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Saturday, December 21. 2013On Self-Refuting Materialism
An injustice, no doubt, to Geber – the 16th century alchemist, distinguished for his cryptic style – is the characterisation of anything as gibberish. But such is the English usage, and it remains to consider some modern gems of the genre, as uttered by self-confessed rationalists in support of naturalism or materialism.
As statements, these examples are analogous in form and content, and thus characterised by the same self-refuting logic – or illogic – typical of such arguments, showing not only that they cannot possibly be true, but that they indeed are void of meaningful assertion. They are, in a word, gibberish. 1. States philosopher John Shook: Naturalism is the view that the only reality is the physical universe of energy and matter as gradually discovered by experience, reason and science. (In debate with Christian apologist William Lane Craig, and on his website, naturalisms.org – although the statement now appears to have been removed, Shook perhaps realising its absurdity.) Physical nature here is defined as the putative object – as the one thing real – whereas experience, reason, and science, these things are gratuitous. The whole subjective apparatus, as ultimately grounded in consciousness, is simply taken for granted. It surely exists – insofar as it does the discovering – but in a curiously abstract, primary, and unacknowledged sense, which is not itself subject to scrutiny. The thing to be explained in Shook’s universe are energy and matter – the only thing real – whereas mind or consciousness, although surely an equal mystery, are evidently not within the field of vision. An analogy, for better or worse, is that of a man at the cinema. He is focused entirely on the big screen, not considering that the enthralling images he beholds are dependent on a projection apparatus – an apparatus pertaining to an ontological order entirely other than the objects of his attention. On a certain level he knows it’s there, but his focus is the movie. In a curious sense he, himself, has become a character in a secondary reality – abstracted and idealised – of exclusively physical entities. He regards the movie as a dynamically closed and independently existing system – entirely unaware of its secondary and contingent nature. 2. States eminent physicist Victor Stenger in an article entitled Quantum Quackery (Skeptical Enquirer, February 1997): Quantum physics is claimed to support the mystical notion that the mind creates reality. However, an objective reality, with no special role for consciousness, human or cosmic, is consistent with all observations. The jewel here is obviously the retort – an objective reality, with no special role for consciousness, human or cosmic, is consistent with all observations – no doubt uttered with a straight face, and oblivious to the massive self-contradiction it contains. Let us consider the elements in this formulation. Again we encounter objective reality – we encounter no special role for consciousness – the whole of which is said to be consistent with all observations. The decisive benchmark in this formulation is, clearly, observation – all observations. It is observation which reveals an objective reality, without any special role for consciousness, either human or cosmic. But what is observation, if not an event in consciousness? Any observation presupposes the ground of mind or consciousness as an intrinsic primary given. So we may paraphrase: An objective reality with no special role for consciousness, human or cosmic, is consistent with the intrinsic primacy of consciousness. Self-evident nonsense! The assumed emphasis in both examples is upon the empirical object – the physical or material universe. The fact of apprehension of such an object, by which alone it is manifest as an observed phenomenon, is entirely taken for granted. The observing consciousness – the fact that there exists a conscious expanse, a luminous window upon reality – these are considered a side issue, of no special significance or interest. Although ontologically fundamental to all human experience, they are placed outside the observational frame of reference, namely in deference to the sacred object – the idol of materialism which they disclose. Whereas in human experience the ostensible subjective and objective form an inseparable whole, this integral whole is denied in the context of these formulations. As thus exemplified, the materialist worldview is maintained by dividing the universe into two, discarding one half (arguably the interesting and significant half), and constructing its epistemological edifice of the half remaining. The materialist conclusion is thus a necessarily consequence which follows trivially from the myopic focus employed. Significant and revealing in these formulations, however, is the implicit primacy of consciousness as a gratuitous primordial given. As outside the observational natural / material frame of reference, it is implicitly accorded transcendent status, however inadvertent the attribution may be. Similarly transcendent in this regard is the observer, a being which hovers, ghostly and godlike, in the pure ether of Platonic abstraction. Indeed, like water to a fish, it would seem that mind or consciousness is too basic a phenomenon, at least for some observers, to seriously weigh in the empirical balance. As to the objective universe, it subsists, suspended within the hermetically sealed hypersphere of epistemological isolation, a bubble within the transcendent void which is the ground of observation and rational thought. What can we make of such skewed perceptions? One might think that the phenomenon constitutes a rare psychological disorder – and perhaps indeed it does, so that its seeming prevalence in the academic sphere is merely a matter of the disproportionate amount of noise it tends to generate. The simplest explanation I can adduce is that of cultural conditioning. In short, the materialist creed is hammered with slogans, with unexamined rationalisations, which conceal a metaphysical axe to grind concerning any notion of transcendence. The result is ideology – the inability to see what is plainly before one’s eyes. Monday, July 15. 2013But Is It Science ? - Intelligent Design And Other Controversies
The reactionary brigade in any field of science, given its usual intellectual constraints, adheres to fundamentalisms that often coalesce into slogans. It’s not science! they are wont to exclaim concerning any field, hypothesis or concept, which challenges their categories in too radical a manner. One area of enquiry thus dismissed is that of Intelligent Design – briefly, the idea that the highly ordered complexity observed in nature is best explained by an intelligent cause. Here it is mostly the pro-Darwin lobby, with moral support from philosophical materialists in general, which maintains the charge that ... Intelligent Design is not science.
Let us then examine the statement (as a class of assertion of the type described, and with specific reference to Intelligent Design theory) ‘such-and-such is not science’. What can we make of the statement, ‘X is not science’? Well, it’s firstly not saying anything profound in the sense of engendering insight or fertility of ideas. It’s more like, X is not science – end of story. The implicit meta-statement is of disengagement, of keeping the matter at arm’s length. Thus already we see some dissonance between the overt statement and its implicit purport. Prima facie the claim is of an analytical nature, purporting to say something about its object – Intelligent Design. What it rather discloses, however, is its own inherent stance, saying in effect, I cannot / will not engage with the matter. But even this is all quite immaterial insofar we are dealing with what, on closer scrutiny, turns out to be a non-statement. That’s right – the assertion ‘X is not science’ is quite meaningless. And let us be emphatic here: It is pure gibberish. For let us consider what its champions would needs be implying, namely that conceptual entities such as fields of enquiry – ideas, conjectures, theoretical constructs – come ready-labelled, as the case may be, with the appropriate designations – such as science, non-science, and of course pseudo-science – and that they (bold, dauntless, and independent thinkers that they are) can detect these labels. But this, of course, is pure nonsense. Nature does not come thus ready-labelled for the convenience of ostensible sceptics, whose intellectual horizons preclude engagement across paradigm boundaries. It is not that ‘science’, as a mystical quality, somehow adheres to fields, to theories and ideas. It is whether the question at hand – whatever it is – is engaged in a scientific manner. This would seem elementary. Yet it continues to elude our self-appointed vigilante guardians of permissible ideas. Thus, in stating that such-and-such is not science, they are saying in effect that it is they who lack the ability to consider the matter scientifically – whether for want of the requisite intellectual tools or, as is more typically the case, out of philosophical paradigm constraints. The deficiency, as per our example of Intelligent Design, thus does not inhere in the field under consideration, but in its critics. Sunday, July 14. 2013
Faith Is The Rock - On The Human ... Posted by Harald Kleemann
in Apologetics, Commentary, Holy Scripture at
16:45
Faith Is The Rock - On The Human Need To Believe ... Something
The stability of the mind is predicated on faith, where by faith we essentially mean that intuitive synthesis which unifies our myriad thoughts and impressions into a coherent worldview. This is why, in scripture, faith or revelation – the terms are synonymous – is called the rock, the foundation. ‘Blessed art thou, Simon Barjona (Mathew 16:17-18): for flesh and blood hath not revealed it unto thee, but my Father which is in heaven. And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church ... It is the revelation, according to the saviour, which is the rock, the foundation, of the Christian worldview – specifically, the revelation of who he is that is speaking ... namely, the Christ.
The present example, along with New Testament usage in general, thus speaks of a specific faith – that informed by the revelation of Jesus Christ. This is what is meant in scripture when it is spoken of the faith. But, as modern usage also has it, there are many ‘faiths’ – persuasions, worldviews, paradigms of the real – such that the concept should also be understood in the larger sense outlined above – the faculty of intuitive synthesis by which the mind reaches a resultant, a conclusion, concerning the nature of reality. Religious critics, of course, claim that it is reason – not faith – which rightly occupies this place of chief organising principle in the realm of mind – or that at least it ought, as it does for those sober, right-minded individuals, whose self-defined identity is of a vaunted rationalism. But this is simply not well observed. The reason is undergirded by faith, by the implicit assumption that reality is such-and-such, where that assumption involves a quasi infinitude of constituent beliefs, most of them so properly basic to human sensibility and culture that they rarely come up for scrutiny, let alone any serious questioning. Faith is accordingly the primordial substance of experience – it goes to the root, as indeed it is the root – and it fills the vast expanse of awareness, delivering a universe out of chaos. The reason, by contrast, arrives late on the scene, as a graft implanted into the tree of faith. It proceeds to analyse on the fractal edge of cognition and proclaims, aha, aha, I can explain ... not recognising for the most part that all reasoning is circular, a closed entropic sphere, suspended without support in the illimitable void. Where the reason gains purchase, harnessing electricity, for instance, and conjuring a glittering techno-sphere out of the void, it is only because it is nurtured, sustained, imbued with substance – the substance – which is faith. When thus understood we see that faith – what we call faith – is not narrowly religious in implication, although it is indeed religious in the broad sense of a binding or covering of the nakedness of the soul. In Genesis 3 it is spoken of that covering – as fashioned by man, and as provided by God. Both are ultimately of faith, although differing in the way they are informed, such that faith is prior, foundational and intrinsic, to any worldview one comes to espouse – whether materialist or mystical. It is this broader understanding which is basic to an appreciation of the nature of faith, although scriptural usage is typically more specific with implicit reference to the good faith – the faith of God as conveyed in the revelation of Jesus Christ. Faith, in this more specific sense, is thus typically distinguished from wisdom of knowledge, where the latter refers to that relative and partial knowledge – of observation and reason – as it were, an extraneous shoot, grafted into the Tree of Life – that primordial Tree in the Garden of God, which is of the nature of faith – meaning the good faith, unalloyed by knowledge or reason. It is in this specific sense, as per the Pauline asseveration, that faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. However, not all faith is thus positive, given the broader use of the term. There is such a thing as faith or intuition gone awry, and here we speak of superstition. Clearly then, the intuition, although primary to the reason, is not infallible. As stated, it is a question of information – of how a mind is informed. It is the quality of information which determines the matter – in the religious as in the scientific domain. And here the reason, to render its due, may serve as a corrective. Indeed, it is here that the essential function of the reason is apparent – that of criticising ideas. It is intuition which generates ideas. Without intuition – or faith – there is are no ideas, and so, no universe. All would be chaos as the reason undermines itself in the conflagration of radical doubt. There would be no world, no sensible cosmos – no self, no other, so subject or object – nothing upon which to base a single proposition, which demonstrates that faith is indeed the rock – the core and foundational principle in the realm of mental organisation. The mind or soul must needs believe something insofar as its very existence is predicated upon, and comprised of that, something. The madman – the insight, I believe is due to the psychiatrist Russell Meares – has not lost his reason; he has all but his reason. Herein moreover lie the grounds for entrenched pathology of belief – for ideology, superstition or faith in the negative sense – that the soul thus misinformed would rather cling to its dysfunctional beliefs, than face existential annihilation in the exposure of rampant all-consuming doubt. It is called the abyss and the dark night of the soul – this radical dissolution of all certainty – and as a passage if initiation, of individuation, of spiritual transformation, it is universally recognised as central to the formation of a viable soul. As also observed Carl Gustav Jung, psychosis is the most direct, if the most perilous, path to individuation. It is perilous indeed, considering the weight of cultural sanctions that are ranged against it. And yet, the experience, in the nature of things, need not be traumatic. It may be of blissful rapture, as per the example of the spiritual birth which is the true Pentecost. The relative ease of the passage is determined by the soul’s inherent disposition as by the spiritual agencies supervening. And whereas the assignation is primarily for the perfecting of the saints (as on this side of the grave), in the greater cosmic context it is the destiny of souls universally. The reason for this is that culture is a lie – a contrivance, an accommodation – namely in its formal institutional conventions. In the cosmological and spiritual asymptote which is the singularity – the biblical Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end – the soul confronts the ground from which it arose, and thus its original and authentic nature. All contrivance, all that is of artifice, falls away in the disclosure of that which is intrinsic. There is a faith then which is natural and uncontrived. It is the rock, the foundation, as the Bible states, and it is the faith as once delivered to the saints. As states Deuteronomy, the book of the two laws (33:27): The eternal God is your refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms. Thursday, June 27. 2013
Got To Be ... Rational ! ? Posted by Harald Kleemann
in Apologetics, Commentary, Evangelism, Holy Scripture at
16:18
Got To Be ... Rational ! ?
O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called: Which some professing have erred concerning the faith. (1 Timothy 6:20-21)
Christian apologists are typically at pains to demonstrate that their faith is rational. By this they usually mean that (1) it bears scrutiny by some canon of reason, and (2) that the tenets of Christian belief are consistent with an arbitrarily advanced state of scientific knowledge – to whit, the perceived present state. It is perhaps not usually admitted, but the inference is clear – science and reason represent a standard of verity and confer validation regarding the faith. Conversely, something is generally considered amiss where these two epistemological systems – religious faith and observation / reason – are perceived to be at odds. If at this point a suspicion arises that exegetes have the whole thing back-to-front – well, I suspect this suspicion may be entirely justified. We are beginning to glimpse just how profoundly – and, indeed, how subtly – the Christian faith has been subverted in a rational inquisition, which goes back at least to the ecclesiastical councils of Constantine. Christianity, originally, signified the ingress of a transcendent mind, incommensurate and radically at variance with the historic continuum. Then, within a relatively brief period, it was ‘tamed’ – co-opted – rationalised ... thereby loosing its transcendent charter and, indeed, much of its redeeming virtue. Whereas the humanist tradition, which we trace to the ancient Greeks, holds wisdom or intellectual achievement in the highest esteem, the gospel peremptorily informs that here is something altogether greater – something greater not merely by degree, but in a manner incommensurate. As Isaiah (55:8-9) states the matter – For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, saith the Lord. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts. Of course, modern biblical scholars have turned this around, confidently asserting that their erudite cogitations are infinitely exalted above the parochial and primitive conceptions of scripture. And their basis for this assertion ... is science and reason. We know better, they claim, than the superstitious ancients who wrote the Bible. While extremes of this stance characterise such liberal and revisionist conclaves of the higher criticism as the Jesus Seminar, it’s leaven permeates no less the biblical evangelical mainstream. Its theological articulations, while paying lip service to transcendent verities, implicitly and ineluctably, bow down and worship at the shrine of reason. The stance, indeed is reflexive – it is part of the academic good tone, and entirely taken for granted. Reasonable – rational – formulations are the sine qua non of scholarly discourse. By contrast, the mystical, the prophetic, the revelational, the intuitive, the visionary, the spiritual as a means of biblical understanding – these are inherently distrusted and banished to the outer margins of acceptable dialogue. As one respondent put it to me – anyone can lay claim to a revelation or vision. To which I answer – quite. Nevertheless, the revelational or spiritual attitude has a chance of being right, for it is the way of God enjoined in scripture. Whereas the rational approach has no chance of succeeding, as the scriptures, again, make abundantly clear. The carnal mind is enmity with God, as Paul informs us in Hebrews – and the carnal mind, we may unequivocally assert, is the rational mind. It is the rational mind – with its handful of explanatory variables, its grounding in the relative, its infinite regress of analytic elaboration, without a sure foundation anywhere in sight. Indeed we may recall that it was knowledge – carnal knowledge, referred to in Genesis as the knowledge of good and evil, and all knowledge, in this sense, is carnal – which precipitated the primordial fall from divine communion. This ‘fall’ – assuredly – was from a holistic, spiritual and intuitive, vision to the partial, relative and analytic apprehensions of the rational mind. Consequently it is by no exertion of the rational mind that the conditions attending humanity’s spiritual exile can be reversed – and here, in a nutshell, is the failing of the modern church: its substitution of scholarship for spiritual revelation. The rational mind cannot relate, in any adequate sense, to the unfathomed and irreducible complexity of the organic. As such it is inherently estranged from nature, as it is estranged from the divine. Being finite in its conceptions, it is necessarily reductive in its modelling of natural process, even as it is reductive in its rendering of scripture in terms of a rational creed. The mystery of godliness reduced to a creed – that, in essence, is the plight of the church. For it is the rational mind which is implicitly elevated to godhead in the realm of human understanding. ‘Rational’ is the new godly. The matter is addressed by Paul, stating that the Greeks require wisdom, while the Jews seek miracles, and we moderns are mostly among the Greeks. Yet addressed in this manner are the both epistemological systems – the magical and the rational – and the gospel submits to neither. Both paradigms are rebuked in that we preach Christ crucified. A stumbling-stone to the Hebrews and foolishness to the Greeks. Christ crucified means the sacrifice of the Word – the cultural understanding, whether rational or magical, must needs perish for the spiritual to arise. This in part is what we mean by salvation and the spiritual birth. This is not to advocate an anti-intellectual stance. Our characterisation of the rational mind as enmity with God does to diminish its efficacy relative to a fallen world. But when directed at the highest, when approaching the asymptote of its own conceptual foundations, it necessarily fails. The reason, in its ultimate function, becomes cognisant of its intrinsic and ineluctable limitations, as indeed mathematicians discovered in the early twentieth century. Yet our cultural institutions – the church included – have failed to imbibe this lesson. The rush to deify the reason continues unabated, and its apotheosis is, no less, that abomination of desolation, standing in the holy place, as spoken of by Jesus. In biblical terms, the Word of Life – the transcendent mind of Christ – is rejected. All redemptive efficacy of the Word is lost as the transcendent revelation is lost. The human mind is not raised to the divine, but the divine reduced to the human. This – again – is the crucifixion of Christ in our age. Saturday, June 8. 2013
It’s The Body ! - On The Irreducible ... Posted by Harald Kleemann
in Commentary, Holy Scripture at
15:57
It’s The Body ! - On The Irreducible Complexity Of The Word Of God
It’s the body – the Word of God. It is the spiritual body of Jesus Christ in abstract form and the information content which structures that form – the body inhabited by the Spirit of God. Contemporary philosophers of science, like Stephen Meyer, author of Signature In The Cell (HarperOne, 2009), recognise that it is information which distinguishes living organisms from inanimate matter, and the same holds for the spiritual body. It is the inherent information content, as appropriated by spiritual revelation, which distinguishes the bride of Christ from the religious cults and denominations. The spiritual bride is comprised of the Word – the whole of the Word and nothing but the Word, it is fitting to add. She is one with her Lord who is the Word – she, the bride and mystical body of Jesus Christ. And what distinguishes the living Bride from the dead denominations and religious organisations is this – that the Word of God has life, and as such it is characterised by organic depth and integrity.
This, again to emphasise, is also the hallmark of the natural body. Nature, the natural universe, is unfathomably deep in its workings. It cannot be reduced to a rational conception in terms of a finite set of variables. And if nature cannot thus be reduced, neither can the Word of God – the Word which is the logos of nature. The inspired Word of prophetic utterance, as the self-disclosure of a higher mind, is transcendent of all rational conception – as states Isaiah 55, exalted above the thoughts and ways of man as the heavens are exalted above the earth. Which further explains why, through the ages, the Word of God has been elusive. It explains indeed the historic failing of the church, insofar it is informed not of the Word, but interpretations of the Word – divisive creeds, each emphasising certain aspects of scripture to the exclusion of others. Although grafted into the Tree of Life – the denominational creeds – they are out on a limb, so to speak. Sooner or later they run out of scripture, and compensate by filling the gaps with rationalisations – extraneous notions which have no part of the body. This explains why the body is sick and all torn up. To illustrate let us consider again the natural body. Metabolism of the natural body is regulated by enzymes, complex molecules which act as catalysts for myriad chemical interactions. Many of these enzymes oppose each other in function, and the health of the body depends on their balance, their due proportion and interaction, as regulated by yet further enzymes. Too much of one, to the exclusion of others, will kill the body, even though each one is good and necessary in itself. This is a perfect analogy of the spiritual body. Religious cults and denominations typically run with some exclusive idea, turning it into an overarching doctrine. Sooner or later, as stated, they run out of scripture, eventually reaching a dead end of spiritual stasis. Which explains why denominational Christianity is dead – why indeed we have something called Christianity, which is not Christianity at all. While it might have qualified as such back yonder in the age of Reformation – under the anointing of the cherubic Man (see Revelation 4) wherein rational exegesis was the state of the art – this is the age of the Flying Eagle, an age of restoration and spiritual revelation. The healthy body, as described, is comprised of the synergy of myriad opposing agents, and thus it is with the spiritual body. It is comprised of the whole of the Word, with its often seemingly contradictory notions – a proposition by which the rational mind is altogether stymied. The rational mind cannot cope with the Word of God, and radical attempts – as it were, of putting new the wine into old bottles – in terms of their consequences, typically range from the ridiculous to the tragic. Indeed the carnal or rational mind, as Paul reminds us, is enmity with God. Only the mind of Christ can take this Word and make it perform as intended. And, indeed, we have the mind of Christ – if we are born of water and blood according to the scriptures. As for the rational mind, it looses itself in the abyss, the incommensurate gulf between the rational conception and the irreducible complexity of the materia mystica, the primordial substance, which is the Word of God. We see this exemplified in the increasingly abstract formulations of academic theology, as in the increasingly indirect means of natural enquiry in the physical sciences – both engaging in realms increasingly remote from the data of sensory experience. From the rational standpoint, as stated, the well is infinitely deep, such that the rational mind is, on analysis, is commensurate with the abyss. The Word of God, by contrast, for all its organic depth and wholeness, never departs from the nexus of immediate experience. This indeed is the hallmark of the visionary and mystical, that it is grounded in the embodied experience. And so ... it’s the body, the Word of God. It is not to be held at arm’s length – dissected, interpreted, doctored, explained – it is to be received by faith. As states the scripture, a body hast thou prepared me – which truth holds for the spiritual body as it does for the natural. Only the mind of Christ can cross the gulf and produce the body, which crossing is the new birth by the Cross of Christ – the crossing of Jordan, metaphorically, which is death to the self. This is one of the scary notion of scripture, the truth of which, however, is liberty, salvation, and the power of the Holy Ghost. And it is a dangerous doctrine, subject, like all great truths, to misapprehension and consequent radicalism. But again we can point to the Word as a sure corrective in that any misapprehension will, surely and in some signal manner, depart from the Word. But the mind of Christ, the Holy Spirit, inhabits, upholds and affirms that Word – the Word which is the spiritual body of the bride of Christ. Tuesday, May 28. 2013The Trinity And The Hound Of Hell
We know something is amiss when apologists are compelled to sound the depths of absurdity. In Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (2003) authors J. P. Moreland and William Lane Craig confront the unenviable task of explaining the Christian Trinity. One explanatory model which they offer is ... Cerberus, in Greek mythology the three-headed hound of hell, a spectral creature guarding the gates of hades. That’s right – an imaginary three-headed dog to explain the nature of God.
In a more recent podcast Craig explains that this was never intended as an analogy, as indeed there are no perfect analogies for the Trinity, but that it nevertheless conveys something significant regarding the essential idea of a tri-personal being. Where the analogy fails, Craig elaborates, is that, if Cerberus should die and his form dissolve, the three minds of God would detach and fly off into space. States Craig: God is an immaterial substance or soul endowed with three sets of cognitive faculties each of which is sufficient for personhood, so that God has three centres of self-consciousness, intentionality, and will. … the persons are [each] divine… since the model describes a God who is tri-personal. The persons are the minds of God. and: … just as Cerberus is a single dog with three consciousnesses, so God is a single spiritual substance or soul with three self-consciousnesses. I submit that, far from being an elegant contrivance, this sounds as atrocious as it is, and we see exemplified the impotence and conceptual absurdity to which trinitarians are reduced in defending their model. We see the unfailing need for extra-biblical referents, concepts and constructs, to maintain what is clearly not a scriptural given. Why – oh why – must theologians conclude that, when God took on human form, this means there are two of them, and when again relinquishing this form but leaving his Spirit, this makes them three? I mean, the Bible explains itself. Jesus said, I am the root and offspring of David, in answer to the very controversy as raised by the Pharisees – how Christ could be God and yet walk the earth as a common man. If only theologians would take the biblical image – that of man – to show forth the nature of God – instead of a three-headed dog or whatever else – the lamentable trinitarian idea would have never arisen. We see, further, the carnal and regressive notion of God as substance, and this quite apart from self-contradictory notion of an immaterial substance. Indeed it appears in the above example that a forth entity is being postulated, i.e. the dog proper supporting the three heads, constituting, as it were, the container or glue, holding together the persons of the Trinity. Not the biblical Spirit – or consciousness – but a spiritual substance constitutes the Godhead by this account – as indeed I always suspected of the trinitarian conception. Without question, the trinitarian reifies his God and, evidently, the more of them (up to a point), the better. While this may seem a reductio absurdum, I have observed it in countless conversations. Faced with the unitarian conception, the trinitarian feels deprived of two thirds of his deity, showing that the trinitarian glasses remain in place, even while an alternative is ostensibly being contemplated. But such is among the consequences when the cart is before the horse with respect to spirit and substance – when there is failure to understand that God is Spirit. Why, finally, the need to theologise? Why the need for argument? Did not Jesus also say, blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God? Why then, and for whose benefit, the intellectual acrobatics of theologians and Christian philosophers? I mean, no-one will argue at consummate length that the sun gives light or that water is wet. Insofar then as their recourse is biblical scholarship – textual analysis and the light of reason – they admit in effect that they have not seen God. From which we can reasonably conclude that they – meaning, the greater majority thus engaged – have no idea what they are talking about. Of course this is shocking to contemplate. Let me state for the record my essential respect for Moreland and Craig as leading lights of Christian academia. Scholarship, however, is no safeguard against theological error, especially when the greater consensus is a stake. Our example illustrates the badlands of absurdity into which even the erudite plummet when compelled to defend one of the many misconceptions in which enlightened modern evangelical Christendom abounds. Is it really so difficult to countenance that the church may have it all wrong? As a writer myself, I am further aware that one wrong-headed idea – and here we may definitely include the three-headed hound of Moreland and Craig – when elaborated or defended, leads to a cloud of obfuscation, an exacerbation of confusion, and before long one faces the fact that one is writing gibberish. Of course, without something more than mere erudition, one may never come that far. Saturday, July 28. 2012Christian Faith And Fairyland
Heaven, hell, angels, devils – when it comes to spiritual categories, for many evangelicals these tend to be vague and nebulous conceptions. They are deemed supernatural and thus inaccessible to direct observation. Or what of such entities as the tree of life in the midst of the paradise of God, the tree of knowledge and its fruit, and the fiery sword of the cherubic guardian? Could some theologian please point them out? Or the garden of Eden, and the serpent of Eden – where are they in natural history? The list could go on, but the reader will get the point.
The typical theological response is to invoke the language of symbol, metaphor and allegory – to readily explain, or explain away, the mystical aspects of the Bible. The tendency is to spiritualise, to mythologise – to deny the literal or straight-forward meaning of applicable texts. Opposing this tendency is the fundamentalist school which insists on biblical literalism to the extent of attributing the fall of humankind to the eating of a piece of fruit. Both contingents are living in fairyland – by which I do not mean the Celtic dreamtime, but a realm wholly imaginary. Both in their respective way are living a fantasy – their Bible is a fairy story (in the derogatory sense). As there is confusion concerning the concept of biblical literalism, let us examine this question. The literal meaning of anything is not an objective universal given, as fundamentalists seem to surmise. Rather it depends on one’s dictionary, which in turn is a product of usage – common or idiosyncratic. If, for example, by shepherd we mean a herder of sheep, Christ cannot be called the good shepherd in any literal sense. If the term, however, is inclusive of meanings such as keeper, protector and guide, a literal reading is entirely justified. We are mistaken, therefore, to infer that biblical writers did not mean what they wrote – literally – on the grounds that our modern analytical and reductive semantics does not resonate well with the holistic and inclusive language of the ancients. Indeed, insofar as reality is a construct of language – and nowhere in literature is this point made so clearly as in the Bible – it is appropriate to reflect that the ancient prophets and seers inhabited a universe quite different from that of modern Cartesian objectivism. They truly inhabited another world – with different referents concerning the actual and real – as readily apparent in their nonchalant conflating of the natural with the mystical or spiritual. Clearly they did not impose the categorical distinctions to which we moderns with our post-Enlightenment sensibilities are accustomed. For asserts Paul (Romans1:19-20), as I never tire to reiterate ... that which may be known of God is manifest in them [in man]; for God hath shewed it unto them. For the invisible things of him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made, even his eternal power and Godhead. St Paul, in other words, was emphatic concerning an experiential faith. The prophets and seers of the Bible spoke of realities, of things directly experienced. It is not enough to believe in a God out there somewhere, to assent to an abstract and ephemeral spiritual world on the basis of hearsay. It is necessary to see for oneself. As states Job 42:5, I have heard of thee by the hearing of the ear: but now mine eye seeth thee. So unless today’s Christians – fundamentalists and professors of the higher criticism alike – enter the mystical world of the prophets, in spiritual fairyland they remain. |
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