Phantastes and the Apology of Aristides

Wow, it has been a LONG time since I posted anything here. This is just a quick note to point out an interesting parallel that I just found between my favorite line in George MacDonald's novel Phantastes and the Apology of Aristides, an early 1st-century defense of the Gospel. In Phantastes, chapter 7, a woman says "I must believe my senses, as he cannot believe beyond his." I've mentioned this quote before in this Blog. I've just finished reading the Apology of Aristides for the first time (translated from the Syriac version), and found this interesting quote, in section XVI: "But the rest of the nations err and cause error in wallowing before the elements of the world [by worshipping elements of Creation instead of the Creator], since beyond these [elements] their mental vision will not pass." I.e. they cannot believe beyond their senses, in contrast to Christians (according to Aristides), who "recognize [and know] the truth".

Self-Publishing

I have officially entered the world of self-publishing. My first offering is a "textbook" for learning New Testament Greek, using the Greek text of 2 John as the basis of discussion. It is based on handouts that I put together for a 6 week crash-course in New Testament Greek that I organized and taught at my church last Spring (2011). We'll have another go-around this coming Spring (2012), for which the Greek text of choice will be Philemon. I'm preparing a new and improved textbook for that, to be self-published just like the 2 John book, only better.

The Abolition of Truth

Evangelicalism is my playground, and I don't tend to play in other playgrounds very often (e.g. Catholic or Pentacostal). So whether "the abolition of truth" is a distinctively Evangelical issue or a more wide-spread phenomenon, I don't really know - I just know what I see in my own playground. Add to all this my uncertainty about whether everything I think of as "Evangelical" matches with the opinions of real aficionados of Evangelicalism, and I start to feel a little uneasy about this blog post. Nevertheless, I think "the abolition of truth" is something that is really going on and is worth comment.

Just because it is one of the more recent pieces I have read along these lines, I'm going to pick on Carl Medearis' post at CNN's BeliefBlog. I don't know much about Medearis, and I don't have any kind of personal beef with him - I'm sure he's a great guy and that he's a sincere Christian doing his best to serve God and His Kingdom. But I think his post is in line with a troubling development in Evangelicalism.

Toward the end of his piece, he says "I believe that doctrine is important, but it's not more important than following Jesus." This sounds good - obviously, simple cognitive assent to a set of doctrines does not cut it ("faith without works is dead"). But in the context of the entire piece, this affirmation that "doctrine is important" leaves me somewhat confused and wondering just what kinds of doctrine he is talking about. His main point seems to be better summed up in the statement that "Encouraging anyone and everyone to become an apprentice of Jesus, without manipulation, is a more open, dynamic and relational way of helping people who want to become more like Jesus — regardless of their religious identity."

Here are two more relevant lines:

What if evangelicals today, instead of focusing on “evangelizing” and “converting” people, were to begin to think of Jesus not as starting a new religion, but as the central figure of a movement that transcends religious distinctions and identities? Jesus the uniter of humanity, not Jesus the divider.

When I used to think of myself as a missionary, I was obsessed with converting Muslims (or anybody for that matter) to what I thought of as “Christianity.” I had a set of doctrinal litmus tests that the potential convert had to pass before I would consider them “in” or one of “us.”

Throughout the piece, Medearis is actually downplaying the importance of doctrine in favor of simply following Jesus: "why don’t we simply invite people to follow Jesus — and let Jesus run his kingdom?" The idea is that we will be a lot more successful persuading/helping people follow Jesus than converting them to Christianity doctrinally, and it will be better for everyone.

But Medearis' piece is just my starting point - I don't want to spend a lot of time dealing with this particular piece, so I'll just sum up my thoughts about it thusly (isn't "thusly" a great word?): I think he's wrong.

It seems to me that Medearis' solution to the difficulties and problems with evangelism and doctrine is riding part of the wave of post-modernism. Like it or not, post-modernism is playing out at the popular level now, even within Christian circles. A central tenet of post-modernism is the abolition of truth. Truth has become so murky and slippery, it's getting hard to hold on to even in the sciences. The secular world is wary of truth claims (i.e. doctrines) in the public arena, and now that wariness is even getting into the sacred world of the Church.

It used to be that doctrine is what identified believers as Christians. Yes, there were various disagreements about various bits of doctrine between this and that denomination, etc., etc., but by and large I think we were pretty good at "majoring on the majors and minoring on the minors" - overlooking doctrinal disagreements on relatively minor stuff in order to be united as the Body of Christ. Now that doctrine is out, what is there to perform the function of identifying believers with Christ? Mission. Following Jesus. The Emerging Church as a whole has a strong sense of mission. I read a piece somewhere recently about college kids calling themselves "Christ followers" instead of "Christians" these days. And Medearis endorses following Jesus in his piece. To be sure, being on mission and following Jesus are great and essential things. My concern is that they are on a trajectory to seriously undermine doctrine within the Church, and along with it, truth.

As Medearis correctly alludes, the concept of truth leads to division. Wherever truth claims are made, some people are going to disagree. If the disagreement is vehement, you can wind up with division, even violence. But is that a good reason to jettison truth altogether? Or even just to downplay it? I don't think so. Yet this is the trajectory that the Church is currently on. We're not there yet, and I don't believe we will ever really get there (Jesus is running his Kingdom, after all), but we are headed in that direction.

Jesus Himself said, "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Light." The missional, Christ-follower movement is doing a great job working out the Way of Jesus, but let's not forget the Truth and Light in the process. To love Jesus is to love not only the Way but also the Truth. Yes, Jesus is a uniter of humanity, as Medearis affirms, but Jesus is at the same time a divider - "Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I have not come to bring peace, but a sword." Jesus himself made plenty of enemies (it got Him killed), and why should we expect to be different? After all, "a servant is not greater than his master". If Jesus could not set aside the Truth for the sake of making more disciples, more Jesus followers, and less strife, then how can we expect to do so?

Of course, there are more and less winsome ways of holding firm to the Truth, and Evangelicals have not always done a great job in this category. By the same token, we haven't always been good at remembering the Way of Jesus. That's no reason to abandon - or to abolish - Truth. It seems to me that equally upholding the Way and the Truth of Jesus is the best way to let the Light of Jesus shine.

Still, this isn't a simple issue of neglecting the Truth. We are witnessing the abolition of Truth, the playing-out of post-modernism. This is a very large issue and it seems impossible to spread one's arms out wide enough to get a good hold on it. Even so, since I'm critiquing the problem, it's my obligation to offer some sort of solution, right? The reason truth is being abolished is because the grounds for knowing the truth have fallen out from under us. A while ago I wrote a little post about this, so I won't go into all the details here. My solution to the abolition of truth is to re-establish the bedrock foundation upon which we can know the truth. But the old bedrock is broken up and crumbling - so what's the new bedrock? My answer in one word: God.

My one-word answer is admittedly kind of cheeky. But after all, if Jesus is the Truth, what is more natural than to posit that God Himself is the bedrock and foundation of all truth? One consequence of this way of thinking is that it absolutely removes humanity from the center of truth. Determining the truth is no longer about me figuring it out based on "self-evident truths" and logical reasoning. The basis of truth is not my own sense-perceptions, nor even the world itself. The basis of truth is God, and God reveals truth to us - and Jesus, who is the Truth, is the centerpiece of that revelation.

There's a bit of Scripture that always bothered me. The people of Israel want to know how they can tell whether a prophet is a false prophet or not, and Moses' answer is, at first blush, stunningly circular: "When a prophet speaks in the name of the LORD, if the word does not come to pass or come true, that is a word that the LORD has not spoken." How is this helpful? If one prophet says "Go to Egypt or you will die" and another prophet says "Stay in Judah or you will die", how can I know which one is telling the truth? The answer essentially seems to be, "You decide which prophet you will believe, and then wait and see." Since the prophets are the mouthpieces of God, you could also sum it up this way: "You decide whether you're going to believe God or someone else, and then see how things turn out." Period. There simply is no room for objectivizing God's revelation, for evaluating whether it is true or not - God is simply not subject to evaluation, and His revelation must simply be taken at face value. This is why Paul says "let God be true though every one were a liar." It's why John says "whoever does not believe God has made him a liar". It's why the author of Hebrews says that "whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists". If we don't believe that God exists, if we don't believe His revelation, we are in effect calling Him a liar because He does in fact exist, and His very existence is the foundation of all truth.

In some ways, this analysis is not very satisfying. After all, I'm taking the existence of God as axiomatic, and what if I'm wrong? This is actually exactly the point: to pursue the question "what if I'm wrong" is to subject God's existence to my own evaluation. It's a non-starter. And this, by the way, is where the Truth becomes divisive. If I believe God, everything is good, since God in fact does exist and by believing Him I testify that God is true. If I don't believe God, I'm in trouble, since God in fact does exist and by not believing Him I testify that God is a liar (because He claims to exist when in fact He doesn't). All of a sudden we have goats and sheep, those who are "out" and those who are "in".

But when and how did God ever claim to exist in the first place? When and how has God ever given us any evidence of Himself? This time I have a two-word answer: the Incarnation. John puts it very clearly:

That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, [...] ³ that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you [...].

Right off the bat, John acknowledges the existence of God as foundational: "that which was from the beginning." He also acknowledges the incarnate revelation of God, a revelation which is commensurate with our own sense-perceptions of hearing, seeing, and touching. This, I think, is the way out of the post-modern mess we're in. The post-modern dilemma is that the objective ground of truth has fallen out from under our feet. The solution is not to abolish truth, but to relocate its foundation away from the world itself, away from our own subjectivity, and to root it in God and His revelation. Jesus is the Truth - this is the starting point. The pinnacle of God's revelation, namely Jesus, was revealed to us by means of sense-perceptions, and this revelation has been passed on down the generations by proclamation ("that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you"), which itself involves hearing (or seeing, in the case of reading).

Of course, there is another Witness to the revelation of God, beyond the repeating proclamations of men: the Holy Spirit. (Ooh, that's a three-word answer.) This is where the rubber really meets the road, I think. If a prophet tells me to stay in Judah or else I will die, how do I decide that he's telling the truth? Ultimately, the Spirit of God must reveal it to me. Notice that we're now back in that lovely circularity again: The prophet is the mouthpiece of God, so it's God telling me to stay in Judah; I'd better believe Him, because by default He is true; I can't evaluate whether the prophet is telling the truth, because that would be to evaluate God; I simply have to decide whether or not to believe; I decide to believe because the Spirit of God has revealed to me that the prophet is telling the truth. Period. I don't evaluate whether the Spirit of God is telling me the truth, or whether it is in fact the Spirit of God who is doing the revealing. We are back where we started: the foundation of truth is God Himself.

That's my take on truth. That's why I think truth should not - in fact, can not be abolished. Truth does not reside on earth or in the human head, it resides in God. "Whoever would draw near to God must believe that he exists". Whoever wants to follow Jesus must pay equal respect to His Way and His Truth.

To Carl Medearis: Sorry, brother, but I think you're wrong.

What do Dante and C. S. Lewis have in common?

It's pretty clear from his academic writings that C. S. Lewis was a big fan of Dante, in particular his Divine Comedy. "I think Dante's poetry, on the whole, the greatest of all the poetry I have read" (in an essay called "Dante's similes" from Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Literature). In this same essay, Lewis categorizes Dante's similes into four groups, with the most Homeric/Virgilian similes in group 1, and the most uniquely Dantesque similes in group 4. Group 3 is pretty solidly Dantesque. Lewis writes:

This intense realism [in Dante's poetry] naturally leads Dante into what is, perhaps, his favourite type of simile, of which I make my third class. It is rather remarkable that Homer and Virgil hardly ever compare an emotion with an emotion. They compare one material thing or action with anothermaterial thing or action - warrior with wolf or words with snowflakes. Or again, they compare an emotion with some external object, the invisible with the visible: a man's mind may bubble like a cauldron. But hardly ever do they say 'Achilles or Aeneas felt at this juncture as you or I, reader, might feel in this or that situation in ordinary life'. If I remember rightly there is only one place in Homer where the content of a simile is psychological [...]. Now it might be predicted that a man who was trying to do what Dante is trying to do, would find frequent occasion for the psychological simile: and in fact, one of the chief memories we bear away from a first reading of Dante is the wealth of passages beginning come colui in which he tries to make us realize something indirectly by telling us that the feeling it excited was like some feeling we know.

Perhaps the best example of this third class of similes is found (according to Lewis) toward the end of Paradiso, when Dante likens his emotions upon seeing the celestial rose to the emotions an ancient barbarian might have had when first seeing Rome, except that Dante's emotions are naturally more intense.

This brings me to the point. I received the set of The Chronicles of Narnia for Christmas and have been working my way through those books, in the chronological order (The Magician's Nephew first, and then The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, etc.). Toward the end of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I was struck by a simile that I think falls into this third Dantesque class, and it is very effective. Lewis is describing Susan and Lucy's ride on Aslan's back as he races toward the witch's castle. I won't quote it at length here, but the simile goes on at length, describing the feeling Susan and Lucy had to the feeling you would have if you were racing through the countryside on a very fast and magnificent horse - except that riding Aslan is much more than riding a horse. There is a very direct realism to this simile (similar to Dante), and it is a simile comparing an emotion to an emotion (similar to Dante), and in my opinion Lewis uses it to very good effect - you feel like you really know what it feels like to ride on Aslan's back.

So, among other things, Lewis shares at least one simile in common with Dante, and it's a very good class 3 simile.

In other news, I finally finished reading the Divide Comedy late last night, after starting it three or four or five years ago!

John, the Apostle to the Post-Moderns

Part 1.

For a while now I've been toying with the notion that one can read the New Testament like a post-modern. By "a post-modern" I mean the kind of person who is at least vaguely aware of the breakdown of Enlightenment ideals of reason and truth. For instance, consider the Declaration of the Independence:

"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness."

The idea was that there are certain self-evident truths (in the case of the Declaration of Independence, they were truths about humanity), and that these could be discovered and agreed upon by all peoples universally. It would then be the task of Reason to build on these basic truths to discover ancillary or corollary truths (for instance, that "it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish" a bad government).

Similarly, in mathematics, it was self-evident that one plus one equals two, and from that we can reason our way to calculus! Or that geometry is conceived of on a flat plane.

Toward the close of the "Enlightenment experiment", these "self-evident truths" were being contested and even overthrown in almost every quarter. Mathematician David Hilbert's project to establish all of mathematics on a self-evident foundation came to an unsuccessful close when the work of logician Kurt Goedel and other mathematicians of the early 20th century proved that it was in fact impossible to establish such a foundation. Albert Einstein's stunning General Theory of Relativity crucially rested on the assumption of a curved geometry. And it became clear that different peoples in different cultures around the world had different ideas about the "self-evident" truths of humanity.

What did all of this mean? Among other things, it meant a rise in pluralism (which can be a very good thing in and of itself), in the belief that there are many truths on equal footing (even if some contradict others) and many kinds of reason, and in the authority of power as a replacement for (debunked) reason in molding social relations.

It also means, in a scientific sense, that the raw data of sense perceptions are the closest we can get to objectivity. Because each of us is admittedly shaped by our past, by our family and friends, by our culture, our perception of the world, and of what is truth, is colored by our experiences and by our expectations. What is truly objective, therefore, if anything, is the world itself. Every sensation we feel (with the five senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell), is a touch of bedrock. If reason is to be somehow maintained (and it's not clear that it can be), it must be built on this bedrock of sense-perception, for it is all that is universally available to every person.

But if truth is to be built on the bedrock of sense-perception, how can we share truth with each other when our sense-perceptions take in different objects? For instance, suppose someone in Africa sees and hears an elephant, and therefore believes that elephants truly exist. What is that to me? If I have never seen or heard an elephant, why should I believe in elephants, if the bedrock of my beliefs is my own experience?

This, I believe, is where language comes into play...

[To be continued...]

Google Wave

Hello, World!

I'm switching from my old blog to this one so that I can interact with Google Wave here. I've figured out how to embed a Wave here, but I'm going to wait to actually embed one until I figure out how to make the embedded Wave read-only (it may be that Google hasn't implemented this possibility yet).

Along with the change in blog URL, I plan to use this blog in a more user-friendly way than I have treated my blogs in the past. In my other blogs, my thoughts have been primarily "notes to self" which others were welcome to wade through if they really wanted to deal with the sometimes unclear and unorganized ramblings of my brain. This blog will be different. I don't promise to blog often, but when I do, it will be clear!

I hope you enjoy it!

Steven M. Lulich
Saint Louis, 2009