldn’t appreciate being on the receiving end of the order to kill or because he rejected the notion that such a violent and cruel command could truly have come from the God he served, it seems God would have reckoned this disobedience as righteousness even if He had indeed given the command.

The objection lodged at this point might be that this is only valid between us mere mortals, blindly milling around in our dark world, and that the moral requirements for us and God might actually just be different. But George MacDonald had some choice words for this point of view:

If you say, That may be right of God to do which it would not be right of man to do, I answer, Yes, because the relation of the maker to his creatures is very different from the relation of one of those creatures to another, and he has therefore duties toward his creatures requiring of him what no man would have the right to do to his fellow-man; but he can have no duty that is not both just and merciful. More is required of the maker, by his own act of creation, than can be required of men. More and higher justice and righteousness is required of him by himself, the Truth;–greater nobleness, more penetrating sympathy; and nothing but what, if an honest man understood it, he would say was right.

Unsurprisingly, MacDonald’s influence on C. S. Lewis is obvious when the latter weighed in on this subject:

To this some will reply ‘ah, but we are fallen and don’t recognize good when we see it.’ But God Himself does not say that we are as fallen as all that. He constantly, in Scripture, appeals to our conscience: ‘Why do ye not of yourselves judge what is right?’ — ‘What fault hath my people found in me?’ And so on. Socrates’ answer to Euthyphro is used in Christian form by Hooker. Things are not good because God commands them; God commands certain things because he sees them to be good. (In other words, the Divine Will is the obedient servant to the Divine Reason.) The opposite view (Ockham’s, Paley’s) leads to an absurdity. If ‘good’ means ‘what God wills’ then to say ‘God is good’ can mean only ‘God wills what he wills.’ Which is equally true of you or me or Judas or Satan.

In other words, we have no good reason to insist that right and wrong are suddenly, radically redefined into unrecognizability just because we’re talking about something God does. Rather, as Paul argues in Romans 2, everyone is held responsible for living up to the light they have (or think they have).

But what about the Fall? How can we be expected to make valid moral judgments if our sinful natures impair our moral intuitions? I’ll be discussing that subject in my next post on the topic.

The post Does God play by the same rules? appeared first on Undeception.

Hart maintains that because creation is not theogany – not necessary to God’s nature or essence – it is theophany – a divine disclosure. Every act of history, no matter how cruel, can only be in some sense “an arraignment of God’s goodness”, for which no full answer is given “until the end of all things”. This leads to his characterization of the final judgment as a more full disclosure of Himself (starting at 9:25).

It would be impious, I think, to suggest that in his final divine judgment of creatures God also judges Himself, but one must hold that by that judgment God truly will disclose Himself, which of course is to say the same thing in a more hushed and reverential voice.

Even Paul in the tortured conditional voice of Romans 9 dares to ask whether there might be vessels of wrath stored up solely for destruction only because he trusts that there are not; that instead all are bound in disobedience and only so that God might prove Himself just by showing mercy on all. The argumentum ad baculum is a terrifying specter but it’s only momentarily conjured up so it can be immediately chased away by a more decisive and radiant argumentum ad veritatem.

The above quote only scratches the surface of his discussion on the topic, but I’ll leave the rest for you to find. He also covers a breadth of related topics, including his problems with original sin and a couple of other Reformed sacred cows (charitably, by the way). Be sure to keep an ear peeled to hear him glowingly mention this blog’s patron “saint” (let the reader understand).

Universalism is not merely a fond wish or an inconsequential theological conviction: the ultimate homecoming of all creation is nothing short of the terminus ad quem for all existence – not even merely the linchpin of the divine logic, but the goal toward which God’s mind is ever turning and toward which every act of divine will is directed. Universal reconciliation is required for the fulfillment of God’s very nature.

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