Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

David Bentley Hart

Memories, Personhood, and God’s Grace

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Around this time, I get a bit somber during the days the birthday of a friend who died a few years ago. He was an unusual guy in a good way. And while I feel I’ve never struggled to be clear, I have struggled to be understood as a person (and who hasn’t?). Anyway, my friend [we’ll called him Bradley] understood me and I think I understood him. Many of his life struggles mirrored mind and a great deal of his personal suffering and demons surpassed mine by a long way. While some of his life struggles made it difficult for us to hang out, we saw each other regularly until he disappeared, which led to his untimely death.

I think about Bradley a lot, probably every day. Spontaneously, at this point, I mostly recall the good and the dark spots of his life only come up when I call them to mind. Bradley’s influence on me, particularly in high school, remains to this day. I was a dorky do-gooder with a chip on my shoulder because I was picked on, thought I was funny but nobody liked my jokes, and when I did good things I wasn’t applauded or I was ignored. When I met Bradley, I thought, “Here’s a guy who’s smart enough for me to admire and whatever mischief he cares to get into, he plans a way to do it just for fun.” And so coinciding with my conversion to Christianity, Bradley and I became friends. We were in a band called the Exploding Chaos Parade and had a lot of fun doing it. Our rag-tag group of friends studied scripture together, went spelunking, got in trouble for parading without a permit, learned to write music, pranked the band director, pranked the whole school, and on and on. And so my whole life since, I’ve learned to let social conventions go when they contradict the things that really matter. Strangely, through learning to be more free from Bradley and learning to obey the gospel command to “treat others as you wish to be treated” my social problems disappeared. Since about my sophomore year of high school, I’ve made many friends in all walks of life and I’ve learned to really care about people in their circumstances. Incidentally, at Bradley’s funeral, it was powerful to learn how much he was willing to sacrifice for literally anybody with a need, because he just didn’t care how things looked…unless the appearance of it was part of the joke.

Bradley was and is part of who I am. The Geoff Smith that exists now, as a father, husband, teacher, Christian, son, and brother is necessarily in relationship to Bradley. David Bentley Hart makes this observation more generally, “After all, what is a person other than a whole history of associations, loves, memories, attachments, and affinities? Who are we, other than all the others who have made us who we are, and to whom we belong as much as they to us? We are those others.”

In other words, there is no sense in which I am the person that I am without the existence of the other people I have known, and in the case of Bradley or my wife or my parents, I am who I am even in the sense that approximations of these people are in my mind that lead me to make choices wondering what their input would be or how they would interpret my choices or thoughts. This raises a serious question, “In what sense could I be redeemed from death, the world, and sin in isolation of any one of those people?” And it’s a serious question because what it means to be me is necessarily tied up in what it means for Bradley to be Bradley. If I am to be redeemed, what of my memories of those who made me me, how can those memories and the relationships that form them be redeemed except in the redeeming of the relationship itself? Elsewhere Hart described persons this way, “But finite persons are not self-enclosed individual substances; they are dynamic events of relation to what is other than themselves.”

So here’s a syllogism:

  1. A finite person is a dynamic event of relation to what is other than themselves.
  2. Redemption in Christ is for finite persons.
  3. Therefore redemption in Christ for a person must be ultimately inclusive of the relationships that make a finite person themselves.

If we accept Hart’s definition of a person, I think we have to entertain the possibility that for a person to be redeemed, so too, the persons that made that person themselves must be redeemed. Now, I harbor no doubts about Bradley’s faith or his reception into God’s grace. I just use our friendship as an illustration in this case because the melancholy of the time of year has overtaken me. Now, I do not doubt the existence of hell, the necessity of God’s justice, or the moral prescriptions of Scripture and plain reason. I merely mean to reflect on what it means for an individual to be redeemed. C.S. Lewis imagines even animals in close relationship to saints finding themselves with spiritual bodies in the New Heavens and Earth.

The Loquacious Atheist: He Is Speaking Pure Gibberish

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When I heard that Daniel Dennett’s new book on consciousness was released, I didn’t care. He has a tendency to argue in this format:

  1. Here’s an idea it isn’t worth explaining from the past.
  2. Here’s my alternative that uses sciency words.
  3. It cannot be explained by current science, but with enough scientific advances, it obviously will be explained.
  4. Logic, etc.

I’m hardly exaggerating. It’s like Sam Harris, but less endearing because it isn’t podcast format and he doesn’t look like Zoolander. I stopped reading Dennett’s books when I recognized that pattern.

David Bentley Hart refers to mistakes like this as the pleonastic fallacy, explaining qualitative distinctions in terms of quantitative increments toward some grander whole. He’s especially fond of the accusation in The Experience of God. In Breaking the Spell, Dennett basically argues that a bunch of physics explanations are true, biology is probably just as accurate, therefore there is no need for a first cause since more explanations will be found. In other words, being itself can be explained by things that already apparently possess being. Theodore Beale made this awesome meme about his style:

[ATHEIST+LOGIC.jpg]

Having mentioned Hart, the silver lining of new Dennett books being released is that Hart lumbers forth from whatever tome laden cavern he inhabits in order to put pen to paper for a brief, scornful essay before returning to his arcane pursuits. Apparently, Dennett does not disappoint and continues his pattern of argument. And Hart, not to be outdone, makes fun of him for it:

Dennett, however, writes as if language were simply the cumulative product of countless physical ingredients. It begins, he suggests, in mere phonology. The repeated sound of a given word somehow embeds itself in the brain and creates an “anchor” that functions as a “collection point” for syntactic and semantic meanings to “develop around the sound.” But what could this mean? Are semiotic functions something like iron filings and phonemes something like magnets? What is the physical basis for these marvelous congelations in the brain? The only possible organizing principle for such meanings would be that very innate grammar that Dennett denies exists — and this would seem to require distinctly mental concepts. Not that Dennett appears to think the difference between phonemes and concepts an especially significant one. He does not hesitate, for instance, to describe the “synanthropic” aptitudes that certain organisms (such as bedbugs and mice) acquire in adapting themselves to human beings as “semantic information” that can be “mindlessly gleaned” from the “cycle of generations.”

But there is no such thing as mindless semantics. True, it is imaginable that the accidental development of arbitrary pre-linguistic associations between, say, certain behaviors and certain aspects of a physical environment might be preserved by natural selection, and become beneficial adaptations. But all semantic information consists in the interpretation of signs, and of conventions of meaning in which signs and references are formally separable from one another, and semiotic relations are susceptible of combination with other contexts of meaning. Signs are intentional realities, dependent upon concepts, all the way down. And between mere accidental associations and intentional signs there is a discontinuity that no gradualist — no pleonastic — narrative can span.

Similarly, when Dennett claims that words are “memes” that reproduce like a “virus,” he is speaking pure gibberish. Words reproduce, within minds and between persons, by being intentionally adopted and employed.

And so it goes. 

A Reconsideration of God’s Impassibility

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When I was in seminary, I abandoned the doctrine of divine impassibility. For readers who do not know, divine impassibility is the doctrine that God is not affected by creation. It sounds weird at first because in the Bible, God answers prayer, gets involved with Israel, and shows wrath against sin.

The reason this doctrine was so important to the early church is that they had the idea that if God changes from one state to another, then God is no longer the source of all being(s). Why? Because God is becoming something else (changing) and therefore not the source of all being. If God is not the source of all being because God is pure ‘being’, then he isn’t divine.

I had decided that any doctrine which claims that God cannot suffer paints a monstrous truth about God: that God is uninterested in the well-being of his creatures. The problem is that I had misunderstood what the early church meant by this idea. I had thought that since the ancient Greeks saw God as impassible, the early Christian converts from Gentile nations just adopted the idea from Greek philosophy without realizing that it cannot be found in the Old Testament. It hadn’t crossed my mind that the idea might be a necessary corollary to some other Christian truth.

A couple of years ago, I spent several months revisiting the ancient arguments for God’s existence based upon the nature of cause and effect, gradations of goodness in human experience, the existence of consciousness, and the nature of logic and mathematics. All of these arguments entail a God upon whom all things aside from God depend for existence. This means that God must be ‘being itself’, thus God is never in any ultimate sense, becoming anything. God is not, by definition, going from one state to another. Of course, this realization forced me to think much more carefully about how I interpreted certain Old Testament passages about God’s emotions. C.S. Lewis mentions this difficulty in Letter to Malcolm, when he observes that the Old Testament authors take no pains to protect any sort of doctrine of divine impassibility from the notion of a stormily emotional Jehovah (51-52).

There is a sense in which what I am saying does not really matter. One can be a Christian without bothering to figure any of this out. Paul’s standard for Christian conversion is rather meager  by many confessional standards (or robust since it requires obedience to Jesus): confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead (Romans 10).

But if you go on thinking about the nature of emotions, particularly in their physical manifestation in human beings, they require a physical/chemical reaction to the environment. God has no environment, if anything, God is the environment in which all space-time has its being. Thus either the Biblical revelation about God’s interaction with creation is wrong or it is given by way of analogy.

The Bible, since it is God’s revelation to the church, requires us to deny the first part of the disjunctive premise, thus God’s revelation appears to be given in Scripture, in some measure, by analogy. But there are certain events in Scripture that are considered ultimate as revelations of God’s nature. For instance, Paul understands the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus as a revelation of the fact that God is loving toward weak and ungodly sinners and enemies (Romans 5:1-11).

Here is a rough outline of the premises and conclusion of an argument for God’s impassibility:

  1. The world made up of things which change.
  2. Things which change, by definition, depend upon causes to change.
  3. God is the cause of the whole world, and therefore not the world.
  4. God depends upon nothing for God’s being.
  5. God is unchanging or impassible.

This may seem opaque. That’s okay, I’m trying to avoid too much philosophical language. But the big idea (God’s unchangeability) can be summarized this way:

  1. God is unchanging, Scripture teaches this (Malachi 3:6, James 1:27) in moments of explicit teaching. Reason dictates that it is so as well.
  2. God is love. Scripture teaches this as well (Romans 5:5-11, 1 John 4:8-16).
  3. Love is a positive perfection of God, God need not change to be loving and caring.
  4. Wrath, sadness, anger, etc are privations of mercy, bliss, and harmony. God suffers no privation, therefore these words in Scripture are analogies about God’s works in creation that correspond to human experience.
  5. Thus, God is, regardless of the state of the creation, unalterably loving.

God’s Love and God’s Impassibility

David Bentley Hart argued in his essay, No Shadow of Turning that God’s impassibility is precisely the guarantee that God’s love is God’s being. Love is not a state from which God could capriciously move or worse, be influenced to move from. As compelling as the idea of a God who suffers with creation can be, it seems that a stronger hope and certainly a more scriptural and reasonable one is that the terrors of creation do not alter God at all, but rather await their sure defeat in space time by God’s own indestructible love and power.

The Incarnation and God’s Impassibility

It it indeed the case as a part of God’s work when the Word of God became flesh and dwelt among us, the Son of God suffered as a man. Paul Gavriluk argues in chapter two of his book The Suffering of the Impassible God,

…by calling the Christian God impassible the Fathers sought to distance God the creator from the gods of mythology. In this debate the major goal was to rule out popular pagan modes of imaging the divine realm as unworthy of the Christian God. Second, the Fathers viewed impassibility as compatible with select emotionally coloured characteristics, e.g., love, mercy, and compassion.

Many Christians see the revelation of God in Christ as a revelation that God could suffer and change. But in more ancient times this revelation showed what God was like all along despite the piecemeal and partial (Hebrews 1:1-2) revelation which was given in the Old Testament. The revelation of God in Christ is that God is love rather than capricious like the pagan gods or the forces of nature.

God is unchangeably loving. The Trinity, remains the same even as my own religious state of mind wavers, my character changes (for better or worse), the creation groans, and the gospel is preached well or poorly. God the Father, who sends the Son for our salvation, and who upon the enthronement of his Son sends us the Holy Spirit ever remains love and loving. God is goodness. Thus, though the church and humanity are commanded to imitate God’s love (and indeed my nature would flourish should I choose to do so as I am created in his image), his interest in the final salvation of humanity neither waxes nor wanes depending upon this or that congregation’s spiritual temperature (Peterson, Long Obedence, 44).

Notes:

My Translation of Romans 5:1-11

For Christ, while we were weak, at the appropriate time, died on behalf of the ungodly. You see, with difficulty somebody would die on behalf of a righteous man, indeed, on behalf of a good man somebody might even dare to die. Now God demonstrates his own love for us this way: while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. Therefore (more so really), having been declared righteous in the present by his blood, will we be saved by him from the wrath. For if, being enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son (more so, having already been reconciled), we will be saved by his life. Now, not only this, but we are boasting all the while in God, through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received this reconciliation.

Aquinas on God’s Joy

Again. Joy and delight are a kind of repose of the will in the object of its willing. Now God is supremely at rest in Himself, Who is the principal object of His will, as finding all sufficiency in Himself. Therefore by His will He rejoices and delights supremely in Himself. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Summa Contra Gentiles, vol. 1 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), 190.

Aquinas on God’s Love

For it belongs properly to the nature of love that the lover wills the good of the beloved. Now God wills His own and others’ good, as stated above. Accordingly then God loves both Himself and other things.
Again. True love requires one to will another’s good as one’s own. For a thing whose good one wills merely as conducive to another’s good, is loved accidentally: thus he who wills wine to be preserved that he may drink it, or who loves a man that he may be useful or pleasing to him, loves the wine or the man accidentally, but himself properly speaking. Now God loves each thing’s good as its own, since He wills each thing to be in as much as it is good in itself: although He directs one to the profit of another. God therefore truly loves both Himself and other things.
Moreover. Since everything naturally wills or desires its own good in its own way, if the nature of love is that the lover will or desire the good of the beloved, it follows that the lover is referred to the beloved as to a thing that is in a way one with him. Wherefore it appears that the proper notion of love consists in the affection of one tending to another as one with himself in some way: for which reason Dionysius describes love as a unitive force. Hence the greater the thing that makes the lover one with the beloved, the more intense is the love: for we love those more who are united to us by the origin of birth, or by frequent companionship, than those who are merely united to us by the bond of human nature. Again, the more the cause of union is deeply seated in the lover, the stronger the love: wherefore sometimes a love that is caused by a passion becomes more intense than a love arising from natural origin or from some habit, although it is more liable to be transitory. Now the cause of all things being united to God, namely His goodness, which all things reflect, is exceeding great and deeply seated in God, since Himself is His own goodness.2 Wherefore in God not only is there true love, but also most perfect and most abiding love. Saint Thomas Aquinas, Fathers of the English Dominican Province, Summa Contra Gentiles, vol. 1 (Bellingham, WA: Logos Bible Software, 2010), 191–192.

David Bentley Hart, Rene Descartes, and my own Cartesian Intuitions

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In his new book The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss, David Bentley Hart notes that during the medieval era almost nobody thought that “the relation of soul and body was anything like a relation between two wholly independent kinds of substance: the ghost and its machine (which for what it is worth, was not really Descartes understanding of the relation either). (p. 168)” This is interesting to me because one of the chief critiques I had heard of Descartes is that he posited that humans are primarily “thinking things” and the mind interacts with the body almost incidentally. But I had always been intrigued when I read Descartes third meditation he notes this, “For since I am nothing but a thinking thing, or at least, since I am now dealing simply and precisely with the part of me that is a thinking thing, if such a power were in me [the power to create oneself from nothing], then I would surely be aware of it. (Third Meditation paragraph 49)”

I had always wondered, and never had anybody to talk to about it, if Descartes contention that we are merely thinking things who happen to be unfortunately embodied, is actually not his position but his assumption for the sake of argument. He’s going solely from what he knows, like in his problem solving methodology. He’s saying, “If I’m merely a thinking thing (the only thing I can know for sure starting from a radically skeptical position), then here are the logical results.” Anyhow, I’m glad Hart sees this too, he’s a thinker who probably knows Descartes better than me and teaches at universities with the requisite libraries to read good books on the topic.