Geoff's Miscellany

Miscellaneous Musings

Christianity

How to Face Overwhelming Odds

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Bruce Charlton explains:

But Christians are equipped with the infinite power of repentance; which means that no matter how many times we are ‘broken’, no matter how many times we are defeated and unconditionally surrender to evil – or actively support and promote evil. We can and should simply repent our sin, we will be forgiven, and we start over again: fighting and resisting. 

The point is not so much winning, as not being defeated; and the point is not so much not being defeated in our bodies and actions, but not being defeated in our souls.

A Christian should be indomitable, and all Christians are able to be indomitable – perhaps most of all those who are weakest and least likely to suppose that they can win by worldly power.

In all toil there is profit

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In all toil there is profit, but mere talk tends only to poverty.

(Proverbs 14:23 ESV)

The proverb above is one I have always associated with one particular type of talk: talking about what you’re going to do instead of doing it.

I think that this aspect is true, but incomplete. I have overly limited the meaning of talk.

Here are forms of talk that are justifiably included under this heading because they replace labor and thus prevent profit:

  1. Being critical of others to the neglect of self-reflection or self-improvement
  2. Being a whiner, complainer, or malcontent
  3. Making excuses and being a wimp (we’re all going to die anyway)
  4. Talking about other people’s accomplishments without accomplishing anything yourself
  5. Talking about how other people messed up your life
  6. Talking about what you would do if only you had this or that
  7. Talking about theology instead of praying, reading Scripture, learning Greek/Hebrew, or putting the words of Jesus into practice.
  8. Talking about what other churches do wrong instead of fixing your own church
  9. Complaining about your neighbors instead of ordering your own household or picking up garbage when you go for a walk
  10. Complaining about the government without knowing local politician’s names or platforms or voting
  11. Preaching sermons but not praying, meditating, or otherwise attending to matters of personal spiritual care
  12. Having endless meetings at work but doing no work
  13. Being a part of dozens of Bible studies but not studying for your calling
  14. Being a part of dozens of Bible studies but not memorizing or reading any of the Bible
  15. Talking about your crush and never asking him/her out

I’m sure that this isn’t comprehensive, but I hope it helps.

Any other aspects of “mere talk” that distract from actual labor and therefore from profit?

John Wesley on Foreknowledge and Election

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Below, you’ll find 1 Peter 1:1-2 and John Wesley’s comments on vs 2. Over all, I find what he says to be convincing. The idea that the descriptions of God’s fore or after knowledge in the Bible are metaphorical is perfectly reasonable. It is just as much true that predestination is a metaphor as it is true that God’s being surprised or ignorant is as well.

Peter, an apostle of Jesus Christ, to the strangers scattered throughout Pontus, Galatia, Cappadocia, Asia, and Bithynia, Elect according to the foreknowledge of God the Father, through sanctification of the Spirit, unto obedience and sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ: Grace unto you, and peace, be multiplied.
(1 Peter 1:1-2 KJV)

[Quote] According to the foreknowledge of God – Speaking after the manner of men. Strictly speaking, there is no foreknowledge, no more than afterknowledge, with God: but all things are known to him as present from eternity to eternity. This is therefore no other than an instance of the divine condescension to our low capacities. Elect – By the free love and almighty power of God taken out of, separated from, the world. Election, in the scripture sense, is God’s doing anything that our merit or power have no part in. The true predestination, or fore – appointment of God is:

1.  He that believeth shall be saved from the guilt and power of sin.

2. He that endureth to the end shall be saved eternally.

3. They who receive the precious gift of faith, thereby become the sons of God; and, being sons, they shall receive the Spirit of holiness to walk as Christ also walked.

Throughout every part of this appointment of God, promise and duty go hand in hand. All is free gift; and yet such is the gift, that the final issue depends on our future obedience to the heavenly call. But other predestination than this, either to life or death eternal, the scripture knows not of. Moreover, it is:

1. Cruel respect of persons; an unjust regard of one, and an unjust disregard of another.

2. It is mere creature partiality, and not infinite justice.

3. It is not plain scripture doctrine, if true; but rather, inconsistent with the express written word, that speaks of God’s universal offers of grace; his invitations, promises, threatenings, being all general.

We are bid to choose life, and reprehended for not doing it. It is inconsistent with a state of probation in those that must be saved or must be lost. It is of fatal consequence; all men being ready, on very slight grounds, to fancy themselves of the elect number. But the doctrine of predestination is entirely changed from what it formerly was. Now it implies neither faith, peace, nor purity. It is something that will do without them all. Faith is no longer, according to the modern predestinarian scheme, a divine “evidence of things not seen,” wrought in the soul by the immediate power of the Holy Ghost; not an evidence at all; but a mere notion. Neither is faith made any longer a means of holiness; but something that will do without it. Christ is no more a Saviour from sin; but a defence, a countenancer of it. He is no more a fountain of spiritual life in the soul of believers, but leaves his elect inwardly dry, and outwardly unfruitful; and is made little more than a refuge from the image of the heavenly; even from righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Ghost. Through sanctification of the Spirit – Through the renewing and purifying influences of his Spirit on their souls.
Unto obedience – To engage and enable them to yield themselves up to all holy obedience, the foundation of all which is, the sprinkling of the blood of Jesus Christ – The atoning blood of Christ, which was typified by the sprinkling of the blood of sacrifices under the law; in allusion to which it is called “the blood of sprinkling.” [End Quote]

Hopefully Wesley’s point of view is helpful to you.

Water from the Desert: Evagrius of Pontus

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  1. Evagrius was a desert monk who lived from 345-399. He was well known for his academic abilities and was frequently sought after for his wisdom but fled the life of popular acclaim upon being tempted to have an affair (think Joseph and Potiphar’s wife).
  2. An anonymous history, Historia Monachorum testifies of him, “We also visited Evagrius, a wise and learned man who was skilled in the discernment of thoughts, an ability he had acquired by experience. He often went down to Alexandria and refuted the pagan philosophers in disputations…He taught us much else about ascesis, strengthening our souls.” His work was described as “training his intellect to examine his thoughts systematically (Palladius’ Coptic Life). This “thinking about thinking” was seen as a direct continuation of Jesus’ command to repent, because the Greek word behind it means, “rethink your thoughts.”
  3. Evagrius’ Core ideas (In his book, “153 sayings on Prayer):
    1. He would often use the word “demons” for bad thoughts.
    2. The pursuit of the good (especially spiritual prayer) is hindered by the passions: “What is it that the demons wish to excite in us? Gluttony, unchastity, avarice, anger, rancor, and the rest of the passions, so that the intellect grows coarse and cannot pray as it ought. For when the passions are aroused in the non-rational part of our nature, they do not allow the intellect to function properly.”
    3. “When the demons see you truly eager to pray, they suggest an imaginary need for various things, and then stir up your remembrance of these things, inciting the intellect to go after them; and when it fails to find them, it becomes very depressed and miserable.”
      1. This is analogous to your experience sitting down to do homework or deciding to clean your room, or resolving to exercise, etc.
    4. What is spiritual prayer? “Whether you pray with brethren or alone, try to pray not simply as a routine, but with conscious awareness of your prayer. Conscious awareness of prayer is concentration accompanied by reverence, compunction and distress of soul as it confesses its sins with inward sorrow.”
    5. How does one dispell the passions and distracting thoughts which stir them up? “He who has mastery over his incensive power has mastery also over the demons. (Discrimination of Passions and Thoughts)”
    6. Finally, here’s his thought on how the Christian interested in daily growing in Christlikeness ought to live, “A monk should always act as if he was going to die tomorrow; yet he should treat his body as if it was going to live for many years. The first cuts off the inclination to listlessness, and makes the monk more diligent; the second keeps his body sound and his self control well balanced” (Texts on Watchfulness).

Sanctification, Repentance, and the Habit Loop

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Introduction to Concept:

In his book The Power of Habit, Charles Duhigg explains something advertisers have known for quite some time: human beings can be trained to respond to cues with routines as long as there is a reward. He calls this the habit loop. It looks like this:

The idea is that when we have a cue, we usually will follow a certain routine that leads to a reward and if this cue occurs enough times it becomes a habit and is very difficult to break. Many habits have no particular reward but are still hard to break. Think about things Americans do not eat (cartilage, fat, and animal skin) that are good for you and if you do not eat these things, think about how gross it feels to try eating them.

Duhigg’s model of habit formation is especially interesting Christians who wish to use spiritual disciplines, obtain some virtue, or overcome some particular sin.

Keep in mind this paragraph from Jesus’ brother:

Jas 1:13-15 ESV  Let no one say when he is tempted, “I am being tempted by God,” for God cannot be tempted with evil, and he himself tempts no one. (14) But each person is tempted when he is lured and enticed by his own desire. (15) Then desire when it has conceived gives birth to sin, and sin when it is fully grown brings forth death.

James’ answers the question, “Who is the go-to guy for blame when we sin?” Who is it? The person who sins. Or, to put it more personally, we are responsible for the temptations to sin that come our way. Desire is the cue, this or that sinful action or constellation of thoughts and actions is the routine, and desire fulfillment is the reward.

Personal Case Study

I have a tendency to struggle with acedia. It’s essentially a feeling of weird existential boredom that leads to sloth. The best cure for it, in the moment it attacks, is to pray, do something physically productive, and move on with life. The thing about acedia is that it never really happens at work, but it can happen after a really productive event or series of events at work. Now, coupled with acedia, I love information. My grandfather used to think it was weird how I always had “factoids” that seemed to have no practical use. He’s right. I remember, though I can’t place the story, when Holmes told Watson, “I am an omnivorous reader with a strangely retentive memory for trifles.” This love for knowledge coupled with a periodic lack of motivation to exert effort causes what the medieval scholars called “curiosity.” Not the good kind that leads to scientific discovery, but the waste of time kind wherein you simply search for novelty. I suppose that if I were less conscientious it would be the sort of feeling that makes one easily addicted to drugs (and I am susceptible to binge playing video games when I cannot sleep).

  1. Cue: Feelings of lack of motivation coupled with a constant desire to know things.
  2. Routine: The internet now exists: follow links, listen to music, and read pointless articles.
  3. Reward: Dozens of silly facts rather in the same time it would take me to read one sustained argument concerning an important truth, perform one satisfying repair to part of my home, or write one chapter of a commentary on the Sermon on the Mount I am trying to finish by the end of the year.

Duhigg prescribes two paths to change the habit loop:

  1. Keep the cue and reward the same, but change the routine. To change the routine, Duhigg notes that we must come to understand precisely what craving is set off by the cue. For instance, a shopping addict might have the desire to accomplish something, but the routine (buying something on credit) is so easy that it is the only option that comes to mind until the loop is further examined by the obsessive clothing buyer.
  2. Remove the cue. Removing the cue only goes so far, but it is better than nothing. For instance, one would no longer be able to binge-watch The Office and eat sweets if they canceled their internet service and only bought meat, eggs, and veggies at the store.

Two Necessary Things to Keep in Mind

There remain two other elements to changing the habit loop:

  1. The role of belief
  2. The education of desire

As to the first idea, Duhigg observes that belief plays a crucial role in long term habit transformation (82-86). In the case of athletes, they have to believe that the new habits will help them succeed. Similarly, AA members who commit to the steps and the whole program are more successful when they actually believe in the higher power (84). In the case of Christianity there is a cluster of beliefs that are important for manipulating the moral habit loop:

  1. Sin really is disgusting and bad for you
  2. The way of Christ is meant to give you joy (often now, but infinitely so in eternity)
  3. You are dead to sin (in other words, it is not your master and you always have a way out)
  4. God will help you

The second element, the education of desire, is implied by Duhigg but made explicit in Scripture and ancient philosophy.[1] This should not be news to us. Many people grow to love the routine of exercise no matter how grueling, people start to enjoy the taste of healthy food on a new diet. For instance, I can only drink one or two types of soda now since I went about four years without a sip of the stuff. Soda, even a sip, burns my mouth and is so sweet that it makes my teeth hurt. If Christianity is true, it stands to reason that the process of habit formation applies to the moral life we see in Scripture as well. And we do see this.

Paul speaks of being transformed by the renewing of the mind. This implies that one can change for the better over time. Similarly, Peter speaks of growing in grace and knowledge. It is also the case that John and James speak of love and faith being perfected in us, respectively. The author of Hebrews says that we should strengthen our weakened joints in our quest for holiness and so-on (Hebrews 12:12). In other words, God shapes our desires through the habits we develop.

References

[1] In order to fully change our character, eventually our choices and then habits, must result in an incremental change of desire toward the good. Jesus talks about this difference of orientation in several places. For instance, he observes that the Pharisees do their religious rituals in order to hide their sin from others rather than as acts of faith, hope, and love toward God (which obeying the Law was always meant to be, see Psalm 19:7). So, when one begins to put to death sinful habits and to put holy habits into practice in their place out of sincere trust and hope in God, ones desires start to change.

Sola Scriptura

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Edward Feser has three posts on the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura (only the Bible) over at his blog.

Here is Feser’s summary of a summary of the Jesuit critique of sola scriptura:

You’ll recall that the early Jesuit critique of sola scriptura cited by Feyerabend maintains that (a) scripture alone can never tell you what counts as scripture, (b) scripture alone cannot tell you how to interpret scripture, and (c) scripture alone cannot give us a procedure for deriving consequences from scripture, applying it to new circumstances, etc.

In my mind this assumes too much (too little?) of the Protestant position. It would seem that the ideal expression of sola scriptura is not that only the Bible can speak authoritatively on faith and morals. Instead, sola scriptura says that of the deposit that the church has received (and Protestants and cult groups have received it as well…even if for now due to widespread ignorance we only receive it through publishing companies), the writings of the prophets and apostles are the only divinely-inspired norm concerning the content of the gospel message. The Bible is not the only norm, it is not the only guide to practice, it is not self-interpreting, it is not a magic talisman, and so-on. It is a norm within the tradition for checking the tradition.

The reason that this distinction is important is that Protestantism is not meant to be permanent. It was and is meant to critique the church of the western world on that church’s own terms (its accepted canon of Scripture). The rejection of the deuterocanonical books is incidental to the reformation because that debate had been ongoing within Christendom and had not led to division. For instance, the Eastern Orthodox church accepts a larger Old Testament than the Roman Catholic and this is not why they are divided.

If sola scriptura is seen in its polemical context first. To summarize, it sounds something like this:

“If we accept these documents as divinely-inspired (which we all do), then we must reject specific teachings current in the church, (which we do not all do).


Most historical Protestants accept, in some sense, that the church has a deposit of the gospel from the era of the apostles, the deposit includes the Bible which includes the Old Testament the apostles quoted and the New Testament which the apostles and their associates wrote. And I think that many Protestants would like to see the Reformation doctrine of sola scriptura as a stop-gap measure against novel accretions of anti-gospel teaching, not as a measure against tradition as such or against church authority or against hierarchichal leadership scructures.

I’m not a fan of the church being out of sync. But here’s the deal, people are obligated to obey the voice of reason and the voice of God. And if the church leadership requires practices of people who read their Bibles that apparently contradict the divine command, then the need for sola scriptura arises.

I do not deny that there are and have been times in the Bible when going against conscience was necessary due to direct divine command. This is because conscience can be wrong.

So, I get that there are times when the church (churches) might instruct people to do things that go against their immediate good sense, hopefully those things are justified by appeal to Christ and his teaching (like asking somebody to care for the poor). But let us take the case of asking the departed saints to pray for us. The Roman Catholic Church asks individuals to engage in a practice that is indistinguishable from prayer to idols to the average layperson. I know this because I know poorly catechized Catholics who think precisely this and pray, in their minds, to statues or pray to saints because they fear that Jesus will be too judgmental of their sins. And I know Protestants who don’t understand the doctrine or barely understand it and still feel that it contradicts the Ten Commandments.

I’m not saying that the Roman Catholic Chruch should outlaw praying to saints (others say that), I’m saying that requiring something of that sort of the faithful is the kind of concern that has not been dealt with since the reformation and is why we need sola scriptura. When catholic apologists defend the practice against those who oppose it actively, that is not the same thing as considering the consciences of those who would never reunite with the Roman Church because they are convinced that doing so puts them at odds with Christ due to the apparent idolatry in asking for post-mortem intercessions (I know some writers do, in fact do this).

There are several other doctrines like that. Thankfully for all of us, justification by faith is true, and we can be wrong about ideas of this sort and be justified by God.

But to be clear, sola scriptura does not state that the only way to know anything about God or faith or morals is Scripture. Sola scriptura says, “If we accept that the church has apostolic authority, then let us not contradict the apostles and what they considered inspired in our own actions and teachings.”

Is this position fraught with difficulty? Absolutely. Is the position of being a part of a church that actively asks you to pray to saints, accept a medieval merit system, and treat the pope not merely as a representative of Christ and a pastor of pastors but as a mystically infallible teacher a difficult position? You bet. But is sola scriptura, when seen in the terms set out above, really as unreasonable as Feser claims? Absolutely not.

Again, my whole problem is that I accept that the church does have apostolic authority and that the church defines/discovers Scripture (obviously the church does not define the Word of God…God the Father did that when he raised Jesus), but in accepting that the church is correct about Scripture certain things which the majority segment of western Christendom accepts instantly become untenable for me and a great many of God’s people.

Sola scriptura was never meant to be a claim that there was no authority in the church’s teaching offices, nor was it ever a claim that neither councils nor creeds are important. It was a claim that if Scripture is accepted along with the creeds and councils, then because of what the church claims Scripture to be in those very creeds, councils, and by those teachers, where contradictions arise, Scripture should be accepted over them.

All the challenges of interpretation, checks and balances within the tradition, and what to make of further divisions within the Protestant movement are not undone by this claim, but there it is.