Volume 4, Issue 2 - Winter 2008 (click for PDF)

– Editor’s Note -

An Inconvenient Truth
by Samir Paul ’10

– The Dispatch –

I: Why Christ?
by Samir Paul ’10; Hans Anderson, Yale ’10; and Nicole Fegeas, Princeton ’10

– Opinions –

The Church, Israel, and the End Times
by Cameron D. Kirk-Giannini ’11

In Memory: Fr. Richard John Neuhaus
by Jordan Hylden ’06

In Memory: Avery Cardinal Dulles
by Matthew Cavedon ’11

– Features -

Certum Est, Quia Possible: An Apologetic for the Existence of God
by J. Joseph Porter ’12

A Christian View of Propositions
by Carson Weitnauer, GCTS ’09

– Books & Arts -

Historic Faith in a New Age
by Daniel Chung ’11

Child of War, Child of Grace
by Lilamarie Moko ’10

The Call to Creation
by Anne Goetz ’11

– Fiction & Poetry -

Father Wallace
by Eric Lang ’09

The Angel
by Judith Huang ’09

Elbows and Knees
by Angela Sun ’10

J O H N T H E P R O D R O M O S
by Kevin McGrath

When Faith is Final and Hope is Vital
by Andrew Chen ’11

- Last Things -

The Power of Prayer
by Jorda n Teti ’08

Not enjoyed it, not found it pleasant, not thought it nice. Loved it in the most nakedly powerful way possible with the kind of fierceness that defies explanation. When was the last time truth gave you the tingly chills you felt during your first kiss? How often do you let an idea crawl into bed and snuggle with you until you fall asleep in each other’s arms?

And has an idea ever given you a stomachache? What was the last idea that caused you real, physical, visceral pain? When did you last allow a belief to devastate you, to crawl underneath your fingernails, take hold, and pull?

More often than not, we live lives devoid of the intensity that our beliefs really demand. We engage our world with an uninspired complacency that takes extraordinary ideas with extraordinary implications and renders them commonplace. We lose sight of the fact that the powerful beliefs we choose to steer our existence aren’t just abstract assertions of some far-off truths, but charged, gritty, taxing expressions of the most fundamental forces that should drive everything we do.

Indeed, ordinary people who believe extraordinary truths – which is to say, the vast majority of the world’s 2.1 billion Christians – are called to similarly extraordinary lives. If we truly believe in the empty tomb, a moment that defies all sense of earthly order, then our lives must be radically re-shaped by the truth of the wandering God-man who swallows death whole.

This issue, we tackle Pontius Pilate’s famous question, “What is Truth?” We begin with students from Christian journals across New England defending the central truth of Christian faith.  Managing Editor Cameron Kirk- Giannini ’11 critically examines a theology about the last days that has gained ground over the past few decades among conservative American evangelicals.  Seminarian Carson Weitnauer attempts to reframe a traditional vision of “truth” as more vibrant, relational, and communal to show that propositional truth isn’t dead after all.  And Joseph Porter ’12 attempts to address one of the most challenging truths of all, examining a philosophical argument for the existence of God that deserves further consideration.

We also pay special tribute this issue to a champion of the truth, the late Fr. Richard John Neuhaus, editor of the journal First Things. Ichthus founder Jordan Hylden ’06 remembers Neuhaus from his time as a First Things junior fellow.  Neuhaus was a brilliant thinker whose journal, says Ichthus Books & Arts Editor Anne Goetz, “with its energetic attention to the implications of orthodoxy and its bracing grasp of life’s irony, played a significant role in forming how I think.” Those sentiments are shared widely, within these pages and beyond.

If we are to take seriously God’s desire – indeed, His command – for us to “love truth,” then we must commit to an honest and open search for it. We hope in this issue to help you lay the groundwork for your own search.

Peace,
Samir Paul, Editor-in-Chief

The temptation in approaching the question, “Why Jesus?” is to step into the Nietzschean contest of wills that ensues when we allow power to decide truth. We might arrive at our understanding of reality by throwing our beliefs into an ideological coliseum where the search for Veritas is bloodsport and only the strong survive. But Jesus delivers us into a new model of what and who truth is, one grounded in a God willing to take on fl esh and human vulnerability that testify to the vigor of His truth. God in Jesus is the weak, the poor, and the marginalized, and thus he sidesteps humanity’s proclivity for stamping out the defenseless.

The answer to our question — “Why Christ?” — is at once beautiful and confounding, much the same as the God who created us: Jesus is the answer because unlike any other god or un-god, He responds to our cries with a shocking and perplexing hope, empathy, and call to action unmarred by our shortsightedness and sin.

The heart of God’s answer to our pain — Jesus — lies in His penchant for subverting our preconceptions of what the Divine should be. Jesus is the simultaneous fulfillment and obliteration of all human expectation. We want a king; we get a carpenter. We want a revolution; we get, “Love those who persecute you.” We want showy strength; we get a messiah nailed to a tree.

This is surprising. But Jesus sees the corruption of human desire and answers with what we really want instead of what we ask for — a God whose justice and sacrificial love transcend the violence of existence and welcome us into something bigger, righter, more beautiful: the hope of a radical peace for which God longs. This vision comes to its fullest expression yet in the resurrection, where we peer into a future promised us by God. Jesus Christ and His new breath are our most compelling such glimpses, guarantees of God’s pledge and appetizers for the feast to come.

What is perhaps most important to remember, though, is that the answer to the question, “Why Jesus?” is not just about assenting to abstract ideas or doctrines or propositional truths. It is entire lives transformed and reoriented by the majestic and unequivocal defeat of death. It is communities made whole and creation restored by the wounded healer. And it is, perhaps most of all, the surprising hope for a radical shalom sent by a God who cuts through our expectations of Him and delivers us, both confirming and confounding everything we thought we knew of Him.

For “The Dispatch,” I have been asked to address the question of why mankind even needs a Christ, a savior. A simplistic answer to this could be: to save mankind from its sin. Yet, what does it really mean to be saved from sin? Here lies at least one answer to the question of the utility of Christ.

A surface interpretation would assume that being saved from sin means we are utterly free from it. Christ vanquished sin, thus it must be completely gone from our lives. The implication of this statement is that we are free from the act of sinning itself. Clearly this is not correct. Look at the world around you. Look at the crimes, the oppression, the wars. More importantly, look at within yourselves. We are plainly still sinners.

If we are not saved from sin itself, then what has Christ freed us from? While we are not free from the act of sinning (God has given us free will to choose right or wrong and even Christ’s coming would not cause Him to take this away), what we are free from is sin’s power. Sin’s power can come in all sorts of forms, but the most visible power of sin is common guilt. This may seem to be a trivial oppressor and not worth the death of the Son of God, but in reality it is deadly, both physically and spiritually.

Under the power of guilt, we feel frustrated and worthless. Trying so hard to be righteous and good, we are disheartened with every sin we commit and the feeling sinks that we should be able to do better–why did I give into temptation? Why am I so bad–I clearly must be a horrible person because look at all of the ugly things I am doing! This is unforgivable. And the depression sinks in and then comes the feeling of unworthiness. I am too sinful for God; I am not good enough for His presence. And then the prayer ceases and in shame we distance ourselves from God until we shut Him out.

But Christ is the embodiment of the ultimate forgiveness. He died so that we would be forgiven. Forgiven of our sins, there is no use for guilt. No sin is too depraved for God’s mercy for Christ gave himself to be the ultimate Sacrifice to atone for every last modicum of man’s evil. Yet it is only through Christ that we are granted this forgiveness, thus only through Christ can we be saved from guilt.

Many claim to follow Jesus the moralist, teacher, or prophet, while others confess Him to be the Christ, the unique instrument of salvation and the sole mediator between God and humanity (I Timothy 2:5). Can we choose one of the former interpretations of the person of Jesus, or must we like Peter confess the latter, saying, “You are the Christ” (Mark 8:29)? If we are honest with ourselves, there can be no reasonable role for Jesus in our lives if not Christ–Jesus is Christ, or He should be dismissed altogether.

As a moralist, Jesus is but an inconvenience. He exhorts us, “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Matthew 5:48), but we surely cannot attain to the perfection of God! Nor will we ever succeed in emulating Christ, the very image of God (Colossians 1:15). Jesus commands us to forsake the sins we enjoy (Matthew 18:8-9), denying ourselves, taking up our cross, and following Him (Luke 9:23). Endeavoring to follow Jesus the moralist will only depress us.

Nor is Jesus more useful as a simple teacher, for not once does He appeal to our reason; instead, He calls us to forsake even the most enticing worldly wisdom and to listen to Him as if with a child’s ears (Matthew 11:25). The message of Jesus does not indulge our intellectual appetite but exposes us as fools (I Corinthians 1:18-20, citing Isaiah 29:14), imparting not a single insight which may render us wise in the eyes of the world. If we listen to Jesus solely as a pupil to a guru, we can only await the well-deserved scorn of a halfwit.

Again, if Christ were merely a prophet, He would be a laughable failure and an embarrassment: His message was utterly rejected by us humans to whom He was sent, the political leaders of the day condemned Him to suffer the death of a common criminal, and His followers are ever the object of persecution.

No, Jesus is not one of these; He claims the office Christ, the Messiahship: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me” (John 14:6). If the accounts of the early Christians to the miracles they experienced (cf. John 20:30-31), corroborated by the enduring witness of the Church to the truth of Jesus’ message, persuade us that He was neither liar nor lunatic when He spoke these words, then there is only one place for Him in our lives: Lord and Christ. Neither He nor we would have it any other way.

The conflict arises from that fact that the proponents of rapture theology generally argue from within the larger framework of dispensationalism, a multifaceted system of beliefs characterized by its emphasis on literal interpretation of biblical prophecy and its unique view of Church history[5].  Many dispensationalists consider their beliefs about the rapture a natural consequence of their beliefs about the Church, whereas critics (notably Carl E. Olson, author of Will Catholics be “Left Behind”?[6], an extensive critique of rapture theology from the Catholic perspective) maintain that scripture does not provide sufficient evidence for their claims. In the following discussion, I hope to substantiate several difficulties I see in what I take to be the common dispensationalist ecclesiology.  These difficulties lead me to regard dispensationalist rapture theology with skepticism.  There are undoubtedly believers in the pretribulational rapture that do not consider themselves dispensationalists, and these will be able to produce arguments for their views that are independent of the aforementioned ecclesiological debate.  The concerns I raise here will likely not affect them.  In fact, it is not my aim to convince the reader to adopt any particular position – the details of the Second Coming are of subordinate consequence with respect to the essence of our religion, which is to follow Christ.  But we are called to love truth[7], and therefore it will not be out of order to carefully examine the dispensationalist’s picture of the Church, Israel, and the end times in light of Scripture.

The Dispensationalist’s Thought Process

Traditional dispensationalists make a clear distinction between Israel and the Church and between God’s plan for Israel and God’s plan for the Church.  When the Bible mentions Israel, they maintain, it is referring to the literal nation of Israel, the Jewish people and the land they inhabit.  In the memorable words of one dispensationalist exegete, “Israel is Israel – period!”[8] According to this view, God’s plan for Israel as revealed in the covenants of the Old Testament and in John’s vision of the New Jerusalem in the book of Revelation is a plan for Israel in the strict sense.  The covenants were made with the Jews and for the Jews.  They will reach their fulfillment when the New Jerusalem is established and Jesus takes on the role of a Davidic king.

The Church, on the other hand, has little place in God’s overarching plan.  Dispensationalist theologians have referred to it as “an interruption of God’s program for Israel”[9] and “an intercalation”[10].   The Church was established because the Jewish people rejected Jesus when he offered himself to them as the Davidic king foretold by prophecy[11].  Thus, the Church bears no relation to God’s plan for his people except insofar as it is God’s response to Israel’s temporary rejection of that plan.

Perhaps because of the nature of their interpretation of God’s plan for Israel, dispensationalists make a further distinction.  Israel, they claim, is earthly in nature, while the Church is spiritual in nature.  Consequently, God’s plan for Israel is an earthly plan – to establish His new earthly kingdom in Jerusalem.  Likewise, we might expect that God’s plan for the Church will be a spiritual plan.  It seems natural to identify the fulfillment of this spiritual plan with the scriptural imagery of believers being “caught up”[12] to dwell with Jesus.  John Nelson Darby, an early and widely influential dispensationalist theologian, makes the connection between ecclesiology and eschatology clear: “It is this conviction, that the Church is properly heavenly in its calling and relationship with Christ, forming no part of the course of events of the earth, which makes its rapture so simple and clear”[13].  Dispensationalists generally go on to argue that since the great tribulation and the other events of the end times are the beginning of the fulfillment of God’s plan for Israel, we should expect the age of the Church to come to an end before they occur.  This is the doctrine of the pretribulational rapture.

The dispensationalist argument for the pretribulational rapture is complicated, and it will be helpful before proceeding to summarize it as follows:

1. The Church is a purely spiritual entity.

2. A purely spiritual entity has a spiritual beginning and a spiritual end.

3. The spiritual end of the Church is described in passages referring to believers being caught up       to dwell with Jesus.

4. The Church is interposed between Jesus’ earthly ministry and the fulfillment of God’s promises     to Israel.

5. The tribulation is the beginning of the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel.

Problems with the Teleological Distinction

Let the teleological distinction designate the system of propositions about the natures and purposes of Israel and the Church set forth in the previous section.  I will now substantiate two problems I see with the teleological distinction.  The first calls into question the dispensationalist’s dualism concerning the properties earthly and spiritual, which is the basis for his first premise above.  The second has to do with the dispensationalist’s claim that Jesus came to establish a Davidic kingdom in first-century Israel, which is the basis for his fourth premise above.

The First Problem – Dualism

The distinction between the earthly character of Israel and the spiritual character of the Church, which underlies the intuition that the two will have distinct fates during the last days, arises from a conceptual confusion.  It is undeniable that Israel is earthly and the Church is spiritual.  However, it does not follow from the fact that Israel is earthly that Israel is only earthly[14].  It is also the case that Israel is spiritual.  The properties of spirituality and earthliness are not mutually exclusive.  Humans, who were formed from the dust but animated by the breath of God, are both earthly and spiritual in nature; it is the same with Israel and the Church.  Paul explains that membership in the nation of Israel is not defined according to descent in his letter to the Romans:

“For not all Israelites truly belong to Israel, and not all of Abraham’s
children are his true descendants; but ‘It is through Isaac that
descendants shall be named after you.’  This means that it is not the
children of the flesh who are the children of God, but the children of
the promise are counted as descendants”[15].

A simple reading of Paul’s letter suggests that Israel is an earthly nation that participates in a spiritual reality, the reality of being born into God’s promise.    Again, it seems that part of what it is to be Israel is to have a certain spiritual property, namely the property of being the collection of the children of the promise.  Consequently we are not justified in the claim that Israel differs from the Church in that the latter is spiritual while the former is not.

Neither is the Church entirely spiritual.  An examination of the actions and qualities attributed to the Church in the book of Acts reveals that the Church is the sort of entity that can be afraid[16], be gathered together[17], make decisions[18], and send the apostles on their way[19].  These are not spiritual activities; rather, they are abilities arising from the fact that the Church is composed of individual believers.  But an entity composed of earthly beings cannot fail to be earthly.  It is important to note that I am not arguing that the Church is nothing over and above the Christians that belong to the Church.  I only claim that the Church has a firm foothold in this world.

If the Church and Israel both have spiritual and earthly qualities, we have lost our justification for the intuition that the Church will have a spiritual end different in character from Israel’s earthly end.  As a result, we have no reason to think that the scriptures about being “caught up” to meet Jesus describe the end of the Church – they could just as well be describing the end of Israel, or of both the Church and Israel, or of neither the Church nor Israel.  We know far less about the rapture than we thought we did.

The Second Problem – The Church as Interruption

The second problem stems from the claim that the Church is mostly irrelevant to God’s larger plan for Israel, having arisen only because Israel rejected Jesus when he came to be its Davidic king.  This interpretation of the mission of Jesus appears difficult to reconcile with certain New Testament scriptures.  I will treat these scriptures as explanada (things to be explained) and the teleological distinction as a theory proposed to explain them.  Presumably, supporters of the teleological distinction believe that their account is compatible with scripture.  They must therefore be able to give a plausible explanation for any and all scriptures that appear to undermine their position.  This will constitute a problem for them if plausible explanations for one or more scriptures are not forthcoming.

Explanadum 1: If God’s purpose for the Incarnation was to install a Davidic king in Israel, then we might expect that Jesus would have preached about his earthly kingdom.  Perhaps, for example, Jesus would at some point have expressed an interest in gaining political authority in Israel.  On the contrary, however, Jesus tells Pilate “My kingdom is not from this world.  If my kingdom were from this world, my followers would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.  But as it is, my kingdom is not from here”[20].  Not only does Jesus appear to deny that he desires to be an earthly King of the Jews, he also provides a plausible criterion by which we can empirically verify it for ourselves.  Surely if Jesus and his followers had been committed to establishing a new Davidic kingdom in ancient Judea, they would have resisted the arrest and execution of its king.  The proponent of the teleological distinction must provide a plausible explanation for Jesus’ surprising silence about his earthly mission.

Explanadum 2: It seems reasonable to suppose that the untimely death of God’s Davidic king would foil His purposes.  But multiple scriptures suggest that Jesus’ death and resurrection were integral parts of his mission on earth from the beginning.  Jesus foretells his death and resurrection numerous times in the course of his ministry[21].  Moreover, the Gospel of John records the fulfillment of prophecies from the Psalms and the books of Exodus and Numbers during the crucifixion of Jesus.[22] How could it be true that God’s plan for Jesus was for him to initiate a Davidic kingdom in first-century Israel and that his death on the cross was part of God’s plan as revealed by the prophets?

Explanadum 3: Near the end of his ministry, Jesus prays, “I glorified you on earth, having accomplished the work that you gave me to do”[23]. The simplest interpretation of this passage is that the things Jesus had done up to that point were the work God had given him to do.  But if God’s plan for Jesus was for him to establish an earthly kingdom, then in what sense had Jesus accomplished the work God had given him to do?[24]

Explanadum 4: It is written in the book of Hebrews: “Indeed, under the law almost everything is purified with blood, and without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins,”[25] and “For it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins,”[26] and “…we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all”[27].  We might conclude that a) a sacrifice was necessary for the forgiveness of our sins and b) an imperfect creation would not have been an adequate sacrifice.  The supporter of the teleological distinction believes that Jesus was not meant to be offered as a sacrifice and that his coming was supposed to initiate a heavenly kingdom in the Davidic tradition.  He must therefore either propose another way in which our sins could have been forgiven (that is, think of another perfect being that could have been sacrificed) or argue that it was not necessary for our sins to be forgiven.  This is by far the most pressing explanadum.  We are taught that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ is the central drama of God’s relationship with man, the most important event in all of history, and the perfect expression of God’s love and grace.  It is that through which we receive salvation and the right to be called children of God[28].  It is the foundation of the Church insofar as the Church is the spiritual fellowship of all those who have accepted Christ’s sacrifice, the living body of Christ in the world.  Yet if we accept the teleological distinction, it is difficult to avoid the suspicion that we are regarding the death and resurrection of Jesus as some sort of mistake, or plan B, or unfortunate misunderstanding.  I submit that if this is the case, then the teleological distinction cannot be reconciled with the Gospel message.  The defender of the teleological distinction must account for and explain away these intuitions if we are to take his claims seriously.

The intuition behind all four explanada is the same: if Jesus was meant to initiate a Davidic kingdom and the Church is merely an interruption in God’s plan for Israel, then why does the New Testament place such an emphasis on the death and resurrection of Jesus, on the New Covenant foretold by the prophets and established by his death and resurrection, on the central role of the Church in that New Covenant, and on the place of all of these in the context of God’s relationship with Israel?  The proponent of the teleological distinction must give a plausible explanation for all of these aspects of the New Testament.  Until he does, the teleological distinction is not a convincing theory of the relationship between Israel and the Church.

The Point

Let us now return to the argument for the pretribulational rapture presented at the beginning of this discussion.  It was:

1. The Church is a purely spiritual entity.

2. A purely spiritual entity has a spiritual beginning and a spiritual end.

3. The spiritual end of the Church is described in passages referring to believers being caught up       to dwell with Jesus.

4. The Church is interposed between Jesus’ earthly ministry and the fulfillment of God’s promises     to Israel.

5. The tribulation is the beginning of the fulfillment of God’s promises to Israel.

The first problem presented above calls into question the legitimacy of the identification of the Church as a purely spiritual entity (premise 1) and therefore the legitimacy of the assumption that scriptures referring to believers being “caught up” refer to the end of the Church (premise 3).  If we agree that there is a problem with these two premises, then the argument is not sound.  Likewise, the second problem presented above was meant to raise our suspicions about the claim that the Church is merely interposed into the history of Israel (premise 4).  If we think it is not, then once again the argument is not sound.   If the argument is not sound, then the dispensationalist has given us no reason to expect a pretribulational rapture.

It is important to realize that I am not denying that scripture predicts the ascension of believers (living and dead) to dwell with Jesus.  I am only resisting a localization of this particular event with respect to the other events foretold, especially because this localization appears to me to be justified by a problematic ecclesiology.  Scripture attests to the fact that the chronology of the Second Coming is obscure[29], and we would do well to be cautious of any claims about the end times that are not explicit in the Bible.  Though I disagree with most dispensationalists on the issue of the rapture, I consider it regrettable that disagreements concerning eschatology cause so much interdenominational strife.  Perhaps in our focus on the details of what is to come we have turned our attention in the wrong direction.  What does our eschatology contribute to our ability to follow Jesus perfectly in every moment – to bring God’s timeless love into time, for the sake of Israel and the world?

“Men’s curiosity searches past and future
And clings to that dimension. But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint-
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime’s death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.[30]“

[2] Matthew 24:21 “For then there will be a great tribulation, such as has not been since the beginning of the world until this time, no, nor ever shall be.” (NKJV)

[3] Grand Rapids, Mich: Zondervan, 1970

[4] e.g. Left Behind: A Novel of the Earth’s Last Days. Wheaton, Ill: Tyndale House Publishers, 1995

[5] ‘Dispensationalism‘ defies precise definition.  The name itself arises from the fact that dispensationalists divide Biblical history into distinct periods, or ‘dispensations’, which are meant to represent different phases in God’s relationship with His creation.  However, there is disagreement among dispensationalists concerning the number and nature of these dispensations, and many of the movement’s leading theologians (notably Charles Ryrie) consider the issue beside the point.  Instead, they argue, what defines dispensationalism is a specific set of views concerning the nature of the Church combined with a commitment to the literal interpretation of Biblical prophecy.  But problems arise with this definition as well, for it has been alleged that traditional dispensationalist interpretations of prophecy are not properly characterized as literal.  In many cases, critics argue, the dispensationalist interpretive method is inconsistent, treating only some passages literally.  So as not to become ensnared in the substantial confusion surrounding the nature of dispensationalism, I have limited my discussion to the particular view of Israel and the Church that has historically been embraced by most American dispensationalists.

[6] San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003

[7] Zechariah 8:19

[8] Van Impe, Jack. Everything about Prophecy. Troy, Michigan: Jack Van Impe Ministries, 1999.  Quoted by Olson, above.

[9] Pentecost, J. Dwight. Things to Come. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1958. Quoted by Olson, above.

[10] Ryrie, Charles.  The Basis of the Premillennial Faith. New York: Loizeaux Bros., 1953. Quoted by Olson, above.

[11] Ryrie writes, “Because the King was rejected, the messianic, Davidic kingdom was (from a human standpoint) postponed.”  Basic Theology. Wheaton, Ill.:  Victor Books, 1986.  Quoted by Olson, above.  Note that the claim is not that Jesus was rejected and then the Church was established, but rather that the Church was established because Jesus was rejected.  It follows from the dispensationalist view that if Jesus had not been rejected, the Church would not have been established.

[12] I Thessalonians 4:17 “Then we who are alive, who are left, will be caught up in the clouds together with them to meet the Lord in the air; and so we will be with the Lord for ever.” (NRSV)

[13] Darby, John Nelson. Collected Works, 11:156.  Quoted by Olson, above.

[14] “P has quality q” does not imply “P has no qualities other than q.”

[15] Romans 9: 6-8 (NRSV)

[16] Acts 5:11

[17] Acts 14:27

[18] Acts 15:22

[19] Acts 15:3

[20] John 18:36 (NRSV)

[21] cf. Mt. 16:21, 17:22-23, 20:18-19; Mr. 8:31, 9:31, 10:33-34; Lu. 9:22, 9:44, etc.

[22] John 19:24, John 20:36-37

[23] John 17: 4

[24] The supporter of the teleological distinction could respond to my first three explanada by saying something like, “While Jesus initially intended to establish a Davidic kingdom in first-century Israel, after he was rejected the plan changed.”  But if he adopts this view, the supporter of the teleological distinction must point out the point where the plan changed.  Moreover (if my argument above has weight), that point must be before the first time Jesus predicts his death and resurrection.   The gospels do not seem to record any such dramatic repurposing.

[25] Hebrews 9:22 (NRSV)

[26] Hebrews 10:4 (NRSV)

[27] Hebrews 10:10 (NRSV)

[28] John 1:12

[29] Matthew 24:36

[30] Eliot, T.S. “The Dry Salvages” in Collected Poems 1909-1962.  New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1991

But the newspapers don’t tend to see what remained the same in Fr. Neuhaus. Through it all, and more than anything else, he was a pastor. All his many, many projects grew out of his deep faith in Christ, and of his drive to give others the gift of joy, hope, and freedom that Christ had given him. He believed deeply that we are all made in God’s image for freedom and relationship, and so as a young man he marched with Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma for civil rights, and as an older man he dedicated himself to the struggle to ensure that every American child is welcomed into life and protected in law. He saw no contradiction between these two stands; for him, they were the same thing. As he saw it, as American progressives began to embrace abortion on demand, it wasn’t he that abandoned the Left; it was they that left him.

If he changed his mind about some things — and many times, he did — it was because of his love of the truth, which was inseparable from his love of Christ. All his life, especially in his writing, Neuhaus embodied the classic Catholic synthesis of faith and reason. I have never known a person who read so eclectically and deeply, whose mind was so fascinated by discovery, who so delighted in ferreting out and endlessly arguing over what was true. Fr. Neuhaus published dozens of books and millions of words in his long career, taking on all comers in the endless, rambunctious conversation that was his life.

That was at the heart of Richard John Neuhaus — his boundless hope, joy, and faith in Christ, his Savior and Lord. He inspired countless souls during his life, many of whom I joined at his standing-room only funeral last week in New York. I was there because one of the lives he touched was mine. This journal owes its existence to him, and I owe him much more. He was a pastor and a writer, an intellectual and a fighter, and in the year I worked for him at First Things, I had the honor of becoming his friend. Knowing him was an unexpected and altogether unlikely gift, just like his life, and just like he knew God’s gift of life and the wonder of this world to be. He counted it all a blessing, and I learned to as well. He taught me what joy it is to spend a lifetime witnessing to the truth and the hope of Christ, and I will carry that with me so long as I live. Rest in peace, Father. I hope to be half the witness you were.

Dulles considered himself an agnostic by the time he arrived as an undergraduate at Harvard in 1936, but the beauty and mystery of nature convinced him that there was more to the universe than meets the eye. He became a Catholic the year he graduated, and sixteen years later he joined the Jesuit order. In 2001, he became the first American theologian to be named a cardinal. Most cardinals are bishops with experience as community pastors. Dulles, however, was given the title in honor of his extraordinary contributions to Catholic theology after the Second Vatican Council.

More than any specific teaching or document, Dulles leaves behind an example of a fierce commitment to using reason to understand and express Christian truth, giving us a chance to see that God wants each of us to use our gifts for His glory.

St. Thomas Aquinas, Quaestiones disputatae de Veritate (1259)

I. TO BE OR NOT TO BE

“Why,” asks Leibniz, “is there something rather than nothing?”[1] This question is not unique to Leibniz; Baron Rees of Ludlow, an English astrophysicist and current president of the Royal Society, echoes Leibniz’ words: “The preeminent mystery is why anything exists at all.”[2] According to Rees (who is not a theist), “Such questions lie beyond science…they are the province of philosophers and theologians.”[3]

With the blistering pace of scientific progress over the past two centuries, however, many have posited (often aggressively) that Leibniz’ question has no answer. Victor Stenger, a physicist and prominent atheist at the University of Hawaii, expresses this view bluntly: “The universe is an accident.”[4] It has no explanation.

It should be noted that the central tenet of this etiological nihilism – namely, that the universe is fundamentally causeless – is not, strictly speaking, a scientific statement, but a philosophical (or, if you prefer, meta-scientific) one. Science can only answer the question “Why is there something rather than nothing?” with subdued silence. Consider C.S. Lewis’ words:

The laws of physics, I understand, decree that when one billiards ball (A) sets another billiards ball (B) in motion, the momentum lost by A exactly equals the momentum gained by B. This is a Law. That is, this is the pattern to which the movement of the two billiards balls must conform. Provided, of course, that something sets ball A in motion. And here comes the snag. The law won’t set it in motion. It is usually a man with a cue who does that. But a man with a cue would send us back to free-will, so let us assume that it was lying on a table in a liner and that what set it in motion was a lurch of the ship. In that case it was not the law which produced the movement; it was a wave. And that wave, though it certainly moved according to the laws of physics, was not moved by them. It was shoved by other waves, and by winds, and so forth. And however far you traced the story back you would never find the laws of Nature causing anything.

The dazzlingly obvious conclusion now arose in my mind: in the whole history of the universe the laws of Nature have never produced a single event. They are the pattern to which every event must conform, provided only that it can be induced to happen. But how do you get it to do that? How do you get a move on? The laws of Nature can give you no help there. … [T]he source of events must be sought elsewhere.[5]

Given a certain set of initial conditions, scientists can generally predict with impressive precision what will happen. But they cannot explain the initial conditions themselves.[6]

It is impossible to ignore the implications of such an assertion: Either so-called “Why?” questions are (as Stenger proposes) unanswerable, or their answers will be of the non-scientific variety. This essay primarily concerns itself with the non-scientific answers to these questions.

II. PRIMUM MOVENS[7]

Given the two horns of the dilemma – either fundamental questions cannot be answered, or they must be answered non-scientifically – it is not difficult to see why non-theists, especially non-theistic scientists, go so far as to say that there cannot be an answer to Leibniz’ question. After all, many who do answer it do so by postulating a First Cause – and once we invoke a First Cause, we cannot help but sound suspiciously religious in our thinking. Indeed, philosophers and theologians have formulated several arguments for the existence of a creative[8] God based on the existence of a First Cause. Christian philosopher William Lane Craig summarizes one variation, the Kalām[9] cosmological argument, in the following manner:

1. Whatever begins to exist has a cause.

2. The universe began to exist.

3. Therefore, the universe has a cause.[10]

St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle (whose ideology may not have been strictly theistic) also postulated what were essentially cosmological arguments.

Though these cosmological arguments may be useful, they do not address the true source of the conflict. They are too physical to be truly metaphysical, for they are couched in spatiotemporal reasoning and dependent upon certain interpretations of the universe’s beginnings. In particular, Aquinas’ and Aristotle’s versions both define causality in terms of motion; Aquinas’ First Cause is the primum movens,[11] and Aristotle’s is the τι ὃ οὐ κινούμενον κινεῖ[12] (“something which moves without being moved”). Because both arguments are based on motion, they are limited; they hinge upon a non-eternal universe.[13] If the universe is infinitely old – if it has always been – we can hardly invoke a primum movens to explain its existence. Something more is needed. This “something more” is Gottfried Leibniz’ argument from contingency.

III. THE PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON

What is contingency? Richard Gale and Alexander Pruss distinguish between contingent entities and necessary entities in the following manner: “A contingent proposition (or being) is one that possibly, in the broadly conceptual or logical sense, is true (or existent) and possibly is false (or nonexistent). A being is a necessary being (or has necessary existence) if and only if it is necessary that it exists.”[14] For example, “A bachelor cannot be married” is a necessary truth because it is, by definition, impossible for a bachelor to be married, but “George Washington was the first president of the United States of America” is a contingent truth because someone else hypothetically could have been the first president.[15]

According to Leibniz, contingent truths (and, by extension, contingent things) must have explanations: “[W]e can find no true or existent fact, no true assertion, without there being a sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise…”[16] This idea is known as the principle of sufficient reason, or causal doctrine, and it forms the linchpin of Leibniz’ argument from contingency. In Leibniz’ mind, reality is a “series of contingent things”[17] – things which do exist but could have not existed – and this “series” of contingencies must be rooted in a necessary (non-contingent) cause, the source of all things, an ens causa sui:

Now, all of this detail implies previous or more particular contingents, each of which again stands in need of similar analysis to be accounted for, so that nothing is gained by such analysis. The sufficient or ultimate reason must therefore exist outside the succession of series of contingent particulars, infinite though this series be. Consequently, the ultimate reason of all things must subsist in a necessary substance, in which all particular changes may exist only virtually as in its source: this substance is what we call God.[18]

Without some necessary being that “[bears] the reason for its existence within itself,”[19] there cannot be a complete explanation for the existence of contingent beings; and if a set of contingent beings cannot be exhaustively explained, they cannot exist. But we know that contingent beings exist, and consequently a necessary being must exist.

Because Leibniz distinguishes between “reasons” (explanations for truths) and “causes” (events which precede and lead to other events), his argument from contingency does not hinge upon a non-eternal universe. Instead, Leibniz’ argument depends only on the aforementioned principle of sufficient reason and the contingency of the universe.

That the universe is contingent seems relatively uncontroversial; the fact that modal logicians speak of possible worlds at all implies that the actual world is not the only possible world, which itself implies that the actual world is not necessary.[20] But even the contingency of the universe is by no means uncontested.

Can we know that other worlds possibly exist? Positing other possible worlds could conflict with a deterministic understanding of the universe that would allow for only one possible world, given certain “laws of Nature” and initial conditions. If everything that happens in the universe is determined from the beginning – if, as Darwin said, “[e]verything in nature is the result of fixed laws”[21] – how can other hypothetical worlds be possible at all? And if other worlds are not possible, is our world necessary and not contingent?

The problem with this line of reasoning is that few things are as arbitrary – as contingent – as the initial conditions and physical “laws” of our bizarre universe. Consider fundamental physical constants. John Baez estimates that there currently exist twenty-six arbitrary fundamental constants in the Standard Model of physics.[22] For example, the fine-structure constant α, which characterizes the strength of the electromagnetic interaction, is approximately 7.297 x 10^-3. Is there justification for the belief that this constant must be what it is, rather than, say, 8.297 x 10^-3? If not, then the fine-structure constant is contingent. It is not 7.297 x 10^-3 of necessity; it could be any real number. If this is the case, then the fine-structure constant, and thus the entire Standard Model of physics, is contingent and not necessary.

But what if our current understanding of physics is incomplete?[23] Perhaps there exists some Theory of Everything which would explain even the allegedly “fundamental constants.” Even if there were such a theory, it would still be as contingent as the fine-structure constant, because other Theories of Everything would be just as plausible as the actual one.

Furthermore, none of this would even begin to explain why the initial conditions of the universe are exactly what they are. Why did the universe begin with x amount of initial matter and energy instead of y? A Theory of Everything could hypothetically tell us how exactly a universe of x matter and energy would behave; it still would not be able to explain why the universe began with that exact amount of matter and energy.[24] Put another way, the exact structure and composition of the singularity which began our universe preceded the existence of time itself; as something which was true, so to speak, “before” time, it cannot be contingent upon physical laws which govern how reality operates within time.

IV. QUO ERRAT DEMONSTRATOR?[25]

Leibniz’ invocation of a contingent universe is not, however, the main point of dispute with his critics; according to Alexander Pruss, “in the Cosmological Argument [Leibniz' argument from contingency] it is the invocation of the PSR [principle of sufficient reason] that gives the most difficulty to the contemporary philosophical atheist.”[26]

Interestingly, the principle of sufficient reason was not widely (if ever) contested until recent centuries. (As recently as 1847, Schopenhauer listed it as one his laws of thought.)[27] However, contemporary analytic philosophy has increasingly called it into question.

Why is the principle of sufficient reason so criticized today? Pruss says that “there is a developing consensus in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion that once one grants the PSR [principle of sufficient reason], the Cosmological Argument [Leibniz' argument from contingency] for the existence of God is sound. … At the same time, the PSR is widely denied in analytic philosophy circles. One reason for the denial is simply this developing consensus together with the wide-spread denial of the existence of God: ‘The PSR can be used to prove the existence of God,’ the argument goes, ‘but there is no God, and hence the PSR is false.’”[28] While he admits that this is not the only argument, I must agree with him that many people, rather than rejecting God after rejecting the principle of sufficient reason, reject the principle of sufficient reason because they are unwilling to accept God.

Pruss believes that the theistic defender of the principle of sufficient reason has two alternatives: “[T]he theist would do well either to try to justify the PSR or to make-do with a weakened version of the PSR.” He either must argue for the principle of sufficient reason or modify it in some fashion.

V. A NEW ARGUMENT

In this essay, I will not attempt to defend the principle of sufficient reason as articulated by Leibniz (though I believe it is ultimately defensible);[29] instead, I will delve into two arguments based on modified versions of the principle of sufficient reason. One, the “new cosmological argument,”[30] is predicated on a weak principle of sufficient reason (W-PSR); the other is predicated on a restricted principle of sufficient reason (RPSR).

Pruss and Gale’s “new cosmological argument,” based on the weak principle of sufficient reason, posits a being who, “although not proved to be the absolutely perfect God of the great Medieval theists…[is] just powerful and intelligent enough to be the supernatural designer-creator of the exceedingly complex and wondrous cosmos that in fact confronts us.”[31] Their argument is “intended to appeal to an atheist who is willing to accept that even if there were a brute fact, i.e., a true but unexplained contingent proposition, the brute fact would be something that could have an explanation.”[32]

They begin by defining possible worlds. According to Gale and Pruss, “A possible world is a maximal, compossible conjunction of abstract propositions. It is maximal in that, for every proposition p, either p is a conjunct in this conjunction or its negation, not-p, is, and it is compossible in that it is conceptually or logically possible that all of the conjuncts be true together.”[33] In other words, a possible world is a coherent collection of propositions in which any proposition p is either affirmed or denied. Each possible world has a Big Conjunctive Fact. “The Big Conjunctive Fact for a given world comprises all the propositions that would be true if this world were to be actualized.”[34] It is the set of all propositions that would be true in a certain world.

Necessary propositions (such as “2 + 2 = 4”), by definition, are true in all possible worlds, and thus every world’s Big Conjunctive Fact will include them.[35] Because all possible Big Conjunctive Facts share the same necessary propositions, necessary propositions “will not serve to individuate or distinguish between worlds.”[36] The set of necessary propositions in each possible world is identical. Therefore, each Big Conjunctive Fact is uniquely individuated by all the contingent (i.e., non-necessary) propositions contained within it, or by its Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact. In the same manner, “[a] possible world is uniquely individuated by its Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact.”[37] Simply put, two possible worlds cannot share identical Big Conjunctive Contingent Facts (and, by extension, Big Conjunctive Facts).

For example, “2 + 2 = 4” (a necessary proposition) will be true in every possible world. But “George Washington was the first president of the United States” (a contingent proposition) will not be true in every world; in some possible worlds, Thomas Jefferson (or Clint Eastwood or Paris Hilton) will be the first president of the United States. Thus, every possible world is unique because every possible world has a unique set of propositions.

After this exposition, Pruss and Gale present the weak principle of sufficient reason: “[F]or any proposition, p, if p is true, then it is possible that there exist a proposition, q, such that q explains p.”[38] (Compare this to the strong principle of sufficient reason, which states that, for any true proposition p, there necessarily – not possibly – exists a proposition q that explains p.) Everything possibly has a reason.

In “terms of a possible worlds semantics,” the weak principle of sufficient reason can be restated: “For any proposition, p, and any world, w, if p is in w’s Big Conjunctive Fact, then there is some possible world, w₁, and proposition, q, such that w₁’s Big Conjunctive Fact contains p and q and the proposition that q explains p.”[39] To simplify, for any proposition p, there must exist at least one possible world which contains p, another proposition q, and the affirmed proposition that q explains p.

Let A be the set of all true contingent propositions, or the actual world’s Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact. So “George Washington was the first president of the United States” is in A, but “Thomas Jefferson was the first president of the United States” is not. Let B be the Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact of the possible world w₁ that contains A and its explanation.

By the weak principle of sufficient reason, we know that A possibly has an explanation; however, we do not know (yet) that A does, in fact, have an explanation. To demonstrate that A has an actual explanation, we must prove that the possible world w₁ (which contains A and its explanation) is identical to the actual world in which we live.

Remember that every possible world has a unique Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact; each will have a unique set of responses to propositions such as “George Washington was the first president.” Given this principle, we will have established that w₁, the world which contains A‘s explanation, is identical to our world if we can show that B, w₁‘s Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact, is identical to A, our world’s Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact. We can prove this in the following way:

Recall that every possible world is maximal. Then A, the actual world’s Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact, contains either q or not-q, but not both. B, w₁‘s Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact, must by definition contain within it A. In addition, we have chosen w₁ such that B contains q. Now assuming that A contains not-q results in a contradiction. If A contains not-q, then B must also contain not-q because B contains A. But we have supposed that B contains q, so B does not contain not-q. So A must contain q. Therefore, there exists a proposition q that explains A, the Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact of the actual world. There exists an explanation for every true contingent proposition.

“What kind of proposition is q? … q is either a personal explanation or q is a scientific explanation,”[40] because a scientific explanation would simply be an impersonal explanation. Gale and Pruss claim that “[i]t cannot be the case that q gives a scientific explanation of p.”[41] Therefore, “q is a personal explanation.”[42]

“Since q is a personal explanation, q will explain p in terms of the intentional action of either a contingent or a necessary being.”[43] It is intuitive (and demonstrable) that q must report the intentional action of a necessary being, not a contingent being:

[I]f it did [report the intentional action of a contingent being], there would be in the Big Conjunctive Contingent Fact a proposition reporting the existence of the contingent being in question. But q itself is not able to explain why the contingent being it refers to exists, since a contingent being’s intentional action evidently must presuppose, and hence cannot explain, that being’s existence.[44]

A contingent creator would require further explanation, making q insufficient.

Therefore, “q reports the intentional action of a necessary being.”[45] In other words, there exists a being who has intentionally actualized our universe. This being, though not necessarily synonymous with the theistic God, is free, intelligent, and powerful enough to have created it.[46]

There exist a few objections to this argument, which Gale and Pruss address, but the main objection is that the weak principle of sufficient reason begs the question. Gale and Pruss are highly critical of this objection:

Our atheistic opponent might have been willing initially to grant us this premise, but after it is seen what results from this acceptance it no longer will be granted. The opponent might charge W-PSR [the weak principle of sufficient reason] with begging the question. When confronted with a valid deductive argument for the existence of God, the atheist can always charge one of its premises with being question-begging. The problem with this facile move is that it lays the foundation for charging every valid deductive argument with begging the question in one or more of its premises.[47]

The weak principle of sufficient reason posits only that explanations are possible. Thus, to reject the weak principle of sufficient reason is to assert dogmatically that it is necessary that certain contingent propositions do not have explanations. As G.K. Chesterton said, “Atheism is indeed the most daring of dogmas…for it is the assertion of a universal negative.”[48]

VI. THE RESTRICTED PRINCIPLE OF SUFFICIENT REASON

Of course, there are other objections both to the weak and to the strong principle of sufficient reason. Pruss considers the

interlocutor who finds the PSR [principle of sufficient reason] very plausible, but who is unable to consent to the PSR because she thinks there are serious counterexamples to it. For instance, she might think that random quantum mechanical phenomena cannot be explained. Or she might be a libertarian who thinks that although one might explain why Smith died by saying that Jones freely chose to kill Smith, one cannot in turn give an explanation for why Jones freely chose to kill Smith: the availability of an explanation would undermine the freedom. … Such an interlocutor would accept the PSR either if the apparent counterexamples could be taken care of or if there were some way of restricting the PSR in a way…that would move the apparent counterexamples beyond its scope.

The position I am imagining is a quite reasonable one if there are counterexamples to the PSR. The PSR does very much appeal to us. The ordinary person has a very strong intuition that it is true. In the case of a principle like this, when faced with counterexamples that one cannot refute one would like to restrict the principle in some plausible way to get around the counterexamples. It would be irrational to dismiss the principle entirely.[49]

He then proceeds to restrict the principle of sufficient reason, using the libertarian objection (essentially, that free will is incompatible with the principle of sufficient reason) as an example:

If we accept this line of reasoning, then we have a very natural way to restrict the PSR: … If p is a true proposition and possibly p has an explanation, then p actually has an explanation.

…

[T]he RPSR [restricted PSR] immediately takes care of all the counterexamples that present propositions that cannot have an explanation.[50]

From this principle, a simple argument can be formulated for the existence of a necessary causal being:

Let p be the claim that there exists at least one contingent being. Then, possibly p has an explanation. Hence, by the RPSR, p in fact has an explanation. Since the agency of a contingent being cannot, without vicious circularity, explain why there exists at least one contingent, it follows that the explanation of p invokes the agency of a necessary being which is a first cause.[51]

This line of reasoning is similar to Pruss’ previous arguments.

But it is not the only argument that can be made with the restricted principle of sufficient reason. Pruss asks us to imagine our world’s Big Contingent Existential Proposition (BCEP), which he refers to as p. This BCEP, or p, is the collection of all true propositions of the form “r exists”: “Bill Clinton exists and Napoleon exists and Bucephalus exists…” for each actual contingent being.[52]

Imagine a world, Ghost-World, containing all the contingent beings that exist in our world (e.g., Bill Clinton, Napoleon, etc.). Imagine that Ghost-World also contains “an infinite number of contingent and powerful ghosts,” such that one unique ghost created each contingent being that exists in our world: “Ghost g₁ created Bill Clinton and ghost g₂ created Napoleon and ghost g₃ created Bucephalus…” for each being.[53] If Ghost-World possibly exists, then p (our world’s BCEP) is possibly explained. Because p is possibly explained and is true, it is actually explained.

That the ghosts from Ghost-World possibly explain p does not mean that they actually explain it: “[I]f there is a possible explanation, there is an actual explanation, but nothing is said about whether the two are the same or not, as indeed nothing should be said, since a given proposition might have one explanation in one world and another in another.”[54] The ghosts prove that p has an explanation, but that does not mean that they are p‘s explanation.

From here, Pruss continues much like he did before:

Now, the explanation of the existence of a concrete contingent being involves the causal efficacy of another concrete being. Thus, the explanation of p must involve the causal efficacy of at least one concrete being. Moreover, the beings whose causal efficacy is invoked in the explanation of p cannot all be contingent. For then these beings by explaining p end up explaining their own existence. However, neither the individual existence of a contingent being is self-explanatory nor is the existence of a bunch of contingent beings self-explanatory. Thus, the explanation of p must involve the causal efficacy of at least one necessary being, a first cause.[55]

We have seen this before: Because contingent beings cannot explain themselves, there must be a necessary being whose existence explains p.

VII. DENIAL

At this point, it will be helpful to consider the implications of denying the principle of sufficient reason (and its variations).

I can easily grant that the existence of God is a boggling prospect to consider. Karl Barth, perhaps the most famous theologian of the twentieth century, said, “God is inconceivable.”[56] God Himself proclaims as much: “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”[57]

But however incomprehensible God (and religion) may be, He is certainly no less incomprehensible than the claim that the universe self-created or appeared ex nihilo. The idea that our orderly, intelligible universe (capable of sustaining conscious life, no less) arose spontaneously is flabbergasting. “It is absurd for the [atheist] to complain that it is unthinkable for an admittedly unthinkable God to make everything out of nothing, and then pretend that it is more thinkable that nothing should turn itself into everything.”[58]

Consider what atheism is – not the affirmation of a philosophy, but the negation of one. It is incomplete. If someone asks me my name, “not Peter” is not an adequate answer; in the same way, atheism in and of itself is not an explanatory philosophy. In fact, by necessity, it denies that the universe has any sort of explanation; it is not merely non-explanatory, but almost counter-explanatory.

Suppose that you woke up one day to discover a Lamborghini on your driveway, leading you to believe that a criminal stole it and was forced to abandon it there. You would probably not be overly surprised if your neighbor said, “I disagree with you; I don’t think it was a criminal. Maybe someone in your family won it and wanted to give it to you as a gift.” If he were to suggest this alternative, the two of you could reasonably discuss exactly how the Lamborghini came to repose on your driveway. But if your neighbor told you he did not believe that there was, in fact, an explanation for the Lamborghini’s presence on your driveway, you would probably be astonished.

This, essentially, is what the atheist generally does – not just for a Lamborghini, but for the entire universe; he denies the very possibility of an explanation.

Pruss believes that position should not be maintained:

Finally, observe that someone who thinks that perhaps there are some contingent entities that could not have a cause, for instance the realities that undergird the lawfulness of laws of nature, should still accept a modified version of the argument that shows the existence of an immaterial cause for the aggregate of all material entities. To see this, instead of enumerating in our explanandum p [the aforementioned BCEP] all contingent beings, just list all the material ones. Plainly, each material being can have a cause, and as before there can be an explanation of p. Thus by the RPSR, there is an explanation of p. Since the existence of a contingent being is to be explained causally, at the pain of vicious circularity, this explanation must involve the causal efficacy of an immaterial being.[59]

Essentially, restricting the restricted principle of sufficient reason even further does not detract from the argument.

VIII. BY FAITH, NOT BY SIGHT[60]

Many people, unwilling to decide between theism and atheism, opt for agnosticism – a beast quite unlike the other two. In a sense, agnosticism concerning God is perfectly justifiable. After all, it is impossible to consider such a weighty question as “Why is there something rather than nothing?” without experiencing a profound sense of awe – and this awe reveals, not our grandeur and wisdom, but our puniness and our ignorance.

Therefore, the modern agnostic asks, how can you know that God exists? For that matter, how can you know that you exist? What is existence? Can reasonable people not disagree? Or, as Pontius Pilate asked Jesus: “What is Truth?”[61]

This is not mere existential conjecture; ironically, philosophy has given us a proof that certain knowledge is impossible. There is no perfect epistemology, or theory of knowledge. Hans Albert considered this fact through what became known as the Münchhausen-Trilemma:

1. If we attempt to justify certain knowledge with other knowledge, we must justify the justification with a further justification. This leads to an infinite regression.
2. We can attempt to justify with circular reasoning, but circular reasoning does not justify.
3. We can speak of “self-evident” truths, but since these cannot be proved, they cannot be certain.[62]

Of course, a “proof” denying the existence of certain knowledge cannot itself be certain: “Il n’est pas certain que tout soit incertain.”[63] This skepticism has profoundly impressed our modern rational and emotional consciousness. How is the theist to answer it?

One important point to make is that self-evident truths, though not provable, are inescapable. Perhaps I cannot “know” that “2 + 2 = 4,” but I also cannot avoid believing it. The classical Muslim philosopher Avicenna highlighted this fact somewhat graphically: “Those who deny the first principle should be flogged or burned until they admit that it is not the same thing to be burned and not burned, or whipped and not whipped.”[64] It is one thing to claim that you do not believe in “absolute truth”; it is quite another actually not to believe in it.

There exists a popular and egregiously false notion that we have substantial control over our beliefs – as if, by saying that we do not believe in absolute truth, we can actually not believe in it. “My religion,” people often say, “is a personal choice,” as if we can choose whether or not to believe in God or Jesus Christ or gravity or, for that matter, Santa Claus. But our beliefs are not switches that we can turn on or off at will; they are complex responses to our experiences, our thoughts, and our emotions.

If people cannot control their beliefs, why bother with arguments for the existence of God? The answer is that, though people cannot control their beliefs directly, they can control their exposure to information and experiences that affect their beliefs. Polemarchus asked Socrates, “Can you persuade us, if we refuse to listen?”[65] We must, as Horace suggests, dare to know.[66]

Another important point to notice is that agnosticism is a statement of knowledge, while atheism and theism are statements of belief. And of course, people believe many things without knowing them. In fact, if certain knowledge is impossible, then everything that we believe is also something that we do not know. In the same way, I can be classified as an agnostic theist; though I do not epistemically “know” that God exists, I certainly believe that He does.

If belief exists without knowledge, what is justifiable belief? How can we say that certain beliefs are “better” than others? If we are truly committed to pursuing the Truth – as our institutional motto, Veritas, boasts we are – we will be committed to exposing ourselves to as much experiential and rational information as possible.

Can my “agnostic theism” be reconciled with what the New Testament writers say about faith? According to Paul’s Letter to the Hebrews, “[F]aith is being sure of what we hope for and certain of what we do not see.”[67] At first glance, the two seem incompatible. But they can be reconciled – if we make the extremely important distinction between epistemic certainty and what I call “spiritual certainty.” Faith is not epistemic certainty – perfect, “rational” knowledge of God’s existence – but spiritual certainty – a perfect trust in a loving Father.

If Faith is mere epistemic certainty, it is indistinguishable from fideism.[68] This, unfortunately, is how many people would define faith. They would agree with Mark Twain: “Faith is believing what you know ain’t so.”[69]

But Faith is not primarily a matter of “reason.” Faith does not come from cosmological arguments; instead, Faith comes from “hearing the message … [which] is heard through the word of Christ.”[70] Faith is experiential; after all, Jesus told his disciples that they would know the Truth if they held to his teaching.[71] The obedience does not spring from the Faith; Faith springs from the obedience. And what teaching are we commanded to obey? We are commanded to love the Lord our God and our neighbor.[72] There is no such thing as faith without Love: “Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness.”[73]

Based on their erroneous understanding of Faith, skeptics have lambasted Christianity’s supposed emphasis on unjustified belief. They do not understand that Faith entails emotional trust manifested in action: “What good is it, my brothers, if a man claims to have faith but has no deeds? Can such faith save him? … Show me your faith without deeds, and I will show you my faith by what I do.”[74] James’ words are meaningless unless Faith is, not merely rational belief, but a spiritual assurance in God’s love and sovereignty.

IX. THE PERSON AND THE IDEA

Arguments for and against the existence of God, though useful, must by their very nature reduce Him to something which He (putatively) is not: an idea. The God of Christianity is not an idea; He is a person.

This is the fundamental difference between the religious and the non-religious. It is anathema to the non-religious mindset that the Ultimate Cause of the universe is personal. For this reason, deists, who believe in an impersonal God, identify much more with agnostics and atheists than they do with theists.

Consider the hypothetical case of a person who believes that God exists, that Jesus is the resurrected Son of God, and that the Bible is God’s message to mankind. Is such a person necessarily a Christian? Absolutely not! For such a person could believe that God gave us the Bible as a sort of hoax to trick us into thinking He loved us.

To be a Christian is not to believe that God, once upon a time, said He loved Mankind. It is to believe that God, now and forevermore, actually does love Mankind – to the point that He Himself became a man to die for Man. A Christian cannot only believe that God has said things; a Christian must also believe that God meant what He said. Christianity is not belief in an idea, but trust in a Person – and the particular trust that we place in our Creator we call Faith.

Most people who reject the idea of God have never truly experienced the person. (Perhaps even most people who accept the idea of God have never truly experienced the person. Tolstoy speaks of “confessing Christ in words and rejecting Him in reality,”[75] and the pandemic hypocrisy and – even worse – apathy prevalent in Christendom lead me to believe that he was far from alone.) They have never truly attempted to regard Him as a living (in the truest sense of the word), emotional, loving being.

This almost inevitably leads to unbelief – for the Christian God, if considered only as an idea, is relatively stale and unappealing. “I exist,” He thunders, “and if you believe this and perform certain actions, you will receive a reward.” He is then a being indistinguishable from a cosmic employer who provides a product in exchange for our services. This understanding of Christianity (and, indeed, of religion in general) is hopelessly impoverished. To understand Christianity, you must seek to understand the person (or, technically speaking, persons) God claims to be.

X. THE BEAUTIFUL TRUTH

If you are looking for faith in Christianity through “reason” and evidence, you will be hard-pressed – not because Christianity is not grounded in reason and evidence, but because Faith is the fruit of walking as Jesus did. “We live by faith, not by sight”[76] – this, because the Christian does not (primarily) seek to understand God as he does a mathematical theorem, but to know Him as he does a friend.

It is not enough for the non-believer to say, “I do not believe in God the idea, and so it is impossible for me to know God the person.” How you feel about God the person will invariably affect how you think about God the idea; the one cannot be divorced from the other. And if you have never experienced God, and have never sought to obey Him, you will probably be bewildered by the mysticism, ritual, and emotion inherent in almost all human manifestations of religion.

This understanding of God will probably require a commitment few people, even religious people, have ever undertaken. Our Lord warned us of this himself: “If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for me will find it.”[77]

“The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult; and left untried.”[78] Christianity is not a checklist of beliefs and promises, but a radical lifestyle – and thus, to test it requires one to test not only Christianity’s tenets, but also its impact on one’s personal life.

It is dishonest to pretend that the primary divide between atheists and Christians is philosophical. For the most part, people do not believe in the Christian God because they cannot believe in modern American Christian religiosity; they are unable to reconcile religious hypocrisy, self-righteousness, and inertness with Jesus’ promise of “life to the full.”[79]

C.S. Lewis said, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”[80]

The Christian way of looking at the world may be utterly different from your own. But I urge you, at the very least, to consider it. I have attempted to demonstrate in this essay that Christianity (and religion in general) can have a “rational” basis; I hope this will encourage you to investigate it further. Read some books by Christian scholars; talk to Christians on campus (or to me); be willing to hear their side of the story. Above all else, do not pretend Christianity is an emotional crutch for feeble-minded people. It is a religion that has informed and inspired some of the world’s greatest thinkers – Pascal, Descartes, Leibniz, Newton, Planck, Goethe, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Heisenberg, and others. It is a religion that has transformed lives in a way nothing else I know can. For me, it is and ever will be the Beautiful Truth.[81]

Pilate’s famous question, “What is truth?” now rings from every corner of contemporary American culture, if in fact the question is asked at all.  In many cases, the very idea of truth is no longer regarded as important or “relevant” to daily life.[i] A number of factors have contributed to this seismic cultural shift, most of which are beyond the scope of this paper.  One in particular, however, is the dichotomous characterization of “objective truth” and “communal understandings.”  That is, the rather obvious insight that all beliefs are culturally conditioned has led many to conclude that there is no such thing as “objective” truth that is independent of our limited and biased cultural perspectives.[ii] A Christian response to this intellectual and cultural challenge must defend the existence and accessibility of objective truth.  This paper attempts to do so by taking a few steps backward from the sound bites of popular culture to freshly appraise the nature of propositions in general and, from that standpoint, to consider some distinctions between true and false propositions.  The intention is not to replace, but to build upon classical understandings of objective truth in such a way that we discover new resources to usurp, co-opt, and derail postmodern critiques of this essential, God-given gift.

What constitutes a proposition?  What are its fundamental building blocks?  The current philosophical dialogue about propositions typically describes them in terms of three factors: their content, their ‘aboutness’ or intentionality, and their truth value.[iii] The central argument of this paper is that the standard analysis fails to notice another key building block: that is, that all propositions have relational character.[iv] In this paper I adopt what I hope is a distinctively biblical approach to this analysis of propositions, proceeding in a particularist fashion, establishing the case from the clearest, paradigmatic examples, then broadening the argument to include all propositions, and finally suggesting some of the important ramifications that are subsequently entailed.

To begin we must define our terms.  How should we understand the meaning of the phrase “relational character” as it pertains to propositions?  I suggest that this includes at least the following factors:

(1) Propositions are always known by a person.  To describe this as a feature of the proposition itself, rather than about the knower, we could adopt as shorthand that every proposition is “known to exist.”  Both are true: the person knows about the proposition and the proposition is known to exist by the person.  This is at odds with a view of propositions as ‘things-in-themselves,’ as if they existed independently of personal awareness, like stand-alone Platonic Forms.[v]

(2) Propositions always have relational impact.  No proposition exists which does not affect some person in some way.  While we should recognize that different people respond to the same proposition in different ways, this confirms the more basic insight that all propositions always have some type of relational impact and this is due to their relational character.

The relational impact of a proposition needs to be considered in two distinct ways.  First, and more important, is the normative impact that a proposition ought to have upon a person.  The scope of a proposition’s normative impact will need to include everything from the appropriate impact when it is first considered to the kind of impact it ought to have if firmly rooted in a person’s worldview.[vi] Second, there is the factual impact, which is a description of the relational impact a “particular proposition in fact has for a particular person (or particular class of persons).”[vii] The difficulty of actually specifying the normative and the factual relational impact of a given proposition should not dissuade us from recognizing these features as constitutive of propositions in general.

(3) Whether propositions are discovered (e.g., through an individual observing the galaxies through a telescope) or shared (e.g., when a husband discusses his feelings with his wife), the impact upon the person who learns of the proposition’s existence depends upon the relational climate in which the person learns of the proposition’s existence. That is, if the astronomer learns of the existence of a new star in the relational climate of knowing and experiencing the love of God, the impact upon the astronomer is quite different than if God’s love is not currently part of the astronomer’s relational climate.  More clearly, the propositions expressed when a husband shares his feelings with his wife will have widely varying impacts depending upon the relational climate that exists between the two of them, the relational climate of the wife in regards to people other than her husband, and most importantly, based on the type of relationship she has with God.  So we should say that propositions not only affect the relational atmosphere in which their existence is discovered, but that the pre-existing relational atmosphere is an essential element of understanding the relational impact of the proposition.  This is a primary reason why different people respond to the same proposition in different ways.

To summarize: by saying that propositions ‘have relational character,’ we understand that to mean that all propositions are known to exist by a person, have relational impact, and that their impact is affected by the relational environment in which a person or community becomes aware of their existence.  That is, propositions are “resonant.”[viii] A symphony offers a useful analogy.  The composer’s score is given expression through the orchestra’s performance.  As the music rises in the air, the notes resonate according to the venue’s acoustics.  God’s creation is represented by the score.  The music, as a harmonic, multi-dimensional portrayal of the score, symbolizes the propositions we use.  The place’s acoustics, as the context for the music, provides an analogy for the significance the relational environment has upon us when we consider propositions.

The paradigmatic case of all propositions being known to exist is God’s omniscience.  God is one being, and three persons, in light of whom we understand personhood itself.  God is also the only being who has awareness of every proposition that exists, including the content, aboutness, truth value, and resonance of each proposition, as well as how that proposition is related to other propositions and each person who is aware of it.  He is an unrivaled appreciator of fine music and the keenest observer of every jarring note.

Within his omniscience, a distinction can be drawn between God’s knowledge of himself and God’s knowledge of His creation.  In regards to His knowledge about Himself, God’s omniscience is temporally coexistent with his very being.  He knows everything about himself at every moment that he exists.[ix] However, it seems to make sense to say that His attributes are logically prior to His knowledge of them; His knowledge of who He is does not determine His attributes; rather, His attributes determine what He knows about Himself.  But when it comes to propositions about and within His creation, then His knowledge of all these propositions is both temporally and logically prior to the creation’s existence.  In addition, His knowledge of all creation is to His glory, both in that He knows everything, and also in that every part of Creation is a reminder to Him of His own greatness in creating, sustaining, and redeeming all that He has made.[x]

When we contrast this with how persons within His creation become aware of propositions about God or an aspect of His creation, we see that our awareness is both temporally and logically secondary to the existence of both.  The similarity is that in learning of the existence of various propositions, we are doing nothing more than “thinking God’s thoughts after Him.”[xi] Part of the relational impact these particular truths should have, then, is humility: both our capacity for knowing and our knowing itself are derivative of the God who made us and the creation in which we live and learn.  At the same time, the same observation provides motivation to learn more about the Creation: it is to our glory to search out a matter, to think the same thoughts God does![xii] It is marvelous to realize that as we learn about more propositions, we become more like the God who made us.[xiii]

A further ramification of this perspective is that it amounts to a denial of a naturalistic worldview.  Whether we are studying the atomic structure of iron or the inner workings of the human brain, there is no impersonal area of inquiry.  It is a fiction to think that there exists nonpersonal facts that are detached from any relational significance.  This universe is not a lonely, empty combination of matter and energy, but a personally fashioned, fully understood work of art.  Everything about this world is known by God and was designed by Him to have a relational impact on those who discover His creation’s various features.

One way of categorizing all that exists in this creation is to consider that which exists as special revelation and that which exists as non-special, or general, revelation.  I believe we should understand the propositions of special revelation to have “living resonance” and the propositions of general revelation to have “common resonance.”

The propositions of Scripture are quite unique.  First, and again starting from the perspective of a Christian worldview, these propositions are themselves God’s Words.[xiv] Therefore, “we cannot say that every passage of Scripture conveys the truth, but we can say that every passage is inerrant, i.e., never affirms in matter of fact what is false.”[xv] We are taught, furthermore, that these words are “living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12 NIV).  The divine truths of Scripture have the relational quality of “living”!  The words of God have in themselves the creative power to impact the very core of the human personality.  Furthermore, we should understand that their relational impact is maximal because we are taught that God’s words do not return to him empty, but accomplish the purposes He intends for them to accomplish (Isaiah 55:10-11).  And thirdly, the Scripture teaches that God’s design, by which His words accomplish their purposes, is connected to the relational environment in which they are received.  For instance, in Genesis 3, we see that the words of, conversely, Satan and God, have very different effects dependent upon the relational contexts in which they are spoken.[xvi] Most emphatic here are Jesus’ words: “If you abide [inhabit, live] in my word, you are truly my disciples, and you will know the truth and the truth shall set you free” (John 8:31-32, ESV).

When we consider propositions that describe God’s Creation-an artistic work that was spoken into existence[xvii]-there are two fundamental types of propositions to describe: those that are true and those that are false.  Both types have a common resonance, inclining us either towards or away from the Creator, depending upon whether a given proposition is true or false.  The word resonance means “the quality in a sound of being deep, full, and reverberating” or, when used figuratively, “the ability to evoke or suggest images, memories, and emotions.”[xviii] I find the word resonance appealing, first, because of the suggestive implications of the Creation being spoken into existence and the aural origin of the word.  Secondly, and more applicably, my suggestion below is that true propositions are an echo of the Creator’s voice, but false propositions are an echo of Satan’s voice.  Thirdly, while the relational character of propositions can at times be carefully specified, still, even in those cases there remains an evocative and suggestive element to this part of a proposition’s fundamental structure.  For these reasons, I suggest identifying the relational character of propositions that are about general revelation in terms of their “common resonance.”

As concerns the true propositions of general revelation, these are first and foremost similar to the propositions of special revelation, which are paradigmatically true statements.  The creation is God’s means of showing to all humanity His invisible attributes.  So, to the degree we accurately describe His creation, these truths are God’s means of communicating to us His nature.  In that sense these propositions are an echo, mediated through the things of this world, of God’s original speech, which generated the created order.  To return to the symphonic analogy, the propositions are an individual’s or group’s means of expressing the Creator’s original score.  These propositions are meant to have relational impact upon us; primarily, to lead us into a worshipful relationship with God.[xix] A true understanding of the creation also contributes to the flourishing of human individuals and societies.[xx] On the other hand, to the degree that we accept or communicate propositions that are false, we suffer and perpetuate the effect of the Fall, imitating Adam, who was influenced by the original deceiver, Satan.[xxi] The relational influence of ignorance and lies is to lead us away from the God of truth.[xxii]

The relational climate in which these propositions are learned affects whether or not their truth will be suppressed or accepted.  The relational climate includes the human element,[xxiii] the demonic element,[xxiv] and, most substantially, the influence of the Holy Spirit.[xxv] It is worth exploring whether or not the resonance of propositions becomes “deeper” or “stronger” as we move from propositions about, say, abstract mathematical truths to descriptions of nonliving matter to plants to animals to humans to human societies.  Another question for further research is to inquire into what kind of hierarchy Scripture and reason might establish for propositional resonance on these and other matters.  How might we compare, for instance, the resonance of academic discourse on poetry versus poetry itself?

At this point we have surveyed the structure of propositions, both of special and general revelation, examining their resonance in terms of propositions being known and having varying relational impact in light of the relational climate in which they are learned.  In each of these cases, we have considered the relational character of propositions from both the perspective of the knowers, especially of God and of humanity, with some consideration of Satan as well.  But what is the significance of this structure?  What difference does it make to suggest that propositions have resonance?

First, the relational significance of understanding the truth about propositions themselves is to lead us to praise the God who understands this world and invites us to do the same.  If, in fact, propositions do have relational character, then to know this is to discover something wonderful about God’s world.

Second, there are considerable implications for epistemology.  For instance, Alvin Plantinga’s ground-breaking work on knowledge, in which he defines knowledge as warranted true belief, specifies four conditions for a belief to have “warrant”: “warrant…is a property or quantity had by a belief if and only if (so I say) that belief is produced by cognitive faculties functioning properly in a congenial epistemic environment according to a design plan successfully aimed at the truth.”[xxvi] The relational character of propositions, as described above, entails that “a congenial epistemic environment” is as much an individual matter as it is a communal one.[xxvii] This understanding of propositions should lead to research that considers which relational environments are more or less conducive to the attainment of warrant, and therefore, of knowledge.[xxviii] Epistemologists therefore need to become intensely concerned with environments.  Further research should explore the immersive nature of total environments: facebook, myspace, SecondLife; opera, movies, concerts, art installations; the classroom, a political rally, business meeting; a church service, Bible study, a service project.  In these endeavors, cross-pollination with the fields of psychology and sociology are likely to be of use to philosophers.

Understanding the relational character of propositions opens up insights into other elements of a proposition’s structure.  For instance, we could begin to understand the aboutness, or intentionality of propositions (which is specifically considered under the topic of “correspondence”), with new insight in certain domains.  For example, when a person speaks truth, say, a case of honest self-disclosure, the proposition’s content corresponds to its referent, the internal state, but we also notice that the proposition’s relational character corresponds to the integrity of the speaker.  But when a person speaks a lie, say, a case of fraudulent self-disclosure, the proposition’s content lacks a referent in the person’s internal states (or past), but at the same time, the deceitful resonance of the proposition still matches the person’s deceitful character.[xxix] To give another example: when a great truth of the physical world is discovered (e.g., E=MC²), there is a fittingly great resonance to the truth (what a sublimely beautiful creation!).  When a lesser truth is discovered (e.g., a relatively minute fact about an ant’s antenna), the proposition may have lesser resonance.  These and many other connections between the various components of a proposition’s structure (or of an interconnected web of propositions) are worth more consideration.

These philosophical investigations ought to lead to extensive, ‘popular-level’ results.  In some cases, all that is needed is for philosophers to think carefully about the wisdom currently disseminated in other fields.  To take one example, Haddon Robinson’s classic volume on preaching, Biblical Preaching, is sprinkled throughout with instructions that clarify the proper fit between sermon content and sermon delivery.  At one point he writes, “If you shake your fist at your hearers while you say in scolding tones, “What this church needs is more love and deep concern for one another!” the people in the pew will wonder whether you know about the love you are talking about.”[xxx] Why is this the case?  Because the propositions themselves have a relational character to them which is at odds with the person who is, in some form or another, sharing these ideas to a certain audience.  The relational dynamics quickly become very complicated.  Philosophical reflection on the relational character of various types of propositions might generate practical results for preachers, public speakers of all types, advertising, web development, and all other forms of communication.

Other fields of study could also benefit.  For instance, to the degree that our churches separate orthodoxy from orthopraxy, we risk running afoul of the essential orthopraxis that we now see is inherent to the very structure of orthodoxy.  The relational character of truth, especially when we speak of Christian doctrine founded upon God’s revelation, should correspond with its intention, promoting love that brings glory to God.  This partly illuminates why Paul was concerned that Timothy and the churches he served “know how one ought to behave in the household of God, which is the church of the living God, a pillar and buttress of truth.”  The church itself, as living people serving a living God, is to serve as a pillar and buttress of truth, both in the living message it proclaims and in the message their corporate decisions affirm.  The implications of this run into every dimension of church life, from our service to and with the poor, to the quality of our evangelism, to the fervency of our prayer meetings.  What is the correspondence between the living Word and our lives?  To what degree does the integrity of our lives facilitate knowing truth?  Does this facilitate understanding knowledge formation as an essential part of our sanctification, as individuals and as communities?[xxxi]

In academia, the rediscovery of the relational character that propositions have creates delight and wonder in all of our studies.  Because it has resonance, truth has depth and mystery.   Therefore, we cannot pretend that it can be known only in strictly formal and logical terms.  Rather, because of its inherent connection to personality, truth is emotionally colorful.  So, for instance, “2+2=4″, like all mathematical truth, testifies to the design of the creation which God the Designer has fashioned.  It is not a sterile point, but evocative.  “2+2=4″ is a joyful, pleasant, delightful, wonderful, worship-inducing truth.  A child’s glee in understanding this simple expression offers us wisdom.  Or, to return to an earlier point, there is something marvelous in knowing something that God knows.  It is as if He has let us in on a secret about his world, an older brother who is sharing His perspective on reality, allowing us into His inner circle.  To take another example: it is like singing along with our favorite artist as we drive down the road.

The apologetic significance of the preceding discussion plays out on many levels.  Beyond the many implications suggested above, perhaps the most direct application is to bring an ancient, but fresh voice, into our culture’s contentious discussion about the very concept of truth and meaningful communication.  In this relational culture, attempting fresh, biblical thinking on propositions and the nature of truth is of the utmost importance.  We need to let God’s living word resonate within our hearts and minds until we gain a clearer perspective on the world he has made.  Along these lines, the identification of a relational element to the structure of propositions explains much of the postmodern desire for experiences and genuineness: there is a hunger and thirst for contact with reality as it is.  Recognizing that lively descriptions of the world are fundamentally designed to express the world as it is-not just in a cold and technical manner, but to do so in a dynamic and colorful manner-may attract ‘postmoderns’ to a new appreciation of propositional truth.  This same understanding is of value for bridging the gap within the church between ‘emerging church’ pilgrims, who at their best are trying to journey towards Jesus within the context of loving communities that generate habits of faithfulness, and guardians of the traditional church, who at their best are seeking to not only conserve valuable orthodox expressions of the faith, but express these truths in new and creative ways.  A greater appreciation for the resonance of truth speaks for and against both communities, challenging each to understand God’s living instructions as a true word that is to find expression in our communal and individual lifestyles.

Whether these ideas are true or not, and whether or not this paper persuasively argues for their truth, our final hope for productive apologetic engagement is the Living Word, Jesus Christ.  He is at the center of God’s score and the most beautiful music wafting through the air.  May the Holy Spirit open our ears, soften our hearts and loosen our limbs, that we might begin to freely dance together to His song.

Bibliography

Allender, Dan and Tremper Longman, Bold Love.  Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1993.

Carson, D.A. The Gagging of God.  Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1996.

Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy.  <http://www.carm.org/creeds/chicago.htm>.

Accessed 7/25/2008

Craig, William Lane and J.P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations For A Christian

Worldview. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003,

“Dictionary,” Version 1.0.2., Copyright 2005 Apple Computer.

Plantinga, Alvin, “Advice to Christian Philosophers.”

<http://www.faithandphilosophy.com/article_advice.php>. Accessed 7/23/2008

—, Warranted Christian Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

The Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Wheaton: Standard Bible Society, 2001.

The Holy Bible: New International Version. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1978.

Robinson, Haddon. Biblical Preaching.  Grand Rapids

[ii] Ibid. 90-91.

[iii] For an excellent summary treatment of these issues, see Craig, William Lane and J.P. Moreland, Philosophical Foundations For A Christian Worldview. Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 2003, p. 130-153.  The burden of this paper is to establish and explicate the importance of a fourth essential component of rightly understanding propositions: their relational character. The technical term I have coined for this aspect of propositions is “resonance.”

[iv] I submit that one possible reason for this neglect has been the failure to bring a distinctively Christian and biblical worldview to bear upon the analysis of propositions in and of themselves.  As Plantinga advised in his decisive “Advice to Christian Philosophers,” Christian philosophers have been too captive to the reigning paradigms current in the esteemed, but secular, centers of philosophy. (Plantinga, Alvin, <http://www.faithandphilosophy.com/article_advice.php>. Accessed 7/23/2008).  In many ways, this paper is an attempt to philosophically articulate and defend concepts which are more common, and even taken for granted, in the fields of theology, sociology, psychology, business, advertising, public communication, journalism, and the arts.  For instance, the psychologist Dan Allender mentions in a book on love that “Knowledge is always personal and relational.  Every fact we learn, imperceptibly, sometimes dramatically, affects our inner world and the universe of relationships” (Allender, Dan and Tremper Longman, Bold Love.  Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1993, p. 266).

[v] I suspect that part of the reason for this is that the printed medium facilitates thinking of propositions as having independent existence outside of personal awareness (perhaps due to a confusion over the difference between sentences and propositions).

[vi] That is, perhaps a particularly important and complicated formula in physics has as its normative impact: a) upon initial consideration, wonder and amazement, b) after acceptance, deepened wonder and amazement, and c) for physicists, should become a rather significant part of their worldview, but for non-physicists, remain relatively peripheral.  But for no person should it become an ultimately important proposition.

[vii] Personal correspondence with Dr. Larry Lacy.  The distinction between normative and factual relational impact was suggested to me by Dr. Larry Lacy, who has been an invaluably wise, insightful, and generous mentor.

[viii] I distinguish between a proposition having “living resonance” or “common resonance” depending upon whether the proposition is of special or general revelation.

[ix] The full description of God’s nature is the greatest song, worthy of singing for eternity (e.g., Revelation 4:9-11).

[x] These are truths which the Psalmist recognizes, e.g., Psalm 92:5.  Cf. Col. 1:16-17.

[xi] The fuller quote, attributed to Johannes Kepler, reads “I was merely thinking God’s thoughts after him. Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it benefits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God”

[xii] Proverbs 25:2.

[xiii] This is especially the case to the degree those propositions are also true.

[xiv] As the Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy states, “We affirm that what Scripture says, God says.”  (<http://www.carm.org/creeds/chicago.htm>. Accessed 7/25/2008).  Cf. 2 Timothy 3:16.

[xv] The Gagging of God, 166.  Again, to quote the Chicago Statement, “We affirm that Scripture in its entirety is inerrant, being free from all falsehood, fraud, or deceit.” (<http://www.carm.org/creeds/chicago.htm>. Accessed 7/25/2008).  Cf. Isaiah 65:16, John 17:17.

[xvi] Cf. Matthew 23, Luke 4:24-30, John 17:21.

[xvii] Genesis 1:1-2:3.

[xviii] “Dictionary,” Version 1.0.2., Copyright 2005 Apple Computer.

[xix] Romans 1:18-25, Acts 17:24-29.  We have many paradigmatic examples of how an understanding of this world leads to a deepened relationship with God in Scripture (e.g. Psalm 104, 148, or the prophetic understanding of natural events, as for instance throughout the book of Jonah with a storm, whale, bush, and worm).

[xx] E.g., 1 Kings 4:19b-34, 10:14-29.  Conversely, 1 Kings 11:1-13.

[xxi] E.g., Genesis 3, Romans 5:12-21, John 8:44, 1 John 2:4.

[xxii] E.g., Psalm 26, Proverbs 1:20-33, Jeremiah 9:3, Acts 3:17, 17:30, Ephesians 4:18, 1 Peter 1:14-15, 2:15.

[xxiii] E.g., Psalm 1, Proverbs 27:27.

[xxiv] E.g., Mark 3:22-27, Ephesians 6:21.

[xxv] E.g., John 3:5, 6:63, 14:16-17, Romans 8:23.

[xxvi] Plantinga, Alvin, Warranted Christian Belief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000, p. 204.

[xxvii] It is interesting that a great deal of the publications on epistemological matters are self-consciously focused on knowledge as an individualistic enterprise, but contain dozens if not hundreds of footnotes referencing the ideas and contributions of other people.  The clear context in which knowledge formation within the field is occurring is a relational one, and therefore not an individualistic one, and that ought to be a clue as to how important communities are for understanding any individual’s formation of knowledge.  The community of epistemologists, and their topics of epistemological discussion, ought therefore to give far greater priority and attention to the importance of community within epistemology itself.

[xxviii] This type of environmental research would be a consideration of what Plantinga refers to as a “cognitive minienvironment” (Warranted Christian Belief, 157-161).  He suggests that given a “favorable cognitive maxienvironment” (e.g., a world much like ours), “there can be minienvironments for a given exercise of our faculties, in which it is just by accident, dumb luck, that a true belief is formed, if one is indeed formed.  A true belief formed in such a minienvironment doesn’t have warrant sufficient for knowledge, even if it has some degree of warrant.  To achieve that more exalted degree of warrant, the belief must be formed in a minienvironment such that the exercise of the cognitive powers producing it can be counted on to produce a true belief” (WCB, 161).  What kinds of relational environments can be ‘counted on’ to produce true beliefs about God?  What epistemic deductions can we make from, say, John 17:20-21, about the appropriate relational environments for true belief formation?  Part of the suggestion of this paper is that a loving relational environment is conducive to believing that ‘God loves me’  because of the congruence or match between that proposition’s relational character and the relational environment in which it is learned.

Dr. Larry Lacy informs me that William Wainwright’s book Reason and the Heart: A Prolegomena to a Critique of Passional Reason explores some of these themes.  He also suggests, “One connection I see between this concept of a normative resonance and the project of doing “research that considers which relational environments are more or less conducive to the attainment of warrant, and therefore, of knowledge” is as follows.  If proposition P, because of the content of P and because of the relevant truths about the person who considers P or the person who comes to believe P, entails that the person ought to do something or seek to adopt a certain attitude and that action or seeking to adopt that attitude “cuts against the grain” of the person, then that person will be more likely to repress the truth” (personal correspondence, July 31, 2008).

[xxix] Cf. Matthew 12:33-37.  Primary examples of this correspondence can be found in reflecting upon the nature of the Trinity, as three persons of complete holiness, relating to one another with complete love, sharing between themselves all truth, as one God.  On the other hand, there is the example of Satan, a Deceiver who constantly lies.  Again, reflecting on this might, for instance, increase our wonder at the beauty of the person of Jesus Christ.  As we consider John 1:14, “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us. We have seen his glory, the glory of the One and Only, who came from the Father, full of grace and truth” (NIV), we see the person of Jesus identified as the Word.  In both His personhood and in His words there is a fullness of truth, which is to His glory, and therefore is conducive to our worship.  A further question: how does the relational character of propositions explicate our understanding of Richard Swinburne’s Principle of Testimony?  Aid juries as they evaluate witness testimony?

[xxx] Robinson, Haddon. Biblical Preaching.  Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2001, p. 204.

[xxxi] As Matthew 22:37 clearly indicates that it is.

“Doubt and belief are each on the rise,” claims Dr. Timothy Keller, author of The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism.[1] As the title suggests, Keller’s new book is an open invitation for rational dialogue on Christianity-both to the faithful and to the skeptical. As the chasm between doubters and believers continues to widen substantially, Keller recognizes the need to communicate clearly, coherently, and calmly. Believers and nonbelievers alike, Keller suggests, have an equal burden of proof and a fundamental obligation to examine their beliefs and doubts critically and rigorously.

Nevertheless, Keller does not endorse a strict rationalist approach to understanding God. Just as a belief in the existence of God requires a leap of faith, so too does a doubt of the existence of God. According to Keller, faith is inevitable, whether one chooses to believe or disbelieve. Belief and disbelief in the existence of God both require a suspension of strong rationalism. Neither God’s presence nor absence in this universe can be conclusively proven through the culturally hegemonic scientific method. Responding to contemporary atheist scholars like Richard Dawkins, Keller aptly notes, “If there is a God, he wouldn’t be another object in the universe that could be put in a lab and analyzed with empirical methods.”[2]

The Reason for God is organized very much like a rebuttal speech in a debate round. For the first half of the book, Keller systematically addresses seven of the most salient contemporary arguments against Christianity. Founder of Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Manhattan, Keller sprinkles his prose with pithy anecdotes and quotations raising fundamental questions about the truth of Christian faith, the goodness of God, and the tension between Christianity and science. For the second half of the book, he embarks on a critically rationalist enterprise to “examine the reasons underlying Christian beliefs.”[3] That is, he offers concrete arguments for the existence of God and the profound implications of such an existence.

Never polemical but always firm, Keller offers an honest examination of Christianity and its tenets. From the very outset of his book, Keller concedes that religion-Christianity included-possesses tremendous positive and negative potential in our world. In fact, he admits that religion “can certainly be one of the major threats to world peace.”[4] In a world ever polarized by passionate doubts and beliefs, Keller recognizes the need for intellectually honest civil discourse. Seeking intellectual integrity in both our beliefs and doubts is indispensable for individual, social, intellectual, and spiritual progress.

Keller never claims to offer “conclusive proof” of God’s existence.[5] As he explains, such conclusive proof is just as impossible to attain in religion as it is in science. In fact, The Reason for God continually challenges us to be skeptical of our own beliefs as well as our doubts. Only when we apply a fair and equal standard of skepticism to both our beliefs and doubts, Keller argues, can we honestly seek the truth of God’s (as well as our own) existence. According to Keller, reasonability should be our ultimate standard: “No view of God can be proven, but that does not mean that we cannot sift and weigh the grounds for various religious beliefs and find that some or even one is the most reasonable.”[6]

Of the seven chapters systematically addressing the most salient contemporary arguments against Christianity, the chapter on human freedom quintessentially represents the intellectual curiosity and rigor of The Reason for God. In this chapter, Keller tackles the argument that Christianity-and its fundamental claim on absolute truth-is the “enemy of freedom.”[7] Canvassing a wide spectrum of modern intellects, including Michel Foucault and C.S. Lewis, Keller contends that truth-claims are unavoidable: “If you say all truth-claims are power plays, then so is your statement. If you say (like Freud) that all truth-claims about religion and God are just psychological projections to deal with your guilt and insecurity, then so is your statement. To see through everything is not to see.”[8]

Not only does Keller challenge the moral relativism of the status quo, but he also challenges the simplistic Western conception of freedom as “the absence of confinement and constraint.”[9] Essentially, he argues that negative liberty is a chimera of true freedom found in God. As he paradoxically explains, “freedom is not so much the absence of restrictions as finding the right ones, the liberating restrictions.”[10] Such a restricting and liberating framework of freedom can only be found in the presence of love. Why is love “the most liberating freedom-loss of all”?[11] Keller explains that the operating principle of love is that we must “lose independence to attain greater intimacy.”[12] In a relationship of love, we constantly limit our freedoms in order to experience a more transcendent freedom in love.

Whereas nonbelievers may view Christianity as a straitjacket imposed by a legalistic God, Keller views Christianity as a self-imposed straitjacket. Why would Christians straitjacket themselves? Because they love-they love God. Once we realize that God himself straitjacketed himself with human flesh (through his one and only son Jesus) and sacrificed his divine freedom because he loves us, our only natural response is to respond to his love in complete surrender of our own freedom. Keller poignantly explains: “Once you realize how Jesus changed for you and gave himself for you, you aren’t afraid of giving up your freedom and therefore finding your freedom in him.”[13]

For many Christians, the second half of Keller’s book may seem like a critical study and rigorous interpretation of the gospel message. Tackling fundamental doctrines of sin, death, and resurrection, Keller presents the case for belief in God. Although his book is titled The Reason for God, Keller seems to be advancing a thesis for the knowledge of God in the status quo. In the second half of his book, he boldly claims that “people in our culture know unavoidably that there is a God, but they are repressing what they know.”[14] Our inherent sense of moral values and moral obligation, Keller contends, is meaningless without the existence of God. Our powerful sense of morality essentially intimates the existence of a higher law-an external and absolute standard of justice.

Keller’s fundamental understanding of Christianity is certainly challenging but also refreshing in a society that relativizes truth and morality and caricatures the fundamental tenets of Christianity. His emphasis on reason holds appeal to both believers and nonbelievers, but he certainly recognizes the limits of reason. Reason alone cannot conclusively prove God’s existence, but it can help us to refine and purify our doubts and beliefs. Ultimately, Keller contends that by honestly examining our doubts and beliefs in the context of God’s grace and love, “we will be enabled to move out toward others as Jesus has moved toward us.”[15]

Anger. Hatred. Bloodshed. Violence. Perversion. Corruption. The true nature of evil. Innocence defiled, tossed to the ground and trampled by those who should know better. A broken childhood, no time to appreciate the sun streaming through the trees, no spirit to laugh and sing. Only death and attempted escape from its clawed grasp. This is the life of a warchild, a child whose youth is callously snatched from him by militants conscripting expendable lives to fight in a violent conflict. This was the childhood of rap artist Emmanuel Jal, who was a child soldier in the Sudanese civil war. He was only able to escape the war through the help of a British aid worker who adopted him and raised him as her own. After his escape, he turned to music to speak out against the violence in Africa and the terrors of the life of a child warrior.

Emmanuel Jal is a rap artist who came to Christ in spite of all the hatred and blind rage of the war he lived through. His mission now is to touch hearts and minds, and to show people the truth of the world around them. Jal speaks with hope and sincerity, which lie in stark and tangible contrast to those in the rap industry who profi t from songs full of shallow lyrics and recycled rhymes about promiscuous sex, glorified guns, drugs and murder. Jal stands above and beyond these artists. He has a meaningful message because his heart is fully engaged in eradicating the superfi cial image carried by rap artists and popular culture, and reawakening people to the truth that violence is happening all around us, that there is more to life than the tawdry and hyperbolic untruths sold to an eager and easily deceived audience. We sell ourselves short by believing such lies, and instead should open our eyes to the humanity around us, in the full depths of our emotions, both the beautiful and the ugly.

His newest album, Warchild, is an uncertain mix of rap, reggae, and spoken word. The CD took a couple of listens before I warmed to it. His flow is often choppy, and some of the words fall awkwardly on the beats. His beats are good but not spectacular, and the musical catalogue of instruments is the standard, rather uninventive and unimaginative arrangement-drums, guitars, bass, and keyboard. This did surprise me, since I had expected him to retain the musical styling of his previous CD. Fortunately, Jal overcomes these weaknesses through the strength of his story and intentions. His raw, unrefi ned, and pure message courses throughout this album, knocking aside any question of rhythm and fl ow. His lyrics are unedited for palatability, or for the listening comfort of the audience-his message is meant to jar the audience out of complacency, and he relies upon truth to touch the heart.

There simply is not enough space to discuss in depth the message of each song, so I encourage you to go online or look in the liner notes to read an explanation of each song. I would, however, like to discuss a few of his songs that made a particularly strong impression.

“50 Cent” was written in the memory of Jal’s cousin in London who had stabbed a white boy because he wanted to be a member of the gang G-Unit. Through the song, Jal speaks out against a cultural disrespect for life and pop-culture’s fl ippant portrayals of violence. Despite the many voices condemning the glamorization of violence in the media, violence remains a very popular and pervasive component of pop culture, reaching extremes that border on a caricature and parody of itself. Rappers boast about the men they stab or shoot, the women they slap, the anger and abuse they have meted out to the world for trivial reasons. But perhaps they should take a turn in the Sudanese civil war. There they would have the truth of murder, of taking the life of another human being who had a home, a family, brothers, sisters, likes and dislikes, good days and bad days-someone who was complete, who was alive. Murder and violence are not glamorous. They are symptoms of the corrosive power of sin and destroy both the murdered and the murderer. One wonders if the rappers who talk about violence so gleefully would sound the same if they had fought in a war. The people whom we mindlessly kill are also loved by God and have souls and purposes in this world. To glorify violence in song and dance is to trivialize it, to make it permissible, and to yield to its influence.

The most moving song is “Forced to Sin”. It depicts Jal’s life as a child soldier from the age of seven to thirteen. During one point in the war, his best friend Luai died of starvation right next to him. Jal’s hunger was so great and his emptiness so deep that he was tempted to eat his friend’s long dead flesh. Circumstance and desperation can force us to sin, to violate the natural rules so intrinsic in our hearts. But most importantly, this song conveys the message that even though the twin specters of failure and death may wait at the door, we must remember our humanity, hold firm to it and never capitulate to forces that threaten to destroy us.

If this message had come from a man who had risen through the industry by bluster and false bravado, this song would be chalked up to meaningless, supersaccharine platitudes, lipservice, ridiculous clichés used to elicit a fleeting feel-good moment. But Jal has gone through hell and back. He has seen men and children die around him, their bodies reduced to rotten husks to be devoured by carrion birds. He has seen innocence destroyed as his African brothers killed one another for a long-forgotten cause in the service of power and greed. Taken from his family at the age of seven, he fought with an AK-47 that was taller than him and killed many. There was no glory in it; for a child soldier, war is a fi ght to survive. If there is anyone more justified in claiming that there is no God, that life has no meaning, that it is better to give up, to give in, to curse the heavens and seek oblivion, it is a man who has seen death and destruction every day of his childhood, and who has participated in the continued desecration of life, the annihilation of his very humanity.

The wonder of it all is that Jal does not curse the heavens. In fact, he praises God for his life, for the opportunity Jesus Christ has given him to live again and spread the good news of hope and grace to those who would listen. This is the power of Christ in us! To heal a child murderer who never knew childhood, who knew only the burn of violence and the fear that death might tap you on the shoulder and take you away at any moment. Nothing but Jesus Christ could have saved someone who was in the depths of darkness Jal experienced.

Final word: Emmanuel Jal is well on his way to becoming a very popular recording artist. His rhymes need some cleaning up, and I would have liked if he had retained the musical style of his first album, Gua; his music lost some of its distinctive character and beauty when he cut out the Sudanese language and musical textures for his sophomore effort. However, his message is profound and stands apart from the manufactured, commercialized rappers and hip-hop artists whose subject matter is the overused, the cliché, and the self-aggrandizing. Jal’s music speaks of a hope that people desperately need and carries an unforgettable argument for the love and grace of God, the changes He wrought in one man’s life, and His power to heal all.