Must the Church be an organization?

In my last post, I concluded that the authority to interpret Christian doctrine rests on the One True Church; however, I have not defined this One True Church. Before we may venture further, we must establish what we mean by this word “Church” (including its capitalized and lower-case forms).

When we refer to a “church” [uncapitalized], we usually refer to a particular congregation of Christians and/or the building they gather in. When we refer to “The Church” [capitalized] we may mean one of two things:

(1) An organization of these churches sharing common doctrinal beliefs affirmed by a central and terminal authority, such as a council, convention, or pontiff (for example, “The Roman Catholic Church” or “The Southern Baptist Church”), in other words, a denomination

(2) The entire global body of Christians, the Body of Christ

When we give the power over interpretation of doctrine to the True Church, we certainly mean the Church in this second, global sense. The question that emerges, though, is whether we must also mean a particular organizational Church (sense 1).

I think we must. My reasons for thinking so are connected to my reason for arguing for the True Church as the defender of orthodoxy in the first place; or put another way, I think this institutional concept of the church is entailed by the role that I have suggested it has.

If we define the True Church as simply the global body of Christ, the question must be asked, do we mean that all Church denominations are included in this? We would then be in the position of affirming the Fire Baptized Church of God of Holiness of the Americas, the Central Yearly Meeting of Friends, the Branch Davidians, the Indian Shakers, not to mention both the Catholics and the Protestants, as all authoritative for interpreting Christian doctrine and practice. Certainly this is not tenable! It is more likely that we mean that the Church transcends the denominations, not fitting perfectly into any one of them. Some people from any denomination might be part of the True Church, and some people from any denomination may not be part of it. In other words, the Church is a spiritual entity known to God and not fully to man.

However, thus abstracting the True Church away from any earthly form leaves us in danger of being unable to recognize it. It cannot be that we are left without any means of ascertaining the Church, because we must be a part of it! Christ wills for us to participate in his Church. Accepting an agnostic position in which we are not concerned about the authenticity of our own church and denomination leaves us powerless to affirm truth or reject falsehood. We may be part of a false or deficient church, and thus develop falsities and deficiencies in our soul, and those around us. We might imbibe false prophecy and erroneous teaching without even knowing it. This is certainly not a possibility that the Good Shepherd leaves open to his precious flock. There must be some way of knowing for sure whether our church or denomination is part of the True Church.

Is there any way that we can affirm the truth of our church or our denomination without equating it to The Church? There is a way, the way taken by congregationalists and quakers and those who see their churches as democratic gatherings of autonomous believers. It is an appeal to a power outside the church or denomination itself: to Reason. The congregationalist believes in his church because he believes that his pastor or his elders or he himself has enough reason and insight, and that their Reason has the authority to interpret Christian doctrine and practice, using the Bible as a basis.

However, I have argued previously that the authority to interpret Christian truth cannot be trusted to the reason of men, for we are flawed and sinful and incapable of reliably interpreting the divine mysteries. The True Church, for whose preservation Jesus prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, could never surrender her members to such a treacherous guide, but would protect them from error by her own authority. Since The Church is herself the true authority (as I said in my last post), she would never abdicate to an impostor.

If we affirm more than one denomination, we fall to contradiction, and if we affirm none of them, we fall to an agnosticism that renders us powerless against error, which itself can only be remedied by giving Reason the scepter of interpretation, which The Church would never do. We must therefore regard a single Church, a denomination, as The Church.

We have now come to the point when we can and must ask, “Which Church (sense 1) is the Church (sense 2)?” or put another way, “Which denomination is the True Church?” I will consider this immense and crucial question later, but the significance of the point we have just come to cannot be overstated, namely, that the question can be framed in those terms at all.

The authority to interpret scripture

In the previous essay I concluded that the Bible is reliable on the basis of the authority of the institutional Church to establish Christian practice and doctrine. But, although Protestants accept from the hand of Tradition both the Bible and its companions, the Creeds, they reject the authority of the Tradition of the Church today (as the battle cry “sola scriptura” proclaims). Such authority must have been removed from the Church sometime (perhaps gradually) between the 4^th Century and the 16^th Century, at which point the Reformation occurred. I have heard it explained in roughly these words: “God gave the institutional Church authority through the apostolic age and through the age of the councils, so that the Bible would be reliably formed, but since the closure of the Canon, the authority to interpret doctrine no longer resides with the leaders of the Church, but with all believers, since the meaning of the Bible is evident and apparent within its completed pages and stands on its own.” Authority to interpret has been removed from the Church, and given to all who can read the Bible for themselves. It is a good thing to read the Bible for oneself, but to place the power to interpret the Bible into the hands of everyone is to destroy all certainty of truth.

The Zionist First Church of God of Holiness

We become aware of this if we consider the hundreds of different protestant denominations, many of which we can agree are dubiously orthodox. Take, for example, Reverend Michael at the Zionist First Church of God of Holiness down the street, who claims to be an apostle, slays people with the spirit, and drives a Rolls Royce because the Holy Spirit told him to tell his congregation to contribute to the work of the Lord. We can’t accept his authority, can we? But on what basis do we reject it? We will answer, “His teaching and lifestyle doesn’t line up with the Bible.” But Apostle Michael quotes heavily from the Bible all the time. So, on what basis do we claim that his teachings don’t line up? “He misinterprets scripture.” And how do we know that he is misinterpreting scripture? Because we know how to correctly interpret the meaning of scripture. On what grounds are we certain of our interpretations?

The first and most common line of reasoning that comes to the Protestant mind is, I believe, based on an incorrect assumption.

Intrinsic meaning?

The Protestant will probably answer that we can be certain of our interpretations because, by careful study of Greek, Hebrew, and biblical history, we can know the original intention of the author to his audience, situated in the historical, linguistic, and textual context, and discovering this intention is to know the meaning of the text. This is based on a key assumption about the nature of meaning shared by most evangelicals and expressed by John Piper:

“The grammatical-historical method…aims to get at something intrinsic to the text, namely its meaning.”

Piper defines the meaning of a text as the author’s intention (as discernible from the historical, linguistic, cultural context, etc.) and claims authority to know it based on the fact that the intention is intrinsic to the words of the text. However, it is decidedly not the case that an author’s intention is intrinsic to his words.

Permit me to get technical for a moment. All meaning is conveyed between interlocutors using a process of coding, transferring, and decoding messages. Words, whether “well formulated in writing” or in spoken utterance, are the signs of meaning, the material used in transfer. In a precise semiology, words are not identical to the author’s intention. The intention or meaning is conveyed by the words in conjunction with the encoding and decoding apparatuses of both interlocutors. My ability to understand someone’s intention is dependent on how well they interpret the message into a form I can understand and how well I interpret the form of their message back into an intention. Therefore, the author’s intention is not simply intrinsic to his words, but passes between him and the reader by the instrument of his words within a communicative act that includes interpretation on both their parts.

Such a denial of the role of interpretation in meaning causes us to (unintentionally) neglect God’s role in interpreting scripture to us, and overemphasize our role. This brings us to the real grounds on which Protestants are sure of their interpretations of scripture.

Faith in Reason

What asserting the intrinsic meaning of the texts of scripture is really doing is placing the full power and responsibility to interpret scripture in the hands of Reason, the faculty of the human mind.

At first, we depend on reason only under the guise of scholarship–“Enough rigorous study and education eventually grant the authority to interpret scripture reliably.” However, the subjection of the scriptures to rational scholarship has, in the past four centuries, produced an enormous amount of scholarship doubting nearly everything that can be believed about the Bible, not to mention thousands of fractures of communion based on contradictions of interpretation. Must we accept the positions of any liberal pastor, any linguist, any historical-critical professor of theology who puts forward a new interpretation of scripture based on scholarly study? If we do, then all we will have left of our Christianity will be an emasculated, ham-strung collection of historical happy thoughts. If we say no, then we must again answer, “On what basis?” It is tempting to pretend that there is a consensus among scholars that we might give authority to, by presenting a list of opinions that excludes scholars we deem to be unorthodox, but as with the Canon we will find ourselves begging the question again.

In the end, the only thing we have left to put forward as the sure authority for the interpretation of scripture is our own reason and intellect. But here we have come to something as indefensible as Reverend Michael’s sermon at the Zionist First Church of God of Holiness, for no man who says that the Holy Spirit spoke to him can be proved wrong, and neither can a man who gives ultimate authority to his own reason. But no reasonable person absolutely relies upon his reason. The sane person never absolutely trusts his sanity. As G.K. Chesterton says, “The sane man knows that he has a touch of the beast, a touch of the devil, a touch of the saint, a touch of the citizen. Nay, the really sane man knows that he has a touch of the madman.” In contrast, it is a mark of the insane man that he fixates on his own reasonings. “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason. The madman is the man who has lost everything except his reason.” The rational man must admit that he is not exempt from the weaknesses of the mind that cause other men to err with the utmost sincerity, and he will look for something greater than himself in which to anchor his understanding of the divine mysteries.

The Church, the interpreter

What shall we say, then? Here lies the Bible before us, but how can we interpret its meaning into our lives with confidence? Surely God has provided a reliable interpreter. We need an interpreter whose authority is neither merely human (as the scholar’s reason) nor merely divine (as the charismatic’s spirit), but has a foot in both, possessing the same dual nature as our Lord Jesus Himself, who is fully God and fully Man. Where can we find such an interpreter? She stands before us in the One True Church, whose Body is on earth and whose Head is in heaven. It was she that gave us the scriptures by the power vested in her, and it is she who continues to give them to this very day. If she does not interpret for us, there can be no sure interpretation.

The authority to interpret the Bible lies today in the same hands as it did in the 4^th century, those of the Church. We need to repent of our trust in our own minds, which does not bring glory to God, and instead gladly submit to the safety of the authority of the Living Body of Christ which preserves truth. We must accept the holy and catholic Church as the agency through which God has promised to guide our interpretations of scripture and proclaim its truth in power throughout the earth.

How can we trust the Canon?

The assaults of modern skepticism on the foundations of Christianity often levy a question that it is crucial to answer: “How can you be sure that the collection of books now accepted by the Church and no others are holy and divinely inspired, bearing testimony to Jesus’ true original message?” Upon being asked how we can know that the Canon of Scripture is trustworthy, the Catholic will answer, “Tradition,” that is, the scriptures are affirmed as canonical because of their reception by the Church, especially over the first 300 years of Christianity, as ratified by the councils of the 4^th century. The key assumption is that the Church had the authority to sanctify the scriptures they accepted, and the sacredness of the Canon is fully dependent on the Church. However, the Protestant, being wont to bestow such power on Tradition, will admit its function but qualify it by pointing to other factors that can be objectively used to define Canonicity, which they claim were the very factors used by the early church, to the effect that Canonicity has always been primarily attributable to them, and only vicariously to the Church. These alternative bases are most commonly (1) their apostolic origin and (2) their own content, that is, the presence of the Gospel in their text. There may be other bases offered by Protestant scholars, but these options are the only ones I can recall being put forward in my 20 years of Protestant education, and besides, together with Tradition they seem to nearly exhaust the possibilities. Now, I am about to argue that the authority that established the Canon of the Bible cannot be ultimately attributable to either of those things, and must therefore be ultimately attributed to the Tradition of the Church.

Apostolic Origin

Common Protestant reasoning is that the Church accepted the Canon based on the apostolic authority of the authors, whose immediacy to Christ ensured their testimony was the true one he came to bring, and whose authority is manifest in the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles, in which they are seen to receive anointing from Jesus and the Holy Spirit to perpetuate the church. Apostolicity does in fact bear a striking correlation with the acceptance of the books in the Canon (almost all of the Canon can be traced to an apostle or an apostle’s associate). However, we cannot accept that a book that merely asserted apostolic authority was authentic, and neither did the early church. There were gospels allegedly written by apostles and asserting the authority of apostolic authorship—the Gospel of Thomas and the Gospel of Peter, among others—which were deemed to be uncanonical. And furthermore, the apostolic origin of some canonical books was disputed at the time of the Canonization of scripture (and is not certain to this day), including at least Hebrews, 2 Peter, and Jude. It is clear that “apostleship” is not a category that can singlehandedly explain to us the difference between canonical and non-canonical books, and it was not sufficient for the early church either. The question is, therefore, on what basis were some books ruled out, and others ruled in?

The Content of the Writings

The reply to this is that the books were judged to be canonical on the basis of the orthodoxy of their content. One of the bases on which their content may have been judged is sometimes referred to as their “Consistent Message,” that is, whether a book contained a “theological outlook similar to or complementary to other accepted Christian writings” . Certainly a degree of consistency is evident in the canonical books, but it cannot be the standard. For one thing, there are some striking inconsistencies in the messages of the books. For example, Martin Luther railed against the book of James and wanted it cast out of the Canon, calling it an “epistle of straw” because its message was so seemingly incompatible with the drift of the Pauline epistles. No, the Canon is not plainly consistent, but full of “dialectical tension,” the precarious balance of paradoxes and antinomies that must be held together by some other cause. By what means could the early church have placed James alongside Galatians, despite the inconsistencies? To what authority would they appeal? Even if we find a core theme throughout all the books (which we do believe is there, deep down), the argument will not hold up, for all that the skeptic need do is choose a book and ask, “What other books was this book judged to be consistent with?” and trace it back to the first epistles and gospels, which could have been consistent with no others, since none existed. (For emphasis, we can recall that in the early era, the books of the New Testament were circulated and possessed by particular churches quite unevenly and incompletely, so that doctrinal decisions based on textual comparisons would have been extremely difficult.) In the end, saying that the Canon was consistent with itself is like being asked “What is a republican?” and replying, “A republican is someone who believes what other republicans believe.” We need to provide some other basis.

Having stripped away mere “self-consistency” as a valid basis, the claim will be revised to state that the canonical books were not consistent with each other, per se, as much as they were consistent with the central message of Christianity, the Gospel. “The early church recognized the sacredness of certain of the circulated writings because it contained the living spark of the Gospel message that they had received. The gospels of Thomas and Peter, for example, were ultimately ruled out because they promoted Gnosticism and lacked an orthodox Gospel core.” Again, this is undoubtedly true, but let us push it further and ask, “How did the early Church know the Gospel? How were they certain of their central message in the midst of many budding heresies?” The Protestant is tempted to say, “They knew it by the standard of the early apostolic writings,” in other words, by the Canon (Greek kanon, meaning rule or measure) of scripture. But here we have committed the logical fallacy of begging the question: The Church knew the Canon because it was consistent with the Gospel, and they knew the Gospel because it was consistent with the Canon! It’s a loop, which reveals that we have inserted some assumption about what the Gospel is. So, on what basis did the early Church know the Gospel?

The Tradition of the Church

At this point we realize it is necessary to believe that the Church has always known the Gospel, inherently—that she possesses the seed that Christ planted and that nothing has ever removed it. This can be attested by much historical evidence—the unbroken apostolic succession of the Apostolic Fathers and their witness through writing—so that we can assert that there was never an opportunity for heresies to have infiltrated the entire heart of the Church, though many were resisted bitterly and several nearly won. However, this belief is ultimately an article of faith, for if we have any confidence in our faith, we must affirm as a fact that God preserved his Church, protecting her from heresy while she presided over the very pugilistic and divisive process of establishing the Bible and doctrines we now hold. Such a belief is warranted in terms of the Bible as well—Jesus prays for such preservation to his Father, and he promises it to Peter and the disciples. Indeed, there is no certain basis for orthodoxy in the first three centuries of Christianity, except that it was kept alive unceasingly in the bosom of the Church, the living body of believers, who passed the Gospel and the Holy Spirit from one to another. The Canon, which gradually materialized throughout this time, owes its birth to her faith. Therefore, all Christians who affirm the inspiration of scripture as we now possess it today must affirm that the institution of the Church was the faithful and authoritative judge and interpreter of the Gospel, at least through the 4^th century.

Which book have you read more than any other and why?

This was the starter question at our staff meeting yesterday, and since I have read the Bible more than any other and that is a bit of a religious limb to go out on in a staff meeting, I had to think about my reply. Here’s how I answered the “why”:

I love stories, but the saddest thing about a story is when you put down the book or turn off the TV and realize that that’s not your life. In the Bible I find an epic narrative of the real struggles and history of ancient peoples, of which I feel I am actually a part and continuation. I find beautiful poetry and prophecy that is, in some real sense, about me. I read the Bible more than any other book because I live for story, and the Bible is to me the story of all stories, in whose pages I find myself told.

On the parable of the talents (Mt 25)

“The possessions of the negligent belong of right to those who will endure toil and danger.” (Demosthenes)

Increase is the fruit of labor, and labor is the fruit of loyalty, and loyalty is the fruit of belief in the kindness of God.

Whoever works will have increase, for work, though it involves risk, by nature eventually produces increase. The faithful servant is not he who has the best fortune in his investments, but who has faithfully worked at them. And in the long run, the investments will always fair the best which have been labored over the most.

If one loves and trusts God, one will labor for him. He will loyally employ the treasures and powers he has been entrusted, for to love is to show love by action. Consider three men: the overseer who is set in charge of a town, the son who is put in charge of a flock, and the tenant who is given a house and grounds. Each is loyal and faithful if he does what is needful—to keep order in the town and see to its maintenance and development, to keep the flocks and let them calf, to maintain the house and grounds. If each lets what is under his charge just “be”, and the master comes to find the town full of unrest, having a negligent overseer, or the flock picked by wolves and diminished, having a negligent shepherd, or the house rotting and overgrown, having a negligent landlord, then who will the lazy servant fool when he makes obeisance? Even if the town is quiet, and the flock of the same number of sheep, and the house unweathered, the servant will be guilty of neglecting the natural potential with which he was entrusted. “What have you done these many years?” the master will ask, and the servant will have no answer but that he pandered about in his own whiles, acting as if he had not been entrusted with anything of value, and that his master’s business was none of his. It is the natural lot of man to labor, to draw the kinetic out of the potential. The man knew, as he betrays by his burbling excuses, that to neglect the potential, to merely sit, was disloyal. Rightly will the master say, “You should have at least put the money in the bank,” or “You should have at least appointed someone else the deputy” so that through natural maintenance, natural increase could have afforded. He has wasted his master’s resources by not caring for them, and by doing so has spoken beyond all his excuses that he does not care for his master either.

What caused this seed of disloyalty and defiant negligence? It had something to do with how the wicked servant saw his master. This is evident from what he says when the master returns: “Master, I knew you to be a hard man, reaping where you did not sow, and gathering where you scattered no seed, and I was afraid and hid your money in the ground.” What does he mean? Jamieson, Fausett, and Brown write, “’The sense is obvious: ‘I knew thou wast one whom it was impossible to serve, one whom nothing would please: exacting what was impracticable, and dissatisfied with what was attainable.’” Gill says that the servant sees his master as “either a covetous man, that is desirous of that which does not belong to him; or an hard master that requires work to be done, and gives neither tools nor matter to work with; like the Egyptian task masters, who demanded the full tale of bricks, but gave no straw.” Benson paraphrases, “And I was afraid — To risk thy money in trade, lest by some accident or other it should be lost, or miscarry under my management, and thou shouldst show me no mercy. Or rather, Lest, if I had improved my talent, I should have had more to answer for.” He is afraid of failure since he sees the master as harsh, and he is resentful of success since he sees his master as selfish and exacting, likely to unfairly repossess any fruits of his labor. As Ellicott says, this belief about his master poisons his ability to faithfully serve him. “[The servant] had never seen in his master either generous love or justice in rewarding,” but saw him as “arbitrary, vindictive, pitiless…and that thought, as it kills love, so it paralyses the energy which depends on love.”

Jesus tells his story on the premise that faith without works is dead; loyalty without investment is not. This is not an ultimatum, a threat, or a command to go work for God; it is simply a fact of life, which we all know if we search our hearts. It is hard not to get caught up in the “faith, or works?” debate, but we all know deep down that they are a unified whole. It is tempting to read this story, or contemplate this fact, and jump to the thought, “I had better go hustle or I’ll be like the wicked servant.” But faithfulness doesn’t start with the act of obedience. It ends up there, yes, but it starts in the heart. The servants’ beliefs cause their fates: the wicked servant’s belief that the master was harsh and unjust made him unwilling to risk his talents, resulting in disloyal sloth, whereas the faithful servants’ belief in the fair and forgiving character of the master frees them to risk the money in trade, resulting in returns, the fruit of labor and evidence of faithfulness.

Before I ask myself, “What am I doing for God?” I ought to ask myself, “How do I feel toward God? How do I believe he feels toward me? Do I trust him? Do I love him like David’s men loved him, loyal to the last?” Out of the confidence that our master is not harsh, but generous in love and faithful in rewarding, and out of a longing for his return, then we feel the surging of potential, the great wide-open life before us, full of beauty, full of people, of adventure to be lived and sacrifice to be made. We feel the deep abiding joy of God that is always beckoning us out of ourselves into the world and others, and we cannot help but go and trade.

What I believe about the Bible

(These statements are where I’m at right now and are, as are my beliefs, “works in progress” by the grace of God.)

I believe that God has revealed himself to man through the scriptures and through the Church his living body.

I believe that the scriptures contain the true testimony of God’s revelation to man, as God saw fit to preserve it through his prophets and the faithful scribes of Israel, and the true testimony of God’s ultimate revelation in the person of Jesus Christ, as God saw fit to preserve it through the apostles’ writings and teachings.

I believe that that God presided over and orchestrated the writing of the scriptures, and that he has preserved them to the present day, such that they accurately and clearly contain all the divine truth which he intended to convey to them. Thus God can be said to be the author of the scriptures, and thus they are sacred, and their contents are of inestimable power and worth.

I believe that the words of the Bible as we possess today in the oldest manuscripts may not preserve the original messages of the authors precisely, literally, and completely, yet that this would be unnecessary according to God’s intentions.

I believe that what can be said to be the revelation of God is not only direct linguistic revelation, but includes other forms, including indirect inspiration (as in the case of the biblical historians, perhaps) and, chiefly, the living human form of Jesus, the Word. Therefore, the Bible can be said to be the Word of God, but in a vicarious sense, since it is the holy vessel of the Word.

I believe that God has made his body, the Church, the steward of his revelation and the house of his Holy Spirit, and as such has given her the power and responsibility to preserve and propagate his great good news, to explain the scriptures, and to interpret the living and active Word into the present moment. (After all, the New Testament scriptures grew out of and were solidified by the Church.)

What is the purpose of man?

You have heard that it was said in the Westminster Catechism, “What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” But I say to you that the purpose of man is for God to love him. Since God is love, we may more simply say that the purpose of man is, God. Our purpose is not really to do something for God, as if he wanted something from us, as if there is some ulterior motive, or result to which we are a means. The truest way to express why God made man is not to say that he made us to worship him, or glorify him, or even (though it is close) to enjoy him. Perhaps the problem is in our utilitarian concept of our purpose. Maybe it’s better to put it this way: We are for God—like a gift. Within the trinity we are gifts, from him and to him, an overflow of his love. Within the abounding excess of the fullness of the love of God, there is no need, no purpose or use as we are prone to think of it. You can no more say that “The purpose of man is…” than you can say, “The purpose of waterfalls is…” Like the lover and the beloved, he is for us, and we are for him. Indeed, even in the physical world, it is out of this great inulterior purpose—love—that life springs. Ask any two parents who are trying to have children what purpose they intend for their children and you will find at the heart of their answer that they simply want to have children so they can love them and let them experience life, as if life itself, despite its pain, is some great act of love—which is exactly what it is.

Priestesses in the Church? Yes, Mr. Lewis, and bishops too!

This essay entitled “Priestesses in the Church?” by C.S. Lewis really floored me when I first read it a few years ago, so much that, of the essays in God in the Docks, perhaps it was the most memorable. It is particularly relevant today. Libby Lane was ordained today as the first female bishop of the Church of England. I imagine that Lewis would be quite disappointed, although perhaps not surprised, that the ordination of priestesses which he called in his day “unlikely to be seriously considered by the authorities” has not only been considered, but effected, and not only for priestesses, but now for bishops. This trend toward the ordination of women is pervasive in may denominations including the United Methodist, Episcopal, and (even prior to this date) greater Anglican traditions. In fact it is even encouraged among the Brethren in Christ, a brethren or holiness denomination based in Pennsylvania of which my wife’s family are committed members.

Googling the essay produces a very sad assortment of blog rebuttals of the essay which do not understand Lewis’ points and really make fools of themselves blabbering on at straw men. Therefore, although you should really just read the essay itself, I will try to do him some brief justice here. Lewis’ argument could be syllogized this way:

Major Premise: A key role of a priest is to represent God to man.
Minor Premise: God has revealed himself to mankind as masculine.
Conclusion: Therefore, a priest must represent God masculinely.
Second Major Premise: a person’s gender is part of their spirituality, it is a “living and semitive figure which God has painted on the canvas of our nature”.
Second Minor Premise: Men are masculine.
Conclusion: Therefore, a man must represent God to mankind.

I find that the only point that one can bail on this train of logic is at the very beginning–one must deny the mystical, representative nature of the sacerdotal office. Protestant denominations that do so, incidentally may have more of an excuse to allow women as “pastors” but this represents a deficiency in their whole Christian system. The fact that they may allow women to fulfill their version of the priestly office reveals that they have no priestly office at all. And I would submit that churches whose leaders merely educate and administrate and visit the sick are missing something of what Christianity truly is. But that is another issue. For churches who acknowledge the mystical role of the priest in the sacramental economy, and who hold the view that the Bible’s consistently masculine imagery for God was not an oversight on his part (R.I.P., TNIV translators), the ordination of female priests and bishops is a perversion of Christianity in the name of that great insidious god of our times, common sense.

Conversation with a colleague continued (peasants and ghosts part 2)

After the previous letter, I received a great response, to which I wrote this additional, long letter. You’ll find, again, that I am on a Chesterton kick. This time I quoted him in my original letter!

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You asked, “First, supposing the farmer actually did see things he firmly believed were real and tangible but seemed outrageous to others, would this be evidence of an omnipotent omniscient being? If the vision were personal evidence of an omnipotent omniscient being, how would one then come to a conclusion that seeing this particular vision justifies that their vision stumps the previous, differing visions of everyone on earth (i.e. Buddhists visioning turtles as messengers of goodness and Shintoists having visions of Monkeys)?”

My story began with “Imagine for a moment that there once was a farmer who was contacted telepathically by aliens.” I’m basically saying “assume for the purposes of argument that an omniscient being did exist.” And furthermore, I am assuming that the revelation that this person received seemed to them to be entirely real. It’s not a question of whether someone seeing a vision is evidence to the whole world that his vision is true, and that everyone should take this evidence seriously. Of course not. What I am saying is simply this: if someone unequivocally rejects the man’s claim up front, he does so because it is not compatible with his world view—it’s nonsense because, to borrow from Oz, he doesn’t “believe in spooks.” We all assimilate new data into our paradigm of the world. He who believes in aliens might see an alien, but he who does not can only see a mirage. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, if he sees the ghost of Marley he will accuse it of being “a bit of bad cheese” or “a bad potato” that he ate. See what I mean? That’s why I’m interested in dialoging primarily about whether there is a God and what he is like, because that’s the wellspring.

You asked: “Would not knowing the causation of a disorder be a reason to pose a hypothesis that an omnipotent omniscient being was the cause of it?”

The question is, rather, would not knowing the causation of an experience be a reason to pose a hypothesis that a disorder was the cause of it? (The answer: not without ye old presupposition.)

You asked: “If an omnipotent omniscient being existed, how could people know for sure that the one they believe in is not one of the other thousands of false ones, and how do they know that this being expects certain behaviors of them?”

Well, you can never know for sure. There must be a leap of faith. But it should be a reasonable leap, with a running start of facts. The best worldview is the one that explains the human experience the best.

And yes, there are plenty of false deities, but that fact in itself does not make it less likely that any one is true, but rather more likely that at least one of them is true. You won’t find a Walmart knock-off purse in an African market, but you will find plenty of Gucci knock-offs. The more genuine the article, the more imitations will be made.

As for knowing that this being expects certain behaviors of mankind, that would be quite possible assuming this being existed as a real entity and communicated with us. If he/it exists and can communicate, then he can certainly communicate what he wants.

You asked, “Finally, could we both agree that it is much more plausible that a farmer might have seen a great number of deer on a hill because there is evidence that deer exist and could have been seen by all present at the siting rather than a vision of the unexplained?”

Of course it might have been deer that he saw. The question is rather whether it might have been an alien. The townsfolk would rightly question the farmer in terms of plausibility. “What did it look like?” “Where was it?” “Were you drinking?” “Was it maybe just a deer?” But the man would insist that he was in his right mind and it was no deer. So the townsfolk would be forced to conclude one of two things: If they believed it was plausible for the man to have seen an alien, then they would conclude that he might have seen an alien, or his eyes might have deceived him. If, however, they believe it is not plausible (believable, possible, etc.) that he saw an alien, then it must have been deer. In this case they would have to conclude that he was crazy, seeing things, afflicted with SPD. And this conclusion See? The materialist position ambitiously requires an absolute knowledge of everything that exists in the universe, because only then could we say, “No, aliens do not exist anywhere in the universe.” In my opinion the agnostic position, the might, is the much easier one to believe. “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Hamlet).

Okay, having spoken to those questions, I would like to move to the last section of what you wrote. Thank you for your honesty in saying that you disbelieve in an omniscient being. You say that it is unfortunate because it makes your life less ordered and easy to explain. But I don’t believe you mean that, and I wouldn’t mean it either, because this is the thing about us: we would rather follow what is true than what is convenient. We are no sheep. It’s like in The Matrix, when that one guy sells out the rebels in exchange for having his memory erased and being put back in the Matrix on an island with tons of money and stuff. He is a villain because he traded what was true (the war-torn, sad world) for what was comfortable. I respect you for having the guts not to do that. If I do believe that your belief is unfortunate, it is because I believe it to be lacking both real comfort and real truth.

You mentioned some things that led you away from believing that there was a God, and I would love to hear your thoughts on any of those in detail in the future.

The last thing that I would like to say is in reply to your final paragraph, that you do not deal with religion anymore because it is divisive, and instead you try to unite people against the US government and the Religion of the State, which is even more dangerous. I totally agree that there are things that the US does that are very wrong so for the sake of argument I’ll say, “Yeah, the US is a corrupt oligarchical state.” However, I believe that true faithfulness to your belief in political freedom from oppression requires an even more radical position. If you would do me the liberty of reading this admittedly huge chunk of G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy (the book I brought in the other night) as if it were my own words, I would be grateful. He says exactly what I’m trying to say in much better words. I have added a couple editorials in [brackets] and bolded them and some other sentences. Also pardon some archaic historical references and slightly different meaning of some terms—it was published in 1908.

We have remarked that one reason offered for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow better. But the only real reason for being a progressive is that things naturally tend to grow worse. The corruption in things is not only the best argument for being progressive; it is also the only argument against being conservative. The conservative theory would really be quite sweeping and unanswerable if it were not for this one fact. But all conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. If you leave a white post alone it will soon be a black post. If you particularly want it to be white you must be always painting it again; that is, you must be always having a revolution. Briefly, if you want the old white post you must have a new white post. But this which is true even of inanimate things is in a quite special and terrible sense true of all human things. An almost unnatural vigilance is really required of the citizen because of the horrible rapidity with which human institutions grow old. It is the custom in passing romance and journalism to talk of men suffering under old tyrannies. But, as a fact, men have almost always suffered under new tyrannies; under tyrannies that had been public liberties hardly twenty years before. Thus England went mad with joy over the patriotic monarchy of Elizabeth; and then (almost immediately afterwards) went mad with rage in the trap of the tyranny of Charles the First. So, again, in France the monarchy became intolerable, not just after it had been tolerated, but just after it had been adored. The son of Louis the well-beloved was Louis the guillotined. So in the same way in England in the nineteenth century the Radical manufacturer was entirely trusted as a mere tribune of the people, until suddenly we heard the cry of the Socialist that he was a tyrant eating the people like bread. So again, we have almost up to the last instant trusted the newspapers as organs of public opinion. Just recently some of us have seen (not slowly, but with a start) that they are obviously nothing of the kind. They are, by the nature of the case, the hobbies of a few rich men. We have not any need to rebel against antiquity; we have to rebel against novelty. It is the new rulers, the capitalist or the editor, who really hold up the modern world. There is no fear that a modern king will attempt to override the constitution; it is more likely that he will ignore the constitution and work behind its back; he will take no advantage of his kingly power; it is more likely that he will take advantage of his kingly powerlessness, of the fact that he is free from criticism and publicity. For the king is the most private person of our time. It will not be necessary for any one to fight again against the proposal of a censorship of the press. We do not need a censorship of the press. We have a censorship by the press. [I think you’d agree with that!]

This startling swiftness with which popular systems turn oppressive is the third fact for which we shall ask our perfect theory of progress to allow. It must always be on the look out for every privilege being abused, for every working right becoming a wrong. In this matter I am entirely on the side of the revolutionists. They are really right to be always suspecting human institutions; they are right not to put their trust in princes nor in any child of man. The chieftain chosen to be the friend of the people becomes the enemy of the people; the newspaper started to tell the truth now exists to prevent the truth being told. Here, I say, I felt that I was really at last on the side of the revolutionary. And then I caught my breath again: for I remembered that I was once again on the side of the orthodox.

Christianity spoke again and said: “I have always maintained that men were naturally backsliders; that human virtue tended of its own nature to rust or to rot; I have always said that human beings as such go wrong, especially happy human beings, especially proud and prosperous human beings. This eternal revolution, this suspicion sustained through centuries, you (being a vague modern) call the doctrine of progress. If you were a philosopher you would call it, as I do, the doctrine of original sin. You may call it the cosmic advance as much as you like; I call it what it is—the Fall.”

I have spoken of orthodoxy coming in like a sword; here I confess it came in like a battle-axe. For really (when I came to think of it) Christianity is the only thing left that has any real right to question the power of the well-nurtured or the well-bred. I have listened often enough to Socialists, or even to democrats, saying that the physical conditions of the poor must of necessity make them mentally and morally degraded. I have listened to scientific men (and there are still scientific men not opposed to democracy) saying that if we give the poor healthier conditions vice and wrong will disappear. I have listened to them with a horrible attention, with a hideous fascination. For it was like watching a man energetically sawing from the tree the branch he is sitting on. If these happy democrats could prove their case, they would strike democracy dead. If the poor are thus utterly demoralized, it may or may not be practical to raise them. But it is certainly quite practical to disfranchise them. If the man with a bad bedroom cannot give a good vote, then the first and swiftest deduction is that he shall give no vote. The governing class may not unreasonably say: “It may take us some time to reform his bedroom. But if he is the brute you say, it will take him very little time to ruin our country. Therefore we will take your hint and not give him the chance.” It fills me with horrible amusement to observe the way in which the earnest Socialist industriously lays the foundation of all aristocracy, expatiating blandly upon the evident unfitness of the poor to rule. It is like listening to somebody at an evening party apologising for entering without evening dress, and explaining that he had recently been intoxicated, had a personal habit of taking off his clothes in the street, and had, moreover, only just changed from prison uniform. At any moment, one feels, the host might say that really, if it was as bad as that, he need not come in at all. So it is when the ordinary Socialist, with a beaming face, proves that the poor, after their smashing experiences, cannot be really trustworthy. At any moment the rich may say, “Very well, then, we won’t trust them,” and bang the door in his face. On the basis of Mr. Blatchford’s view of heredity and environment, the case for the aristocracy is quite overwhelming. If clean homes and clean air make clean souls, why not give the power (for the present at any rate) to those who undoubtedly have the clean air? If better conditions will make the poor more fit to govern themselves, why should not better conditions already make the rich [substitute: educated] more fit to govern them? On the ordinary environment argument the matter is fairly manifest. The comfortable class must be merely our vanguard in Utopia.

Is there any answer to the proposition that those who have had the best opportunities will probably be our best guides? Is there any answer to the argument that those who have breathed clean air had better decide for those who have breathed foul? As far as I know, there is only one answer, and that answer is Christianity. Only the Christian Church can offer any rational objection to a complete confidence in the rich. For she has maintained from the beginning that the danger was not in man’s environment, but in man. Further, she has maintained that if we come to talk of a dangerous environment, the most dangerous environment of all is the commodious environment. I know that the most modern manufacture has been really occupied in trying to produce an abnormally large needle. I know that the most recent biologists have been chiefly anxious to discover a very small camel. But if we diminish the camel to his smallest, or open the eye of the needle to its largest—if, in short, we assume the words of Christ to have meant the very least that they could mean, His words must at the very least mean this— that rich [substitute: educated] men are not very likely to be morally trustworthy. Christianity even when watered down is hot enough to boil all modern society to rags. The mere minimum of the Church would be a deadly ultimatum to the world. For the whole modern world is absolutely based on the assumption, not that the rich are necessary (which is tenable), but that the rich [substitute: educated] are trustworthy, which (for a Christian) is not tenable. You will hear everlastingly, in all discussions about newspapers, companies, aristocracies, or party politics, this argument that the rich man cannot be bribed. The fact is, of course, that the rich [substitute: educated] man is bribed; he has been bribed already. That is why he is a rich man. The whole case for Christianity is that a man who is dependent upon the luxuries of this life is a corrupt man, spiritually corrupt, politically corrupt, financially corrupt. There is one thing that Christ and all the Christian saints have said with a sort of savage monotony. They have said simply that to be rich [substitute: educated] is to be in peculiar danger of moral wreck. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to kill the rich as violators of definable justice. It is not demonstrably un-Christian to crown the rich as convenient rulers of society. It is not certainly un-Christian to rebel against the rich or to submit to the rich. But it is quite certainly un-Christian to trust the rich, to regard the rich as more morally safe than the poor. A Christian may consistently say, “I respect that man’s rank, although he takes bribes.” But a Christian cannot say, as all modern men are saying at lunch and breakfast, “a man of that rank would not take bribes.” For it is a part of Christian dogma that any man in any rank may take bribes. It is a part of Christian dogma; it also happens by a curious coincidence that it is a part of obvious human history. When people say that a man “in that position” would be incorruptible, there is no need to bring Christianity into the discussion. Was Lord Bacon a bootblack? Was the Duke of Marlborough a crossing sweeper? In the best Utopia, I must be prepared for the moral fall of any man in any position at any moment; especially for my fall from my position at this moment.

Do you see what Chesterton and I are getting at? If we are to be really honest about oppression, we must admit that it follows mankind like a shadow—because we ourselves cast it. We have to embrace the real solidarity of the human race: The paradoxically mixed good and evil of human nature. We are all half perpetrator and half victim. None of us is fit to rule. It’s not the USA, or THOSE RICH GUYS, it’s ALL OF US. By itself this would lead to a useless despair—“We’ll never get free!” or as Chuck said, “Might as well be the US because someone else will oppress us if they don’t.”

But Christianity does not leave us there. It does not write off the problem, or tune it out, it amplifies it—“oppression is ubiquitous”—but then it introduces a hope into the equation which is bigger than any country or league of countries. It gives us a remedy for human nature, and a trustworthy king, trustworthy because he is not merely human. And it allows us to relocate our hope from earthly kingdoms to the kingdom of God. It promises that justice will be served and all the powerful oppressors humbled one day. And it gives us the courage to fight to bring that kingdom, full of social justice and peace, to reality on the earth even now. Christianity ushers in the liberation of the human soul from his own bonds of oppression of himself and others. This ultimate liberation—the kind you are looking for—is only found in the rule of the rightful king. I know you don’t believe the Bible but permit me to quote a poetic vision from Psalm 99 about as I close:

The strength of the King loves justice;

You have established equity;

You have executed justice and righteousness in Jacob.

I hope that this has made some sense—it’s big stuff for me too, strong in my head but hard to catch and stuff into words. I’m eager to hear your thoughts and replies and I promise I will read anything even as long as this was J.

Your fellow yearning earthling,

Ben

Can we believe the peasant who saw a ghost

The following is a letter I wrote to a colleague after a conversation we had in which he implied that those who have miraculous/supernatural religious experiences are basically deluded. Although I hesitate to juxtapose such a great mind with my own, I have included after it G.K. Chesterton saying precisely what I was getting at, with much more style and erudition. The passage is taken from Orthodoxy.

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OCD or schizotypalism is, as I understand from you, a psychological condition. You implied that people who suffer from this condition are essentially misaligned with reality, either through paranoia, such as washing excessively (which indicates irrational beliefs about hygiene), or through schizophrenic behaviors such as “hearing voices” (which indicates an instability of the mind). If “misaligned with reality” is not a decently accurate general description of what you were referring to, I suppose I was quite confused and missed what you were trying to say. But assuming I got the general idea, I proceed.

You also said that something akin to this condition tends to produce both lunatics and the founders of religious movements, the difference between the two being less the nature of their condition and more the chance suitability of their behaviors in that particular time and place. To extend the metaphor, if the voices come upon you at the right time or in the right way, you will be lifted onto people’s shoulders as a prophet, but if at the wrong time or in the wrong way, you will be burned at the stake as a witch.

Obviously to have founders of religions who are misaligned with reality would lead us to the conclusion that those religions are misaligned with reality, and this would not be desirable no matter how successful the religion. In fact, the more successful, the more heinous. If Mohammed was hallucinating the Qur’an, then Islam is not a good thing. But I want to talk about an assumption that is evident in your argument.
Imagine for a moment that there once was a farmer who was contacted telepathically by aliens one night. Astounded, he ran into the bar downtown the next day and announced, “I was contacted by aliens last night!” However, at that very moment, the town lunatic, a disturbed drunkard, burst through the doors and said, “I saw ‘em too! I saw aliens last night!” Then, a man turned to the farmer and said, “Get out of here with all that talk of aliens, Sam. We all know that if that lunatic says he saw ‘em, then they ain’t there.”

The man’s reply would be entirely nonsensical if he meant, “Anything the lunatic claims to exist doesn’t exist,” because the lunatic, no doubt, might possibly make claims about having seen real entities, such as “I saw ‘bout fifty o’ ‘em deer up ‘er younder jus’ yesteeday.” – but the deer will not cease to have existed because of his statement. No, it is much more likely that the man’s intention in saying that is, “You are in bed with the lunatics on this one, Sam, because there’s no such thing as aliens.” He says this because he has a presupposition that aliens don’t exist.

You say that religious founders are often misaligned with reality and point to the similarity to people who are out of touch with reality. But something that a person falsely claims to have seen is not necessarily false. The dictionary calls a hallucination “a sensory experience of something that does not exist outside the mind”—but if it does exist outside of the mind, then that person is not hallucinating, he is actually sensing. Therefore, “hearing voices” does not prove that you are misaligned with reality unless you combine it with the presupposition that voices don’t exist. If voices do exist, then, even if 99% of people who have claimed to have heard them are nuts, it is possible that some people have heard them sanely.

I personally believe that some people (actually all of us, but some in particular) have experienced the supernatural God—experiences that are real, while inexplicable to psychology and neurology. (I mean that, while there might be correlations between brain activity and the experiences, that the brain activity or any sum of environmental stimuli do not constitute the causation of the experience.) How to tell these experiences apart from the crazies is another discussion. But if one rules out the existence of the supernatural, like the man in the bar, it’s therefore pointless to go looking for crop circles with the farmer or interview him to determine the plausibility of his experience—he is wrong merely for having made his claim.

So that’s it, I wanted to draw out the fact that the stuff you were talking about last night is built on the presupposition, “There is no God” and ask, would you agree that you hold this presupposition? If so, I would like to kind of “go deeper” with that and engage on that if you want.

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IN G.K. CHESTERTON’S WORDS

My belief that miracles have happened in human history is not a mystical belief at all; I believe in them upon human evidences as I do in the discovery of America. Upon this point there is a simple logical fact that only requires to be stated and cleared up. Somehow or other an extraordinary idea has arisen that the disbelievers in miracles consider them coldly and fairly, while believers in miracles accept them only in connection with some dogma. The fact is quite the other way. The believers in miracles accept them (rightly or wrongly) because they have evidence for them. The disbelievers in miracles deny them (rightly or wrongly) because they have a doctrine against them. The open, obvious, democratic thing is to believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a miracle, just as you believe an old apple-woman when she bears testimony to a murder. The plain, popular course is to trust the peasant’s word about the ghost exactly as far as you trust the peasant’s word about the landlord. Being a peasant he will probably have a great deal of healthy agnosticism about both. Still you could fill the British Museum with evidence uttered by the peasant, and given in favour of the ghost. If it comes to human testimony there is a choking cataract of human testimony in favour of the supernatural. If you reject it, you can only mean one of two things. You reject the peasant’s story about the ghost either because the man is a peasant or because the story is a ghost story. That is, you either deny the main principle of democracy, or you affirm the main principle of materialism— the abstract impossibility of miracle. You have a perfect right to do so; but in that case you are the dogmatist. It is we Christians who accept all actual evidence—it is you rationalists who refuse actual evidence being constrained to do so by your creed. But I am not constrained by any creed in the matter, and looking impartially into certain miracles of mediaeval and modern times, I have come to the conclusion that they occurred. All argument against these plain facts is always argument in a circle. If I say, “Mediaeval documents attest certain miracles as much as they attest certain battles,” they answer, “But mediaevals were superstitious”; if I want to know in what they were superstitious, the only ultimate answer is that they believed in the miracles. If I say “a peasant saw a ghost,” I am told, “But peasants are so credulous.” If I ask, “Why credulous?” the only answer is—that they see ghosts. Iceland is impossible because only stupid sailors have seen it; and the sailors are only stupid because they say they have seen Iceland.