Making Sense of Morality: Islamic Ethics

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

A Spectrum of Views

In this period between the ancient Greeks and the Scientific Revolution, there also was the rise of Islamic ethics. In Islam’s “classical” period, several schools of thought developed, which cover an epistemological spectrum of how we know what is right. At one end were the rationalists, including Avicenna and Averroes. In their view, moral truths exist objectively, even apart from Allah. Reason can discover moral truths, which does not conflict with revelation.

Next along this spectrum were the Mutazalites. For them, too, morals exist objectively. We can know them from the Qur’an, the Traditions of Mohammed, or independent reason. Some thought we could know morals independently of revelation. Further, they reasoned that theistic voluntarism (morality is based solely on Allah’s will) could lead to some immoral conclusions.

In response, Sunni theologians (or traditionalists) held the sovereignty of Allah as their supreme principle. They disputed the Mutazalites’ view that there are objectively real moral principles that even Allah follows. Such truths would exist independently of Allah’s sovereign will. In effect, independent reason limited Allah’s power, and objective morals had to be rejected. For Ashari, morals are what Allah commands, which ultimately we know only from revelation.

For traditionalists, ethics is one of action (doing Allah’s will). While there has been room for virtue in Islamic ethics, for traditionalists, virtues are not ends in themselves. Instead, the beginning of Islamic ethics is submission, and the end is obedience. Since the traditionalist view realizes both the fundamental point of Allah’s omnipotence, as well as revelation as the basis for knowing what is right, it is easy to see how this view came to dominate.

So, can the traditionalist view preserve these core morals? Yes, but only if Allah so wills that they are valid. But, there are no limits on Allah’s sovereignty, as is the case with the Judeo-Christian God’s character, so conceivably Allah could will they are invalid, and we would have no basis for complaint.

For Further Reading

George F. Hourani, Reason and Tradition in Islamic Ethics

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 3

---

R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.

---

Making Sense of Morality: Plato and Aristotle

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Introduction

To begin our historical tour, I will start with the ancient Greeks. I will focus on Plato and Aristotle, who still much influence on western ethics.

Plato

For Plato, morals are not human products. Instead, they exist objectively in the intelligible realm, which includes the forms. A form is a universal that itself is not located in space and time (it is metaphysically abstract). A universal is one thing, yet it can have many instances in the visible, sensible realm. For example, justice is a universal, and there can be many just people. The identical quality, justice, can be found in many instances.

A comparison of these two realms:

Plato’s Two Realms

Justice can be instanced in a human being because humans are a body-soul duality, and the soul is their essential nature that defines them as the kind of thing they are. All humans should be just, and to reach their true goal, or telos, they need a proper balance of the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Yet, it is hard to reach the telos, for the process of education in the knowledge of the good is very difficult. His “cave” illustration shows that only a few people leave the “shadows,” a place of illusions which they mistake for reality. Instead, only a few strive toward the true light outside the cave and acquire knowledge of the forms.

In this, Plato questionably assumes all people want to be virtuous. All they need is education and effort. Furthermore, though he realizes people should be virtuous, he seems to lack a “connection” between the moral forms and human nature. Why is justice appropriate for our souls?

Today, it is hard for many even to conceive that there could be immaterial and objectively real entities. Still, can Plato’s view sustain the four core morals? It seems it can; the virtues of love and justice, as well as the principles that we should not murder or rape, would be universals that are normative for all. Moreover, we know these morals by reason, which fits with our intuitive knowledge of their validity.

Aristotle

For Aristotle, there is a deep unity between the body and the soul. The body is appropriate for humans due to the kind of thing they are (i.e., our essence). Similarly, the cardinal virtues (prudence, temperance, justice, and courage) are appropriate for humans due to their soul’s nature. As one’s essence, the soul enables a person to grow and change and yet remain the same person. That is, one’s personal identity is constituted by one’s set of essential properties and capacities (even for virtues), which do not change. If people changed in some way essential to them, they’d no longer exist! Yet, they can undergo other kinds of changes, like the development of the virtues, and still be the same individuals.

Aristotle’s ethics is practical, seeking how to achieve the function of a human being, which is to guide one’s actions by reason. The virtues are developed by habituation and training. This involves being apprenticed to someone who has the virtues. Moreover, virtues are a mean between two extremes. For instance, courage is a mean between cowardliness (a vice of deficiency) and rashness (the vice of excessiveness). Moreover, like Plato, the good is found in community; Aristotle would not support the western, autonomous individual.

Like Plato, Aristotle believed in universals, though they always had to be instanced in particulars. Still, immaterial, objectively real universals exist, which rubs against today’s common belief that humans are just physical things. Moreover, he was pretty confident in human abilities to use our reason and know universal truths, as well as in our abilities to be virtuous by habituation. Even so, like Plato, it seems his views can preserve the four core morals and our knowledge thereof. Of course, we will have to see later if it is reasonable to believe there are real, immaterial universals.  

Further Reading

Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics

Plato, The Republic, Books, 4, 6, 7, & 10

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, ch. 2

---

R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.

Enduring Loss and the Hope of Glory

Buffy had been losing weight for a few weeks, but the procedure was supposed to be routine. Still, there we sat in the vet’s office listening to the doctor explain that our kitty just wasn’t recovering from her biopsy.

Her blood pressure and temperature were dangerously low, and our normally energetic, friendly cat could barely lift her head and seemed hardly even to recognize us. Her eyes were glazed over, her breathing labored.

My husband and I sat in the room numb, struggling to grasp how it could be that our ten-year-old, always healthy pet was now lying listless in an incubator as the vet did all she could to stimulate the healing process.

A few of the doctor’s words penetrated our mental fog, but they only added to our confusion: “We’re not ready to give up on Buffy yet,” “Let’s keep her in the emergency clinic overnight,” “Do you want to add a DNR?” We had no framework into which we could fit these statements, no sense of how this happened, let alone how to respond.

Buffy’s death followed soon after, and it was a devastating punch to the gut—no less because it came a week before our cross-country move. We had picked the house in Texas with Buffy in mind and had imagined her there, sitting next to David in his office while he worked as she so faithfully did in Lynchburg, hanging out with us while we watched TV, running around playing with the laser light. But now she wouldn’t be coming with us. It was a hard realization to take. Grief mingled with anger came quick, but the demands of the moment left little space for mourning.

Inside the house I was packing boxes while outside our son was digging Buffy a grave, a grave we would have to leave behind. The rapid approach of our moving day meant no time for a memorial, no time to be still and simply reflect on this precious cat’s life. I felt an impulse to rage against the meaninglessness of it all, but had no energy or mental space to generate the emotions.

Buffy’s death—so unexpected, so wrong, and yet so inescapable—somehow symbolized all I felt about this summer’s transition. There would be promising possibilities waiting for us in our new location and new positions, I knew, but what loomed larger for me at that moment was all I stood to lose with the move, and Buffy’s death underscored that loss, crystalizing and compounding it.

The comfort of home, the familiarity of Lynchburg, the intimate acquaintance with my late institution’s practices and policies: these would soon be no more. Harder still was moving 1,200 miles from my family and son and leaving behind friends and beloved colleagues. And all of this during a pandemic. This transition has been one of the most difficult experiences I’ve had to endure—with its logistical challenges, financial burdens, and emotional tolls.

Although I know on one level that the conditions at our past school would have made staying there more challenging in the long run, my longing for comfort and my visceral resistance to the loss entailed by our fresh start persisted and sometimes manifested in anger. I was angry that my many prayers for spiritual renewal at Liberty returned unanswered and seemingly unheard, that conditions worsened even.

I was angry that God’s answer to my pleas for deliverance involved so much loss and pain. And I was angry that those responsible for the unbearable conditions were either unaware of or unmoved by the pain they caused. Like Buffy’s death, it all just felt so wrong. It was hard to square with my vision of God, the one who cares and comforts, who sets things right. Why had he refused to set things right? Or, rather, why was the remedy he offered, this escape, so painful?

Over the summer, I wrestled with the paradox of trusting the redemption of my pain and loss—of Buffy, of our home in Lynchburg—to the same God who allowed that loss in the first place.

I know the biblical promises of the resurrection. I know that they apply not merely to the physical body  but also to the cosmos. “Behold, I make all things new,” Jesus says in Revelation. It’s a beautiful promise—life-giving in every sense of the phrase. But as much as I’ve professed my embrace of those truths, even earlier this summer in writing about the pandemic, Buffy’s loss conjoined with our move tested that faith. I am only now starting to believe that that testing strengthened it.

The pain I endured through Buffy’s loss and this transition has pushed me further in my recognition of how little I know of God’s redemption of the world or even of what in the world God has redeemed. Day by day I had to lean on God to provide the strength I lacked, the comfort for my hurts, and the hope to overcome my fears. It was a sobering time, too, as it forced me to confront my own self-entitlement, pride, and complacency.

I longed for God to prevent Buffy’s death and to accommodate my desire to remain in place. Truth is, Christianity teaches that real victory comes beyond death, not in bypassing it. I have said it before, I know it cognitively, but this summer I experienced that truth and now know it even deeper—even as I’m still learning of the restoration God will provide on this side of my loss.  

That really is the story of scripture, that God delivers us through suffering and loss not from it. Humanity’s ultimate deliverance, of course, comes from the ultimate suffering—the innocent suffering of Christ on the cross. The resurrection is, in fact, linear—death, and only then eternal life.

It’s a hard word in many ways. Who willingly embraces suffering? No one of their own strength and not for suffering’s sake alone. Instead, redemptive suffering requires our hearts to be set right—and it can serve to set our hearts right if we allow God to do a new work in us through it.

Thomas Merton in No Man Is an Island puts it this way:

If we love God and love others in him, we will be glad to let suffering destroy anything in us that God is pleased to let it destroy, because we know that all it destroys is unimportant. We will prefer to let the accidental trash of life be consumed by suffering in order that his glory may come out clean in everything we do.

If we love God, suffering does not matter. Christ in us, his love, his Passion in us: that is what we care about. Pain does not cease to be pain, but we can be glad of it because it enables Christ to suffer in us and give glory to his Father by being greater, in our hearts, than suffering would ever be.

So this summer was excruciating. I’m coming out of it—stronger, more experienced, better prepared for what God has ahead. But most of all, I’m even more confident that the eternal glory to come, of which I’ve seen only glimpses so far, truly will far outweigh these light and momentary afflictions (2 Corinthians 4:17).

---

Marybeth Baggett is professor of English at Houston Baptist University and serves as associate editor for MoralApologetics.com. She earned her PhD in Literature and Criticism from Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and — along with her husband— recently has published The Morals of the Story: Good News about a Good God (IVP Academic, 2018).

Making Sense of Morality: Judeo-Christian Ethics

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Between the time of the ancient Greeks and the Scientific Revolution, western ethics was dominated by religious traditions. I will give a broad overview of several key thinkers from Jewish and Christian thought. Could these ethical views preserve these core morals?

Jewish Thought

First I will focus on the Hebrew Scriptures. There, ethics are grounded ultimately in God’s moral character and thus what He commands. Those commands, or laws, were not arbitrary. Instead, He always would will what fits with His morally perfect character. Thus, it was a deontological (duty-based) ethical approach.

As God’s people, Israelites were to be like God. For instance, because God is just, holy morally pure and undefiled by sin (evil), and compassionate and loving, they too were to practice justice (Micah 6:8), be holy (Lev 19:2), and be compassionate and loving.

In addition, there was room for other forms of ethical reasoning. The wisdom literature appealed at times to utility (consequences) of actions (e.g., Prov 6:20-29). There also was room for self-interest (e.g., Deut 28:1-7, 15, where Moses spells out blessings of obedience, and the consequences of disobedience). There also was room for appeals to reason, or natural law. People should know particular moral principles based on how God has created them and nature (e.g., from observing nature, be diligent, Prov 6:6-11; do not slaughter pregnant women to extend one’s territory, Amos 1:13).

Also, Maimonides (d. 1204) lived in Spain, home of the Jewish intellectual center during the Islamic empire. He tried to synthesize Aristotle’s thought (which he received through Islamic sources) with the Mosaic Law, or Torah. To him, God’s revelation is perfectly compatible with natural law. Moreover, both sources give us knowledge of objective moral truths, which ultimately are grounded in God. As with Aristotle, Jewish thought has room for virtues, but the primary emphasis is obedience.

Christian Ethics

Christians draw ethics from both the Old and New Testaments. However, unlike Israel in the Old Testament, Christians do not live under a theocracy. Moreover, they are not under the Mosaic Law, but grace, to be in relationship with God. Still, they should obey the moral law out of love for God.

Specifically, they are to love God with all their being, their neighbors as themselves (Matt 22:37, 39), and one another as Jesus has loved them (John 13:34). They also are to care for the vulnerable (James 1:27, Luke 14:16-24) and, generally, to embody Jesus’ kingdom’s values. Moreover, there is a continued stress upon obedience, but with special emphasis upon heart attitudes (Matt 5:17-20). However, Christians cannot do this apart from the power of God’s Spirit in them. Virtues continue to matter, for Christians are to become like Christ, their telos (Eph 4:13, Col 1:28).

Augustine (d. 430) built upon the biblical teaching that God is intrinsically good and sovereign. Since God only does what is good, His creation is good, so He did not create evil. Instead, evil arose from humans’ feely willed rebellion against God. Evil, then, is spoiled, perverted goodness.

Augustine posited two cities, or kingdoms: that of humans, and that of God. Members of the city of man live after their sinful desires. At best, they can achieve a rough peace and justice, and they follow their love of themselves. In contrast, members of the city of God follow God’s Spirit, and they have the peace of God and with God. They are motivated by God’s love.

Augustine adopted the cardinal virtues and tied them to the theological ones, faith, hope, and love. Yet, he refocused the cardinal ones in terms of the love of God. Due humans’ sin, it is impossible to be truly virtuous by their own efforts.

As a Catholic, Aquinas (d. 1274) synthesized Augustinian theology with Aristotelian philosophy. Aquinas posited two realms that can be depicted variously: the heavenly and the earthly; revelation and reason; sacred and secular; supernatural and natural; and grace and nature. The supernatural realm includes the theological virtues, while the natural realm includes the cardinal, or natural, virtues.

In each pair, each realm is for the other. For instance, God cares for and gives revelation to creation, and creation is to glorify God. Also, revelation is intelligible by reason, though reason cannot exhaust what we know by revelation.

Aquinas also blends both deontological and virtue ethics. Christians should embody the theological and natural virtues, while non-Christians should embody the natural ones. So, his ethics applies universally, and we can know ethics by reason and revelation.

In all these Christian and Jewish views, there is a body-soul dualism, with the soul as humans’ essence. So, the virtues and commands are appropriate for humans due to their nature, and morals exist objectively. In these ways, it seems they can preserve our four core morals.  

For Further Reading

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, First Part of the Second Part (on law), and the Second Part of the Second Part (on virtues)

Augustine, City of God, and The Enchiridion

Robert M. Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought, 393-408

R. Scott Smith, In Search of Moral Knowledge, chs. 1, 3

---

R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.

4 Thoughts on Responding to Tragedy, Pain, and Suffering

Sometimes in life tragic news shatters our plans, alters the direction of our lives, leaves us with a string of unanswered questions, and causes us to lose hope for a period of time. News such as this oftentimes comes in the form of a text message, phone call, letter, social media post, medical prognosis—or in my own case, when my wife and I recently heard these seven words in an ultrasound room:

“I’m so sorry. There is no heartbeat.”

You see, my wife and I found out around the time of my birthday in late August that we were expecting our fourth child, only to realize a few weeks later in an ultrasound room that we were actually expecting our fourth and fifth children. We were going to be the parents of twins! I remember feeling a profound sense of excitement (and if I am honest, I also felt a bit overwhelmed).

About a month after our first ultrasound appointment, preparing to enter the ultrasound room for the second time, we were thrilled to see our twins and also hear their little hearts beat. The appointment began with a quick scan of the first baby, allowing us the opportunity to see how much our first baby had grown. We were also able to hear our first baby’s heartbeat. Everything appeared fine until the ultrasound technician shifted her attention to the second baby, where we soon realized that something was wrong. After a few moments of attempting to detect a heartbeat, the ultrasound technician broke the news to us that our second baby did not have a heartbeat. Following a few moments of unbelief (and perhaps even denial), my wife and I locked eyes as tears began rolling down each of our faces. We were devastated.

In the days since receiving this news, we have cried together, prayed together, and reflected upon God’s truths together. Although there are many truths that I could share in light of losing one of our twins, four thoughts have consumed my mind.

First, God empathizes with us in our pain. Hebrews 4:15 says, “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to empathize with our weaknesses…” Jesus Christ, our high priest, not only shows compassion to those of us who are hurting, he takes to himself a joint feeling of our weaknesses—because he himself endured suffering, loss, mockery, abandonment, and temptation. Jesus experienced not only physical suffering, but also spiritual, emotional, and relational hardship, among other things.

Have you been rejected by friends before? So has Jesus. Have you been made fun of before? So has Jesus. Have you been ridiculed for your beliefs? So has Jesus. Have you lost someone you loved? So has Jesus. Have you experienced physical, emotional, or relational pain? So has Jesus. And here is the one that has been most comforting for us recently: Have you lost a child? So has God the Father. Although there are many other ways in which God can empathize with us in our specific instances of pain and suffering, here is the bottom line: God knows what it is like to be in our shoes; he took on human flesh, becoming one of us and walking in our shoes, experiencing many of the difficulties that we face today. This enables him to empathize with us, proclaiming, “I understand what you are going through. It’s tough. I’ve been there before.”

Second, we can trust God in our “why” moments. There are times in life when we wonder why something (usually something bad) has happened. In our “why” moments, and in all other moments, we can trust God because of who he is. The character of God is the foundation of our faith in him. Of course, the same is true with a close friend or a spouse—we trust the character of these individuals when we do not know why they are asking us to do certain things, and again, it’s because of who they are. However, unlike our human acquaintances, God is entirely holy (Is. 6:3), good (Ps. 136:1), loving (1 Jn. 4:8), just (Is. 61:8), sovereign (Acts 4:24), omnipresent (Ps. 139:7), omnipotent (Jer. 32:27), gracious (Ex. 34:6-7), merciful (Ex. 34:6-7), unchanging (Mal. 3:6), personal (Gen. 3:8), and so on.

God is also omniscient, which means that he knows all things, including the answers to all of our “whys.” Although we may not know “why” something has happened, such as the loss of a child, we can still trust God who knows why. As we understand who God is on a deeper level, we come to realize that because of his character, we are able to trust him in those things that we do not know or understand. Why? Because of who he is; he is trustworthy.

Third, God gives us what we need most: himself. Having gone through several tragedies in my lifetime, I am not convinced that we would be entirely satisfied even if God revealed to us his reasons for allowing something to happen. With our “answer” in hand, we would still be missing what we need most: God himself.

The day that my wife and I received the news about our twin’s passing, I read Job 38-42 and reflected on these words from C. S. Lewis, found in Lewis’s Till We Have Faces: “I know now, Lord, why you utter no answer. You are yourself the answer. Before your face questions die away. What other answer would suffice?”[1] This Lewis quote is very similar to what Job realizes about God in the last five chapters of the book of Job. Job does not get an answer; rather, he realizes that God is the Answer. What we need most in the face of tragedy is not an answer to a question; we need God, who is himself the Answer. God is not only what we need most, he is also what, or more correctly who, is best for us. Simply put, a mere answer in the form of a statement will not truly satisfy; we need something far greater: the Answer himself.

Fourth, God gives us others to help us through our pain. Oddly enough, in the week following the difficult news about our twin, I came across several newspaper clippings pertaining to my father’s sudden death in 1994. Despite reading each article carefully, one of the articles deeply moved me. The article, focusing on how the community where we lived in North Carolina at the time rallied around us, begins this way: “Sometimes the pain from a sudden tragedy can be made less hurtful by the love and acts of kindness which result.”

As human beings, we were never meant to go through life alone. God has given us others to help us through our pain, to meet the needs that we have, pray for us, encourage us, and so on. The pain that we experience as a result of something difficult in our lives is oftentimes either lessened or at least becomes more bearable when we allow others to minister to us amidst our pain. In the days since October 22, numerous family members, friends, coworkers, and students have come alongside us in order to weep with us, pray with us, encourage us, and bless us in so many other ways (meals, cards, etc.).

There is certainly a lot more that I could say, and I pray that God gives me opportunities to say more in the future—particularly to those who find themselves experiencing loss as we have experienced loss. For now, it is enough to remember that (1) God empathizes with us in our pain, (2) that we can trust God in our “why” moments, (3) that God gives us himself, and (4) that God provides others to help us through our pain. These four truths continue to assist us as we navigate the difficult season through which we are walking, and I am confident that these four truths will get us through whatever else may come our way in the future.

*Elyse Faith, our sweet girl who we never actually “met,” we love you and we cannot wait until the day we see you in heaven. Until then, we’ll cling to what your name means: faith in the promises of God.

---

Stephen S. Jordan currently serves as a high school Bible teacher at Liberty Christian Academy, a Bible teacher and curriculum developer/editor at Liberty University Online Academy, and he oversees the curriculum development arm of The Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University. He possesses four graduate degrees and is presently a PhD candidate at the Liberty University Rawlings School of Divinity, where he is writing his dissertation on the moral argument. He and his wife, along with their three children, reside in Goode, Virginia.

---

[1] C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2017), 351.

Making Sense of Morality: Introduction

Editor’s note: R. Scott Smith has graciously allowed us to republish his series, “Making Sense of Morality.” You can find the original post here.

Our Moral Landscape

Today, in the west, we live in a time with many different moral “voices” and competing claims. When I was a graduate student in Religion and Social Ethics at the University of Southern California from 1995-2000, this was quickly apparent. Many of my fellow grad students rejected any kind of objectively real morals. Instead, they saw morals as their own construct, which were based on a wide range of preferred views. One person, a Reformed Jew, tried to integrate her religious tradition with the insights of Jacques Derrida’s deconstructionism and the sociology of knowledge. Many rejected their Catholic roots and instead embraced some form of critical theory, which is deeply liberationist in spirit. Some followed Foucault and queer theory, while others embraced Nietzsche. Still others followed various feminist theorists.

Like them, many people think morality is simply “up to us”; morals are just particular to individuals or communities. Indeed, they are deeply suspicious of any claims that there are morals that transcend and exist independently of us. They think that to impose others’ morals, including “objective” ones, on people is deeply imperialistic and oppressive. After all, who are you to say what is right or wrong?

There also are different social visions that align with these moral viewpoints. For example, progressives seem to be secular, such that morals for society should be based on secular, public reasons, not narrow, sectarian, or religious reasons. Otherwise, how could we come together and be a society in which there are so many different, private moral visions?

Shaping Influences

Now, for those influenced by western thought, and especially those who have grown up in the west, it easily can seem that not only is this moral diversity the way things are, but also the way things should be. After all, in the west (and especially the U. S.), we prize the value of autonomy, which we understand as being free to determine our own lives. Coupled with the view that morals are basically “up to us,” we should expect there to be an irreducible plurality of viewpoints, norms, and values.

Over time, in the west a large number of competing moral theories have been advanced. But these did not come out of a vacuum. They have a history with many shaping influences, leading even to the mindset that morals are up to us. One of the things I will do in this series is to explore those shaping factors. Two of them are the Scientific Revolution, and the “fact-value split” in the late 1700s.

Core Morals

Despite this great plurality of ethical views, it still seems there are at least some core morals all people simply know to be valid. For instance, people want justice to be done. They may disagree about what constitutes justice, or their theories about justice. But, it seems people know that justice is good and should be done. Love is another virtue people know to be good. They may disagree about what the loving action should be, but they still seem to agree that we should be loving. 

Image by Mary Pahlke from Pixabay

Besides these virtues, there are some principles that people simply seem to know are right. For instance, it seems people simply know murder is wrong. While some may disagree about what act should count as murder, nevertheless, we know that murder (as the intentional taking of an innocent person’s life) is wrong. I would add that rape is wrong too. These four morals seem to be core –we simply seem to know they are valid.

Some might add other moral principles and values to that short list. For example, for many, it is clear that genocide and chattel slavery are wrong. In this series, I will focus on those four core morals. I will look at the various types of ethical views in western historical context, to see if they can preserve those core morals. If a theory cannot do that, then it seems we should reject it. In that process, a key question I will ask is this: what kind of thing are these core morals? But, before I start that survey, I will explore the influences from the Scientific Revolution on our ethical thinking.

---

R. Scott Smith is a Christian philosopher and apologist, with special interests in ethics, knowledge, and seeing the body of Christ live in the fullness of the Spirit and truth.

The Simpsons, the Talmud, and Divine Command Theory

In an episode of The Simpsons, the perpetually pious Ned Flanders is the representative of a theistic ethicist. Gerald J. Erion and Joseph Zeccardi explain:

In Springfield, Ned Flanders exemplifies one way (if not the only way) of understanding the influence of religion upon ethics. Ned seems to be what philosophers call a divine command theorist, since he thinks that morality is a simple function of God’s divine command; to him, “morally right” means simply “commanded by God” and “morally wrong” means simply “forbidden by God.” Consequently, Ned consults with Reverend Lovejoy or prays directly to God himself to resolve the moral dilemmas he faces. For instance, he asks the Reverend’s permission to play “capture the flag” with Rod and Todd on the Sabbath in “King of the Hill”; Lovejoy responds, “Oh, just play the damn game, Ned.” Ned also makes a special telephone train room in Reverend Lovejoy’s basement as he [Ned] tries to decide whether to baptize his new foster children. Bart, Lisa, and Maggie, in “Home Sweet Home Diddily-Dum-Doodily.” (This call prompts Lovejoy to ask, “Ned, have you thought about one of the other major religions? They’re all pretty much the same.”) And when a hurricane destroys his family’s home but leaves the rest of Springfield unscathed in “Hurricane Neddy,” Ned tries to procure an explanation from God by confessing, “I’ve done everything the Bible says; even the stuff that contradicts the other stuff!” Thus, Ned apparently believes he can find solutions to his moral problems not by thinking for himself, but by consulting the appropriate divine command. His faith is as blind as it is complete, and he floats through his life on a moral cruise-control, with his ethical dilemmas effectively resolved.

            I thought of this passage the other day as I was working my way through Jane Sherron De Hart’s compelling biography of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Although Ginsburg had pride in her Jewish heritage, it was eventually more for its social dimensions than religious ones. De Hart writes about one of the exceptions:

There was also one other factor that might have indirectly contributed to [Ginsburg’s] success, though it did not occur to Ginsburg at the time—the age-old connection between Judaism and the law. The Torah (the five books of Moses) functioned as the original constitution for Jews. In the centuries following their exile from the land of Judea, rabbis and scholars in scattered Jewish communities had to figure out how to apply the Torah and its multiple commandments to seemingly insoluble problems of law and ritual. How could a common standard of behavior be maintained in the face of new sociopolitical, economic, and technological developments?

The result was the Talmud—a body of debates and opinions emphasizing legal argumentation based on the precedent of Mosaic law. Issues were examined from every possible angle, though room was always left for further interpretation in the face of ever-changing circumstances. The pattern of thought and methodology used to create the Talmud two millennia ago is remarkably similar to the kind of thinking demanded in law schools today. Ginsburg herself later elaborated on this theme in the introduction to a book about her Jewish predecessors on the Supreme Court. “For centuries,” she explained, “Jewish rabbis and scholars have studied, restudied, and ceaselessly interpreted the Talmud, the body of Jewish law and tradition developed from the scriptures. These studies have produced a vast corpus of Jewish juridical writing that has been prized in that tradition.”

            Making Ned Flanders one’s foil instead of, say, a Jewish sage steeped in the Talmud renders quite a bit easier the task of depicting religious folks as doltish numbskulls uninterested in thinking hard. It is also a quintessential example of constructing a straw man. In truth, whether in the interpretation of the Old Testament or New, good exegesis is hard work. It is done according to solid, principled logarithms of hermeneutics, taking into account the often multifarious aspects of context. The Bible itself tells us to study to show ourselves approved, rightly dividing the word of truth (2 Tim 2:15), which presumably suggests we can wrongly divide the word of truth. When, as is often the case, what scripture teaches are general principles, there is a great deal of labor called for in applying them to specific and concrete situations. It is hard work, taking real thought, not floating through life on cruise control. That believers on occasion—intelligent and informed ones at that—don’t always see eye to eye on how best to exegete a passage and understand its import is evidence that the interpretive task is no easy matter, and often far from a no-brainer. For one who takes, say, scriptural commands seriously, rightly understanding them includes all the following: application of general principles to specific situations, each with its own unique features, extenuating circumstances, and mitigating factors; contending with invariable and vexed hermeneutical complexities; disambiguating between the timeless and transcultural, on the one hand, and the contingent and culturally conditioned, on the other; studying societal, biblical, and historical contexts in rich detail; engaging both heart and mind and communities in conversation; something at least resembling reflective equilibrium; precedent, synthesis, extrapolation, and more besides.

            Ned is a funny character, no doubt, but hardly the paradigm of a thoughtful theist.

---

David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

The Second Phase of My Involvement in CASL Administration: Twilight Musing Autobiography (Part 23)

A key decision I had to make early in my year as acting dean was whether to be a candidate for a regular 3-year term as dean. After discussing the matter with friends and praying about it (though I suspect not sufficiently), I decided that the College would be best served by my not being a candidate, thereby lending more credibility to my being an honest and impartial broker between competing departmental objectives. I wanted the year to achieve the healing of animosities and distrust of administration within the College. My motives were good, I think, but I’m not sure my judgment was sound, especially in view of the person who was selected for the job after a nationwide search.

Joachim (“Kim”) Bruhn was a portly, friendly man who generally made a good first impression. However, within a few months his jolly “Hello, I’m Kim Bruhn, and I’m new here” began to wear thin, and his handling of the job proved less than satisfactory. One staff member observed that his personality and character were “a mile wide and an inch deep.” He had grand ideas about where the College should go and how it should get there, but he was terrible when it came to details. And on top of that, he had very flexible standards of telling the truth. He relied heavily on his staff to handle details, and so he was not always immediately and responsibly aware of exactly where the College’s finances stood nor what was the state of day-to-day operations. All of this meant that often I found myself being asked to explain or defend policies and decisions that I either lacked information on (because he had failed to tell me) or felt were on shaky ground.

I oversaw the College’s dealings with campus service units, such as Admissions and Registration and Records, and in doing so I was able to trade on relationships I had built during my year as Acting Dean. They trusted me, but they were sometimes puzzled by the difference in what they heard from Dean Bruhn and what they heard from me. Faculty in general did not hold Kim in high regard, and my close association with him tarnished my character with them sometimes. All these frustrations led to my deciding to resign as Associate Dean after serving two years.

When I informed Provost Eugene Arden, my friend and mentor over the years, he asked me out to lunch and made a strong pitch for me to stay on for another year. He argued that I was among the top 10% of people he had observed over the years in my aptitude for administration and that if I toughed it out I would have a good potential for an administrative career. I think perhaps he was already seeing that Kim Bruhn would not be approved for a second term as Dean, and that I was in a good position to succeed him. On the other hand, if I resigned (whatever my reasons), it would be a blot on my record and a hindrance to my being chosen for future administrative jobs. However, I was not willing to endure another year of working with Kim Bruhn and felt morally obligated to resign in order to disassociate myself from his dishonesty. In retrospect, that may have been an exercise of poor judgment. I think I was more concerned with my reputation than with whether the Lord wanted me persevere or give up.

In December of 1975, a disrupting event happened in Module 8 that turned out to have personal consequences for me. Early one morning, I received a call that a fire had broken out in our set of modules. (The sage comment of the Fire Warden when he assessed it was, “It appears to have been either an accident or arson.”) When I arrived on campus, I found that there had been considerable damage in Module 8, especially in a room where most of my campus library was stored. Later in the day, Laquita and I were dismayed at how many books were scorched and water-logged. We had to leave things in place until the insurance people had reviewed the scene in order to process the school’s claim for damage compensation. A good proportion of my books had to be written off for any remaining market value. We finally received our part of the school insurance settlement and were ready to move the books home to do whatever repairs we could. The year before this, we had bought a house in an attractive neighborhood about ten minutes away from the campus. We didn’t quite have the required down payment (1/3 of the cost in those days), so we swung a short-term bank loan for the balance and closed the deal. In August of 1974, we moved into 9 Adams lane in Dearborn, where we lived for the next 44 years. It was here that we moved the damaged books, storing them in the basement while we salvaged what we could, which turned out to be a majority of them.

Then, someone suggested we look into our homeowners’ insurance policy to see if there might be some recompense from them for the damaged books. We filed a claim, and wonder of wonders, we received a check for almost exactly the amount of our short-term loan! That incident has been a standard story in our history of incidents illustrating the Lord’s special provision in times of need. In addition, the great increase in my base salary during my years in administration had incremental effects in subsequent years, and the final result was a very healthy retirement package that even now is supplying the bulk of our retirement income. God’s supply of our financial resources over the years has kept us from being in debt except for one short term mortgage. That is one tangible result of my year as Acting Dean.

---

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

---

Let Not Your Heart

My family arrives at Grandma’s house.  She exclaims as we pile out of the car, “The only thing about saying ‘hello’ is I’ve gotta say ‘goodbye’”.  Saying “hello” implies saying “goodbye”; arriving suggests leaving;  Jesus’ coming means Jesus’ going.  Why does Jesus leave? Why must life have such parting and departing, particularly at life’s end?

Jesus’ disciples wonder the same thing.  Thursday evening before he is crucified, Jesus says to his disciples, “Little children, I am with you only a little longer”.  “Lord, You just got here…you’ve been saying the last three years, ‘Follow me’.”  Now you’re saying the opposite, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now…A little while, and you will no longer see me” Jesus’ disciples are in shock.  Jesus, the One whose Kingdom is to have no end and who “will reign over the house of Jacob forever”, is departing?

This is the background for Jesus’ heartwarming word to his disciples,  “Let not your heart be troubled.  Believe in God and believe also in me.  In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.  If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?”

“Let not your heart be troubled” .  The word “troubled” is full of trouble: it pictures a horse confronting a coiled rattlesnake, or a hurricane agitating the sea.  Being left alone by the Savior to a world of darkness and terror troubles the heart.  What’s troubling you?  Today, I do not know anyone who is not troubled; indeed, Jesus himself was ‘troubled’.  At the ‘Last Supper’ as he foresees his betrayal, he ‘was troubled in spirit’.  The shade of meaning Jesus uses in the tense of his word, “do not be troubled”, looks beyond the troubling moment.  It is a commanding imperative coming out of eternity:  “Do not go on letting your heart be troubled”;  “do not persist in being troubled.”  Though the immediate impact of a coiled rattlesnake in your path makes your heart pound, do not continue to be agitated.  Why not?  That brings us to Jesus’ second imperative.  The first imperative only works because of this second imperative.  It is the antidote for your troubled heart:  “Believe in God and believe also in me.”  If you trust in God, you will trust in Jesus Christ.  If you trust in Jesus Christ, then you trust in God. Once this trust is established, then your future is established:  you are not only going to see Jesus again; you are going to be with Him again - forever!

“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places.  If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you?  And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” Look at the phrase, “In My Father’s House”.  In England, one refers to the British Royal Family as the ‘House of Windsor’.  Similarly, ‘my Father’s House’ refers not to a structure , but to the Father’s Family or his Kingdom.  ‘Father’s House’ is the Father’s realm where the Father resides.

Keeping that in mind,  consider further.  “In my Father’s house, there are many _____.”   There is no exact translation of the word left blank variously translated, ‘mansions’, ‘rooms’, or ‘dwelling places’; a better term is ‘traveler’s rest’.  The idea of ‘traveler’s rest’ seems to be a place where weary pilgrims on a long and trying journey find long-term sanctuary.   A ‘traveler’s rest’ is a haven removed from suffering, from the weary struggles of conflicts and battles, and the dangers of dark forces.

In JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings , the Hobbit Frodo Baggins is on a perilous and strenuous odyssey to save the world from the Dark Forces. At a moment of impending death and capture, he is removed to safety to Rivendell.  Rivendell is a “traveler’s rest’ in a strategically fortified gorge offering him security and peaceful protection.  Here he convalesces in perfect safety.

Last October, my wife Pam and I had an ambitious day of travel.  We toured American Founder John Adams’ home and then drove across Boston.  Heading up into New Hampshire, we ambled around Robert Frost’s farm.  At early dusk, we arrived at our final destination, the New Hampshire country inn, Manor on Golden Pond .  In desperate need of country refuge and refreshment, we found a ‘traveler’s rest’!  We still savor the gourmet dinner in the elegant, paneled dining room; we see the view of Golden Pond out the picture window of our bedroom.

“In my Father’s house there are many permanent, traveler’s rests.”  Is there one for you?  Jesus says to his disciples, ‘I am departing to ready it for you.’  The Lord of Hosts is making up His disciple’s residence.  “If it were not so, I would have told you.’  This is a strong statement.  Jesus’ word is at stake.  One more thing:  ‘If I go and prepare a place for you, I am coming again and I will take you with me to my home.  So that where I am, there you may be also.’ 

Historically, English Lords, such as Lord Grantham in Downtown Abbey, invite people to their estates like ‘Downtown Abbey’ for ‘do’s’ - like his hunting party.  People come for days to the country and live off the hospitality of the Lord of the manor. 

The Lord of the heavenly realm has departed to go ahead of his disciples; He’s preparing eternal residences - ‘traveler’s rests’ - even one for you!  He very much wants you to join him there.  So that where He is, ‘there you may be also’.  Don’t you want to be with Him and his friends?  Knowing this means, you only have one final parting, and then no more ever again.  In the meantime, ‘do not go on letting your heart be troubled...trust in God and trust in Jesus Christ!

---

Tom is currently a retired Elder in the Virginia Annual Conference.  He has pastored churches in Virginia, California and England.  Studying John Wesley’s theology, he received his Ph.D. and M.A. degrees from the University of Bristol, Bristol, England and his Master of Divinity degree from Asbury Theological Seminary. While a student, he and his wife Pam lived in John Wesley’s Chapel “The New Room”, Bristol, England, the first established Methodist preaching house.  Tom was a faculty member of Asbury Theological Seminary. He has contributed articles to Methodist History and the Wesleyan Theological Journal. He and his wife have two children, daughter Karissa, who is an attorney in Richmond, Virginia, and, John, who is a recent graduate of Regent University.  Being a part of the development of their grandson Beau is a rich reward.  Tom enjoys a good book by a crackling fire with an English cup of tea.  His life text is, ‘Jesus, confirm my heart’s desire, to work and speak and think for thee’.

Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part III

In previous installments I have spoken of three experiences from my past—from my childhood, in fact—that shaped me as a moral apologist. These were the following: being raised in the holiness and camp meeting tradition, watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and seeing a poignant television commercial about a relief organization’s work in an underprivileged part of the world. All of those experiences were what we might call positive ones—inspiring me to think about what moral goodness is, what it looks like, and what it feels like.

Not all of the experiences that shaped me, though, were positive. Like all of us, there were also plenty of negative experiences from my past, so today I’m going to share one of those in particular. It is an especially difficult chapter from my past to share. It is the source of a fair amount of shame, because it was no small moral infraction.

More than once I had the opportunity to put a stop to a particular kid getting bullied. He was an easy target, not a physically strong boy, and in various ways an outlier, just not fitting in. Although more than once I had a strong impulse to reach out, to protect him, to include him, to befriend him, I did not. And on more than one occasion I actually saw him getting cruelly bullied and did nothing about it. I have thought about this many times since then, and I am still ashamed for not doing the right thing.

In fact, my resounding silence and abject failure to do the right thing was actually doing the radically wrong thing. My failure to act was wicked, and the reason, I’m convinced, I felt guilty about it is because in fact I was guilty. The feeling was indicative of a deeper problem, tracking the reality of an objective condition. I knew to do right and failed to do it, and in so failing I did something unspeakably awful. I know that now, but I knew it then, too.

In his Confessions, Augustine shared with laudable transparency his own painful childhood lesson in depravity. The example seems trivial—stealing pears—but the key to grasping its import is understanding that beneath its garden-variety nature lurked something far more sinister. He elaborated like this:

I wanted to carry out an act of theft and did so, driven by no kind of need other than my inner lack of any sense of, or feeling for, justice. Wickedness filled me. I stole something which I had in plenty and of much better quality. My desire was to enjoy not what I sought by stealing but merely the excitement of thieving and the doing of what was wrong. There was a pear tree near our vineyard laden with fruit, though attractive in neither [color] nor taste. To shake the fruit off the tree and carry off the pears, I and a gang of naughty adolescents set off late at night after (in our usual pestilential way) we had continued our game in the streets. We carried off a huge load of pears. But they were not for our feasts but merely to throw to the pigs. Even if we ate a few, nevertheless our pleasure lay in doing what was not allowed.

Such was my heart, O God, such was my heart. You had pity on it when it was at the bottom of the abyss. Now let my heart tell you what it was seeking there in that I became evil for no reason. I had no motive for my wickedness except wickedness itself. It was foul, and I loved it. I loved the self-destruction, I loved my fall, not the object for which I had fallen but my fall itself. My depraved soul leaped down from your firmament to ruin. I was seeking not to gain anything by shameful means, but shame for its own sake.[1]

Of course all human beings have their redeeming characteristics and moral strengths—each of us is made in God’s image, after all. We are far from being as bad as we can be. Still, only after recognizing our need to be forgiven—our having fallen short of the moral law, both our draw and repulsion to the good, our love and hate of shame, our indulgence of darkness, our taste for wickedness—are we able to apprehend just how good is the good news of the gospel.

In an essay called “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis identifies salient features of those in his generation, and his analysis is perhaps even timelier today. Among such features was skepticism about ancient history and distrust of old texts; another one—most relevant for present purposes—was that a sense of sin is almost totally lacking. Lewis writes that

Our situation is thus very different from that of the Apostles. The Pagans … to whom they preached were haunted by a sense of guilt and to them the [g]ospel was, therefore, “good news.” We address people who have been trained to believe that whatever goes wrong in the world is someone else’s fault—the Capitalists, the Government’s, the Nazis’, the Generals’, etc. They approach God Himself as His judges. They want to know, not whether they can be acquitted for sin, but whether He can be acquitted for creating such a world.

In attacking this fatal insensibility it is useless to direct attention (a) To sins your audience do not commit, or (b) To things they do, but do not regard as sins. They are usually not drunkards. They are mostly fornicators, but then they do not feel fornication to be wrong. It is, therefore, useless to dwell on either of these subjects. (Now that contraceptives have removed the obviously uncharitable element in fornication I do not myself think we can expect people to recognize it as sin until they have accepted Christianity as a whole.)

I cannot offer you a water-tight technique for awakening the sense of sin. I can only say that, in my experience, if one begins from the sin that has been one’s own chief problem during the last week, one is very often surprised at the way this shaft goes home. But whatever method we use, our continual effort must be to get their mind away from public affairs and “crime” and bring them down to brass tacks—in the whole network of spite, greed, envy, unfairness, and conceit in the lives of “ordinary decent people” like themselves (and ourselves).[2] 

In class I sometimes ask how best to address this ubiquitous notion nowadays that none, or at least hardly any, of us are deep sinners in need of forgiveness. It is a challenging situation to confront, but very often a prominent part of our current context. Perhaps one way is to talk about one’s own failures, rather than our neighbor’s. For another, Lewis directed folks to consider their chief sin of the previous week. Yet another approach might be to reframe the question like this: Ask folks to consider the biggest mistake they ever made, and then ask them what went into that mistake. Specifically, is there, in their resultant regret, any moral element? That may edge people closer to considering their moral failures.

Of course, for Christians encouraging such reflection, the point is not to put people under condemnation to leave them there, but to share the news of liberation from guilt and reconciliation with a loving God anxious to save them to the uttermost. Not the false liberation of defiantly denying, or simply failing to recognize, one’s guilt, but the true freedom that comes from knowing the truth.

I also hope one day I run into the man who had been that bullied boy, and tell him I am sincerely sorry for my wretched cowardice and complicity in cruelty.

---

David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

---

[1] Saint Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 29.

[2] C. S. Lewis, “Christian Apologetics,” in God in the Dock (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1970), 95-96.

The Necessity of a Cosmic Mind

Anyone who is anyone in apologetics has heard of the kalam cosmological argument. Short, concise, and powerful; the kalam argument notes the causal agency behind the origins of the universe. Simply put, the kalam argument holds:

1. Everything that begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause (C&M, 102).

After further researching the kalam argument, it was discovered that an ontological reality underlies the argument. That ontological reality is that one cannot escape the necessity of a Cosmic Mind for three reasons.

1. Necessity from Absolute Beginning of All Physical Universes. Physicists like Stephen Hawking and others posit that this universe is but one of many endless universes. Some theories contend that an endless movement of branes (not brains) collide and cause universes to “pop” into being. Other theories hold that an eternal multiverse gave rise to universes like ours. However, William Lane Craig and others have noted that the BGV theorem, named for its founders (Arvind Borde, Alan Guth, and Alexander Vilenkin), indicates that any and all physical universes demand an absolute beginning. I do not deny that a multiverse could exist. A multiverse is entirely possible as are many other universes. Neither is problematic for the Christian worldview. When one notes the enormity of God’s Being, multiple universes become child’s play for such a God. Nonetheless, mindless universes cannot be the answer for why something exists as they too would require an explanation for their existence.

2. Necessity from an Impossibility of an Infinite Regress. Second, it is impossible for an infinite regress of physical past events to have occurred. That is, endless physical events of the past are impossible. There comes a point where something beyond the scope of the physical world is required to explain physical origins. Craig offers two philosophical arguments to verify this claim.

1. An actual infinite cannot exist.

2. An infinite temporal regress of events is an actual infinite.

3. Therefore an infinite temporal regress of events cannot exist (W&D, 390).

While mathematical infinities can exist, Craig notes that such infinities are a different story when considering physical infinities. Craig does not dismiss infinities. Rather, he holds an Aristotelian model of time where time is viewed as eternal but broken into segments (C&M, 114; W&D, 398-399). However, infinite past physical events are impossible given that actual infinities do not exist in spacetime.

            Additionally, Craig argues,

1. A collection formed by successive addition cannot be an actual infinite.

2. The temporal series of events is a collection formed by successive addition.

3. Therefore, the temporal series of events cannot be an actual infinite (W&D, 396).

Herein, no universe or universes could hold an infinite number of additions in time’s past. Thus, physical universes are temporal and finite.

3. Necessity from the Inability of Forms to Explain the First Cause. Some, like Erik Wielenberg, agree that the answer to the finitude of the universe is not found in an infinite regress of events, but rather in transcendent entities. However, these transcendent entities are not God, per se, but mindless Platonic Forms. Yet this is a fairly simple objection to answer. Mindless entities can do nothing. If mindless entities exist in the world of Platonic Forms, they just are. They do not do anything. They exist. Thus, a transcendent Mind is the only logical answer to this problem. This Cosmic Mind would need to be, as Swinburne and Craig note, “immaterial, beginningless, uncaused, timeless, and spaceless” (C&M, 193). Interestingly, the Cosmic Mind that is necessitated sounds a lot like the God of the Bible.

If one follows the trail of necessities, one lands at the necessity of a Cosmic Mind. While this does not necessarily connect the God of the Bible with the Cosmic Mind implied, the similarities are so intricately connected that it would take more faith not to connect God with the Cosmic Mind than to connect the two. This Cosmic Mind knows all and sees all. Thankfully, this Cosmic Mind eventually became the Incarnate Son who provided redemption for all who would receive him.

---

Source

Craig, William Lane, and J. P. Moreland, eds. The Blackwell Companion to Natural Theology. West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012.

Walls, Jerry L., and Trent Dougherty, eds. Two Dozen (Or So) Arguments for God. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2018.

---

About the Author

Brian G. Chilton is the founder of BellatorChristi.com, the host of The Bellator Christi Podcast, and the author of the Layman’s Manual on Christian Apologetics. He received his Master of Divinity in Theology from Liberty University (with high distinction); his Bachelor of Science in Religious Studies and Philosophy from Gardner-Webb University (with honors); and received certification in Christian Apologetics from Biola University. Brian is enrolled in the Ph.D. program in Theology and Apologetics at Liberty University and is a member of the Evangelical Theological Society and the Evangelical Philosophical Society. Brian has served as a pastor in pastoral ministry for nearly 20 years.

https://www.amazon.com/Laymans-Manual-Christian-Apologetics-Essentials/dp/1532697104

© 2020. BellatorChristi.com.

Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part II

In the second installment of this series, I want to talk about two other childhood experiences that shaped me as a moral apologist. Last time I talked about being a child of camp meetings. Experience number two was this: One of my earliest memories as a child was watching Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Fred Rogers had a saying, and it went like this: he wanted to “make goodness attractive.” I still remember a few years ago when a documentary was released about his life and work, and how grown men could be seen openly weeping as they watched and remembered. I have read, and from my experience as both students and teacher I suspect it is true, that students won’t always remember what a teacher says, but won’t forget how teachers make them feel. Fred Rogers was, for many of us, one of our first teachers, and he had an uncanny knack for making people feel better about themselves, for making people feel loved, respected, and appreciated. He most definitely made goodness attractive, and the documentary was so powerful, in part, because it was a reminder that moral goodness isn’t vacuous sentimentality, but something real and solid. Rather than a sign of weakness, it’s a sign of strength. Fred gave viewers, young and old alike, an experience of goodness, and especially to give a child such an experience is truly a gift of great value.

I bring up Fred Rogers in the context of moral apologetics because when I think of morality, I think of one like him. I don’t think of rules and regulations; burdensome, onerous requirements; projections of piety and suffocating sanctimony; goody two shoes; or someone afraid of living life to the full for fear of offending the heavens. I do not think of moralism, legalism, holier-than-thou attitudes, fear of sex, avoiding tobacco or alcohol, or never getting angry. Nor does morality invoke the specter of weakness or carry connotations of something effete or enervating. Rather it is about strength and character, integrity and fidelity, and an abundant, rich, creative life. It is about excellence and living as we were intended to live, and it is about loving our neighbor as ourselves, and seeing the infinite dignity and value and worth of every human being we encounter as creatures made in the very image of God, the sort of thing Auden had experienced with his fellow teachers on that one occasion. A man like Fred Rogers, though anathema to Nietzsche, was, contra Friedrich, a man of incredible strength, willing to do the hard work of loving even his unlovely neighbors, a man who strove to make goodness attractive—not in a mousy, Pollyannaish way, but in a genuine, transparent, risk-taking, courageous way. Mention of morality doesn’t make me cringe or turn sheepish, nor tempt me to engage in derision and derogation. It rather inspires and ennobles. When I think of morality, I think of Fred Rogers.

Now, experience number three: When I was very young, maybe six or seven, I saw a television advertisement. The commercial was designed to raise money for a relief agency helping needy people in a different country. One image struck me as particularly poignant, and it was this: A relief worker handed a piece of food to an obviously hungry child. I still remember vividly how visceral my reaction was. There was something about the scene that struck me as remarkable, and in a quite specific sense. It seemed to me at the time morally remarkable—it was more than merely proper or appropriate, nice or kind; it was those things, for sure, but it was more than that. I may not have had all the vocabulary at the time, but I had at least the cursory concepts, and it was beautiful and right; it was altogether lovely and good. Although I was very young, I remember what seemed for all the world to me at the time as an apprehension of sorts. It was nothing less than an epiphanous moral experience for me, and one that would exert a quite long-term effect. It was as if in that moment I became deeply convinced that morality is something real. A thought occurred to me at the time that I have never forgotten, and of which I remain convinced, namely, that I will never be surer of anything else than I was that what I had seen was a morally good action. Of course there were other formative childhood experiences, including ones that shaped my eventual vocation, but this was certainly an important one.

Children of course can be mistaken, and they often are. In fact, on some models of childhood development children are morally immature and often predominantly egoistic at least early on. But former University of Massachusetts philosopher Gary Matthews some years ago challenged that idea by suggesting that there are numerous ways to measure moral maturity, of which descriptions of moral theory are but one. It is true children are not good at doing that, but there’s another important measure, something like empathy, and he wrote that children often put adults to shame on this score. They often display great capacity for recognizing and empathizing with suffering. So he thought children have much to teach adults about ethics, contra those who in condescending fashion look down on children as morally stunted. I think I can honestly say that I have spent much of my professional career trying to get a better grasp on what I took that day to be a rock solid foundation on which to build. I don’t pretend for a moment to think this establishes the thesis of moral realism. A variety of challenges to moral realism are on offer and in need of careful assessment. Nevertheless, much of what moves me about the moral argument is a sturdy commitment to moral realism that none of my work in philosophy ever since has undermined. In fact, it has strengthened it.

---

David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

Fatherlessness and Incarceration

Sometimes various folks like to adduce statistics to drive home the value of being raised with two parents. Of course two parents are not always better than one—one deeply loving parent is better than having two cruel ones, for example—but there are some compelling statistics that provide reason to think that the nurture and stability of two-parent homes, generally speaking, better conduce to healthy socialization. A commonly cited figure pertains to incarceration. Empirical studies show that 85% of youths in prison grew up in fatherless homes. On occasion pastors will point to such statistics as a quick way in which to encourage parents to stay together and raise their children in a healthy environment.

All that is well-rehearsed material, but here I would invite folks to consider how a kid, say, from a fatherless family may interpret such statistics. Perhaps he’s in church as a youngster, and the pastor cites these numbers, or any of plenty of others that indeed reveal how growing up without a father is disadvantageous. I ask you to consider such a scenario because I know of a young man who had this very experience, and for years afterwards he struggled with what the statistics meant for him. Since he wasn’t old enough to process the information, he (mistakenly and understandably) confused what he had heard with the thought that it was likely that he himself, as one growing up fatherless, would end up behind bars. Although this was a mistake, logically speaking, that’s the sort of thing kids are naturally wont to do, and it was hardly his fault. Sadly the experience left him feeling for years that he was doomed to a subpar life, perhaps even something like prison. Worse, he thought this was one of the messages the church itself had to offer him.

It dawned on me today that the math of this matter is a good problem for Bayes’ Theorem, and the result is telling and, for this young friend, hopeful. So the question is this: What is the probability that someone raised without a father will end up incarcerated? There are three variables: the antecedent probability of becoming incarcerated; the antecedent probability of growing up fatherless; and the conditional probability of being fatherless if one is incarcerated. Respectively, those figures go like this: .00716, .39, and .85. The formula looks like this:

P(IlF) = [P(FlI)P(I)]/P(F)

This is to say that the probability of becoming incarcerated if one grows up without a father is the product of the (conditional) probability of being fatherless if one is incarcerated and the (antecedent) probability of being incarcerated, divided by the (antecedent) probability of being fatherless. Plugging in the values, the result is .0156. Which is to say that there’s about a 1.56% chance, if one grows up without a father, of ending up incarcerated. Admittedly this is all course grained, and it remains several times higher than for those who do not grow up without a father. But it is nothing like the initial, stark conditional 85% probability of having grown up fatherless if one is incarcerated.

Fathers are important, undoubtedly. Having been blessed with a great one myself, I am aware of this truth very well. However, especially for vulnerable kids without the capacity to make sense of and process troubling statistics, perhaps we can and should, with some sensitivity and delicacy, empathy and kindness, save them some heartache, dissonance, and angst by carefully avoiding the suggestion that to be raised without a father probably relegates them to an inferior life. Such a nonredemptive message isn’t just bad math, it is bad theology. We are called to visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, not add to their burden, even if unwittingly.

Reference:

Abwesende Vater statistik, aktualisierte Forschung | Lovefreund.de

---

David Baggett is professor of philosophy and Director of the Center for Moral Apologetics at Houston Baptist University.

Editor's Recommendation: Reimagining Apologetics by Justin Bailey

“In these pages Justin Bailey extends readers an enticing invitation to an expansive epistemology, one that weaves together truth, goodness, and beauty for a fresh vision of the gospel. Bailey locates this apologetic method at the intersection of theology, philosophy, and culture, shaping his innovative evangelistic approach through careful engagement with the work of Charles Taylor, George MacDonald, and Marilynne Robinson. What emerges is a volume as engaging as it is accessible, as historically informed as it is relevant, and as scholarly as it is practical. Reimagining Apologetics would be a fine fit for both college classroom and layperson’s library alike.”

— Marybeth Baggett, Associate Editor

Hope Among the Graves

A few days ago my wife and I and our daughter Rachel made one of our occasional visits to the grave of our daughter, Cynthia, Rachel’s biological mother who died of Huntington’s Disease in 2010.  She’s buried in a peaceful, ordinary county cemetery in Spring Arbor, MI, and we make the 15-minute trip there four or five times a year to trim the grass and flowers around her grave.  Our most recent trip was on a beautiful, sunny fall day, when it was just pleasant to be out.  We sat there at the grave after we had trimmed around it and thought about how Cynthia’s life had enriched us, in spite of her disability.  The same is true of Rachel, who also has Huntington’s Disease, the genetically transmitted disease of which her mother died.  Just the week before, we were made aware of how a comment Rachel made in our small group at church had an effect none of us had anticipated.

One member of our group was lamenting about some really intense difficulties he had gone through, and Rachel remarked something to the effect that we could be confident that it was all going to be all right, because we are on our way to heaven.  The leader of our group made no particular comment at the time, but the next week he and his wife went for a vacation and he had time to ponder his own busy life, and he remembered Rachel’s word of encouragement and was uplifted by it.  He told us about this experience when we met again the next week.  Rachel said her remark came out of a kind of vision that God had given her, and that was not the first time that she had had a word from the Lord to share.  We were all blessed by the word of the Lord coming through her.

Just as Rachel and her mother before her have been a blessing in spite of their disability, so it seemed to me, there in the grave yard, that there was hope represented in that seemingly unlikely place, and the next day the following poem came to me.

Visiting Cynthia’s Grave

I want to be among the graves

When Jesus comes to claim His own;

To see the spirits rise,

Unbound from Adam’s dust,

The resurrection of the just

Erupting at trumpet’s call,

Unshrouded and clothed anew

With Christ-like form

To meet Him in the air.

Passing fair to wear

Eternal robes of immortality!

Oh, what a congregation then,

When all the Lord’s elect,

Both those awaiting in the dust

And those not yet beneath the earth

Triumphant rise

To meet Him in the skies,

Forever freed from Adam’s curse!

                     Elton D. Higgs

                     (Sept. 8, 2020)

---

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton.  Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

Dean for a Year: Twilight Musing Autobiography (Part 22)

Toward the end of my sabbatical year in England, I received a spate of phone calls from back home at UM-Dearborn.  The first was from Dennis Papazian, chair of the Division of Arts, Sciences, & Letters, whom I had served as his associate chair.  He informed me that a cabal of faculty were at work seeking to prevent him from continuing in his position as head of the unit for a year while a search was conducted for a Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences and Letters (CASL).  The renaming of the position from Division Chair to Dean, would be part of the reorganization of the academic units through a new set of bylaws, a kind of constitution for the governance of the campus.  Dennis was pleading with me not to accept a coming offer to take the post of Acting Dean for the next academic year.  The second call came from two colleagues who were leading the “rebellion” against Dennis, urging me to accept the offer when it came from the Chancellor.  They described the alleged offenses of Dennis as Chair and described the wide support they had found (generated?) for deposing Dennis and appointing me.  The third call came from the Chancellor, who detailed the generous terms of the appointment and said he was acting on a petition for my appointment from a number of faculty in liberal arts.

All of this was very heady stuff for a still young mid-grade faculty member.  Laquita and I talked it over, and I called the Chancellor back and accepted.  We flew back home with mixed delight and apprehension for the task that lay ahead.  With just about everybody except Dennis Papazian, I was the golden-haired boy (though I didn’t have much hair of any color left by that time), and I’m afraid I didn’t approach the job with any great humility.  As soon as I could after I arrived back at campus, I went to see the Provost (chief academic officer) of the campus, Eugene Arden, who was a mentor and advocate for me throughout the rest of his years at UM-D.  His administrative assistant, Elnora Ford, greeted me warmly, and I was announced and ushered into the Provost’s office for my first interview with him.  He was a New York Jew who had the brash and often acerbic wit that one associates with New Yorkers.  He could be very gentle and helpful toward those he thought deserved it, but bitingly dismissive of those he thought were being dishonest or manipulative.  (Later, he described a group of dissident faculty members who called themselves the “Committee of Concerned Faculty,“ as the “Committee of Disturbed Faculty.”)  He warned me of the politics that had been the source of my being appointed, and he assigned me an associate dean from the Social Sciences Dept. to “balance the ticket,” so to speak.

Dennis Papazian very much wanted to talk to me, so I went to his office on the first day or two after I returned.  He complained bitterly of how he had been treated and blamed primarily Claude Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth, two of my colleagues in English and, in the future, my next-door neighbors.  He said they spearheaded the campaign to depose him, and that the power they showed did not bode well for the future.  On that matter, he proved to be right, as I would discover to my great distress.  But for the moment, he was primarily wanting to convey his feeling that, after having been trained by him to do administrative work and being his close associate, I turned on him and was willing to accept the Acting Dean appointment without any regard to loyalty that I owed him.  In my naivete, I had not even thought about that aspect of the offer, especially since I rather agreed with his critics that he was a wheeler-dealer who sometimes cut corners ethically.  Unfortunately, my relationship with Dennis remained strained for many years after that.

I went to get settled into my office in the extemporized quarters for CASL administration, one of several “temporary” modular units (actually some of them stayed around for 10 to 15 years).  The Dean’s office was located in the corner of Module 8, which also housed the College secretaries and associate administrators, including the administrative secretary, Fern Ledford, and the financial assistant, Joe Rath.  Don Proctor, my associate dean, also had an office there.  Since he was also chairman of the Social Sciences Dept., his Module 8 office was secondary.  Fern Ledford kept my calendar and took my calls, so I worked quite closely with her; and Joe Rath made sure that I was aware of the state of College accounts and knew of any inappropriate expenditures.

As Dean, I chaired the Administrative Council (department chairs) and the Executive Committee (elected representatives from each department responsible for setting academic policy for the College).  We met on a regular basis so that we would be mutually informed of what was going on in the departments and could make decisions appropriate to each body.  There had been much tension during the past year among these groups because of the movement to oust Dennis Papazian from his position, so my first job was to assure my colleagues that I would deal openly, transparently, and honestly with them, to the best of my ability.  In the discussion of starting the search for a permanent dean, I had to make the decision of whether I would be a candidate.  I declined to do so, lest my candidacy taint my ability to carry out disinterestedly my job as Acting Dean.  Although I made the decision from good motives, as things turned out, I think the College might have been better off had I elected to run, since the man who was appointed, Kim Bruhn, was not a happy choice and was replaced after only one term.

I think that in general people wanted me to succeed in restoring some harmony to College administration.  I was able during the year to convince people that I wanted to deal with them straightforwardly.  Early in my year’s tenure, I was able to carry out a deal with the Natural Science Dept. to purchase a key piece of equipment that they needed by implementing a creative way of financing the transaction and getting it approved by the Provost.  That was an indication that I was broadly supportive of all departments, not just Humanities, and that I was sympathetic to the special (and expensive) equipment needs of the sciences.  I also established a good working relationship with the other Colleges and the academic support units, such as Admissions, Registration and Records, and staff members in the Chancellor’s office.

I learned a lot that year that laid the foundation for further administrative duties, but I never held the top spot again.  At the end of the year the Provost asked me to stay on as Associate Dean of the College to provide continuity and to be able to use my administrative talents to help the College to function smoothly.  UM-D was still growing at the time, and CASL needed to be guided to absorb that growth without sacrificing either good order or quality of programs.  The next installment will cover my two years as Associate Dean.

---

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton.  Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

---

Moral Apologetics and Biography, Part I

When I was in graduate school, a very good teacher of mine once suggested that I “purge the personal” from my work. It was generally good advice, which I tried to follow, and I was appreciative of his insight. It is indeed often best to do so as we strive to write about a topic objectively and dispassionately. But when it comes to moral apologetics, it is not always easy or even possible for me and others to do so at a distance, and sometimes it does well for us to consider some of the reasons why.

So in series of short posts I intend to discuss moral apologetics and various ways in which it has reverberated in my life and the lives of others. This is important, I suspect, for several reasons, one of which is this. In order for something like morality to be taken as importantly evidential in a person’s life, something about morality must seem especially striking. Unlike a geometric proof that need not engage one’s affective or imaginative sides (though for some it may), the moral argument, to have purchase in a person’s life, likely requires a requisite prior experience of goodness. Likewise with an aesthetic apologetic, requiring enough prior experience of beauty. Goodness and Beauty are quite analogous in this way, which makes a great deal of sense if anything in the vicinity of Plato’s view is right that they are practically flip sides of the same coin. Both of these “Transcendentals” are deeply experiential realities.[1]

The anecdotes in this post, then, are designed to illuminate an aspect of moral apologetics that logically and often chronologically precedes close examination of a formal moral argument. These are the sorts of experiences that prepare the ground, as it were, make fertile the soil of our hearts and minds to hear the argument and feel its force. Perhaps the reason why some remain largely unmoved by the moral argument is that they lack the requisite experience of goodness, and as a result the argument lacks purchase for them. In the same way some raised without a loving father in their life have a harder time believing in a loving Heavenly Father—while, interestingly, some with missing or unloving parents naturally gravitate to a loving God like a ravenous man to a delicious meal.

Acknowledging the contours of our personal stories is not the same as reducing questions of evidence to psychology. It’s rather simply to apprehend how various aspects of our past have helped shape us, sometimes giving us eyes with which to discern what’s there, and sometimes serving as blinders or obstructions impeding our vision. Just as good intellectual habits make more likely our acquisition of truth, and a rule of reason is a bad one that prevents us from discerning truth and evidence that are really there, likewise our formative experiences can either help or hinder our quest for reality.

In my own life story, three episodes in particular stand out as shaping my vocation as a natural theologian and moral apologist. One is that I was a child of the holiness tradition. To this day I can still smell the sawdust trails of camp meetings from my earliest years. We often attended more than one camp meeting a year, and any summer season I now experience bereft of a visit to camp meeting strikes me as emaciated somehow. A few years ago Marybeth and I wrote a history of a camp meeting in Michigan I attended for many years, and it started like this:

Eaton Rapids Camp Meeting has touched my life profoundly. One of my earliest memories, in fact, was looking high into the air at the windows near the top of the tabernacle. It was after an evening service, if my faint memory serves, and I must have been herded back to the main auditorium after the youth service was done. People were milling about and darting in various directions. I still recall seeing some tables set up with various advertisements (likely from Bible schools and the like) at the back of the tabernacle, and the outstanding impression I experienced at that age was the sheer enormity of the structure. It was simple but elegant—it seemed well-nigh ornate to me—with doors propped up all around its perimeter. Its capacious wooden canopy was enough to mesmerize my imagination for quite some time. I am guessing I was around five or six years of age. I didn’t know it at the time, but I was smack dab in the center of a vintage piece of classic Americana. This was camp meeting, in Eaton Rapids, Michigan, and it was, to my best guess, 1971 or 1972.[2]      

Camp meeting shaped my soul. I had been taught many of the same things in church, of course, but camp meeting was like church on steroids, and it drove home a great many lessons. God is love, for example—essentially, perfectly love—and God desires the very best for each of us. He loves us enough to send Jesus to die for us. God does not merely want us to believe in him, or treat him like a miracle dispenser to bail us out of trouble. He want us to know him, find our vocation in him, and love him. God’s grace is sufficient for us, and enough both to forgive for our committed sins, and deliver us from our condition of sinfulness.

Longtime Asbury College president Dennis Kinlaw once wrote that even our good deeds, done for Christ and in his strength, can be tinged with self-centered self-interest that permeates the depths of our psyches and defiles even our best. “This raises the question of a clean heart and of an undivided heart full of the love of God…. That is why the experience of a clean heart and of a perfect love for God is often described as ‘a second work of grace.’ The identification of this need in the believer’s life and the provision in Christ for a pure heart is the special mission of the camp meeting.”[3] 

When Kinlaw was in his nineties, Marybeth and I went to visit him in Wilmore and were able to pummel him with questions for a few hours. Still sharp as a tack, he regaled us with stories as college president, presiding over the famous 1970 revival at Asbury, pastor, professor, administrator, camp meeting preacher. He was an eminently impressive person, just brilliant, but something about him struck me as particularly interesting. He didn’t point to his tenure as college president as central to his identity, nor his PhD in Old Testament from Brandeis, but to an experience he had as a thirteen year old boy at Indian Springs Camp Meeting in Georgia. In the twilight of his life, with the benefit of all the hindsight afforded a 90-year-old man, he pointed to those altar experiences he had as a boy, when he met God in person—under the preaching of another longtime Asbury college president, its founder Henry Morrison, no less—as what was at the heart of who he was. More than anything else from his experiences, that was what he saw as defining him.

My next post will discuss a second feature of my childhood that softened my heart and opened my mind to the moral argument.

---

With his co-author, Jerry Walls, Dr. Baggett authored Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality. The book won Christianity Today’s 2012 apologetics book of the year of the award. He published a sequel with Walls that critiques naturalistic ethics, God and Cosmos: Moral Truth and Human Meaning. A third book in the series, The Moral Argument: A History, chronicles the history of moral arguments for God’s existence. Dr. Baggett has also co-edited a collection of essays exploring the philosophy of C.S. Lewis, and edited the third debate between Gary Habermas and Antony Flew on the resurrection of Jesus. Dr. Baggett currently is a professor at Houston Baptist University.

---

[1] Readers are strongly encouraged to listen to David Horner’s remarkable talk “Too Good Not to be True,” accessible here: https://www.moralapologetics.com/wordpress/video-too-good-not-to-be-true-the-shape-of-moral-apologetics-david-horner.

[2] David & Marybeth Baggett, At the Bend of the River Grand (Wilmore, KY: Emeth Press, 2016), xi.

[3] Ibid., 265.

The Withered Hand

Here recently, emotions come on me like an Imperial Star Destroyer out of lightspeed.  I’m good one minute, and the next I need to sit down and deal with the lump in my throat.  No warning, no spinning thoughts, no sleepless nights, no nothing.  Boom.  The Empire is there to destroy me.

Until COVID hit, everything seemed to be going swimmingly. Job was going alright, the kids are growing, my wife still likes me.  From a stage-of-life standpoint, I had challenges that I needed to face, but those challenges gave me hope and energy.

Then, well, COVID. 

I’m an introvert, so spending days upon days by myself is what I like to call pretty neat-o. I teach English, so I basically read and write for a living.  I love teaching, but I’m usually pretty exhausted by the end of a class or two. And I’m even one of those very annoying people who got even more accomplished without the constant distractions and, well, people. During COVID, I got stuff done. Good stuff.  Stuff I deeply believe that God wanted me to do and was pleased with me for.

So, why was I miserable? 

Well, as I write this, I have no idea. I’m a rather positive person, so being miserable is new.  I’m not one to sing “Everything is Awesome” wherever I go, but I might hum it under my breath.  I can usually see an opening, a light.  In my world, things are rarely ever hopeless.

As my emotional pit deepened, I tried everything to understand and deal with the incredibly strong, powerful emotions I was feeling: I took walks, I sat on my deck, I worked, I hung with family, I tried to control them with schedules I came up with, I presented them with my over-the-top expectations for their behavior, I did it all. . .

I still felt miserable.

When I was growing up, there was a very common song that we sang, with this lyric: “Every day with Jesus is sweeter than the day before.”  Without offering any commentary on the song, I will say that, here recently, this has certainly NOT been my experience.  Some days with Jesus are better, but some days aren’t.  I was taught that the promise of salvation and the hope of eternity was enough for any rough day I might encounter.  But here I was, during a time of tremendous grief and stress (worldwide grief and stress, mind you) being crippled emotionally.  Seriously, I should have been doing great, but every day seemed tougher than the day before.  And I believe Jesus was with me on this.

So, I went to the elders at my church (I’m one of them), and I told them how I was feeling and that I needed professional counseling. I wouldn’t say they knew it was coming, but none of them seemed surprised, either.  They’d seen me, over the previous handful of years, survive a couple strokes and then talk about the changes that ensued: my job, my marriage, the kids, the works.  To this point, I had done whatever I thought was wise so I could heal.  We bring everything to our meeting: confessions of sin, frustrations over jobs, parenting challenges, even finances.  Nothing, really, is off the table. 

They listened and prayed that God would help me in this.

Then, just like my quick-appearing emotions, it came to me.  The miracle where Jesus healed the man with the withered hand. The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke each has an account of this particular miracle. Jesus was at the synagogue on the Sabbath. Jesus asks the man to show everyone his hand. I asked myself: everyone knew about this guy’s hand, right?  He’d been seen at the synagogue, probably more than once. This guy probably wasn’t there by accident, and I’m guessing he was a regular fixture there. The context is clear, too: Jesus asked the man to show his withered hand so that everyone could see what he was about to do. 

Yet, I wonder: was there a small part of that bit of theater meant for the man? To be sure, the rest of the scene deals with the reactions of the religious folks and the crowd.  But Jesus ignores all of them to make that request. I imagine Jesus looking at the man, and everyone else kind of disappearing for that moment: “stretch out your hand.” Did the man do it immediately? Did his hand shake? Did he have a queasy nervousness before he did it?

This man had lived his life with this withered hand, and I’m sure he’d lived his life around it, too.  There wasn’t a blue-collar/white collar divide. He couldn’t pick up a desk job because he couldn’t work a manual labor trade.  Everything was a manual labor trade, and he had to get on with life if he was ever going to live.  He had to cope.  Nothing was going to change.

I think, in some way, Jesus was showing that this man was going to be healed, but he also required the man to show his withered hand to show everyone else that he needed healing. He wasn’t ok. The man’s life was as bent as his hand, and he needed to look at it again, so Jesus could do something about it.  Too often, I live my life that way: working around and over the places in my life where I must simply face the fact that I need healing. 

Being overly optimistic while ignoring the difficulties of a particular situation is a guide  for living a half-life or no life at all.  In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins interviews Admiral Jim Stockdale, where they discuss Stockdale’s torture while he lived as a POW in the concentration camp dubbed “The Hanoi Hilton” in Vietnam.  During the interview, Stockdale described the personal discipline it took to survive such a brutal—and long lasting—lifestyle.  His description for what it takes to succeed has taken on the name “The Stockdale Paradox”:  “You must never confuse the faith that you will prevail in the end—which you can never afford to lose—with the discipline to confront the most brutal facts of your current reality.”

It’s strange to say it, but I believe one key weakness that I’ve been living around is that I’m too positive.  I haven’t looked at the difficulty in my life, as easy as my life seems to be, in comparison to, say, Jim Stockdale’s torture.  That’s why I’m not making that comparison.  I’m actually comparing myself to the men who, according to Stockdale, didn’t make it.

I’ve been looking at everything in the world, due to COVID (sickness, death, anger, financial ruin, frustration, arrogance, all of it), and I find myself quickly imagining how things would be when all of this is over. That, friends, is deadly. In fact, Stockdale claims that the people who died quickest in the Hanoi Hilton were the ones who were the most optimistic—they imagined getting out by Christmas, then by Easter, July 4, and so on.  According to Admiral Stockdale, they died of a broken heart.

But my approach to my own pain, is not just a symptom of humanity, it’s very much a symptom of the brand of Christianity I find myself in, the brand of Christianity that is quick to paper over pain and hardship in favor of a “God is in control!” statement or a “He’s coming back soon” encouragement or even an “I see God working” prophecy.  In his book Recapturing the Wonder, Mike Cosper describes this brand of the Christian life: “Many pastors and writers paint a picture of the Christian life that is much more akin to a Thomas Kinkaid painting: everything bathed in amber light, flowers blooming even in the snow, everything peaceful and picturesque.”

In contrast to that picture, Jesus demands to see what’s broken or hurting or not working anymore.  As my wife says, “you have to reveal it before you can heal it.”

But Jesus himself, at different times in his life, asked for evidence of the pain that people around him suffered.  He knew about that pain, so it must have been for the benefit of the person who needed to be delivered.  Of course, even as he asks to see the withered parts of our lives, Jesus personifies the reality that we will prevail.

My Thrilling First Sabbatical Leave Abroad (2) (Part 21)

Our trip into Scotland was a good launch to the year for us. It paved the way for us to take subsequent family trips and for touring around with guests from the U.S. We hosted our friends Wendell and Joyce Bean and their daughter, Melanie, who was about Liann’s age, and with them, we rented a van and visited the Cotswolds, Wales, and northwest England. It was in Chester that we discovered one morning that in the confusion of our departure we had left behind our little Cynthia at the B&B. We quickly corrected our mistake, and Cynthia was quite calm when we arrived, having been plied with cookies by the proprietress while she waited. Crossing the English Channel by ferry, we hit the high spots in Paris and Amsterdam, as well as visiting Cologne and its magnificent cathedral. Unfortunately, our most vivid memory of the visit to Cologne was an incident where Joyce got locked into a toilet booth because she didn’t have the correct coin for paying the attendant. The woman was quite insistent that Joyce would not be released until she paid properly! Finally, someone came in and resolved the matter, and Joyce was released.

We also had the pleasure of being visited by Sel and Helen Sutterfield, who were “uncle” and “aunt” to our children, who were quite comfortable with them and readily engaged in conversation with them. One morning Helen came down for breakfast in one of her usual tasteful ensembles, and Liann told her,”Aunt Helen, you look very “smaht” this morning,” using both an English term of description and its British pronunciation. With the Sutterfields we concentrated on points of interest in London and the south of England, including notable sites in Essex, such as the great house of Audley End and the ancient log church in Greensted.

One of the Essex sites that touched our hearts was the old church of St. Peter’s-on-the-Wall, at Bradwell-on-Sea. It was out in a lonely field on the North Sea and had been restored and re-consecrated, after being used many years as a barn. Built in 654 by St. Cedd, early evangelist to the East Saxons, it was impressive, even in its austerity. Praying there, we felt the power of the centuries of prayers that had been offered there. It was constructed of materials remaining from a Roman fort on that site. In contrast nearby was a WWII concrete bunker, one of many that had been built for coastal defense. At the other end of the spectrum was the famous Canterbury Cathedral, ecclesiastical home of the Archbishop of Canterbury, the clerical head of the Church of England. The beauty and glory of the ancient cathedrals never ceased to amaze us. It is also the destination of the group of pilgrims in Geoffrey Chaucer’s medieval poem, The Canterbury Tales, making it especially meaningful to me as a teacher of literature. The town walls still stand, forming part of the walls around the Cathedral Close, the private grounds belonging to the Cathedral.

Back in Upminster, we settled into our routine. The girls were quickly oriented to their school. It was only a short distance away from our house, and they went back and forth on their own, even coming home for lunch. They did well academically, and Cynthia, being only four when she started, got a head start from where she would have been in the U. S. The headmistress, Mrs. Pullam, was a traditional British school administrator and believed in developing character in her students, as well as intellectual skills. The boys wore short pants all the year around, whatever the weather. When one of the mothers asked Mrs. Pullam about their abbreviated garments in very cold weather, she replied, “It toughens them up!” One of our early memories of Cynthia’s marching to the beat of her own drum arose from her being late coming home from school one day. We went looking for her, and we found her poring over a trail of ants on the sidewalk. She was always interested in bugs, and she saw no reason that she should not just follow where her curiosity led.

Laquita spent a lot of time that year reading books, including a good deal of the local history of Upminster and the Borough of Havering, which was the political and geographical area of which Upminster was a part. We went on walks to see sights she identified through her reading, such as the old Cranham parish church associated with James Oglethorpe, principal founder of the State of Georgia. Right in the center of Upminister was the old parish church of St. Lawrence’s, known for its “high church” liturgy. Because of its use of incense and the ringing of a bell with the Eucharist, Evangelicals laughingly referred to them as “smells and bells.” We visited both the grounds and the inside of the church and found the usual reflections of distinguished parishioners of the past who were buried there. The most prosperous of the members were able to set brass images of themselves and their families into the floor of the church to mark where they were buried. One of Laquita’s interests during the year was doing brass rubbings that were made by stretching a strong sheet of black or white paper over a brass gravestone and rubbing a special wax, called a “heel ball,” across the paper to create an image of it. We have a number of these framed on our house walls, and she gave several of them to people as special gifts. It was fairly easy to gain access to the brasses back then, but it has become increasingly difficult to get permission for this activity, and most churches now charge for it. Laquita and I took several excursions by bus to visit small, very old parish churches that had brasses she wanted to rub.

The customs of daily living in those days still reflected “old England,” since it took the country many years to recover from the privations of World War II. Shopping for food was a challenge, since refrigerators were small and it was necessary to go down to the row of shops serving the community every day or two. One would go to the butcher for meat, to the greengrocer for fresh fruits and vegetables, to the chemist (pharmacist, drug store) for medicines and sundry items, and to the small grocer for other food items. There was also a hardware store, a shoe shop, and a laundromat, which we visited regularly. The shopper was to bring her own shopping cart or bags to hold all the items. One had to go into the town of Upminster to find a grocery of any size, and nothing like our modern supermarkets. By the time we returned there to live again in 1980, refrigerators were bigger and supermarkets had begun to spring up. Milk was delivered to most homes every morning, so that was a help. One day early in our stay, Laquita heard a horse-drawn cart coming down the street with a man ringing his bell and shouting something, so she went out to meet him with 50 pence in hand and asked for a cabbage, thinking he was selling vegetables. He replied, “Oh, no luv, Oi’m the rag and bone man,” meaning he collected junk to sell. No doubt he had a chuckle about that strange American woman.

Across from the shops was the local bank, Nat West, or National Westminster. Tellers generally knew their customers, nearly all of whom lived in the neighborhood. We opened an account, and before long we were visited by the bank manager, Mr. Chambers, a man of 60 or so who was part of the country club set and later in the year treated me to lunch in the exclusive country club dining room. I was of course a complete neophyte in the financial customs and had to learn to write checks and deposit slips in the British manner. The tellers were amused at my accent and my lack of common knowledge about British customs. We have maintained our Nat West account all these years, but, alas, the Cranham Branch closed a number of years ago, and our relationship with the downtown Upminster Branch was never as personal as the one in Cranham.

Every so often we would catch bus number 248 in Cranham and go to downtown Upminister to shop for groceries and other items. The “anchor store” for Upminster was Roomes’ Department Store, which was very large and occupied two buildings across the street from each other. Among the other shops we liked was a little bookstore called Swan’s. It was delightfully cluttered and had a wide variety of books, new and used. One of the most lasting of our purchases there were children’s story tapes that we listened to with our children for two generations. Rachel still has some of them. We also bought travel books there and maps. Number 248 could also take us to Romford, the old Essex market town. Market day there brought hundreds of farmers, clothes merchants, craft and jewelry sellers, fast food stalls, and other people hawking all sorts of wares. It was a marvelous sight and we usually brought home something useful or interesting.

When we could arrange for after-school care for the children, Laquita and I spent days in London, especially in the traditional financial district called the City, or the “Square Mile,” with its ancient Roman walls and beautiful churches built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London in 1666. The best-known structures in the City, of course, are the Tower of London and St. Paul’s Cathedral, the crown of Wren churches. It was delightful to be there in the winter time, since there were few tourists and one could walk even in the British Museum without crowds. We were not much into shopping, but we did go to the famous Harrod’s Department Store, with its amazing artistic display of fish and confections. Toward the end of our stay, we went to a big china shop in London called Lawley’s and bought a set of Royal Doulton china in the Valley Green pattern. It has been our special set of dishes for guests and family festive occasions. We had it shipped, and it was an exciting final touch to our trip when the china arrived at our house a few weeks after we got home. What a year it was!

---

Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton.  Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

---

The Paradox of Preservation

Accustomed to the tumultuous turquoise of the Pacific, the static, dusty-emerald undulation of Yosemite’s slopes, floors, and ridges transfixed me. Traversing 2,500 miles of open ocean every time I left my home of Honolulu, Hawaii gave me a sense for vast spaces. But in Yosemite I, a land mammal, found an untamed vastness where I could do more than dabble around the edges; I could enter. Fueled by light, cool air, exertion that would have been toilsome between the Tropics flowed easily. Wind and vistas, not exhaustion, stole my breath as I followed a trail from the canyon rim to the valley floor.

Enjoyment of Nature

Yosemite National Park comprises 761,747.50 acres of the 50,543,372.74 acres devoted to National Parks in the United States.[1] These parks reflect the value judgement that preserving land from human habitation is worthwhile. While National Parks existed before 1916, the 1916 act establishing the National Park Service enshrines in law the rationale behind their existence:

To conserve the scenery and the natural and historic objects and the wild life therein and to provide for the enjoyment of the same in such manner and by such means as will leave them unimpaired for the enjoyment of future generations.[2]

John Muir, founder of the Sierra Club and chief advocate for preserving Yosemite, placed a similar emphasis on the capacity of wilderness to bring abiding joy to humans. Against proposals to dam a portion of the Yosemite protected area, he wrote, “Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where Nature may heal and cheer and give strength to body and soul alike.”[3] At first blush, both the founding documents of the National Park Service and Muir’s statement imply that protecting land from human habitation is important because doing so enables a different, more refined human use—enjoyment. 

Beneath this superficial human-centeredness, however, lies a deeper value judgement. The splendor of glaciers and granite, of foliage and fiery sunsets, brings joy to humans precisely because nature is good; joy is the emotional consequence of experiencing nature’s goodness. Enjoyment of nature can be human-centered even as friendship can be me-centered. But both enjoyment of nature and enjoyment of a friend can stem from recognizing and reveling in the goodness of the other. The non-human world brings health and cheer at least partly because it is not a world of our own making; its value enjoins preservation.

Enjoyment of Nature and the Paradox of Preservation

The U.S. National Parks reflect the value judgement that preserving human enjoyment of nature is worth significant national resources. To the 318,211,833 people who enjoyed these parks in 2018, U.S. National Parks also made an assertion; they asserted that nature is good and thus worthy of preservation.[4] But the manner of this assertion, enjoyment of nature, is paradoxical. Nature is good apart from us, but we recognize this goodness only in relationship with it. To hear nature’s proclamation of its value, we must enter it. And by that act, we render it less natural—by entering the non-human world, we render it part of the human world. By venturing into a world that is not of our own making, we make it, if only marginally, a world we have made.

This paradox is present in nearly all preservationist ecological endeavors, not just the National Park system. Preservationist ecological endeavors are motivated by experience of nature, but they require withdrawal from nature. They demand, often in moral terms, that humans make a double movement, both towards nature in ecological enjoyment, study, and intervention and away from nature by restraining our presence in it.

It seems that this dual movement of humans towards and away from nature requires a framework in which humans are both part of and distinct from the rest of nature. For human enjoyment, study, and mere presence in nature to be legitimate, this presence must not be unnatural; it must not be inherently corrupting. But to justify the moral mandate that humans exercise restraint in interactions with nature, preservationist ecological endeavors require that humans are not just another part of nature—if humans ought not to thoughtlessly decimate miles of rainforest, but Army Ants are under no similar obligation, then there must be some distinction between humans and ants. If preservation is, as is widely recognized, good (and perhaps even morally obligatory), there must be some way to both uphold and adjudicate between these paradoxical principles of human unity with and distinctness from nature.

Naturalism and the Paradox of Preservation

Naturalism, for instance, can uphold each of these principles. Historically speaking, evolutionary naturalism suggests that there is unity between humans and the rest of nature because we all have the same ancestors; all that separates us from other animals is a few genetic mutations. In contrast, an emphasis on present empirical observation of humans’ seeming intellectual uniqueness suggests a large divide between humans and other animals. Thus, naturalism provides some justification for each of the paradox-producing principles that are assumed in preservationist ecological endeavors.

But naturalism does not seem to provide a way of navigating this paradox. Naturalism must do more than simply state that humans are both a part of and distinct from nature; it must explain how these two seemingly contradictory truths can be integrated. While naturalism can account for either human unity with nature or human distinctness from nature, it provides no non-arbitrary way of integrating these two principles, no grounds for discerning when we should move towards nature per our unity with it and when we should move away from nature per our distinctness from it. It takes something more than naturalism to account for what we know about our relationship with nature.

Christianity and the Paradox of Preservation

Christian Theism seems to provide this something more. Whether they are interpreted evolutionarily or not, the first few chapters of the Christian Bible teach that humans are both part of nature and distinct from the rest nature. Humans are part of nature in that they, just like the rest of nature, are created by God, from whom they derive their identity and value. God designed humans and the rest of his creation to harmoniously cohabit the Earth. But these same chapters also teach that humans are distinct from nature in two ways, one positive and one negative.

Positively, humans are the only part of the world that is said to be created “in the image of God.” This means that humans are not just another part of creation, which helps explain the fact that humans have ecological moral obligations, while ants do not. Negatively, these chapters recount that, while God created humans to live in harmony with God and the rest of God’s creation, humans rejected right relationship with God. By doing this, humans corrupted themselves and their relationship with all of God’s creations. Human presence in nature introduces an unnatural, corrupting element because we have, within ourselves, an unnatural, corrupted element.

Thus, Christianity, like naturalism, upholds the paradoxical principles of human unity with and distinctness from nature. But it also goes beyond naturalism by providing a principle for navigating this paradox. Christianity says that humans should engage with nature in all of the ways that are in accord with God’s design for our presence in it and withdraw from nature when our corruption would corrupt God’s design. Admittedly, the specifications of God’s design are much debated among Christians. But this does not minimize the fact that, because Christianity appeals to a God who is beyond both the human and natural realms, it has a basis for defining these two realms and describing how they should interact.

National parks and other preservationist ecological efforts stem from one of our era’s great moments of moral clarity. But these efforts rely on a paradox that naturalism can at best uphold, not navigate. By both upholding and navigating this paradox, Christianity provides a better accounting for our known ecological moral obligations.

---

[1] National Park Service, Land Resources Division. 2019. “Summary of Acreage.” September 30, 2019. https://www.nps.gov/subjects/lwcf/upload/NPS-Acreage-9-30-2019.pdf.

[2] “The Organic Act.” 1994. In America’s National Park System: The Critical Documents, edited by Larry Dislaver. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/anps/index.htm.

[3] Muir, John. 1908. “The Hetch Hetchy Valley.” Sierra Club Bulletin VI, no. 4 (January): 211-220. https://vault.sierraclub.org/ca/hetchhetchy/hetch_hetchy_muir_scb_1908.html.

[4] National Park Service. n.d. “Frequently Asked Questions.” Accessed January 16, 2020. https://www.nps.gov/aboutus/faqs.htm.