Category: Theology

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Book Update and Paul and Rabbinic Judaism

I’m working on my new book on justification and have finished the portion directly dealing with Jesus in the Gospels. I’m now moving on to Paul. I’ve begun my assault on the New Perspective. If we look at the context of Rabbinic Judaism, I think we can find a number of polemical echoes in Paul – although it’s hard to say how much is pre-70 A.D. Rabbinic tradition and how much gets generated after the fact. There are two interesting ideas in Rabbinic Judaism to which Paul seems to be responding:

Image from St Paul Kpehe Parish, http://stpaulkpehe.org/st-paul-the-apostle/

Image from
St Paul Kpehe Parish,
http://stpaulkpehe.org/st-paul-the-apostle/

A. That there is an “evil impulse” in humanity, but that it can be master by the law.

B. That although Israel isn’t going to be 100% perfect in obeying the law, they can always draw on the reserve of good will in the merits of the patriarchs.

On the first point Paul argues not only that the evil impulse is morally incapacitating, but that the law actually eggs it on and makes it worse. Hence, the law doesn’t help us master it.

On the second point, Paul inverts the idea of the merits of the fathers and claims that we’re actually under the curse of our ancestor Adam.

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The “Wolf of Wall Street” and the Orders of Creation: Part II

Part 2 of a throwback post from February 8, 2014

From the perspective of Luther’s Genesis Commentary, the idea that the Kingdom of God comes if we fix politics is all wrong.  In his commentary on the primal narrative of human life before the Fall, Luther shows that God established first the Family and then the Church as the original and most authentic setting of human existence.  They were created before the Fall into sin and therefore are not necessarily a response to the condition of human sin.   Rather, they are a natural setting for human life on earth.  These orders only become unworkable on their own after sin arrived on the scene.  Therefore after the Flood, in Genesis 9 God promulgates the new law of retribution, thereby implying the establishment of the Order of the State, as Paul confirms in Romans 13.  Hence, the State and its coercion are not meant as a means of fulfilling human life.  It is, unlike the other Orders, something created in order to counteract human sin and therefore make up for the failures of the first two Orders.  As a result, it cannot replace these other Orders.

This of course brings us back to the Wolf.  Belfort, like many others in our society, did not belong to the Church and did not have much of a family life (the little he has, he systematically destroys).  In terms of his behavior, he is able to do many, many things which are illegal, but — oddly enough — the government doesn’t care about most of them. When he is finally convicted, the prosecutors have no interest in his use of prostitutes or cocaine!  Hence, the normal and natural settings for human life are barren for him.  They do not function as either a medium of vocation, or as a means of moral formation.  He has no ultimate hope in his life, and so he feels that Epicurean excess is the only reasonable goal of human existence.  He has no sense of the law of God as taught by the natural law and summarized in the Decalogue.  And, hence, the only thing left over to direct and restrain him is the State.  Since the State is not omniscient and omnipresent, it cannot actually regulate his moral and spiritual life — even if that was its role — in a way that could force him to live a productive life.  All it can do is come in and pick up the pieces.  He is free to get away with whatever he can.

Within such a situation then, the State must either remain impotent in the face of a corrupt culture in which the Orders of the Church and Family are non-functional, or it must actually take over those functions and become more and more intrusive, totalizing, and, indeed, tyrannical.  And this latter course more often than not happens.  And so there comes about a kind of symbiotic effect.  The more the Church and the Family deteriorate as Orders of Creation, the more the Order of the State takes over their functions.  And the State must then feeds children and supports families because there are no families or fathers.  The State teaches “virtue” (after a fashion) in public schools.  And to many secularists the State becomes a kind of religion and now brings the kingdom.  Nevertheless, it is likewise the case that as the State takes over these functions and becomes more and more totalizing, it also accelerates the deterioration of the Orders of the Family and the Church as well.

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The “Wolf of Wall Street” and the Orders of Creation: Part I

Part 1 of a throwback post from February 8, 2014

image courtesy of Wikipedia

A few weeks ago, my wife and I went to see The Wolf of Wall Street about the corrupt stockbroker, Jordan Belfort.  Very good, I thought, although not my favorite movie of the year (David O. Russell’s American Hustle wins that honor).  It was a bit long, and I think that certain more lurid scenes could probably have been cut.  That being said, it was an interesting study in personal ambition and the power of human beings to engage in almost limitless self-corruption (Incidentally, although some may doubt the truth of some of Belfort’s stories, the FBI agent who followed him stated in an interview that, to the extent he could verify things, the stories were not exaggerations).  In many respects though, I think director Martin Scorsese got fundamentally wrong why Belfort became corrupt and the nature of his corruption.  The film was never really preachy (something Hollywood often cannot help), but the subtext was quite obviously an indictment of capitalism.  There was even a reference to the 1%, that is, a nod in the direction of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

I would of course make a couple of points about this.  First, of course, any economic system is corruptible, because humans are by nature corrupt.  This is obvious and I need not elaborate on this by pointing to historical examples.  Secondly, there is nevertheless a possibility for capitalism with virtue (one might say).  Certainly the Puritans had a vibrant capitalist culture while maintaining a relatively high level of morality (at least in human terms).  The Dutch did as well.  Historian Simon Schama has documented this in his book The Embarassment of Riches about the Dutch in the 17th century. In my own city, Grand Rapids, this culture of virtuous capitalism has continued, with the old and wealthy Dutch families using their resources to build up the civic life of the city in some very remarkable ways.  One the heirs to the DeVos fortune spoke at Aquinas College’s graduation back in 2010 and gave a talk on business life and Christian vocation that would have warmed Martin Luther’s heart.  So, I think what Belfort’s problem and the problem of current economic system is not really capitalism per se, but capitalism without virtue.

So if it’s not capitalism, but capitalism without virtue that’s the problem, why did The Wolf of Wall Street become the way he did and not like a more virtuous capitalist?  I would argue that part of the problem with Scorsese’s critique is that it doubles down on the problem that created Belfort in the first place.  Scorsese somehow thinks there needs to be more state-control.  Indeed, over the previous 100 years or so, we have developed the notion that the state is really the center of human life.  This is a mistake made not only by the Left of the political spectrum, but also by the Right.  That being the case, in our current political discourse the state is meant to bear weight that it wasn’t established by God to bear as an Order of Creation.  In other words, the assumption is that human flourishing happens if we get politics right.  In fact, not just human flourishing happens, but maybe even the Kingdom of God happens – witness the strange messianic projects that both liberal and conservative Presidents have conjured up in recent decades.  It’s just the matter of invading one more country and converting it to democracy, or it’s a just matter of inventing one more social program- and “Bam!” the kingdom has come!

To be continued…

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Pornography and Idolatry

Throwback post from March 1, 2014

When my wife and I are too brain dead for the epic political machinations of Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, or House of Cards, we watch the various TLC or Discovery channel “streaming” series on Netflix.  My wife refers to these series as “Trashy TV,” largely because they exploit their audience’s interest in people’s seemingly freakish behavior.  One show we recently watched was called “My Strange Addiction.”  Lost among the episodes in which people ate Comet or drywall 10 times a day for the last 30 years (these were an actual cases!), was one truly bizarre episode involving a young man named “Davecat.”  You can read Davecat’s story here: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2439522/Davecat-40-shunned-organic-women-marry-synthetic-doll.html 

Davecat (a name he received via online gaming), is currently in a “relationship” with a life-sized doll.  When “My Strange Addiction” was being filmed, he was merely living with the life-sized doll in question.  Since then he has taken it to the next level.  He is now an activist for the right of people to marry life-sized dolls.  Moreover, he has also purchased other life-sized dolls, and is presumably building a life-sized doll harem.

Admittedly, even by the standards of our deeply confused sexual culture this is extremely weird.  That being said, I think what Davecat is doing is simply a more extreme version of the principle at work in pornography; and, as we know the use of porn is not out of the ordinary in our culture.  At its heart, I believe Davecat’s situation and pornography reveal something deeper about the human soul in our fallen state.  Ultimately, pornography and idolatry come from the same dark place.

First of all, as I point out to my world religion students, just as ancient people lived in a world full of idols, so too do we live in a world full of pornography.  And both reveal something about human nature on a fundamental level.  Pornography is a form of sexual idolatry.  Just as idols are lifeless, distorted, images of God, so too pornographic images are lifeless and distorted images of human sexuality.  Davecat simply takes things to the next level and has purchased a lifeless woman for himself.  It is not unlike a lifeless statue of a god in ancient Greece or modern India.

Moreover, just as we know that there is a real, God-given human sexuality out there because the Internet is full of pornography (why create it, if it isn’t a substitute for something real?), one of the reasons that we know that the true God exists is because the world has historically been full of idols.  When atheists say that there is no God, because the world is full of distorted images for God, it is as illogical as a person finding the Internet full of pornography and then claiming that the human need for sexual intimacy is a pure illusion (or a merely sublimation for something else!) and that there is no real sex out there.

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Lutheran Theology and the Metaphysical Question

Throwback post from April 3, 2014

The entire discussion of sanctification brought up a number of issues.  Chief among them is my use of speech-act theory, as well as my use of categories of thought taken from relational and ecstatic metaphysics to explicate my views of sanctification.  When I pointed out the advantage of these ways of speaking to give an account of and to conceptually preserve biblical and confessional commitments (as well as their precedent in Luther’s own ways of speaking and conceptualizing theology), it was charged that I rejected the substance ontology of the early Lutheran dogmaticians, and that I was therefore out of accordance with the historic tradition.  As much as I tried to explain in a few short sentences to point out that my position was being distorted, such a response was generally speaking ignored.  Below, I would like to clarify my position on the metaphysical question in light of my biblical and confessional commitments to God’s truth.  Regarding Lutheran theology and the need to speak in terms of philosophical ontology, I would make the following observations:

1. One cannot canonize any one ontological scheme.  There are a couple reasons for this.  First of all, the great weakness of Catholic and Reformed theology is that they have more or less canonized a particular metaphysical scheme and allowed it to determine their theology.  This can be seen in the Catholic commitment to things like Transubstantiation and the doctrine of created grace.  In the case of the Reformed, they enter into their discussion of the two natures in Christ and the sacraments with philosophical presuppositions about what divinity and humanity are (non capax, etc.), and what God would do and what he would not do .  And so, ultimately they ignore or obfuscate what Scripture says about these things.  Secondly, Lutheranism (or perhaps more accurately, people who define themselves as Lutheran!) has functioned with a number of different philosophical traditions: Nominalism, Scotism, Aristotelianism, Leibnizianism, Kantianism, Hegalianism, and Existentialism.  Many of these philosophical schemes have had unfortunately distorting effects on the teaching of biblical truth.  My opponents tend to think the Aristotelian one was pretty good.  In some respects, this was true.  Nevertheless, this too also created any number of problems.  One example might be the false teaching of “receptionism,” that is largely a function of the Melanchthonian appropriation of Aristotle’s casual scheme.  All causes must be in place (including reception) to actualize a reality.  This distorts the gospel-promise of the Supper by effectively claiming that my action of reception is a contributing cause of the body and blood of Christ being present, rather than the sole cause lying in the promissory and consecratory word.  The third reason that we cannot canonize any one metaphysical scheme is that as Oswald Bayer has pointed out, this would be the theology of glory.  To know a universal scheme within which we can relate the ontic reality of God to all beings in an absolutely consistent way would in fact to suggest that we could know God’s being in itself, and how all of God’s works (which, often seems contrary) are coordinated with one another.  This is a problem because we know that the theology of glory always leads to conceit and self-justification.  Such a knowledge of God is not proper to this life, but the next life.  In this life, an attempt at such a knowledge leads to creatures believing in God as a transparent ideal, rather than a savior.  From this, theology and ethics becomes structured around trying to be conformed to that ideal.  Such knowledge will only be possible and helpful to us in the next life when God purifies us and conforms us to his ideal reality.

2.  If metaphysical and ontological terminology and schemes have historically distorted aspects of biblical teaching, then why bother with them at all?  One has heard this argument from Lutherans  often enough, and indeed to some extent in the history of Protestant theology.  The young Luther was contemptuous of philosophical terminology borrowed from Aristotle.  Of course, he never completely rejected philosophical learning (he has very nice things to say about Plato in the Heidelberg Disputation, as he trashes Aristotle).  Moreover, many of the presuppositions he used to attack philosophical reason were in fact borrowed from Nominalist philosophy (this is particularly the case in his arguments against Zwingli).  Finally, he ultimately did acquiesced to Melanchthon’s revival of a purified Aristotelianism in the curriculum of Wittenberg by the 1530s.  Moreover, we find of course a similar rejection of philosophical metaphysics in the considerably less orthodox theology of 19th century Liberal Protestantism.  Schleiermacher and Ritschl in particular rejected philosophical tradition as a basis or in some case, even a tool, for theological discourse.  Adolf Harnack built an entire theory of the fall of the Church around it in his History of Dogma by positing that Christian theology had gradually been corrupted by Greek philosophy (his famous “Hellenization Thesis”).  Unfortunately for the coherent of their argument, they attacked philosophical reason on the basis of Kantian presuppositions, thereby revealing that they were unable to escape philosophical schemes themselves!  

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