Protestantism – Maverick Philosopher

Five Current U. S. Protestant Political Outlooks

"There are currently five major streams of Protestant political outlook and activism."

1) The old Religious Left

2) The old Religious Right

3) The neo-Anabaptist Left

4) MAGA Christianity

5) TheoBro Right

Finally, there is the TheoBro right, which wants a Christian confessional state that legally privileges Christianity as the only remedy for defeating the Left. Some of its leaders openly denounce voting rights for women as a liberal, modern corruption that undermines the family. Its denizens are not very numerous but have a high profile through social media. And its influence exceeds its numbers because it is aligned with much of MAGA Christianity. Its chief literature is Stephen Wolfe’s The Case for Christian Nationalism. Many of its followers descend from Calvinist entrepreneur Doug Wilson of Moscow, Idaho. The American Reformer is its chief online exponent.

Back to Inerrancy: A Note on Vanhoozer

I have been doing my level best as time permits to get up to speed on inerrancy as understood by evangelical Protestants. I have a long way to go. Today I preach on a text from Kevin J. Vanhoozer. I will examine just one sentence of his in his contribution to Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2013, p. 202, "God does not contradict himself, despite surface textual appearances to the contrary (Isa. 45:19)."

This compound sentence conveys two thoughts:

a) God does not contradict himself.

and

b) Some Biblical texts appear to show that God does contradict himself, but in every case this is a mere appearance.

Ad (a). This is true, and presumably true by definition. Nevertheless, there is a question one could raise, but pursuing it here would lead us off track. The question concerns God's relation to the law of noncontradiction (LNC). Is he subject to it as to a norm external to himself? Must he abide by it? If yes, that would appear to limit God's sovereignty and his power. If he is all-powerful, does he have the power to make LNC false? See here. I raise this issue only to set it aside (for now); so please no comments on this issue. For present purposes, (a) stands fast.

Ad (b). What I write here is not verbatim the same as what Vanhoozer wrote in his second clause. What justifies my "in every case"? It is justified by Vanhoozer's definition of inerrancy on p. 202:

. . . inerrancy means that God's authoritative word is wholly true and trustworthy in everything it claims about what was, what is, and what will be. (emphasis in original)

Vanhoozer appears to be reasoning along the following lines. Since God does not contradict himself, and since God is wholly truthful and trustworthy in everything he communicates to us in the Scripture, the Scripture cannot contain any contradictory passages or any false claims. From this follows that any appearance of contradiction is a mere or false appearance, and any appearance of falsehood is a mere or false appearance. And so what some of us see as errors, are not really errors, but mere "difficulties." (202)

Thus the Bible is wholly inerrant, inerrant in everything it claims, and not merely in its soteriological claims, that is, its claims regarding what is needed for salvation!

Now why don't I accept this?

Well, Vanhoozer appears to be confusing the Word of God = the Logos = the Second Person of the Trinity with the Word of God in a second sense of the term, namely, the Scripture. I argued in an earlier post that they cannot be one and the same, and this for a very simple reason: the Word in the first sense is co-eternal with the Father and thus eternal. The Word in the second sense is not eternal inasmuch as it had an origin in time. So at best it is sempiternal.

What's more, the Word in the first sense is metaphysically necessary; it is as metaphysically necessary as the First Person of the Trinity. But the Scripture is metaphysically contingent, which is to say: there is no necessity that it exists. It would not have existed had God not created anything. The divine aseity ensures that God has no need to create. Had he not created us humans, we would not have fallen, and would be in no need of 'salvific info.' God revealed himself to us in Scripture. No 'us,' no revelation to us. It takes two to tango, as Trump recently reminded us, echoing Ronnie Raygun (as lefties call him).

If you disagree with what I have just argued, then you would be saying that the Scripture pre-exists its being written down. That may be so in Islam (I am not quite sure), but it is surely not so in Christianity.

But there is more to my argument, namely, that communication from God to man is via ancient human authors, who are finite and fallible and riven with tribal and cultural biases, even if they are our superiors in wisdom and discernment. This is why one cannot validly infer the inerrancy of Scripture from the inerrancy of God. No doubt God is wholly veracious, infallible, omniscient, and inerrant. But how do you get from that proposition to the proposition that the Scripture contains no errors about anything soteriological or non-soteriological? You need an auxiliary premise to the effect that the authors of the scriptural texts, who received the divine messages, were somehow able to put them into the words of ancient languages and in such a way that the divine meaning was perfectly captured and expressed. I see no reason to believe that. In fact, given what we know about human beings, I see every reason not to believe it.

Vito Caiati correctly pointed out that in Christianity God reveals himself in the man Jesus of Nazareth. True. But that is irrelevant to the inerrancy question. Here's why. The doctrine of inerrancy states that the Bible, the whole Bible, OT and NT, is inerrant, either in all its claims or in all its soteriological claims. So the fact, if it is a fact, that "The Word became flesh and dwelt among us," — the Second Person of the Trinity, mind you, not the Bible! — and that the Incarnate Word was encountered by the apostles and disciples of Jesus and written about by them, is irrelevant to the question whether the Bible as a whole is inerrant.

On Swimming the Tiber: Reasons for Leaving Protestantism

I had put the question to Russell B, "What were your reasons for becoming a Protestant in the first place and then leaving Protestantism, apart from acceptance of DDS? [The doctrine of Divine Simplicity?] And what sect did you leave? Here is his response; I have intercalated some comments of my own.

1) The reason I became a Protestant was due to poor catechesis, unfortunately. I went to Biola as an undergrad where I attended an Anglo-Catholic church in Newport Beach (Still a great and lively one). Unsurprisingly, my metaphysics class (which was actually labeled as an ontology class) just presupposed the thin theory of existence.

Then you probably did not take that class from J. P. Moreland, who very favorably reviewed my A Paradigm Theory of Existence.

My primary reasons for leaving Protestantism:

A) One has to admit the Church was fundamentally wrong for 1500 years until Luther came around (an impossible pill to swallow)

B) Unification of the church: you need a ‘head’ to settle disputes (much like a Supreme Court). I think orthodoxy struggles with this as well: they are seemingly split too.

C) I am a big-time social conservative (I would say I am slightly ‘left’ leaning economically) and couldn’t square most Protestant churches caving to the cultural winds of secularism. The Catholic Church has problems, of course, but not compromising on things like abortion and homosexuality, for example, struck me as very attractive. I also read portions of Alex Pruss’ One Body which sealed the deal.

D) The lives of the Saints especially Aquinas, Teresa of Avila, Catherine of Siena, Anselm, Francis and St John of the Cross.

Now, I don’t want to knock Protestantism too hard. Of course one can be a Protestant and subscribe to DDS and endorse a thick conception of Existence.

2) The two upward paths, that of religion and that of philosophy, come together as one at the apex of the ascent in the divine simplicity. The ascent to the Absolute is thus onto-theological.

Beautifully written. I also want to thank you for your clear prose. I love Barry Miller and his work but at points he was a little sloppy and difficult to understand. I didn’t encounter that with your work.

PS:

1) I was recently listening to your episode on Dale Tuggy’s podcast. I hate recommending podcasts but I think my friend Pat Flynn—podcast called Philosophy for the People—reached out to you. If you have time, you should definitely consider going on it. His podcast is the only one that I am aware of that consistently talks about DDS, thin/thick existence, analytic philosophy’s dismissal of existence, etc.—basically everything that would appear on your blog. (Feser, Koons, Dolezal have all had appearances)

Russell's (B) above raises questions about the pros and cons of a teaching authority to unify doctrine and settle disputes.

One who refuses to accept, or questions, a teaching of the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) may be accused of reliance upon private judgment and failure to submit to the Magisterium or teaching authority of the Church. Two observations on this accusation.

First, for many of us private judgment is not merely private, based as it is on consultation with many, many public sources. It is as public as private. Everything I've read over the years from Parmenides on down in the West, the Bible on down in the Near East, and the Upanishads on down in the Far East feeds into my 'private' judgment. So my 'private' judgment is not merely mine as to content inasmuch as it is a collective cultural upshot, albeit processed through my admittedly fallible and limited pate. Though collective as to content, its acceptance by me is of course my sole responsibility. My first point, then, is that we ought to distinguish wider and narrower senses of 'private' and realize that a 'private' judgment might not be merely private.

Second, the party line or official doctrine of any institution is profoundly influenced by the private judgments of individuals. Think of the profound role that St. Augustine played in the development of Roman Catholic doctrine. He was a man of powerful will, penetrating intellect, and great personal presence. He was trained in rhetoric in Carthage and in Rome. Imagine going up against him at a theological conference or council!

Summing up the two points, the private is not merely private, and the official is not merely official.

Of course, part of the official doctrine of the Roman church is that its pronunciamenti anent faith and morals are guided and directed by the Holy Ghost. (Use of the old phrase, besides chiming nicely with der Heilige Geist, is a way for this conservative to thumb his nose at Vatican II-type innovations which, though some of them may have had some sense, tended to be deleterious in the long run. A meatier question which I ought to take up at some time is the one concerning the upsurge of priestly paederasty after Vatican II: post hoc ergo propter hoc? That should give pause to any one thinking of swimming the Tiber. Rod Dreher, who took the plunge, kept swimming, eastward. We could say he swam the Tiber first, and then the Bosporus, when, disgusted by priestly paedophilia, and the RCC's mafia-like protection of their own, he embraced Eastern Orthodoxy.)

What I have just written may sound as if I am hostile to the Roman Church. I am not. Nor have I ever had any negative experiences with priests, except, perhaps to have been bored by their sermons. All of the ones I have known have been upright, and some exemplars of the virtues they profess. In the main they were manly and admirable men. But then I'm an old man, and I am thinking mainly of the pre-Vatican II priests of my youth.

I have no time now to discuss the Church's guidance by the third person of the Trinity, except to express some skepticism: if that is so, how could the estimable Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) be followed by the benighted Bergoglio? (Yes, I am aware that there were far, far worse popes than the current one, and I am aware of the theme of Satan's grip on the sublunary.)

Of course, I have just, once again, delivered my private judgment. But, once again, it is not merely private inasmuch as it is based on evidence and argument: I am not merely emoting in the manner of a 'liberal' such as Bergoglio when he emoted, in response to the proposed Great Wall of Trump, that nations need bridges, not walls. What an unspeakably stupid thing to say! Well, then, Vatican City needs bridges not walls the better to allow jihadis easy access for their destructive purposes. Mercy and appeasement must be granted even unto those who would wipe Christianity from the face of the earth, and are in process of doing so.

But how can my judgment, even if not merely private, carry any weight, even for me, when it contradicts the Magisterium, the Church's teaching authority, when we understand the source and nature of this authority? ('Magisterium' from L. magister, teacher, master.)

By the Magisterium we mean the teaching office of the Church. It consists of the Pope and Bishops. Christ promised to protect the teaching of the Church : "He who hears you, hears me; he who rejects you rejects me, he who rejects me, rejects Him who sent me" (Luke 10. 16). Now of course the promise of Christ cannot fail: hence when the Church presents some doctrine as definitive or final, it comes under this protection, it cannot be in error; in other words, it is infallible.

In a nutshell: God in Christ founded the Roman church upon St. Peter, the first pope, as upon a rock. The legitimate succession culminates in Pope Francis. The Roman church as the one true holy catholic and apostolic church therefore teaches with divine authority and thus infallibly. Hence its teaching on indulgences not only cannot be incorrect, it cannot even be reasonably questioned. So who am I to — in effect — question God himself?

Well, it is obvious that if I disagree with God, then I am wrong. But if a human being, or a group of human beings, no matter how learned, no matter how saintly, claims to be speaking with divine authority, and thus infallibly, then I have excellent reason to be skeptical. How do I know that they are not, in a minor or major way, schismatics diverging from the true teaching, the one Christ promised to protect? Maybe it was some version of Eastern Orthodoxy that Christ had in mind as warranting his protection.

These and other questions legitimately arise in the vicinity of what Josiah Royce calls the Religious Paradox.

Biblical Inerrancy and Verbal Plenary Inspiration

Recent discussions with Calvinist friends led to the topic of Biblical inerrancy. I've always looked askance at it, but one of the friends, Brian, assures me that Scripture is inerrant in every particular, and nor merely with respect to faith and morals. How is that possible?

I tend to think about inerrancy and related topics under the umbrella of the following assumptions.

A1) The triune God of the Christian Bible exists.

A2) Said God reveals himself to man.

A3) One of the ways he reveals himself to man is via Scripture.

A4) Scripture exists in the form of different texts written at different times by different ancient human authors.

A5) Scripture does not pre-exist its being written down, but comes into existence in time and over time when the various human authors write down their texts in human languages, Hebrew for example.

A6) These authors write under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit such that the content or gist (spirit) of what they write derives from the Holy Spirit (der Heilige Geist) and is not merely excogitated (thought up or made up) by the authors. (I am not suggesting an etymological connection between the English 'gist' and the German 'Geist' or the English 'ghost.' There is no such connection as far as I know.) Thus these ancient human authors, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, mediate God's message to man. Without their mediation, no message would get through from God to the rest of us who merely read (and understand) the scriptural texts either in their original form or in translations and transcriptions, but did not write (author) these texts. The authors of these texts are conduits of the divine message. They are the receivers of the divine transmission which the rest of us receive at a second remove.

Being finite and fallible mortals, limited by their languages and cultures and tribal affiliations, these 'receivers,' despite their operation under the Spirit's inspiration, add human 'noise' to the divine 'signal.' It is to be expected that the signal-to-noise ratio will vary from author to author and thus from text to text, and that the over-all signal-to-noise ratio in the New Testament will be more favorable than that in the Old.

(A7) Scripture is not the same as the Word (Logos) of God (verbum dei) referred to in the prologue to the Gospel of John: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God . . . ." The Word or Logos is co-eternal with the Father; Scripture is not. They cannot be the same because the former is metaphysically necessary while the latter is metaphysically contingent. Scripture might never have come into existence. And as I said, it came to exist in time over time. Scriptural revelation is revelation to humanity; humanity consists of human creatures; there is no necessity that God, being a se and wholly self-sufficient, create anything; hence there is no necessity that humanity exist and that scriptural revelation exist. God cannot reveal himself to man if there is no man to reveal himself to.

The Bible, therefore, cannot be identical to the Word of God, if 'Word of God' refers to the Second Person of the Trinity. For again, the Second Person is co-eternal with the First Person, but the Bible, i.e., Scripture, is not co-eternal with any of the Persons. It is not eternal at all. It exists in time, but not at every time. Scripture does not eternally exist, nor does it always exist. So we can't even say that the Scripture is omnitemporal, i.e., sempiternal.

Some will bristle at the above at insist that the Bible is [stamp the foot, pound the podium] the Word of God! You may say that but then you are using 'Word of God' in an altered sense to refer to the Scripture which, inspired by the Holy Spirit and expressive of the divine Logos, is written down by men who, finite and fallible and culture-bound as they are, not to mention suffering from the noetic consequences of sin, add their 'noise' and filtration and limitation to the divine 'signal,' so that the end result is at best derivative from, but not identical to, the divine Logos, or Word of God in the original sense.

Finally, would it not be absurd to suppose that He Who Is, He whose name is Being itself, (Exodus 3:14) thinks in Hebrew from all eternity and composed Scripture in Hebrew from all eternity and handed a bit of it to Moses on Mount Sinai? Hebrew is a human language; no Hebrews, no Hebrew language; the existence of the latter presupposes the existence of the former. There is no necessity that humans, or any creatures at all, exist and so no necessity that human languages exist; God, however, is from all eternity noesis noeseos, thought thinking itself without need of any human language.

Now if we think about scriptural revelation along the above lines, then one cannot reasonably expect Scripture to be inerrant in every particular, as my Calvinist friend Brian says it is. Why not? Well, the 'receivers' are crappy so that, even if the divine Transmitter and his transmission are pure and impeccable, distortion and noise will be introduced by the lousy 'receivers.' The ancient authors each received a truly divine message, but then each had to express it in his own way with his own words as he understood the words of his native human tongue. Cultural and tribal biases may be expected to creep in, not to mention distortions and limitations of a syntactic and semantic type: human languages are not equal in their expressive capacities. A Calvinist should have no trouble adding to the mix by chalking up some of the noise and distortion to the "noetic consequences of sin."

Verbal Plenary Inspiration?

So I am wondering whether Brian, who tells me that Scripture is inerrant in every particular, and thus in every historical detail it reports, subscribes to the doctrine of verbal plenary inspiration. Five Views of Biblical Inerrancy, Zondervan, 2013:

Verbal plenary inspiration means that the text we have is verbatim the text God inspired, down to the very terminology and syntax. It is not that God gave human authors a general impression or message that they then communicated in their own words and according to their own understanding. Rather God accommodated his message to each author's style and understanding, even as such did not interfere with the content. (p. 19)

According to Norman Geisler, " . . . the locus of meaning (and truth) for an evangelical is in the text, not in the mind of the author behind the text. It is the graphai that are inspired, not the author's intentions behind them." (18-19)

If that is Brian's view, then I understand how he could could hold that view that Scripture is inerrant in every particular. If not, how would he reply to my sketch above of the mechanics of Scriptural revelation?

Your move, Brian.

Notes on R. C. Sproul, Does God Exist?

Trudy the Calvinist gave me a reading assignment. Herewith a first batch of comments for her and your delectation, discussion, and (presumably inevitable) disagreement.

In Chapter One, "The Case for God," Sproul distinguishes between four approaches in apologetics: fideism, evidentialism, presuppositionalism, and "the classical school" (4) He comes out against the first three and nails his colors to the mast of the fourth.

Fideists maintain that there are no rationally compelling arguments for the existence of God, and that we must therefore rely on faith alone. Sproul mentions Tertullian who opposed Athens (philosophy) to Jerusalem (Abrahamic religion) and famously asked what the latter has to do with the former. He held that Christianity is objectively absurd in the sense of logically contradictory, and that this absurdity was a sort of 'reason' to accept it: credo quia absurdum (I believe because it is absurd.)* Sproul rejects this extreme view on the ground that it amounts to "a serious slander against the character of God and the Holy Spirit, who is the Spirit of truth." (2) Sproul's point is solid. There cannot be self-contradictory truths. If so, how could the Source of all truth, the Spirit of truth, be self-contradictory?

Evidentialists defend the faith through appeals to biblical history. I am put in mind of what S. Kierkegaard calls "the infinite approximation process" (See Concluding Unscientific Postscript) a process which never arrives at a fixed and final result. According to Sproul, the most the evidentialist can attain is "a high degree of probability." (2) The probability is high enough, however, to prove the existence of God "beyond a reasonable doubt." Indeed, he thinks the probability sufficient to block every "moral escape hatch," except one: "You didn't prove it beyond the shadow of a doubt," i.e., the case has not been conclusively made. This is not good enough for Sproul: he thinks the case for the very specific God of the Christian Bible (presumably with all the Calvinist add-ons) must prove this God beyond even the shadow of a doubt.

Moreover, Sproul holds that one can establish the existence of the God in question beyond the shadow of a doubt. which is to say, in a rationally coercive, philosophically dispositive, entirely ineluctable, 'knock-down' way. Apologists of the classical school believe that the case for God can be made "conclusive and compelling." "It is actual proof that leaves people without any excuses whatsoever." (4) Sproul hereby alludes to Romans 1, as becomes clear at the end of the chapter. No excuses, no escape hatches. You are morally at fault for refusing to accept the God of the Christian Bible!

Presuppositionalists, led by Cornelius van Til, hold that the existence of the God of the Christian Bible can be conclusively established, but to do so, "one must start with the primary premise of the existence of God." (4) One can inescapably conclude that God exists only by presupposing his existence. Sproul's objection is the standard one levelled against the apologetics of the 'presuppers,' namely, that presuppositionalism enshrines (my word) the informal fallacy of petitio principii, or hysteron proteron if you prefer Greek. In plain English the fallacy is that of circular reasoning. To put it in my own way: every argument of the form p; therefore p is formally valid in that it is logically impossible for the premise to be true and the conclusion false. But no argument of this form could give anyone a reason to accept the conclusion. Circular arguments, though valid in point of logical form, are probatively worthless. Sproul goes on to tax Van Til & Co. with the fallacy of equivocation, but Sproul's discussion is rather less than pellucid, so I won't say any more about it; in any case, I agree with him that presuppositionalism is an apologetic non-starter, as I have argued over many an entry. (See my Van Til and Presuppositionalism category.)

Classical apologists such as Sproul and presuppositionalists both assert that without God there is and can be no rationality. The difference is that classicists insist that the existence of God cannot be merely presupposed, but must be proven in a non-circular or "linear" (Sproul) way. They also insist that it can be proven conclusively, and thus in such a way as to render the existence of God objectively certain. As I read Sproul, he is telling us that we can know with objective certainty, and thus without the possibility of mistake, that the God of the Christian Bible exists. In the later chapters of his book he lays out the proof.

Critique

So much for exposition. Where do I stand? I reject all four positions, as above formulated. My current position, tentatively and critically held, is however closer to fideism than to the other three. Call it moderate fideism to distinguish it from the Tertullianic and Kierkegaardian extremes. It is moderately fideistic in that it rejects the anti-fideism of the presuppositionalists and that of the classicists.

Readers of this weblog know that I have maintained time and again that one can both reasonably affirm and reasonably deny the existence of God. That is to say: there are no rationally coercive arguments either way. Nothing counts as a proof sensu stricto unless it is rationally coercive. So there are no proofs either way. An argument can be good without being rationally coercive, and there are good arguments on both sides. There are also bad arguments on both sides. The quinque viae of the doctor angelicus are good arguments for the existence of God, but in my view not rationally compelling, coercive, dispositive, ineluctable — pick your favorite word. They don't settle the matter, once and for all. But the same holds for some of the atheist arguments, some of the arguments from evil, for example. Galen Strawson is the polar opposite of Sproul on the God question. So to savor (bemoan?) the extremity of the worldview polarization, take a look at my critique of Strawson at Substack.

So am I taking the side of Tertullian and Kierkegaard? No way. They go to the opposite extreme to that of Sproul (although he is not as extreme as the 'presuppers'). I am a fair and balanced kind of guy.

I say that the belief that God exists is a matter of faith. Faith is not knowledge, but it is not entirely opposed to it either, as it is for Tertullian and Kierkegaard who hold that belief in the God of the Christian Bible, God Incarnate, is logically absurd, and yet is to be maintained, for S. K. anyway, by infinite subjective passion. On the contrary, I say that one ought not believe anything that is demonstrably absurd (logically contradictory), and that to do so is a plain violation of the ethics of belief. (If you subscribe to an ethics of belief, then you must also be a limited doxastic voluntarist, and I am.) Faith does not and cannot contradict reason; it supplements it. Faith is on the way to knowledge and seeks its fulfillment in it. Faith is inferior to knowledge as a route to reality, as Aquinas would agree. Faith extends our grasp of reality — our contact with it — beyond what we can know, strictly speaking, except that there are and can be no internal assurances of veridicality here below: the verification, if it comes at all, will come after we have quit these bodies.

Faith is neither blind nor seeing. It is neither irrational nor rational, but suprarational. It goes beyond reason without going against reason. 1 Corinthians 13:12 may provide a clue: ^"For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known." (KJV) Paul is suggesting that we see all right; we are not blind. But the seeing is obscure at present and will culminate in luminosity. Cognitio fidei is not cognition strictly speaking, but it is not blind either. We could liken it to a dim and troubled sighting in the fog. Pace Kierkegaard, not a desperate leap, but a hopeful reaching out beyond the bounds of the certain.

Sproul thinks he can prove the existence of God by reason alone. In my next installment I will show that he fails in this endeavor.

_______________

*Nietzsche quipped that Tertullian should have said credo quia absurdus sum, "I believe because I am absurd."

Are Trad Catholics a Protestant Sect?

One of the more interesting blog posts I have run across recently.

Am I an Intellectual Glutton? Evdokimov, Jackson, Precepts, and Counsels

Study everything! proclaims the first half of my masthead motto. I live by it. Am I an intellectual glutton? The self-critical and conflicted Tom Merton asked himself that very question in a journal entry. I put the question to myself.

Example. I am up from a nap and enjoying an iced coffee. I will soon be banging on all eight. As part of the afternoon start-up I am reading back-to-back, and back-and-forth, Paul Evdokimov (The Sacrament of Love: The Nuptial Mystery in the Orthodox Tradition, St. Vladimir's Press, 1985, orig. published in 1980 as Sacrement de L'Amour), and the Blake Bailey biography of Charles Jackson, the alcoholic, married-to-woman, homosexual who achieved minor literary fame as the author of the thinly-veiled autobiographical booze novel, The Lost Weekend (1944). Jackson died at age 65 having destroyed himself with drugs and alcohol.

I have long been fascinated by the utterly wild diversity of human types. There is nothing like it it the animal world, and yet we too are animals. We are in continuity with the animals but an incomprehensible rupture, saltation, jump, metabasis eis allo genos, occurred at some point in the evolutionary process that gave rise to man who is, paradoxically, both an animal and not an animal. Heidegger is right; there is an abysmal/abyssal (abgruendig) difference between man and animal. An abyss yawns between the two. Heidegger is echoing Genesis but going deeper, and some would say, off the deep end, with his talk of man as Dasein, the Da of Sein/Seyn. More on Heidegger when I dig into Dugin.

And then there is Paul Evdokimov (1901-1970). I have Merton to thank for bringing him to my attention. Here is a passage that struck me:

There is no reason . . . to call one path [the marital state] or the other [the monastic state] the preeminent Christianity, since what is valid for all of Christendom is thereby valid for each of the two states. The East [unlike the RCC] has never made the distinction between the "precepts" and the "evangelical counsels." The Gospel in its totality is addressed to each person; everyone in his own situation is called to the absolute of the Gospel. Trying to prove the superiority of the one state over the other is therefore useless . . . The renunciation at work in both cases is as good as the positive content that the human being brings to it: the intensity of the love of God. (Evdokimov, p. 65)

For the Roman Catholic distinction between precepts and counsels of perfection that Evdokimov is rejecting, see here. "It has been denied by heretics in all ages, and especially by many Protestants in the sixteenth and following centuries . . . "

Why the Collapse of Philosophical Studies in the Islamic World?

Leo Strauss sketches an answer in his "How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy" in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. T. L. Pangle, University of Chicago Press, 1989, pp. 221-222, bolding added:

For the Jew and the Moslem, religion is primarily not, as it is for the Christian, a faith formulated in dogmas, but a law, a code of divine origin. Accordingly, the religious science, the sacra doctrina, is not dogmatic theology, theologia revelata, but the science of the law, halaka or fiqh. The science of the law, thus understood has much less in common with philosophy than has dogmatic theology. Hence the status of philosophy is, as a matter of principle, much more precarious in the Islamic-Jewish world than it is in the Christian world. No one could become a competent Christian theologian without having studied at least a substantial part of philosophy; philosophy was an integral part of the officially authorized and even required training. On the other hand, one could become an absolutely competent halakist or faqih without having the slightest knowledge of philosophy. This fundamental difference doubtless explains the possibility of the later complete collapse of philosophical studies in the Islamic world, a collapse which has no parallel in the West in spite of Luther.

I like the "in spite of Luther." What is Strauss getting at? I turn to Heiko A. Oberman' s magisterial Luther: Man between God and the Devil (Yale UP, 1989, tr. Eileen Walliser-Schwarzbart). On p. 160, Oberman speaks of the new Wittenberg theology that Luther formulated "against the whole of scholasticism": "The whole of Aristotle is to theology as shadow is to light."

Why do I like the "in spite of Luther?" Because I am averse to Protestantism for three solid reasons: it is anti-monastic, anti-mystical, and anti-philosophical (anti-rational). No doubt the RCC is even more corrupt now under Bergoglio the Termite than it was in Luther's day; so if this maverick decides he needs a church, he will have to make the journey to the (near) East. Go east old man! (I plan to report later on Vladimir Lossky's The Mystical Theology of the Eastern Church.) But here's a bit more Oberman to nail down my point about Protestantism (or at least Lutheranism's ) being anti-philosophical:

The knowledge that there was an infinite, qualitative distance between Heaven and earth became an established principle for Luther as early as 1509: all human thought, as noble, effective, and indispensable as it might be to solve problems in the world, does not suffice to fathom salvation because it cannot cannot reach Heaven. Questions of faith must be resolved through the Word of God or not at all. The temptation — or compulsion — to sanctify the words of an and believe in them is satanic. When God is silent, man should not speak; and what God has put asunder, namely Heaven and earth, man should not join together.

Thus not even Augustine, especially Augustine the neo-Platonist, could become the new, infallible authority, because that would merely have been replacing one philosophy with another, substituting Plato for Aristotle. [. . .]

The alternative is clear: whatever transcends the perception of empirical reality is either based on God's Word or is pure fantasy. As a nominalist Luther began making a conscious distinction between knbowledge of tge world and faith in God . . . . (pp. 160-161, emphasis added)

A quick question: given sola scriptura, where in the Scriptures does God deliver his verdict on the problem of universals and come down on the side of nominalism? And if Holy Writ is silent on the famous problem, then it is "pure fantasy" and Luther has no justification for his nominalism.

And what about sola scriptura itself? Where in the Bible is the doctrine enunciated?

Romanists 1; Lutherans 0. And this despite the undeniable corruption of the RCC in those days that triggered Luther's protest.

Is Hegel the Protestant Aquinas?

Substack latest.

UPDATE (5/8/2024). This from Kai Frederick Lorentzen:

You write:

" . . . It does annoy me, however, that Kainz doesn't supply any references. For example, we read:

Hegel was critical of Catholicism at times, in his writings and lectures. For example, he once made a scurrilous remark about the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist . . . .

Very interesting, but what exactly does he say and where does he say it? Inquiring minds want to know . . . . "

That's from § 552 of the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften where it says in context of the thought that religion is for the Selbstbewußtsein [self-consciousness] the basis of ethics and the state:

Es kann aber das Verhältnis der Unfreiheit [of the Selbstbewußtsein on the one and the content of truth on the other side – kfl] der Form nach stattfinden, obgleich der an sich seiende Inhalt der Religion der absolute Geist ist. Dieser große Unterschied, um das Bestimmtere anzugeben, findet sich innerhalb der christlichen Religion selbst, in welcher nicht das Naturelement den Inhalt des Gottes macht, noch auch ein solches in den Gehalt desselben als Moment eintritt, sondern Gott, der im Geist und in der Wahrheit gewußt wird, der Inhalt ist. Und doch wird in der katholischen Religion dieser Geist in der Wirklichkeit dem selbstbewußten Geist starr gegenübergestellt. Zunächst wird in der Hostie Gott als äußerliches Ding der religiösen Anbetung präsentiert (wogegen in der lutherischen Kirche die Hostie als solche erst und nur allein im Genusse, d.i. in der Vernichtung der Äußerlichkeit derselben, und im Glauben, d.i. in dem zugleich freien, seiner selbst gewissen Geiste, konsekriert und zum gegenwärtigen Gotte erhoben wird). Aus jenem ersten und höchsten Verhältnis der Äußerlichkeit fließen alle die anderen äußerlichen, damit unfreien, ungeistigen und abergläubischen Verhältnisse; namentlich ein Laienstand, der das Wissen der göttlichen Wahrheit wie die Direktion des Willens und Gewissens von außen her und von einem anderen Stande empfängt, welcher selbst zum Besitze jenes Wissens nicht auf geistige Weise allein gelangt, sondern wesentlich dafür einer äußerlichen Konsekration bedarf. Weiteres, die teils nur für sich die Lippen bewegende, teils darin geistlose Weise des Betens, daß das Subjekt auf die direkte Richtung zu Gott Verzicht leistet und andere um das Beten bittet, – die Richtung der Andacht an wundertätige Bilder, ja selbst an Knochen, und die Erwartung von Wundern durch sie, – überhaupt, die Gerechtigkeit durch äußerliche Werke, ein Verdienst, das durch die Handlungen soll erworben, ja sogar auf andere übertragen werden können, usf., – alles dieses bindet den Geist unter ein Außersichsein, wodurch sein Begriff im Innersten verkannt und verkehrt und Recht und Gerechtigkeit, Sittlichkeit und Gewissen, Zurechnungsfähigkeit und Pflicht in ihrer Wurzel verdorben sind.

(G.W.F. Hegel, Werke 10, Frankfurt a.M. 1986, pp. 356-357)

Here it is in English:

As the inseparability of the two sides has been indicated, it may be worth while to note the separation as it appears on the side of religion. It is primarily a point of form: the attitude which self-consciousness takes to the body of truth. So long as this body of truth is the very substance or indwelling spirit of self-consciousness in its actuality, then self-consciousness in this content has the certainty of itself and is free. But if this present self-consciousness is lacking, then there may be created, in point of form, a condition of spiritual slavery, even though the implicit content of religion is absolute spirit. This great difference (to cite a specific case) comes out within the Christian religion itself, even though here it is not the nature-element in which the idea of God is embodied, and though nothing of the sort even enters as a factor into its central dogma and sole theme of a God who is known in spirit and in truth. And yet in Catholicism this spirit of all truth is in actuality set in rigid opposition to the self-conscious spirit. And, first of all, God is in the ‘host’ presented to religious adoration as an external thing. (In the Lutheran Church, on the contrary, the host as such is not at first consecrated, but in the moment of enjoyment, i.e. in the annihilation of its externality. and in the act of faith, i.e. in the free self-certain spirit: only then is it consecrated and exalted to be present God.) From that first and supreme status of externalization flows every other phase of externality – of bondage, non-spirituality, and superstition. It leads to a laity, receiving its knowledge of divine truth, as well as the direction of its will and conscience from without and from another order – which order again does not get possession of that knowledge in a spiritual way only, but to that end essentially requires an external consecration. It leads to the non-spiritual style of praying – partly as mere moving of the lips, partly in the way that the subject foregoes his right of directly addressing God, and prays others to pray – addressing his devotion to miracle- working images, even to bones, and expecting miracles from them. It leads, generally, to justification by external works, a merit which is supposed to be gained by acts, and even to be capable of being transferred to others. All this binds the spirit under an externalism by which the very meaning of spirit is perverted and misconceived at its source, and law and justice, morality and conscience, responsibility and duty are corrupted at their root.

BV: I see no reason to think that Kainz is to referring to the above passage from Hegel's Encyclopedia. In a later article I just now found, Corpus Christi and Reality, Kainz writes,

My reference was to one of Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of religion, in which he criticized the Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation, causing a Catholic student to report him to the authorities. Hegel had attempted what we might call a sick joke: he asked whether, if a mouse had come across a consecrated Host and eaten it, Catholics might be obliged to act worshipfully to the mouse, and so forth.

But again Kainz gives no reference! So I consulted Hegel's Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1827), but found no reference to any host-eating mouse in the passage in which Hegel refers to communion, which he calls Genuss which means enjoyment but also partaking of as in the eating or drinking of something. (In some contexts, genies ß ar has the connotation, edible.)

Back to Lorentzen:

Heavy stuff, no? Well, with a little stretch you could say that Hegel is more Lutheran here than Martin Luther himself. Luther's theological approach, as I recently learned from Volker Leppin's brilliant study Die fremde Reformation: Luthers mystische Wurzeln (München 2016: C.H. Beck), was rooted in medieval mysticism in the line of Johannes Tauler and Meister Eckhart, whose idea to give birth to an inner divine child was strongly appreciated by Luther. Regarding extensive philosophical framing of the religious practice he became more and more critical. Here Luther's negative view of the traditional doctrine of the Eucharist finds its place: It's the Scholastics with their detailed Aristotelian understanding of the Eucharist that Luther has a problem with. The flesh and the blood of Christ is absolutely real, but no philosopher can prove how! Instead, the affection of the baptized members of the community validates the ritual. Same problem in the other direction with the merely symbolic understanding of bread and wine, as we find it expressed by Zwingli and his successors like Calvin. Here Luther suspects Neo-Platonist hubris against God.

Lorentzen's take strikes me as basically correct. Here is a little under four minutes of Volker Leppin.

In his 1827 lectures on the philosophy of religion Hegel mentions three views about the host or communion wafer:

According to the first, the host — this external, sensible thing — becomes by consecration the present God, God as a thing in the manner of an empirical 'thing.' The second view is the Lutheran one . . . here there is no transubstantiation . . . the presence of God is utterly a spiritual presence — the consecration takes place in the faith of the subject. The third view is that the present God exists only in representation, in memory, and to this extent he does not have this immediate subjective presence. (Hodgson one-volume edition, U. of Cal Press, 1988, 480-481.)

Alles klar?

This may help: Transubstantion, Consubstantiation, or Something Else?

Also of interest: Must Catholics Hate Hegel?

Herr Lorentzen signs off:

With best wishes!
Ex toto corde

Kai (who likes your recent Sunday meditation - Hyperkinetic and Hyperconnected - a lot!)

Why Swim the Tiber?

A philosophy colleague I thought was Protestant has unbeknownst to me swum the Tiber. I asked him why. Here is part of his response, slightly redacted:

My story is rather boring, I’d wager. Since my late teen years I was nonplussed with the lack of intellectual vigor in most Protestant denominations (Baptist, Methodist, etc.) I began to hear the call of Rome in graduate school. My study of Aquinas, Scotus, Suarez, et al. had an effect. But for whatever reason I simply couldn’t make the move at the time; the blame may have been on Mary’s status, perhaps even the idea of a Pope’s (seemingly) radical authority. Ergo my move to Lutheranism.

But as I continued my studies both philosophical and theological, I began to call into question the ardent “individualism” at the heart of Protestantism. Indeed, I’m not sure there would have been a Hobbes or a Locke without a Luther . . . and while my respect for the latter waned (though surely did not disappear), I began to see the need — if you can call it that — for authority, for something or someone who stands above all the rest, who makes the contested call. I suppose that amount of Hobbesianism stayed with me. While in politics perhaps individual freedom (“rights”, if you will) trumps all, I’m just not so sure that’s the case when it comes to eternity, to salvation. Maybe the stakes are too high, I’m not sure. But I can’t stand on my own.

My colleague has more to say and in a later entry I may address it; the issue of teaching authority, however, is an important one that merits discussion. I will have my say and I invite others to do the same.

Summing up the two points, the private is not merely private, and the official is not merely official.

By the Magisterium we mean the teaching office of the Church. It consists of the Pope and Bishops. Christ promised to protect the teaching of the Church : "He who hears you, hears me; he who rejects you rejects me, he who rejects me, rejects Him who sent me" (Luke 10. 16). Now of course the promise of Christ cannot fail: hence when the Church presents some doctrine as definitive or final, it comes under this protection, it cannot be in error; in other words, it is infallible.

These and other questions legitimately arise in the vicinity of what Josiah Royce calls the Religious Paradox.

One last point for today. My friend and colleague questions above "the ardent 'individualism' at the heart of Protestantism." This point, however, needs some qualification inasmuch as Martin Luther, while anti-Rome, was not anti-Church. He was certainly no maverick theologian preaching his own 'personal,' 'individualistic' truth. In his battle with the Anabaptists, Luther is decidedly anti-papist, but not anti-Church. Luther thought that the Anabaptists, Zwinglians, Schwenckelfeldians, et al. ". . . threatened the Reformation cause because together they formed a common front repudiating Church and society." (Heiko A. Oberman, Luther: Man between God and the Devil, Yale UP, 2006, p. 229)

If what Protestants want is a reformed church, then they want a church, which will have its 'confession,' its compendium of defining doctrines and prescribed and proscribed practices that would be binding upon and thus authoritative for anyone who wanted to belong to that church. If so, the issue should not be framed as one between individualism and church authority, but as between one church authority versus another, for example Calvinists versus 'papists,' 'Romanists.'

Three Notes on David Mamet

Top o' the Stack.

The third note sends the reader to How the Democrats betrayed the Jews. Mamet is right about the Dems. He also rightly notes that Christianity bears some responsibility for anti-semitism:

It began with the fall of the Jewish state in 77 CE. Afterwards, we find the Christian libel that the Jews killed Christ, the medieval information that we slay Christian children to bake their blood into matzoh, that we were the cause of the Second World War; and, currently, that we exist to murder Moslems.

It’s all one horrific attack, and its earliest recorded instance is John 8:44 (of the Jews): “You are of your father, the Devil, and your will is to do your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the Beginning, and has nothing to do with the truth because the truth is not in him. When he lies, he speaks according to his nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.”

John 8:44 is quite a passage. You should crack open your New Testament and read it in context.

Martin Luther's role in the spread of anti-semitism cannot be gainsaid. I am currently reading Heiko A. Oberman's surpassingly excellent Luther: Man between God and the Devil (Yale UP, 2006) wherein we read, on p. 294:

Three days before his death Luther added an "Admonition against the Jews" to his last sermon, held in Eisleben on February 15, 1546. It clearly illustrates the change Luther had undergone in old age. There had been no transformation of friendship into enmity; only the measures proposed for an effective policy of improvement and and conversion had changed: "The Jews are our public enemies; they do not cease to defame Christ our Lord, to call the Virgin Mary a whore and Christ a bastard, and if they could kill us all, they would gladly do so. And they often do." Nevertheless, "we want to practice Christian love toward them and pray that they convert."

Luther's anti-semitism was softened by Christian charity; not so the Palestinian Authority's.

PA: All mosques must teach that extermination of Jews is an Islamic imperative.