Parent of the Year

Apparently there are rules that immediately disqualify you from becoming Parent of the Year.  I know this now.  A little too late.  If you are in the running, hope knowing these will help your chances.

(1) You might get disqualified if you've ever justified not brushing your kids teeth before bed, because "they're going to lose those teeth anyway."

(2) You might get disqualified if you're jealous that your wife has taught them to eat healthier food then you.

(3) You might get disqualified if you think one of the best chew toys for your baby is the chord of an electric phone charger.  There was a double disqualification on this one actually, they say electrocution AND strangling hazard.

(4) You might get disqualified if (because the elevator takes too long at the mall) you try to use a double-stroller on the escalator.

(5) You might get disqualified if you express how proud you are of your 1 1/2 year old being able to stuff 3 full cookies in his mouth.

(6) You might get disqualified if pee in their diaper isn't 'enough' to take the time to change it.

(7) You might get disqualified if you take pictures of your child's colored-in 'Hitler mustache' and post it on the internet.

Disclaimer: One out of the two parents in our family holds no guilt in the previously mentioned disqualifications.  The guilty party shall remain anonymous.  You'll be forced to guess with great difficulty I'm sure.

The Nature of Beauty (Part 1)

One of my favorite questions to ask a musician or artist is: "Is the beauty you try to create in your art objective or subjective?"  In other words, "Is the beauty you're trying to create simply in the eye of the beholder?"  The answer to this question carries with it some assumptions that I'm unsure whether people have thought much about.  I do believe there is a subjective experience of beauty, but I'd like to make a brief case for the position that beauty at its core is an actual property of objects or events.  That is, it is an objective reality.  But first, what does it even mean for beauty to be objective?

It means that beauty is something that exists in the object, not in our perception of the object.  It means beauty can be there whether any one sees it or not.  It means that people can perceive beauty correctly or incorrectly (now this is where toes get stepped on, but be patient).  It means there are some aesthetic standards fitting to the object, to the event, or to the art that make something beautiful or not.  So what reasons would compel us to think about beauty like this?  Here are a few:

Beauty seems to be something that an observer discovers, not something an observer creates.  The difference between discovering and creating is simply this:  I discover something that is already there.  But when I create something, it wasn't there before I created it.  When I look at a waterfall or a sunset, when I listen to a moving poem or song, it seems like we want to say I'm experiencing for the first time the beauty that was already there.  For example, I could have listened to a piece of music twenty times and felt nothing, maybe even disliked it.  But on the 21st time perhaps I sensed something wonderful about it (notice the language: 'about it') that I came to discover.  So when was the music beautiful?  This is an argument from intuition, but it would seem strange to say the music became beautiful at the 21st listening of it.  It seems much more natural to say I discovered its beauty on the 21st time I listened to it.  If that's true, beauty at its core is a property of an object not of a 'beholder.'

There are things to learn about creating beautiful art.  This seems obvious, but this is a powerful argument for objective beauty.  We have entire universities, schools, and departments dedicated to the training of young artists and musicians,  People hire tutors and instructors, we have libraries of books and research all for this expressed purpose.  The fact is however, training in the arts so that people refine their ability and sense for how to create beautiful art is a contradiction in a world where 'beauty is in the eye of the beholder.'  You cannot improve your art if there is no objective standard of what constitutes improvement. In fact, in this world artistic refinement and improvement does not actually exist.  This seems quite counter-intuitive.  If there is something to actually learn about creating beautiful art, than there is something non-subjective about beauty.

Things do not get more beautiful the more people like them.  For example, say we uncovered a new painting from Rembrandt last year.  Would we ever say things like: This painting had no beauty for 400 years, but now this year it has become beautiful? (because now the 'beholders' can see it).  We just don't talk like that, because our language betrays that we don't really think beauty works like that.  What we would say is:  The beauty of this painting lay hidden for centuries.  And now the beauty that was hidden in the painting has been uncovered.  Beauty is a property of objects, not of the people that perceive it.

Different levels of expertise are possible in art.  Do we not say that this person is an expert composer or she is a top film writer, etc?  According to what standards could someone know more than another about what is beautiful in the various arts?  Only if there are objective features to beauty, could someone then be more gifted than others in perceiving and producing beautiful things.

Disagreements about beauty are not meaningless.  It is one thing to say people need to be more open-minded in how they evaluate poetry, music, films, or other art.  It is another thing to say those evaluations are meaningless.  A world without objective beauty must see any disagreement about beautiful art as saying nothing more than: "I like this, You don't like this."  If you move beyond this, to give actual reasons why the person should like it, or should not like it, you're trying to use objective features of the art to evaluate its aesthetic value.  But there are no objective features that have aesthetic value in this world!  They must be committed to the position that beauty cannot be measured by anything objective.  But any artist knows that these evaluations whether given or received are not meaningless even if these evaluations could be mistaken.

God is beautiful whether anyone perceives Him that way or not (Psalm 27:4, 96:6). It is a theological fact that God was beautiful and majestic before creation ever existed.  That is, before there was anyone to perceive him.  And he has remained such even in the midst of a creation that largely doesn't see him as beautiful and supremely desirable.  God's aesthetic features don't change in value based on the perceivers (beholders) that might view him differently.

Why does this all matter?  Philosophers have a tough time knowing how to characterize the sort of thing beauty is.  Think of all the things we call beautiful: Stories, paintings, music, waterfalls, a women's hair, the design of a home, self-sacrifice, a gentle disposition (1 Peter 3:3-4), etc.  How can all these things have the same property?  If they do, what kind of property would it be?  The trend toward entirely reducing the reality of beauty to a subjective experience is partly motivated by the fact that naturalism doesn't have the ontological resources to account for objective beauty.  In fact, the existence of objective beauty is a reason itself to find naturalism's account of what exists unsatisfactory.

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.