Relocating To Elfland

A recent ABC article reporting on the work of Satoshi Kanazawa has me a tad worked up. The reason, you will shortly discover, is that I am evolutionarily challenged and (understandably) defensive about it.

Bottom line, says Kanazawa, smart people tend to become liberals and atheists (rejecting religious values); and smart men tend to value relational fidelity (adopting family values), while this isn’t necessarily true for smart women (who have always had strong family values, and still do).

Dimwits like me, by contrast, tend to remain stuck in religious values; the males among us also remain “mildly polygamous,” while our females continue to value fidelity as they always have, and as their brighter female counterparts still do.

The data supporting all this is pretty thin, when you get right down to it. About 20,000 kids are interviewed in their teens, and again in their 20s, and lo! the smart ones have become more liberal, more atheistic, and . . . well, things are a bit fuzzier in their family values, because the smart guys are starting to value faithfulness, while the smart girls aren’t appreciably different from the dumb ones – they all want relationships that last. Hmmmm. . . . “The participants were all in their twenties, and ‘the findings from them [says Kanazawa] may or may not generalize to all Americans across generations.” You think??? I wonder what IQ it took to figure that one out.

Something else I don’t get (nota bene: I am not one of the bright ones): all of this is supposedly thrilling in view of evolution. Bright people, i.e., the evolutionarily advanced ones, have this cool capacity for things “evolutionarily novel.” For example, it’s so weird that smart kids eventually become liberals – they actually start to care about other people – because ordinarily in evolution it’s survival of the fitter. Those who remain stuck in uncaring conservatism, now, they make sense; they are evolutionarily predictable.

But (if I may) doesn’t this really change the rules in evolution? I mean, the whole idea of natural selection assumes certain adaptational patterns, most notably that features which make for higher survival and reproduction will gradually prevail over those that don’t. (I didn’t make this up; I got it from Jerry Coyne, who should know.) So is it really evidence of being “smarter” or “better” or “more advanced” that one takes care of other people at great cost to oneself? Couldn’t this be construed as evolutionary regress, or at best an anomaly (read: weird)?

Never mind, though. What really kills me about Kanazawa’s findings is that they are so atrociously sexist (perhaps that needn’t trouble him, being a man of science and all). “Higher intelligence,” we are told, “had no effect on the women’s [family] values.” So what happened here? How come the smart girls don’t have the capacity for evolutionary novelty in their family values? How come they haven’t been able to get beyond predictably faithful to “mildly polygamous,” while their male counterparts are moving from “mildly polygamous” to faithful? If girls are so evolutionarily predictable on this point, doesn’t that mean they are less evolutionarily advanced than the guys? (It can’t be an IQ problem, because we know they are smarter than the dumb girls.) But . . . bear with me here . . . wouldn’t that sort of undermine the whole point of Kanazawa’s findings? Wouldn’t that mean that evolutionary novelty and predictability have precisely nothing to do with one’s IQ?

I’m not bright enough to figure out if I should be insulted by this research. I am definitely bright enough to figure out how insulted I would be if I were a bright girl.

“In greeting creatures in an attitude of admiration and delight, and in seeing them in the light of the incarnate Son who is the direct manifestation of the Father’s beauty, one comes to taste of the Father’s delight in giving expression to his beauty in his eternal Word and in the Spirit’s articulation of all the words that the divine Word comprises.” (David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite, p. 308)

“Footnote to All Prayers”
by C. S. Lewis

He whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskilfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolaters, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.

Take not, O Lord, our literal sense.  Lord, in thy great
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.

The power that gave me sight, the existence of my vision, and the clarity or unclarity of my vision, are not what I am to be looking at. Our Calvinistic doctrine of varying responses to God’s Word, and of the divine reasons for this variance in response, has led us (through our own carelessness) to turn from the Word to fruitless investigation of whether we have responded to it.

A vital question, at the core of Christian faith, is the question, “What is my relationship to God?” This is intimately connected to other questions: e.g., what is my standing before God (addressed by the doctrine of justification), what is my identity before God (addressed by the doctrine of adoption), and what is to be my response to God (addressed by the doctrine of sanctification).

As a pastor in the modern theological climate, I am amazed how difficult it is to persuade God’s people that a sure answer to this central, vital question may be found only in the objective Word of God, the Word of God that comes to us from without. The reason for this difficulty of persuasion in Calvinistic circles, I believe, is that we hold passionately to the biblical truth that faith is a gift of the Holy Spirit. We believe that without the internal (subjective) working of the Spirit, the external (objective) Word of God will simply not save.

This is an enormously important biblical truth. The problem lies in what we do with it. When we want to answer the question, “What is my relationship to God?” we turn, not to the objective Word of God (which comes to us in scripture, preaching, and the sacraments) but to the further question of whether we have experienced the subjective working of the Spirit. Notice what has happened here: the means by which we are brought to certainty has been confused with the ground on which that certainty is (indeed, must be) based. There is a world of difference between saying that one comes to know one’s relationship to God (that we arrive at the certainty of faith) through the work of the Holy Spirit, and saying that one attains to such knowledge and certainty on the basis of the work of the Spirit. Put another way, the objective rock on which faith is built cannot be the subjective work by which one is enabled to perceive and rest upon that rock. In seeking to determine what is our relationship to God, we have turned away from the object (what He says He has done for us) to the subject (what He has done or not done in us). No wonder we have problems with assurance.

Someone will surely counter, “But Paul says the Spirit bears witness in our hearts that we are the children of God.” Right, but the Spirit doesn’t point to this internal witness-bearing as the basis for our faith. Our rebirth and conversion (or lack thereof) is not what the Spirit witnesses to us; He tells us we are children of God by illuminating the revelation of Jesus Christ through Word and sacrament.

So stop trying to find evidence of an internal work of the Spirit, troubled Christian. If you begin here, your search will never yield an answer to your vital question. You are to look to Christ as He is set forth in Word and sacrament; and if your eyes are fixed restingly here, you may be sure it is only because of the illuminating, enlivening work of the Spirit. The Spirit works through Word and sacrament to show you Christ; you are closest to the work of the Spirit when you are closest to Word and sacrament, and you evidence the work of the Spirit most when you are rest in the Christ who comes to you by these means. And if you rest, this too will give assurance of salvation (WCF 18.2), but your resting (or anything else in you) can never be your starting point.

“If Christian revelation, which presupposes the darkness and error of unspiritual humanity, submitted in advance to the judgments of reason, it would by that token contradict itself. It would thereby place itself before a tribunal whose jurisdiction it had first denied. And having once recognized the authority of reason on the level of first principles, it could no longer oppose that authority in the articles of faith.” (Bavinck, p. 1.516)

“Doubt and distrust in the cause we champion renders us powerless in the battle.” (Bavinck, p. 1.515)

“The last year of the nineteenth century began on January 1, 1900. The ‘civilized’ world, less numerate than it thought it was, celebrated the beginning of the twentieth century on that New Year’s Day . . . .” (William Everdell, The First Moderns, p. 159)

I guess the civilized world wasn’t any more “numerate” a hundred years later, when it celebrated the new millennium a year early!

“If Christianity is a religion of redemption in the full and true sense of the word and hence seeks to redeem human beings from all sin, from the errors of the mind as well as the impurity of the heart, as much from the death of the soul as from that of the body, it in the nature of the case cannot subject itself to the criticism of human beings but must subject them to its criticism. The revelation that comes to us in Christ through Scripture in fact takes that position toward us. It does not put itself on a level below us to ask for our approving or disapproving judgment on it but takes a position high above us and insists that we shall believe and obey.” (Bavinck, p. 1.505)

At the risk of shameless name-dropping, one of my dear friends in the world is Hwaen Ch’uqi. This past weekend I was in Hwaen’s company, and we fell to discussing his views on Schoenberg and the modern assault on hierarchy in pitch (I believe he has an article coming out on the subject, so I mustn’t give away too much). His avowedly Trinitarian musings led me back to a recent fascination of mine: the place of music in Christian cosmology.

We all remember the story of Aslan’s singing Narnia into existence in The Magician’s Nephew. Even more impressive, if possible, is the theme of Ilúvatar with which Ainulindalë opens:

“Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of Ilúvatar to a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Ilúvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void. Never since have the Ainur made any music like to this music, though it has been said that a greater still shall be made before Ilúvatar by the choirs of the Ainur and the Children of Ilúvatar after the end of days. Then the themes of Ilúvatar shall be played aright, and take Being in the moment of their utterance, for all shall then understand fully his intent in their part, and each shall know the comprehension of each, and Ilúvatar shall give to their thoughts the secret fire, being well pleased.”

Thus Middle Earth and the deep foundations of its eschatology were laid.

We are not told in the Bible that Yahweh God sang creation into being, but David Bentley Hart, Robert Jenson, Jeremy Begbie, and others have recently shown how creation resounds with the “music” of the Triune life. This is especially so in the lives of His human creatures. Do we grasp, for example, what an astonishing thing occurs any time two people have a conversation? There is between two persons an absolute and inviolable difference, one might even say, distance. “I” am not “you”; the converse is likewise true; yet the interval between us is not one of utter alienation, precisely because God has given us a logos (we call it “language”) to traverse that interval, so that it may be one of consonance, of peace. Were it not for our doctrine of the Trinity, we would be left without a metaphysical ground for this; we would be left with either total difference (and dissonance) on one hand, or a collapse of personal distinctions on the other. How can it be that the logos traverses the distance between us, preserving the rich variety of our difference without isolation or hostility? The Christian answer is that this happens among men precisely because it happens within the God in whose image we are made. And few things express so well as music how an interval can be breathtakingly harmonious, even as the difference remains without which the interval would cease to exist.

How can it be, furthermore, that a hierarchy exists among men – that we are not, manifestly, all created “equal”; that we do not all hold the same station and possess the same gifts – yet this hierarchy can exist without violence (one thinks of a mother holding her infant child)? Again, the metaphysical ground is the personal properties of the Triune God, the order that exists in the relationship of the Persons. And, again, we find the illustration in music. Take a 1/3/5 chord, change it to 3/5/1, and the chord is not the same, even while the notes remain identical. The order of notes matters, it is genuinely significant, which detracts nothing from either the value of each individual note or their consonance when struck together.

Perhaps Yahweh did not sing on the day He when made the heavens and the earth; but the morning stars certainly did (Job 38:7), and they sang their Maker’s theme. They are singing it still.