Election Reflections

A Twilight Musing

Along with many other citizens, I’m sitting here the morning after the election trying to sort out where the results leave us as a nation, and especially as Christian citizens.  I’m relieved, as are many others, that the long, shabby campaign is finally over and we’re no longer bombarded by political junk mail, phone calls, attack ads, and sleazy discourse.  It has been widely stated that this campaign has been more flawed and ignobly pursued than any in living memory, and many are disillusioned as to the future of our democracy.

But perhaps this is a suitable reminder for Christians that nothing in Scripture indicates we are to expect government to do more than maintain public order and curb criminal activity. According to Paul in Romans 13:1-7, The proper response of Christians to governmental authority is submission to it and obedience to its laws.

Let every person be subject to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by God.  Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment.  For rulers are not a terror to good conduct, but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is in authority? Then do what is good, and you will receive his approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer.  Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath but also for the sake of conscience.  For the same reason you also pay taxes, for the authorities are ministers of God, attending to this very thing.  Pay to all what is owed to them: taxes to whom taxes are owed, revenue to whom revenue is owed, respect to whom respect is owed, honor to whom honor is owed.

An additional duty of Christians toward government is stated in 1 Tim 2:1-3: “I urge that supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings be made . . . for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way.”

Certainly submission to civil authorities, abiding by the law, and praying for political leaders are commands as applicable to us as to Christians of the first century; but it is also true that people of God who live in a democratic republic have broader opportunities to influence government than did our brothers and sisters in earlier times, and therefore we have more responsibility as citizens.  However, such opportunities and responsibilities can easily tempt us to place more emphasis on our own efforts than on seeking discernment from the Lord as to how to conduct ourselves politically.  In response to this or any other election campaign, we should not be elated in pride if the candidate we agree with wins, nor cast down in bitterness if our favored candidate loses.  Especially in the aftermath of such a heated and vituperous campaign as we have just seen, Christians need to rededicate themselves to being models of sincere concern for public officials, whether we voted for them or not; and models of mutual respect as we deal with our social and political differences.  The best testimony that Christians can give at a time like this is to be agents of healing, rather than strident voices of either self-righteousness in victory or bitterness in defeat.

Image: "election chalkboard" by Jeff Warren. CC License. 

A. Thornhill’s The Chosen People: Chapter 2: "God Chose Whom?"

Summary by C. P. Davis [su_dropcap]I[/su_dropcap]n this chapter, Thornhill, after drawing out the distinction between what he terms “individual” and “corporate” election, discusses individual election in Second Temple thought. He begins by first noting that there is a touch of artificiality to these two terms, inasmuch as neither of them is used within Second Temple literature. This, however, should not overshadow the fact that there is a distinction between these two concepts, whatever one might call them. The chapter is divided into four major sections and a summary. We will briefly overview each of the major sections.

The first section, “The Character of the Elect,” is devoted to showing that Jews from the Second Temple period did not necessarily think of election in terms of salvation. The evidence seems to indicate that salvation, though an important corollary, was still just a corollary to the main thrust of election. But if salvation is not the main point, what is? Thornhill argues that the character of the elect fills this spot. In regards to salvation as election, our author writes, “Jews did not necessarily think in those categories” (28). The first bit of evidence comes from Wisdom of Ben Sira, which is clearly not focused on “otherworldly” notions, but rather has an eye to the practical life here and now. Ben Sira is largely concerned with displaying the magnificent qualities of the elect before God. In a telling section of his work (Sir 44:1–50:29), Ben Sira highlights God’s choice of famous Israelites, all of whom have been selected because of some inherent quality each possessed. Moses, in particular, is said to be chosen because he was faithful and meek. Character clearly plays a role for Ben Sira, but what about others?

The idea that character is relevant to election is also found in a number of additional psalms of David, some of which were discovered at Qumran. Psalm 152 and 153 portray David as one that is holy and elect, the two terms being linked. This seems to indicate that election has to do with David’s character before God. This is supported further by Psalm 155 where David is seen pleading with God to save Israel, on the basis of the faithful whom God has chosen. All of these psalms share the common theme of linking personal piety with God’s choice. But there is even more evidence for this concept in 1 Enoch. In fact, it is frequent that one finds election attached to personal disposition in this work. Like the psalms, 1 Enoch links the terms “elect,” “holy,” and “righteous,” in such a way that it is hard to separate the notion of election from an individual’s piety.

  “Chosen for a Purpose” is Thornhill’s second section, and here the focus shifts from character to function. That is, election deals not only with the piety of an individual, but with the role that person is to fulfill here and now. For Ben Sira, Moses was clearly chosen. Now, if one stops there the picture is not complete; one must ask what Ben Sira had in mind with this choosing. Moses was not simply chosen for salvation, but was chosen “so that he might teach Jacob the covenant, and Israel his decrees” (Sir 45:5). Again, the additional psalms of David tell the same story, only here David, not Moses, is the chosen. David is actually said to be chosen against the natural choice of man. God had a preferred choice, and this choice was for the purpose of leading the flock of Israel. As Thornhill points out, this passage is eminently “office-oriented” (37). The situation is no different in the Psalms of Solomon. Here the focus is once more on David and God’s choice of him to rule Israel. Interestingly, Israel is rebuked in this psalm because its sin had effectively cast off blessings that come through submitting to the Lord’s chosen. The only way to fix the problem is to look for one in the line of David to rule Israel.

In the third section, “Corporate Representation,” Thornhill unpacks one final aspect of individual election. Though coming close to corporate election, the concept of representation focuses on the individual as a reflection of the masses. Under this aspect of election God might treat a group in accordance with the stance of an individual. Jubilees offers a number of examples. This retelling of the book of Genesis casts God’s choice of Jacob in terms of obedience and righteousness. It might be noted that character is once again brought to the fore. However, a new development can be seen here: Jacob becomes the paradigm for the covenant community. A similar insight may also be gleaned from Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs. Specifically, the Testament of Simeon 5:1-6 indicates that Levi and Judah represent the remnant of God’s faithful, and both the Testament of Dan and the Testament of Naphtali, though not clearly making the same identification, elevate Levi and Judah in such a way that the same type of picture seems to be present. But perhaps the clearest instances of this corporate representation can be seen in 1 Enoch. Thornhill notes a number of locations that house this idea, among which 1 Enoch 39:6 makes clear that the “Righteous/Elect One ensures the salvation and blessing of the righteous/elect ones” (49).

The final section, “Paul and Chosen Individuals,” seeks to evaluate the writings of Paul in light of the preceding material. Again, the focus is upon Paul’s doctrine of individual election. In Galatians 1:15­–16, one finds Paul speaking of himself as one that was chosen for a specific task. Romans 16:13 portrays Rufus as one who had been chosen as a prominent member of the local church. Adam and Jesus are then presented as the paradigmatic individual representatives (in this case of the entire human race!) in 1 Corinthians 15:20–24. And in the case of Jesus, this issue becomes even more acute when thinking of the atonement (2 Cor 5:18–21). Needless to say, each aspect of individual election, as articulated above, can be found in numerous segments of Paul’s material.

Image: King David in Prayer By Pieter de Grebber (circa 1600–1652/1653) - Web Gallery of Art:   Image  Info about artwork, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15144058

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 4, Section 4.1.3, “The Social Character of Obligation”:

Hare now asks if we, by bringing in human nature in this way, have abandoned the distinctive mark of divine command theory, and simply turned it into a species of natural law theory. The argument has not been that the moral law is natural law strictly speaking, but that the content of at least two of the Ten Commandments has been turned into presumptions against taking God to be commanding us to act in a certain way, and these presumptions are taken from what fits human nature. For Scotus, the first table is natural law strictly speaking (except for the “seventh day” prescription). The command to love the neighbor would also be natural law strictly speaking, since we are necessarily commanded to love God, and to love the love of God, and therefore to love the neighbor’s love of God. But Scotus believes in the possibility of reprobation, so there is a restriction needed: we are commanded to love the love of God in the neighbor “at least by anyone whose friendship [God] is pleased to have.” We can and should have a defeasible presumption that we and the neighbor are not among the reprobate, because the judgment is God’s and not ours. Moreover, since we are necessarily commanded to love God, and since human nature is specified in terms of this end, we can say that God necessarily commands what fits human nature. But Scotus does not think that any of the specific commands in the second table can be deduced from this. There are two different possible kinds of deduction from what fits us. There is a deduction of a presumption in two cases, but in no case is there a deduction of an absolute prohibition.

A second point is more important. The argument so far doesn’t imply the moral law or moral obligation is deducible from human nature even in the case of the prohibitions on killing the innocent or on lying. There can be a presumption against doing something and still not an obligation not to do it. Here we return to Adams and Darwall and their notion of the social character of obligation, which we can accept with one qualification. The social character is that we are obligated to someone, or by someone. [Murphy objects that, whereas tort law always has a tortfeasor and a victim, and so has a “bipolar” structure, this is not true of criminal law, which can have a “monadic” structure in which there may be no victims at all (God and Moral Law, 126). If this is right, we should not say that obligation as such is bipolar. But there is good reason, Hare thinks, explored by Darwall in The Second-Person Standpoint, ch. 5, to think that moral obligation is more like tort law in this respect.] The opposite of “obligatory” is “forbidden.” It is not at all an easy matter to delineate this social character, but the general point seems right. The qualification is that we should not derive the agent’s obligation from the goodness to the agent of the relation that would be damaged by violating the obligation. That would be another form of eudaemonism. But that aside, suppose we start with the way Adams puts the basic idea, that, where there is a violation of an obligation, one “may appropriately have an adverse reaction to it.” The question is: Who is it whose appropriate reaction is here in question? Human beings have limited information, and limited sympathies. Even if we did know the preferences of others, we would tend to prefer the preferences of some people to the preferences of others in a way not countenanced by the moral law.

We might ask, why should we assume that the person to whom we are accountable in an obligation is the same as the person who generated the obligation in the first place? There is a tradition of argument, in Kant, for example, and also in Suarez, that God is legislator, executive ruler, and judge, and that moral law assumes that it is the same person who carries out all three functions. This tradition lay behind the discussion of God’s authority in Ch. 2. In Kant’s terms, the author of the law (which we repeat in our own wills) has to have a holy will, the administration of the law has to be by the “supersensible author nature,” and the judge has to be able to see into our hearts; and there is one person, and it is the same person, who does these three things. We might ask: “Why could it not be three different persons?” After all, in human societies it can be an advantage to have these functions divided. Hare is content to make this modest claim: If there is only one God, that one God is the most appropriate person for these three roles.

If this argument works, or something like it works, we can say that moral obligation requires not just a presumption against doing something but an obligator, and that deducibility from human nature and non-divine facts alone therefore has to be denied. Now we can return at last to Murphy’s dilemma. The first horn proposed that, if God is free to command what God wants, the non-moral and non-divine facts are inert. But if, as Hare has argued, God is constrained though not determined by facts about our nature, these facts will not be inert. The second horn of the dilemma proposed that it is odd to say that we are obligated not by the maximal set of non-moral, non-divine facts (where these include facts about our nature), but God is so constrained. The response is that this is not odd at all. We and God are different. Both God and we are constrained by non-moral and non-divine facts, and neither God nor we are obligated by those facts. But we are obligated by God’s commands. God does not require an obligator at all, but is the obligator. Even in those cases of moral law (if there are any) in which God’s command is constrained by the non-moral, non-divine facts, we are obligated not by those facts but by God’s command.

Intuiting the Beauty of the Infinite: Ramanujan and Hardy’s Friendship and Collaboration

The Man Who Knew Infinity, a recent movie based on a book of the same name by Robert Kanigel, recounts the short but remarkable life story of India’s great mathematical prodigy Srivivasa Ramanujan (henceforth SR). Although what follows is a response to the film, the book is well-worth reading, filled with luscious prose such as in this sample: “The Cauvery was a familiar, recurrent constant of Ramanujan’s life. At some places along its length, palm trees, their trunks heavy with fruit, leaned over the river at rakish angles. At others, leafy trees formed a canopy of green over it, their gnarled, knotted roots snaking along the riverbank.”

The movie begins by quoting Bertrand Russell (a character in the movie itself): “Mathematics, rightly viewed, possesses not only truth but supreme beauty.” It then shows SR in India, doing his mathematics (without much formal training) while trying to eke out a living for his family. His passion and talent for math are obvious; trying to describe maths (the preferred British abbreviation) to his wife, he says it’s like a painting, but with colors you can’t see. There are patterns everywhere in mathematics, he adds, revealed in the most incredible forms. Finding himself in need of someone who could understand and appreciate his ground-breaking work, SR wrote G. H. Hardy, legendary professor at Cambridge, and eventually Hardy invited SR to traverse the ocean and come work with him there.

This incredible opportunity required SR to leave his wife behind and endure the long journey and culture shock of moving to England, which contributes to a compelling narrative, with many twists and turns I’m not discussing but that make for a terrific, sometimes heart-wrenching tale. Despite the trials and challenges (including a war), what’s amazing was how much work SR and Hardy were able to do over the next five years—publishing dozens of groundbreaking articles.

The divergent worldviews of the two men make the dynamics of their friendship particularly fascinating to chronicle. SR was a devout Hindu whereas Hardy was a committed atheist—though the first time Hardy says this to SR in the movie (“I’m what’s called an ‘atheist’”), SR replies, “You believe in God. You just don’t think he likes you.” Incidentally, this is a key structuring question in C. S. Lewis’s moving novel Till We Have Faces: whereas both Psyche and Orual believe in the gods, Psyche believed they were marvelous and loving, but Orual thought they were only dark, unkind, and mysterious. In Rudolph Otto’s terminology, Orual was familiar with the tremendum aspect of the Numinous, but Psyche with both the tremendum (the awe-inspiring mystery) and the fascinans aspect of the Numinous. Fascinans is the aspect of the Divine involving consuming attraction, rapturous longing—and is often connected to the imagination, beauty, even poetry.

The diametric difference in SR’s and Hardy’s ultimate worldviews proves to be related to a central aspect of the plot. Hardy is adamant about the need to show step-by-step proofs of SR’s conclusions, while SR is depicted as functioning on a much more intuitive level. I’m not concerned for now what artistic liberties the moviemakers might have taken in this regard, but it is true that SR would often write down the conclusions of his work and not all the intervening steps. There may be at least a partial explanation of this which is fairly prosaic: paper tended to be in short supply for SR in India. But it’s at least intriguing to consider the explanation advanced in the movie: SR possessed incredibly strong intuitive skills. Mystifying Hardy, SR could just see things that few others could and felt little need to offer the proofs.

Hardy—though incredibly impressed with SR’s abilities, likening him to an artist like Mozart, who could write a whole symphony in his head—repeatedly says that intuition is not enough. Intuition must be “held accountable.” Proofs mattered, to avoid projecting the appearance of SR’s mathematical dance or art as on a par with conjuring.

It isn’t that SR’s intuitions were infallible. His theory of primes, however intuitively obvious, turned out to be wrong. Still, though, many of his intuitions were eventually vindicated and proved right. One among other interesting questions that SR’s reliance on intuitions raises is how much discursive analysis they involve. It’s a vexed question among epistemologists whether intuitions are a lightning quick series of inferences, or something more immediately and directly apprehended. The quickness with which they come naturally lends itself to the latter analysis, but perhaps there’s something to the former option—particularly if much of the analysis is done beneath the level of conscious awareness. In the Sherlock Holmes stories, for example, Sherlock’s inferences would come so quickly that Watson characterized them as resembling intuitions; likewise, realizing it’s sometimes easier to know something than to explain the justification for it, Sherlock himself recognized the way knowledge can have features that resemble more immediate apprehendings than just the deliverances of the discursive intellect. A couple of real-life Sherlocks, Al Plantinga and Phil Quinn had a dust up some years back on whether basic beliefs are formed inferentially or not.

The difference in Hardy’s and SR’s styles, we come to see, is related to their divergent worldviews. Exasperated at Hardy’s recurring disparagement of intuition as lacking in substance, SR finally blurts out, “You say this word as if it is nothing. Is that all it is to you? All that I am? You’ve never even seen me. You are a man of no faith. . . . Who are you, Mr. Hardy?” The underlying dynamic that brought this exchange to a head was the way SR connected his own identity to those intuitions. Hardy had asked SR before how he got his ideas. Now SR gives his answer: “By my god. She speaks to me, puts formulas on my tongue when I sleep, sometimes when I pray.”

SR asks Hardy if he believes him, and adds, “Because if you are my friend, you will know that I am telling you the truth. If you are truly my friend.”

In Till We Have Faces, we find a similar scene. Orual can’t see the gold-and-amber castle that Psyche tells her of, but Orual also knows that Psyche had never told her a lie. One issue here is testimony, and the conditions that need to be in place to take it as reliable. Of course someone could be telling the truth, the best they understand it, and still be unreliable—for perhaps they’ve unwittingly made a mistake, or they’re delusional or confused.

At any rate, Hardy’s reply is transparent: “But I don’t believe in God. I don’t believe in anything I can’t prove.”

“Then you don’t believe in me,” SR responded. “Now do you see? An equation has no meaning to me unless it expresses the thought of God.”

Hardy remained skeptical of SR’s theology, but couldn’t dispute with the results. He would go to bat for SR to get him a fellowship at Cambridge, and in his impassioned defense of SR’s accomplishments he extolled his incredible originality, by which SR could apprehend so much truth otherwise missed. On Hardy’s view, the creativity and originality, though they provided SR a lens through which to see, didn’t subjectivize SR’s findings; rather, they were a tool for seeing farther and seeing more.

This contrasts with, say, Simon Critchley’s interpretation of the poetry of Wallace Stevens. On (Critchley’s) Stevens’s view, the only reality we experience is mediated through categories furnished by the poetic imagination, rendering our perspectives products of the imagination and, thus, subjective—yet still able to be believed despite their fictive nature. This is what some might call a more “postmodern” perspective than Hardy’s more traditional view that there’s an objective reality we’re able to discern, however imperfectly and through a glass darkly.

In real life, when Hardy died, one mourner spoke of his “profound conviction that the truths of mathematics described a bright and clear universe, exquisite and beautiful in its structure, in comparison with which the physical world was turbid and confused. It was this which made his friends . . . think that in his attitude to mathematics there was something which, being essentially spiritual, was near to religion.”

Hardy didn’t believe in God, but he did believe in SR and in the objectivity of mathematical truth. He wrote of his Platonism in his Mathematician’s Apology, and the movie captures this too. In one of his defenses of SR, he related the story of the way SR said mathematical truths are thoughts of God—a view parallel to, say, Plantinga’s view that modal and necessary moral truths are also thoughts in the mind of God. Then Hardy added, “Despite everything in my being set to the contrary, perhaps he’s right. For isn’t this exactly our justification for pure mathematics? We are merely the explorers of infinity in the pursuit of absolute perfection. We do not invent these formulae—they already exist and lie in wait for only the brightest minds to divine and prove. In the end, who are we to question Ramanujan—let alone God?”

Though math, on Hardy’s view, is discovered, not invented, it may take those with prodigious talents to uncover its deepest truths. Speaking of which, near the start of the film Hardy had said, “I didn’t invent Ramanujan. I discovered him.” Even more than the math, this is a movie about men and their remarkable friendship and fertile partnership across radically divergent and conflicting paradigms. The humanity of the film is its best feature of all.

After five years of collaboration between these unlikely friends, SR returned to India, having contracted a fatal disease—likely tuberculosis. Within a year he died, at the age of just 32. Hardy was crestfallen when he heard the news, and grieved the loss deeply. Near the end of the movie, he reflected on his collaboration with both SR and another colleague, Littlewood, saying he’d done something special indeed: “I have collaborated with both Littlewood and Ramanujan on something like equal terms.”

Paraphrasing Hardy, he once commented that out of 100 points, he would give himself 30 as a mathematician, 45 to Littlewood, 70 to Hilbert. And 100 to Ramanujan. In the year SR spent in India before his death, he poured his brilliant findings into another notebook. It was lost for a while, but when found, the importance of its discovery was likened to that of Beethoven’s “10th Symphony.” A century later, these formulas are being used to understand the behavior of black holes.

Power, Holiness, and the Ark

The Ark of the Covenant was created according to God’s specifications to house three items: the two stone tablets on which were written the Decalogue; a container of God’s miraculous manna from the wilderness wanderings; and Aaron’s rod that budded as evidence of his divine appointment as High Priest.  The Ark was the center of God’s Presence in the Tabernacle (and later the Temple), and therefore it was to reside in the Holy of Holies where only the High Priest could enter.  However, during the period of the Judges, the Ark was lost to the Philistines, and when they returned it to Israel, it came to rest in Kiriath-jearim, not far from Jerusalem.  It was still there when David was made King of Israel, and one of his earliest acts (I Chron. 13:5-14) was to move the Ark to Jerusalem in anticipation of the building of the Temple.  The attempt proved to be abortive, and David’s experience in that failure marked a significant turning point in his understanding of God and his relationship to Him. During the period of David’s life before he was made King, he was on the run from the first king of Israel, Saul.  When Saul was rejected by God because of his disobedience, David was anointed King secretly while he was still a boy.  He experienced a brief ascendency when he came forward to slay the giant Goliath, and then was made a commander of Saul’s army.  But when he incurred Saul’s jealousy and wrath, he was forced to flee and became the leader of a rag-tag group of malcontents and lived as an outlaw in caves and wilderness areas.  During that period, he wrote such Psalms as the 18th, which focuses on God’s powerful deliverance of David from his enemies (including Saul, according to the heading).  This reflects the understandable focus of David on God’s power and might, an emphasis that was still there when he proposed to move the Ark to Jerusalem.  Consequently, he made some major errors that forced him to adjust his focus to recognize the importance of God’s holiness.

The Ark was designed with metal loops at each lower corner, so that poles could be inserted through them to enable the Ark to be carried without its being touched, a procedure which God had specified to underline the holiness of this special artifact that represented the very Presence of God.  In disregard to this command about how to transport the Ark, it was put on an ox-cart, and when the oxen stumbled at one point in its journey, Uzzah, one of the men driving the cart, quite naturally put out his hand to steady the Ark and keep it from falling.  Although Uzzah seems not to have had any active intent to show disrespect toward the Ark, he was struck dead by the Lord for committing sacrilege.  Indeed, God’s judgment was on the whole situation wherein David and the leaders of Israel had either forgotten God’s command as to how the Ark was to be carried, or thought it unimportant.  David acknowledges his great error when he makes a second, successful effort to bring the Ark to Jerusalem (I Chron. 15:1-16:1).  After specifying that only the Levites could transport the Ark in the way prescribed by God, David observed: “Because you did not carry it the first time, the Lord our God broke out against us, because we did not seek him according to the rule” (15:13).  So “the Levites carried the ark of God on their shoulders with the poles, as Moses had commanded according to the word of the Lord” (v. 15).

But David’s immediate response to the slaying of Uzzah is not submissive (“David was angry because the Lord had broken out against Uzzah” [I Chron. 13:11]), and he obviously had to work through that anger to realize the enormity of his offence against God’s holiness.  A part of his coming to that understanding was a feeling about God that he had probably not experienced before: “And David was afraid of God that day” (13:12).  All of David’s experience of God before this point, from his being given the power to defeat Goliath to divine deliverance from his enemies in the wilderness, seems to have evoked love for the Lord and gratitude toward Him, but not fear.  Why was it important for David both to love and thank God and to have fear evoked by radical exposure to His holiness?  The answer is akin to the reason that we must understand and accept not only God’s generous grace and mercy toward us, but also embrace the fact of His wrath toward sin, His judgment.  To see only God’s mercy and goodness is to ignore what it cost Him to overcome His righteous wrath and judgment toward sin and sinners and to be oblivious to His inherent holiness that makes it impossible to allow sin in His presence.  Impossible, that is, unless God Himself does something to make it possible.  And the ultimate Good News is that God sacrificed a part of Himself to pay the price demanded by His wrath.

Only a shadow of this truth was available to David under the Old Covenant, and his crucial experience with the Ark drove him to the immediate acceptance of the fact that God’s holy Presence in the Ark could be accommodated only by the yearly sacrifice of atonement within the Holy of Holies that was the Ark’s ordered dwelling place.  When it finally came to rest in the Tabernacle tent David provided for it in Jerusalem, David had finally come to realize that God’s holiness properly evoked fear and trembling, as well as gratitude that God had provided a way for His holiness to dwell with His people without destroying them.  Herein was the seed of the complete Good News that a full, final, and eternally sufficient sacrifice had been made through the death of God’s own Son so that God in the integrity of His holiness could dwell among His people through the Holy Spirit without destroying them.

What relevance does David’s experience with the Ark have for us?  Perhaps it is that like him, we must come to recognize, fully accept, and deal with the wrathful side of God.  It is common for modern-day Christians, in their zeal to present God in the most attractive terms, to ignore or minimize the fact that He has a terrifying side that insists on keeping the reality of sin and judgment vividly in our consciousness.  If we succumb to the temptation to minimize the presence of evil and sin in this fallen world, we cheapen what it cost God to bridge the gap between His holiness and our captivity to sin.  Without the application of what Christ did, God has no choice but to exercise His wrathful judgment on sin.  God’s love and mercy can overcome the effects of sin only when we fully acknowledge it to be what it is and confess that because of His inviolable holiness it separates us from God.

Thanks be to God that under the New Covenant of the blood of Christ, God’s holiness is no longer embodied in an untouchable box of death, but now makes its redemptive dwelling within us.  What a terrifyingly wonderful manifestation of God’s grace!

image: By Domenico Gargiulo - http://entertainment.webshots.com/photo/2276876770037029906rWGmjt, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2291904

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 4, “Can We Deduce Morality from Human Nature?” Section 4.1.2: The Fittingness of the Law to our Nature

Recall Adams’ answer to the famous arbitrariness objection to DCT: God’s command is not arbitrary in the contemporary pejorative sense because it commands what is good, but it has discretion over which good things to require. To make this picture work we need an account of goodness. Chapter 1 suggested that a person who says a thing is good expresses that she is drawn or attracted by it and says that it deserves to draw or attract her in that way. But now we need an account of the criteria for this deserving. Adams proposes a single criterion for when “good” means “excellent”: a thing is good to the extent that it resembles God. But while this fits many kinds of excellent things, it does not fit all. In particular it does not fit the goodness of natural kinds. Take two different species of plant that are different; there is resemblance to God in life, but also in such differences, but the differences aren’t differences in likeness to God. There’s a different goodness in the way a particular plant within a species differs from another. This is what follows from Scotus’s picture that we get more perfection as we move from genus to species, and then yet more as we move from species to each individual member, to the haecceity. Resemblance to God does not seem well equipped to explain all this difference in the good.

Here are four plausible ways of thinking of the relation of this difference to God. First, God created it. This suggests not simply that God is the source, but that God delights in the variety; perhaps this is one of the reasons for the “very good” in Genesis 1. Second, these various beauties draw us to God. Chapter 1 claimed that what finally draws us and deserves to draw us is God and what draws us to God. This makes the account dynamic rather than static, and that is an improvement, because it connects better with the account of the meaning of “good,” which is based on the idea of being drawn. But the goodness of the variety does not reside only in its drawing us to God. It also does not reside only in its having been created by God, which would make the value too transparent to God and insufficiently intrinsic. The third way of thinking is metaphysically the most ambitious. Perhaps we learn about God from the creation in the same sort of way we learn about an artist from his or her work. It’s not that the features resemble him, but the work is, nonetheless, utterly characteristic. It manifests his aesthetic preferences and aesthetic personality, which is in a sense present in the work. Two different plant species might manifest God in slightly different ways. This is close to Adams, but different. Manifestation and resemblance are not the same because of this sense of God’s presence in the manifestation. A fourth picture might be that each kind of flower species, indeed each plant, is a part of the biotic whole, which God loves. This is different from the previous picture because it makes the value of the parts derive from the value of the whole. We can add that God intends a whole new heaven and earth, not just new humans as co-lovers, but a new creation. Perhaps non-human species have goodness in their destination just as individual humans do, though there are large difficulties with this view, such as dinosaurs.

The moral law is good for humans because it fits human nature. Scotus says the precepts in the second table of the Ten Commandments are “exceedingly in harmony” with the first practical principles that are “known from their terms,” even though they do not follow from them necessarily. Scotus is saying that the second table fits our end, but is not deducible from it. He standardly describes this relation of “fit” in aesthetic terms. This account of goodness allows us to give some content to the way in which the good, at least the good for humans as humans, overridably constrains what we should take to be obligatory.

This suggestion is partly the same and partly different from the one Geach made in his famous article about the good. He distinguished “predicative” adjectives like “red” from “attributive” adjectives like “good,” on the grounds that the meaning of attributive adjectives can’t be detached from the meaning of the nouns to which they are applied. He held that “good” in phrases like “good human” is a purely descriptive term, and we know its meaning just by knowing the meaning of “human” and “human act” and so by knowing what humans and human acts are for.

Hare concedes that we do get a constraint on what we should take to be good for humans from knowing what humans are, and that this in turn constrains what we should take to be commanded by God. But Hare wants to make two points against Geach. First, the term “good” in “good human” and “good human act” has, in our ordinary language, more than a purely attributive use. For a Kantian a good human act is one that displays a good will, and this is defined in terms of the whole procedure of the Categorical Imperative. Hare thinks we should concede that “good” in “good person” is sometimes used attributively, and that in “good human being” it may be used both ways. Second, even the attributive use is more than merely descriptive. To ascribe a function to a chisel is normally to say how it is to be used, and to say that a chisel is to be used for cutting fine grooves in wood and is not to be used as a screwdriver is to make a prescription.

Adams’ DCT needs a constraint on what we should take to be commanded by God in order to overcome the objection from arbitrariness. If God’s command makes something obligatory, should we think that we might be commanded, and thus obliged, to fly a plane into a skyscraper? No, says Adams, for this could not be the command of a loving God. What counts as “loving” is settled by ordinary valuation, for Adams, but Hare thinks this seems wrong, for reasons he’ll give later. But a related idea seems right: we should probably not take something as commanded by God if it does not fit the characteristic kind of loving of God done by a rational animal. This would imply a presumption against taking an innocent human life, though it wouldn’t rule out such a command and at the same time God changing the circumstances. Also, recall various ways Abraham’s context is different from ours (no life of Christ to emulate, for example). At any rate, taking innocent life is inconsistent with the feature of our rational-animal agency that features each of us going through a particular trajectory.

This point comes helpfully into connection with the four Barthian constraints mentioned earlier. Our trajectories involve our being individual centers of agency, being in time, being free, and being language-users. This is often put in terms of our personal narratives. We don’t know in advance the good works God’s prepared for us, and God is free with respect to the route selected for each of us, and the duration of that route. God has discretion, but chooses in accordance with our good as pilgrims. But the question of what access we have to the nature of this good is a different one, though also an unavoidable one. It’s natural to assume the trajectory requires a full lifetime, so killing would be a premature termination, unless God were to indicate to the contrary.

This gives us one example of a constraint from our nature on what we count as good, if we are to be able to respond to the divine call to be co-lovers. There is a form of argument here that can be extended to other examples. The form of argument is transcendental in the Kantian sense; it argues from the conditions of possibility of some fact that is taken as basic. Thus the argument from providence is a transcendental argument from the “fact of reason,” that we humans (creatures of sense and creatures of need) are under the moral law. The present argument argues backwards from the fact that we are recipients of God’s call to conclusions about what we (and God) have to be like to make this possible. But then it reverses direction, and asks what constraints are placed on what we can take to be divine commands by the fact that we are this kind of people.

Now consider the proscription on bearing false witness. There is a plausible argument, this time from the last of the four Barthian constraints, that we are language-users. Our language is a system of external signs, used to communicate internal thoughts. But then we have to be able to assume that these signs are being used most of the time to communicate thoughts correctly. What is at issue here is not whether the thoughts communicated are true, but whether what is communicated corresponds to what is thought true. The plausible part of Kant’s argument is that the institution of language-using requires that we be able to trust that most of our fellow language-users are communicating what they believe to be the truth, or what they really want. So there is a presumption against telling a lie, because if anyone, anytime, with any degree of frequency, may lie, this undercuts the very institution of language, which is necessary for lying as well as for telling the truth.

In the case of lying, as in the case of killing the innocent, we are left with an overridable constraint. Consider by contrast the exceptionless kind of constraint offered by the “new” natural law theory, which proposes eight basic goods, as Porter puts it, “elemental enough to be regarded plausibly as self-evident to all and yet provided with enough content to provide an immediate basis for practical reflection.” The dilemma that Porter poses for this kind of theory is that either the list is sufficiently general to be self-evident, but then it does not have enough content significantly to guide action in the exceptionless ways the theory proposes, or it is specific enough to guide action in this way, but then it is not self-evident to all. To pose this dilemma, however, is not to deny that goods such as life and truth pose some constraint on moral obligation.

Some Things I’ve Learned by Living this Long

A Twilight Musing

Occasionally at this stage of my life, I think perhaps I’ve lived this long because there were things God wanted me to know that I wasn’t ready to accept when I was younger.  Perhaps you would like to know what a couple  of those things are.

Lesson 1: No amount of beating up on myself will compensate for my imperfections.  Early in my life, I was so full of my own virtues that I was too insensitive to feel guilty.  In my middle years, although I was increasingly and disappointedly aware of my failings, open admission of guilt was dangerous to my self-image; so I suffered the pain of my self-indictment privately, for the most part, seeking somehow to turn my guilt itself into an exonerating virtue.  As I edged into my mature years, I began to realize that in spite of my being a nominal believer in the unique efficacy of Christ’s sacrificial death to cover all my sin, I also harbored the unstated conviction that I could earn more of God’s love and favor than I already had by compiling a record of good behavior sufficient to forestall or minimize guilt.  Of course, I failed, and then I was ensnared in guilt again.

The solution, I found, is to embrace and rejoice in the process that John presents in his first epistle: “If we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us.  If we confess our sins, He is faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (I Jn. 1:8-9).  I had always read this process of confession and forgiveness as a kind of emergency medical care to cover those moral cripples who just could not make progress in the New Life they had been given.  But I now think that this process of confronting our sin, confessing it, and experiencing forgiveness is an integral and ongoing part of our maturing relationship with God.  Embracing this daily process (not achieving behavioral perfection) is what John means when he admonishes us to “walk in the light,” for it is there that “we have fellowship with one another [as fellow sinners] and the blood of Jesus . . . cleanses us from all sin” (I Jn. 1:7).  There is freedom in that light to fully accept that being redeemed is an ongoing process that absorbs our sins so thoroughly that we continually stand pure before Him.  So the  continual recognition of our sinfulness is not a source of perpetual shame, but a source of marvel and rejoicing, because we are walking miracles of God’s grace.  There is no longer any need to cover up or deny our lapses, for now our struggle with weakness is an ongoing opportunity to relinquish the attempt to glorify ourselves and to glorify God instead.  As Paul says in II Cor. 12: 9-10, I can “boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me . . . .  For when I am weak, then I am strong.”

Lesson 2: Waning strength provides new focus for my life.  In the energies of my youth, I had the luxury of being able to devote attention to a number of significant activities and goals, such as graduate school, church activities, and maintaining and enjoying my marriage.  In my late twenties I started my first full-time faculty position, children were added to the mix, and I even managed to participate in a boys’ mentoring group and sing in a community choir.  I didn’t always get my priorities right in the distribution of my time among these activities, but that difficulty arose from my having enough mental and physical resources to pursue multiple applications of my energies.  This prime of life ability to attempt doing an amazing number of things was exciting, but it sometimes prompted pride if I was successful in one or more of these areas.  When in later middle age I began to experience the diminution of some of my skills and the opportunities to display them, I discovered just how much pride I had invested in getting recognition for them.  Therefore, I did not accept that diminution gracefully, and I somewhat bitterly lamented my losses, particularly the decrease in quality of my singing voice.

But at least that forced acceptance of reality made me better oriented when real old age set in to be content with the opportunities that were left to me, some of which I wouldn’t have known how to appreciate earlier in life.  My writing of these Musings is a prime example of a new opportunity that God opened up as a surprise at just the right time in my life.  I spent a lot of time in my earlier life trying to find things I thought God wanted me to do, probably putting more emphasis on my ego-pleasing choices than on God’s will and direction.  Now that I have less energy to seek out areas of service, He has shown me that when I wait on Him, He brings things to me.

So, as one old preacher was reported to have said when asked how he was doing, “I’m just repentin’ and praisin’.”

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 4, “Can We Deduce Morality from Human Nature?” Introduction & Section 4.1.1: The Non-Deducibility of the Law from our Nature:

Introduction: Hare has been arguing that eudaemonism (in the four forms discussed) does not have a proper place for what Scotus calls, following Anselm, the affection for justice. The present chapter is about a different dividing question in moral theory: can morality be deduced from “natural” facts, or from statements about the “natural” properties possessed by people and actions? The term “natural” here is problematic. The first section of the chapter discusses Scotus’s view that the moral law can’t be deduced from human nature, but is exceedingly fitting to it. In the second and fourth sections the denial of deducibility from “natural facts” will extend to a dispute with contemporary theorists. The third section examines RMH’s take on natural facts. The second section looks at Adams’ attempt to deduce a way to fix the reference of “good” from facts about what most humans most of the time think is good. Hare calls this “consensus deductivism.” The fourth section looks at the attempt by Foot and Hursthouse to deduce conclusions about moral goodness from facts about the characteristic human form of life. Hare calls this “form-of-life deductivism.” No entirely neat separation between these two kinds of view is possible.

4.1 SCOTUS.

4.1.1: The Non-Deducibility of the Law from our Nature

Scotus rightly denies that the moral law can be deduced from human nature. Note, first, it is deducibility that is denied, rather than some weaker relation such as fittingness. Scotus accepts that the moral law, such as the second table of the Ten Commandments, fits human nature exceedingly well, but he insists nonetheless that this is natural law only in an extended sense, not in the strict sense, because God is free to command creatures with human nature otherwise. Natural law in the strict sense is “known from its terms” or deducible from what is known in this way.

Second, it is moral law that is denied to be deducible from human nature, and not goodness. His examples of moral law are from the second table of the Ten Commandments, though we should not assume that he intends this list to be exhaustive. Third, the term from which deducibility is denied is human nature. But this has to be understood in a way that is not already conceptually subsumed under moral law. If we define “human being” as “a being under moral law,” or if we make being under moral law essential to the kind “human being” (as Kant does), then there will be a trivial deduction from the premise that a being is human to the conclusion that it’s under the moral law. On the other hand, if we deny that humans are by nature under the moral law, then we have simply denied deductivism from the beginning and begged the question.

Here’s a third alternative. We can grant that human beings are by nature such that they are fulfilled, or they reach their end, by loving God. Scotus says our end is to be condiligentes, co-lovers, which is to say that we enter into the love that is between the three persons of the Trinity. This human love of God, however, is distinct from the way angels love God or God loves Godself; humans love God as rational animals. We can ask whether we can deduce the moral law from our end specified as being condiligentes.

One prominent case Scotus gives is the commandment “You shall not steal.” Private property, he points out, is presupposed by the commandment but is not essential to human beings. There is no deduction of the proscription of theft just from human nature, and the divine command is to that extent contingent; there is no necessity here binding the divine will.

But stealing is not the most difficult case for someone who wants to maintain the contingency of the second table. What about killing? God could bring a killed person back to life, but perhaps more needs to be said. The question of whether the command not to kill is contingent tout court is not settled by the question of whether God could command otherwise given merely human nature. We can ask, “Could God command the killing of the innocent if not just human nature, but our circumstances stayed the same; in particular, if we stayed dead once killed?” In a later section Hare will take this up.

Random Ruminations on Spiritual States of Mind

Rumination 1 - What is the answer to the question of why humans should feel guilt?  Why should one not just accept his mistakes, remedy those he can, and not worry about the others?  The answer lies in an analogy:  One whose sensitivities to music have not been developed may be satisfied with a mediocre performance; he feels insufficiency in a musical rendering only when his sensibilities are enhanced to show him what is possible.  In the same way, only divine perspective can show sin, because it is an offense against God.  If one is content to limit his view of things to this world, he may very well not feel guilt, since the consequences of his wrong actions in that light are only practical, not spiritual.

Rumination 2 - It is indeed true that one can tell no difference between trying to be “good” by his own will power and obsessively seeking to be made “good” by God’s power; because in both cases one is primarily concerned with an image of himself, rather than with his being an instrument of God to bless others.  He is concerned with his own goodness rather than God’s, and his prayers are for God to help him be “good” in the eyes of others in order to glorify himself, rather than God.

Rumination 3 - A major barrier to yielding to God and the work of His Spirit within us is that it’s initially humiliating.  It’s hard to admit that we need Someone Else to chart our course, and that the good we do is the result, not of our righteousness, but of His formative power.  But a consoling corollary is that God also takes on Himself, through Christ, even our bad actions and their consequences.  Thus, we can give Him all of our actions with the confidence that He understands their nature and their outcomes even better than we do.  We should not make it our primary goal to “be” virtuous, but to let His power—which we freely choose and seek to understand—produce virtue within us.

Rumination 4 -  Habitual melancholy is such a luxurious feeling, because it is egotistically romantic, connoting (in some distant way, above logic) one’s isolation from ordinary people.  Occasional melancholy may be only thoughtful sadness, but perpetual melancholy is likely to feed a scornful outlook (all the more dangerous because often veiled).  If melancholy shields us from the world, it can also hide us from ourselves.

Rumination 5 - Only the pure in heart will see God.  One is indeed responsible for his actions, but his ultimate responsibility is for what, from the depths of his heart, he wants.  The choice that is wholly his is whether or not he will desire something more than his “heart of darkness.”  He can either nurture that dark heart, or cry out beyond it.  Worst of all, he may choose to pretend it doesn’t exist.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 3, “Eudaemonism,” Section 3.3.4: The Fourth Defense: Agent-Transcendent Eudaemonism

Finally, the Aquinas-Porter argument can be revised in a way that is not liable to the objections to the first step and the second. Suppose we say that the agent’s encompassing good is not some more general good, like the good of the polis or of the natural world or of God’s friends, that necessarily includes her individual good, but the divine itself, which is by its own nature self-transcending. For Scotus, the end for human beings is to enter into the love that the persons of the Trinity have for each other, or to become co-lovers. This means that the highest activity is one of will, prepared by intellect, since Scotus accepts the principle that nothing is willed except what is previously cognized. This view should be distinguished from a view that happiness involves both the intellect and the will, but the activity of the will (the loving) is consequent on the highest activity, which is the beatific vision in the intellect. On Scotus’s view we can say that, of faith, hope, and love, the greatest is love both here and in heaven. On the other view, love may be the greatest of the three down here on earth, but in heaven the greatest will be a state of the intellect. The proposal we are now considering is that the agent identifies her happiness as entering into a kind of loving that is itself self-transcending. Such divine self-transcendence can be seen within the Trinity.

The proposal we are considering would appear to overcome the difficulties with the two steps of the Porter-Aquinas argument. First, it doesn’t beg the question about motivation. It allows that we have both a self-perfecting and a self-transcending love. But it holds that the second comes out of the first, because we identify in perfecting ourselves with a being that is itself self-transcending. Second, it does not hold that there is a necessary harmony between the self-indexed interests of an agent and the wider groups in which she is included.

The proposal has been stated in theistic terms, but can also be found in non-theistic terms. It might seem that if you identify the best (the most perfect) state of yourself as loving, then there will no longer be a tension between perfecting yourself and spending yourself for others. But there’s a difficulty here, which discloses itself in the following dilemma: either this is a single-source theory (deriving all motivation from my own happiness and perfection) or it is not. We have interests that do not reduce to virtue, or to conforming our lives to the Categorical Imperative for its own sake, and it’s completely appropriate for beings like us to have these interests. The point was made earlier that Kant should have allowed that self-indexed motivation includes more than the satisfaction of sensuous inclination. Now a single-source theory can to some extent accommodate such motivation. Aristotle, for example, can insist that self-love of the right kind is consistent with various forms of self-sacrifice. But he also insists that these are forms of self-love. His picture of motivation is that, if the agent were to ask herself “Why am I doing this?” the fundamental answer would be “because I am assigning myself the best thing.” Scotus and Kant would say that this answer is unacceptably self-regarding. But there is a dilemma here. Some followers of Aristotle disagree with his point about self-love and say the virtuous person should be called “good-loving.” This is unobjectionable, but now we no longer have a single-source theory. In Scotus’s terms, God will be loved both for God’s own sake and for the sake of the union. So either we stick with a single source theory that seems objectionably self-regarding, or we allow that self-indexed motivation properly remains, and then we have a double-source theory again, like that of Kant and Scotus.

The point is that the self-indexing of some goods needs to remain. An attempt to get rid of all such goods is Maimonides’ notion we’re absorbed into God. But surely there’s a sense in which we lose ourselves on that view; we lose, in Scotus’s term, our haecceity. One way to put this is that the fourth defense of eudaemonism paradoxically ends up compromising the aspiration to happiness.

So there is a dilemma for this kind of “agent-perfective” account of eudaemonism. It is the best form of eudaemonism; one free from many of the objections raised in this chapter. But it still faces the present dilemma. Suppose we think that an agent should be motivated by the desire to perfect herself, and suppose that being perfected is becoming the kind of person who is not always motivated by self-indexed goods. Do we now have a form of eudaemonism that is not “unacceptably self-regarding”? The problem is that we need to know whether this is a single-source account of motivation. If it is, and this account does not retain motivation toward goods that are self-indexed and necessarily so (such as the particular way of loving God that is unique to an individual), goods that could be (counterfactually) in tension with God’s own good, then the account is, we might say, “unacceptably self-neglecting.” But if it keeps these goods, then it is no longer a single-source account. By the definition at the beginning of this chapter, this means it’s no longer a form of eudaemonism. But what we need in our substantive theory is an account that gives us both kinds of goods.

The Tragedy of Solomon

A Twilight Musing

Recently I reread the account of King Solomon’s reign (I Kings, chapters 3-11) and was once again impressed with the tragic story of a man who began exceedingly well but ended disastrously. The story of his rise and decline is marked by the three appearances of God to him at the beginning, middle, and end of his long life as king. These messages from the Lord to Solomon occur at the humble and noble beginning of his reign (3:3-14), at the vulnerable middle when he was at the peak of his success (9:1-9), and at the shabby end (11:9-13), after he had succumbed to the temptations of lust and self-indulgence. God’s very best blessings to Solomon turned out to be snares to him. Therein we have the essential elements of a literary tragedy: the story of a man with heroic virtues whose gifts are pursued to excess and lead to the destruction of both himself and the people who have benefited from his virtuous actions.

The seeds of Solomon’s fall are there even before God appears to him the first time. In I Kings 3:1, we read, “Solomon made a marriage alliance with Pharaoh king of Egypt. He took Pharaoh’s daughter and brought her into the city of David until he had finished building his own house and the house of the Lord and the wall around Jerusalem.” This youthful marriage to a pagan bride is a foreshadowing cloud the size of a man’s hand that eventually matures into a veritable storm of apostasy by Solomon. It is ironic that reference is made to it just before the heart-warming story of the initial appearance of God to the young king, in which he pleases God by humbly asking only for “an understanding mind to govern your people” (3:9). God then assures him that he will receive not only what he has requested, but riches and honor as well (3:13), and his marriage outside of God’s people is pushed to the background.

The effect of this act works away like a dormant disease which will break out to pollute Solomon’s great achievements. Even though he must have known that he had violated God’s command not to intermarry with pagan foreigners, perhaps he rationalized that by bringing her to Jerusalem to live, her exposure to the holy project of building the Temple would temper her pagan upbringing. But far from being influenced for good by Solomon, his Egyptian wife progressively separated herself from him. First, he built her a house attached to his own, but separate (7:8), and afterward she moved even farther away, going “up from the city of David to her own house that Solomon had built for her” (9:25). The building of a separate house by Solomon for his Egyptian wife prefigures his building pagan shrines for the 700 wives and 300 concubines who led him astray at the end of his life (11:1-8).

But there is no direct reference to this shadow in the account of the celebratory events (8:1-11) leading up to the Lord’s second appearance to Solomon. The wise king is at the height of his glory and success, having just completed the building of the Temple and being at rest from all of Israel’s enemies. The whole tone of the occasion was triumphal, with the procession of the priests carrying the ark of the covenant to the Holy of Holies in the Temple, accompanied by all the treasures accumulated by David in his preparations for the building of God’s house. Moreover, there were sacrifices of “so many sheep and oxen that they could not be counted or numbered” (v.7). These actions were followed by Solomon’s magnificent dedicatory prayer (8:12-61), which stands at the peak of his success and constitutes the crux of his career, looking both backward to what has been accomplished, and forward to what will come.

It begins by acknowledging that the God who enabled Solomon to build the House of God is too great to be contained within it (in contrast to pagan idols); but embedded in the prayer were repeated references to the future sins of the people and their need for forgiveness. The primary focus in the prayer was not, as might be expected, on the physical splendor of the edifice, nor even the acts of worship that would be carried out daily there, but on the various circumstances by which the Israelites in the future would be separated from the Temple and would need to repent and pray for forgiveness. I suspect that Solomon did not realize that he was prophetically projecting the future rebellions and infidelities of God’s people, nor that these would spring from his own turning away from the Lord.

Solomon begins the body of his prayer (8:22) with three positive petitions, based on God’s faithfulness to His promises and His covenant with David and the people of Israel: (1) that God will perpetuate the placing of a descendent of David on the throne of Israel; (2) that God will honor His promise to manifest His Presence in the Temple built for Him according to His specifications; (3) and that God would always hear the prayers of His people toward this Temple, wherever they may be. This first section of the prayer is concluded by the general request, “And listen to the plea of your servant and of your people Israel, when they pray toward this place. And listen in heaven your dwelling place, and when you hear, forgive” (8:30). This concern with God’s forgiving the sins of the people is echoed repeatedly in the following seven specific requests for God to hear and respond to the people’s prayers, four of them explicitly mentioning sins against God and His covenant that require God’s forgiveness before the people can be restored. (The remaining three reaffirm God’s intent to defend the righteous among His people and to punish those who mistreat them.) Thus, Solomon’s petitions are weighted toward the likelihood that God’s people will need to pray for and receive forgiveness for straying from God’s covenant.

In view of this cautionary tone of Solomon’s prayer, what the Lord says to the king when He appears to him a second time (9:1ff) is especially poignant, for Solomon is then at his maximum vulnerability to pride, having just completed both the Lord’s house and his own magnificent palace (the building of which, by the way, took twice as long as for the Temple; see 6:38-7:1). He is renowned for the wisdom God gave him, and he has been freed from any threat from his enemies (see I Kings 4). He has every human reason to assume that he is in good standing with the Lord. At this point,

“the Lord appeared to Solomon a second time, as He had appeared to him at Gibeon. And the Lord said to him, “I have heard your prayer and your plea, which you have made before me. I have consecrated this house that you have built, by putting my name there forever. . . . And as for you, if you will walk before me, as David your father walked with integrity of heart and uprightness . . . , then I will establish your royal throne over Israel forever . . .. But if you turn aside from following me . . . and do not keep my commandments . . . but go and serve other gods and worship them . . . then I will cut off Israel from the land that I have given them, and the house that I have consecrated for my name I will cast out of my sight . . . .” (9:2-7).

As is typical in literary tragedy, the hero is given warnings that, if they had been seen and heeded, would have enabled the great man to avoid the errors that led to his downfall. The writer of I Kings has revealed these warnings to the reader, but they are unperceived by the hero, for he is caught up in the apparent security of his successes and is ripe for his fall. In the aftermath of God’s second appearance to Solomon, a good deal of text is devoted to picturing the opulence and glory of Solomon’s reign, including the visit from the Queen of Sheba, who further fuels Solomon’s blind pride by declaring that his wealth and wisdom exceeded all that she had heard about him (10:6-7). All of this description of Solomon’s magnificence makes abruptly shocking what comes next in the narrative.

By the time God appeared to Solomon the third time (11:9-13), he had fallen into the twin pits of lust and degenerate idolatry. We are told that “when Solomon was old his wives turned away his heart after other gods, and his heart was not wholly true to the Lord his God,” for he built high places for the worship of abominable deities “for all his foreign wives” (I Kings 11:1-8). The story of this most favored king of Israel coming to so wretched an end, in spite of his great God-given wisdom, should raise the elements of pity and fear that great tragedy evokes: pity that Solomon allowed his blessings to become pitfalls, and fear lest we do the same.

Image:Idolatry of Solomon by Sebastiano Conca. Public Domain.

A. Thornhill's The Chosen People: Chapter 1: "The Missing Link in Election"

No, this chapter is not discussing the problems with the political election cycle in the United States. Instead, A. Chadwick Thornhill focuses upon the doctrine of election, and how the Jewish mindset most certainly affected its formulation in the New Testament. Specifically, Thornhill narrows his topic to the way in which the apostle Paul’s concept of election was formed. Thornhill begins by discussing the New Perspective on Paul (NPP), and how certain elements of this theory should be retained. His main contention is that most scholars who deal with the NPP never deal directly with the concept of election. It is his goal to remedy this situation.

Thornhill begins by defining three theories of election: “national and unconditional,” “national and cooperative,” and “remnant-oriented and conditional.” The first theory develops election along the lines of a once-saved-always saved mentality. Specifically, it views the election of Israel as a holistic enterprise, whereby God chose this people for salvation. Anyone who is an Israelite is therefore saved by the nature of his covenantal relationship with Yahweh. Supporters of this theory (e.g., Sanders) often seek to adjust the common view that salvation in Israel was based upon works-righteousness. The second theory views Israel’s soteriological position as a tension between two poles: obedience and election. This is the least clearly defined category of the three. The third position argues that unconditional election of the nation Israel was never the point of the covenant. Instead, by studying Qumranic material and Pseudepigraphical works, it becomes clear that a conditional view of the covenant was the predominant Jewish view. Developing this third theory, then, is the major focus of the present book.

    The first major question addressed deals with how Second Temple Jews viewed their election. This is an important area of study because it leads to a second question: how might this understanding have affected the apostle Paul’s writings? He was, after all, a Jew of this time period. Thornhill believes that it is inappropriate to assume that Paul necessarily stood against the tide of all Jewish thought, just because he argued against some ideas. It is illogical to assume that due to a few instances of disagreement, Paul would have denied all of his Jewish background. Indeed, if this concept were taken to its logical conclusion then one would have to argue that Paul stood even against the Old Testament! At the same time, Thornhill is cautious not to overstate this point. He is clearly aware that Jewish thought at this time was rather amorphous. Nevertheless, there are certain widespread characteristics that he will seek to illustrate in subsequent chapters.

With this in mind, our author establishes a criterion by which he will proceed: each work from Second Temple Judaism that he will analyze will be addressed on its own merits and only then will it be compared with Paul’s material. The hope is that this methodology will offer a necessary safeguard against reading a preconceived notion of Paul’s theology into surveyed material and vice versa. The goal is to develop a picture of the zeitgeist of the Second Temple Jewish world, in relation to the doctrine of election. This goal is to be reached by analyzing three sources: the Dead Sea scrolls, the Apocrypha, and the Pseudepigrapha. In each case, an attempt will be made to expose those ideas that seem to be held by a broad sector of the Jewish world.

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 3, Section 3.3.3, “The Third Defense: Thomist”

The third defense of eudaemonism is drawn from the picture of Aquinas’s account of the relation between morality and happiness described by Jean Porter. She starts with a difficulty about understanding Aquinas, which is that he seems both to affirm eudaemonism and to assert that charity loves God for the sake of God and the neighbor for the sake of the neighbor, and not for our own sakes. Porter tries reconciling these. Aquinas expresses his eudaemonism by saying we all act with the goal of happiness, which sounds like a denial of the picture Hare attributed to Scotus and Kant featuring two fundamental motivations behind human action. But Aquinas also says that the love of God for God’s own sake is the distinctive mark of charity, and that charity towards the neighbor requires us to promote the neighbor’s good for the neighbor’s sake and not our own. There’s a paradox here. Porter tries resolving it in two steps.

The first step is to say that whatever overarching good the agent loves as her final end, she must regard it as in some way a meaningful goal for her own actions. But the Kantian would say this begs the question. For Kant and Scotus there are two fundamental sorts of motivations. For Aristotle and Aquinas-Porter, just one. For Aquinas the actualization of one’s final end is natural, but for Kant it’s free, not in this sense natural. Scotus says if an angel had the affection for advantage but not for justice, it wouldn’t be free. It begs the question to assert that we know, just on the basis of understanding human agency, that there is just one final end.

It might be thought almost unavoidable to say any action of mine must be directed at my own good, but recall some distinctions here. The first, from Butler, is that there are two senses in which every good aimed at by an agent might be a good for the agent, and the first does not imply the second. The first sense is that the good aimed at is good for the agent just because it is aimed at. In the second sense, the good for the agent is an object whose definition includes internal reference to the agent. Now, the moral law occasions in the agent a feeling of respect. Respect is my feeling, but it is not occasioned by a self-indexed object. Rather, it is occasioned by the moral law, which has no reference to me at all. The second distinction was between cases where the explicit description under which the object is loved is self-indexed and cases where it is not. Here Aquinas-Porter and Scotus-Kant would share common ground in saying that the self-indexed description need not be present to the mind of the agent. But what is at issue between the two positions is the former question: must the object be self-indexed if it to be intelligible to an agent? Aquinas-Porter says yes, and Scotus-Kant no.

Aquinas-Porter gives a second step in the proposed solution to the apparent contradiction of asserting both eudaemonism and the thesis that we should love God and the neighbor for their own sakes. The solution is to point to the fact that the individual belongs in a nested series of comprehensive general goods: the political community, the natural world, and God’s friends.

Both sides agree God brings virtue and happiness together, but the anti-eudaemonist insists this is not a necessary connection, but one due to God’s providential care. This makes a difference to the kind of gratitude we have to God. It also reminds us of the possible conflict, and the need for a ranking. Seek ye first the kingdom of God and his righteousness, and all these other things shall be added unto you.

Is it the case that the interest of the individual necessarily coincides with the true interests of the polis? Not necessarily, for what the polis might need is for me to hand the reins over to another, yet that might not be in my own interest. Even if we leave the Aristotelian framework, the possibility of tension between the true interests of the individual and of the state arises in the so-called problem of dirty hands. The state needs in its leadership people who are willing to compromise moral standards in a way that is inappropriate for private individuals. Moral compromises need to be made, and this is a cost to moral character that our leaders have to bear. Or consider surgeons who have to cut into living tissue on a regular basis, and who have to develop a certain kind of hardness of heart if they are going to do their jobs. This, too, is a kind of sacrifice of moral sensitivity they make. Or take the case of soldiers who have to be willing to become hardened to some degree about killing other people. It seems likely that there is some conflict between the interests of the state and of the individual. Remember the modal claim of Porter-Aquinas that there can’t be a conflict. For Kant divine assistance is needed to ensure there’s no conflict.

The second level in the nested series is the level of the natural world, or cosmos. Can we say that the interests of all the individuals who suffer and die in the course of evolution are somehow realized in the development of human beings? It seems doubtful that the whole created order exists for our sake. Kant’s own position is one that sees no natural coincidence of interest, but he agrees that humans can’t survive or flourish without the laws of nature in place.

The third level in the nested series is the community of the redeemed, the “friends of God.” Is it possible that the loss of salvation by some persons might be to the glory of God, and that charity might therefore require them to accept damnation? In previous generations, Calvinist congregations would regularly contain people who thought they were among the reprobate, but nonetheless attended divine worship with devotion, and no doubt tried to do their duties recognizing them as divine commands. Is such a frame of mind incoherent? If not, then surely there is not a necessary coincidence between my greatest good, in this case my salvation, and the glory of God. This mere possibility is enough to reject the necessary connection of the modal claim.

The point is just that God is not constrained here by necessity any more than we have necessity at the other two levels of the nested series. (I think I disagree with Hare here.) About all three levels we can that, if there is a harmony, it is a contingent harmony established because God is both, in Leibniz’s terms that Kant also uses, sovereign of “the kingdom of nature” and sovereign of “the kingdom of grace.”

Random Ruminations about God

A Twilight Musing

How presumptuous of me to think that I can love mankind more than God does!  And such a presumption is the basis of my difficulty in accepting the uniqueness of salvation through Christ.  I assume that it is my respect and regard for other people which makes it difficult to consider the possibility that good people can be lost, even if they are sincerely moral and religious by their own lights.  But my reluctance is really an unwillingness to relinquish my own finite viewpoint for God’s infinite one.  It is a refusal to admit that if there are spiritual realities, they are not going to be changed by my not accepting them.  It is foolish to refuse a physician’s services because you consider your illness unfair.  By the same token, if sin is a mortal illness and God’s grace is the answer, my view of whether human beings ought to be held responsible is irrelevant—this aside from the fact that God has not obligated me to make the leap from believing that “good” people can be lost to figuring out who is going to be damned.

My choice is whether to accept the fact that God is Love.  If He is, then He only is the measure of real concern for others; if He is not, He is either not worthy of consideration, or merely a construct of human ideals.  I cannot presume to show God’s love apart from God’s truth; I cannot consider the eternal good of my fellowmen apart from God’s perspective.  The last and most stubborn stronghold of myself is my determination to maintain my own sense of fairness rather than God’s.  If our warfare is spiritual, the weapons and the tactics are no more of my choosing than is the battle itself.  If it isn’t, the “life of the Spirit” is a psychological illusion and a distraction from the concerns of the “good life.”

Rumination 2 -  God absolutely IS, but He is also BECOMING.  He will not stand still for us to analyze Him, nor will He permit us to stand still while we seek Him.  Only that which is in motion lives; stagnation does not belong to God. There is infinite variety in God, but it is variety with an unchanging core.  Only when we see Him as He is will we fully realize how that which is Immutable is also an endless chain of newness.  Until then, we must be content to accept even that which appears to be mutable as an integral part of His design.  That He is always one step ahead of us assures us that the unknown is His; we need beware only that which we know.

Rumination 3 - It is difficult for humans to put God’s wrath in perspective, because we see wrath only as we ourselves exercise it to fulfill a need.  God’s wrath is absolute, springing from His absolute Holiness, and not something needed to build up His image or as an emotional outlet.  Man understands only his own self-satisfying wrath and is confused because he imputes that kind of wrath to God.

Rumination 4 - The mind of God, it seems to me, is more analogical than logical.  Mere logic is too neat and tempts one to believe that he has reached the limits of consideration.  God prescribes from absolute, unconstructed wisdom; humans can prescribe (be dogmatic) only by the artificial frameworks of logic applied to the supralogical  Word of God.  God’s absolute edicts are probably altered when they are put into human language; at any rate, humans should be careful not to dilute them even further by trying to enclose them completely by logic.  Logic can systematize truth in a limited way, but it must be tempered by a more spiritual way of understanding God.

Summary of Love of God: A Canonical Model: Chapter 9: “Who Is the God Who Loves?”

In chapter nine of The Love of God: A Canonical Model, Peckham summarizes the five key aspects of the foreconditional-reciprocal model of divine love that he has developed in the book and then focuses on key questions concerning God’s essence in light of how he loves. God’s love is volitional, evaluative, emotional, foreconditional, and ideally reciprocal. These features highlight the “give-and-take relationality” that exists in human-divine love. God’s choice to love means that he allows himself to be affected by the disposition or actions of his creatures and to engage with humans in profoundly emotional ways. God’s love for humans is undeserved but not without conditions in that it is only those who reciprocate God’s love that enjoy a particular love relationship with him for eternity. God works toward a bilateral love relationship with humans but does not unilaterally determine who will reciprocate his love. Such coercion is incompatible with genuinely loving relationships.

Is Love God’s Essence?

The bulk of this final chapter focuses on ontological issues that are key to determining what God must be like if he loves in this particular manner. The first of these issues is the relationship of divine love to God’s essence. In light of 1 John 4:8, 16 (“God is love”), many have postulated that love is God’s essence. Because of the mysteries associated with divine essence, Peckham takes a more cautious approach in asserting, “God’s character is love, and God is essentially loving” (p. 252). All that God is and does is congruent with divine love. The members of the Trinity have enjoyed an eternal love relationship with each other, but this “essential intra-trinitarian love relation does not extend to creatures” (p. 253). God is not morally or ontologically bound to love his creatures but voluntarily chooses to do so. This explanation preserves divine freedom in contrast to pantheistic conceptions that view God’s love for the world and his creatures as necessary to his being.

Divine Love and Perfection

Peckham next examines how the foreconditional-reciprocal model of divine love accords with a proper view of God’s perfection. Some forms of the transcendent-voluntarist model often view God’s enjoyment of the world as a defect that impinges on divine perfection, but Peckham argues that while God is ontologically independent from the world and self-sufficient, he also finds enjoyment in the world’s goodness and takes displeasure in evil. Because of his abundant love for humans, God has “voluntarily bound his own interests to the best interests of his creatures” so that the quality of his own life is interwoven with the course of human history (p. 256).

God has also extended significant creaturely freedom to humans, allowing them the choice to reciprocate his love or not to do so. The fact that humans act in ways that either positively or negatively impact God reflects that God himself is not the causal agent of these actions. God’s will is not “unilaterally efficacious,” evidenced by the ways in which “free beings actually affect the course of history, often in ways that are not in accordance with God’s ideal decisions” (p. 258). Peckham provides a helpful distinction between God’s “ideal will,” referring to what would occur if all agents acted in perfect conformity to his desires, and his “effective will,” which refers to what God evaluatively wills after taking into account the wills and actions of his significantly free creatures. God allowed Adam and Eve to not obey his ideal will in favor of granting them this creaturely freedom. The death of Jesus was “God’s will,” not in the sense that he desired it to happen but because it was part of his larger plan of salvation. We clearly see numerous instances in Scripture where God’s desires are not fulfilled (cf. Ps 81:11-14; Isa 66:4; Ezek 18:23; Matt 23:37-39; Lk 7:30), and such occurrences are necessary as a means of securing genuinely reciprocal divine-human love relationships.

Peckham’s distinction between “ideal will” and “effective will” contrasts to how more deterministic models distinguish between “desired will” and “decretive will.” In this, God genuinely desires that all be saved but has not decreed that all would be saved. Peckham raises the question, “If God’s will is unilaterally efficacious and God wants to save everyone, why does he not do so?” (p. 262). God ought to be able to determine every individual to accept his love and be saved, but the reality is that God acting in this way would be incompatible with the biblical ideas of significant human freedom and the bilateral nature of divine-human love.

Divine Love, Passibility, and God’s Constancy

Peckham also addresses how passibility and constancy can both exist within God’s person. Reiterating from his fuller discussion in chapter six, Peckham affirms that God is affected by the disposition and actions of his creatures and argues that explaining the strongly emotional language used to describe God in the Bible as anthropomorphic lacks a clear canonical rationale. God’s relational nature is reflected in the give-and-take aspects of his interaction with humans as he calls for response to his initiatives and then relents, rewards, or punishes based on what those responses are. Peckham is careful to qualify that his view of passibility does not deny divine immutability when understood as the constancy of God’s character and promissory purposes. God has voluntarily chosen to enter into the joys and sufferings of the world and does so “evaluatively and voluntarily but not essentially” (p. 269). God allows himself to be affected by others while also maintaining “ontological independence from the world.”

Divine Love and Theodicy

Lastly, Peckham examines divine love in relationship to the issue of theodicy and argues that the foreconditional-reciprocal model has advantages over the other models in outlining why there is evil in the world if God is good, all-powerful, and all-loving. The determinism of the transcendent-voluntarist model asserts that God predestines all evil but does no evil himself in that God wills these actions for different reasons. Peckham contends that this perspective is unsuccessful in attempting to avoid making God culpable for evil, asking how God could be good if he could have unilaterally willed to prevent evil without hindering his purposes and why God did not unilaterally determine that he be fully glorified before his creatures without evil. The pantheism of the imminent-experientialist model goes in a different direction, positing that God is not responsible for evil because he was unable to prevent it. This view offers an impoverished view of God and also raises the question of whether or not evil will ever come to an end.

The foreconditional-reciprocal model explains that God is omnipotent but that possession of all power does not require the exercise of all power. God freely grants power to other agents whose choices he does not unilaterally determine. God’s voluntary allowance of evil testifies to his loving nature. Since love must be free and cannot be determined, the necessary context for genuine love requires the possibility of evil and the rejection of God’s ideal will. Peckham writes, “God allowed evil, while passionately despising it, because to exclude its possibility would exclude love” (p. 274). Though creatures suffer greatly, God suffers more, and the voluntary suffering of God on the cross ensures that evil will be eradicated in the eschaton and that the universe will continue in “unceasing love and uninterrupted goodness.”

John Hare’s God’s Commands, Chapter 3, “Eudaemonism,” Section 3.3.2: The Second Defense: Stoic

We turn next to a different defense that the eudaemonist might make, one that derives from the Stoics. The idea is that the notion of reason brings impartiality with it, and so our good as rational beings requires that we follow the moral law. This is the sort of idea that says achieving the good of all, as you do if you act impartially, just is achieving your own good properly understood.

The key is “properly understood.” The good or “benefit” has to be distinguished from the merely “convenient.” Goods when properly understood are shared or common to the excellent. We have from the Stoics a “double-source” view of motivation. They distinguish motivation by self-concern and motivation by concern for others. Both of these develop. They have a technical term for this that we can translate “appropriation.” We can distinguish two kinds of appropriation: personal and social. The first is the development that takes us from self-preservation to valuing reasoning as a way to get the things that fit our nature, such as health and wealth, and then to valuing reason in its own right. The second is the development through progressively wider social groupings, until one cares for every human being.

This is a double-source theory in a sense, but not in the sense introduced earlier. This is because the Stoics were eudaemonists, and held that both forms of appropriation enable one to see better a single thing, one’s own chief good, which remains the source of all motivation. But here’s a problem: It’s true that if I already see my aunt, for example, as worth the same as my mother, then I will see that a benefit to my aunt is worth the same as a benefit to my mother. But if I don’t already see this, it is unclear how reason can require me to see it. What the argument needs to show is that it’s irrational to prefer benefiting those near to those far. Why should reason move to this? In fact, for that matter, why should reason prevent me preferring benefiting myself to benefiting someone else?

A contemporary philosopher who makes an argument rather similar to the Stoic one is Peter Singer. He thinks that we can get on an “escalator of reason,” and find ourselves moving toward the standpoint of the impartial spectator or ideal observer. From this standpoint, which Sidgwick calls the point of view of the universe, it makes no difference to the moral decision whether the interest being served is mine or someone else’s. But Singer also accepts from Sidgwick that reason allows me to get off the escalator at any point. He denies the argument he attributes to Kant that reason by its nature requires universalizing, or willing the maxims of our actions as universal laws. The point is that Singer acknowledges that we can’t get a convincing argument from the nature of reason itself for moving to the moral point of view. There is nothing irrational in itself, he says, about preferring oneself.

A number of other contemporary philosophers have tried a similar strategy. One is Korsgaard, whose conception of the “normative question” Hare’s been using all along. She thinks that Kant intended the formulation of the Categorical Imperative in terms of universal law to give us, all by itself, the moral law. But she thinks Kant failed to see that prescribing universal law does not yet settle the question of the domain over which the law of the free will must range. The domain could be the desires of the moment, for example, or of the agent’s whole life. She thinks she can provide an argument for extending the domain over every rational being. She starts from the observation that what separates humans from other animals is their ability to act on the basis of a self-conception, what she calls a “practical identity,” conceptions like “sister” or “philosopher.” She thinks practical identities create unconditional obligations, and this is one place where her view can be questioned.

Cohen raises the case of the idealized Mafioso. Not doing some horrible deed might result in his loss of identity, yet surely we are better off not having to say that the Mafioso has an obligation to do the horrible thing. Korsgaard qualifies her claim by adding that the Mafioso has a deeper obligation to give up his immoral role. This is because the activity of reflection has rules of its own, and one of them is the rule that we should never stop reflecting until we have reached a satisfactory answer, one that admits of no further questioning. Following this rule would lead the Mafioso to morality.

Hare thinks the argument breaks down here. There is nothing in the nature of reflection as such that requires giving priority to the way humans are the same (namely, that they have practical identities) over the ways they are different. Even if it’s true that valuing your practical identity implies valuing the human capacity to set a practical identity, you can still value your differences from other human beings more. So, alas, it’s possible to be a fully reflective Nazi. To be sure, we can always define “reflection” or “reason” in such a way that it brings morality with it. But there does not seem to be a morally neutral account of reason or reflection that allows us to deduce morality from it. The history of attempts to give such an argument is not encouraging. If, though, we accept that the moral law is God’s command, then we can see a way to argue for it from the premise that reason tells us that, if there is a God, God is to be loved and obeyed (a proposition, recall, Scotus argued, can be known from its terms).

Image: By Paolo Monti - Available in the BEIC digital library and uploaded in partnership with BEIC Foundation.The image comes from the Fondo Paolo Monti, owned by BEIC and located in the Civico Archivio Fotografico of Milan., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=48067347

Learning from Broken Relationships”

A Twilight Musing

My wife suggested that I write a piece on ways that I have learned from my mistakes. That opens a broad field of possibilities, but probably the most fruitful area would be bungled relationships, particularly when close friendships have been injured, sometimes permanently. The bottom line of what I learned from these snafus is that confronting others to point out their mistakes requires not only courage, but also compassion and awareness of one’s own vulnerability. Gal. 6:1-2 presents the standards for correcting a brother or sister: “You who are spiritual should restore him in a spirit of gentleness. Keep watch on yourself, lest you too be tempted. Bear one another’s burdens, and so fulfill the law of Christ.” I would like to relate a couple of instances of my own mishandled confrontations and the painful lessons I learned from them, detailing how those mistakes could have been avoided had I fully understood the passage just quoted.

The most painful of these was the rupture between myself and an intimate friend who was one of my closest confidants. He was a minister and a psychological counselor of great ability with whom I shared many common perspectives and tastes. In fact, the combination of our both having some academic and religious standing and enjoying fairly frequent stimulating and satisfying conversations meant that the intensity of our mutual reinforcement weakened our ability to challenge one another when we needed to. For either of us to do that would have threatened the ego satisfaction we had from boosting and being boosted. So when I became aware that his messages had lost their freshness and that he had settled into being comfortable in his reputation, I felt I needed to confront him with this error, but I had had no experience in doing so constructively. More than that, I was not guided by the advice of Paul in the passage quoted above to be gentle, to be aware of my own moral vulnerability, and to share my brother’s burden. Also, I thought the relationship between us was so strong that it would survive my being bluntly frank with him. At the time I saw my actions as being morally courageous, but my friend felt they were brutal and out of character with what he thought me to be.

It took me many years to understand fully why my attempt to challenge my friend shattered our relationship (which, by the way, was mended on the surface but never recovered its previous intimacy). As the years went on, I realized how I should have done it, and my deepest regret is that after the alienation he never again trusted me in the deep way he had before, and I destroyed a relationship that could have been enriched by my handling the confrontation more sensitively. I realized too late that had I dealt with his fault with more humility, gentleness, and compassionate sharing of his burden, I could have been his partner in correction, rather than merely his accuser. Moreover, the way would have opened up for a mutually beneficial relationship in which our love and regard for one another didn’t depend on our each maintaining an unrealistic image of who we were. We needed to see and acknowledge each other’s flaws and to experience the richness of God’s and each other’s forgiveness.

The other example of how I brought about an estrangement and how I could have avoided doing so took place in my workplace, an academic institution. Although the split was not with a fellow Christian, in a way it was worse, because my actions turned out to compromise my Christian witness, even though I acted from a desire to stand up for Christian standards. This incident involved two of my colleagues with whom I had close ties because we were next-door neighbors and members of the same academic department. Part of the mistake I made was from naivete, since it took several years for me to realize that they were homosexual companions. Consequently, Laquita and I became friends with them and socialized with them with no self-consciousness about their relationship. They naturally assumed that we knew they were sexual partners, but had found a way to accept that fact in spite of our conservative Christian convictions. (In retrospect, what we were able to do in our ignorance might well have been possible merely on the basis of respectfully dealing with people where they are, not where we think they ought to be.) One summer in the late 70’s, when homosexual militancy was gaining ground but did not yet have the majority support it has now, a group of people on campus decided that there needed to be a homosexual support group. When I read about it in the student newspaper, I felt moved to write a letter to the paper about my reservations concerning the acceptance of homosexual practices as normal and morally neutral. When the letter was published, I was thoroughly excoriated by my colleagues, and my next-door neighbors exploded in both public and private indignation at my “intolerance” and “bigotry.” They felt betrayed and stabbed in the back and regarded me as a hypocrite.

How could I have applied the principles of Gal. 6:1-3 to this secular situation? First of all, I could have put myself in their shoes and have anticipated how they would react to my suddenly, without any attempt to soften the blow for them, going public with remarks that they found personally insulting and disrespectful, seeming to reject out of hand a vital part of their identity. Had I gone to them privately and expressed my views, they would have been shocked and disappointed, but perhaps at least they would not have seen me as insensitive to the opprobrium and ill-treatment suffered by open or suspected homosexuals at the time. I could perhaps have stated my convictions with firmness but gentleness, not self-righteously minimizing my own vulnerability to sexual temptation, but showing a willingness to share the burden of our human condition. That could have opened the way for meaningful discussion that was not charged with the emotion of public argument. Once again, I was guilty of mistaking my boldness in confrontation as virtuous courage.

Unfortunately, there are several more instances I could cite, but even mea culpa can be overdone. I hope these examples are sufficient to deter others from the mistakes I made. If so, that is some compensation for the damage I did. I’m not sure that old age necessarily brings wisdom, but it certainly brings a deeper understanding of our experiences.

Reweaving (To an Estranged Brother)

When God has done, He has undone, too; The knots of will unraveled Await the Weaver's hand. Though that which bound our love Seemed closely knit, He knew that it required A purer bond to make us one. So, Lord, secure the cords again, And stay our fumbling hands, Lest we re-tie what you undid; In one deft stroke, Retwine our hearts in unity, For love alone, and not security.

--Elton D. Higgs (Oct. 29, 1982)

image: "Broken" by H. Olsen. CC License. 

John Hare’s God’s Command, Chapter 3, “Eudaemonism,” Introduction and Section 3.1: Does Morality Make You Happy?

INTRODUCTION: Recall the argument from justification in ch. 1. If we ask the normative question “Why should I be moral?” or “Why should I take the moral demand as a valid demand on me?” one answer we might propose is “because it will make me happy.” Another answer is “because it will fulfill my nature as a human being.” These are related because one theory about happiness is that it resides in the fulfillment of our nature. If either theory is sufficient, a divine command theory will not be needed for answering the normative question. This chapter is about the first answer, and the next chapter about the proposed derivation of the moral law from human nature.

Hare’s claim is that the first answer fails for two reasons. First, it is not strictly true, at least in this life. Second, even if it is true, it gives the wrong kind of motivation. Questions of justification and questions of motivation are different but linked on a Kantian account of morality. If the terminus of a person’s motivation is her own happiness, she is not following the moral law for its own sake, and therefore “because it will make me happy” fails as a justification of this kind of moral obedience. The claim that such a pattern of motivation is unacceptably self-regarding is the central topic of this chapter.

3.1: It’s not strictly true to say that morality makes you happy in this life, or that, if you act well, things go well. There are two reasons for this. The first is that you can be morally good and still be miserable, because moral virtue does not have the right kind of leverage to secure happiness. Consider people striving to be virtuous but are clinically depressed. Or consider that a great deal of happiness is dependent on our relations with other people. We live in a world in which many of the people we know and love are not doing whatever they can to follow the moral law, and in this way we become sources of unhappiness for each other.

The second reason it is not strictly true to say that morality makes you happy in this life is that morality not merely fails to secure happiness; it can actually decrease it. Virtue can make unhappiness worse if we think we deserve to be happy if we’re virtuous. Denial of opportunities in accordance with virtue can be very frustrating. Moreover, the more virtuous you are, the more acutely you will feel the sufferings of those around you and hate the injustice that causes it. Even more straightforwardly, morality may require a genuine sacrifice of this-worldly happiness. The key question is one of motivation and ranking. How do we negotiate the continual dilemmas in which one or the other seems to have to give way?

To say there is regularly tension between the two goals is consistent with saying, with RMH, that, if we were bringing up a child purely in his own interest, we should try to inculcate in him some reasonably demanding moral principle with the attendant moral feelings. His view was that virtue was necessary but not sufficient for a good human life. He thought an empirical judgment is that those committed to a life of virtue are generally happier than those who aren’t thus committed, but he conceded that occasions will arise in which the saints’ or heroes’ principles will require them to make very great sacrifices. So, if parents educate their children to admire and practice virtue, they may be bringing it about that in some unlikely contingencies their children have to pay a very high price. Even so, he thought, the parents should bring up their children that way, because it is usually the case that people who are so brought up are happier.

Recall in this context that the demand of Kantian morality is very high. We are to love enemies with what Kant calls “practical love,” for example, sharing their ends, as long as these ends are themselves morally permissible. Also, we have to share the ends of the poor in the rest of the world who could be helped by our lowering our standard of living and sending out the proceeds. This doesn’t mean we have to reduce ourselves to abject poverty; but, even though it is a complex question just how much to reduce, it is very likely that most of us in the developed world live too richly.

Even if it’s strictly true, however, that morality leads to happiness, perhaps mediated by the supersensible author of nature, this answer to the normative question would not give us the right kind of motivation for a justification. “Eudaemonist” is Kant’s term for someone who says that “happiness is really his motive for acting virtuously.” This is a single-source view of motivation; all our motivation derives finally and properly from our own happiness. Hare claims that this is unacceptably self-regarding. He looks at four proposed defenses of eudaemonism against this claim, and replies to each of them. The first three will end up compromising on the moral demand, and the fourth will compromise on the aspiration for happiness.

Some criticize Kant’s argument from providence by saying Kant defines happiness and morality too narrowly, the former as the sum of pleasures and the latter as the sense of duty requiring elimination of all singular reference. Hare replies that the argument from providence doesn’t in fact need these defective features of Kant’s account. All the argument needs is that happiness is essentially self-indexed, and that morality is essentially not self-indexed. If we want to hold that we are properly motivated by what is good in itself, independently of its relation to us, this requires a double-source view of motivation: We are motivated both by our own happiness and by what is good in itself independently of our happiness. Once we concede that point, we will see that there is no necessary coincidence between morality and happiness, and that assurance of consistency between the two requires a view about the governance of the universe as a whole.

The substance of this chapter will be an examination of four defenses of eudaemonism. The first is from the Epicureans. It starts from the pleasure we get in the pleasure of others, what Sidgwick calls “sympathetic pleasure,” and argues that there is a good sense of “for its own sake” where what is meant is “for the sake of the agent’s pleasure internal to it.” The second is from the Stoics. It’s the notion of reason that brings impartiality with it, and so our good as rational beings requires that we follow the moral law. The third is from a character Hare calls Aquinas-Porter, to whom is attributed an interpretation of Aquinas by Porter. On this representation, Aquinas has a way to reconcile Aristotle’s eudaemonism with the view that the distinctive mark of charity is loving God for God’s own sake and promoting the good of the neighbor for the neighbor’s sake and not our own. The key to reconciliation is to postulate a nested series of interests that’s necessarily harmonious and includes the agent’s own happiness within it. The fourth defense revises the third by dropping the nested series, and it proposes instead that an agent perfects herself by union with God, who is self-transcending. These four proposed defenses are not an exhaustive list, but they are among the most important.

Image: By Phillip Medhurst (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Summary of Love of God: A Canonical Model: Chapter Eight: “The Reciprocal Aspect of Divine Love”

Chapter eight of John Peckham’s Love of God: A Canonical Model focuses on the ideally reciprocal nature of divine-human love. While God has a universal love for all persons, he “enters into and enjoys a particular, intimate relationship only with those who freely reciprocate his love” (p. 220). Humans must choose to respond to God’s love in order to enjoy its blessings and benefits, and this reciprocity is necessary because of the nature of love, which involves the free and mutual giving of the self to the one who is loved. This discussion of reciprocity in divine-human love overlaps in many ways the previous discussion of the foreconditionality of God’s love in chapter seven.

God has foreconditionally bestowed love on every person, enabling a reciprocal response by humans to that love. God seeks these relationships because he is by nature love (1 John 4:8), and the revelation of God’s triune nature reflects that the Father, Son, and Spirit have eternally enjoyed a reciprocal love relationship. God is not in need of relationship with his creatures, but he desires and seeks relationship with humans. He expects that humans will reciprocate his love and responds with love and special intimacy to those who do so. In the Old Testament, God shows his “lovingkindness” (hesed) to those who “love” (’ahav) him and keep his commandments (Exod 20:5-6; 34:7; Deut 7:9; Neh 1:5; Jer 32:8; Dan 9:4). Similarly, the New Testament teaches that both God and Jesus respond with love toward those who love and obey the Son (John 14:21-23; 16:27). Followers of Jesus enjoy an intimate friendship with him because of this reciprocal love (John 15:14), but must remain in that love (John 15:9-10).

The Biblical Evidence for Reciprocity in Divine-Human Love

The reciprocity of divine-human love is especially reflected in the covenant and kinship relationships that God enjoys with his people. God initiates covenant relationships through calling and election prior to any human response, but those in covenant with him are expected to love him in return and to keep his commands. Providing a corrective to the sharp distinction between promissory and obligatory covenants in the Old Testament, Peckham rightly emphasizes that all covenants between God and humans contain elements of conditionality that place obligations upon those in covenant with the Lord. Even promissory covenants like the Abrahamic and Davidic covenants that guarantee the ultimate fulfillment of God’s promises place conditions of loyalty and obedience upon those who wish to personally experience their blessings  (cf. Gen 18:19; 22:16-18; 26:4-; 1 Kgs 2:3-4; 8:2; 9:4-9).

The use of marriage and parent-child metaphors to portray the covenant relationship particularly highlights the bilateral “give and take” involved in divine-human relationships. God has an enduring and patient love for his people, but he also expects the love of his people in return (cf. Ezek 16:8-13; Jer 2:2). God’s compassionate love for his people surpasses that of a human parent (Isa 49:15), but humans can also reject God as husband or parent and thus sever the kinship relationship (Isa 50:1; Jer 3:8; Hos 2:2). In the Old Testament, Israel’s repeated apostasy brought a rupture of their special relationship with Yahweh so that they forfeited their claim to be his “wife” (Jer 3:1) and “children” (Hos 1:6, 9; 2:4). God gave his wife a certificate of divorce (Isa 50:1) and sent her away into exile. God’s love for Israel was enduring so that he called for their repentance and return even in the midst of their apostasy and he promises to make a new covenant with those who seek him and return to him (Jer 31:31;36; Ezek 16:60-62; Hos 2:19-20; 14:3-4). In the New Testament, only those who respond by faith in Jesus Christ are allowed to be called children/sons of God (John 1:12; Rom 8:14; 1 Jn 3:1-2).

Regarding the human reciprocation of divine love, Peckham makes two important clarifications.  Reciprocal love does not mean that humans can love God equally or that the relationship between God and humans is symmetrical, but it does mean that a relationship between God and humans is possible in which “God’s love is responded to positively so that humans become conduits of divine love” (p. 231). The second is that the reciprocal nature of divine-human love also means that human love for God is not the result of God’s unilateral action. While God is the prime agent and initiator of divine-human love, he does not unilaterally cause humans to enter into a love relationship with him. Peckham states that “humans possess the divinely granted freedom to reciprocate or reject God’s love” (p. 231) and views this understanding to be in line with the numerous exhortations in the Bible for humans to love God and statements in the Bible concerning human love for God. He argues that “the divine exhortations for human love would be superfluous and misleading if human love were unilaterally determined by God such that those who do not love God could not love God” (p. 231). The numerous passages that speak of the reward given to those who love God “strongly imply genuine contingency and significant human freedom” (p. 231).

God’s Universal and Particular Love

Peckham’s view of divine-human love as ideally reciprocal necessitates a distinction between God’s universal and particular love. There is a universal invitation to all, but God’s relational love can be rejected and forfeited. There is a special “insider love” for those who respond to God, but those on the outside who reject God’s love could have been insiders as well but were not willing. Humans do not earn God’s love by responding to his initiatives because their response “is no more meritorious than the acceptance of a gift from a benefactor” (p. 234).

Pekcham rejects universalism in all of its forms, because God’s love ultimately can be rejected and resisted. He also rejects the idea that God’s particular love reaches only those whom God as chosen as his elect. Peckham, in agreement with Walls and Olson, finds it problematic to say that God truly loves those whom he has unilaterally chosen not to save. He also raises the question of why God does not save all if he truly can unilaterally impose his love on humans.  A reciprocal view of divine-human love instead asserts that God does all he can “within the bounds of bilateral significant freedom” to bring about the salvation of all, but ultimately each individual must choose to accept or reject the offer to enter into relationship with God.

A Further Canonical Perspective to Consider

Peckham’s model of the reciprocal nature of divine-human love accords well with the canonical interplay between the divine initiative to enter into relationships with humans and the contingency of human responses to those initiatives. Peckham also raises important questions regarding how divine-human love can be genuine and mutual if unilaterally imposed on humans. At the same time, there appears to be a canonical movement in Scripture that perhaps does not receive enough attention in Peckham’s treatment. In the new covenant that God would make with Israel, there is a greater emphasis on the circumcision of the heart, writing the divine law on the heart, or the giving of a new heart that would serve to override Israel’s unbelief and that would guarantee the nation’s fidelity to the Lord (cf. Deut 30:16; Jer 31:31-34; Ezek 11:19). Walter Brueggemann writes of this movement from a “Deuteronomic model,” stressing human repentance as a condition for Israel’s restoration, to a “Prophetic model,” in which restoration occurs without Israel’s repentance. This movement does not eliminate reciprocity, because human repentance/response remains a part of the equation, but Peckham could devote more attention to this greater emphasis in the new covenant on divine initiative in securing the human responses that God desires. Peckham states that “those privy to God’s particularly relational love allow God to love them forever” (p. 243), but it seems that there again needs to be greater emphasis on the indwelling of the Spirit (also a new covenant reality) that seals the believer in this love relationship and that secures the believer’s enduring love in relationship with God. The power of God that acts to hold the believer in this reciprocal love relationship once it is initiated is also an important part of the canonical presentation concerning divine-human love.

Chapter 2: “The Case for Abduction” of God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning

In this chapter, Baggett and Walls motivate using an abductive moral argument over a deductive moral argument. They first review what they call the Anti-Platonist Moral Argument (APMA), such as the one proposed by William Lane Craig:

P1. If God does not exist, then objective moral values and duties do not exist. P2. Objective moral values and duties do exist. C3. Therefore, God exists

To prevent ruling out theistic ethics, Baggett and Walls take Craig's definition of objective moral (deontic) truths to be facts according to which some actions and motivations are right or wrong independently of whether any human mind believes it to be so.

As previously mentioned in Good God, some theists have reservations about the argument. C. Stephen Layman, a theist himself, rejects APMA because of P1 which he thinks is unappealing to nonbelievers, especially Platonists. If Platonism is true, then P1 is false, because one can appeal to a possible world where God does not exist but objective moral value and duties do (since moral values and duties exist necessarily on their view). One may counter that God’s existence is necessary, so there is no such world and Platonism is false. However to do so would be to appeal to C3 which would be circular. Hence, Layman thinks that P1 lacks non-circular justification, wide enough support, adequate intuitive force, and sufficient obviousness.

John Milliken, another theist, similarly rejects P1. He imagines a world such us ours without God. He thinks intuitively that, in such a world, morality still holds. In more philosophical terms, he takes P1 to be a nontrivially false counterpossible (since he is committed to Divine necessity).

In Good God, Baggett and Walls have also previously offered their criticisms, and in John Hare's (another theist) review of Good God, Hare says that Baggett and Walls have argued convincingly that Craig's view that atheism leads to moral nihilism is unlikely to be persuasive. Note that Baggett and Walls do not think Craig's argument is bad or unsound, rather that it is relatively unpersuasive to many atheists for a few reasons. Hence they propose one should adopt their abductive moral argument instead.

God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning

By David Baggett, Jerry L. Walls

For the classical theist, a world such as ours could not even exist without God, while for the atheist, the world is possible without God. Hence a world such as ours, with at least the appearance of love, relationships, satisfactions of morality, social harmony, clear moral apprehensions, etc., is possible without God for the atheist. Baggett and Walls think that it is better to approach atheists by affirming their common convictions about moral truth and then asking what better explains such facts, rather than encouraging them to assume such a world like the actual world is consistent with atheism, providing them a lot of theoretical resources to use, and inviting them to construct a secular moral theory. It would be strange if atheists could not come up with a substantive moral theory using the rich resources of a world like ours, which is only here (if theists are right) because God created it with such features. This allows atheists to travel some distance down the road in building an ethical theory. Hence Baggett and Walls prefer an abductive moral argument that does not rely on P1.

Craig however thinks that his formulation has the advantage of meeting the atheist in the world as he conceives it to be and asking whether morality would be objective without God. The problem however is that while one allows such a world with such rich resources to be consistent with atheism, one (potentially anyway) dismisses too hastily the atheists' serious efforts to build a secular ethic. This explains why so many secular theories have emerged and sport considerable merit. It is not as if secular theories fail altogether to explain anything morally. They can get somewhere given the resources of the world. Baggett and Walls think however that this world conjoined with God provides a better explanation of the full range of moral facts.

Other theistic ethicists seem to recognize this. Robert Adams, for example, thought social requirement theory had its strengths in explaining the idea that obligations are owed to persons. Human social requirement theory is not without resources to make sense of this, but adding God is crucial to complete the theory. Another example is Linda Zagzebski who grounds morality in motivations and admits that the first half of her theory can be constructed without reference to God at all. She then completes her theory by bringing God in.

Craig however thinks that when it gets down to showing that the best explanation of objective moral values and duties is God, one will slip into arguing that, given atheism, objective moral values and duties would not exist. So the abductive argument still ends up doing the same thing as the deductive argument. Contra Craig, Baggett and Walls think that they are doing something different. The deductive argument says, "Imagine the world is atheistic, now try to make sense of morality, you can't." The abductive argument instead says, "Suspend belief on whether the world is atheistic or theistic, try to make sense of morality. Given its features, you can make some progress. But what better explains the fuller range of moral facts in need of explanation, the world alone or the world and God?”

In short, they list five main problems in total with the deductive argument (TDA). In a footnote, they construct an Acrostic called CARBS:

1. Counterpossibles. Counterpossibles are counterfactuals with an impossible antecedent. For example, "If a necessarily good and loving God commanded murder and torture for fun, it would be right to do so," or "If there were a square circle, mathematicians would be puzzled." For the classical theist, if God exists necessarily, then "God does not exist" would be impossible. Hence P1 is a counterpossible (according to classical theists), and a particularly intractable counterpossible—one in which the being presumed to be the very ground of being doesn’t exist. Presuming to know the features of such an intractably impossible world strains credulity. (Note that “If God doesn’t exist, then God didn’t create the world,” doesn’t seem particularly problematic, but it’s also analytic.)

2. Acknowledging the rich features of a world like this if it could exist without God. The deductive method doesn't allow enough room to acknowledge what would be the simply amazing features of a world like this if it could exist without God, whereas the abductive approach allows the world without God to explain some of morality, while providing the explanation for why it can.

3. Rejecting realism instead of naturalism. By allowing the atheist to think this world with its features is compatible with atheism, it is easy for them to reject moral realism instead of naturalism, contributing to the escalation of nihilism Nietzsche predicted would ensue from the “death of God.” The abductive method instead keeps the moral facts in question front and center as the starting data in need of explanation.

4. Bridge-breaking. The deductive version can sever the bridge with naturalists by focusing on differences rather than similarities. The abductive argument agrees that the world can account for some of the moral data to a certain extent, and then shows how adding God to the picture offers a considerably more robust explanation.

5. Saying uncomfortable things. The deductive version makes us say very uncomfortable, unintuitive, and unnecessary things like "If God does not exist, then rape is not wrong." The abductive version avoids this.