Author Archives: Rob Harrison

Thought on atheism and the use of theology

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John Stackhouse wrote a post a couple weeks ago responding to the following quote, attributed to Richard Dawkins:

What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them. I have never heard any of them ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false. If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference? Even the bad achievements of scientists, the bombs, and sonar-guided whaling vessels, work! The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything. What makes anyone think that “theology” is a subject at all?

His response, “What Good Are Theologians?” is, if I understand him properly, an appeal to scientist/philosopher Michael Polanyi’s concept of “personal knowledge,” and to the lesson of Basil Mitchell’s parable of the freedom fighter. (He doesn’t explicitly reference either, but he does quote Polanyi in one of his comments on the thread.) I say “if I understand him properly” because if I’m right about that, then a number of his respondents don’t understand him properly—my read appears to be a minority opinion.

The post is well worth reading; but it’s worth reading, in part, to set up the discussion in the comments, which I think is better than the original post. I particularly liked this contribution from one Ian:

As Stan Grenz and Roger Olson assert in their invitation to the study of God, Who Needs Theology, “Everyone is a theologian.” (IVP 1996) The only question remains are you a good theologian or a bad theologian. Of course Dawkins is referring to those of us who are or are becoming professional theologians.

Yet, one also has to wonder about his claims concerning the type of world we have. For the Glory of God by Rodney Stark suggests that we would not have many of the technological advances that Dawkins claims for science without Christian theology. Descartes himself found theological ideas significant for his method and science is indeed indebted to him for good or ill.

Finally, Dawkins has made a career out of theology by pitting himself against a theological worldview and its promoters. One wonders what we he would do without us? Who would read his books?

(At first I thought that was Iain Provan, but then I realized that the name was spelled differently.) Other commenters take on the ridiculously (and arrogantly) reductionistic position staked out by Dr. Dawkins, but I think Ian has hit the key point on the head: everyone is a theologian, in that everyone forms and articulates beliefs about the nature and existence or non-existence of God. The role of the theologian is to inform and critique those beliefs, and the reason for the violence of Dr. Dawkins’ response is not rational, but personal and visceral: he is categorically unwilling to have his beliefs (which are the foundation and justification for that reductionism) either critiqued or informed.

This is characteristic of Dr. Dawkins, as it is of his fellow “New Atheists”; I’ve laid out my views of them before, and I remain convinced that they are the mirror image of whom they imagine their opponents to be: dogmatic fundamentalists who have made their chosen god in their own image and will brook no contradiction of their dogma because it would threaten their chosen self-understanding and way of life. Though they make a great parade of their insistence on reason, their rationalism appears to be of the kind best captured by Benjamin Franklin in his Autobiography:

So convenient a thing it is to be a rational creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for every thing one has a mind to do.

Or, one might add, “believe.” When Dr. Dawkins asks, “What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody?” he’s defining “use” on his terms—terms which have already, by their narrowness, predetermined the answer, to ensure that he need not feel obliged to grapple with the answer.

Evening prayer

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The Lord reveal himself more and more to us in the face of his Son Jesus Christ and magnify the power of his grace in cherishing those beginnings of grace in the midst of our corruptions, and sanctify the consideration of our own infirmities to humble us, and of his tender mercy to encourage us.

And may he persuade us that, since he has taken us into the covenant of grace, he will not cast us off for those corruptions which, as they grieve his Spirit, so they make us vile in our own eyes.

And because Satan labors to obscure the glory of his mercy and hinder our comfort by discouragements, the Lord add this to the rest of his mercies, that we may not lose any portion of comfort that is laid up for us in Christ.

And, may he grant that the prevailing power of his Spirit in us should be an evidence of the truth of grace begun, and a pledge of final victory, at that time when he will be all in all, in all his, for all eternity. Amen.

—Richard Sibbes

HT: Of First Importance

Reflections on Obamacare as potential law

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The great misnomer in the health care “reform” debate comes in references to “the health care bill” or “the health care plan.” There is no one health care bill, and no one health care plan. There are various versions of legislation, and much yet to be decided, and probably whole sections that haven’t been written. There is in no reasonable sense one coherent piece of legislation.

More importantly, though, even when there is, and even if it passes, we still won’t be that much clearer on what the law is. Randall Hoven explains:

Let’s just say that you use HR 3200 as a surrogate for Obama’s plan. It definitely has words—1,017 pages worth. Here is what Congressman John Conyers said about it.

What good is reading the bill if it’s a thousand pages and you don’t have two days and two lawyers to find out what it means after you read the bill?To appreciate this statement, you should know that Conyers has been in Congress since 1965; only John Dingell, the bill’s sponsor, has served longer in the House. You should also know that Conyers has a law degree. And now he is chairman of the House Judiciary Committee.

If a legislator of 44 years, himself a lawyer and in fact chair of the judiciary committee, along with two other lawyers cannot figure out what this bill means, what hope do you, or I, or any “neutral” fact checker have of figuring it out?

William Jacobson, a professor of law at Cornell Law School, chronicled his efforts to understand this “dense House bill” in the American Thinker. He used a “dartboard” method to randomly select pages to analyze, stopping after seven such pages. “I will try to explain what the section and provisions on the page mean. There is no guarantee that I will be able to do so, as some of these provisions may be incomprehensible.”

“Incomprehensible” to a law professor. Also incomprehensible to an experienced legislator and lawyer working with other lawyers. Yet we are supposed to believe, say, the Huffington Post, when it interprets Obama’s health care plan for us?

This is not just a health care issue; it is an issue with all modern legislation. That is, the legislation passed by Congress and signed by a President become ink blots for those left to interpret it in the future. The money to fund the legislation is quite real, but the meaning of the legislation is more like quantum mechanics: there is no “there”, just probability distributions.

In other words, whatever plan passes (if a plan passes at all) won’t be “law” in the sense that we usually think of; it will, rather, be only an approximation. The way things work these days, we might think we know what the law means, but we really don’t until the courts are done making up their collective mind how they want to rewrite—err, I mean interpret—it.

This isn’t the only issue that arises, either, when we stop to consider Obamacare not as a political issue but as a potential addition to the law code. There is in fact a more significant one: is it even constitutional? Retired attorney and constitutional law instructor Michael Connelly, having read all of HR 3200, doesn’t think so:

This legislation also provides for access by the appointees of the Obama administration of all of your personal healthcare information, your personal financial information, and the information of your employer, physician, and hospital. All of this is a direct violation of the specific provisions of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution protecting against unreasonable searches and seizures. You can also forget about the right to privacy. That will have been legislated into oblivion regardless of what the 3rd and 4th Amendments may provide.

If you decide not to have healthcare insurance or if you have private insurance that is not deemed “acceptable” to the “Health Choices Administrator” appointed by Obama there will be a tax imposed on you. It is called a “tax” instead of a fine because of the intent to avoid application of the due process clause of the 5th Amendment. However, that doesn’t work because since there is nothing in the law that allows you to contest or appeal the imposition of the tax, it is definitely depriving someone of property without the “due process of law.”

So, there are three of those pesky amendments that the far left hate so much out the original ten in the Bill of Rights that are effectively nullified by this law. It doesn’t stop there though. The 9th Amendment provides: “The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.” The 10th Amendment states: “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are preserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Under the provisions of this piece of Congressional handiwork neither the people nor the states are going to have any rights or powers at all in many areas that once were theirs to control.

Much has been made, and quite properly, of the fact that the President wants to transfer 1/7 of the American economy to government control; but if Hoven and Connelly are right, that’s only the lesser danger. The greater danger is the corrupting effect HR3200 (or more likely, its descendant) would have on our laws and our political process. It’s a funny thing, when a Republican was in the White House, the Democrats raged against the “imperial Presidency”; but when it’s one of their own, they’re happy to go along with an absolutely unprecedented power grab by the Executive Branch. They must not figure they’re ever going to lose another election.

Methinks somebody struck a nerve

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—or rather, that a whole bunch of somebodies did, judging by the Left’s reaction to the turnout in D.C. on Saturday. Dan Riehl has a good rundown, as does Charlie Martin (HT: Shout First, Ask Questions Later), while Thomas Lifson quotes a spokesman for the National Park Service as saying,

It is a record. . . . We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever.

No question, estimating crowd sizes is tricky under any circumstances; the high-end estimate I’ve seen is 2.3 million people, so it seems reasonable to guess that the actual number of participants was lower, and probably a fair bit lower. On the other hand, the media’s attempts to dismiss the crowd as “tens of thousands” is simply ludicrous, given the pictures and videos; there were, at the very least, hundreds of thousands, as one participant makes clear:

Here is a series of time lapse photos of the march from 8:00 am to 11:30am. The crowd was constantly anywhere from 25 to 50 abreast. I know. I walked in the middle of it, along the sidewalks to move forward quicker, and around the entire circuit, up to and beyond Senate Park. At times, we were so crammed together, breathing became strained. Taking the low number, and assuming a line of 25 crossing a given point every second for three-and-a-half hours, gives you about 300,000. Whatever the actual number, it was certainly magnitudes greater than “tens of thousands.”

At this point in time, I feel pretty confident saying two things: one, the number of people who turned out for this past weekend’s Tea Party is at least comparable to the number who showed up this past January for the inauguration, and probably greater than the record attendance (1.2 million) at LBJ’s inauguration in 1964; and two, the dispute really doesn’t matter. What matters is, it was huge, the largest grassroots event in American history, and however much the media might try to downplay that fact, the politicians in D. C. know how big it was. What they do with that is up to them, but I don’t think any of them are foolish enough to believe the media spin.

The necessity of justice

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Heidelberg Catechism
Q & A 12
Q. According to God’s righteous judgment
we deserve punishment
both in this world and forever after:
how then can we escape this punishment
and return to God’s favor?

A. God requires that his justice be satisfied.1
Therefore the claims of his justice
must be paid in full,
either by ourselves or another.2

Note: mouse over footnote for Scripture references.

This begins Part II of the Heidelberg Catechism, its account of our deliverance from sin and death; but where we might expect this to begin with an immediate declaration of the good news, the text demurs. Its authors knew that we can only understand the good news of the gospel as good news if we have come fully to appreciate the bad news from which it sets us free. The good news isn’t that God thinks we’re good enough as we are; the good news is that we aren’t good enough as we are—indeed, we’re worse than we think we are—but that God loves us anyway, and that though we cannot be good enough to satisfy him, he made a way to be good enough for us.

Understanding that begins with understanding the greatness of God’s righteousness and holiness and the absolute character of his hatred of and intolerance for sin; grace must begin with the satisfaction of his justice, either by ourselves or by another. As M. Eugene Osterhaven writes (44-45),

God requires that the creature made in his image give him unconditional obedience and love, and that man love his neighbor as himself. this is the essence of the law. Law and obligation are necessary because God is God. . . .

Man thus stands in debt to God. He owes him the obedience of perfect love but does not give it. Nor is there any escape from full payment. . . .

God is not a man who forgets. He is rather a righteous judge who will “render to every man according to his works” (Romans 2:6). He does not live in some distant place and he does not forget those whom he has made in his own image nor their moral relationship to him. He is the Lord of heaven and earth and he tells all men everywhere that someday they shall stand before him to give account (John 5:28-29; II Corinthians 5:10).

This is why James doesn’t say, “Mercy replaces judgment,” but rather says, “Mercy triumphs over judgment.” God’s judgment doesn’t disappear, nor is it set aside, it is redirected in his mercy.

No Shadow of Turning

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(Genesis 22:1-19; James 1:12-18)

I imagine you’re all familiar with the sort of mock awards that label people most likely to do this or that. You know, the section in the high school yearbook that picks the boy and girl most likely to succeed, and then goes on to such things as “Most Likely to Host a TV Game Show.” Well, in my class at Hope, if our senior yearbook had had “Most Likely to Win a Nobel Prize,” there’s no doubt who would have won it: Richard Bouwens. Richard was, to put it mildly, an interesting character. He was sweet-natured and gentle, but completely clueless socially; he had at once the most brilliant and the most narrowly focused mind of anyone I’ve ever met, and while he probably understood physics and its underlying math as well as any of our professors, the rest of his subjects were a mystery to him, as were most of the people he studied them with.

I remember a table full of us helping him set his schedule one semester, and his complete bewilderment at all these subjects, what they were and why he needed to take them; I also remember one of my roommates talking about taking Richard for Sunday dinner at a friend’s house one time and spending the whole meal translating, Richard to English and back again. If you’ve heard the stories about Einstein getting lost walking to work from his house in Princeton, when he could see the campus from his front step—that’s Richard.

As I said, though, he was kind and likeable, and undeniably brilliant in his field, so we all helped him deal with the areas where he was weak; to his math and physics professors, though, he was a real challenge. In particular, there was the problem of how to push him hard enough without completely losing the rest of the class, which is something I don’t think any of them ever solved. I still remember the time—my roommate was in this class and told me about it—when one of Hope’s math professors decided he was going to write a test that Richard couldn’t ace. It didn’t work. Richard still got his A, but the whole rest of the class flunked. I think the prof ended up having to take Richard’s score out and grade the rest on a curve to avoid wrecking their GPAs for the semester.

Now the problem with that test was that the professor got so focused on Richard, and on not letting Richard beat him, that he forgot the real purpose of that test. It wasn’t, properly, to keep Richard from getting an A, but to show the students in that class how well they understood the material (and, of course, to help him quantify that so he could grade them). The proper purpose of that test, like any test, was educational, to help the students see what they still needed to learn. In forgetting that, he ended up producing a test designed not to educate his students but to fail them—which, except for Richard, is exactly what it did. It’s unfortunate the prof only realized that after he’d given it.

Fortunately for us, this is a mistake God never makes. As we saw last week, the purpose, or at least one purpose, of testing is to produce endurance; part of that is that testing teaches us what we can endure, that we’re actually capable of doing a lot more and pushing ourselves a lot further than we think possible. God tests us, stretching us so that we grow, and so that we see ourselves growing; he pushes us to our limits at times, not to find out where they are—he already knows that—but so that we find out where they are. After all, believing we can endure testing is essential to actually enduring it.

This is why verse 12, which both closes the previous section of James and opens this one, says, “Blessed is the one who perseveres under trial.” Blessed are those whose faith is tried and proven true and strong, for they are the ones who run the race with endurance, taking hold of the eternal life to which they were called, and at the end of their race receive the crown of life from the Lord’s hand. We noted a few weeks ago that the winners of the ancient Olympics would receive a laurel wreath as their prize, a temporary crown that would last only a week or two before withering completely; but those who win the race of faith, who run with endurance, receive something far better, something eternal: the crown of life that the Lord has promised to those who love him. This is the gift of true, unending life, the life of God, with God, forever.

That said, no one always perseveres. Trials always bring temptations with them, temptations to yield to the pressure and take the easy way out, and sometimes even the best of us give in to those temptations. When that happens, there’s the further temptation to blame the whole thing on God. After all, it’s well established in the Scriptures that God tests us; we have the definitive example in Genesis 22, where God tests Abraham’s faith about as sorely as it could possibly be tested. (There’s a lot that can be said about that story, about how it foreshadows but inverts God’s salvation—because in the end, he would provide the lamb to take the place of all of us, but that lamb would be his own son; but for this morning, note another critical point in verse 5. Note how Abraham says, “The boy and I are going over there to worship, and then we will come back to you.” He trusted that somehow, some way, God was going to be faithful, and Isaac would come home with him; that was his response to God’s test.) But if it’s God who tests us, then it’s just a short step to saying that it’s God who tempts us; and if we can blame him for tempting us, then it’s his fault if we give in, not ours.

To this, James says, “No. It’s your own desires that tempt you—it’s you undermining yourself. God can’t be tempted by evil; it doesn’t appeal to him at all, and so he has no interest in tempting anyone else.” He allows us to be tempted in order to try to test us; he allows our desires to rise up against our faith, because if he suppressed them for us, we would be worse off in the end; but he isn’t the source of our temptation. For that, we must look within, to our own fallenness and our own weaknesses; and forcing us to do so, to see our dark side as well as our good side, is one of the benefits of the trials God sends us.

To avoid doing so, to refuse to see the darkness we all harbor in ourselves, is to yield to one of the most insidious and deadly of all temptations, that of spiritual pride, which is driven by the desire to see ourselves as holier than we really are. The only antidote to that poisonous sin comes through other trials and temptations; even if God protected us from every other temptation, it would only provide more room for that one to operate in our lives, which would be no gain to us in the long run. We must face our sinful desires directly, and see them for what they really are, if we’re to grow; and for that to happen, in order to see ourselves that clearly, we must be put to the test.

The key point here is that though testing and temptation are closely linked—indeed, the temptation often is the test—they’re fundamentally different. The temptation in itself is a bad thing, it’s the lure of sin and the pull of evil in our lives, and it is not of God; but he allows it in order to test us, and the testing, though difficult, is a good thing. It’s necessary for our growth, necessary for us to build endurance, and necessary to keep us humble. Without it, we end up like the student who coasted through school on challenge-free classes and easy As—lazy, unmotivated, with an unreasonably high opinion of ourselves and our abilities, and utterly unprepared to face any kind of real challenge.

This is important for us to understand, not only for our view of ourselves, but also for our view of God. You see, to confuse testing and temptation, to blame God for tempting us and accuse him of doing wrong in testing us, is to call him the source of evil in our lives as well as of good. Essentially, then, we’re saying that God is inconstant, that he’s good at one point and not good at another—that he’s as fickle and changeable as the weather. Of course, in the weather, that’s not all bad. One of the things I miss about Colorado is the play of light on the mountains—watching the cloud-shadows move, sharp-edged, across the slopes, seeing the peaks light up on a bright morning, and again with the alpenglow at sunset; but while that sort of variation is a beautiful thing in the mountains, it wouldn’t be good at all in God.

We’d be in a world of hurt, literally, if the goodness of God changed with the weather, or the seasons, or the time of day. And so James tells us—and there are a lot of different translations for this, since it’s difficult Greek, but the overall point is clear—that in God there is no such variation. We don’t see shadows move across our lives as God’s light shifts, or changes, or wanes; the world turns, and day comes and goes, but God is the source of all light, and his goodness remains steady. He is always good, and only good, and everything he sends is good, and nothing evil comes from his hand.

This is why we can, as James tells us, consider it joy when we encounter various trials; they’re difficult, yes, but we can approach them with the assurance that God is at work in and through them for our good. God has allowed them in order to help us grow, he’s with us in their midst, and he wants us to overcome them—he tests us because he wants us to pass. He isn’t trying to bring us down, he’s working to build us up, and if we will only lean on him when trials come, he will give us what we need to face them. As Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 10, “No testing has overtaken us that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let us be tested beyond our strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that we may be able to endure it.” God is faithful, and his faithfulness is great beyond our ability to measure; he allows us to face trials only so he can bring us through them. We can trust this to be true, we can trust his goodness and his faithfulness, because he is the Father of lights, the source of all light, and in him there is no shadow of turning; his light never wavers, his goodness never changes, and he always keeps his promises.

One more blogroll addition

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I’d never run across the blog “Shout First, Ask Questions Later” before today—I found it courtesy of a link from Kathryn Jean Lopez—but having found it, I’m glad I did. I linked a couple of her posts in the post immediately below this one (and there are more on the 9/12 march that deserve your time), and I’ve added it to the blogroll as well, as one of the loyal opposition. Check it out—but wait until you have a little time; there’s a lot there.

Barack Obama, uniter?

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In a way, perhaps. No, President “I Won” hasn’t proven to be the post-partisan “new politics”political messiah his campaign promised, but no rational human being could have expected that he would be; it’s simply not in the cards for a politician to come along and bring consensus between the parties (though if he were actually trying to build coalitions and create compromises rather than steering such a partisan course, we might be closer). More seriously, though, he can’t even unite his own party, which is why his domestic agenda has had such a rocky course of late despite Democratic dominance on the Hill.

What our community-organizer president does seem to be doing, though, is uniting and inspiring large chunks of the grassroots. To be sure, lately he’s been uniting and inspiring them against him, but hey, you can’t have everything. I was amazed to hear predictions that the Tea Party movement’s March on Washington would draw hundreds of thousands of people; the House leadership even put out a memo projecting two million participants, but I figured Glenn Reynolds and Moe Lane were right:

I think they’re floating huge numbers—two million? are you kidding?—so that they can paint it as a disappointment if we see “only” hundreds of thousands. . . .

Two million would be about double the turnout of Obama’s inauguration. I don’t believe the Dems really expect that.

Usually, when it comes to politics, if you go with the cynicism, it will get you where you need to be. Not this time. In fact, media estimates do indeed have the 9/12 Tea Party in D.C. pushing two million people—the police estimate, though lower, still had the count at 1.2 million—and from the pictures and the stories, it isn’t hard to believe. At the top of the page, you can see a picture from Mary Katherine Ham, courtesy of the Instapundit.

I liked Professor Reynolds’ comment on the Daily Mail article I linked above:

So maybe I was wrong to be so skeptical. But cut it in half and it’s still a huge number. And this is priceless: “Many protesters said they paid their own way to the event—an ethic they believe should be applied to the government.” Why is the British press more honest in its reporting on this stuff than the American press?

Meanwhile, a reader emails: “I’ll tell you what I find impressive. I’m watching the Fox news video about 15 minutes after the end of the event. The crowd has thinned out enough that you can see the ground and there is not a speck of trash on the grass. Absolutely clean. To contrast, google ‘pictures of litter on the mall after the inauguration.’”

The mind boggles. More people descended on D.C. today to protest the president’s socialist agenda than came for his inauguration—possibly twice as many—and that was a huge event. No wonder Wall Street is confident the government takeover of health care is dead.

This is what death panels look like

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and why you shouldn’t believe anyone who tries to tell you that there will be no difference between government bureaucrats and the insurance-company bureaucrats we have now (even as problematic as that current bureaucracy is, even as badly as we need to prune it). Read Michelle Moore’s New Ledger piece on “Rationed Care & The Most Vulnerable Among Us” . . . but be prepared, it’s an emotional read. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that it was Sarah Palin, a mother of five, including a baby with Down Syndrome, who came up with the phrase “death panels”; newborns who aren’t “perfect” and perfectly convenient truly are, even more than the elderly, the most vulnerable among us. They are the ones who most deserve our care—not to be abandoned as “too expensive.”

(Cross-posted at Conservatives4Palin)

A politician to root for

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(if you’re a conservative, anyway). According to Rasmussen, Sen. Michael Bennet (D-CO), who was appointed to fill Ken Salazar’s seat when Sen. Salazar stepped down to become Secretary of the Interior, is polling down around 40% against two potential Republican challengers in next year’s election. The thing is, those two challengers are largely unknown in the state—they’re politicians at the city/county level.

That’s why I was interested to discover someone else has thrown his hat in the ring: Luke Korkowski. A lawyer and a small businessman—he runs his own practice, and has an MBA alongside his law degree—who has clerked for the Montana Supreme Court, he has no elective experience, but plenty of real-world experience; were Bob Beauprez or Bill Owens running, the fact that Korkowski’s never served in elected office before might be more of a problem, but no one else in the race on the Republican side has served above the local level, so that’s really not an issue. What matters more is that he has experience in actually running something in the real world, and that he’s a man of character. (You have to appreciate someone whose campaign website confesses to a traffic misdemeanor.) I don’t know him personally, but I know some of his relatives pretty well, and I can attest to this: they’re good people.

Luke Korkowski wouldn’t be the typical member of the U.S. Senate by any means, but I don’t think that’s a bad thing; I like his principles, I like what he stands for, and I like who stands with him. I’ll be pulling for him in 2010.