God became, on the one hand, less impressive, less mysterious–and more like us.  On the other hand, human reason became exponentially more capable of traversing divine heights once God descended into the stratosphere as a mere “explanation” of all the other things we found more fascinating than Him and were curious about.  Once the transition took place from God as the One who is transcendently above and beyond the chain of existence, to the god who is merely the biggest, baddest, coolest entity within the sphere of being, the gospel was tamed and the cheap substitute of hyper-rationalistic religion arose in its place.  The implications of this basic transition in the way European intellectuals began to view the world are innumerable.  William Paley, in Natural Theology, could devise a scheme–apparently without blushing and all the while putting on a straight face–in which the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob became the “God of the gaps,” merely filling in for whatever science or moral theory could not at present comprehend, analyze or explain.  How considerate and helpful of him–and which, come to think of it, is exactly how an educated English gentleman is supposed to act, after all.  Christian ethics, once radical and counter-intuitive to those who remain outside of the story of Jesus, became self-evident, ahistorical moral truths knowable apart from the crucified and risen Jesus and easily translatable into any sort of theistic religious framework one could manage.  The kingdom of God and Christ has become the kingdom of the world.

The greatest tragedy, though, is that Christians as much as atheists have gladly given their assent to this pagan conceptuality, and in the process doomed themselves from the get-go.  David Bentley Hart, in a recent essay on Heidegger, puts it this way:

“Modernity, for Heidegger, is simply the time of realized nihilism, the age in which the will to power has become the ground of all our values; as a consequence it is all but impossible for humanity to dwell in the world as anything other than its master.  As a cultural reality it is the perilous situation of a people that has thoroughly—one might even say systematically—forgotten the mystery of being, or forgotten (as Heidegger would have it) the mystery of the difference between being and beings as such.  Nihilism is a way of seeing the world that acknowledges no truth other than what the human intellect can impose on things, according to an excruciatingly limited calculus of utility, or of the barest mechanical laws of cause and effect.  It is a ‘rationality’ of the narrowest kind, so obsessed with what things are and how they might be used that it is no longer seized by wonder when it stands in the light of the dazzling truth that things are.  It is a rationality that no longer knows how to hesitate before this greater mystery, or even to see that it is there, and thus is a rationality that cannot truly think…

Whatever its material causes (about which Heidegger really had nothing to say), the founding ideology of the modern vision of reality was, he believed, easily defined: the triumph of subjectivity in philosophy and of mechanism in science; egoism and technology.  A crucial boundary had been explicitly crossed, he believed, in the thought of Descartes, who entirely inverted what hitherto had been regarded as the proper relation between the thinker and the being of the world.  Whereas almost all earlier philosophers had assumed that the ground of truth lay outside themselves, and so had believed philosophy to be the art of making their concepts and words conform to the many ways in which being bore witness to itself, Descartes’ method gave priority to a moment of radical doubt about everything outside the self.  Earlier philosophy had generally treated epistemological skepticism as a frivolity to be rejected; Descartes saw it a as a problem to be solved. 

Hence, rather than beginning from wonder before the mystery of being (the origin of all philosophy), Descartes began by trying to certify the reality of his perceptions and on the foundation of his own irreducible subjectivity as a ‘thinking substance.’  To do this, Descartes actually was first obliged temporarily to blind himself to the witness of being: ‘I will close my eyes,’ he says in the third Meditation, ‘…stop up my ears…avert my senses from their true objects…erase from my consciousness all images…’  Only then could he rationally reconstruct the world for himself, on the fundamentum  inconcussum of his own certainty of himself.

Thus, in a way that Heidegger regarded as genuinely ‘impious,’ modern philosophy makes the human being—the self—the first principle of reason and then determines what does or does not count as truth on the basis of what the self is capable of establishing by itself.  The certitude that Descartes achieved was really of a rather trivial kind and a poor substitute for the wonder that he had forsaken.  Moreover, the world he saw when at last he opened his eyes again and graciously granted it license to be was no longer the world on which he had refused to look.  It was a fabrication and brute assertion of the human will, an inert thing lying wholly within the power of the reductive intellect.  The thinker was no longer answerable to being; being was now subject to him.  Under the intellectual and cultural regime announced in Descartes’ writings, the mystery of being has simply become invisible to thought.  Even the mystery of God is forgotten, says Heidegger; the God of Descartes is a deduction of the ego, serving as a secondary certification of the verity of experience and defined as a causa sui precisely because even divine being must now be certified by modern reason’s understanding of causality.  God thus is just another kind of thing, the chief function of which is to provide ontological and epistemic surety for all other things.” (David Bentley Hart, “A Philosopher in the Twilight,” First Things)

In the Terry Lectures at Yale a few years ago, prominent literary critic (and Marxist!) Terry Eagleton also posits that much of the “New Atheism” actually turns out to disbelieve in this Enlightenment God who does not transcend our existence, in turn failing to grapple at all with the God of Jesus who calls into being the things that are from the things that are not:

“God the Creator [is not] some kind of mega-manufacturer or cosmic chief executive officer, as the Richard Dawkins school of nineteenth-century liberal rationalism tends to imagine—what the theologian Herbert McCabe calls ‘the idolatrous notion of God as a very large and powerful creature.’  Dawkins falsely considers that Christianity offers a rival view of the universe to science.  Like the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett in Breaking the Spell, he thinks it is a kind of bogus theory or pseudo-explanation of the world.  In this sense, he is rather like someone who thinks that novel is a botched piece of sociology, and who therefore can’t see the point of it at all.  Why bother with Robert Musil when you can read Max Weber?  For Thomas Aquinas, by contrast, God the Creator is not a hypothesis about how the world originated.  It does not compete, say, with the theory that the universe resulted from a random fluctuation in a quantum vacuum…Dawkins makes an error of genre, or category mistake, about the kind of thing Christian belief is…But Christianity was never meant to be an explanation of anything in the first place.  It is rather like saying that thanks to the electric toaster we can forget about Chekhov…Creation is not about getting things off the ground.  Rather, God is the reason why there is something rather than nothing, the condition of possibility of any entity whatsoever.  Not being any sort of entity himself, however, he is not to be reckoned up alongside these things.” (Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate, pp. 6-8)

In confessing the God who names Himself as “I am that I am,” and in singing of the One who was, who is, and who is to come, Christians must strive to recognize how at odds their faith is with every syncretistic, empty rival conception of “god” in the abstract, as constructed and sustained by human imagination.  We inhabit a culture in which the dominant plausibility structure revolves around the idea–taken absolutely for granted, as obvious to us as the nose on our face–that God is basically like us, that He is known primarily through my subjective thought processes, and that His agency in the world is limited by my moral sentiments.  As we seek to be transformed by the renewal of our minds, let us not ignore the radical implications of the utter transcendence of God, lest we also become immune to the scandal of the God who freely took on flesh in the Incarnation, becoming what He once was not.

The Claim

Some people believe that the Bible is inerrant. By this they mean that what the Bible says is invariably true, or that the Bible never goes wrong with respect to what it says, or that the Bible, properly interpreted, is always reliable, or any number of equivalent alternatives. This claim does not usually function as an epistemic primitive; instead, it is generally seen as a consequence of the fact that the Bible is inspired, or is the word of God, or is a divine revelation, or any number of equivalent alternatives.

My aim in this post is to clarify, examine, and ultimately reject the doctrine of biblical inerrancy.  But before I take a single step in that direction, I want to affirm the central intuition that lies behind it: the intuition that the Bible is an inspired and authoritative document, a document that makes true and centrally important claims about the nature of reality and the way we ought to live. This is a constitutive Christian claim; if a person does not affirm it, he or she is in virtue of that very fact not a Christian. So we should be concerned to affirm it. In fact, one of my aims in this series is to show that rejecting the doctrine of inerrancy gives us a much more credible and convincing basis for affirming the centrality of the Biblical witness to Christian faith.

I will begin by proposing a clear and (I hope!) minimally tendentious way of understanding the concept of inerrancy. Then I will present what I take to be the two best arguments for the thesis that the Bible is inerrant, along with the reasons why I think each is unsuccessful. These will be followed by a discussion of the evidence suggesting that the Bible is errant. Finally, two responses open to the friend of inerrancy will be discussed and found unsuccessful.

The Claim Revisited

Galileo presents the external witness to Catholic officials.

The claim is that the Bible is inerrant. But what is meant by ‘inerrant’? Lack of clarity in this area is the source of a great deal of confusion and fallacious argumentation. The believer in errancy has often directed his criticism towards a straw man version of inerrantism representative of the beliefs of few or no actual defenders of that position. Usually, he conflates inerrantism with a form of naive literalism and then argues that the former commits its proponent to some absurd conclusion: “You think the Bible is inerrant? Well, right here it says that the earth is a footstool (Isa 66:1)! You don’t believe that, do you?” Here the errantist has forgotten that his opponent may avail herself of the helpful notion of a proper interpretation. By helping herself to such a notion, she becomes immune to criticisms founded on the more superficial falsehoods and contradictions in the Biblical text.

Indeed, the notion of a proper interpretation allows us to get much clearer about the concept of inerrancy. The science of exegesis is extremely complex and still incomplete. At the same time, we must suppose that we have some handle on the meaning of any text we want to call inerrant. But providing a specification of the numerous rules according to which we decide exactly what our inerrant text is actually saying is not a feasible exercise. Must we complete the project of Biblical exegesis before even starting in on the question of Biblical inerrancy? Certainly we will have to find a way of specifying the set of propositions the inerrantist is concerned with labeling inerrant. This is where the notion of a proper interpretation comes into the picture. Instead of listing the rules for finding the relevant propositions, we can just say that they are the propositions implied by the text as properly interpreted. In fact, to make things even clearer, we can introduce an ideal observer, the Historically Omniscient Perfect Exegete (HOPE), and specify that the relevant set of propositions is just the set our HOPE would identify as being implied by the Biblical text. (Being a perfect exegete, our HOPE takes into consideration factors like genre, cultural context, semantic shifts, etc.) There is still room for disagreement about what our HOPE would include or exclude from the set, but now we have neatly distinguished between two kinds of concerns: concerns about exegesis – in our new way of talking, concerns about which propositions our HOPE would identify – and concerns about inerrancy – concerns about whether the propositions our HOPE would identify are true.

In conclusion, then, let us say that a given text T is inerrant just in case each proposition our HOPE would identify as implied by T is true.

(There will still be some who call themselves inerrantists or something similar but do not believe in the truth of some of the propositions our HOPE would say are implied by the Biblical text. They might, for example, say that they believe the Bible is inerrant on issues of faith and practice, but not generally. Some of these people will call this the doctrine of the infallibility of scripture, to be contrasted with the doctrine of the inerrancy of scripture. I think this is a corruption of language– ‘infallible’ and ‘inerrant’ are properly synonyms; one of them cannot correctly describe a text where the other does not. But there is no deep objection to be found in terminological disagreements. I will prescind from treating the ‘doctrine of infallibility’ at length, stopping only to say 1) that I think it is substantially closer to the truth than the ‘doctrine of inerrancy,’ and 2) that I think the two are susceptible to analogous criticisms. The rest of this post will therefore be directly relevant to ‘infallibility’ as well as bona fide inerrancy.)

The Philosophical Argument

I use the label ‘the philosophical argument’ to denote a set of arguments that seek to derive the inerrancy of the Bible from premises relating to the doctrine of inspiration and God’s character. In the following, I will not be proceeding with reference to any particular author or authors because I have not yet encountered an attempt to formalize the philosophical argument. Instead, I will begin by myself stating the argument I see implicit in much contemporary dialogue about the Bible. It proceeds as follows:

1. The Bible is the inspired word of a perfect God.

2. If God is perfect, then God would not have inspired an errant text.

3. Therefore, the Bible is an inerrant text.

Rejecting premise 1 is not a move open to the Christian, or at least it is a move the Christian should try to avoid if at all possible. If we are to reject the conclusion, then, it will be because premise 2 fails to withstand close scrutiny.

Now, it is not immediately clear why it should be that God’s perfection precludes his inspiring an errant text. Certainly the consequent in the conditional is not found merely by reflecting on the idea of perfection. Rather, it seems to me likely that premise 2 is actually a consequence of some suppressed premise or premises which are not usually brought to the front of debates about the Biblical text. In particular, it seems to me that the truth of premise 2 is supposed to follow from the notion that an errant Bible would make God either a deceiver or a poor communicator; thus in either case an imperfect being. Let us consider each alternative in turn.

Would an errant Bible make God a deceiver? Well, a person is a deceiver just in case he intentionally brings it about that we believe something that is 1) false and 2) harmful. (I include criterion 2 so as to exclude cases in which the falsehood is either irrelevant or necessary for conveying a more important beneficial truth.) Now suppose the Bible is errant. Does it follow that God is a deceiver? Not unless we can prove that it contains some harmful falsehoods that God wants us to believe. Now, I do in fact think the Bible contains some harmful falsehoods (some of which Peter van Inwagen has written about in the print journal), but I would by no means say that God wants us to believe them. Why would one believe that if the Bible contains harmful falsehoods, God wants us to believe them? Only if one first believes that the Bible is supposed to convey only truths. In other words, we must presuppose inerrancy in order to make sense of the claim that an errant Bible would make God a deceiver. But then we cannot use our conclusion as evidence for the Bible’s inerrancy; to do so would be begging the question.

Would an errant Bible make God a poor communicator? Well, a person is a poor communicator just in case he sets out to communicate something and then fails, to a greater or lesser extent, to do so. Now suppose the Bible is errant. Does it follow that God is a poor communicator? Not unless we can prove that God set out to communicate only truths in the Biblical text. But this is just the inerrancy thesis– once more, we must presuppose inerrancy to make an argument from errancy to God’s being a poor communicator. Again, our argument begs the question.

In general, I think we can say the following: any attempt to deduce Biblical inerrancy from God’s perfection will proceed by calling into question either the virtue or competence of a putative God who inspires an errant Bible. But in order for such an argument to be successful, we must include presuppositions about God’s intentions in inspiring the Bible, which will be based on a prior conviction that the Bible is inerrant. And so all such arguments fail; every one of them begs the question in one way or another.

The Appeal to Scripture

There is a second type of argument for the inerrancy of the Bible that is popular in contemporary circles. It has two varieties, a weak one and a stronger one. The weak variety may be stated and refuted rather quickly:

1) The Bible claims that it is inerrant.

3) Therefore, the Bible is inerrant.

The discerning reader will notice that I have numbered this argument to suggest that there is a suppressed premise. That is because the argument as it stands is quite obviously invalid. Consider the analogue – Skippy claims that he is inerrant; therefore, Skippy is inerrant – which is clearly not sound. In order to fix it up, we need to add:

2) The Bible is inerrant.

But then, of course, our conclusion is one of our premises, and we have failed to provide an argument at all.

Let us move quickly onward. The stronger form of the argument from scripture is similar in that it, too, begins with the Bible’s own claims about its inerrancy. But it proceeds differently, by premising that if the Bible is importantly true, it will be true in its central themes, and that the Bible’s own inerrancy is one of its central themes. The conclusion then, is that the Bible is either inerrant or not importantly true. Given that no Christian, even the errantist, will want to say that the Bible is not importantly true, we have a rather stronger case for inerrancy.

Notice that one of the premises in this argument does not admit of prima facie acceptance or rejection. The claim that the Bible’s inerrancy is one of its main themes is a question of exegesis. Our HOPE would know whether to accept or reject this premise, but we, being neither historically omniscient nor exegetically perfect, will have a much harder time of it. But say that we charitably agree that the Bible’s own inerrancy is one of its central themes. The stronger argument from scripture still fails because we have no reason to accept the premise that if the Bible is importantly true, it is true in each of its central themes. Indeed, why would someone think this premise true? Only if she is subject to one of the confusions about the implications of God’s perfection that we uncovered in our discussion of the philosophical argument. (I have already granted, of course, that as long as we are Christians we believe that the Bible is importantly true, and this surely implies that at least some good portion of its central themes are true. But there is no magicking an ‘all’ out of a ‘some’, and the argument from scripture needs an ‘all’.) Once again, we find ourselves with no reason to believe in the doctrine of inerrancy.

Evidence Against Inerrancy

So far, we’ve seen the failure of the two most promising classes of arguments for Biblical inerrancy. But why do we need arguments, anyway? Biblical inerrancy seems a natural and congenial position. Even if there’s no knockdown argument for it, is there any reason to let it go?

I say that there is. In fact, I say that there are two related categories of reasons: reasons having to do with the contradiction of the Scriptural witness with itself, and reasons having to do with the contradiction of the Scriptural witness with things we have independent reason to believe. Call these the internal and external witnesses.

Of course, the very existence of the internal and external witnesses has been hotly debated. Such debate is possible because, given any particular false proposition or pair of contradictory propositions, it will always be open to the inerrantist to deny that the one or the pair is implied by the Biblical text. The fundamental problem is this: we don’t know what our HOPE would think about the Biblical text! There isn’t any such thing as a HOPE, after all, and so we’re left with our own imperfect exegetical skills. Accommodation is unimpeachable as long as it keeps itself within the boundaries of good exegesis, but we aren’t fully equipped to tell where those boundaries lie or when they’ve been transgressed. Thus, for example, we find authors (and teachers of my church membership class) denying any contradiction between the accounts of the genealogy of Jesus in Matthew and Luke by positing a linguistic backstory according to which they make no attempt at recording the same information. Similarly, we have John Walton’s The Lost World of Genesis One, in which he attempts to use valid exegetical principles to establish that the Genesis does not, in fact, describe God’s creation of the universe de novo. This method of response to proposed contradictions runs into problems when it strains our exegetical instincts. No single such strain will be a reason to reject inerrancy, but if the internal or external witness forces us to knowingly and systematically set aside our better exegetical impulses, then I say that we have reason to believe that the Bible, properly interpreted, is errant.

I will now present a selection from the internal and external witnesses:

1. The accounts of the events leading up to and immediately following the birth of Jesus in Matthew and Luke are contradictory.

2. The genealogies of Jesus presented in Matthew and Luke are contradictory.

3. The dates given for the last supper in John and in the synoptic gospels are contradictory.

4. The chronologies of the calling of the disciples in the four gospels are contradictory.

5. The chronologies of the major events in Jesus’ life presented in the four gospels are contradictory.

6. The accounts of the Israelites’ history in Kings and Chronicles are contradictory.

7. The story presented in the Pentateuch is, in numerous places, internally inconsistent.

8. The stories of Genesis 1 and 2 are incompatible with discoveries of modern biology, geology, and cosmology.

9. The New Testament’s spiritual explanations for psychological disease are incompatible with a modern medical understanding of the same conditions.

10. The genocidal commands of God depicted in the Biblical histories are incompatible with what we now know it means to be a morally perfect being.

The friend of inerrancy may be tempted to begin going down the list, offering rebuttals to each of my claims. But let us take a step back and reflect on the dialectic. We have already defeated the two most promising arguments for Biblical inerrancy. The only reason to believe in inerrancy, at this point, is that it is in some nebulous sense a congenial thing to believe. Strong attachments to the position are not warranted. Now we are presented with a list of prima facie reasons to believe that Biblical inerrancy is false. It is appropriate to descend into the trenches, so to speak, in defense of inerrantism? The best possible outcome would be a thorough defense of one’s nebulous sense that inerrantism is a congenial position. Moreover, it looks (at least from my perspective) like there isn’t much hope for the project of trying to show, through valid exegesis or empirical argument, that every item on the list, and indeed every other item that could possibly be produced as evidence against inerrancy, is a chimera. It is not good enough, after all, to show that there is some interpretation of the text according to which the contradictions do not arise. It must be further demonstrated that each such interpretation accords with the best exegetical standards. And insofar as these clearly include not interpreting the text with the prior aim of ironing out contradictions, it is difficult to see how competent exegesis could favor the inerrantist. To struggle against the internal and external witnesses here would be both purposeless and hopeless, thus irrational.

Accommodation

There remains one further approach the inerrantist might take in defense of his position. Perhaps he disagrees with the assumption that one should only be allowed to resolve contradictions in the text through standard exegesis. Perhaps he thinks we are meant to be clever with the Bible, to make it work, because God has graciously provided us with just enough information to recover the truth. This approach has the benefit of dealing tidily with the list of complaints against the doctrine of inerrancy that I presented in the last section, and indeed nearly any such list I could conceivably present. For one must only be sufficiently creative to see how, for example, it could have been the case that Jesus’ birth was attended by the shepherds and the wise men, and that he both fled to Egypt and received the blessing of Simeon, and so on, and so on…

But to take this approach is to build the walls out of the foundation stones. The reason we were attracted to inerrancy in the first place was that, in some vague way, we thought that God’s perfection implied that he would communicate to us clearly. But the extreme species of accommodation now under discussion takes as its point of departure the premise that the truth is cryptically concealed in the Biblical text. And to accept as a premise that the Bible is cryptic is to deny that God’s perfection entails his communicating clearly, and to deny the latter is to give up the central motivation for the doctrine of inerrancy. So this last avenue of escape for the inerrantist is, like all others, a dead end.

Inerrancy Rejected

There is no good reason to think that the doctrine of inerrancy is true. There are many good reasons to think that the doctrine of inerrancy is false. It is a rational requirement, then, that we reject it. A rational requirement is binding on all rational agents. So we reject the doctrine of Biblical inerrancy.

I would like to conclude with a personal note to the reader: If you found my argument convincing and are now terribly concerned about where that leaves us as faithful Christian believers, or whether we can even rationally continue as such– to you, as the angel says, “Do not be afraid!” It will turn out that, once we’ve arrived at a proper understanding of Biblical interpretation, everything will fall into place and the central tenets of Christian faith will emerge all the stronger for their new foundations. This promissory note will have to suffice for now. Next time, we will settle on a way of determining which parts of the Bible we ought to believe, and then in subsequent posts we will see how our new method justifies our acceptance of the Apostle’s Creed as a statement of faith.

Until then, soli deo gloria.

Now, readers of this post will fall into three categories. Those in the first category will have already, based on the above, drawn the conclusion that I am among the most awful, sleazy, rotten, perverse pretenders to Christian faith. (Or perhaps, if they happen to be more charitable, only that I need serious pastoral attention.) Those in the second category will treat the things I’ve said as stale news. What could possibly be more obvious? Talk about something more interesting! Some of these will be atheists or agnostics; others will profess Christian faith. And those in the third category, who will perhaps find this series most enriching, will have responded with some mixture of caution and intrigue.

The coelacanth, our fleshy-finned brother from the Devonian.

Two years ago, I was a first-category man. Theological liberals frustrated me to no end. Why didn’t they get it? If orthodoxy meant biting the intellectual bullet and positing demons, mysterious floods, the total moral depravity of certain Near Eastern cultures, etc., you bit the intellectual bullet! Christ is worth any cost! “We walk by faith, not by sight.” The situation wasn’t helped one jot by the fact that the theological liberals I knew all seemed to believe some crazy thing or other; if not that Jesus’ resurrection was a mere emotional phenomenon among his disciples, then that the biblical text has no meaning whatsoever, or that Jesus was an unintelligible or antiheroic character. These seemed (and still seem) awful, unwarranted sorts of things to believe. Their unpleasant odor hovered miasmically around the whole body of liberal thought; I wouldn’t touch it with a ten-foot pole!

But now I straddle the line between category two and category three. What happened? Well, that’s the point of this series. I will present, in what may become a rather long sequence of short arguments, my reasons for this intra-religious conversion. But before I do that, I want to make a placatory confession: liberals are awful! If you think we’ve harmed the church is a hundred different ways, you’re right! Liberal theology is a broad umbrella indeed, and there are some pretty skanky things living in its shadow. (Derrida is a good example.) But if you have the charity to consider old arguments anew, I think you’ll find some great insights here in the shade.

Two points bear mentioning before next week: First, I do not purport to discuss any topic exhaustively. There will be many occasions to ask, “But what about X?” Sometimes I may talk about X in a later post, or in a comment. Sometimes I may never talk about X. The most important thing, when considering some X or another, is to ask whether that X is potentially a defeater or serious challenge to the view I present. This will only be the case if X, taken together with what I have said, produces a contradiction or, in the case of arguments from the weight of the evidence, if X tips the balance in the opposite direction. Second, while this first post has been biographical, I consider myself to have arrived at the present point for good reasons. And that means that I conceive my project as more than biography– as philosophy, in fact. And if the reasons are good for me, they’re good for you, too. I aim to convince, not merely relate. So hold me to high standards, and don’t let me get away with any loose business!

In Christ,

Nico

Irreligious - Epistemology and god: Rationalists are from Mars, Empiricists are from Venus (3) -
Terence Lee writes his third post on ‘“Epistemology and God”, an ongoing series of essays on the theory of knowledge and how it relates to God’.

ONGs on the way – Japanese husbands, love your wives… – The Ongs, who are (full disclosure) my cousins, write about the Japanese stereotype of the Male Chauvinist Husband, and how a couple of Japanese pastors honor their wives.

World Traveler – “For the Sake of my Brothers” – The writer talks about Paul (and other Biblical characters’) Messianic statements – that is, offering their own damnation in exchange for their brothers’ salvation.

And they built the high places of Baal, which are in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto Molech; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin.
Jeremiah 32:35

Then God said, “Take your son, your only son, Isaac, whom you love, and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains I will tell you about.”
Genesis 22:2

In my opinion, all art is part of a triptych, whether it admits it or is conscious of it at all. A triptych has three parts: The Garden of Eden/The Fall; The Crucifixion/The Sacrifice; The Restoration/The Kingdom of Heaven. Another way of saying it would be to say, there are three realms in art: Heaven, Earth and Hell. There is something very human about being fascinated with hell. Perhaps this is why the Inferno appeals more to people than either the Purgatory or the Paradiso. Perhaps it is the same instinct that draws people into horror films summer after summer. I know that I have difficulty looking directly into the heart of Evil, but that it is those books and works of art that do so that are the most powerful to me. They have also the stature of Great Literature: 1984, for example, is the most harrowing thing I’ve read from the 20th century. Catch-22 literally made me sit down in exhaustion and fear when I got to The Part. Dogville made me weep with anger and horror. 28 Days Later still haunts me. Animal Farm, Brave New World, Lord of the Flies all made me look at my fellow human beings a little more warily. And just last night I picked up Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and it’s one of the most brutal things I’ve ever read. And I’m not even halfway through, and I haven’t even got to The Part yet (which the man who recommended the novel to me assures me will come). I’m not sure what The Part is, yet – does he kill the boy? Does he eat the boy? Does he meet his mother on the road and kill her? I’m not even sure I want to know.

This unflinching honesty, though, is the sort we do need in our coddled 21st century first world cocoon. It is necessary. It is necessary to be jolted out of the complacent stupor that comfort and abundance lull us into. For Man’s Heart is very dark, very very dark indeed – for there is a beast within each of us. What I love about The Road is its bleak portrayal of a world under Natural Law – that is, under the Laws of the Jungle. With no constraints, with no Leviathan, with, most importantly, no God, this is what becomes of Man. The child is a natural theist – so far the jury is still out on the father, but I have already met the old man who is a nihilist whom they feed. And I know that the heart of nihilism is destruction. And that the child would not stand a chance for even a second if he were alone, because he would be slain and devoured.

I think I first understood cannibalism a little better after watching the brilliant 1999 Julie Taymor film version (which makes you want to go vegetarian) of Shakespeare’s most gruesome play (featuring amputations, rape, torture, and the cooking of sons to be served to fathers and mothers), Titus Andronicus. It is so visceral, and really made me realize what a redeemed horror is at the heart of Christianity and what an irredeemable horror lies in the breasts of men. Steeped in the horror of the Spanish Civil War, Goya expressed this best when he painted Saturn devouring his own children.This is, after all, what war is: the sending of sons and daughters to protect fathers and mothers. Even worse, Civil War – the war of brother against brother, of father against son – senseless, timeless, uncontrollable. This is also genocide, the wiping out of entire tribes of brothers – and of course, this is cannibalism itself: the killing of brothers to devour human flesh.

Freud explained this phenomenon as occurring in the unconscious, due to prehistoric events at the time when consciousness arose in Mankind. He posited a band of brothers killing their father and eating him – a ritual which brought about (according to Freud) a rule of law. Indeed, before Christendom, this was pretty much the norm everywhere. It still is, in many places in the world today – the law of the survival of the fittest. C.S. Lewis also talks about the Fall of Man in the Problem of Pain, and posits that the first human ancestor, once self-consciousness had arisen, had to make the choice between himself and God. It would not, I guess, be a stretch to make that between himself and the Imago Dei in another man. Certainly we know that Cain killed Abel, one generation outside the Garden of Eden.

But it is child sacrifice that is the rankest thing to the nostrils of God – idolatry He tolerates for a certain number of years. But when the “abomination of abomination” occurs – making children pass through the fire, as the peoples did to Molech – judgment is at hand. Before the invention of childhood in around about the Victorian era, children were less than nothing in most societies. Some societies didn’t even name them until they came of age, because the emotional investment would be just too great. Children worked as a matter of course, were abused, used as cheap labor or slave labor (see Oliver Twist), were bought and sold as chattel. In other words, children, especially orphans, were the weakest of the weak, along with widows, who also had no protection. To sacrifice one’s children was then not only an affront against all natural familial love, but also against God’s justice, which is always on the side of the poor and weak.

We may not set up pyres or literally eat up our children, but what does it say when, in societies where achievement is the end goal, or where parents try to live vicariously through their overachieving offspring, and twelve-year-olds regularly leap off tall buildings or hang themselves or slit their wrists because they cannot live up to expectations? Or conversely, where children are had and not cared for, abandoned to the roving militias of the ghetto, to addiction and crime and violence? Remember that God provided the Ram, and that because of that Abraham did not have to slay the son he loved.

Oedipus’ tragic flaw was the most fundamental one of all: Hubris – that is, pride, the willingness to defy the gods.

image from Wikipedia

He displayed this when he claimed that the prophecy concerning his birth would be unfulfilled. He declared this at the height of his powers: the man had, running from exile from Corinth (where he had been adopted as a little baby and brought up as a prince) in order to not fulfill the prophecy concerning the Corinthian king and queen, met with a strange man who challenged him. He had a duel with him and killed the man. Then he met a Sphinx along the way, and being a wise man he solved the Sphinx’s riddle, freeing the people of Thebes from its tyranny. He was given a beautiful bride, the Queen of Thebes, as a prize, and made King of Thebes. As King of Thebes he ruled wisely, excising the sinners from the land, bringing peace and prosperity to the citizens of Thebes. It was at this point that he said, Apollo’s oracle will fall! And of course, (anyone who has read any myth at all will know) this is when the metaphorical shit hits the metaphorical fan.

At the time I thought this a pagan play, with a skewed morality which I could hold at a critical distance. I would appreciate it aesthetically, I thought, but not morally. After all, I’m a Christian (I thought to myself). My God is not like Apollo at all – He would never hold me accountable for something he predestined me to do anyway, and in any case, He wouldn’t make me go through this kind of horror. My God also knows that I only have the best of intentions – he won’t hold me accountable for sins I commit unknowingly! So I reasoned: I will not be swayed by some silly Greek play. I had already decided ahead of time that the gods were unjust, when I wrote the essay. Now to list the evidence, I thought. You can read my argument, which I still think very reasonable, here.

Yesterday I realized I was wrong. I had been guilty myself of hubris – for putting the gods (yes, even pagan gods) in the dock, as such, along with Oedipus. If gods and men were equal – on a level moral playing field, as such – I would take the part of Oedipus in a heartbeat. After all, who’s the better man: an unknowing father-killer and mother-ravisher who did everything he did out of compassion for strangers, or Mr Zeus himself, who’s pretty much raped every pretty girl and goddess this side of Creation, smote people he didn’t like for no good reason, fathered a pantheon of illegitimate bastards and then been an absent father to them all, and pretty much (pardon my French) dicked around for all his everlasting life? I thought Oedipus the better man! But you see, gods and men are different. This is the lesson of humility.

Well, first of all, the Zeus that the ancient Greeks worshipped and theorized about, and probably the Zeus that the playwright Sophocles had in mind when he wrote this, is quite different from the Zeus of popular legend. People did not think of Zeus as my Mr. Zeus, as described in the above paragraph. Apparently the Greek and Roman myths about the gods being capricious and annoying – all those delightful stories – were as controversial as say, Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, or, more to the point, Jesus Christ Superstar or even Madonna’s music or the Da Vinci Code are to Christians today. Perhaps the best analogy to how Sophocles’ play today would be Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ – reverent, controversial, with a moral god in the centre, not some capricious serial adulterer, written probably by a devout but flawed man. So I was wrong on that count – I brought a straw man of a god to the dock, when really I should have been considering Someone far more like my God.

If the God of Abraham, Isaac and Joseph were the One who put Oedipus through this particular play, I realized, just yesterday, I would agree with Him. Here are several things I have learned in the last ten years, sometimes at great personal expense, which compel me say this:

1)   Direction, not intention, determines our final destination.

I have done terrible things out of good intentions, and I can honestly, having searched my heart, say that I did not mean to do them. Nevertheless, I did them, and the consequences of my actions were real. My experience of reality is subtly different from my friends’ and acquaintances’ and enemies’. They each have an interior world, with a personal narrative. Until I am in touch with this narrative, I can never know if the words I say, or the things I do towards them, are helping or hurting them. The road to hell truly is paved with good intentions – I’ve realized this because I have both tossed carelessly my friends into the flames, as well as been abandoned to the Pit by the best of people, all thanks to good intentions.

2)   Sin is not just personal – it is generational and collective.

This is a hard lesson to hear, particularly in America, or anywhere in the West where individualism is the dominant ideology. America tells you that “you can make it on your own”. So Americans make up stories (let’s take Disney films for example) in which the hero is largely orphaned (usually he or she has only one parent, and that single parent is pretty ineffectual), and the orphan makes it in the world anyway, within one generation, accomplishing what he sets out to do. Of course, the true nature of American success is very rarely like this. Michael Sandel, building on the work of John Rawls, has already begun arguing against individualism with communitarianism. In Political Science, Robert Putnam brought to our attention the consequences of the breakdown of community in America. Going back further, John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government was written upon seeing early America, and the most salient difference he had seen between the New World and the Old was the American genius for organization – that is, of building community, of grassroots groups and movements. Given these roots, communitarianism may really be as American as individualism.

But back to my point about collective Sin. This is not to say that (as people in Jesus’ day argued) something such as blindness was an indication of parental sin. Nor should it ever give credence to such horrible thoughts such as that the melanin of those of African extraction is a symbol of the sins of their fathers, and therefore we should blithely exploit them as slave labor. No, this is not what I mean by collective Sin. I think that collective Sin is actually more of an accumulation of tiny individual sins. Let’s get back to Oedipus for an illustration. When the King and Queen of Thebes hear of Apollo’s oracle concerning their son Oedipus, (that he would kill his father and rape his mother), they are horrified and decide the only way to save themselves and Thebes is to kill their newborn son. However, love stops them. The baby is instead abandoned on a hillside. A shepherd sees the baby and is moved to compassion, and takes him in and raises him as a shepherd boy. Later he is brought into the King of Corinth’s palace and raised as a prince. A drunkard Oedipus meets one day tells him about the prophecy concerning him. Oedipus is horrified, and flees Corinth to save his adoptive parents. This is when he meets his actual father on the road, and commits parricide.

Truly, the road to hell was paved with good intentions! I do not have the heart to blame the King and Queen of Thebes for not killing their child. Nor do I have it in me to say the shepherd should have left well enough alone (if you ever find yourself ensnared in a myth, taking in a changeling child is always a bad idea). But perhaps we can definitely say that that man should not have been drunk, and gone around blabbing about ancient oracles while drunk. Who knows, if Oedipus had never talked to that drunkard, he could have ended life as a very satisfactory King of Corinth. In any case, all of these people broke the law. The law against a person who would kill the King and rape the Queen was death. Even though Oedipus was a newborn infant, he deserved death if the prophecy was true. The shepherd did not know the law (that the baby was condemned), but he should have known the law of myth (never pick up a changeling baby). However, out of compassion he thwarted the law. Defying the law leads to Death – this is the burden of all knowledge and Wisdom. I think if each of us knew what we were capable of, and the evil that we will in fact unleash in our lives, we would probably all quite impartially sentence ourselves to death. It is God’s grace that allows us to move through time like blind little minnows, not knowing what we do, and who we kill daily on the road. It was the accumulation of these tiny little transgressions – against laws of reason (logos), against laws of myth (mythos) – that added up to tragedy.

3)   Sin has eternal consequences because God does not work inside Time.

Albert Einstein divined that Time is merely one of many dimensions, although we tend to experience the world in three dimensions, traveling down the line of Time. God doesn’t (for obvious reasons) do this. He is able to see all of human history (as well as pre- and post-human history) as happening all at once. This solves the conundrum of free will vs. predestination. We are responsible for every single sin we commit, and if we imagine Christ eternally on the cross, being nailed by each sin as we commit it, perhaps we would be a little more hesitant in our words and actions. We are even more culpable for particular sins if directed by a particular prophecy not to do something. (Fortunately most of us do not find ourselves in this situation – although it does call for a careful, thorough examination of the prophecies of the Bible).

At one and the same time, everything has already happened in the sight of God. This is why God is able to deliver prophecy via his prophets. This is also why prophecy is useful – because the prophetic message has always included “repent!” as its basic, fundamental cry. If people hear the prophecy, and repent, judgment will be held back. Well, at least until the stench of sin reaches a certain noisome pitch, and when the cry of the poor and the widows becomes quite unbearable again, at which point the whole thing starts all over again. This makes every sin a lot more terrible, even the small ones, because each one echoes down the long reaches of history, geography, Eternity itself. Furthermore, it joins the sins of our fathers, the sins of our friends, and the sins of total strangers to form a stream of narrative: these various tributaries converge to form the River of Death: the Styx, that runs through Hell itself. The sins of the fathers are handed down to the next generation (via genes, via inherited patterns of behavior, via kinks or omissions in the moral code). So it really isn’t Apollo’s fault that Oedipus is predestined and free to commit sin. That is simply the human consequence of only living in three and a half dimensions.

So what is the whole point of Grace, anyway? What’s the point of compassion if it merely leads to hell, the same way cruelty leads to hell? What difference does it make whether you do unto others as you would have them do to you?

If I were God, I would never have put Oedipus through all that. I also would never have inflicted that horrible prophecy on him. However, if none of this had happened, we would lack one of the first and greatest heroes of the Western Canon: blind Oedipus, who put out his own eyes and exiled himself from his Kingdom the moment he realized what he had done. Why did Oedipus blind himself? I think I finally see why.

Oedipus wanted his outward self to be a reflection of his inward condition. “I was blind,” he says, as he stabs one eyeball after the other. “Therefore let me be blind.” It is an affront to the gods for him to have sight, because it creates a chasm between heaven and earth – between the spiritual world and the physical world. Blindness is what Oedipus longs for, after all: if he had never known any of the prophecy, if he had continued having fulfilled it, without knowing he had, he may have been a great king, (he already was). Cloaked by blindness, protected by wool pulled over his eyes, he could conceivably have been a good king of Thebes. But he would never have gained the stature of a tragic hero, whose name is uttered by mortals even today.

I wrote a little poem about blind Oedipus wandering in exile. If Oedipus had been Christian, I would have said to him, one day your Savior will come and redeem those eyes. You have repented more than an ordinary man can bear – you have repented in dust and ashes, and your crying eyes show me your nobility, your sincerity. One day when you are caught up in heaven you will lift up your sad face, and see. And He will restore your sight.

passing by Oedipus

I was walking by

the walls of a kingdom

flushed in the fading sun

and passed hardly a glance

at the cloak in the gutter –

the one with the noble heart

(the eyes were closed,

I could not see

if they were truly blind)

Slate’s Since you Asked – My advice to you is… just wait – Cary Tennis, advice columnist extraordinaire, writes a very very wise piece on resting which seems to speak directly to my Commencement/Moving out/Loss of bunnies-addled self.

Facebook Note – A Poem on the Occasion of A Church Being Probed For Financial Irregularities – Gwee Li Sui, Singaporean poet, responds to, well, a church being probed for financial irregularities and then pointing fingers at the devil for making them do it.

Slate’s Since you Asked – How to Get a Job – Yup, double post, but I’m graduated, and this is good!

But instantly she was annoyed with herself for saying that. Who had said it? Not she; she had been trapped into saying something she did not mean. She looked up over her knitting an met the third stroke and it seemed to her like her own eyes meeting her own eyes, searching as she alone could search into her mind and her heart, purifying out of existence that lie, any lie. She praised herself in praising the light, without vanity, for she was stern, she was searching, she was beautiful like that light.

- Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse.

What exactly is going on here? She chants to herself that continual loop of consciousness, and suddenly her consciousness is intruded upon by something else. It does not come from her, she insists – but isn’t that a greater theological implication, if it came from someone else?

What if it comes from another consciousness? In To The Lighthouse, Woolf litters recurring phrases everywhere, and they always have a source. But there is no source for this phrase. Unless it is the Source itself – but would the novel possibly admit that? Then the empathetic denial – why this defensive rebuttal, if it is simply something that comes randomly to you? And why does it turn to searching, to the denial of lies, the searching of truth? Yes, “that lie” – is the lie of religion, or rather the lie of God, that she rejects. But can she really resist it? Is it simply language (my professor, James Wood asked) that forces her hand, or rather whispers through her mind – the simple remnants of a Christianity-steeped tongue that has simply accrued so much religion in it that it cannot be rid of so easily? Is it language that speaks her?

What if it IS language that speaks her? I think this is a marvelous thing, if true. It means that the ghosts of our ancestors are still with us, still eddying in the syllables we wrap our tongues around. And why should this not be, if it is the Word that made all in the first place? Isn’t it a blessing that even though Western Civilization may shun Christianity today, it is inevitably, and beautifully laced with it? Isn’t it worth being called beautiful?

I’m not, of course, calling To the Lighthouse a book with a Christian worldview – Mrs Ramsay seems to believe in something that endures – but it is without personality, whereas at the web of all thought and all events and texts and contexts and angels and principalities and powers and histories and nations – in the centre of all narration, to me, is Christ.

These are my illustrations of To the Lighthouse which I did for my final final project at Harvard. I am quite exhausted by them, but also very happy with them.

Just the brief version of what I was trying to do: These are recurring portraits of four main characters in To the Lighthouse, in order of appearance: Mrs Ramsay (the cover), Lily Briscoe, James Ramsay and Mr Ramsay. The portraits are interspersed with three landscapes of increasing menace, marking World War I that occurred in the middle segment, “Time Passes”. I was trying to weave the progression into modernity between the 19th and 20th centuries, which is when Woolf writes her novel. So I tried to demonstrate this in the evolving art style, from more 19th century impressionism through dark surrealism, cubism and finally pop art (the final portrait of James Ramsay). I was also focusing on Mrs Ramsay as the “lighthouse”, or centre of the novel, and also the Madonna figure (I had wanted to do one of her holding James, but I am better at single portraits than combinations). Also, fun fact: the lighthouse can be found in most of the paintings, if you look hard enough.

Recently, I have been reflecting on the concept of magic – on the face of it, a profoundly un-Christian and un-philosophical subject, but one which I have found to be very instructive.

G.K. Chesterton

My thoughts were prompted by a couple excerpts I re-discovered from G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy:

“Granted, then, that certain transformations do happen, it is essential that we should regard them in the philosophic manner of fairy tales, not in the unphilosophic manner of science and the ‘Laws of Nature.’ When we are asked why eggs turn into birds or fruits fall in autumn, we must answer exactly as the fairy godmother would answer if Cinderella asked her why mice turned into horses or her clothes fell from her at twelve o’clock. We must answer that it is MAGIC. It is not a ‘law,’ for we do not understand its general formula.”

That made me think: What, ultimately, is the difference between a magical world and a lawful (or nomological) one? What, that is, is the ultimate difference between our world and Narnia or Middle-Earth? I realized that I did not have clear answers to these questions – and, more importantly, that there were no answers for me to find. The wizard’s craft was just as orderly and determinate as the scientist’s – and perhaps more so.

In The Lord of the Rings, Lady Galadriel tells Sam that she does not know what the hobbits mean by “magic” – for those features of her world which we would deem magical are, for her, merely ordinary. After all, a magic mirror in her land behaves just as regularly and predictably as the (supposedly non-magical) weather in ours. One man’s magic is another man’s law: “[T]he cool rationalist from fairyland does not see why, in the abstract, the apple tree should not grow crimson tulips; it sometimes does in his country.”

The inevitable conclusion is that our world is just one magical world among many:

“A tree grows fruit because it is a MAGIC tree. Water runs downhill because it is bewitched. The sun shines because it is bewitched. I deny altogether that this is fantastic or even mystical. We may have some mysticism later on; but this fairy-tale language about things is simply rational and agnostic.”

Why is this all important? This is Chesterton’s opinion:

“All the terms used in the science books, ‘law,’ ‘necessity,’ ‘order,’ ‘tendency,’ and so on, are really unintellectual…. The only words that ever satisfied me as describing Nature are the terms used in the fairy books, ‘charm,’ ‘spell,’ ‘enchantment.’ They express the arbitrariness of the fact and its mystery.”

Our world is governed, not by irrevocable laws (such as those that govern thought), but by one brand of magic among many; it is governed arbitrarily, or (in the parlance of contemporary philosophy) contingently. In our world, the word “Mellon” has no special power; but it could just as well open the door of the mines of Moria. In our world, we have gravity; but we could just as well have anti-gravity.

None of these considerations should be taken as endorsements of what is typically meant by “magic”: trust in astrologers, mediums, and demons rather than in God. Such dark arts are repeatedly condemned in the Bible: Our trust is not in the dread spirits of the night, but in the living God of Light. Instead, my intention is mainly to show how we moderns have (yet again) turned reality on its head. We have placed our hope in understanding Nature to Her very roots, all the while despairing at ever knowing Her Maker. But our hopes are entirely misplaced. The magic that we call “Nature” is incomprehensible; it is only the Magician Who has been revealed to us.

We do well to study the Book of Nature; in such a world as ours, we might as well get a handle of some magic tricks. But we must not forget that we are studying the Book of Nature and not another grimoire only because God chose to cast one spell and not another – only because God said Fiat lux and not Abra Kadabra.

If God is omniscient, are our actions truly free? The Bible leaves no question of God’s omniscience or our free will. Yet if God’s knowledge is perfect, then it seems that He must know everything we will do before we do it. And if we have no alternative but to do what God already knows we will do, it looks like we have no choice in the matter. We are thus presented with a problem. The thesis that “infallible foreknowledge of a human act makes the act necessary and hence unfree” is known as theological fatalism.1,2

The argument for theological fatalism goes as follows:

1. God knows, with certainty, everything in the past, present, and future.

2. Therefore, at time t = -1, God knew that Jack would go up the hill at time t = 1.

3. Because the past is unchangeable, Jack cannot change God’s knowledge at t = -1 that he would go up the hill at t = 1.

4. If Jack cannot choose to behave in a different way, then he does not have the ability to freely exercise his will in the matter.

5. Therefore, Jack cannot go up the hill freely.

A typical response to this problem is to declare that God is timeless and thus not capable of being understood within our conception of time. As C.S. Lewis puts in Mere Christianity:

“Suppose God is outside and above the Time-line. In that case, what we call ‘tomorrow’ is visible to Him in just the same way as what we call today. All the days are ‘Now’ for Him. He does not remember you doing things yesterday, He simply sees you doing them: because, though you have lost yesterday, He has not. He does not ‘foresee’ you doing things tomorrow, He simply sees you doing them: because, though tomorrow is not yet there for you, it is for Him. You never supposed that your actions at this moment were any less free because God knows what you are doing. Well, He knows your tomorrow’s actions in just the same way – because He is already in tomorrow and can simply watch you. In a sense, He does not know your action till you have done it: but then the moment at which you have done it is already ‘Now’ for Him.”3

In the context of the above argument, it seems that Lewis denies the second premise because he believes that God’s timelessness means He cannot be described as being (or knowing) at a particular time t. Perhaps this response even seems reasonable considering that God created the universe of space-time and thus (we might think) must exist outside of it. Yet Lewis’s explanation of the nature of God’s timelessness fails to resolve the issue because it is based on an inadequate understanding of God’s perspective. It depends on the idea that God experiences everything in the present, in the now.

Yet if He is beyond the time-line, then He isn’t experiencing all events as “in the now”; He should instead be seeing all of the points on the time-line at once. And if He is observing all the points on the time-line, then the points must be fixed in place. If the points are fixed in place, then it seems that it is outside of our power to change them. God may not “foresee” our actions from his perspective, but he certainly “foresees” them from ours.

Although Lewis rejects premise 2 from God’s perspective, it is still true from Jack’s and our perspective. The claim is that because God is timeless, He cannot be characterized as knowing future events at a prior point in time. That is, God only knows what occurs at time t = 1 because he observes it happening at that time. Yet because He lies beyond the time-line and can observe the actions at all points on it, He should see the events at time t = 1 before they occur. A better characterization from our time-bound perspective is that God knows all the events at all points. At time = -1, God does know what Jack will do. At the point at which Jack is deliberating whether or not to go up the hill, God already knows the outcome he will choose. There are a few ways to try to escape this problem. Lewis could reject the first premise and claim that God chooses not to observe the time-line beyond the particular point in time that Jack is experiencing. He could claim that even if God knows all of our actions, He does not force us to choose the particular action that we take. Yet both of these solutions would require arguments beyond God’s timelessness. The argument by timelessness alone cannot resolve the apparent contradiction of foreknowledge and free will.

[1] Zabzebski, Linda. “Foreknowledge and Free Will.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Mar 13, 2008 <http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/free-willforeknowledge/#2.5>.

[2] It is important to note that the lack of free will stems from foreknowledge and not from causal determinism. God’s timeless nature implies that he should be aware of the future and what our actions will be, not that his infinite knowledge of the past enables him to predict by a causal chain what will occur. If it were the case that free will were denied because one’s actions are contingent solely upon one’s past experiences, then God would be entirely unnecessary to the discussion. Determinism alone would suffice. However, I am unaware of any passage in the Bible that would justify determinism, and therefore I will not discuss it here.

[3] Lewis, C. S. Mere Christianity. HarperCollins Edition 2001. New York: HarperCollins, 2001. Print.

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Jordan Monge ‘12, a Philosophy and Religious Studies concentrator living in Currier House, is the Opinions Editor of </em>The Ichthus.