Monthly Archives: December 2013

politics

egalitarianism

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How often has it been in history, when war is caused by disrespect. An important person in my life has just come to the conclusion that their error with respect to me has been disrespect. But I fear we shall fall again into the maelstrom of conflict. We hold fundamentally different views of authority. I, no big surprise, hold no human authority above myself, though I do what government requires of a citizen, and when appropriate obey the powers above me. But that doesn’t mean that I hold their authority with any more reverence than my own reason, or autonomy. My view and sense of egalitarianism doesn’t rob from the appropriate powers, their right to exact whatever tribute the social contract requires. I am not so stupid as to suggest that authority should be challenged in every situation. Authority has its place, and I give it plenty of room. I count it the wisdom of Christ to allow the authorities to exact their proper payment without any rebellion. This is the agreement of the social contract. The state and whatever body represents them need funds to pay police, pay for schools, etc. to make sure the overall movement of any society I could possibly support is supported by me. There are, of course, errors, but that is to be expected in any human authority. Recourse to political means are always available, since they are not sending people to jail for disagreeing with them, and don’t happily prosecute the public will, at least not without a great deal of blowback that leads eventually to some change.

Egalitarianism, not only an Age of Reason and Enlightenment virtue but that of some ancients and moderns, continually plies its trade against the assumption that law is to be obeyed irrespective of the justness of that law. There is no ostensible recourse for one whose belief systems go against the common political stream. This pressure can be either de facto or de jure, reflecting either the status quo or the legal precedent, but setting oneself against the stream has consequences.

Egalitarian politics strives against these pressures. No one has the authority given by God to exercise law of any kind against another just because they disagree with the status quo. Neither, on a more personal level, does one person have a right to judge another unworthy for their failure to conform, and attempt to exact justice for that failure.

Libertarianism informs the issue here. One can’t impinge on another’s rights without recourse. This assumes some form of natural law and some form of the social contract that doesn’t raise itself to the level of government. In other words, we can’t expect that being unfair to others should go unnoticed, or that we shouldn’t respond to it. We need to keep a sense of fairness that doesn’t cross the borders of decency expecting no response from the golden rule. The golden rule stands as the rule of fairness that exacts from us the necessity of judging our behavior in terms of how we would like to be treated. As a general principle it is the foundation of all egalitarian principles, and the denial of any sense of either divine right against a person, or legal authority that oversteps the bounds of reason.

Let me take you to a conflict that has recently been absolved. A person whom I am forced to interact with daily has under the pressure of my continued censure decided that they have been disrespectful of me and so decided that I should be resisted with all force. We had become desperate for the anger I felt and expressed, and for the futility of the situation that didn’t seem to be resolving.

They decided that the only way to resolve this was to play the authority card, and the anger had escalated to the point of verbal violence. I disrespected that authority, well, on top of disrespecting authority in general as a method of resolving issues, and so had become part of that violence as a matter of resistance. I had the high card, in egalitarian reason, and so was ready to let it play out in my favor. They also decided that since they had authority in their favor, they would let it play out. But they were losing, both reason and common decency, and I was losing my mind waiting for understanding to have its day.

They resolved that they had disrespected me and that that was the problem. Yes, I agree, but they played the authority card by giving it to me. I resisted that authority, claiming that in Christ we are all on the same ground, and that we should treat each other with the respect due to ordinary human beings.

I don’t know whether they have taken this hint, but the effort they made to apologize for not respecting me has brought peace. I will make every effort to respect their move and keep peace. But I have to resist their solution of me becoming the authority. That would be a joke. Who am I to exercise authority over an equal? What a complete waste of effort. I don’t have enough brain power to run my life and theirs as well.

Our interaction will have to be played out on an egalitarian field. I am no more capable of being in charge of another adult than I am of being in charge of my own life. My own life I give over to the love of God, not so much as an authority, but as the beneficent Creator. I do not deny his authority as creator, but sense that authority is not the mode of his communication to us in Jesus Christ. He makes the offer of life, and we either take it or not. I say yes to this offer, try to understand what would be pleasing to God and make my decisions on that basis. But this is not a basis of law. What I can live with is that God offers the way for us, and that we either choose to take it or not in any case. If this is the true God, then taking his advice and rule is the route to truth. If this is not the true God then the advice becomes one more voice in the light of reason that has to be taken into consideration.

Globally, the voice of God has to be tested against other voices, and this is not a zero-sum game. If God is God, then there is no real competition for the position. The challenge that Thomas Hobbes delivers to us is that we must govern ourselves as obedient to a ruling authority and that the state will function as the salvation of people in the political enterprise. But if the state of nature is, instead of the constant war that Hobbes observes, but rather, a state of cooperation as some of his more optimistic contemporaries envisioned, then the authority card has lost its usefulness if it ever really had it.

I argue, especially with this significant other, that we are all created equal, as the Declaration of Independence suggests, and that we are all responsible to God for carrying playing that out. There is no essential requirement to submit to authority, nor to try to figure out where in any authority scheme we fit, but that we are all responsible to God for how we make this work out. Otherwise, we are stuck with the terrible prospect of determinism that requires that we find our place in the scheme of things and play out our part in terms of a script that is already written. Oh my God, how could you have let this happen? 😉

genesis 1-11, interpretation, philosophy, theology

will the real adam and eve please stand up?

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Adam, Eve, and the Gospel

by Richard Davis, and Paul Franks

Here is the link to the original article in Enrichment, a journal for ministers in the Assemblies of God.

Here are a few notes about “Adam, Eve and the Gospel” and a few assumptions where it falters. One can happily deny the “literal” existence of Adam and Eve, without denying the actual existence of Adam and Eve, just as one can deny, like Augustine did, that the creation story is literal without denying that God created the universe and everything in it according to Genesis one and two.

If the essay above is meant to offer some comfort to those who believe in a literal Adam and Eve, we first have to ask what “literal” means with a bit more precision. I’m not going to do that here but note that when we use the word “literally,” we most often use it metaphorically. See this article in The Economist from November, 2013. I quote, “…if ‘tree’ and ‘rock’ aren’t metaphors, nearly everything else in our vocabulary seems to be.” When we talk of a literal Adam and Eve we mean the people “The Book” says, who are probably not a whole lot like the real people we imagine they are. Literarily, they serve a function that is contested among different groups, and the authority card seems especially inappropriate here.

Now before going down that rabbit hole, of what the “real” Adam and Eve were like, I would like to note a logical gaff that leapt out to me immediately. In the sixth paragraph, “Although not specifically named, anyone with a passing familiarity of the Creation story knows whom Jesus is talking about [in Mark 10:2-9]. The ‘them’ are Adam and Eve (Genesis 1.27).” I would like to give Davis and Franks a pass here, but is that really true? They are the ones making claims to being literal, yet don’t they realize the possibilities of that little statement of Christ? Easily, and most generally, the statement could refer to the first of our kind, but was Christ referring to Adam and Eve? That is a leap of faith, an interpretation, not a literal reading of the Scriptures. Christ was obviously referring to those of our race for whom marriage was based on fidelity. But are those people necessarily Adam and Eve? If as the Scripture allows, Jesus wasn’t speaking specifically about Adam and Eve, then the quandary Davis and Franks cook up disappears.

Davis and Franks then take us to the logic of the “Fall,” a fall, by the way which isn’t a literal reading of the Scripture because the Scripture nowhere states there is a fall. The Fall is, like the Trinity, a second-order theological object. The Trinity has a good history, and solid corroboration in the Scriptures, but the Fall is an object imposed on the Scriptures because of the concept of causation. First let’s look at the passage Davis and Franks give us, then at the problem of causation. They give us Romans 5:12, usually the go-to passage for those who wish to pronounce the blame on Adam. But logically it breaks down differently.

The passage is a conclusion to a previous argument that we’re not going to trace: “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men because all sinned—“ ESV. Davis and Franks build the case through this scripture that Adam is the cause for our sin. But they stray in order to make the case for this. The translations are fairly literal, and all revolve around two clauses. The first clause, “sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin” states that Adam was the first. Okay, fine. The second clause contradicts Davis and Franks by stating that “so death spread to all men because all sinned.” Rewrite that in better English, and it becomes “so, because all sinned, death spread to all men.” The causal link is broken between Adam’s sin and ours in the very passage Davis and Franks wish to use to prove that there is a causal link. Adam is the first, and when Paul follows in verse 14a with “Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam.” If the transgression was not like that of Adam, did they cook it up on their own? There seems to be a disconnect that prevents any causal link. Adam was first in sin, while Christ is first in redemption. That is the context of the passage in Romans 5. The problem is with defining why we sin.

Paul does make a causal argument in 5:15, and that seems to contradict my conclusion above. But, let’s keep both these suppositions in our mind at once and try to see what comes of it. If we are literalists, we need to read 5:12 through 5:15, but that does damage to 5:12 if we think that it is the sin itself that is transmitted. This brings up the problem of inheritance.

We know more about inheritance, especially genetic inheritance, than our predecessors. Nothing material science tells us allows the transmission of sin. But this is the weakest argument. That doesn’t answer the question for us, but it sets a form of groundwork. With it, and the Scripture, I will argue that transmission of sin by genetic inheritance is unreasonable, a break with God’s intent, and contrary to plain statements of Scripture.

Keeping 5:12 and 5:15 in mind, let’s look at Ezekiel 18. This chapter is the most thorough compendium on the inheritance of sin available in the scriptures. Its conclusion is blisteringly clear. There is no inheritance of sin, or of righteousness either. In support of Rom. 5:12 each man dies for his own sin, not the sin of his father or his son. So according to Ezekiel, sin is not part of the inheritance of Adam.

There is a passage that seems to contradict Ezekiel 18 in Numbers 14:18 “The LORD is slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love, forgiving iniquity and transgression, but he will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

But he is not punishing the children, children’s children or, grandchildren for their own sins, which if Ezekiel is correct they are not at fault for, but for the sins of the fathers. Even this case would not require any transmission of sin, only residual punishment. This is an easy sociological question to suggest an answer for. The answer is that the destruction to social well being done by the father may take generations to ameliorate. They inherit the consequences of the sin, not the sin itself. Ezekiel is intact. The children’s sin is not the cause of the punishment laid on their father, though the sin of the father is the cause of the punishment of his progeny. Even though they are bearing the punishment of the father’s sin, the children to four generations who sin will also suffer the consequences of their own sin.

The results of sin can be passed on, but I see no reason to think that the cause for sin passes on, except of course the possibility that sin has something to do with being human equivalent to the capacity Adam had when he sinned. For those who wish to break this debate into its tried and worn categories, that is that people are born evil, neutral, or good; I think those categories should be abandoned. Even now we know so little of what it means to be human, those categories have nothing to do with what people are in some essential nature. It is rather a view of human behavior that is looking for an explanation. In other words, those categories are subsequent to the debate at hand serving as conclusions, not data we are looking at that will help us decide why we sin. In a circular fashion, if those conclusions are true, then, at least, people born evil explains why they sin.

But that leaves us in a moral dilemma. Even common human reason recognizes injustice when it sees it. Here’s the proposition that the determinists recognize perfectly well, but ignore. If we inherit the predilection to sin, and we sin because of that inheritance, then we are not at fault for that sin. If we are not at fault then we cannot be justly punished.

So looking for causality for sin harking back to Adam, we are left free of the burden of sinfulness and its subsequent effects, and God can’t justly hold us accountable. But God does hold us accountable for our sin, so there must be an element of free will, pure libertarian choice involved in the sin, so that we can be held accountable for it.

So the causality argument that Davis and Franks appeal to in order to secure the “literal” Adam and Eve, turns out to be a theological debacle that solves no riddles.

Happily, we do have something Adam had that we inherited. We have our humanity. If we sin because we have free will and the imagination to think more of our judgment than we ought to thereby straying from God’s path, then we, like Adam and Eve, will suffer the consequences of that sin. Thank God for Jesus who redeems us and gives us everything necessary for life and godliness.

But I know the determinists, neo-Calvinists and amateur logicians in our ranks will rankle at this argument. They will rehearse the worn out phrases that are supposed to make me happy with God’s injustice which is the result of their broken theology. I am free of that, responsible for my actions freely chosen.

The determinists, and partners to the fatalists of Buddhism, those who wish to cheat the study of human nature by accusing their progenitors for their own sins; those who wish to find a cause for every effect, have become deists. For them there is no God who is doing a new thing in the earth. There is no new life emerging from the ashes, there is no redemption, because God has already predetermined beforehand by a fixed causality, who is to be saved and who is to be lost. Ezekiel kicked them off that wagon, but many have hopped back on because of the feeling that their logic has abandoned them. Uncertainty and unresolved angst are too difficult to bear, and so they retreat to the certainties of their predecessors, remaining orthodox and wrong at the same time.

But like the thinkers in the Age of Reason, many of these folks do not know how to hold in tension the true things they have evidence for, and reduce the world to simple probably wrong formula. In the Age of Reason thinkers like Galileo Galilei aimed to destroy the authority of Aristotle because Aristotle had outlived his usefulness. His theories were no longer instructive, like the debate today between Calvin and Arminius. Why should we stick to the categories so ancient that they bear no resemblance to the modern ones? Are the modern ones better? Certainly, where they take into account data that were unavailable to our predecessors. For example, those who fight Darwinian evolution tooth and nail, are still fighting with tools developed in the nineteenth century and before; they use literalism, pre-atomic, and pre-geological sciences.

To finish my response to Davis and Franks’s waving of their arms, I say that the real Adam and Eve are, even in scientific circles, our progenitors, and that we have good evidence in materialist terms that whenever they lived, they were probably greatly unlike the people we imagine Genesis is telling us about but suffered the same malady we do, and that is, reason, the desire for knowledge, a robust sense of their own importance, and freedom to make mistakes. I would say to Davis and Franks keep puzzling this issue and don’t stop short of the truth. The puzzle of what in the scripture should be read word for word as truth, and what is metaphor is unresolved in your facile attachment to worn out theological objects. Your results should not drive the interpretation of your data.

dreams, student

in a dream

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I found myself in an Italian villa, or something like it. I discovered a very interesting parallel between the natural world and an idea I had. So, I assembled the children of the place, two young boys. As I began to explain the parallel, and even before I could convey my excitement at the discovery, hoping to catch the interest of the older brighter boy, he decided that my instruction was a total waste of time for him. He couldn’t see the point of sitting there, so stomped off.

Here is what I learned. First, I wasted my emotional energy on that boy, worrying how to engage him after he left. Second, I became blind to the younger boy in my anger. As my anger waned, and I settled down, I noticed the younger boy dawdling, playing with some object in his imagination. It’s almost as if he had entirely missed my exchange with the older boy. I had judged him slower, less apt, and so almost missed my golden opportunity to find a way to convey my excitement, and perhaps drive him to build a curiosity about the reasons of the natural world I discovered.

As dreams go, this one faded at the moment I began to search for a way to instruct the younger boy. I had forgotten the insight that set up the situation. But I remembered how the anger toward the older boy almost lost me the opportunity of engaging the younger one.

I am always in this quandary about how I am disposed to select some students for success over others. I know my natural inclination has its flaws, and that my rationality is biased. But I do it anyway. I don’t think it is possible to fully focus on this problem and teach at the same time. I can’t help but focus on those who are interested in conversing. But I know, that as a student, I didn’t always leap to the floor to speak. That didn’t mean I wasn’t thinking about it.

When I was young I went through something called “sensitivity training.” Part of the feedback I remember is that even though it didn’t look like I was paying attention, I was listening. This is like the younger boy of my dream. Is this dream all about myself? Like Neo in the Master’s lair viewing the multitudes of possible reactions to the conversation at the same time, am I looking at my self through two of the obvious lenses of my action? Is the older boy the part of me that refuses instruction for all the reasons people rebel, while the younger boy is me lost in a daydream and not engaged with the rebel’s drama? These are clearly parts of me.

The older boy may be an archetype of the offended person who doesn’t have time to sit through a lecture by someone he doesn’t trust and has been hurt by, even if only by association. The younger boy may be an archetype of the dreamer himself. Now, I’m in a loop dreaming about myself being in a dream. I had no idea this examination would be so much fun. Now, I find the lint in the bellybutton: What is it about me that offends me about myself? Never mind, the catalog of possibilities is large, but never fatal.