Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Contemporary Trends

David Bentley Hart’s That All Shall Be Saved

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I pre-ordered Hart’s most recent book as soon as I discovered it would be released. I like Hart’s work and I found his New Testament translation to be mostly helpful despite its many shortcomings. His new book is thought provoking and contains at least three hard to beat arguments for apokatastasis (the doctrine that God will redeem every last living soul in the end). I’ll write about it in the future. To be honest, I’m nearly convinced.

But this book helped be realize something else about Hart that I had only ever had intimations of, but never quite verbalized.

Hart’s verbal invective is something I used to excuse as the result of reading so much rhetoric from the eras he studies most, a fun way to be in an otherwise stultifying and boring life: academia. I took his rudeness as a sort of acquired by study version ancient honor-shame culture that men of great ambition used to utilize to make important points. Teddy Roosevelt made awesome insults, so did Seneca, Jesus, Augustine, the puritans, etc.

So when people complain about Hart’s verbal abuse, I’ve always taken them to be thin-skinned. If Hart is too mean, then isn’t Jesus?

But thinking back through it, Hart treats scholars with whom he shares 99% agreement as imbeciles if they do not agree with even his most obscurantist viewpoints. This is not mere rhetorical flourish, but an inability to empathize with other viewpoints. More importantly, they give them impression of being the angry lashings out of somebody who feels bullied. Now, who feels bullied by slight disagreements? Typically the physically unthreatening or inept. The man who feels rejected by the physical culture of other men fells that his only weapons are words. Men like this have no other way to hurt people they feel misunderstood by. I’ve met a lot of academics and quite a few of them have this problem. May Hart’s compassion for those who misunderstand him grow in proportion to his belief in God’s grace.

Virtue Signalling: Good or Bad?

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What is virtue signalling?

Virtue signalling is “the conspicuous expression of moral values by an individual done primarily with the intent of enhancing that person’s standing within a social group.” Jesus, while not using the terminology, definitely addresses the concept.

Good?

“You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden. Nor do people light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on a stand, and it gives light to all in the house. In the same way, let your light shine before others, so that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven.

(Matthew 5:14-16 ESV)

Virtue signalling looks like a moral duty..

Bad?

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven. “Thus, when you give to the needy, sound no trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, that they may be praised by others. Truly, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you give to the needy, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.

(Matthew 6:1-4 ESV)

It also looks like the central tenet of hypocrisy.

Which is it?

Doing good deeds publicly with full knowledge that you may be seen is simply part of what it means to be Jesus’ disciple. To seek the good we must, in many cases, be public, and in doing so, this makes the good appealing to those who seek lesser goods or accidentally seek evil.

On the other hand, doing good deeds solely for social credit is bad. Most public moral criticism happens this way. We criticize easy moral targets publicly with the hope that people will like us. The internet has made this dopaminergic process available on a mass scale at micro-costs.

Summary

  1. To do good for its own sake (part of ‘the good’ is the reward of knowing God and receiving his promises, btw).
  2. To do so, we must realize that ‘the good’ is inclusive persuasive actions on the part of sincere actors.
  3. Therefore, some level of virtue signalling that invites new participants in good behavior, reinforces that behavior in those who do it already, or increases alliances amongst those who practice virtue is virtuous.
  4. Finally, virtue signaling for hedonic (pleasure seeking) reasons is sinful.

To answer the question, “Is virtue signalling good or bad?” It depends on if you’re virtue-signalling to God.

The Church in Africa is Unimpressed

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In response to efforts of the American leaders in the United Methodist Church to influence Africa’s Methodists to reject the Biblical teaching on homosexual marraige, they did not budge:

I thank God for His precious Word to us, and I thank him for you, my dear sisters and brothers in Christ.
As the General Coordinator of UMC Africa Initiative I greet you on behalf of all its members and leaders. We want to thank the  Renewal and Reform Coalition within the United Methodist Church for the invitation to address you at this important breakfast meeting.
As I understand it, the plans before us seek to find a lasting solution to the long debate over our church’s sexual ethics, its teachings on marriage, and it[s] ordination standards.
This debate and the numerous acts of defiance have brought the United Methodist Church to a crossroads (Jeremiah 6:16).
One plan invites the people called United Methodists to take a road in opposition to the Bible and two thousand years of Christian teachings. Going down that road would divide the church. Those advocating for the One Church Plan would have us take that road.
Another road invites us to reaffirm Christian teachings rooted in Scripture and the church’s rich traditions…

While “we commit ourselves to be in ministry for and with all persons,” we do not celebrate same-sex marriages or ordain for ministry people who self-avow as practicing homosexuals. These practices do not conform to the authentic teaching of the Holy Scriptures, our primary authority for faith and Christian living.

However, we extend grace to all people because we all know we are sinners in need of God’s redeeming. We know how critical and life changing God’s grace has been in our own lives.

We warmly welcome all people to our churches; we long to be in fellowship with them, to pray with them, to weep with them, and to experience the joy of transformation with them.

Friends, please hear me, we Africans are not afraid of our sisters and brothers who identify as lesbian, gay, bi-sexual, transgendered, questioning, or queer. We love them and we hope the best for them. But we know of no compelling arguments for forsaking our church’s understanding of Scripture and the teachings of the church universal.

And then please hear me when I say as graciously as I can: we Africans are not children in need of western enlightenment when it comes to the church’s sexual ethics. We do not need to hear a progressive U.S. bishop lecture us about our need to “grow up.”

Let me assure you, we Africans, whether we have liked it or not, have had to engage in this debate for many years now. We stand with the global church, not a culturally liberal, church elite, in the U.S.

The rhetoric used by Dr. Kulah is excellent. Why? He lulls white American Christians into a moment of agreement by starting the speech with a beautiful call for unity. A cherished idea in modern academia is that while American academics are superior to all the knuckle-draggers in America, ultimately, they are exactly similar to everybody else on the planet. But once he gains that support, he makes a hardline distinction between two roads the church can travel, “One plan invites the people called United Methodists to take a road in opposition to the Bible and two thousand years of Christian teachings. Going down that road would divide the church. Those advocating for the One Church Plan would have us take that road.”

He then reminds them that elite Americans and their western enlightenment values are of no use to the kingdom of God. This is encouraging.

Just Once

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More and more articles on the standard Christian websites and highly read blogs have articles that follow this pattern:

  1. I used to believe idea ‘X.’
  2. After agonizing, recognizing how bigoted the church was, and really following the Holy Spirit [God told me!], I realized I was wrong about ‘X.’
  3. Now that I believe ‘Not X,’ many evangelicals seem to disagree with me and it hurts.

Belief ‘X’ is almost always something like traditional Christian sexual ethics, the Biblical restriction on divorce, being pro-life, believing that God is real (not even kidding), or believing the Bible is inspired or even accurate at all.

Just once it would be interesting to see a story pumped that said, “I used to believe the progressive narrative and careful study changed my mind.”

What I’ve noticed in these personal narratives, by the way, is how little actual thought goes into the claims being made. For instance, a famous Christian band was also a worship band. When they started questioning the core beliefs of the church they were paid to lead (within the confines of their statement of faith), they were surprised and hurt that their efforts to change all of that were not accepted. What’s the point? These individuals didn’t even consider that their “new insights” into the Bible being false would disqualify them from their job leading people in worshiping the God of the Biblical narrative.

My charitable read on these people is that they’ve confused thinking with feeling guilty about changing their mind. It’s a sort of sunk-cost fallacy on their part. “I cannot abandon this belief because it would feel like too big of a change in my life.”

On the other hand, perhaps the more accurate reading is that as the culture (defined as mass media culture) becomes more and more a progressive monoculture, these people cannot bear to be left behind by it. In other words, the social pressure of the internet, sitcoms, and political leaders of the day is too much. So their emotions lead them to their new insights, but they need a way to try to keep fellowship with their old social group: “Led by the Holy Spirit” or “after studying the Bible.”

The Rabbis and Biblical Interpretation

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Mike Heiser makes a compelling case against referring to the rabbinical authors uncritically when trying to understand the Bible:

You have to realize appealing to rabbis means nothing. Rabbinic thought and biblical thought (and academic work) are miles apart. Hey Christians enamored with rabbis: The rabbis can’t even get the messiah right (or, to be more charitable, the two powers in heaven doctrine right — that belief they used to have in Judaism until it became uncomfortable due to Christianity). If you’ve ever listened to Ben Shapiro (I’m a fan of the show) you know what I mean. He often does “Bible time” on his podcast. But what you get isn’t exegesis of the text in its ancient context. What you get is rabbinic opinion (with all the contrarian rabbinic opinions shelved to the side). Rabbinic interpretation (think Talmud and Mishnah) contradicts itself over and over again. That’s what those works do — they fling opinions at each other. That Hebrew food fight got codified into the Talmud and Mishnah. And Judaism is fine with that. We shouldn’t be. Most of what you’d find in rabbinic writings bears little to no resemblance of exegetical work in the text understood in light of its original ancient Near Eastern worldview. Not even close. They’re frequently making stuff up (they apply biblical material to situations in which the community found itself in; the work of the rabbis was responsive to community circumstances — it’s very applicational or situational).

I thought I would preserve this valuable paragraph before it got somehow removed from the internet.

But I will add that the Rabbis, while not worth reading at length if you read slowly, is not utterly without merit. For instance, sometimes material in the Talmud makes arguments for an interpretation. Such an interpretation is either right or wrong, in whole or in part. He observes that his anti-rabbinical argument is effective against early Christian writers as well:

This is also why the church fathers aren’t authorities in biblical exegesis, either. They are centuries (even millennia) removed from the biblical period and had no access to things like ancient Near Eastern texts and the Dead Sea Scrolls for help in interpretation. They were brilliant, but far removed from the right contexts and under-sourced.

While I think that early Christian Biblical interpretation, particularly of the New Testament, is more valuable than Heiser does, I do understand his point and it is valuable. The antiquity of an opinion no more makes it right than it’s Hebrew-ness or Greek-ness. To think an opinion’s source guarantees it to be right or wrong (excepting that the opinion come from God) is the genetic fallacy, a short-cut in thinking.

Do read the whole piece.

Sex Laws: Do They Pass the Reality Test?

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If you know me, you know I’ve got an anti-authoritarian side. This is temperamental first and only then morphs into ideology. I noticed this about myself in my late teens. Because of that, I typically found myself siding w/libertarian in most areas of political theory. But I knew, even in high school, that pure anarchy wasn’t reasonable because even at the level of neighborhoods, people with short time preferences or low IQs would just live in chaos in a society bereft of deep organizing mythology as is our own. But I’ve never been sure just how far a modern society can or should go with respect to regulating individual morality outside of contracts and violence.

I’ve recently gained insight as I’ve revisiting Robert Jenson’s Systematic Theology: The Works of God and reading Camille Paglia’s Vamps and Tramps: New Essays. Paglia is a libertarian, Jenson is a social-realist of the sort that, if he tweeted, would be banned from Twitter (I mean, it’s difficult to describe how much “bad talk” Jenson makes…Paglia too, but from a different angle entirely).

Both of books were published around 2000. Here is a quote from each, exemplifying their points of view with respect to sexual law-making:

My libertarian position is that, in the absence of physical violence, sexual conduct cannot and must not be legislated from above, that all intrusion by authority figures into sex is totalitarian. (No Law in the Arena, Paglia)

We may get at the matter so: sexuality is the reality test of the law…Where law fails its reality test, it is indeed but a product of dominance…A sexually anarchic society cannot be a free society. For no society can endure mere shapelessness; when the objective foundation of community is systematically violated the society must and will hold itself together by arbitrary force. Nor is this analysis an exercise in theoretical reasoning; it merely points out what is visibly happening in late-twentieth-century Western Societies. (The Works of God, Jenson)

Two authors of above average intelligence see the opposite modes of legal reasoning as necessarily totalitarian!

Interestingly, Paglia revels in the “objective foundation of community” insofar as she sees the masculine and feminine archetypes as the result of evolution and necessary. She even chides the political left for failing to realize that the Christian right is concerned to preserve the inviolability of reproduction as the locus of argument in sexual ethics. She even says that the nuclear family will work (as an enforced social unit) “in a pioneer situation” where everybody is preoccupied w/survival and passing on wisdom to children.

Every emotional fiber of my being tends toward Paglia’s idea as I just prefer to leave people alone and let them do what they will and to be left alone in turn. But the fact of the matter is that the laws on the books tend to have the psychological effect of translating into assumed moral norms (I suspect that most of OT case law functioned this way in practice). And so having unenforced laws in favor of the traditional family unit, even from a utilitarian, evolutionary standpoint makes sense.

The idea that laws and the philosophical justification behind them need a reality test is absolutely the case and a law that accommodates, promotes, and is based on the reproductive necessities of the species is about as real as it gets.