Category: Christian Doctrine

The Christian View of Death and Immortality

Thanatology presupposes philosophical anthropology: what death is taken to be depends on what the human being is taken to be. Although Christianity certainly has affinities with Platonism, so much so that Nietzsche could with some justice speak of Christianity as Platonism for the people, the Christian view of man is in an important respect un-Platonic. In terms of Aquinas' Latin, Platonism holds that homo est anima utens corpore, man is a soul using a body. On this view the person is essentially the soul, and the body is a temporary and accidental housing or vehicle. There are Platonic passages in which the soul is described as "imprisoned" in the body. The body is the prison house of the soul. The soul is in the body like an oyster in its shell. These and other metaphors can be found in the Platonic dialogues.  If one thinks in this way, then death is not a calamity but something good. Death is liberation, release, the separation of one thing, the soul, from another, the body, to which it should not have been attached in the first place. The fall into time is a fall into the flesh.  For Platonism, death undoes the fall into time. Death is to that extent good, and the philosopher welcomes it. Indeed, the philosophical life is a preparation for death. (Plato, Phaedo, 67e)

Christianity has civilized us . . .

. . . but it has also weakened us.  Our virtues, which once were strengths, are now weaknesses.  Some of our virtues have come to vitiate as much as some of our vices. 

We in the West no longer crucify malefactors or break them on the wheel. We now wring our hands, absurdly, over whether lethal injection is "cruel and unusual punishment."  A nation that has lost the will to execute its worst and most destructive criminals is a nation not long for this earth.  Can the will to live exist in a people who under no circumstances can muster the will to kill?

One of the fruits of civilization is toleration, that touchstone of classical liberalism.  It is a beautiful thing. It becomes a weakness, however, when it extends to the toleration of those who crucify and behead and throw homosexuals off of buildings.

Crucifixion in Islam:

It is all too common to view the practice of crucifixion as a form of torture and execution from antiquity which hasn’t been used in nearly two millennia, yet this is hardly the case. In fact, crucifixion is a standard means of execution in Saudi Arabia, and there is a growing movement among Islamists to bring back crucifixion as the preferred means of punishment for a variety of crimes, including apostasy from Islam, “fitna,” which is a pliable term which can refer to unbelief or mischief-making, or anything which goes against Islam and Shariah. This is explicitly taught in the Qur’an:

The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this: that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off… (Qur’an 5:33).

Ominously for Christians, strongly associated with fitna is “shirk,” the associating of partners with Allah. Believing Jesus to be the Son of God is, for Muslims, one of the worst forms of shirk, and is therefore punishable by death, including crucifixion. (There is a dark irony here, as Muslims do not believe Jesus was crucified, yet they prescribe crucifixion as punishment for Christians.)

Read it all. Disturbing images.

Absurdistan: The Cross of Christ is Supposed to be an Argument against the Death Penalty!

From a German correspondent I learned about the theology blog Nachtgedanken, Night Thoughts. I agree entirely with the current post which begins:

"In der Karfreitagspredigt sagt Bischof Ulrich Neymeyr: "Der Justizirrtum, dem auch Jesus zum Opfer gefallen ist, ist eines der schlagkräftigen Argumente gegen die Todesstrafe". Tagespost 19.4.2019.
 
Diese bischöfliche Aussage evoziert eine Frage: Was wäre, wenn Pontius Pilatus dieser Justizirrtum nicht unterlaufen wäre? Jesus Christus wäre nicht gekreuzigt worden, er wäre so nicht für unsere Sünden gestorben und wir wären so Nichterlöste. Wenn aber die an Jesus Christus vollstreckte Todestrafe uns erlöst hat, sie so also Gutes gewirkt hat, wie soll dann diese vollstreckte Todesstrafe gegen die Todesstrafe sprechen? 
 
The stupidity of this 'bishop' beggars understanding.  He obviously does not understand the Christian narrative he is supposed to be articulating and promoting. Had Christ not been crucified, he would not have died for our sins, and we would not have been redeemed. It was God's will that Christ, the sinless one, suffer the death penalty. How then can the execution of Christ speak against the death penalty? 
 
Quite apart from Christian teaching, anyone who is not morally obtuse should be able to see that the death penalty is precisely what justice demands in certain cases.   The punishment must fit the crime.
 
I explain the PFC principle here and distinguish it from barbaric versions of lex talionis.

Good Friday: At the Mercy of a Little Piece of Iron

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Craufurd, Routledge 1995, p. 75:

The infinite which is in man is at the mercy of a little piece of  iron; such is the hum an condition; space and time are the cause of it. It is impossible to handle this piece of iron without suddenly reducing the infinite which is in man to a point on the pointed  part, a point on the handle, at the cost of a harrowing pain. The  whole being is stricken in the instant; there is no place left for God, even in the case of Christ, where the thought of God is then that of privation. This stage has to  be reached if there is to be incarnation. The whole being becomes privation of God: how can we go beyond? After that there is only the resurrection. To reach this stage the cold touch of naked iron  is necessary.

'My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?' There we have the real   proof that Christianity is something divine. (p. 79)

We are spiritual beings, participants in the infinite and the absolute.  But we are also, undeniably, animals.  Our human condition is thus a  predicament, that of a spiritual animal.  As spirits we enjoy freedom of the will and the ability to encompass the whole universe in our thought.  As spirits we participate in the infinity and absoluteness of truth.  As animals, however, we are but indigent bits of the world's fauna exposed to and compromised by its vicissitudes.  As animals we are susceptible to pains and torments that swamp the spirit and obliterate the infinite in us reducing us in an instant to mere screaming animals. In the extremity of suffering, the body that served us as vehicle becomes a burden and a cross, and our way through the vale becomes a via dolorosa.

Now if God were to become one of us, fully one of us, would he not have to accept the full measure of the spirit's hostage to the flesh?  Would he not have to empty himself fully into our misery?  That is Weil's point.  The fullness of Incarnation requires that the one incarnated experience the worst of embodiment and be tortured to death.  For if Christ is to be fully human, in addition to fully divine, he must experience the highest exaltation and the lowest degradation possible to a human. These extreme possibilities, though not actual in all,  define being human. 

The Crucifixion is the Incarnation in extremis.  His spirit, 'nailed' to the flesh, is the spirit of flesh now nailed to the wood of the cross. At this extreme point of the Incarnation, doubly nailed  to matter, Christ experiences utter abandonment and the full horror of the human predicament.  He experiences and accepts utter failure and the terrifying thought that his whole life and ministry were utterly delusional. 

The darkest hour.  And then dawn. 

Self-Made Meaning is Unmeaning

One can bake bread, buy bread, or beg bread. Can one bake for oneself the bread of meaning? Or must one ask for it? (One cannot buy it.) Some say that the only meaning a life has is the meaning the liver of the life gives it.  This is a mistake as I will argue in painful detail in a separate entry. For now I merely invoke the authority of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, trs. Foster and Miller, Ignatius Press, 1969, p. 73, orig. publ. in German in 1968:

Meaning that is self-made is in the last analysis no meaning. Meaning, that is, the ground on which our existence as a totality can stand or live, cannot be made but only received.

To which I add: if there is no meaning there to be received, then there is no meaning.

David Horowitz on the War Against Christianity

David Horowitz argues in his new book "Dark Agenda: The War to Destroy Christian America," that secularists and leftists want to turn the nation into a godless, heathen society where religion has absolutely no role.

Horowitz, who heads the David Horowitz Freedom Center in Los Angeles, is used to taking controversial positions. He is the New York Times best-selling author of "Radical Son and Big Agenda: President Trump’s Plan to Save America."

“The war on Christianity is real, and it’s right on our doorstep,” Horowitz says.

In an exclusive interview with Newsmax magazine, Horowitz details the perils facing our nation’s religious freedoms and the efforts by conservatives of all faiths to save them.

Newsmax: Many people think of the persecution of Christians as being limited to the Mideast, Far East, and Africa, far away from the United States. But that’s not true?

David Horowitz: No, it’s very bad in the U.S. This war against Christianity is a war of the left, which is the Democratic Party, because Christian values are incompatible with the social justice delusions of the left. Everything about Christianity — the sanctity of the individual, the individual soul, individual accountability and equality — all these things are anathema to the left. Efforts to keep religion out of daily life continue to grow, such as school prayers and public displays of faith.

But you argue that’s not what our founding fathers intended.

Horowitz: That’s right. The First Amendment prevents the government from prohibiting the free exercise of religion, but the left has attacked that clause. Jefferson acknowledged a wall of church-state separation, but all that meant was the state won’t make one religion like Anglicanism the official religion and persecute the other religions. The American Civil Liberties Union stood that reassurance on its head with “wall of separation between church and state” becoming a bumper-sticker slogan for leftists and secularists who want to silence religious people and marginalize their beliefs. You describe yourself as an atheist Jew.

Why would a Jewish skeptic write a book coming to the defense of Christians in America?

Horowitz: It was prompted by the murder in 1974 of a friend of mine, Betty Van Patter, a dedicated leftist and mother of three who was a bookkeeper at the New Left magazine Ramparts, which I edited. I had raised money to buy a Baptist church and turn it into a school for the Black Panthers; after Betty discovered the Panthers had doctored their books, she was raped, tortured, and beaten to death. I investigated and found the Panther Party was a criminal gang engaging in extortion, arson, drug trafficking, and murder. Still, their leaders received the support of the American left which defended the killers because they were the voices of the oppressed and champions of the progressive clause.

How does President Donald Trump fit into the fabric of American Christianity today?

Horowitz: He’s terrific for America. He’s a great patriot, and I think that’s what inspired the Evangelicals to support him. He wouldn’t have been elected without them.

What is your view of the Democratic Party?

Horowitz: It no longer respects equality. It’s a racist party. White people, males, and straight males are guilty before the fact, and people of color, women, and gays are innocent, even if the facts show they’re guilty.

Will the persecution of Christians be a big issue in the upcoming 2020 presidential election?

Horowitz: Oh, totally! It’s going to be a huge issue. Once either [Supreme Court Justices] Ruth Bader Ginsberg or Clarence Thomas retire, and Trump nominates this Catholic woman [believed to be U.S. Circuit Judge Amy Coney Barrett] there’s going to be a battle.

Do you believe Roe v. Wade will be overturned?
Horowitz: I hope so. This is a war. The left wants to kill babies outside the womb; they’re baby killers. Their slogan “pro-choice” is completely fraudulent, because they make choices. You have to choose to have sex, you have to choose who to have sex with, you have to choose whether to use contraception or not . . . or if something goes awry you have to choose not to use the morning-after pill, or to give birth to the baby and find it an adoptive mother, or kill it. It’s not about choice or reproductive freedom B.S.

You say the catalyst for writing the book was the intolerance of the left. Can you explain?

Horowitz: Before I began writing the book and was becoming acquainted with all of the issues, I thought the persecution of Christians was a somewhat parochial issue. I [began having] sympathy for this community because the left is being so intolerant . . . Now I see it as a central battle. The country is at stake. The left wants a one-party state, you can see that. How can you have a resistance to a dually elected president? It’s sedition. It’s treason, in the normal sense of the word, to obstruct a president. Everything that’s running the Democratic Party today is obstructionism. You can’t have a democracy if you don’t accept the legitimacy of an election. I mean, that is fundamental.

Is St. Paul an Anti-Natalist?

I wrote in Christian Anti-Natalism? (10 November 2017):

Without denying that there are anti-natalist tendencies in Christianity that surface in some of its exponents, the late Kierkegaard for  example, it cannot be maintained that orthodox Christianity, on balance, is anti-natalist.

Ask yourself: what is the central and characteristic Christian idea? It is the Incarnation, the idea that God became man in Jesus of Nazareth. Thus God, or rather the second person of the Trinity, entered into the material world by being born of a woman, entering into it in the most humble manner imaginable, inter faeces et urinam nascimur. 

The mystery of the Nativity of God in a humble manger in a second-rate desert outpost of the Roman empire would seem to put paid to the notion that Christianity is anti-natalist.

To sum it up aphoristically: Nativity is natalist.

I still consider what I wrote above to be basically correct: Christianity is not, or at least is not obviously, anti-natalist. But now I want to consider a much more specific question: Is Paul an anti-natalist? To narrow the question still further: Is Paul advocating an anti-natalist position at 1 Corinthians 7? My correspondent, Karl White, thinks so:

Paul promotes celibacy as the highest ideal, the logical outcome of which is an end to humanity. I simply cannot see how anyone can dispute this. 

I shall now dispute it.

We cannot sensibly discuss the question whether Paul is an anti-natalist without first answering the logically prior question: What is an anti-natalist? David Benatar, the premier contemporary spokesman for the view, summarizes his position when he writes, "all procreation is wrong." (Benatar and Wassermann, Debating Procreation: Is it Wrong to Reproduce? Oxford UP 2015, 12) He means, of course, that it is morally wrong or morally impermissible to reproduce.  The claim, then, is a normative one. It is therefore not a statement about what is factually the case or a prediction as to what is likely to happen.  It is a claim to the effect that we humans ought not reproduce.  (If you are curious about Benatar's reasons for his unpopular view, I refer you to my Benatar category.)

The question, then, is precisely this: Does Paul, at 1 Corinthians 7, maintain that all procreation is wrong and that we ought not reproduce?  I answer in the negative.

Karl White is certainly right that Paul "promotes celibacy as the highest ideal."  The passage begins, "It is good for a man not to marry," i.e., good for a man not to have sexual intercourse with a woman.  The issue here is not marriage as such, since there can be celibate marriages; the issue is sexual intercourse, and not just sexual intercourse between a man and a woman, but also homosexual and bestial intercourse. And let's not leave out sexual intracourse (to coin a word), i.e., masturbation. (There are Catholic priests who, horribile dictu, actually maintain that their vows of celibacy do not rule out sodomy and masturbation.)*

And there is no doubt that Paul wishes all men to be like him, celibate. (verse 7) But he goes on (verse 9) to say that each has his own gift from God, with different gifts for different men. His gift is the power to be celibate. But others are not so gifted as to be able to attain this lofty standard. For those lacking Pauline self-control  it is better to marry than to burn with lust and fall into a cesspool of immorality.

Paul does not say that it is morally impermissible to reproduce or that it is morally obligatory to refrain from sexual intercourse. In fact, he is saying the opposite: it is morally permissible for a man to marry and have sex with a woman.  It is also a prudent thing to do inasmuch as it forces a man who takes his vows seriously to channel his sexual energy in a way which, even if not productive of offspring, keeps him from immoral behavior.

Paul does not affirm anti-natalism as defined above. He can be plausibly read as saying that sexual intercourse for the purpose of procreation (and presumably only for this purpose)  is morally permissible, but that there is a higher calling, celibacy, one which is not demanded of all.  (It can't be demanded of all, because it is not possible for all: 'Ought' implies 'can.' Only some have been granted Pauline self-control.)

Karl White said, "Paul promotes celibacy as the highest ideal, the logical outcome of which is an end to humanity." But it is not a logical consequence of Paul's preaching that either a) procreation will cease — no chance of that! — or b) that procreation ought to cease.  For he is not saying that all ought to be celibate. He is saying that celibacy is supererogatory, above and beyond the call of duty or the demands of moral obligation.  It is only for those we are specially called to it.

Paul is not an anti-natalist in the Benatar sense. He is not maintaining that procreation is morally wrong. But I grant to Karl that there is a sort of anti-natalist flavor to Paul's preaching, perhaps along the following lines.

Procreation is not immoral, contra Benatar. But it nevertheless would be better if people did not engage in it.  This is an ideal that is unattainable except in rare cases and so cannot be prescribed as a moral requirement for all of humanity.  But if it is an ideal, then ideally it would be better if procreation cease and the human race come to an end.

_________________________

*Well, we are all given to self-deception. The weight of concupiscence makes it hard to avoid. Raw desire suborns intellect and conscience.  As a young man, before I was married, I rationalized an affair I had with a married woman by telling myself that I was not committing adultery; she was. It is extremely important for the moral life to observe carefully, and in one's own case, how reason in its infirmity can be so easily suborned by the passions.  Is reason then a whore, as Luther said? No, that goes too far. She's more like a wayward wife. Reason is weak, but not utterly infirm or utterly depraved. If she were either of these, the reasoning of this weblog entry could not be correct when, as it seems to me, it is!

ADDENDUM (3/4/19)

Karl White responds:

To clarify, I should have been more precise in my wording.
 
What I meant to say was something along the lines of "If everyone became celibate, then humanity would end within a generation. Presumably if celibacy is the highest ideal, then Paul could not morally protest at this outcome."
 
Also, Paul is not for a total end of humanity. He believes its highest manifestation is in the guise of the 'spiritual bodies' he describes in his one of his letters and to which he desires all humans will come.
 
So I agree that Paul is not an anti-natalist in the Benatarian sense, but that he would have little problem with humanity in its current manifestation coming to an end seems fairly clear to me.
 
BV:  Now we agree!
 
Dave Bagwill writes,
Some thoughts on Paul and celibacy. I think it is probably the case that Paul thinks of celibacy not as the highest ideal at all, but rather as a vocation, a calling. To contend otherwise would be to ignore Paul's saturation in Jewish thought and worldview. That worldview, shaped by the Jewish scriptures, encourages, admonishes, and praises married life from the very beginning, and children are part and parcel of that state. I think that any interpretation of Paul that disregards this fundamental imperative must be suspect; conversely, his statements are most fruitfully understood in the over-arching Creation imperatives.
 
The case can also be made that biblically, man + woman = Man. Certainly, from experience, married life is the only way (excepting a special call to celibacy) that I could be 'complete', to the extent that I am. The 'classroom' of marriage is where I've learned and am learning that "Love is not affectionate feeling, but a steady wish for the loved person's ultimate good as far as it can be obtained." – C.S. Lewis
 
It is also prudent to consider not just the words that Paul spoke, but , as Miles Coverdale advised: "“It shall greatly help ye to understand the Scriptures if thou mark not only what is spoken or written, but of whom and to whom, with what words, at what time, where, to what intent, with what circumstances, considering what goeth before and what followeth after. ” "At what time, to what intent, with what circumstances" – if I were a competent exegete, I think an investigation into Paul's writing about celibacy would clear up any notion of a 'higher life' to be had as a result of celibacy alone. I in fact tend to distrust any purported 'spiritual' or 'higher-life' proponent that begins with a disparagement of the married estate.
 
ADDENDUM (3/5/19) Karl White responds to Dave Bagwill:
 
. . . I politely disagree with Dave Bagwill's comments. Paul is famous/infamous for his breaking with Jewish thought – in many ways that is the essence of Paul and why he is credited as the 'founder' of Christianity. His placing of celibacy as the highest ideal seems fairly uncontroversial to me. Also, merely because an individual has found personal contentment in marriage does not somehow invalidate Paul's espousal of celibacy – many have found contentment in celibacy and solitude and Jesus seemed to have little time for the family as an institution.

Two Senses of ‘Presupposition’ in Van Til and in General

Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., p. 279: "Thus the truth of Christianity appears to be the immediately indispensable presupposition of the fruitful study of nature." My gloss:

The fruitful study of nature presupposes the truth of Christianity.  It is a fact that we study nature, and it is a fact that our natural-scientific procedures are successful in many ways and in many areas of inquiry.  Now what is factual is actual, and what is actual is possible. But how is it possible? What are the conditions of the possibility of our successful understanding of nature and (some of) her laws? We are being told by Van Til that an indispensable and thus necessary condition is the truth of Christianity.

This illustrates one legitimate use of  'presupposition.' Presupposition in this sense relates an activity or procedure to a proposition.  To say that activity A presupposes proposition p is to say that A could not be undertaken with the hope of success  were p not true. 

For example, the procedures of natural science presuppose the intelligibility of nature.  We would not seek the laws of planetary motion, for example, if we did not antecedently believe that the motion of the planets was regular and law-like and understandable by us. But IS nature intrinsically intelligible, intelligible an sich? We have  good reason to think so given the success of our physics as shown by its technological implementation.

The presupposition of the intelligibility of nature is therefore well-grounded .

We can push our transcendental regress a step further by asking: what does the intelligibility of nature itself presuppose? What are the conditions of the possibility of nature's being understandable by us?  What would have to be the case for nature to be intelligible to us?  Here are some candidate answers:

A. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the truth of Christianity. (Van Til)

B. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the existence of God. (It is only because a supreme Intelligence created the world that it is intelligible.)

C. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the truth of Kant's transcendental idealism according to which "The understanding is the law-giver of nature." 

D. The intelligibility of nature presupposes an immanent order and teleology along the lines of Thomas Nagel's Mind and Cosmos. On Nagel's view, the rational order is self-explanatory, a necessary feature of anything that could count as a cosmos. Nagel views the intelligibility of the world as "itself part of the deepest explanation why things are as they are." (17).  Now part of the way things are is that they are understandable by us.  Given that the way things are is intelligible, it follows that the intelligibility of the world is self-explanatory or self-grounding. "The intelligibility of the world is no accident." (17)   "nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings." (17) See my Nagel category for much more on Nagel's book and other works of his.

I myself incline toward (B).  (A) entails (B), but I see no reason to accept (A).  The sort of bottom-up reasoning that can plausibly justify us in positing God cannot plausibly justify us in positing the God of orthodox Christian theism with all the Reformed add-ons.

The other sense of 'presuppose' is in play here: "I therefore presuppose the Reformed system of doctrine." (Van Til, p. 27) A presupposition in this sense is an assumption that is accepted unconditionally, uncritically, without question. 

Bottom-Up and Top-Down

The first sense of presupposition fits with a bottom-up approach. We start with various features of the world we experience and we then ask what makes them possible.  We attempt  a regress from the given to the hidden. We start with the world, not with God, and we aim to arrive at God.  But if we arrive at God in this way, then the properties we will be justified in attributing to God will  only be those needed for our explanatory purposes.   Those properties are in a certain sense tied to our starting points.  For example, one might reason along these lines: the universe is contingent, but its existence is not a brute fact; so it must have a cause external to it.  In this way we get to God as First Cause.  Or we start from the intelligibility of nature and arrive at God as the supremely intelligent source of the intelligibility we find here below.  Supposing we can get to the true God in this way, a God that needn't have caused anything, or sourced the intelligibility of anything distinct from himself,  it nonetheless remains the case that the properties of this God will reflect the facts we start with and our need to explain them. 

The second sense of presupposition fits with a top-down approach.  We start with God, or at least we try to start with God, and then, instead of regressing from the given to the hidden conditions of the possibility of the given, we progress from the hidden to the given.  This is possible if the God who is hidden to the natural man with his natural intellect has revealed himself.   I understand Van Til to be saying that we know the true God, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob only because he has revealed himself to us.  The revelation that Van Till accepts is the final truth, not only about God, but also about man, and the universe.  Since it the revelation of God, it cannot be questioned.   We can say that for Van Til, God and his revelation understood along Reformed lines constitute the Absolute Presupposition.

Interim Conclusion

Van Til's bottom-up  transcendental argumentation appears to be a sham. Despite appearances, he is not trying to justify belief in the God of orthodox Christian theism by argumentation from given facts (the existence of nature, its order, beauty, and intelligibility) to that which must be presupposed if they are to be so much as possible; he is not trying to justify belief in the Christian God at all.  For he just assumes the existence of the Christian God as something that needs no justification and cannot be questioned since it is that without which there would be no questioning or proving or anything else.

With that absolute presupposition in place as his unquestionable starting point, he can then advance, but not justify, claims like (A) above: 

A. The intelligibility of nature presupposes the truth of Christianity.

What Van Til is doing in effect is simply presupposing the truth of (A)! What he ought to be doing, however, is giving us a reason to accept (A). It comes as no surprise, then, that Van Til claims that all reasoning is circular reasoning. (123) We will have to examine that claim and Oliphint's defense of it in a separate post.

Van Til just assumes the truth of his worldview and then in effect says: See! I can explain everything, including why there is no neutral ground for the assessment of worldviews, and why people who reject the particulars of my worldview reject them.  But this is of no help to someone who sees no reason to accept his worldview  in the first place.

Suppose I grant that that sin has noetic consequences. I grant the thesis.  But that leaves open the question as what exactly the noetic consequences are. Is it a noetic consequence of sin that I do not accept Van Til's worldview?  Or is rather a noetic consequence of sin that Van Til denies that there is a neutral ground for the assessment of worldviews?

Fascinating! More later. And thanks again to Dave Bagwill for inspiring me to get going on this.

Van Til on an Absolutely Certain Proof of Christianity

Cornelius Van Til, The Defense of the Faith, 4th ed., p. 381:

The best, the only, the absolutely certain proof of the truth of Christianity is that unless its truth be presupposed,there is no proof of anything.

Van Til's  claim, to employ some Kantian jargon, is that the truth of Christianity is a condition of the possibility of proving anything. That's quite a claim. Let's put it to the test.

One can prove that the null set is unique by reductio ad absurdum. We begin the reductio by assuming that the null set is not unique, that there are two or more null sets. By the Axiom of Extensionality, two sets differ numerically only if one has a member the other doesn't have, or vice versa. But the null set, by definition, has no members. So the assumption leads to a contradiction. Therefore there cannot be two or more null sets. Hence the null set is unique. 

The proof presupposes the Law of Non-Contradiction (LNC), and I am willing to grant that LNC and the other laws of logic can be argued to presuppose in their turn the existence of an omniscient necessary being. One argument to this conclusion is the Anderson-Welty argument which I critically examine here. I conclude that, while the argument is not rationally compelling, it does contribute to the rationality of belief in God.  In other words, the Anderson-Welty argument is a good reason to believe in the existence of God. It does not, however, establish the existence of God in a definitive manner. It does not show that the existence of God is absolutely certain.

Van Til Cornelius At the very most, then, one can plausibly argue to, but not prove, the existence of an omniscient necessary being whose existence is a presupposition of our rational operations in accordance with the laws of logic.  But this is a far cry from what Van Til asserts above, namely, that the truth of Christianity with all its very specific claims is a condition of the possibility of proving anything. Trinity and Incarnation are among these specific claims. How are these doctrines supposed to bear upon the laws of logic?  Perhaps the Van Tilians have an answer to this. If they do, I would like to know what it is. But not only is Van Til's conception of God Christian, it is also Calvinist so that all the characteristic claims of Calvinism are also packed into the conception of a God that is supposed to be a condition of the possibility of all  proof.  How does predestination, for example, bear upon the laws of logic?

Van Til and Romans 1:18-20

I tip my hat to David Bagwill for recommending that I read Cornelius Van Til. So I sprang for the fourth edition of The Defense of the Faith, with Oliphint's annotations, P & R Publishing, 2008. Van Til's presuppositionalism is intriguing even if in places preposterous. Having discussed Romans 1:18 a couple of time before in these pages, I looked to see what Van Til had to say about it. But first my take, one that Van Til & Co. might dismiss as 'Romanist' or worse.

Rather than quote the whole of the Pauline passage at Romans 1: 18-20, I'll summarize it. Men are godless and wicked and suppress the truth. What may be known about God is plain to them because God has made it plain to them. Human beings have no excuse for their unbelief. "For since the creation of the world, God's invisible qualities — his eternal power and divine nature — have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made . . . ."

Paul's claim here is that the existence and nature of God are evident from creation and that unbelief is a result of a willful turning away from the truth.   There is no excuse for unbelief because it is a plain fact that the natural world is divine handiwork.  Now I am a theist and I am sympathetic to Christianity. But although I have one foot in Jerusalem, the other is  planted firmly in Athens. It therefore strikes me that to characterize the natural world as 'made' or 'created' begs the question in favor of theism. As begging the question, the Pauline claim about the evidentness of the world's being created offers no support for theism.  It is an analytic proposition that there is no creation without a creator. So if the heavens and the earth are a creation, then it follows straightaway that a creator exists.

But is the world a divine creation? This is the question, and the answer is not obvious. That the natural world is a divine artifact is not evident to the senses, or to the heart, or to reason. Of course, one can argue for the existence of God from the existence and order of the natural world. I have done it myself. But those who reject theistic arguments, and construct anti-theistic arguments, have their reasons too, and it cannot fairly be said that what animates the best of them is a stubborn and prideful refusal to submit to a truth that is evident.  It is simply not objectively evident to the senses or the intellect or the heart that the natural world is a divine artifact. If it were objectively evident, then there would be no explanation of the existence of so many intellectually penetrating, morally upright, and sincere atheists.  Even if the atheisms of Nietzsche, Russell, Sartre, and Hitchens could be dismissed as originating  in pride, stubborness, and a willful refusal to recognize any power or authority beyond oneself, or beyond the human, as may well be the case with the foregoing luminaries, it does not follow that the atheism of all has this origin.

I am moved to marvel at "the starry skies above me."  This was one of two things that filled Kant with wonder, the other being "the moral law within me."  But  seeing as is not seeing.  If you see the starry skies as divine handiwork, then this is an interpretation from within a theistic framework.  But the datum seen can just as easily be given a non-theistic interpretation.

It is all-too-human to suspect in our opponents moral depravity when we cannot convince them. The Pauline passage smacks of that all-too-humanity. There are sincere and decent atheists, and they have plenty of excuse for their unbelief.  The fact of evil being perhaps the best excuse. The best of them, if wrong in the end, are excusably wrong.

Or so I tend to think. But I am open to a change of view and a change of heart (metanoia).

I suppose I will be told that I am falsely assuming that there are some neutral data that we can access via reason unaided by revelation, data that will supply premises for arguments to the existence of God, arguments that would constitute a philosophically neutral, theologically uncommitted preambulum fidei in Thomas's sense, when such a neutral method can only in the end issue in the conclusion that Christian theism is not true. The correct method, I will be told, is to start with and adhere to the presupposition that Christianity is true, lock, stock, and barrel, and to see everything in its light:

Roman Catholics and Arminians, appealing to the 'reason' of the natural man as the natural man himself interprets his reason, namely as autonomous, are bound to use the direct method of approach to the natural man, the method that assumes the essential correctness of a non-Christian and nontheistic conception of reality. The Reformed apologist, on the other hand, appealing to that knowledge of the true God in the natural man which the natural man suppresses by means of his assumption of ultimacy, will also appeal to the knowledge of the true method which the natural man knows but suppresses. The natural man at bottom knows that he is the creature of God. He knows also that he is responsible to God. He knows that  he should live to the glory of God. He knows that in all that he does he should stress that the field of reality which he investigates has the stamp of God's ownership upon it. But he suppresses his knowledge of himself as he truly is. (123-124)

At this point in the text comes a footnote referencing Romans 1: 18 ff.

Above I suggested that Paul begs the question. Now to beg a question is to assume what one needs to prove.  But there is no need to prove what one presupposes.  So one who presupposes the truth of Christian theism cannot be accused of begging the question. There just is no question that can be neutrally engaged by the reason of the natural man if the truth of Christian theism is presupposed.

The ultimate principle of all proof is the Law of Non-Contradiction. It therefore cannot be proved, but only presupposed.  One who affirms it cannot therefore be reasonably accused of begging the question: there simply is no question here that can reasonably be disputed.

But this leaves unanswered the question why we ought to presuppose the truth of Christian theism. For the latter, with all of its very specific claims about Trinity, Incarnation, etc. is rather unlike the logical law just mentioned — to put it in the form of an understatement.  Why not presuppose atheism as many today do? They too can and do make claims about what we 'know' and what we 'suppress.'  We all know deep down that we are nothing but clever land mammals slated for extinction, with no higher origin or higher destiny, but we suppress this ugly truth because we are unwilling to face the dreadful facts.

If a gratuitous assertion can be met with a gratuitous counter assertion, the same goes for a gratuitous presupposition.

More later.

“And the Word Was Made Flesh and Dwelt Among Us” (John 1:14)

Let us meditate this Christmas morning on the sheer audacity of the idea that God would not only enter this world of time and misery, but come into it in the most humble manner possible . . . . Read the rest here.

It is a 'sermon' you will not likely hear in any Catholic Church.  What you will hear in the decadent Catholic churches of the present day is all manner of diversionary pablum as if designed to keep one from confronting the Christian narrative in its full strength. The few exceptions will prove the rule.

 

A Christian Koan

Man is godlike and therefore proud.  He becomes even more godlike when he humbles himself.

The central thought of Christianity, true or not, is one so repellent to the natural human pride of life that one ought at least to entertain the unlikelihood of its having a merely human origin.  The thought is that God humbled himself to the point of entering the world in the miserably helpless and indigent way we in fact do, inter faeces et urinam, and to the point of leaving it in the most horrendous, shameful, and excruciating way the brutal Romans could devise, and from a most undistinguished spot, a hill in an obscure desert outpost of their empire.

A Christological and Mariological Query That Leads into the Philosophy of Language

Theme music: What If God Was One of Us  (just a slob like one of us)?

My favorite Oregonian luthier, Dave Bagwill, checks in:

Karl White wrote in your post of 12-6-18: "If Jesus is a person of the Godhead then it must hold that his essence is immutable and above contingent change, particularly in response to human actions." In what way COULD "Jesus"  be a 'person of the Godhead'? If I understand the classic narrative correctly, Mary, his mother, was a virgin who was made pregnant by the "overshadowing" of the Holy Spirit. So: there was an egg! A contingent egg,  with DNA. And something fertilized it, supernaturally.
That's right. On the classical narrative, Jesus was born of a virgin without a natural father. The fertilization of the ovum in Mary was by a supernatural, miraculous, process.  So while Jesus came into the world the way the rest of us poor schleps do, inter faeces et urinam nascimur, born between feces and urine, the pregnancy that eventuated in his birth was caused by the third person of the Trinity acting supernaturally upon natural material, namely the contingent ovum in contingent Mary, who is of course a creature who wouldn't have existed at all if nothing material had been created.
That was the moment of Jesus' conception. An eternal, pre-existent entity named 'Jesus' could not have existed before that conception, unless of course Mary's DNA contribution was of no account -  but in that case, we were not given 'the man Jesus Christ, made in every way like his brothers so that He might be merciful and faithful as High Priest'. Heb. 2.27. Also see 1 Tim. 2.5,6. Because – to be made like us 'in every way' either means just that, or it doesn't.  He was made in every way like us. If Mary made a DNA contribution at the moment of conception, then her son  'the man Jesus Christ ' did not pre-exist. Am I at all thinking clearly here?
Yes, Dave, you are thinking quite clearly, and I agree with you. But there are some nuances that give rise to questions that lead us into the philosophy of language and  metaphysics.
 
You and I take 'Jesus' to refer to a particular man, a composite of human soul and human body, born of a woman at a particular place at a particular time.  And I take it that we understand 'born' to imply that an entity that is born first comes into existence when it is born and did not exist before it was born.  To be born, then, is not for an immaterial Platonic soul-substance to acquire a material body, but for a soul-body composite to come into existence.  On this 'Aristotelian' conception of being born,  nothing that is born pre-existed its being born.  Being born is not an alterational (accidental) change, a change in an already-existing substratum/subject of change, but an existential (substantial) change, whereby something first comes into existence.
 
But couldn't someone who accepts the Chalcedonian one person-two natures view say that 'Jesus' refers to the Son, the second  person of the Trinity? In the earlier thread, Fr. Kirby says, "The man Jesus is a person of the Godhead, if we understand 'the man Jesus' to be denominative rather than descriptive."  I take it that a denominative term is one whose reference is not determined by the descriptive content, if any, that the term bears or suggests. Such a term refers directly as opposed to a descriptive term that refers via a description that an entity must satisfy in order to count as the referent of that term.  If we take 'the man Jesus'  to be denominative, then 'man' plays no role in determining the term's reference. The reference can succeed even if the referent is not a man.  (And of course the Son, taken in himself and apart from the Incarnation, is not a man, i.e., does not have a human nature, but only a divine nature.) If so, then the following identities hold and hold necessarily:
The Son = the man Jesus.
The Son = Jesus. 
It then follows that Jesus or the man Jesus is a person of the Godhead.  To clarify this further we need to dip into the philosophy of language.
 
How does 'Jesus' refer? Does it refer via a description that the name abbreviates, or does it refer directly?  Suppose by 'Jesus' we mean the Jewish carpenter born in Bethlehem to the virgin Mary by the agency of the Holy Spirit. The italicized phrase is what Russell calls a definite description, and his thesis about ordinary proper names is that they are definite descriptions in disguise. On this theory, 'Jesus' refers to whomever satisfies the description we associate with the name.  It follows that the referent of the name must have the properties mentioned in the description.  For example, 'Jesus' cannot refer to anything that was not born of a woman. Now the second person of the Trinity, necessary, co-eternal with the Father, etc., was not born of a woman, or born at all,  nor was he from all eternity a carpenter, etc. Recall how I explained 'born' above: an entity that is born first comes into existence when it is born and did not exist before it was born. If this is what is meant by 'born,' then the Son (second person of the Trinity, Word, Logos) cannot be born. But then how are we to understand the Incarnation?  The idea, of course, is that God the Son came into the material world by being born of a virginal human female.  But how is this possible if nothing that is born pre-exists its being born?
 
We seem faced with an aporetic triad:
Jesus was born;
The Son of God was not born;
Jesus is the Son of God.
What's the solution? There is no problem if two different senses of 'born' are in play. I suppose I will be told that the Son is born in the following sense: the pre-existent Son which has prior to the Incarnation a divine nature only, acquires at the Incarnation a human nature in addition to the divine nature.  Thus there is one person (suppositum, hypostasis), and that person is the second person of the Trinity, God the Son who, before the Incarnation has exactly one nature, the divine nature, and after the Incarnation exactly two natures, one divine the other human.  Being born, for the Son, is then an alterational change in the Son: the pre-existent Son acquires a second nature.
 
The trouble with this answer is that it implies that Jesus is not "made in every way like his brothers." He is born in a different way.  He is born in a Platonic or rather quasi-Platonic way whereas we are born in the 'Aristotelian' way.  Dave and I did not exist before we were born/conceived.  Jesus did exist before he was born/conceived assuming that 'Jesus' is used denominatively as opposed to descriptively.  When we were born/conceived, we didn't acquire something that we lacked before, human nature; we were nothing at all before.  But when Jesus was born he acquired something he did not have before, human nature.
 
My interim conclusion is that it is deeply problematic to take 'Jesus' as referring to God the Son. Insofar forth, Dave is vindicated against Karl. Jesus is no member of the Godhead.