Relocating To Elfland

A single sentence from Kenton Sparks on the Biologos website captures a view of scripture that is rapidly gaining ground in evangelical circles: “Scripture is a casualty of the fallen cosmos.” There you have it: like the humans who wrote it, scripture is fallen. It needs to be redeemed. It needs to be saved. Sparks is pretty explicit about this:

“Scripture is in need of redemption and . . . God is working to redeem it. . . . Even the New Testament, in spite of its special position and redemptive role in the canon, is by no means fully redeemed. It still envisions slavery as an acceptable social practice, maintains a very low view of women at points . . . throws ethnic slurs at Cretans . . . and includes Paul’s angry wish that his opponents at Galatia would ‘go the whole way and emasculate themselves.’ ”

And the conclusion of the matter:

“The Bible, with its two Testaments, plays a vital role in God’s redemptive work. Taken as a whole, it is a steady and valuable guide for God’s people as they seek to know him and to love their neighbors. But ultimately, the redemption of both Testaments, and of the cosmos and humanity, is accomplished by the death, burial, resurrection, ascension and return of our savior, Jesus Christ. Until that final day comes, we shall continue to struggle with the problems of pain and suffering, and with the problems in Scripture. These are our problems that Christ has graciously taken upon himself.”

Well, that’s reassuring to hear, isn’t it? Someday Jesus will save even the scriptures, so we won’t have to trouble ourselves anymore sorting out what’s scientifically accurate, historically reliable, morally acceptable, etc., from all the stuff that isn’t. Boy, will that be a relief.

There was a time when one would have thought it wholly superfluous to point out in Reformed and evangelical circles how problematic this is. One would have thought it goes without saying that if the Bible is to retain anything like the position of authority it has held in the history of orthodox Christianity – if it is to retain any meaningful ultimacy as “the Word of God” – then human beings should not be in a position of parsing it to determine where it is really, divinely true, and where it is not only fallibly human, but even sinfully human. But alas, the days when such naiveté could be indulged are long past.

Pete Enns might tell you I’m writing this because I’ve missed the God of the Bible altogether. I just don’t get it that it’s not “a problem for God to enter into the human experience and allow that human experience to shape – from beginning to end – how the Bible behaves.” (Apparently, for Sparks, “from beginning to end” includes sin and the need for redemption. I’ll come back to that.) The God of the gospel is Immanuel. He enters our fallenness completely. But I, you see, insist on a fundamentalist, bibliolatrous, exclusivist, “finely-tuned system of theology” required by my platonic god who refuses to get his hands dirty in the real human situation.

On the subject of systems, I find it curious that the view of scripture put forward by Sparks and Enns is often portrayed as a mere corollary of Chalcedonian orthodoxy. We believe the Incarnate Word of God was not only divine, but also human – fully human. We must, therefore, embrace that the written Word of God is not only divine, but also fully human, including errors and even moral lapses that need to be redeemed. But doesn’t the analogy break down at just this point? Whatever human weaknesses beset the Son of God on earth, sin and the need for redemption were not among them; to affirm that they were is to deny that He was in any position to redeem anyone else. We might go further, in fact, by way of the communicatio idiomatum, and say that the absolute truthfulness and moral perfection of His divine nature were properly attributable to His human thoughts, words, and actions. And in saying such things we would not (pace Enns) be drifting anywhere near the frightful marshes of Platonism.

Reasoning by analogy back to the written Word, we must say – indeed, we stake a great deal on it – that even as God did not cease to be God when He became the man Jesus Christ, He did not cease to be God when He authored the scriptures through human writers. We need to be more precise still: the Triune God revealed in scripture did not cease to be that God when He inspired the scriptures, the God who knows all things and whose every word may be trusted. Here I am struck by the relevance of something J. Gresham Machen wrote in Christianity and Liberalism:

“Does not the liberal preacher say that the Bible is ‘divine’ – indeed that it is the more divine because it is the more human? What could be more edifying than that? But of course such appearances are deceptive. A Bible that is full of error is certainly divine in the modern pantheizing sense of ‘divine,’ according to which God is just another name for the course of the world with all its imperfections and all its sin. But the God whom the Christian worships is a God of truth.”

Reading this, one thinks Enns may be right to say that two different views of God operate behind these two different views of scripture. One is the God revealed in scripture, who remained so in the very act of inspiring human writers, ensuring pure words that require no redemption (even as, in the Incarnation, He ensured a pure human nature that required no redemption); the other is a god who either virtually disappears into his human writers (only in their entirely, authentically fallen words, undisturbed by any external power, do we encounter his), or stands apart from the human writers such that their words can be his only after the fact (Nestorius comes to mind).

To sharpen this point about different deities, it’s no accident that what transparently drives Enns and Sparks toward their radical view of scripture is what they perceive to be the irresistible force of modern science. They believe with modern science, for example, that evolution is an established fact, and that God must therefore have “created” the cosmos using the evolutionary process. But that is simply another way of positing that God “created” the cosmos using such processes as naturalistic science can discover, observe, test, and predict. God set the stuff of the cosmos in motion (there’s the Christian bit), then stepped back and let nature run its course (as understood by naturalistic science). Beyond the initial act of setting things in motion, the forces of nature are cosmically ultimate; put another way, those natural forces (or what Machen called “the course of the world with all its imperfections and its sin”) are “god.” In the context of such a deistic cosmology, it’s difficult to see how any other view of scripture could emerge than the one to which Enns and Sparks subscribe. If God surrendered sovereignty over the cosmos once He created it (being bound now by its unalterable laws, which science continues to discover), then how could He possibly have retained sovereignty over the thoughts and words of human writers of the Bible? How could He not have been bound by their finitude, fallibility, and sinfulness?

“Whereas the resurrection of Christ in a sense breaks the bonds of the social order that crucifies, so as to inaugurate a new history, a new city, whose story is told along the infinite axis of divine peace, the religious dynamism of Attic tragedy has the form of a closed circle; it reinforces the civic order it puts into question, by placing that order within a context of cosmic violence that demonstrates not only the limits but the necessity of the city’s regime. . . . The form, context, and substance of Attic tragedy underwrite a particular narrative mythos, which depicts violence as the aboriginal continuity between the natural and moral worlds, and the human community as a besieged citadel preserving itself in part through the tribute it pays to the powers that threaten it.” (David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 380)

“What must be grasped from the very beginning is that evolutionism’s cosmology involves an intellectual sleight-of-hand operation. It appears initially to denigrate man’s position in a universe of infinite (or almost infinite) space and time, only subsequently to place man on the pinnacle of this non-created realm. Man becomes content to be a child of the meaningless slime, in order that he might claim his rightful sovereignty in the place once occupied by God. By default – the disappearance of God the Creator – man achieves his evolving divinity.” (Gary North, The Dominion Covenant: Genesis, p. 253)

“A person recognizes how planned most days of most people are at the moments when surprises or accidents occur. The presence or actions of children make demands or cause tumult. The beckoning or threatening presence of the child reveals how captive of ordinariness our lives can be.” (Martin E. Marty, The Mystery of the Child, p. 36)

Christianity glories not in mere weakness, but in weakness that is a showcase for the power of love.

“If, then, dread of God, and hatred of God, be the cause of all our sins, how shall we be cured of the love of sin, but by taking away the cause? How do you most effectually kill the noxious weed? is it not by striking at the root? In the love of Christ to man, then – in that strange unspeakable gift of God, when he laid down his life for his enemies – when he died the just for the unjust, that he might bring us to God – do not you see an object which, if really believed by the sinner, takes away all his dread and all his hatred of God? The root of sin is severed from the stock. In His bearing double for all our sins, we see the curse carried away – we see God reconciled. Why should we fear any more? Not fearing, why should we hate God any more? Not hating God, what desirableness can we see in sin any more? Putting on the righteousness of Christ, we are again placed as Adam was – with God as our friend. We have no object in sinning; and, therefore, we do not care to sin. In the 6th chapter of Romans, Paul seems to speak of the believer sinning, as if the very proposition was absurd: ‘How shall we that are dead to sin’ – that is, who in Christ have already borne the penalty – ‘how shall we live any longer therein?’ And again he saith very boldly: ‘Sin shall not have dominion over you’ – it is impossible in the nature of things – ‘for ye are not under the law, but under grace’ ye are no longer under the curse of a broken law, dreading and hating God; ye are under grace – under a system of peace and friendship with God.

“But is there anyone ready to object to me, that if these things be so – if nothing more than that a man be brought into peace with God is needful to a holy life and conversation – how comes it that believers do still sin? I answer, It is indeed too true that believers do sin; but it is just as true that unbelief is the cause of their sinning. If, brethren, you and I were to live with our eye so closely on Christ bearing double for all our sins – freely offering to all a double righteousness for all our sins; and if this constant view of the love of Christ maintained within us – as assuredly it would, if we looked with a straight forward eye – the peace of God which passeth all understanding – the peace that rests on nothing in us, but upon the completeness that is in Christ – then, brethren, I do say, that frail and helpless as we are, we should never sin – we should not have the slightest object in sinning. But, ah! my friends, this is not the way with us. How often in the day is the love of Christ quite out of view! How often is it obscured to us – sometimes hid from us by God himself, to teach us what we are. How often are we left without the real sense of the completeness of his offering – the perfectness of his righteousness, and without the will or the confidence to claim an interest in him! Who can wonder, then, that, where there is so much unbelief, dread and hatred of God should again and again creep in, and sin should often display its poisonous head? The matter is very plain, brethren, if only we had spiritual eyes to see it. If we live a life of faith on the Son of God, then we shall assuredly live a life of holiness. I do not say, we ought to do so; but I say we shall, as a matter of necessary consequence. But, in as far as we do not live a life of faith, in so far we shall live a life of unholiness. It is through faith that God purifies the heart; and there is no other way.” (Robert Murray M’Cheyne, “The Love of Christ”)

This month’s edition of Ordained Servant Online includes an article by Dr. David Noe bearing the provocative title, “Is There Such a Thing as Christian Education?” Because the stakes are so high in what he has written, I’m responding with a post that is considerably longer than usual.

Dr. Noe seeks to mount an effective (and in his mind, it seems, somewhat overdue) assault on “that last noun-stronghold where the adjective ‘Christian’ shelters and where many thinking Christians wish to keep it protected,” namely, education. The adjective “Christian,” he argues early in his article, has been attached most unhelpfully to all sorts of nouns, not only without adding any real meaning to these nouns, but actually with the effect of muddling their meaning.

What, for instance (he asks), is the difference between bicycling and “Christian” bicycling? Or piano practice and “Christian” piano practice? Or volleyball and “Christian” volleyball? If we cannot discern how attaching “Christian” to such nouns makes any difference, other than to create the misimpression that (say) the motion of bump/set/spike changes because one believes in Jesus, should we not abandon the adjective? But then, why stop here? Is it not in the interests of semantic economy to unburden other nouns, such as “philosophy” and “art”? Doesn’t one read the same text of Gorgias whether one is a Christian or not? Doth not the Christian and the pagan potter throw the same clay? Who then can meaningfully speak of “Christian” or “non-Christian” philosophy or art?

With all of this in hand, Dr. Noe finally reaches out to grasp his intended quarry: there can be (he says) nothing distinctively “Christian” about either the process or the result of the activity for which we employ the noun “education.” For instance, “the fact that I am a Christian would make no observable difference in either process or result when it comes to educating students in Plato.” From this it follows: “the most we can say about ‘Christian education’ is that it is education delivered or provided by Christians. . . . [In saying that, we are] saying nothing distinguishable either about the process or the result of that process.”

I retrace Dr. Noe’s steps in this way, because I wish it to be clear that I have understood him. Quite clearly, in fact. And having understood him, I don’t know which appalls me more: his argument, or the fact that this argument is being presented without so much as a hint that it reflects anything other than the mainstream of thought in the Orthodox Presbyterian Church. I, for one, wish to register my dissent from Dr. Noe’s argument and his conclusion in the strongest possible terms, and I am fully confident that I am not the only minister in the OPC who would wish to do so.

Is it in fact the case that the bread of “education” simply is what it is, and that being a disciple of Jesus Christ determines nothing more than the jam one prefers on one’s bread? That is precisely what Dr. Noe is saying: the text of Plato is the text of Plato, the teaching of Plato is the teaching of Plato, and while one may dab on here or there the condiment of Christianity, this has nothing to do with the substance of one’s learning, or the process by which it is learned.

What is completely absent from this analysis is a biblically holistic understanding of education. One could, I suppose, reduce “education” to mere data input. One could perhaps even call such data input “the acquisition of knowledge.” What one could not do is derive such an educational model from the anthropology presented in scripture. Man, in biblical terms, is never simply a receptacle for data; he is called to bear the image of God in understanding, discernment, and wisdom; and the formative processes of God’s covenant with His people, especially when they are still young, are all directed at the inculcation not simply of information but of everything meant by wisdom. (As an aside, it is remarkable that Dr. Noe, a classicist, fails even to mention Christian interaction with the classical trivium in terms of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom.) Data neither exists in the raw, nor is it ever learned in the raw; it is always discovered and mastered within an interpretive framework (a “worldview,” to deploy the overused term). The same may be said of the development of various skills: all are learned within an interpretive and teleological context, within the context of a worldview. Here I don’t think I can improve on the words of J. Gresham Machen, who said of the “freedom” granted by government schools for hours of religious instruction:

But what miserable makeshifts all such measures, even at the best, are! Underlying them is the notion that religion embraces only one particular part of human life. Let the public schools take care of the rest of life – such seems to be the notion – and one or two hours during the week will be sufficient to fill the gap which they leave. But as a matter of fact the religion of the Christian man embraces the whole of his life. Without Christ he was dead in trespasses and sins, but he has now been made alive by the Spirit of God; he was formerly alien from the household of God, but has now been made a member of God’s covenant people. Can this new relationship to God be regarded as concerning only one part, and apparently a small part, of his life? No, it concerns all his life; and everything that he does he should do now as a child of God.

It is this profound Christian permeation of every human activity, no matter how secular the world may regard it as being, which is brought about by the Christian school and the Christian school alone. I do not want to be guilty of exaggerations at this point. A Christian boy or girl can learn mathematics, for example, from a teacher who is not a Christian; and truth is truth however learned. But while truth is truth however learned, the bearing of truth, the meaning of truth, the purpose of truth (even in the sphere of mathematics) seem entirely different to the Christian from that which they seem to the non-Christian; and that is why a truly Christian education is possible only when Christian conviction underlies not a part, but all, of the curriculum of the school. True learning and true piety go hand in hand, and Christianity embraces the whole of life – those are great central convictions that underlie the Christian school. (“The Necessity of the Christian School”)

This is not difficult to illustrate, using adjectives other than “Christian.” My background prior to the ministry was in law, and there is no doubt that the Bill of Rights is the Bill of Rights whether one studies it at UC Berkeley or Regent University. One could therefore try to make the case that the adjectives “progressive” and “conservative” are meaningless as applied to constitutional jurisprudence. That would be news to the faculty and students at either institution.

Or one might say that because Yale Divinity School and Westminster Theological Seminary use the same Greek New Testament, the adjectives “evangelical” and “non-evangelical” are vacuous in New Testament studies. Dr. Noe actually says something very like this: “Presumably a very bright non-Christian reasoning consistently, diligently and with complete access to the basic data of special revelation, can more often reach sound and valid conclusions than the most devout yet dim-witted believer on the topic of our Lord’s incarnation.” As a plank in his overall argument, I find this simply bizarre: are we really prepared to say that because some non-Christians bring a higher IQ to the Bible than some Christians, and because everyone is using the same Bible, there is no significant difference between a “Christian” and a “non-Christian” understanding of our Lord’s Incarnation? I wonder: should the pastor with an average IQ offer his Sunday school class to the brilliant pagan from the local divinity school, because the biblical data of the Incarnation is the same no matter who teaches it?

Or let us suppose the educational subject matter at hand is sexuality. The facts are the facts, for Christians and non-Christians alike; yet I can hardly imagine a Christian parent who wouldn’t insist on presenting those “facts” within a decidedly “Christian” context. Here as elsewhere, the “facts” are never in the raw; it makes a universe of difference whether they’re learned within the context of the fear of the Lord, or not. If that is true in sex education, it’s true in all education. There is no sphere of learning in which the child of God is not called and commanded to love the Lord his God with all of his mind. There is an educational process that aims at this result, and there is an educational process that undermines it. The one is Christian; the other is not.

Our fathers in the OPC have made this case even more strongly than I have done here. Cornelius Van Til, for example, had this to say on the issue of educational method:

Here, too, the temptation besets us that we should be very keen to watch the methods that are used around us. Now this too is in itself altogether commendable and necessary. It is commendable because every good soldier should know the tactics of the enemy. It is commendable too because perhaps some of the methods used by the enemy may be transformed and used by us. But transformed they must always be. We cannot afford to say that if only we place a different content before our pupils we need not worry about the form because the form is neutral. If a glass has contained carbolic acid you do not merely pour it out in order then to give your child a drink of water. How much more impossible will it be to take a non-Christian spiritual content and pour it out of its form in order to use the latter for the pouring out of a definite Christian-theistic content? The connection between form and matter is too much like that of skin and flesh to allow for the easy removal of the one without taking something of the other. It is incumbent on us to be on our guard with respect to the educational methods of our opponents. We can never, strictly speaking, use their methods. We can use methods that appear similar to theirs, but never can we use methods that are the same as theirs.

So, then, our conclusion with respect to the educational philosophies and the educational policies that surround us is that we must be intensively and extensively negative or we can never be intensively and extensively positive in the Christian-theistic sense of the term. The fundamental principle of the antithesis upon which Christianity is built demands nothing less than that. We must more and more dare to be consistently peculiar in our educational policies. If we dare to be peculiar we will be “peculiar” in the eyes of the world, to be sure, but we will not be “peculiar” in the eyes of God. If we are not peculiar, we will be “peculiar” in the eyes of God and be twice “peculiar” in the eyes of the world. (“Antitheses in Education,” emphasis on original)

These are sage words, and we would do well to heed them for the sake of our children’s children.

Given the idiosyncratic and highly controversial nature of what Dr. Noe has put forward, it is my hope that Ordained Servant will provide opportunity for those who firmly disagree to respond, especially where their dissenting views are well-pedigreed in OPC history.