I’m probably one of the only Americans who despised being a homeowner. There were a few reasons I liked apartment living better, but the major source of my disdain stemmed from a homeowner's marriage to incessant yard work. If there was one thing that reminded me of the curse, it was the entropy to which my yard would succumb in a single week. Yard work just seems like a monotonous task that one does solely for looks, with little to no return, and being left only with the promise that you’ll have to rinse and repeat in about a week. It just seems like a vacuous endeavor. It's utterly monotonous. While our move to Romania has significantly diminished the size of the yard for which I’m responsible, this yardwork has come with its own set of challenges. I now have to lug heavy machinery up steep embankments. I have to take care no to run over the electric mower’s cord (I didn't even know electric mowers existed before moving to Romania). I hate it. Yard work is a small thing, I know (unless you are one of our neighbors who wishes it would be a bigger thing for us), but it’s something I despise.
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*This is a rapid fire piece. I have so many ideas backlogged and I want to put something out each month, but I just can't bring myself to write a ton of full-length pieces. I decided to start a less formal format where I quickly lay out some thoughts I had. These pieces are often first thoughts, and should be taken with an even bigger grain of salt than pieces I've spent more time on. There is a famous Orwellian movie I hear referenced every once in awhile - Minority Report. The movie is basically about a future world in which technology enables leaders to know who will commit which crimes before they actually happen. They are able to essentially rid the world of crime (except the crimes of the aristocrats, of course) by locking up "criminals" before they actually commit their crimes.
The movie is similar to another common ethical dilemma in which you are a time traveler who has the opportunity to kill Hitler while he's a child. Would it be moral to kill him before he actually committed his crime, even if you were as certain as you could be of what his future held? Can the ends justify the means? Can one be guilty and justly judged before they've committed a crime? Minority Report and time traveling assassins are all far-fetched sci-fi concepts, but the idea of preemptive justice is not far-fetched at all. As Americans, we've preemptively judged many nations through our military and many criminals through disproportionate sentencing. We drop bombs and we raise sentences based on what we know of our enemies. While we certainly preemptively judge on a national scale, we Americans often promote Minority Report justice on an individual scale. I mean, isn't that what self-defense usually is? If someone invades your home and you choose to confront them with a gun rather than lock your room and call the police, aren't you preparing to kill an aggressor based on the assumption that they're seeking your harm rather than your material goods? Even if one thinks the death penalty is a legitimate punishment for murder, how many cases of "self-defense" are cases in which one's life would have been taken? How many times is self-defense taking the life of someone who would have stolen or assaulted rather than killed? I have to ask two questions, then. First, why are we so critical of Minority Report as being Orwellian when we do something similar in our promotion of self-defense on both a national and individual scale? Second, why do we hide our inhumanity behind self-defense? Many would be appalled at state execution for theft, assault, or rape, as many are even appalled at state execution for murder. Yet self-defense goes even further in that it is execution for a presumed crime. Self-Defense is passing the death sentence for a crime not yet committed. *This is a rapid fire piece. I have so many ideas backlogged and I want to put something out each month, but I just can't bring myself to write a ton of full-length pieces. I decided to start a less formal format where I quickly lay out some thoughts I had. These pieces are often first thoughts, and should be taken with an even bigger grain of salt than pieces I've spent more time on. Did Jesus only speak inerrantly? Was there anything about which he was mistaken? Was a perfect eyewitness for every event or could his perception ever be skewed? Did he ever get any of his math homework wrong? Did he know Bible verses perfectly the first time trying to recite them from memory, or did he have to work and try over and over again until he knew it? What does it mean to grow in wisdom and understanding if not that there is a point where we are less informed? Isn't being ill-informed sometimes/often the same thing as being errant?
When we speak of inerrancy of the Bible, we assume that it has to be so because God's words are inerrant. How is it that the written word of God must be inerrant while it seems the living word of God was certainly errant? Is it because Jesus's errant part was the human part (if you think we can dissect him like this)? Is Jesus's human nature any more prone to errancy than the non-divine human agents God inspired to write the Bible? How is it that the God-man indwelt by God's Spirit could speak errantly while the God-inspired, human authors of the Bible could write perfectly? Did God empower the human authors more than his own Son? Or does God only ensure that he speaks inerrantly for certain events - like the writing of scripture - and not for other events, like the incarnation of the redeemer? Proverbs 26:4-5 Do not answer a fool according to his folly, or you yourself will be just like him. Answer a fool according to his folly, or he will be wise in his own eyes. The Bible is a complex document which can be confusing on a multitude of levels. But perhaps one of the ways in which it is most often confusing is in its bipolarity. Did Jesus come to bring judge the world (Jn. 9) or not judge it (Jn. 3)? Is Jesus the prince of peace (Is. 9) or did he come to bring not peace, but division (Lk. 12)? Or, as Proverbs 26 writes, are we or are we not supposed to answer a fool according to their folly?
Most would call me an idealist, but not in the nice way. I'm not the loveable idealist - some pie in the sky dreamer who holds lofty aspirations that will never come to fruition. I'm the despicable idealist - the kind who refuses to advocate getting our hands dirty in order to accomplish the greater good. I advocate that one should never kill another and that one should never lie, no matter what. And that type of moral idealism just doesn't fly in the real world. I mean, look where it got Jesus?
Of course I understand the aversion to pharisaical moralism. Nobody, including me, wants a system that offers sacrifices and works up to God which are secretly built on foundations of injustice. I don't want my neighbor's ox to fall in a ditch on the Sabbath and refuse to help him out, or condemn a healer for healing someone on the day of rest. I don't want to pray for your hunger while doing nothing tangible to resolve it. Yet, as a moral idealist, many often think this is the type of vain offering I'm advocating, and I get it. Hopefully I can resolve that misperception of idealism and give you a new vision for the world which causes you to become an idealist too. *Please note that this article is not critiquing inerrancy as a whole, but rather a specific form of it - we'll call it hyper-inerrancy. Hyper-inerrancy is often found in fundamentalism and in many with a lay understanding of what inerrancy means, and who aren't aware of its implications. This is an inerrancy of tokens rather than of types. For a more detailed discussion of that, you can check out this article from Stand to Reason. I think identifying and eliminating that type of understanding of inerrancy is vital for Christian intellectual integrity and apologetics. The idea of inerrancy has honestly been a struggle for me over the past few years. Ironically, that struggle started as I delved more into apologetics. There are two key points of struggle for me in regard to inerrancy: the autographs and the circumscription.
*This is a rapid fire piece. I have so many ideas backlogged and I want to put something out each month, but I just can't bring myself to write a ton of full-length pieces. I decided to start a less formal format where I quickly lay out some thoughts I had. These pieces are often first thoughts, and should be taken with an even bigger grain of salt than pieces I've spent more time on. Most people advocate the idea that life and morality are best exemplified by the avoidance of extremes. If you err in one direction, you end up being licentious, and if you go in the other direction, you end up being uptight and legalistic. The letter of the law or no law at all. Both are problems.
But when you try to apply this concept of avoiding the extreme, you end up with a life that doesn't depict radical Christianity at all. Let's just take economics as an example. If you were to tell the early church in Acts to avoid extremes, you'd tell them not to horde their money, but also not to give their money away "unwisely." They should live modestly, but they also should make sure to save enough to put their immediate family first, to put their kids through college, and to have a safe, comfortable retirement fund to provide for their future. You certainly wouldn't tell them to share all their possessions and to give to those in need to a point that it hurts them and their families. Yet that's exactly what the early church did. The thing is, God's commands are extreme. So hording for self and spending in excess for self both fail to demonstrate love, just in different directions. They're both egoistic. But selling possessions, giving to the poor at cost to yourself, and sharing in common are extreme measures, but they are beautiful goods. I think we have to nuance the term "extreme" or else we equivocate on it. When we say don't go to extremes, what we should mean is that we shouldn't err to either side, either extremity, or either direction. What we shouldn't mean is that we live a life devoid of actions which are extreme and powerful. Think of it like driving on the road. When you stay in the middle - in your lane - you go at high speeds and have purpose and direction. But when you go into either ditch, you hit ruts, signs, fences, guardrails, and you slow down or crash. Extreme speed can only be maintained when avoiding the extremity of the road. Chesterton has a wonderful discussion on this in his book "Orthodoxy." Chesterton argues that Christian virtue is not the avoidance of extremes, but rather the furious joining of two extremes. Courage, for example, comes when one counts his life as lost while simultaneously desiring to preserve his life. To only count one's life as lost is to be a suicide, while to only care about the preservation of one's life is to be a coward. Courage, like most/all Christian virtues, can only be held if one holds both extremes in the middle. The Christian life is an extreme life and we ought not to use this idea of "avoiding the extreme" to water down how we are called to live. *This is a rapid fire piece. I have so many ideas backlogged and I want to put something out each month, but I just can't bring myself to write a ton of full-length pieces. I decided to start a less formal format where I quickly lay out some thoughts I had. These pieces are often first thoughts, and should be taken with an even bigger grain of salt than pieces I've spent more time on. Most Christians believe in some sort of progressive revelation. God didn't reveal all of himself at one time, but rather revealed more and more truths about himself and his plan over time. This seems like a clear fact considering the perfect revelation we get in Jesus, which was thousands of years in the making, but it also makes moral sense. We, as parents, don't hold our kids to the same standards we'd hold adults, as they are just learning to deal with morality and expectations. Had God given humanity immediate justice and held us to full expectations, sin would have destroyed us all. But God is gracious and patient with us.
But for those who hold to inerrancy, as my group does, this idea of progressive revelation seems to be a problem. The thinking on inerrancy is that the truth of God's word is so important, that there can be no imperfection in the words of God. God had to ensure that the Bible was not only initially transmitted perfectly, but that it was maintained perfectly - at least in regard to the main ideas (some allowance is made for grammar and syntax differences, as the Bible is undeniably errant in this regard as evidenced by a plethora of divergent manuscripts). The thinking is that what God says is so important and vital for us, that he couldn't have failed to transmit his words perfectly. However, there's a double standard at play here. The issue is that our idea of inerrancy is applied to the syntax and data, but not to understanding. This is a problem for all Christians who hold to inerrancy, but especially for Reformed Christians who believe that God has control even over hearts and minds. What we are essentially saying is that syntactical/dative inerrancy is so important that God ensured an inerrant text, yet the content wasn't important enough that he ensured inerrant understanding. The physical Bible is inerrant, but God's communication skills are extremely errant as proven by the multitude of people who either don't believe in him, or who deviate from what he intended to convey in their various denominations and sects. If inerrancy of the physical text is important, then certainly inerrancy of comprehension is important. If God knows how to communicate - and especially if God has control over hearts and minds - then one would expect that something like progressive revelation would not exist. God could have zapped information into brains like a pensieve, he could have communicated more forthrightly, or he could have changed hearts and minds and made the blind to see. I have to ask myself, then, why one sort of inerrancy is important to me, the syntacitcal/dative, while the other, arguably more important aspect of inerrancy of comprehension, is not. Jesus answered, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me..." (Jn. 14:6). "He committed no sin and no deceit was found in his mouth" (Is. 53:9 / I Pet. 2:22).
Truth is a topic that has been on my mind a lot this year, as the world seems to be careening towards an epistemological precipice, driven closer and closer to the edge by a world filled with lies, propaganda, polarization, and relativism. In a world of such grand illusions, I take comfort in knowing that I serve a God who doesn't merely utilize truth when it's convenient, but a God who is truth always. Yet as we draw closer to our celebration of the Christ's incarnation, I'm left with a bad taste in my mouth in regard to truth, because in some ways, the incarnation seems disingenuous. Does Jesus really embody truth? I mean, literally, does he embody it? Because the way Christian thinking often goes, it seems like in the taking on of a human body, the God-man actually masked the truth. Jesus is divine, glorious, holy, magnificent, and all other good and amazing terms you can think of. But when the Word became flesh, it seems like his divinity and his glory were actually being concealed. Photo by Mark Jason Gatus on Scopio *This is a rapid fire piece. I have so many ideas backlogged and I want to put something out each month, but I just can't bring myself to write a ton of full-length pieces. I decided to start a less formal format where I quickly lay out some thoughts I had. These pieces are often first thoughts, and should be taken with an even bigger grain of salt than pieces I've spent more time on. I despise consequentialism - the idea that the ends justify the means. Many Christians say they despise it too, but we practice this ethic all the time. My go-to example is the 2016 election of President Trump by over 80% of those in my group - conservative Christians. "He's not as bad as the other candidate!" "We can't vote third-party or abstain because a greater evil would result!" "The president isn't a pastor-in-chief, he's a commander-in-chief." "The possibility of getting supreme court justices who will ban abortion and gay marriage justifies significant moral flaws." The list could go on. The ends justified the means.
In my group's mind, justifying, overlooking, or dismissing "minor" evils like sexual assault, mysoginy, racism, denigration, mistreatment of immigrants, and all that stuff - it's all ok because even if we combined all those evils, they pale in comparison to the egregious issue of abortion. Abortion has killed tens of millions of humans in the past fifty years. One of the main problems with a consequentialist ethic is that we recognize its moral reprehensibility when we apply it to other situations. My favorite go-to example is from the book of Kings, when two mothers plan to cannibalize their children to save both of their families. From a consequentialist standpoint, murdering two kids to save two whole families sounds like the perfect moral plan. Numerically speaking, the equation is flawless. Two lives are lesser than, say, ten lives. But we recognize that such an action wouldn't be justifiable - unless, perhaps, one of the mothers was running for president. But let's take another example here - one which would lead to infinite quantities of good being achieved. If, as most non-Reformed, and many Reformed Christians believe, children who die before a certain cognitive function are elect and go to be with God when they die, then why not allow abortion and advocate for a theocracy in which all children of non-Christians (and perhaps wayward and mediocre Christians as well) are killed? Think of all the souls who would immediately experience bliss rather than the fires of hell? What is the murder of a temporal life in comparison to the saving of a soul for eternity? Of course such a thought is reprehensible because we recognize that it's evil. Regardless of the good that would be brought about - the infinite good for billions of people - we can't justify such good by participating in evil. Despite an Augustinian view one might take which justifies actions through motivations, we can't justify evil with any intent, even the best ones. What strikes me as particularly revolting about Christian consequentialism is that it is fine trading on other sins and evils for an unguaranteed "greater good," yet it refuses to trade on sins and evils for a known good. We can compromise morality in voting to obtain power which may or may not lead to the short and long-term goals we have in view, yet we refuse to embrace evil for a known infinite good we could accomplish for billions. If Christian morality includes consequentialist ethics, we're novices who are refusing to do great good. But if Christian morality doesn't include a consequentialist ethic, we're unfaithful subjects to the King who are determining good and evil for ourselves because we don't think our Lord is able to produce good results out of mere faithfulness. We have made ourselves kings, and in doing so, have exposed ourselves as fools. |
*The views and ideas on this site are in no way affiliated with any organization, business, or individuals we are a part of or work with. They're also not theological certainties. They're simply thinking out loud, on issues and difficulties as I process things.
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