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Sunday, June 14, 2015

Canon and authority--a common Catholic argument analyzed

One of the strongest Catholic arguments against Protestantism is the challenge, "how do you explain the canon of the New Testament on sola scriptura principles?" At the same time, Catholics often throw away their advantage by silly overstatement. It is nonsense to say, for instance, that "there was no Bible for 300 years," and it is not self-evident that the Church that canonized the Bible was simply identical to the contemporary "Roman Catholic Church," or that accepting the canon automatically means accepting the Catholic understanding of church authority as a whole.

As in so many similar debates, I think that the correct position, and the early Church's position (which is generally, broadly speaking, the same thing), transcends both Protestant and Catholic views, although the Catholic view, properly nuanced, is basically correct.

The legitimate Protestant criticisms of the way Catholics often present their case are:

1. Scripture is defined in formal rather than material terms--as a canon rather than as particular content. That's how you get what sound to Protestant like crazy statements such as "there was no Bible until the fourth century." This means "there was no fully defined, universally accepted, precise canon until the fourth century." (I'd go further and say, "until the sixteenth," if you really want to define it that precisely.) But to many Protestants it seems pretty silly to use the term "Bible" to mean "a fully defined, precise canon." "The Bible" is a name for the material that the Church has recognized to be divinely inspired. Clearly such material existed long before the fourth century.

2. This brings us to the most common complaint, which is that Catholics confuse the recognition of Scripture with the creation of Scripture. The Church acknowledges that God has inspired certain books. The Church does not make them inspired, and thus to many Protestants it seems blasphemous to say such things as "the Church created Scripture." The common Catholic usage here follows on the first point. If "Scripture" means "a list" rather than divinely inspired content, then it makes sense to say that the Church created the list. But again, to many Protestants that seems to miss the point pretty badly and focus on formalities rather than Spirit-inspired content.

3. And finally, there's the question of what we mean by "the Church" when we speak of the Church determining the canon. That's really the fundamental question between Catholics and Protestants, I think. And again, I think the answer is both/and rather than either/or. Protestants are right that the Church is the body of believers, not just the hierarchy. But many of them see no point in a hierarchy at all, and they are wrong. The Church, properly ordered, is led by bishops in apostolic succession in communion with the Bishop of Rome. And obviously the early Church, which discerned that certain books were inspired by God, was so ordered. However, Catholics spoil their excellent case when they insist on the hierarchical nature of the canon-recognition process. The evidence indicates that this process was mostly a matter of reception by particular communities of believers and then a lengthy process of sorting out the differences between various local canonical traditions. Of course bishops, including Rome, played a key role. But Catholics often speak of the process as if all the bishops got together and issued a decree one day, and that's not how it happened.

Now for the major Protestant alternatives, which I think are untenable:

1. Protestants often argue that Scripture is "self-authenticating." This builds on legitimate point 2, of course--the Holy Spirit both inspires Scripture in the first place and witnesses that it is inspired. But clearly this witness speaks to the Church as a whole and not to individuals in isolation. Not recognizing this is perhaps the greatest error of garden-variety American Protestantism. Fortunately, many folks are recognizing this error and moving to a healthier understanding of how Christians hear the Spirit--in community with each other. That being said, I find that many Protestants use the term "self-authenticating" as a magic formula to avoid thinking about the canonical process at all. If you challenge it, you are challenging Scripture somehow. I have trouble explaining this attitude so as to make sense of it, because I don't think it does make sense.

2. Many other Protestants (or sometimes the same Protestants) argue in a more rationalistic fashion that the early Church used certain objective criteria in determining canonicity, such as apostolic authorship. This website is a pretty standard example of that approach. Now obviously there were criteria that the early Church used, but the formal lists one finds on Protestant apologetics websites make the process seem much more cut and dried than it really was. Furthermore, modern scholarship frequently disagrees with the early Church's decision. For instance, the vast majority of scholars think that Peter did not write 2 Peter. Even pretty conservative scholars like Ben Witherington believe that only part of 2 Peter is authentic. Whether you say "2 Peter is authentic and the scholars are just wrong" or "it doesn't matter whether Peter wrote it, because it's inspired by Scripture anyway," clearly some factor is at work other than an objective determination of whether the evidence indicates that Peter wrote it. 
3. A final common objection is that the "early Church" isn't the same thing as the "Roman Catholic Church." This is perhaps particularly common among Anglicans and others less likely to go with the first two approaches. For many moderate Protestants, the judgments of the Church as a whole are to be taken very seriously, while the modern "Roman Catholic Church" is seen as just one among many fragments of the Church. This is the perspective with which I'm most in sympathy, but as Newman showed, it's very naive insofar as it doesn't acknowledge that the early "Catholic Church" was itself one among many contenders. The canon was forged in controversies with Marcionites and Gnostics who had their own rival canons. It wasn't just "the list of books that everyone agreed on."

So to boil the matter down, I think that the attempts of many Protestants to evade the question of Church authority are in vain. Rather, there are two questions that need to be answered on both sides:

a. How is the early Church related to the Church today? Are all Trinitarian Christians its heirs, or just those in communion with Rome, or some other subset of Trinitarian Christianity?

b. Why do we treat the canonical decisions of the early Church differently than other decisions the early Church made?

Note that both of these questions need to be answered by both sides. Catholics can't just assume a simple identity of the Roman Communion with the early Catholic Church. Nor can they simply argue "we should accept everything the early Church accepted," because there were beliefs and practices of the early Church that Catholics don't accept today (like the very harsh attitude to Jews or some of the cultural beliefs about women). But Catholics do have coherent and reasonable answers to these questions.

If Protestants are to have a reasonable answer, it would go (in my opinion) along these lines:

a. All Trinitarian Christians are heirs of the early Catholic Church, not because the early Church was "just everybody" but because the formative doctrinal choices of the early Church were of particular importance and have proved consistently over the centuries to be the right ones. The differences between early Catholics and Marcionites or Arians are fundamental to our identity as Christians in a way that Catholic-Protestant differences aren't. And this is clearly recognized by the Catholic Church today, since "Rome" acknowledges Trinitarian Protestants as baptized brothers and sisters and makes a sharp distinction between them and such groups as the Mormons or the Jehovah's Witnesses.

b. These fundamentally constitutive acts of the early Church include (but are not limited to) the recognition of the core books of the canon. From this perspective, some disagreement about canon is possible where the early Church disagreed. The only point where that disagreement is still alive today is with regard to the "deuterocanonical" books of the OT. For moderate, ecumenical Protestants (such as Anglicans) the question of whether these books are fully canonical is not terribly important. They clearly should be used and treated with honor, but there are some good reasons to question whether they are fully inspired in the way that the books of the Hebrew canon and the NT canon are.

For this argument to work, it needs to be nuanced, I think, by a recognition of the importance of Rome within the broader Church. I am convinced that the bishops of Rome do have a divinely ordained role to play in safeguarding orthodoxy. I am not convinced that everything they condemn is to be condemned, but I am convinced that they have never accepted into the canonical heritage of the Church (I'm using this phrase to mean more than just books, but also defined doctrines, liturgical practices, etc.) something that is fundamentally incompatible with it. This is the main place where I differ from most Anglicans and other ecumenical Protestants, who generally see your Church simply as "the biggest denomination"--an important ecumenical partner because of its size and its links with tradition, but not qualitiatively different from other Christian bodies. That's why I keep trying to convert personally, but my conviction that all Trinitarian Christians are members of the Church keeps pulling me back.

Saturday, May 16, 2015

Greg Boyd's warfare theology part 7--final thoughts

When I began this series, I made it clear that I approached Boyd's theology with a very different attitude to its two major components. I was quite willing to be persuaded of his "warfare theology," which appealed to many intuitions I already had about major themes in Scripture. But I very much wanted to find a way to take warfare theology and leave open theism.

So where do I stand now?

With regard to open theism, Boyd has further confirmed an opinion I had already formed on the basis of my previous reading and conversations with William Hasker. My objection to open theism is not so much that it limits divine power, but that it is insufficiently open to mystery and paradox in the way it speaks of God. Both Hasker and Boyd have made an excellent case that "simple foreknowledge" offers no substantial advantage over open theism in terms of God's providential care. Middle knowledge or Thomist "knowledge-by-causation" do. But if both those options are rejected, then open theism does nothing further to limit God's power. If God only knows what will happen, and does not cause free choices to occur, then God's way of dealing with human beings is no different than it would be under open theism. (I understand that there are counter-arguments to this, and perhaps I will be persuaded when I read them. But I have to go on what I see at present, since I can't read everything there is to be read.)

My primary objection to open theism has been, and remains, that it makes God too "anthropomorphic." I have no reason to believe that a being of the kind described by open theism exists. That is to say, the rational reasons for believing in God point to a reality that surpasses the power of our minds to understand or our language to describe. Open theists generally reject this traditional "apophatic" picture of God as a piece of mystification overly influenced by Greek philosophy. (It isn't, in fact, the way the pagan Greeks thought about God, but that's a separate dispute.) If this transcendent, mysterious, ultimately indescribable reality does not exist, then it seems unlikely that some lesser, more comprehensible being exists who created the universe and is worthy of worship.

It's important to be clear here: I'm not saying that open theists don't worship the true God. We all have inadequate ideas about God--that's the point of the apophatic view I just described. And insofar as I think their views are inadequate, they are "inadequate" because of very real and genuine concerns on their part, including a desire to be faithful to the Biblical (particularly OT) picture of God, which is thoroughly relational and usually anthropomorphic. A dispute about how we describe God philosophically is not the same thing as a fundamental disagreement about the object of our worship. But it's still an important dispute, and I'm not convinced that the open theists are on the right side.

Ironically, I find the theology of Tom Oord (who has been on my mind quite a bit recently because of his university's botched and reprehensible attempt to fire him for "budgetary reasons") more convincing in this regard than that of more orthodox open theists like Boyd, Hasker, and Sanders. Oord argues from a conception of God's nature which stands as an alternative (a powerful alternative, though I'm not convinced by it) to more classic formulations. But now that I've read some Boyd, I need to read some Oord (I know his work from blog posts and conference talks, which isn't a good way to understand someone's ideas in depth).

But I also find Boyd's theology more appealing than that of Sanders and Hasker for the reasons I gave in my first post. Boyd's open theism is tied up with his commitment to what I acknowledge to be a thoroughly Biblical picture of God as a warrior against the forces of evil. Yet my attraction to "warfare theology" isn't enough to overcome my misgivings about the overly anthropomorphic picture of God that Boyd shares with Sanders and Hasker.

Furthermore, while I find the broad outlines of warfare theology compelling, I have some serious problems with several aspects of it, which are related to my problems with open theism.

In the first place, Boyd sets up what I think is an untenable dichotomy between "warfare theology" and traditional "blueprint theology," instead of accepting that we may need to hold both in tension. Boyd blames "blueprint theology" for the Church's frequent inability to make a difference in the world. As he sees it, Christians accept that evil is the result of God's providential plan and thus are not motivated to fight it. Evil becomes an intellectual problem to be solved rather than an enemy to overcome. This is a powerful critique and undoubtedly has some basis. Certainly we need a shift in understanding to a more vigorous, unabashed affirmation of God's opposition to evil, and this will involve rethinking what we mean by divine omnipotence to some degree. God's omnipotence is shown above all in Jesus' victory over the powers of darkness on the Cross. Everything must start there.

But historically, Boyd is just wrong in claiming that a traditional view of providence has been consistently and inevitably stultifying to Christian efforts to oppose evil. He cites Cowper's famous "God Moves in a Mysterious Way" as an example of piety shaped by blueprint theology. This is a very poor example for his argument, because Cowper was a strong abolitionist and had close ties to the people responsible for ending British participation in the slave trade--one of the more striking examples of Christians making a clear positive difference in history. For Cowper and other evangelical Calvinists of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, trust in God's providence was energizing, not enervating. Boyd sets up a straw man and sweepingly condemns the historic Christian faith in God's inscrutable ways, a faith which has frequently _inspired_ just the kind of radical resistance to the powers of evil that Boyd calls for. Boyd thus falls into the common trap of blaming all the ills of Christian history on a theology he disagrees with, and promising that if we jettison that theology for theology he approves of we will be able to turn things around. This is a harsh way to put it--Boyd's motives are commendable and his passion for justice is a great gift to the Church. But the typical open theist distaste for mystery and paradox causes him to oversimplify the case and set up traditional Christian providentialism as the enemy instead of offering a more modest corrective.

If God exists at all, any true description of God is going to be paradoxical and contain apparently incongruous elements. Any attempt to eliminate paradox impoverishes our view of God.  Christians have, historically, used warfare language alongside "blueprint" language in varying ways and to varying degrees. Boyd makes an excellent case for shifting our emphasis. The popular, semi-Christian belief prevalent in our culture, especially among the poor, is blueprint theology. Most people believe in a God who plans and governs everything, and when a loved one dies they interpret this as God's inscrutable decision to "take" the person. The message that God is on the side of life against death and has defeated the forces of evil on the Cross has not been clearly heard. This needs to be reversed. Rather than speaking as if God were the Master Controller in the sky who in some inscrutable way still opposes the evil that he ordains, we should speak of God as the one who fights against the evil his creatures freely do, while acknowledging that in some inscrutable way God is in control and that even evil, in the end, works toward the ends God has ordained.

Boyd, of course, affirms that God is ultimately in control and that God has freely chosen to allow creation "room" to exercise freedom. And this leads to my second major problem with his "warfare theodicy" as well as with the open theism that underlies it. In Boyd's account, God is still ultimately responsible for evil. If, as Boyd claims, God knows exactly what the probabilities are for any possible world God chooses to create, then God knew that the world we live in was possible. Boyd deals with this by suggesting that a situation as bad as ours had a relatively low probability of happening. In other words, instead of living in the best of all possible worlds, we live in something very close to the worst. God, essentially, took a bet and lost.

Of course, for Boyd this doesn't mean that God loses control or gives up. But it does force Boyd into a dilemma. Logically, either God would have made the creative choices he did if he knew how it would all turn out, or he wouldn't have. In the former case, we are back with the difficulty Boyd seeks to escape. In the second--if God really regrets creating the world, as Boyd's literal reading of Gen. 6 suggests--then we live in a kind of cosmic mistake. God loves us, but not so much that he would still have created us if he had known what terrible evil some of us would do and suffer.

And that is why, in the end, I think Boyd's effort to create an alternative to traditional "blueprint theology" fails. But his picture of God as a warrior against evil, and his rejection of any view that leads us to be complacent with evil, is clearly correct. As with other open theists I've read, Boyd seems to me to pose overly sharp dichotomies and tell me that I must choose one of them. I refuse to do so, even if that means that my answer to the difficult questions Boyd raises has to be, "I'm still wrestling."

Sunday, April 19, 2015

Letter to the board of trustees of Northwest Nazarene University with regard to the firing of Tom Oord

I did not originally intend this as an open letter, but my wife urged me to publish it on the grounds that some of what I say here about issues in contemporary evangelical higher education is worth saying publicly. And I tend to trust her judgment on that sort of thing.

Background for those who don't already know: recently a tenured theology professor at Northwest Nazarene, Tom Oord, was suddenly laid off, allegedly for budgetary reasons. Since the president of the university had tried to get rid of him before, and since he was both a very prestigious and a very controversial member of the faculty, the claim that this was a purely financial decision didn't hold water. Most recently, the layoff has been put on hold while the board reviews the president's decision (though I didn't know that when I wrote the letter).

Dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

I take the liberty of writing to you because of my deep concern about the recent removal of Tom Oord, and the broader pattern of craven, worldly pragmatism cloaked in piety that is rotting away the heart of evangelical higher education.

Unlike many of the people you are hearing from about this matter, I have no connection with NNU and no direct connection with the Church of the Nazarene. I come from a radical Holiness background (in fact my grandparents grew up in a church where "Nazarene religion" was a pejorative synonym for a compromising, watered-down version of Holiness teaching) but have been Episcopalian since 1998. 

What I have to say to you on this matter comes from my own bitter experience at another evangelical institution of higher learning, Huntington University. I taught for six years at Huntington , arriving in the wake of the firing of John Sanders in 2006. I lost my own job in 2012 for genuinely financial reasons (I was an untenured assistant professor and the generalist in the department, so unlike Oord, I was the logical person to lay off), and the questions concerning presidential leadership and the relationship between Board, faculty, and administration raised in the context of that budgetary controversy were very similar to those that you are currently considering. 

It is my belief, however, that the roots of the problems faced by HU in 2011-12 lay in the removal of John Sanders in 2005-6, and the broader pattern of poor decisions of which the firing of Sanders was the most egregious example. Institutions of higher learning in the United States are facing tough financial and strategic decisions, and more and more are compromising traditional liberal arts education in the name of pragmatism. In the case of evangelicals, however, there is a further factor at work--the intense pressure exerted on university administrations by conservative donors, alumni, pastors, and parents who object to any ideas being taught at "their" institution which violate their particular understanding of Christian orthodoxy. Those who call for the removal of "heretical" faculty are generally themselves deeply sincere Christians, and I respect their piety even when I disagree with their views and their methods. However, the pressure exerted by these sincere believers for godly (if in my opinion misguided) reasons interacts with the broader institutional culture of pragmatism in deeply toxic ways which risk destroying the intellectual and spiritual integrity of American evangelical higher education.

In the case of Sanders, intense pressure by conservative Christians hostile to Sanders' open theism and inclusivism led (allegedly) to a decline in enrollment. Since HU's growth plan was (disastrously) based almost entirely on a steady increase in enrollment, anything that hurt recruitment among evangelical youth was seen as hurting the institution. That pragmatic consideration was, as far as I could discern from speaking to the people involved, the primary reason for the removal of Sanders. As a result, all faculty at HU (including myself) worked in the knowledge that the institution had no genuine commitment either to academic freedom or to doctrinal principles. Any faculty member who awakened controversy would be seen as expendable, even if the administration had no problem with his or her theology. 

I understand that Tom Oord's theology has been examined by authorities within the Church of the Nazarene and found to be compatible with the doctrinal commitments of the denomination. If the CotN had decided otherwise, it would of course not be my place as an outsider to protest. But I do protest with all my heart against the transparent pretext that Oord has been fired for merely financial reasons. Given his stature in his field and (if I am not mistaken) his excellent teaching evaluations, the claim that he was the most expendable member of the department is simply not believable, unless his controversial status is taken into account. No coherent account of why this decision was made has emerged from the administration, as far as I'm aware.

If you allow this decision to stand, you are putting your seal of approval on injustice and corruption. If you ask President Alexander to resign, but also do not reinstate Dr. Oord, then you have not solved the real problem. the real problem is not the poor leadership of one president (I know very little about Dr. Alexander and bear him no malice) but the broader pattern, going far beyond Dr. Alexander or any one institution, of which this reprehensible incident is simply the most recent example. If you are going to have a liberal arts college at all, then you must stand by the academic freedom of your faculty up to the point at which they are officially found by competent church authorities to have violated the basic principles of the Church of the Nazarene. The removal of faculty based on a fear of negative financial consequences resulting from controversy obviously undercuts the intellectual integrity of your institution. But it also compromises the university's claims to uphold Scriptural holiness.

Holiness requires truth. It may be holy, it may be loving, sometimes to remove heretics from positions of authority. It can never in any way be holy or just to remove a man who has been found innocent of heresy simply because his ideas are controversial.

I pray that whatever decision you make in the coming days will be made not in the spirit of worldly calculation but in a manner that you will be able to defend before the Judgment Seat of Christ.

Your brother in Christ,

Edwin Woodruff Tait

Tuesday, April 14, 2015

Greg Boyd's warfare theology part 6--how it all fits together

Boyd's "warfare theology" is a comprehensive account of how God relates to the world in providence and salvation, from creation to the final consummation. Having looked at parts of this theology over the previous several posts, we're now in a position to examine how it all comes together. And in doing so, I want to highlight several parts of Boyd's theology that don't come under the previous headings, particularly his eschatology (which is one of my favorite parts of his work).

Boyd's fundamental starting point is that God respects creaturely freedom. Creation, for Boyd, involves God giving creatures a space in which to exercise a certain degree of autonomy. It is central to freedom, as Boyd sees it, that this decision be irrevocable. God can't say "sorry, you are messing up and so I will step in and take away your freedom." At the same time, freedom has a limit--eventually the created being will have worked out the potential for good and evil inherent in its creation, and will face judgment for how it has used the power God gave it. This power affects not only the creature itself but other beings, to a greater and lesser extent depending on the power of the being in question (very great in the case of Satan, for instance).

Boyd supports this high valuation of creaturely freedom by appealing to quantum mechanics and chaos theory. I'm not in a position to evaluate this part of his work scientifically, or even philosophically. But for Boyd, order emerges out of the chaos of myriad beings (or even just quantum particles) interacting with each other. God is in "control" in the sense that God rides the wave of created freedom, guiding it without ever determining the actions of individuals. God moves creation infallibly toward the final goal of union with Himself in peace and love, but God shows his sovereignty precisely by accomplishing this goal through (rather than against) the freedom of His creatures.

God's providence, then, takes the form of responding to the free actions of created beings, sometimes in anger and sorrow, but always with an ultimate purpose of mercy and redemption. Boyd suggests that there have been moments in the history of the universe when creation became so messed up that God had to create the opportunity for a new start through a cataclysmic act of judgment. Boyd speculates that the destruction of the dinosaurs and the creation of the world described in Genesis 1 (recall his interest in the "gap theory") was one such moment. Another, more clearly recorded in Scripture, would be the Flood. God's "regret that he made humanity," while genuine, is not the final word. God always finds a way to respond graciously to the destructive behavior of creation, setting the stage for a new act in the drama of created freedom.

Eventually, however, the misuse of freedom will end. Reality will catch up to those who have tried in vain to create a reality of their own. Following C. S. Lewis and Jerry Walls, Boyd understands hell as a self-imposed punishment, a prison to which people condemn themselves. But following on some hints in Lewis (quite differently from Walls), Boyd suggests that this false reality is, in fact, a kind of nothingness. I don't see this as outright annihilationism, but Boyd certainly approaches annihilationism (and I understand that he may have embraced it more explicitly in recent years). He uses the concept of relativity, again, to suggest that the damned lock themselves into a "now" that is somehow separated from God's "now" and thus left behind. Hence, from the standpoint of God and the redeemed, they no longer exist. (I may be getting this part wrong--it was pretty complex and my slow progress on these blogs has meant that it's now quite a long time ago that I read the book.)

Boyd's entire theology, then, is structured around a progression from an initial good creation rooted in the gift of freedom to a final consummation in which those who have insisted on misusing their freedom will be locked into the false reality they have created, and those who have opened themselves to God's love will rejoice with God in a world from which evil has been banished. His open theism and "warfare theology" are key parts of this vision, but it's important to understand them in their broader context within the compelling drama of salvation that Boyd outlines in these two books. In my final blog post in this series (yes, the series will finally end with the perfect number of seven), I will summarize my own reactions to Boyd's theology as found in God at War and Satan and the Problem of Evil.

Sunday, March 15, 2015

Greg Boyd's warfare theology part 5--open theism

As I said in my first post in this series, my knowledge of open theism before reading Boyd was primarily dependent on the work of John Sanders and William Hasker (also David Woodruff and Tom Oord). I respect Sanders' work very much but did not find his presuppositions with regard to open theism convincing. Hasker held my feet to the fire on a number of points of logic in very helpful and challenging ways, but again I found his understanding of God to be on the whole too anthropomorphic and not sufficiently open to mystery. I have been intrigued by Boyd for years precisely because he links open theism with a "warfare theology" that I find intriguing and appealing in principle. Hence my desire to read his work in more depth and understand just what he means by warfare theology and how it relates to his open theism. I have spent three posts laying out warfare theology without bringing in open theism precisely because open theism is, for me, the most clearly problematic aspect of Boyd's thought. If I can take his insights on warfare theology and leave the open theism, I'll be happy to do so.

I think the relationship between warfare theology and open theism in Boyd's thought is best described by analogy with Richard Dawkins' famous remark about atheism and evolution: that evolution does not require atheism or prove it but makes it possible to be an "intellectually fulfilled atheist." In the same way, I think, open theism makes it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled warfare theologian. (And just as one can certainly be an evolutionist without being an atheist, so one can certainly be an open theist without being a warfare theologian. Hasker's theodicy, for instance, does not appeal to a warfare model.) One can, Boyd argues, hold to warfare theology without adopting open theism, but there are various awkward questions one has to answer. Open theism is the philosophical position best suited to warfare theology. Hence, if Boyd's description of the Bible's stance on God's war with evil is correct, open theism becomes more appealing.

Boyd, like other contemporary authors who have written about this issue, distinguishes between three basic explanations of God's "exhaustive foreknowledge" (i.e., knowledge of everything that has happened or will happen).

1. The Thomist (or Augustinian, or Calvinist) position that God knows things by causing them. Open theists tend to roll Thomism, Calvinism, and other forms of Augustinianism together. It's a bit more complicated than that. Thomists deny that God causes evil, because (like other traditional Christian theologians) they deny that evil is a thing. Evil is a privation--a lack of a good that ought to be in something God has created. Calvinism is really a theological position, not a philosophical one. Some Calvinists are more thoroughgoing determinists than Thomists are. Some are essentially Thomists. Some hold to some other slightly different way of reconciling God's sovereignty and human freedom. At least one prominent modern Calvinist philosopher, Alvin Plantinga, is a Molinist. At any rate, for the purposes of this discussion I'll use the term "Thomist" for the relatively more "deterministic" end of the spectrum (though of course Thomists deny that they are determinists). That is to say, Thomists explain how God knows things by saying that God knows everything as an imitation of his own infinite perfection. God knows possible things as possible reflections of his goodness, and he knows the specific things he creates by knowing the specific ways in which he eternally chooses to have those specific creatures reflect the divine perfection. Aquinas deals with the question of God's knowledge of free acts by saying that God knows things in the mode in which they exist. So if we choose freely, God knows us choosing freely. Later Thomists have tried to deal with the complexities of this, and I'm not very familiar with these discussions. But obviously open theists find this explanation, however nuanced, less than satisfactory, particularly when combined with the claim that God knows things precisely by virtue of causing them. If God knows my action by virtue of causing it, and knows it timelessly with absolute certainty (more on timeless knowledge in a minute), then what does it mean to assert that the action is free? Furthermore, for Boyd Thomism is a classic embodiment of "blueprint theology," and he clearly assumes that it is simply incompatible with a warfare perspective. Hence, Boyd does not deal with Thomism in much detail in Satan and the Problem of Evil. Rather, he focuses on the views that hold more potential for compatibility with warfare theology.

2. Chief among these is Molinism. This was proposed in the late sixteenth century by a Jesuit theologian, Luis de Molina, as an interpretation and development of Aquinas' thought. The Dominicans rejected Molina's view (and clearly he does disagree with Aquinas on some significant points), and formulated the developed "Thomist" position in opposition to it. Molina's innovation was to suggest that God knows not only what is possible and what actually exists, but also what would exist if certain other things came to be. (This is called "middle knowledge," because it's in between God's knowledge of what is and God's knowledge of what is merely possible.) The classic Biblical example cited by Molinists is 1 Samuel 23. David saves a city called Keilah from the Philistines, and Saul promptly gets an expedition together to attack the city and capture David. David asks God whether Saul will attack, to which God responds "yes." Then David asks whether the people of Keilah will hand David over, and again God responds "yes." Now in my opinion this isn't anything like a conclusive. It can be explained in terms of God's knowledge of the human heart--the people of Keilah actively intend to hand David over if Saul shows up, or perhaps they are simply people of such a character that God knows they will hand him over (this is Boyd's explanation). But it's a good example of what Molinists are talking about when they speak of middle knowledge. Since David skedaddles before Saul gets there, there is no "future" event for God to know. But at the same time, the betrayal of David by the people of Keilah isn't just one among many possibilities God sees--it is a fact about what would have happened.

Philosophically, the classic problem with Molinism is the so-called "grounding objection." At this point, we're getting into philosophical waters that are a bit deep for me, but as I understand it the grounding objection means that it's not clear just what it is God knows when God knows "what would have happened." The men of Keilah never actually chose to betray David. On Molinist principles, they wouldn't even have had to think about what they would do if Saul attacked for God to know that they would betray David under those circumstances. Indeed, according to Molinism God knows "what would have happened" from all eternity. His knowledge is logically prior (i.e., not dependent on) anything human beings do. So what is the basis for this knowledge? It isn't God's decree. It isn't a choice that a creature actually makes which God can see/foresee. What exactly, then, is God knowing?

A second objection, related to the first I think, is that Molinism actually is deterministic, though it's trying to avoid determinism. To say that there is a fact about what I would do under circumstances X seems (at least to me) to imply that my actions are determined by their circumstances. I do not have "libertarian freedom" with regard to possible circumstances if there is only one thing that I would do under those circumstances. But perhaps I just don't get it. The issues surrounding Molinism are extremely complex, and while I have become much more dubious about the theory than I used to be, I'm not in a position to have a firm view one way or the other.

3. The third and often least understood possibility is "simple foreknowledge." Now on the face of it this is apparently what a lot of people believe. People speak all the time about God knowing things or foreknowing them, whereas middle knowledge is a rather abstruse philosophical concept. But I think most theists are implicit Molinists--I certainly was. Once the concept of middle knowledge is explained, it makes intuitive sense. If God knows everything, wouldn't God know what "would have happened"? Only on a bit more thought do the problems with middle knowledge appear (and perhaps--or at least so say the partisans of middle knowledge--with a bit more thought they disappear again!). In simple foreknowledge, on the other hand, God only knows things that actually happen. Those are the only things there are to know. There is no truth or falsehood about the statement, "Edwin would accept a job at Harvard if it were offered to him" or the statement "Ted Cruz would start a nuclear war if elected president." There may be things about me or Ted Cruz that would make it likely or even morally certain that we would or wouldn't do these things, and in all the views I'm discussing (including open theism) God would know these things perfectly. But the only things God actually "sees" are the things that actually happen, at whatever point in the timeline of creation they happen.

Open theists tend to think that this view, like all the "exhaustive foreknowledge" positions, is incompatible with free will. But a further objection to this one is that it does nothing at all to explain divine providence. In middle knowledge, God might know that Herod will kill baby Jesus if God does not send an angel to tell Joseph to flee to Egypt. So God sends the angel. But under simple foreknowledge, God knows only that He will send the angel and that the Holy Family will flee. He knows eternally that this is what happens. Thus, this knowledge can't guide Him in knowing what needs to be done to prevent Herod from killing Jesus. I have been informed that there are responses to this objection, but I have not yet read them. At this point, it seems to me that simple foreknowledge is primarily about the nature of God and says little about how God actually exercises providence.

A fourth position really isn't an alternative to the previous three, but has traditionally been assumed by adherents of all of them. That is "timeless knowledge"--the view that God exists in an eternal "now" and thus knows everything that has been, is, or will be as if it were present. Many modern philosophers have abandoned this position while still arguing for some form of "exhaustive divine foreknowledge." Thus, open theists such as Boyd frequently seem to treat timeless knowledge as an extra add-on--a view that proponents of exhaustive foreknowledge may hold but which if so will put extra burdens on their position.

My own view, on the other hand, is that God's timelessness is the key issue. If God moves through time much as we do, then the open theist position is likely to be correct. I think that open theists have good arguments explaining why, setting God's timelessness aside, it is not necessary to believe that God knows the future exhaustively. Indeed, if God exists in time, it seems to me to follow almost necessarily that the future does not exist to be known. The only reason to believe the future is real is that God is, so to speak, already there.

Boyd's philosophical arguments for open theism rest on a reworking of Molinism. Boyd argues that just as God knows the truth of all statements about what is or is not (the basic definition of omniscience), and of all statements about what would or would not be (the Molinist "middle knowledge"), so God knows the truth of "might/might not" statements. In other words, some things exist, and God knows them as existing. Other things would exist if certain conditions were fulfilled, and God knows those things as conditionally real. But other things exist only as possibilities depending on the choices of free beings. God perfectly knows just how probable these things are, because that is all there is to know until the choice is made one way or the other. Again, if divine timelessness is untrue, then these arguments are quite convincing. And if divine timelessness is true, but "simple foreknowledge" best describes how God's knowledge relates to God's providence, then for all practical purposes the open theists are right about how Providence operates, even though they are wrong about the nature of God's knowledge.

One modern scientific theory that is sometimes invoked (by Larry Wood, for instance) to support the traditional view of God's timeless knowledge is Einstein's theory of relativity. Does it not appear to demonstrate that time is just a dimension of reality, and thus that the future is real? William Hasker's response to this is to argue that Einstein's theory requires total determinism--a "block theory of time" in which the future is unchangeable because it's just as real as the present. Hasker thus appeals to believe that Einstein is basically wrong about this, although I don't claim to understand either Hasker or Einstein very well. Certainly open theists have a natural affinity for quantum physics (I'll deal with that in the next post). Boyd, however, takes a different tack from Hasker, appealing to Einstein to support his position. Boyd argues that God has a "now" that includes the "now" of every creature, even though their "nows" may not entirely coincide with each other. I would argue, on the other hand, that God's "now" includes every moment of every creature's life, and that Boyd's use of Einstein actually works better to defend that position. (Though certainly we then run into Hasker's determinism objections. . . . )

Biblically, open theists generally seem to think they have a very strong case. Sanders rests his case very largely on the alleged more "Biblical" nature of open theism compared to the Greek philosophy underlying classical theism, and Boyd follows suit. Like Sanders, Boyd points to the many passages from the Bible speaking of God changing his mind or seeking to learn something he did not already know. One obvious, traditional objection to this reading is that this language is anthropomorphic. Boyd, like Sanders, leans heavily on evangelical worries about playing fast and loose with Scripture through non-literal readings. According to the open theists, Christians have been taught to read this language non-literally because of presuppositions borrowed from Greek philosophy. Sanders acknowledges that, in fact, all theological language about God is in some sense metaphorical. Boyd, on the other hand, seems to interpret the language in a more consistently literal way (perhaps I misunderstand him). For instance, while all open theists rest a lot of weight on passages such as Genesis 6:6 which say that God changed his mind, Boyd works this concept (and particularly Genesis 6:6) into his overall theodicy. Boyd seems to believe that God really did regret making humanity and really did initiate a horrific cataclysm that wiped out most of the world, allowing God to start over again. Similarly, as we've seen, Boyd argues that God may have done something similar before the creation of humans, in response to the fall of the demons (the "Gap Theory").

My objection to Sanders' appeal to a more "literal" reading of the God-changed-his-mind passages has always been that Sanders doesn't actually seem to want to take the context of these passages very seriously. Do open theists really want a picture of God in which God actually decides to wipe out the chosen people in his anger (Exodus 32:9-10, for instance) and then changes his mind because of Moses' intercession? It has seemed to me that open theists want to abstract the picture of "God changing his mind" from the actual instances in which God does so in Scripture, and that in fact the traditional understanding of the language as anthropomorphic metaphor is therefore a lot more defensible than the supposedly more "faithful" open theist interpretation.

Boyd, on the other hand, does seem to take the contexts for these passages very seriously. But I still wonder whether a "literal" reading of such language is actually sustainable. What does it mean to say that God really regretted having made humanity? Doesn't that, in fact, contradict Boyd's claim that God knows all the odds and is never taken by surprise (more on that later)? And what does it say about God's relationship to those of us who live after the Flood? Does he still think we shouldn't exist? Or has he changed his mind again?

In short, I remain unconvinced that this language should be read as indicating a real change of mind on God's part, and thus unconvinced that it makes a solid case for open theism.

Furthermore, it is striking that the passages Boyd relies on come (I believe exclusively) from the Old Testament. I think Boyd has become aware of this problem more recently, since in a tweet some months ago he appealed to Jesus' prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane to support open theism. If Jesus is God, and Jesus didn't know for sure if he had to go through with dying on the Cross, then that's an indication that the future is open for God. I don't think that this argument holds up Christologically (it seems to me quite clear that Jesus was there speaking as a human being, and I hold a fairly "kenotic" Christology), but it does represent a move toward finding more explicit NT support for the position.

I think that this point often goes without much notice because the most vehement opponents of open theism are Calvinists, who have a very robust view of the authority of the OT. But if, in fact, it's true (as I believe) that the NT does not support open theism in the ways that the OT often does, then I think that's a serious blow against the open theist case for two reasons. First because, according to most forms of historic Christianity, the NT has doctrinal priority over the Old and is the key to interpreting the Old. (I got into an argument about this recently in which a good friend who is an OT scholar accused me of Marcionism, and I hope to write a post sometime soon that defends against this accusation, but this isn't the place for that.) But furthermore, if your argument is that post-Biblical Christians came to believe in divine unchangeability and exhaustive divine foreknowledge because of the influence of Greek philosophy, you have to deal with the fact that the Greek-speaking authors of the NT appear already to have been "corrupted."

On the whole, I find Boyd's philosophical arguments more convincing than his Scriptural ones. Together with Sanders and Hasker, Boyd has convinced me, at least tentatively, that open theism can support a robust doctrine of providence. (More on that in the next two posts.) It does not seem to me that a non-determinist version of timeless knowledge actually provides any significant advantages in accounting for God's providential actions in the world. Indeed, Boyd argues persuasively throughout the two books that an "open" view of providence accounts best for the Scriptural descriptions of God fighting evil, and gives us more hope than does the view that God has everything under total control. However, I still find the open theist arguments too reductionistic and anthropomorphic. And I do not find Boyd's arguments from Scripture convincing for this reason, although it may well be that the Scriptural language about God changing his mind speaks to a powerful mystery that our traditional understanding of God fails to grasp.

Monday, February 02, 2015

The Two Messengers

Perhaps to the clear-eyed angel
There was nothing in the word he brought but glory:
Infinite splendor in a point of flesh,
Bursting, breaking through the veil of blood and mucus,
Passing through a narrow gate
To fill creation with redoubled light.

Only the old man, his rheumy eyes
Blurred with false hopes,
Back scarred by Roman rods,
Feet hard with trudging up the stony hill
To watch the heroes die,
Only he, perhaps, could taste in his body the sourness of the sweet word,
Could see the sword quivering in the stainless heart,
And know in what bitter way the glory comes.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

Greg Boyd's warfare theology part 4--the "blueprint model"

Boyd's antagonist throughout his two volumes of "warfare theology" is something he calls the "blueprint model" or "the myth of the blueprint." This view of Divine providence, according to Boyd, became prominent with Augustine, replacing the "warfare model" which had prevailed in the first three centuries of the Church's history. In "blueprint theology," God ordains in some way everything that happens. This may take Calvinist or Arminian forms, may use the language of "permission" rather than saying that God directly causes everything. For Boyd (a point where he ironically agrees with Calvin) this doesn't make a lot of difference. If God's will is seen as the ultimate reason why everything (including evil) is the way it is, then we have "blueprint theology."

Boyd acknowledges the comfort this confidence that "God's is in charge" brings to believers. But he believes this comfort to be an illusion. He drives this point home in several places throughout the two books by means of harrowing examples. The first, from which Boyd names the first chapter of God at War, is the horrifying story of a girl named Zosia whose eyes were ripped out by Nazi soldiers. The second example is the story of a young woman who was raped as a child and who, as a college student, continued to struggle to find "God's purpose" in what had happened to her. The third is the story of a couple whose two children contracted a rare genetic disease that caused them to degenerate physically and mentally, eventually dying horribly and leaving the parents' marriage and faith utterly shattered.

Boyd argues that terrible things like this--and any of us could easily come up with dozens more examples--are not best explained by some hidden providential purpose of God. Their ultimate explanation--the only explanation possible or necessary for the specific event--is that fallen beings (human or demonic) abused their freedom in ways that led to these tragedies. God does use evil to bring forth good, but God does this by fighting against evil, not by choosing sovereignly to permit it to happen for a higher purpose. God's response to evil produces good, but the evil itself is not part of a "higher plan."

This distinction is, perhaps, just as subtle and tricky to make as the one Boyd rejects between God actively causing evil and choosing to permit it. Furthermore, God does still choose to permit evil in the sense that God chose to create a world of free creatures knowing every possibility and indeed every probability. (More on this in the next post, on open theism.) Boyd has to admit, then, that on his theory our universe has had some pretty bad "luck" in terms of the choices made by free creatures, choices God (in Boyd's view) hoped the creatures would not make. Thus, Boyd does not entirely "get God off the hook." Instead of a blueprint, Boyd paints a picture of a chaotic universe in which God allows millions of free agents to make free choices in ways that interact with each other (and with God's choices, and with the behavior of non-sentient creation) in a dance of infinite complexity. And yet, this chaotic universe still has a kind of pattern, a pattern willed by God, and for the sake of which God is willing to risk the very real possibility of horrific tragedy. In that sense, then, the differences between Boyd's view and the "blueprint" theory are somewhat less than Boyd admits.

Boyd argues that the "blueprint" has radically warped our understanding of God's relationship to evil. Instead of fighting evil, we seek to understand it as an intellectual "problem." Boyd points to hymns enjoining humble submission to God's loving providence as poisonous fruit of the "blueprint myth." He points, for instance, to William Cowper's "God moves in a mysterious way," with its famous lines
Judge not the Lord by feeble sense,
But trust him for his grace;
Behind a frowning providence
He hides a smiling face.
 This is a particularly infelicitous example for Boyd's argument. William Cowper, who wrote it, was a passionate opponent of slavery and a close friend and colleague of John Newton, one of the major figures behind the abolition of the slave trade in the British Empire. And there are plenty more examples of Christians whose confidence in God's sovereignty and providential care empowered their efforts to change the world.

The narrative "Christians have made X theological mistake, which has led to all the problems of Christian history, but I will correct the mistake and then everything will be great" is a deeply tempting one. On this particular issue, I'm particularly tempted by it, because clearly Christians have a huge intellectual problem explaining evil in traditional terms. And clearly this problem is linked to the broader problem of how we understand power, how we think of God's power, and how we exercise power as Christians on earth in the service of righteousness. But the temptation to place our hopes for the future effectiveness and purity of the Christian faith in a particular theological "tweak" must, I think, be resisted. That is not to say that the tweak may not be a good and much-needed one. But we will probably find some way of compromising with the powers of the world no matter what our theology. We can only try to make it as hard for ourselves as possible.

Historically, is Boyd right to blame Augustine for the shift to "blueprint theology"? I expect that he will flesh out his argument more fully when he finally comes out with the third volume in his trilogy, The Myth of the Blueprint. Elaine Pagels makes a related argument in her Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. She contrasts pre-Augustinian theologians such as Justin Martyr, for whom Christianity was a message of freedom, with Augustine's conviction that human depravity needed continual repression and correction by coercive authorities in both church and state. Clearly there is a contrast between the theology of figures like Irenaeus and Justin Martyr and that of Augustine. How much of it is Greek/Latin and how much is due to Augustine's influence or other historical shifts within Western theology is open to debate, I think, since figures like Tertullian and Cyprian don't quite fit with either Augustine or with the Greeks. And far too much often gets blamed on Augustine (for instance, penal substitution is often linked to him even though his atonement theology is actually primarily "ransom"). But I think Boyd is on to something in arguing that the second-century apologists were much more willing to ascribe real agency to created beings, human and angelic/demonic, while Augustine's theology seeks to explain everything in terms of the divine will. However, Augustine does not in fact say that evil has its origin in the divine plan. For Augustine, God uses evil and sovereignly chooses to permit it, but Augustine explicitly ascribes the origins of evil to a defective will falling away from the divine goodness. William S. Babcock has argued ("Augustine on Sin and Moral Agency" in The Journal of Religious Ethics 1998, and "The Human and Angelic Fall" in Augustine: From Rhetor to Theologian, 1992) that Augustine never managed to explain just how this defective will could originate. So perhaps rather than painting Augustine as straightforwardly ascribing the origin of evil to God, it would be better to say that even in Augustine there is a tension between a "blueprint" view and a more free-will-oriented approach. In short, I think Boyd's account could be more nuanced, and no doubt will be in the forthcoming volume. But I think he's right that Augustine contributed heavily to the development of an approach to evil that explains it primarily in terms of God's mysterious purposes, thus leaving the question of the origins of evil as a thorny if not insoluble problem.

But does Boyd in fact have a more satisfactory explanation of the origin of evil? Boyd leaves free will as a basic assumption for which no explanation is necessary. Free beings make the choices they make and there's an end of it. His glorification of the pre-Augustinian tradition clearly is due in part to the fact that they simply don't ask the difficult questions Augustine asks about the nature of free will. But once the genie is out of the bottle--once the Augustinian questions have been raised--I don't think we can simply return to the pre-Augustinian naivete just because it's convenient to do so. (I recognize that Boyd doesn't think it's naivete--he thinks it's a sensible recognition that free choices need no explanation beyond themselves.) Once again, my fundamental disagreement with Boyd and with open theists in general lies in their discomfort with paradox and mystery. On this issue, in particular, paradox and mystery are unavoidable.

That being said, I'm on board with Boyd's passionate denunciation of the way "blueprint" explanations make a mockery of the reality of evil and harm people who have suffered terrible evil. Clearly, whatever we say at the philosophical level, on the practical level "Satan and evil people have done terrible things to you, but God loves you and is fighting for you, and so am I" is a much better response to people who have been raped or abused than "God allowed this for a reason and you need to figure out the reason." And clearly there are philosophical questions that need to be asked if we are going to give the second answer and not the first. Boyd has done the Christian community a service in raising these questions.

But alas, I've heard very little discussion about these issues in the 13 years since Satan and the Problem of Evil came out, or the 17 years since God at War was published. No doubt some of this is due to the fact that Boyd's open theism has led to the subsuming of his powerful and provocative "warfare thesis" under the broader category of open theism. In the next post, I'm going to address Boyd's arguments for open theism and how they relate to his "warfare theology."