Roots of Democracy

"I am a [proponent of democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man.

I think most people are [proponents of democracy] for the opposite reason.  A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government.

The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they're not true... I find that they're not true without looking further than myself.  I don't deserve a share in governing a hen-roost.  Much less a nation...

The real reason for democracy is just the reverse.  Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows.  Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves.  I do not contradict him.  But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters."

—C.S. Lewis, "Equality in Present Concerns 

How Classical Philosophy Utterly Failed

The classical world utterly failed in their attempt to bring people to moral goodness says the late Dr. Dallas Willard.*  Early thinkers like Plato and Aristotle (along with the Stoics and Epicureans later) did not ultimately understand the root of moral reality.  This is what he means:

"One of the most wonderful books in the world besides the bible is Plato's Republic.... And Plato's Republic looks like it is about 'the republic,' but its actually about the human soul.  It's a study of the human soul and how the soul works and in particular it is devoted to the question: "How can we train and develop people so that their soul actually works as it should?  Some of you may have read it and you know that Plato's view was that the good person is one with a balanced soul.  In particular it is a soul where the reason is doing its job, the appetites are doing its job, and the emotions are doing their job.  And the idea is that the emotions are supposed to align with reason to govern the appetites.  Well its certainly a fascinating theory and a wonderful story.  And his view is that the way you get this is you develop an educational system in which people who are able to reason well rise to the top.  And they then are able to get the emotions in order and so that will handle the appetites.  And then the state would also reflect that same order.

"And then Aristotle basically has the same theory, except his view is that you don't get this by education, you get it by legislation.  And what you do is you organize the government in such a way that you establish institutions that shape souls that are good.  And then people do the things they are supposed to, and so on.  But of course it didn't work.

"If you look at the history of Greece and the history of Athens and you'll see the miserable thing it fell into. The Greeks couldn't stop killing one another.  And actually Greek history as an independent deal up until very recently ended when they had to invite the Romans in to keep them from killing one another.  The world in which the people before Christ existed and the world in which the people at Christ's time existed (the Epicureans included) was one where people were just striving to somehow get a hold of moral reality.  And they never could do it."


* Willard begins this discussion at 1:01:40 of the video.  He continues afterward to make some interesting observations about how ancient Christianity and how our contemporary culture much later deals with these very same questions.  

Jerusalem the Movie

If you get an opportunity, check out the beautiful footage of the land of Israel captured by National Geographic in a short film called Jerusalem:

*Disclaimer: As it is a National Geographic feature you might have to excuse the incredibly shallow assessment of the difficulties, conflicts, and differences over Jerusalem.

Returning to Eden and Other Hopeful Delusions

The human condition is unavoidably filled with brokenness, pain, and grief says psychologist and psychoanalyst Dr. Jennifer Kunst.  In her book Wisdom from the Couch she says further that we also innately feel that "suffering was never meant to be.  The toil, pain, and profound sense of alienation that we experience are all a big mistake.  The world wasn't supposed to be broken.  It didn't have to be this way..."  We long for something more.  She continues: "Whether we are searching for the fountain of youth, unconditional love, or transcendental mountaintop experience, we human beings seem to have an innate longing to return to a lost ideal, a protected, blissful state.  Some call it the Garden of Eden.  Others call it Nirvana.  Psychoanalysts call it the womb.  In any case it seems clear that we have a picture of a perfect place that we once inhabited, and then lost, and now we're trying to find again."

Kunst goes on to share that these longings and stories about our origins get one thing exactly right: Our world is a very broken world.  But the additional part that says, 'it wasn't always like this or it wasn't meant to be like this' is actually a fantasy.  The brokenness of the world is no ones fault.  It is just broken.  The reason we feel this way is the subconscious effects that come from being forcefully evicted from our safe, sheltered, and continuously nourished state within the womb.  We subconsciously want to return to that untroubled paradise.  Feeling deep down that there is something more, something we lost, we tell stories that makes sense of it -stories like the Garden of Eden.

Kunst writes about psychoanalytic theory from within the Christian tradition.  Despite the limitations she perceives, her background and faith clearly seem to inform her picture of a healthy life and psychology.  There are parts of her faith she proudly commends, but others she finds hard to digest.  I deeply appreciate the honesty and the beautiful way in which she attempts to synthesize both these sources of wisdom to cast a vision for a truly healthy life.  But what should we make of this contention?  Is brokenness just what it means to be human?  Is it a fantasy to hope and long for a world without brokenness?  Is the brokenness of the world really no ones fault?

I'm sure you know my answers to those questions.  But I want to commend to Dr. Kunst the scope over which these questions hang.  These are not peripheral questions that Christianity is relatively neutral on.  These questions stand at the very core of the Christian faith.  And it is not because the core of Christianity has a particular view about the intricacies of the afterlife or about the literalness of the first three chapters of Genesis.  It is because the core of Christianity says something about Jesus.  And that Jesus has strikingly set in motion an unprecedented path for human reconciliation, redemption, and healing.  Things that psychologists care a lot about.  As St. Paul says, death and corruption have been swallowed up in victory (1 Cor 15:54).  How?  Because the sting of death is sin he says, and in the most unlikely of ways Jesus has defeated (though not yet eliminated) sin.  The cosmic defeat of the poison of sin is the centerpiece of Jesus' healing project.  For St. Paul, Jesus cuts out the very root and source of corruption and death.  Another way of saying it is, for the Christian faith the roots of brokenness, conflict, and death are not "value neutral aspects of life."  The roots of brokenness have to do with sin.  And sin is never "value neutral." (Note: I am not saying corruption and brokenness in one's life is because of specific sin in the same person, like some sort of karmic equation.  But I am saying in the big story of the Christian faith, brokenness and corruption did parasitically enter the world by sin; the same sin that has a grip on all of us).  And the guilt, shame, and fear that comes from it does destroy us, as Dr. Kunst observes.  But these are put to rest not by dismissing our fault and not by obscuring our role in the brokenness around us.  It is put to rest by rejoicing in the core Christian conviction of a victory that undercuts the power of fear, shame, and erases our guilt.

Dr. Kunst talks about the self-imposed limits and boundaries of her faith commitments that also give her freedom to search and explore important truth within her field.  I'm not entirely sure where her limits begin and where they end.  But I would commend to her that a world where human brokenness has no source and ultimate redemption is a fantasy is a world that misses the very core of the Christian faith.

A Few Observations on the Trinity Discussion

On Secundum Scripturas, Bruce Ware has given a very helpful defense of his position of "Eternal Relations of Authority and Submission" (ERAS).  Remember this is a view that God the Father and God the Son have had not just relations of authority and submission during the incarnation, but there are functional relations of authority that have been a part of the inner divine life even before creation.  A few interesting arguments and responses by Matthew Emerson and Luke Stamps are worth commenting on.

Singular Will

Emerson and Stamps had raised earlier the problem this view might have with the traditional creedal statements of a singular unified will within the Trinity.  Historically, the Trinity does not have 3 wills, one for each person.  There is only one singular volitional capacity.  And it is only in the sense of Christ's human nature that Christ's will and the Father's will can actually be two distinct realities (Luke 22:42).  Emerson and Stamps have concerns that if submission in the Trinity is a reality before the incarnation than it seems to imply two wills.  A will that possesses authority (the Father) and a will that submits (the Son).  How then can there be only one will in the Trinity?  Borrowing language from Anatolios, Bruce offers a unique response: 

"While each possesses the same volitional capacity, each also is able to activate that volitional capacity in exercising the one will in distinct yet unified ways according to their distinct hypostatic identities and modes of subsistence. So, while the Father may activate the common divine will to initiate, the Son may activate the divine will to carry out, e.g., “from” the Father, “through” the Son—as has often been affirmed in Trinitarian doctrine following the pattern in Scripture itself (e.g., 1 Cor 8:6). Given this, one might even speak of one unified will of God, as the volitional capacity common to all three, along with three “inflections” of the unified divine will (borrowing Anatolios’s wording), or three hypostatically distinct expressions of that one divine will."

Very interesting.  But Emerson and Stamps are not entirely convinced.  They have additional concerns that are also helpful questions that Bruce would probably need to clarify.  Nevertheless, I wonder what a purist position about the divine will (like Stamps and Emerson) would need to say with regard to the Father's "sending" and the Son's "going" before the incarnation.  Maybe there is no distinctive authority to read in here (which would seem to me a hard bullet to bite).  But even still there must be some sort of distinctive volitional choices happening here that Ware would have the ontological resources to explain.  Yet I'm unsure how the traditional position that denies these distinctives within the divine will would address this.

On Sonship and Eternal Generation (EG)

Emerson insightfully points out that one of the problems with the discussion is a hermenuetical one.  Many people settle for trying to find proof texts instead of using the entire pattern of scripture as the foundation for how we are to understand these distinctions.  As he outlines a defense for EG, he says: "...Even beyond these particular texts, they [the Nicene fathers] saw that the scriptural pattern of speaking about the relations of the first and second persons of the Trinity are inherently related to generation. “Father” and “Son” are relational terms. If it means anything to be a son, it means to come from one’s father.”

The fatherhood of God and the sonship of man is of course a prominent theme in scripture.  And while there are scriptures that talk about God's fatherhood over all creation (Acts 17:28), the more prominent and significant biblical concept of God's fatherhood over creation has nothing to do with origin or generation.  His children are adopted into God's family as sons and daughters (John 1:13, Eph 1:4, Gal 4:6-7).  It is one of the most beautiful and central truths in all of scripture.  And in fact the Galatians passage actually clarifies exactly what the significant characteristic is regarding us being sons:  It is that "sonship" means we are adopted heirs of Christ.  If the most significant and central biblical meaning behind God's "fatherhood" and our "sonship" has nothing to do with generation, then it is hard to know the biblical warrant for saying the biblical concepts "father" and "son" inherently relate to generation.

To be fair, in another article Matt does supplement his case by bringing in a discussion of Phil 2:5-11. This a very helpful passage, and it does emphasize the incarnational submission we see in Christ's life.  But I still find myself confused how it inherently precludes any other passage that could talk about pre-incarnational submission.

By the way, I've always enjoyed my conversations with Matt and I have the utmost respect for his scholarship and his sharp mind.  I hope my thoughts and questions contribute meaningfully to the discussion.

Eternal Functional Subordination and its Critics

In my circles the blogosphere is buzzing about the debate between Christ's submission to the Father within the Trinity and some of the historical views concerning Eternal Generation (EG).  Two evangelical giants, Bruce Ware and Wayne Grudem have written about a way of understanding Christ's submission to the Father with a different picture than the way it has been talked about historically.  Historically, the Christian tradition has largely held to a position called Eternal Generation (EG) or Eternal Begottenness, where Christ is begotten, not created, and specifically begotten in an eternal sense.  There was never a time where Christ did not exist, but he does derive his "origin" eternally from the Father.  Ware and Grudem instead posit a position called Eternal Functional Subordination (EFS) that stands as an alternative to EG.  The main idea is that the authority of the Father and the submission of the Son is an eternal relation.  Meaning, the submission did not just begin at the incarnation, it has been a part of the inner Trinitarian relationship since before creation.  This relation does not have anything to do with generation or origin (even if its eternal), but the relation is instead a functional way the inner life of God has always existed.  The caveat of course is that this authority and submission is not ontologically rooted in their essence, but simply a functional reality of the inner life of the Trinity.  I won't restate all the arguments, the historical developments, and all the nuances here because others already have done that sufficiently well.  Darren Sumner has a good summary here.

However, while I was reading Sumner's summary, he offers two critiques of EFS that interest me but seem to me to leave Ware and Grudem's position unfazed:

Get ready.  Take a breath.  First is what he calls his theological critique.  He says since Ware presses functional subordination between the Father and Son into eternity, so to speak, it leaves it at odds with another theological doctrine: divine simplicity.  Divine simplicity argues among other things that God does not have a multiplicity of attributes.  And so if Ware's position says the Son for instance has something like the "attribute of submissiveness," and the Father has a different "attribute of superiority," than it leaves EFS standing in tension with divine simplicity.  But this is not a terribly substantive critique.  First, all Ware would need to highlight again is the qualities of submission and authority are functional not ontological.  They are not expressions of their internal essence, but more like a functional disposition.  If that's the case, EFS can get along with divine simplicity quite well.  Related to that, metaphysicians, and especially realists, often make a big deal about the distinction between an attribute and a relation.  Ware is arguing that functional subordination is a relation and does not need to be committed to the position that relations are reducible to attributes.  The ability to create an abstract noun (submissive-NESS) from the relational distinction, does not mean it is an "attribute" in an ontological sense.  And even if it is, then even EG would succumb to this critique.  Remember, eternal generation says the distinctions between the members of the Trinity are a relation of origin.  The relation of begotteness, unbegottenness, etc.  If the relation of divine submissiveness is reducible to a full-fledged attribute in Sumner's ontology such that it compromises divine simplicity than it would seem the traditional EG relations of begotteness and unbegotteness would suffer the same fate.

His second critique is methodological.  The method by which Ware defends his view of the relationship of the members of the Trinity and then compares it to the marriage relationship is self-referential.  It is circular.  The reason, he says, is because Ware uses natural theology to show that the relationship between the Father and the Son is analogous to the human father-son relationship concerning authority and then uses that understanding of the Father and the Son to make an analogy about authority in marriage.  Whatever Sumner makes of the analogies is one thing, but Sumner clearly mischaracterizes Ware's moves as "natural theology."  Natural theology uses other sources of knowledge besides revelation to build a theology.  Sumner admits that God as Father and Son comes from revelation.  And that the bible itself makes the analogy between sonship and Jesus, and fatherhood and God the Father.  Whether the authority structures of sonship and fatherhood are part of what the bible is communicating about God in this analogy is certainly debatable.  But to dismiss it as a "natural theology" move is just a misunderstanding of natural theology.  To call something "natural theology" does not mean it merely uses human observation or reasoning; every theology does that!  If that's what natural theology is, then every piece of literature ever written on theology is "natural theology."  Natural theology bases its knowledge of God exclusively on human observation or abstract reasoning.  Once you bring in revelation into your doctrine of God you have stopped using "natural theology."  Therefore, since Ware starts his argument with revelation about God as Father and Son, he was never even in the ballpark of natural theology.

If anyone is curious, I'm very sympathetic to EFS picture of God's internal relations although I would say there is something else that creates the distinction between the persons of the Trinity.  Even though EG is the traditional view, I have found many of the exegetical and philosophical arguments for it quite unconvincing.

Can Men Commit Adultery?

A local friend of mine who lives here mentioned how common it is for men to have “other women” besides their wives, especially when they travel for work, etc.  These other women are typically foreigners with a different background than the locals.  Of course I was shocked on many different levels.  But I was mostly unprepared for the reality that male infidelity could be so common particularly in this part of the world.  Simply because this is within a part of the world where female fidelity is taken with the utmost seriousness.  So what gives?  Why is the same act on one side of the gender line a betrayal and dishonor of the highest order, while on the other side it has so little consequence?  It was a difficult question to wrap my mind around until I read this article...

Kyle Harper writes that much of the ancient world thought with the same type of categories.  In a 2011 JBL article he examines the development and usage of the Greek word “moicheia” meaning adultery.  For the Greeks (and almost all ancient cultures) adultery did not mean simply having extra-marital relations.  Its meaning was fundamentally about the “violation of a respectable woman.”  And in fact, sleeping with another man's wife was actually construed to be “a crime against another man.”  A crime either against the husband of a respectable woman, or if unmarried a crime against her father (or brothers).  When this is the fundamental understanding of adultery in honor-based cultures, it becomes clearer why there are different ways of thinking about it for men and women.  If a husband in ancient Greece were to have extra-marital sex with his female slave for instance, it is not actually considered adultery.  The same was true for prostitution.  In fact, P. Leithart summarizing Harper says that in ancient Greece “prostitution was not merely tolerated but seen to fulfill a social good.  It allowed men to satisfy their sexual desires without violating honorable women, that is, without the danger of rivalry with another man.”

Harper goes on to argue that in the ancient world the Jews (particularly their prophets) were the first to reconstruct an understanding of adultery that ran across gender lines.  Such that by the second-temple era (and on into the New Testament period) the gulf between the sexual ethics of the Jews and their gentile neighbors was notoriously vast.   

It dawned on me that the contrast I noticed here was more nuanced than just a simple double standard.  There were new definitions and different categories being used than I was working with.  Protecting the honor of respectable women was held with the utmost esteem.  And it brings into focus the ethics that come with the shame and violation of such honor.  This explains the rigidity of their standards from this angle.  But at the same time this understanding theoretically leaves open the question of extra-marital affairs by men that don't affect “respectable” women. And at least in the observations of my friend here, they are not just “theoretical.”