Category: Epistemology

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Epistemology Psalms

Psalms and Secondary Causes

Storm clouds over wheat field. Danger weather with dark sky over fields

Lately I’ve been reading through the Psalms. I’ve read the Psalms many times and find them deeply comforting but also challenging. One thing I’ve noticed on this reading is how nationalistic — I’d dare say jingoistic — many of the Psalms sound, while at the same time coming across as whiny and self-justifying. Some of them must have been, originally, quite a bit of propaganda. But this post is about theology and philosophy, and how the Psalms help us understand primary and secondary causes, so I’ll leave this part of the discussion for another day.

Discussions about theology and science often go awry when people assume that God must “intervene” in nature in order to act. The Psalms regularly attribute natural events to Divine action. A good case study is Psalm 135:

For I know that the LORD is great
And that our LORD is above all gods.
Whatever the LORD pleases, He does,
In heaven and in earth, in the seas and in all deeps.
He casues the vapors to ascend from the ends of the earth;
Who makes lightnings for the rain,
Who brings for the wind from His treasuries.

Ps. 135:5-7

Perhaps the ancient Psalm writer really thought God dipped into a storehouse of clouds and lightning kept at the ends of the earth and pushed them along over Jerusalem with his literal hand and breath. We know today there are no literal “ends of the earth,” no storehouse of clouds and lightning waiting for God to scoop them up. We know how weather forms, and we don’t need to invoke direct Divine intervention to explain the origin of a storm.

But I wonder if the Psalm writer really was that naive. The Psalm continues with a discussion of God’s mighty acts of justice (grisly justice that doesn’t seem all that just — but I’ll leave that for another day as well):

He smote many nations
And slew mighty kings,
Sihon, king of the Amorites,
And Og, king of Bashan,
And all the kingdoms of Canaan;
And he gave their land as a heritage,
A heritage to Israel His people.

Ps. 135:10-11.

In Numbers 21, and Dueteronomy 2, Sihon was King of the Amorites, who was not willing to let the Israelites, led by Moses, pass through his land. Numbers tells us that

So Sihon gathered all his people and went out against Israel in the wilderness, and came to Jahaz and fought against Israel. Then Israel struck him with the edge of the sword, and took possession of his land from the Arnon to the Jabbok.

Num. 21:21-31.

After dispatching Sihon, the Israelites came upon Og the King of Bashan:

But the Lord said to Moses, ‘Do not fear him, for I have given him into your hand, and all his people and his land; and you shall do to him as you did to Sihon, king of the Amorites, who lived at Heshbon.’ So they killed him and his sons and all his people, until there was no remnant left him; and they possessed his land.

Num. 21:33-35. (See also Deuteronomy 3)

The Israelites met Sihon and Og in battle, and these Kings died by the sword. There’s no indication that God directly struck them dead. The “natural” cause of their deaths was the injuries they received in battle, which required the action of Israel’s soldiers. It’s possible to describe that event without references to Divine action. But the Psalms say God slew Sihon and Og, and Numbers and Deuteronomy say God delivered the armies of Sihon and Og to Israel for victory.

Reformed Divines sometimes referred to this as concurrence – God concurred in the actions of the human warriors to achieve God’s end. Perhaps this is a decent way to think about it, but it also seems to cramp the agency of the human actors, and it doesn’t really get at events that don’t involve intelligent agents, such as the weather. (Yes, intelligent agents can affect the weather, as in climate change, but weather happens whether any agent acts or not.)

The Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas, using Aristotle’s four-fold concept of causation, spoke about primary and secondary causes. The primary cause is God’s will, which in Aristotelian terms relate to the formal and final causes. God established the original design of things like storm clouds and humans, their formal cause, which enables them to achieve certain things. God also established — or, more accurately, God is — the final cause of all that He created, the purpose and end for which they are made. The secondary cause is the action of the thing itself — what Aristotle called material and efficient causes. A thing has capacities relating to its properties — the material of which it’s made. When a thing causes effects, putting something into motion, that is an efficient cause. So evaporation, air pressure, ocean temperatures, and so-on producing a storm are water, air, and temperature acting in accordance with their material properties to produce effects. Warriors using their intelligence and strength to produce weapons and kill enemies are using their material properties to produce effects.

These secondary causes, in Aquinas’ theology, have their own integrity. This means we can examine the relationship between properties and effects scientifically without looking for Divine intervention. We can describe a thunderstorm, or a battle, in terms that don’t invoke God, and the resulting narrative is true at its own level of description.

So do we need God at all? In the modern period, many streams of philosophy rejected Aristotle entirely, and in particular rejected Aristotle’s ideas about causation. This did free up the energy and imagination of the modern scientific revolution from certain dogmas relating to Aristotle’s cosmology. But material and efficient causes alone don’t tell as anything about the significance of any events, including their moral or ethical significance. Is there a purpose to existence? Are there better and worse ways to be in light of any such purpose? These are questions relating to what Aquinas called primary causes and to Aristotle’s formal and final causes.

But how can we know there really is something like formal and final causes? Maybe scientism is right: the universe is a brute fact, there are only secondary causes — matter and physical effects — and the effort to find any transcendent design and purpose is a delusion. But most people, anyone who really thinks about it, I’d say, knows this can’t be right. The fact that anyone cares about the truth of this claim shows that we know it matters and that we can actually reason about it beyond the scope of mere matter and physical effects.

But — one very important thing to note here is that we can’t know there really is something like formal and final causes by searching for God at the end of a chain of material or efficient causes. If we’re looking for the literal storehouse God reaches into to dig out lightning, we won’t find it; if we’re looking for the “irreducibly complex” part of evolution that could only have been assembled directly by God, we won’t find it; if we’re looking for a physically measurable soul or Divine or Evil Spirit that physically alters our brains to produce good or bad actions, we won’t find it. Such efforts miss the point entirely.

To dig further into this question of epistemology, we’d need to get into some deep and contested waters. In short, I think some kind of externalism must be correct, and in particular that Plantinga and the “Reformed Epistemologists” are on the right track about basic beliefs that can’t be proven by the kinds of evidence demanded by internalists. I would suggest that “Reformed” epistemology is also consistent with early/mid-Medieval and Patristic Christian epistemologies, properly understood within their own contexts. Aquinas is often portrayed as an internalist, offering rational proofs based only on self-evident truths, but I don’t think that’s really what he was doing in the Five Ways or otherwise. Certainly it’s not what Augustine or the Greek Fathers did. But this gets way deep into the weeds. I’m not really sure any of these pre-modern thinkers fit neatly into modern internalist / externalist boxes, and I’m not sure I do either (really these boxes seem to me a symptom of some excesses of modern analytic philosophy and I lose patience with them quickly).

Looping back to Psalm 135: how does the Psalmist know God commands the storms? How does he know God was behind Israel’s victories over Sihon and Og? In the first case, this doxological statement is based on the Psalmist’s experience of majestic, powerful storms in relation to his experience of God. It is an analogical observation. The storms reveal God’s power. In the second case, God Himself revealed to Moses that God would ensure the victory. The “evidence” for the primary causes was grounded in revelation.

So how did the Psalmist or Moses know, or how do we know, that there is revelation, or if there is revelation, that it is God’s revelation? In Plantinga’s terms, this gets into the question of “properly basic” beliefs. I think Plantinga properly refers to the testimony of the Holy Spirit here, but I also think in this way he is not sufficiently Trinitarian and Christological. I don’t see in Plantinga very much about the Son — the Son’s incarnation, death, resurrection and ascension, but also the Son’s preexisting nature as the Logos of creation.

You could say the Son’s nature as the Logos cuts against Plantinga’s program — the Logos is the reason of creation, the natural law that allows rational reflection to lead us to the truth of God. But this leads us to ask a related theological question about the relationship between “nature” and “grace.” If creation is a gift, an act of grace, the Logos‘ self-donation in creation is also an act of divine self-disclosure — an act of revelation. There is no “pure,” unmediated nature; there is no “pure,” unmediated reason. To know anything, human creatures must always refer to something external to their own minds, not least when employing human reason, which is a human way of partaking in the Logos.

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Church Epistemology Law and Policy Missiology Political Theology Spirit

Atheists, Christians, the Pope, and Doing Good

The headline of a recent Huffington Post article caught my eye:  “Pope Francis Says Atheists Who Do Good are Redeemed, Not Just Catholics.”  Another HuffPo article notes that “Atheists Like What They See in Pope Francis’ New Openness.”  What’s going on here?  Good things, I think.

We need to dig a bit into the homily delivered by the Pope for the Feast of Santa Rita – Patron Saint of impossible things – to understand the theological undercurrents of these remarks.

The cornerstone of the Pope’s homily is a concept of natural law:

The Lord created us in His image and likeness, and we are the image of the Lord, and He does good and all of us have this commandment at heart:  do good and do not do evil.  All of us.  ‘But, Father, this is not Catholic!  He cannot do good.’  Yes, he can.  He must.  Not can:  must!  Because he has this commandment within him.

This is not a new teaching.  Some notion of natural law has been part of Christian theology from the first century New Testament writings until today (see, for example, Romans 1:20, the locus classicus for Christian natural law thinking).  Atheists, of course, will reject the concept of a natural law implanted in universal human nature by God.  They will offer other reasons for the good that they do.  But Christian theology has always held that all human beings in their created humanness bear the image of God and have a “natural” sense of what is good.

Christian theologians, however, have often disagreed about how or whether or to what extent sinful human beings can follow the natural law.  The key question here is the effect of sin on human nature and the accessibility of God’s grace to sinful humans (again, a locus classicus is Romans 1).  We can illustrate this through two historically important Christian thinkers:  Pelagius and Martin Luther.  Pelagius held that even after sin, a human being could theoretically follow his or her created nature and obtain perfection through the natural law alone.  One of Pelagius’ concerns was to preserve human freedom to follow or not follow God.  Luther, in contrast, wrote a tract titled “On the Bondage of the Will” in which he argued that sin has erased human freedom.  A sinful human person always does evil.

Both Pelagius and Luther were more complex as thinkers than this sketch suggests.  Just as some sense of natural law has always been a part of Christian thought, so has Christian thought always recognized the weight and tragedy and depth of human sin and the utter dependence of human beings on God’s grace.  Both Pelagius and Luther – as well as St. Paul and Athanasius and Augustine and Aquinas and Calvin and Barth and many other great Christian thinkers throughout history – have wrestled with this tension.  As is always the case, distortions (“heresies,” in the historically freighted lingo) crop up when one node of a tensioned web of thought is amplified so that the web snaps. 

In this case, the nodes are human freedom and human bondage to sin.  Or, stated in more common theological terms, the nodes are “nature” and “grace.”   The tensioned web of robust Christian thought (“orthodoxy”) holds that all human beings are both (1) created morally free and accountable and (2) thoroughly sinful and utterly in need of God’s grace.

At the equilibrium point of this tension we find another passage in Pope Francis’ homily that caught the attention of the HuffPo headline writers:

The Lord has redeemed all of us, all of us, with the Blood of Christ:  all of us, not just Catholics.  Everyone!  ‘Father, the atheists?’  Even the atheists.  Everyone!  And this Blood makes us children of God of the first class!  We are created children in the likeness of God and the Blood of Christ has redeemed us all!  And we all have a duty to do good.

For a journalist unacquainted with Christian theology, as well as for many Protestant evangelicals, a statement like this sounds like bland universalism.  Many of us from evangelical backgrounds are trained to think of “redemption” as something utterly separate from our created selves that only becomes part of our experience when we forcibly take hold of it.  That is, we completely sever “nature” and “grace.”

A more careful account is that sin’s corruption of human “nature” in fact makes us into something “un-natural.”  We are not now as we are created to be.  This is one of the essential points of the Biblical story of Adam and Eve and Eden.  The literary genre of that story surely is not “literal history” (whatever that would mean), but it tells a basic truth.  We cannot, because of sin, be or become what we truly are, without God’s help.  But the help – the grace – God gives us does not erase or replace “nature.”  “Nature” is already grace-shaped.  “Nature anticipates grace,” as Aquinas said, and grace perfects nature.  Redemption, then, is not alien to who we are in our created humanity.  What is “alien,” in fact, is the separation and death and emptiness of sin.

We – evangelicals and Americans more broadly – also are accustomed to think of “redemption” to mean “who goes to heaven.”  It’s as though redemption were a magic potion on a store shelf.  We might be directed to the correct aisle and grab the bottle of potion and force the potion down our throats, or we might not.  Even if the bottle is in theory universally accessible to every shopper – indeed even if there is a voice on the PA system announcing “attention shoppers, Redemption Potion is in the bottles in aisle four” — not many find it or grab it or swallow the bitter draught.  Some in very severe Reformed traditions might even say the bottle is hidden behind other things and is only made accessible to a chosen few.  Maybe a clerk whispers in the ears of those who are chosen – “psst, check out aisle four….”  In any event, it’s all about this magic potion, which instantly transforms those who drink it from “unredeemed” to “redeemed.”

I think the Pope had a different notion of “redemption” in mind in this quote.  I think he had in mind the redemption of all creation, including human nature as something universal in which all particular human beings share.  In this sense, all human beings are already redeemed by the blood of Christ.  The defects of universal human nature were assumed by Christ and are healed in Christ.  All particular human beings are capable of doing good, since all particular humans participate in universal human nature, which Christ has healed.  And to the extent any particular human is doing good, he or she is already in some fashion participating in the new humanity, the new Adam, brought about by the faithfulness of Christ. 

This concept is of course contrary to hard-line Reformed theologies that suggest the “good” done by non-Christians is only a sort of “civil good” and not genuine good.  But it is, I believe, thoroughly consistent with scripture and the broad Christian tradition, and it is a truth recognized by most Protestants today outside some narrow circles.  At the very least, God’s prevenient grace allows every human being to know and do the good to some extent.   Those of us within the Church, in fact, ought to be the first to acknowledge how far we regularly fall short in doing good, even with the benefits of regular Christian worship and sacramental life.

Does this mean that every particular human being is “going to heaven?”  No.  The freedom available to us because of Christ’s victory over sin and death remains contingent on our participation by faith.  We are free to reject the freedom of Christ and to accept instead the bondage of sin.  And in Catholic theology, along with the broad tradition of Christian thought, it is clear that this centrally involves the freedom to respond or not respond to the gospel of Jesus Christ as it is made known to us.  But, broadly speaking, Catholic theology is much more reticent to claim knowledge of precisely how God reveals Himself to others and precisely how others are or are not responding to God’s grace.  It may be that every atheist is beginning to respond and will finally respond “yes” to Christ, or it may not.  It may be that every professing Christian has expressed and will express a fundamental “yes” to Christ, or it may not.  Scripture suggests that only God finally knows the wheat from the tares, the sheep from the goats.

Does this then mean that anyone can “earn” heaven by “doing good?”  Again, no – and I don’t think the Pope would say so.  We are “justified” by faith, not by works.  Catholic, Orthodox, or Protestant, this is a basic and beautiful truth of the Gospel.  But the scriptural content of “justification” involves being made “just” – not only in name or by judicial declaration, but in fact.  We are made just only as a free gift of God’s grace made available to us by the faithfulness of Christ in his death and resurrection.  To accept that gift means, by the power of the Holy Spirit, gradually being made into a person more like Christ.  It means “abiding” in Christ, like a branch on a vine (John 15).  It means participating in the loving life of the Triune God.

The Pope’s conclusion is also important because it reflects this holistic notion of justification and redemption:

And this commandment for everyone to do good, I think, is a beautiful path towards peace. If we, each doing our own part, if we do good to others, if we meet there, doing good, and we go slowly, gently, little by little, we will make that culture of encounter: we need that so much. We must meet one another doing good. ‘But I don’t believe, Father, I am an atheist!’ But do good:  we will meet one another there.

Notice that “redemption” in this picture is about making culture and meeting one another – starting here and now!  It is not only about getting to heaven someday.  And notice that this redemptive construction of culture does not, and cannot, happen all at once.  I love the notion of creating culture “gently, little by little.”  How often I fail that ideal!  In a world where grave violence persists, it is not always possible to go “gently” (I am thinking at the moment of efforts to combat human trafficking and child pornography).  Nor does going “gently” mean avoiding clear articulation of differences or eschewing evangelism.  But in this process of recognizing the genuine “good” done by the other, maybe this gift of gentleness – which, after all, is among the particular fruits of the Holy Spirit (Gal. 5:23) – can be realized.

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Epistemology Spirituality

Lonergan on the Desire to Know

Deep within us all, emergent when the noise of other appetites is stilled, there is a drive to know, to understand, to see why, to discover the reason, to find the cause, to explain.  Just what is wanted, has many names.  In what precisely it consists, is a matter of dispute.  But the fact of inquiry is beyond all doubt.  It can absorb a man.  It can keep him for hours, day after day, year after year, in the narrow prison of his study or laboratory.  It can send him on dangerous voyages of exploration.  It can withdraw him from other interests, other pursuits, other pleasures, other achievements.  It can fill his waking thoughts, hide him from the world of ordinary affairs, invade the very fabric of his dreams.  It can demand endless sacrifices that are made without regret though there is only the hope, never a certain promise, of success.

— Bernard Lonergan, Insight

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Epistemology Science and Religion

Al Mohler's Ephemeral Epistemology

James Kidder, a Christian paleontologist, comments on Al Mohler’s most recent critique of BioLogos.  Mohler’s view of science seems to rest on an “appearance of age” argument.  According to Mohler, “given a plain reading of Scripture, there is every reason that Christians should reject a uniformitarian presupposition.”

Big words like “uniformitarian” and “presupposition” make this idea sound smart.  It is, however, profoundly anti-intellectual.  I mean “anti-intellectual” here not in the sense of opposing the “academic elite” as a class.  I mean it literally: adopting Mohler’s epistemology destroys our ability to “known” anything.  It is, in fact, a relativistic, Gnostic and nihilistic world view, which is not at all compatible with Christianity.

Mohler effectively sells out a Christian realist view of the universe to Descartes’ Demon.  Descartes was troubled by empiricism.  How can I really know for certain, he wondered, whether the things I observe with my senses are “real?”  I can’t prove, he reasoned, that the apparent reality I observe isn’t just an illusion created by a malevolent demon to keep me deluded.  After all, whatever proofs I might offer would be part of the illusion.  Thus he resolved to the one fact he thought could not be an illusion without self-contradiction:  that of his own existence.  “I think, therefore I am.”

Mohler’s epistemology says that Descartes was right to be afraid after all.  The world that we think we observe, with its distant starlight, its layers of fossils, its rates of radioactive decay, and so on, is illusory.  It may “appear” to be very old, but it is in fact something very different.

But, Mohler would say, Descartes’ Demon is vanquished because a “plain reading of scripture” tells us what really happened.  Here is the insurmountable problem:  a “plain reading of scripture” depends on “uniformitarian” assumptions about history.  It assumes that the text we now have is really an ancient text, created thousands of years ago.  It assumes that there really was a Jewish community and subsequently a Christian Church that existed in the past and preserved and handed these documents down as scripture.  It assumes that people in the past used certain words that have meanings that can be known with a high degree of certainty through historical study.

If Mohler’s view of history is correct, then all of his assumptions about scripture are up for grabs.  Absent a “uniformitarian” view of history, there is no way to be sure that what we now think of as “scripture” wasn’t poofed into existence with the “appearance of age” only moments ago.  There is no way to know with any certainty what the “plain meaning” of these documents might be or whether there is any “language” with meaning at all.  Indeed, there is no way to know whether Jesus really lived and truly rose again.

If your world view causes you to deny that history is real, that is a sure sign of trouble.  Without history, there is no meaning.

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Culture Epistemology

More Rationalistic Apologetics: Sigh

Scot McKnight writes about Dallas Willard’s new collection of apologetic essays, A Place for Truth:  Leading Thinkers Explore Life’s Questions.  Scot and many others like this kind of book.  For me, it provokes more of a frustrated shrug.

First — looking at the Table of Contents of this book, it’s an odd collection of folks who don’t agree with each other on many important things. Francis Collins and Hugh Ross speaking of faith and science in the same book? Really a radically different apologetic between those two, even though they both agree on the age of the earth (Ross thinks the Bible is a scientifically precise document and its supposed scientific precision is what led him to faith).

This strikes me as problematic, not just fot the coherency of the book, but for the presumption about apologetics and truth that underlie the book. It still is in this rationalistic vein of evangelical apologetics, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong, there’s a place for such arguments — as where McGrath pokes holes in the “meme” idea, for example. But if the Big Idea underlying the book is that Truth is One and Truth is Rational and The One Rational Truth is Accessible to All Through Reason — then it’s a huge problem to feature radically contrasting perspectives on what the truth is about something like whether Gen. 1-11 is a kind of embedded pre-science (Ross) or an allegory (Collins).

Second — even the general “fine tuning” arguments Francis Collins makes are not in themselves terribly convincing. I think they are convincing, or at least “helpful,” for someone starting from a position of faith, in order to support or show the coherence of faith. But taken strictly on the grounds of secular reason, they don’t really prove anything.

And this, once again, is the central problem with Willard’s style of apologetics: it presumes that the propositions of Christian faith are demonstrable at least in significant part through the exercise of natural reason. This just isn’t so (or as Barth would say: “nein!”). A genuinely Christian epistemology and apologetic must begin with the claim that “Jesus is Lord,” a claim known only through revelation, and then work outwards by employing reason to demonstrate the coherence, beauty, and correspondence to reality of that claim (or better, the contingency of reality upon that claim).

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Epistemology Historical Theology Humor Law and Policy Photography and Music Spirituality

CLS v. Martinez: An Ugly Decision Arising from Ugly Circumstances

Today the Supreme Court released its opinion in Christian Legal Society v. Martinez.  If you have heard about this case from the press or from an advocacy group and are concerned about it, I’d encourage you to read the entire opinion as well as the concurrence and dissent.  The whole package is ugly, I think.  It seems that the principles of freedom of expression, association and religion have been mired in a Dickensian procedural swamp, which was either created by the majority or conveniently used by the majority to bypass the big issues presented by the case. I urge interested readers to peruse the entire 75 pages of all the opinions, so that you may experience for yourself how a question of important Constitutional moment can be drowned in the turgid waters of civil procedure.

The majority opinion, written by Justice Ginsberg, holds that U.C. Hastings’ “all comers” policy was content-neutral and reasonably related to the school’s policy of promoting a diverse forum for student activities.  The all comers policy stated that approved student organizations must admit any student to membership or eligibility for leadership, regardless of the student’s status or beliefs.  A pro-choice group, then, would have to admit pro-choice students, a Democrat club would have to admit Republicans, the Christian Legal Society would have to admit non-Christians or people who do not live according to the CLS’ views on sexual ethics, and so on.

Indeed, the all comers policy does seem content-neutral as Justice Ginsberg describes it.  On its face, the all comers policy itself seems silly and unworkable — it essentially would require that no student organization can stand for anything other than the principle that it is good to encourage diverse viewpoints — but not unconstitutional.

In contrast, the dissent, written by Justice Alito and joined by Justices Roberts, Scalia and Thomas, goes into great detail about the factual circumstances of Hastings’ adoption of the all comers policy.  In short, according to Justice Alito, the all comers policy was “adopted” as a litigation strategy late in the game.  The policy really at issue, Hastings’ “Nondiscrimination Policy,” only prohibited discrimination based on a select few protected categories — race, color, religion, national origin, ancestry, disability, age, sex or sexual orientation.  Enforcement of the Nondiscrimination Policy against groups, such as CLS, that discriminate in one of these categories on the basis of religious beliefs raises a very difficult Constitutional question:  do the freedoms of religion, speech and association mean that the government must accommodate religious groups that discriminate based on categories such as sexual orientation?

In a previous post, I summarized the issues in the case, and expressed my view that the whole thing was an unfortunate manifestation of ongoing confusion by Christians about the relationship between American government and Christian faith.  In his dissent, Justice Alito expresses disappointment with the majority and suggests that the majority’s opinion is “a serious setback for freedom of expression in this country.”  He might be right, but maybe not for the reasons he expresses.  In one sense, I’m glad the majority found a way to avoid deciding the more difficult issues presented by the Nondiscrimination Policy.  There is a hard tension between citizenship in the Church and citizenship in a liberal (meaning classically liberal) pluralistic democracy.  I don’t think it’s a tension that we in the Church should want to press up against so hard.  Sometimes, the wiser course for the life and mission of the ekklesia is to maintain a faithful witness without suing for full government recognition of all our rights.

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Epistemology Theology

Hunsinger on Faith and Evidence

This post by George Hunsinger I think is excellent.

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Epistemology Humor Law and Policy

The Lost Interview of Jesus?

The Bibliographic Society (B.S.) announced today the discovery of a previously unknown manuscript dating to the first century C.E.  This spectacular find, hidden under a bushel in the Qumran caves, appears to be a record of an interview between a local journalist named Simon Bar Khoba and a person identified tantalizingly only as “the Nazarene.”  I’m reproducing a portion here that has already been deciphered and translated:

SBK:  It’s said that you refuse to sign the Jerusalem Declaration.  My readers would like to know why.

TN:  My kingdom is not of this world. If My kingdom were of this world, then My servants would be fighting the authorities for me; but as it is, My kingdom is not of this realm.

SBK:  But surely you agree that the Roman law is inconsistent with God’s law! Isn’t it our duty as God’s people to change this?

TN:   Put your sword back in its place. All who draw the sword will die by the sword.

SBK:  Who said anything about a sword? I’m talking politics! We need to take back our nation!

TN:  Do you think I cannot call on my Father, and he will at once put at my disposal more than twelve legions of angels?

SBK:  Um… I guess. So go ahead, call out the angels and let’s transform this culture!

TN:  You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you, Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.

SBK:  That hardly seems practical or fair. Our culture is in the grip of great darkness. It’s our responsibility to confront the darkness and show our leaders their errors. If we rebel against the government, it is an act of love, not retribution.

TN:  You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you: Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

SBK:   So we’re supposed to tolerate the scorn of these reprobates who over-tax us, over-spend on social programs, and all the while indulge in every kind of debauchery? Personally, I’m putting them on notice: I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore. Are you with us or against us?

TN:  Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

SBK:  This is astonishing, if I may say so. We need to show these people we mean business, that we’re organized and unified. The Jerusalem Declaration lays out our core principles, a plan by which we can begin rightly ordering this society. What do you offer instead?

TN:  Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days

SBK:  No, no and a thousand times, no! The Temple can’t be destroyed, it’s the key to our restoration!

TN:   Behold, I am making all things new!

SBK:  You can’t be serious.

At this point, the manuscript becomes illegible. Hopefully, the BS will be able to decipher more of it soon!

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Epistemology Law and Policy Science & Technology Spirituality

Reflections on the Religious Legal Theory Conference

Last week we held the Religious Legal Theory:  The State of the Field conference at the law school.  I’m incredibly gratified at how the conference went.  Organizing this conference was, in fact, one of the most satisfying projects of my professional career.

This was a unique conference in that we focused on legal theory from an ecumenically religious perspective.   The keynote speakers included Christian, Jewish, and Muslim scholars, and presenters included Catholics, Evangelicals, Presbyterians, Mormons,  Buddhists, and others.  None of the speakers or presenters minimized their own faith distinctives — indeed, many of the presentations were explicitly theological — and yet we found common ground in the desire to develop legal theory that acknowledges, celebrates, and integrates religious distinctives.  It was a thrill to see all these diverse scholars interacting with each other in peace.  This mood was summarized nicely by a scripture I read at the start of the conference’s second day:  And the word of the Lord came again to Zechariah:  “This is what the Lord Almighty says:  ‘Administer true justice; show mercy and compassion to one another. Do not oppress the widow or the fatherless, the alien or the poor.  In your hearts do not think evil of each other.”  (Zech. 7:8-10).

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Epistemology Historical Theology Law and Policy Martin Luther Theology

Martin Luther: Freedom

“A Christian man is the most free lord of all, and subject to none; a Christian man is the most dutiful servant of all, and subject to every one.”

— Martin Luther, “The Freedom of a Christian”