Relocating To Elfland

The splash continues from David Bentley Hart’s recent First Things essay, “Is, Ought, and Nature’s Laws.” Responses and related reflections have followed from Rod Dreher (here, here, and here), Alan Jacobs (here), Peter Leithart (here and here), Edward Feser (here and here), Steven Wedgeworth (here and here), and Alastair Roberts (here). Anna Williams notes some other contributions in her First Things roundup.

The discussion is a very old one about the existence and knowability of an objective moral order in the world. Are there objective, self-evident, universal moral truths and norms? Are these truths and norms accessible, and if so, by whom, and by what means?

Two claims have surfaced in the various posts. One is that there is an objective moral order in the world (“natural law”); but since not everyone agrees that it exists, the only way to argue for it is from scripture, from “thus saith the Lord” (in Leithart’s words, “the only arguments we have are theological ones”); the problem being that “only people whose imaginations are formed by Scripture will find [such biblical, theological arguments] cogent.” Those who don’t accept the Christian view of reality have no reason to find Christian ethical reasoning persuasive.

Others disagree, claiming that God’s creation (including the moral order of the world) is what it is, even if we never heard Him say anything about it. “As long as we exist within the creation,” says Alastair Roberts, “we are besieged by God.” To be in the created moral order is not only to be bound by it, but at some level to know it. Edward Feser is supremely confident about this: he believes “objectively true moral conclusions can be derived from premises that in no way presuppose any purported divine revelation, any body of scriptural writings, or any particular religious tradition,” precisely because human reason is part of the created order, teleologically oriented to it, and unable “in principle . . . to will anything other than the good” to which the created order itself is teleologically oriented. Objectively true moral conclusions can therefore “in principle be known via purely philosophical arguments” without resort to divine revelation.

What shall we say to these things?

My interest in the conversation stems in part from the fact that I’m finishing a sermon series in Genesis 1–11 in which I’ve tried to identify the big pieces of the Genesis cosmology. Two features in particular have stood out. First, Genesis tells us the cosmos we’re living in is deeply enchanted. Everything we perceive with our senses is freighted with unseen realities, not least the Word and Spirit of the Creator who upholds, fills, and animates all things – in Him we live and move and have our being. All visible things are full of deep invisible magic (if I may so express it), filled with the presence and power of the invisible God. On one hand, this supplies a basis for expectation and prediction as we engage the natural world and the flow of history: we rightly anticipate a certain order, because the visible realms are ruled by the invisible God. On the other hand, the world’s enchantment supplies a basis to expect the unexpected. The world has a wonderful (sometimes bewildering) unpredictability about it, for the simple reason that God remains wholly free in relation to His world – “He does according to His will among the host of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth” (Daniel 4:35).

Second, Genesis tells us our cosmos is deeply eschatological. Everything we perceive with our senses is freighted with ultimate purposes (the eternal purpose of God). As surely as there is a transcendent dimension to everything we observe, there is a teleological dimension to every creature and to creation as a whole. God made all things with a given nature for certain purposes (both proximate and ultimate), and part of the human adventure is to discover and work out these purposes.

These two big pieces – enchantment and eschatology, transcendence and teleology, the giftedness of the world and the givenness (or, as Ken Myers likes to say, the “grain”) of the world – are fundamental to the cosmology of Genesis. But I think the recent debates have reminded us to be careful of a misstep here. The world is not this way because Genesis says it is; the world is this way whether or not Genesis was ever written, and whether or not anyone ever reads Genesis. We must not confuse Welt and Weltanschauung; we mustn’t collapse the cosmos of Genesis into the cosmology of Genesis. The world is deeply enchanted and deeply eschatological whether or not we happen to look at it through the lenses of deep enchantment and deep eschatology. The way the world is doesn’t depend in the slightest on the way we look at the world (as my friend Peter Escalante puts it, “Reality isn’t up for vote”).

This isn’t true only in the realm of reality; it’s also true in the realm of human knowledge. As creatures who are part of (inextricably embedded in) the world as God created it, we know the world is enchanted and eschatological – we cannot escape transcendence and teleology, even if we devoutly wish to in the realm of our conscious reflection. Reality is what it is, and deep down we all know it. This is obvious when you listen to ethical discourse: all such discourse regardless of the participants operates on the assumption that some behavior is morally reprehensible, that there is some irreducible distinction between good and evil. Take away this self-evident truth, this sine qua non, and ethics ceases to be rational. People may differ radically in what they identify as moral or immoral, but they’re not in disagreement about the existence of morality itself. Thus moral reasoning is possible even between those who profess faith in the God of the Bible and those who profess no faith whatsoever. We Christians know objective moral truth exists because the Bible tells us so; but we need to remember that our unbelieving neighbor knows it too, whether or not he or she has ever opened a Bible. It comes with being made in imago Dei.

I think we need to recognize how high the stakes are in this ongoing discussion. If we surrender the metaphysical ground that man is made in God’s image and that as such he is (though fallen and in dire need of God’s Word and Spirit) both subject to and at some level aware of the moral order of the universe, we leave ourselves in a position where we can, in fact, only thump our Bibles – and worse, our biblically intelligent hearers will recognize that we have actually given up on what our Bible says. If they hear us cite the Bible, but see that we have no confidence that God’s moral order is operative within them and they within it, or that His moral order is known to them (in other words, if they see that we have accepted their moral autonomy as real), then we have yielded not just the authority of natural law but also the authority of the Bible. Needless to say, that would be a bad thing. We’ve ceded enough ground to the myth of a naked public square, to the myth of moral autonomy. We must not yield another inch to those who scorn either the cosmos or the cosmology God has given us.

We must not . . . confuse the problem of toleration with [the] solution of the question of truth. Tolerance is a humane attitude, which respects the personality of the other, but it has nothing to do with the truth or falsity of the “other’s” opinions and ideas. In this sense the genuine Christian missionary in particular will be “tolerant,” yet at the same time he may not believe that there is any truth in the religion of those among whom he lives; he desires that the “heathen” whom he is trying to convert shall be treated with all respect, even in their unconverted state, and he will not try to force the true religion upon them. This tolerance is often sadly lacking in the very persons who profess a relative attitude toward the question of truth and revelation; on the other hand, genuine “tolerance” is often practiced by those who are opposed to all “relative” views of Christianity. (Emil Brunner, Revelation and Reason: The Christian Doctrine of Faith and Knowledge, p. 219)

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?

Thesis:

Intellectual skepticism toward Christianity founders on “the law of the object.” If one does not come to the Triune God of Christianity as the Lord He has revealed Himself to be, then one has already denied His existence, and further debates about His existence, character, or claims are pointless. One is already at a discussion table from which He has been barred; one would have to move to an entirely different table (set by Him) to deal with Him at all.

Discuss.

Last night I attended a book launch at Union Theological Seminary for a volume coauthored by my friend, Dr. David Innes: Left, Right & Christ: Evangelical Faith in Politics. There’s a great deal I could say about the panel discussion, in which not only the authors but also Richard Land and Jim Wallis participated; but as a pastor and biblical exegete, I found one particular question from the audience especially striking. A young woman asked the three (apparently) white males on the panel: “How do you adjust for your whiteness and maleness when you read the Bible?” It was closely related to another question asked by the moderator to the authors: “If you are both Bible-believing Christians, how do you reach such fundamentally different conclusions about a biblical approach to politics?” At the heart of both questions is the problem of hermeneutical “lenses”: none of us reads the Bible “objectively” (we are always particular people in a particular cultural setting, ineradicably influenced in the way we perceive and understanding everything); so is anything we ever say about the Bible “objectively” true? Can it ever be?

I felt for the respondents. Tomes could be (and have been) written on these issues, and they had mere seconds to fire back an answer! Here are a few thoughts that came to me later as I thought about the questions.

First – and this isn’t intended saucily – one might just as well ask, “How do you adjust for your femaleness (or color, or whatever) when you read the Bible?” What this throws into relief is that there are multiple perspectives/lenses in reading the Bible. Why should we interrogate one, but not others?

Once this variety of perspectives has been identified, there are three possible approaches. One is a political approach, which seeks (or assumes) the preeminence of one lens (e.g., female, male, black, white, Latin American) over others. This is power hermeneutics; whether it proceeds from a culture of majority privilege or a culture of minority under-privilege, it is fundamentally about power; it is about imposing one lens on the interpretive community to the subjugation of others.

A second possible approach is the rationalist one, which assumes that we can (theoretically, at least) throw away all the lenses and just read the Bible “objectively.” This Cartesian notion has been shot to death so many times in the last fifty years that I won’t bother doing it again here.

But, of course, we must be careful of an opposite ditch. There is, thirdly, a relativist approach in which (contra rationalism) it is assumed that because none of us is objective, all of our readings of scripture are so biased that none of us can ever say, “Look, that’s absolutely and universally true.” In this approach, whatever objective truth may exist “out there somewhere,” we certainly have no access to it; we have only what we see through our lenses.

Two things, quickly, by way of analysis:

As some of Barth’s disciples (and others) have pointed out, each of these three approaches seems not to take adequate account of the God of the Bible in reading the Bible. God Himself speaks in scripture with divine authority, His Spirit bears witness to the Word, thus every time we come to the Bible we (and all of our lenses) come under divine judgment. The issue is not whether I can get hold of my lenses and, if necessary, throw them off; the simple fact is that God will! He is the key “player” in the hermeneutical process; and He speaks and acts as sovereign Judge. Anyone who does not come to scripture with a humble awareness that he or she is sinfully biased and that God will expose his or her biases and command repentance, is coming to scripture as its lord and judge; and the object of the interpreter’s judgment is no longer the Word of the Lord, but mere text.

Let it be said that this divine judgment on all human interpretation is decidedly applicable in the North American context. Much was made last night of how “American” our reading of the Bible ought to be. I would say that we Americans in particular should come to scripture ready to be judged: the Bible is a Middle Eastern book, the Word took flesh as a Middle Easterner, and we have no idea how much our comfortable lenses will be smashed by the thought-world in which God chose to enculturate His revelation to humankind. If the gospel was an offense to Jews, and foolishness to Greeks, how will it rock the applecart of post-Enlightenment Western culture?

There is a further point I would want to make. When it comes to our biases in reading scripture, we are immeasurably helped by the fact that we are part of a holy catholic church. I was actually amazed that this never came up last evening. I am not permitted to claim a personal monopoly on biblical interpretation, nor is any local church community permitted to claim a monopoly, for the simple reason that we are all part of a worldwide interpretive community that stretches from the days of Jesus right down to the present. If my lenses are judged by the Lord in my reading of His Word, they are also judged by the readings of my brethren, even as their readings are judged by mine. Even those who preach and teach the Word profit from the Berean “judgments” of those who hear them. None of us should ever shy away from the challenge to our reading of scripture that comes from other Christian communions. This is part of the glory of being members of the Body of Christ.

“The grace of the Word of God is not magic. It is promised to the Church that is required and ready to serve it. If it makes strong what men make weak, good what men make evil, pure what men make impure, that does not mean that it does everything where men do simply nothing, where men perhaps do not stand under this requirement and in this readiness. When we have done all that was required of us, we must add that we are unprofitable servants. But if we infer from this that we might equally well allow ourselves to be idle servants, we are not trusting in the grace of the Word of God. When we do trust in it, we stand under the law of the Word of God which is laid upon the Church; we are active in its service (without the presumption of trying to compel its operation, or the folly of trying to see in its presence our own success).” (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.765–66)

“Precisely in order that he may really appropriate what Scripture has to say, the reader and hearer must be willing to transpose the centre of his attention from himself, from the system of his own concerns and questions (even if he thinks he can give them the character of concerns and questions typical of his whole epoch) to the scriptural word itself.  He must allow himself to be lifted out of himself into this word and its concerns and questions. It is only from this that light can ever fall upon his own life, and therewith the help which he needs for his life.” (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.739)

“Is there a worse threat to freedom itself than the establishment of man as his own lord and lawgiver? Who can exercise a worse tyranny over us than the god in our own breast? And what further tyrannies does not this first and decisive one drag in its train? It is inevitable that the man who claims to be directly in communion with God, and free from all concrete forms of authority, will all the more certainly be delivered over to the powers of nature and history, to the spirit of the age and of contemporary movements, to the demons of his situation and environment.” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.668)

“When the Church has suffered seriously, i.e., not from without but inwardly and essentially, it is never because it has lived too much but too little under the Word of Scripture. But the Church has become increasingly strong and self-conscious and bold, and produced heroes and geniuses and benefactors, and been able to establish comfort and hope for all people, not only within but without its walls, and gained genuine respect for itself, even in the world, when it has had a humble mind, and been prepared to live not above or alongside but under the Word. The existence in all ages of a Church which is really alive is therefore a concrete answer to the objection that an acknowledgement of the priority of the Bible in the Church will be detrimental to the living God and a living faith. The very opposite is the truth. Death usually reigns in the Church when it is thought that this acknowledgement should not be made.” (Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.502)

“[The] life of the children of God is always a life for Christ’s sake. The foundation of the Church is also its law and its limit. . . . By its inmost nature the Church is forbidden to want independence of Jesus Christ, or sovereignty in thought or action. If it did, it would relapse into the unjustified and unsanctified nature from which it is withdrawn in Christ. This will always find plenty of means to assert itself in its life. But it cannot want to relapse into it. It is born of the omnipotent Word of grace; it would only die if it were to become or to be anything but the fulfillment of that Word. Grace holds good only where grace rules. The rule of grace which is unfailing where men are God’s children for Christ’s sake, the dependence of these men upon the Word of which they are reborn – this is the reality of the Church . . . . And in the light of it, it is and must be true that extra ecclesiam nulla salus.” (Barth, Church Dogmatics, p. 2.216)