Same as it ever was

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It is a commonplace among conservative evangelicals to bemoan the state of the church at large—and certainly there is much to criticize: failures of evangelism and discipleship, enthusiasm for compromise (except on unimportant issues), doctrinal error, lack of commitment, lack of faith, lack of love. With so many easy targets, it is easy to dwell on the problems and failings, allowing them to consume our focus and feed that grimly enthusiastic resignation that is always waiting for news of trouble so it can shuffle out to declare, “But of course.”

While introspection and self-critique are certainly important within the body of Christ, it’s easy for our concerns to become morbid and counterproductive. We have a tendency to act as if folly, selfishness, and lukewarmness have only just now erupted within the church, placing us at a unique disadvantage never before faced by our spiritual ancestors. Surely the purer church of past generations did not have to deal with dishonest and selfish members (Acts 5:1-11), holier-than-thou attitudes (Acts 11:2-3), legalism (Acts 15:1), personality conflicts (Acts 15:36-39), petty quarreling and disunity (I Cor 1:11-12, 6:1-8), spiritual immaturity (I Cor 3:1-4), acceptance of blatant immorality (I Cor 5:1), dishonor of the Lord’s table (I Cor 11:17-22), misuse of spiritual gifts (I Cor 14:21-23), false teachers (II Cor 11:13, II Pet 2), backsliding and heresy (Gal 1:6-9), hypocrisy by church leaders (Gal 2:11-14), betrayal by fellow believers (II Tim 4:14-16), disproportionate respect for worldly wealth (James 2:1-4), or faith without fruit (James 2:14-20). And all that during the period when believers were actually taught by the apostles themselves!

But, of course, once the early church matured we were able to move on to a higher plane of holiness during the next millennium, where we could discuss questions like whether Jesus was really God, whether he was really human, whether the path to holiness lies in renunciation of all connection with the world, whether we should torture folks over theological disagreements, and whether salvation can be purchased through works or good, hard cash. But fortunately the common folk, at least, were known for their theological maturity and wisdom, since hearing the Scriptures read in a language no one actually understands is well-regarded as an effective means of growth and sanctification.

Finally, of course, the Reformers genuinely did usher in a period of greater spiritual zeal and growth… along with bitter internecine backbiting and conflict, plus some of the most murderous wars central Europe had ever seen. After about a hundred years, as much of the new Protestant church grew increasingly dead and corrupt, the Pilgrims and Puritans departed to the New World to establish a new, more God-centered life for themselves. And, within a generation or two, they had developed a “vigorous popular culture exhibiting the following characteristics: high mobility of adolescents and young adults, a popular culture centered on alehouses rather than church and relative freedom from parental control,” according to Else Hambleton in Daughters of Eve: Pregnant Brides and Unwed Mothers in Seventeenth Century Essex County, Massachusetts. We remember the First and Second Great Awakenings but forget what it was that the early American church required awakening from.

My point in all of this is not that we should throw up our hands and declare the fight a lost cause. A thousand times no! Quite the contrary. The fight is a won cause; a cause that has been won by the grace of God during every year of every century through which the fallen, foolish, feeble creatures that make up the church have stumbled. We serve the God who declares, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is perfected in weakness” (II Cor 12:9). Surely when God set about recruiting “the poor and crippled and blind and lame” from “the streets and lanes of the city… the highways and along the hedges,” he anticipated that the results might be a motley crew? Are we really surprised that the membership of an organization that is only open to sinners consists largely of sinners?

Of course, we ought never be content with the present state of the church, any more than we can ever be content with the present state of our own sanctification; certainly God is never content with either. Heaven forbid that we rest comfortably, as individuals or as a body, anywhere short of the mark set by Jesus’ command, “Be ye perfect.” The Corinthians needed Paul’s vigorous rebuke, as did the Galatians, as did Peter. The danger lies not in seeing the failings of the church, but in failing to see anything else.

What we’re looking at, what we’re focusing on, matters a great deal. Speaking of his own process of sanctification, Paul declared, “one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and reaching forward to what lies ahead, I press on toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus” (Phil 3:13-14). As individual Christians, we are not to focus on what we were or were not. We are not to focus on what other people are or are not. We are only to focus on God: our goal, our pearl of great price, the author and finisher of our salvation.

Similarly, it is hard to see the value in squinting back over our shoulder to compare the state of our fellow believers today with those who came before. “Looking behind, we press on toward the goal of our idealized image of what the church was, in better days.” Because surely the lame man is best served by worrying whether he can hobble as fast as his fellow cripples, rather than casting himself at the feet of the One who can heal and crying, “Son of David, have mercy on me.”

Should we learn from the past? Certainly. Should we appreciate our history? Absolutely. But we must carefully avoid the self-pitying illusion that our generation is somehow uniquely handicapped with a worldly church, prone to theological error and lukewarm conviction. Doubtless the church has been stronger at times; doubtless also, weaker. But ultimately, that’s a “God’s-eye view” question which is not our concern.

For the church, as for the individual, there are really only two facts that matter: what we are right now, and what God is. It doesn’t matter where we came from or what lies behind, good or bad; all that matters is fixing our eyes on him and being transformed by him, pressing onward toward the goal. Folly and weakness and sin will challenge us as we walk together toward that goal, just as they have challenged Christians of every age, and ultimately our only hope of overcoming is to fix our gaze on our Savior; just as it was for Christians of every age.

The logic of faith

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God uses faith “to shake us out of our logical thinking,” declared the pastor at a local church I visited a few weeks ago. I recently heard another pastor explain that we can only grow in our faith if we stop listening to our reason: either we listen to our reason or we listen to God.

I think any Christian can relate to the basic idea being expressed here. Faith often demands of us things that do not “make sense” in the colloquial sense of the phrase. Military strategists may disagree about the best tactics for an outnumbered insurgency with limited weaponry battling an overwhelming occupying force, but as a general rule they would agree that dismissing 98.7 percent of your manpower is not a brilliant first step; so of course that’s exactly what God told Gideon to do. Building a floating castle in a land without rain makes little sense, and marching in circles tooting horns is an unconventional approach for capturing your region’s most powerful city. But that’s exactly what God commanded.

So it is certainly accurate to say that faith rarely “makes sense” in human terms. But if we go beyond this point to conclude that faith is illogical or somehow opposed to reason, we end up in an error with potentially serious consequences.

Because, indeed, faith is at its core entirely logical. The logic of faith is deductive, and begins with a simple premise: God is faithful. When Abraham sacrificed Isaac, it was an entirely logical thing to do. He knew God. God had promised, “In Isaac your descendants shall be called,” so “He considered that God is able to raise people even from the dead” and prepared to sacrifice his son. The whole thing reads rather like a syllogism: If God allows Isaac to be destroyed, He will have broken His word. God cannot break His word. So God will not allow Isaac to be destroyed, all suggestions to the contrary notwithstanding. If, instead, Abraham had merely woken up one morning and decided it would please God if he set out to kill his son, that would have been decidedly illogical. And that would not have been faith.

Why did Gideon dismiss all but 300 men? Why did Noah build the arc? Why did Joshua march around Jericho? Because God told them to do so, and they knew that God is faithful. Had any of them acted without the assurance of God’s command and of His faithfulness, that would not have been logical. And that would not have been faith.

Yet logic is not the heart of faith. If it was, then a purely rational, emotionless artificial intelligence of the sort sometimes imagined by science fiction would be an exemplar of faith, when in fact such a creature could never actually know faith. It is interesting that faith is never mentioned in connection with angels, beings to which the Church has long attributed pure reason. It would seem that faith is irrelevant to a creature which sees things as they truly are, for whom no contrary passion or momentary appearance can shake the knowledge and assurance of the I Am. For faith is born out of a limited perspective; it grows out of the words “all suggestions to the contrary notwithstanding.”

The writer of Hebrews refers to “the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” We may take it as a given that these “things” do in fact exist; otherwise we would be defining madness rather than faith. We may even take it as a given that those of whom faith is expected have good reason to believe in the existence of these things. But knowing, for the queer mixture of dust and spirit which is a human being, is not always enough.

Numbers 14 records God’s appearance to the Israelites at the height of their panic over the strength of the country they had been commanded to subdue. They were literally about to stone Joshua and Caleb for urging the people to trust in God and carry on, when “the glory of the Lord appeared in the tent of meeting to all the sons of Israel,” declaring himself ready to dispossess and destroy them. (It it worth noting that theophanies are rarely comfortable. This one perhaps even less so than most.) God’s complaint against the Israelites was simple: “How long will this people spurn Me? And how long will they not believe in Me, despite all the signs which I have performed in their midst?” (emphasis added). These were the same people who had just witnessed a series of ten plagues that would resound through Middle Eastern history for centuries (I Samuel 4:8), who had just watched a sea open up before them and then return to consume the world’s mightiest military in their wake, and they were completely unmanned by a walled city full of unusually tall people.

A similar charge underscores Jesus’ question in Matthew 8 when he asks his panic-stricken disciples, “Why are you afraid, you men of little faith?” as he calms the stormy sea. These were men who had ample reason to trust in Him. Without even leaving Matthew 8, we see Jesus cleanse a leper, heal a Roman centurion’s paralyzed servant, and restore Peter’s mother-in-law’s health. And then he gets into a boat, the wind blows, and his disciples straightway forget all this and are terrified by a sea full of unusually tall waves.

We might laugh at the obviousness of the error, were it not for an uncomfortable awareness of how easily our own attention is drawn away from “things not seen” by unusually tall things of one sort or another. We, like Abraham, Gideon, Noah, Joshua, the Israelites, and the disciples, have every reason to believe that God is “able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think.” But all we can see is the fact that things aren’t working out, or it’s taking too long (Father Time is remarkably tall sometimes), or the task is too big for us or will hurt too much. And we forget what we know, that God is faithful. Faith is nothing if not logical, but faith is far more than logic. True faith is found in holding fast to things unseen, clinging to what is real even when the truth feels far less substantial than the tall and dancing shadows that surround us.

Intentionally elusive truth

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Commenting on the process of inspiration by which the Bible came together, C.S. Lewis writes in Reflections on the Psalms,

To a human mind this working-up (in a sense imperfectly), this sublimation (incomplete) of human material, seems, no doubt, an untidy and leaky vehicle. We might have expected, we may think we should have preferred, an unrefracted light giving us ultimate truth in systematic form–something we could have tabulated and memorised and relied on like the multiplication table…

We may observe that the teaching of Our Lord Himself, in which there is no imperfection, is not given to us in that cut-and-dried, food-proof, systematic fashion we might have expected or desired. He wrote no book. We have only reported sayings, most of them uttered in answer to questions, shaped in some degree by their context. And when we have collected them all we cannot reduce them to a system. He preaches but He does not lecture. He uses paradox, proverb, exaggeration, parable, irony; even (I mean no irreverence) the “wisecrack”. He utters maxims which, like popular proverbs, if rigorously taken, may seem to contradict one another. His teaching therefore cannot be grasped by the intellect alone, cannot be “got up” as if it were a “subject.” If we try to do that with it, we shall find Him the elusive of teachers. He hardly ever gave a straight answer to a straight question. He will not be, in the way we want, “pinned down”. The attempt is (again, I mean no irreverence) like trying to bottle a sunbeam…

Since this is what God has done, this, we must conclude, was best. It may be that what we should have liked would have been fatal to us if granted. It may be indispensable that Our Lord’s teaching, by that elusiveness (to our systematising intellect) should demand a response from the whole man, should make it so clear that there is no question of learning a subject but of steeping ourselves in a Personality, acquiring a new outlook and temper, breathing a new atmosphere, suffering Him, in His own way, to rebuild in us the defaced image of Himself.

Accepting as a premise this view of the “intentional elusiveness” of much scriptural teaching, it is worth considering how it affects the Christian walk, and in particular our relationships within the Church. As is often the case, we seem to have a tendency to slip away into one of two opposing errors. On the one hand, a right and praiseworthy desire to find out the hidden things of God, to learn His ways, discover His truth, and provide guidance for His flock, leads us to create systems out of the unsystematized, striving as best we can to reflect the Truth in our doctrine. And thanks be to God for those teachers who “feed the sheep” in this way. The danger comes, however, when we easily and unconsciously draw the authority of the Word up into the human constructs which it nourishes; when we forget (in practice, if not in theory) that disagreeing with us is not the same as disagreeing with God.

And so we fight to the death over questions of doctrine upon which reasonable people may reasonably disagree. Is there a difference between baptism by immersion, baptism by pouring, and baptism by sprinkling? Yes. Is it possible that one method is preferable to another? Certainly; in fact, I would make that argument. Can I prove it from Scripture, beyond reasonable disagreement? No. And neither can you or any other Christian. But this now brings us to our first error’s opposite.

Having seen the divisiveness and sin that have followed what one imagines to have been roughly one thousand, nine hundred and seventy-odd years of still-unresolved doctrinal disputes, it is tempting to give up any attempt at systematization or orthodoxy as hopeless and even harmful. If Scripture intentionally does not provide the objective black-and-white schema we would need in order to formulate final answers for so many theological concerns, why even attempt an answer to insoluble questions?

The first and most obvious answer to this objection is found in Christ’s words to Peter immediately before His ascension: “Tend My sheep.” Why is it important to search out (begging divine assistance for our own flickering reason) the principles and truths concealed within Scripture’s intentional elusiveness? “Tend My sheep.”

Returning to the question of baptism as an example, if there is in fact a form of baptism which is more in keeping with the purpose and significance of the act, then it follows that the Church benefits and God is glorified when his people conform more nearly to His ultimate design. If there are ways of worshiping, praying, organizing a church, caring for the poor, engaging the world, or structuring the family which better conform to God’s nature and will, what a poor shepherd he would be who didn’t attempt, to the best of his ability and relying on the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to discover those truths in the light of Scripture.

Jesus Himself did not condemn the master-systematizers of His day, the Pharisees, for attempting to extrapolate rules of behavior from the Bible. Instead, He criticized them for failing to reach the right conclusions, and He offered a better understanding of the principles to be drawn from Old Testament teachings (e.g. Matthew 12:1-7, 12:10-13, 19:4-9, 22:29-32). The Pharisees’ error lay not in studying the patterns of revelation in an attempt to sketch the truth behind, but in becoming so caught up in their own rough sketches that their eyes strayed from the truth they were attempting to approximate.

But the Pharisees return us full circle to be reminded of the danger of our first error, for what Christian has not at one time or another been reminded of his close spiritual kinship to that group of Hebrew theologians whose name has become a shorthand for blinkered legalism? History and our own experience show how quickly we conflate our rules with His, demanding that our brothers bow down and worship before the images we have constructed upon His altar. If love of God and love of His people demand that we search out the elusive truths within His revelation, how can we best avoid the attendant dangers?

The first step, of course, is to beg Him for humility. To pray that our motivation would always and only be love, for the truth we pursue and for the fellow-searchers with whom we seek it. To cultivate an awareness of the distinction between His truth and our extrapolations upon the basis of His truth. To remember that even the most indubitable premise cannot guarantee the truth of a conclusion on the other end of a chain of human reasoning. And to remember that those who doubt our doctrine but love our God are guilty of, at worst, mere misunderstanding, and may only be guilty of arriving first at a truth which we have yet to see.

Beyond this point, however, it is worth returning to Lewis’ final paragraph above, in which he guesses at the reason why we might have received the strange gift of so many dim and elusive truths, “that Our Lord’s teaching, by that elusiveness (to our systematising intellect) should demand a response from the whole man, should make it so clear that there is no question of learning a subject but of steeping ourselves in a Personality, acquiring a new outlook and temper, breathing a new atmosphere, suffering Him, in His own way, to rebuild in us the defaced image of Himself.”

How are we to achieve the right balance between a love of the truth on the one hand and a humble recognition of our own fallibility on the other? How are we to learn, to instruct, and to avoid error as much as is possible for imperfect human creatures? By so “steeping” ourselves in the Word that our very being is, both consciously and unconsciously, shaped into conformity with the One Who we begin to know as we know ourselves. We must absorb, and absorption is a gradual process. To see is not necessarily to know: Many skilled artists have studied and beautifully reproduced Raphael’s paintings, but only his greatest pupil was able to complete his Transfiguration so that one cannot tell where Raphael’s work ended and Giulio Romano’s began.

For of course the ultimate goal is not merely to know the truth, but to know the Truth. If much of Christian doctrine is given to us as a puzzle in this life, we might find a hint of explanation in watching a child’s total absorption in putting the jigsaw pieces together and watching a picture emerge. We may have been given a puzzle, but it is a puzzle the ultimate purpose of which is to show us the nature of the puzzle-maker, and which, like a sort of reverse mirror, impresses His likeness upon us the longer we gaze into it.

Knowledge without proof

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For nearly four hundred years, the central question of philosophy has been epistemological: Is it possible to know, and if so, how? Descartes struck the first blow, and almost the last, in his attempt to doubt his way to certainty. Though his effort satisfied himself, later thinkers ran into a small problem; like a man measuring a ruler against its own mirror image, Descartes’ rigorous deductions proved that human reason is trustworthy, as long as one trusts reason enough to rely upon it for the proof.

A brief burst of optimism in the possibility that knowledge could be stamped upon a blank mind by the external world withered under the realization that all knowledge of the external world must be mediated through the senses, the reliability of which is just as doubtable as that of reason, and just as incapable of verification. How can we evaluate the trustworthiness of our sense perceptions, other than by comparison against the perceptions of our senses?

And so four centuries of philosophy may be distilled into various permutations and developments of the first half of Descartes’ famous (and misquoted) maxim. “I think,” with emphasis to be placed upon the utter, singular insularity of the pronoun and the uncertainty of the verb. I, and I alone, think, and am not sure. If reason must be doubted, what can be trusted except the single fact that I am a thing, thinking about itself? If the senses are untrustworthy, what can I really know of any other things outside the thing that is me?

Various schools have dealt differently with the dilemma. Solipsism is perhaps the most honest response, accepting the situation at least theoretically. Existentialism offers the most emotionally satisfying solution, proposing by sheer will or luck to rebuild something from the wreckage of meaning – “something” being as specific as one can get. Pragmatism is cheerfully American in its practically impractical determination to ignore all such stuffy questions and concentrate on what works. (Leaving rather vague the question of how we are to judge what works, or what “working” would actually entail.) And postmodernism, at least in its philosophical dimensions, offers the oddest answer in its focus on closely studying and vigorously defending the correct understanding of whatever it is that it insists we cannot know.

All this from one simple assumption, that one cannot know what cannot be proven (in this case, the general reliability of reason and of the senses) — a proposition that provides perhaps the only common theme among all the disparate philosophies from the Enlightenment onward, even among those, like Kant, who appear to accept the possibility of innate knowledge. It is ironic that such an influential premise would be so obviously false as an absolute proposition, so questionable as a mere assumption, and so definitely contradicted by every evidence of human experience.

This epistemological assumption is found even in the definition of knowledge commonly used by those from more conservative philosophical climes, where the existence of such a thing as knowledge is still believed to be possible. Knowledge, so defined, consists of “justified true belief.” In other words: knowledge is belief which actually corresponds with reality and for which we have, as Plato writes, “an account of the reason why [we believe]” (Meno 98).

As a matter of pure logic, the proposition that it is impossible to know what cannot be proven is fatally flawed, for it cannot meet its own criteria; there is no way to prove that what cannot be proven is unknowable, and so the standard falls by its own hand. It might without contradiction actually be true, but the truer it is the less could its truth be known.

So we appear to be at an impasse. Logically, either truth can be known without proof or truth cannot be known without proof. It is impossible to prove the truth of either proposition (a fact which itself fits more comfortably with the former than with the latter opinion). Since neither can be proven, those who accept the latter view must do so on grounds of prejudice (in its most literal meaning) rather than knowledge. Yet prejudice is a powerful thing, and the former proposition in no way benefits by pointing out the lack of support for the latter, so the question is worth further consideration. If we cannot determine the truth of either possibility by direct examination, perhaps more light may be thrown on the issue by working in the other direction.

Let us assume, for the moment, that it is true that nothing can be known except what is provable. Proof comes through logic and reason, working from premise to conclusion. If all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then I can prove that Socrates is mortal; but only if I do in fact know that all men are mortal and Socrates is a man. So proof must begin with knowledge, and knowledge is a necessary condition for proof. Thus it follows that either knowledge preexists proof, or else there is no proof and therefore no knowledge.

It is now possible to restate the dilemma advanced earlier: Either truth can be known without proof, or knowledge is impossible, and reason also (since reason depends upon knowledge of basic laws of thought).

It is important to note, again, that neither of these proposition can be proven, though both are logically possible and one must necessarily be true and the other false. (Unless in fact reason itself is untrustworthy, a point to which we will return shortly.) It is ironic that the foundational question of philosophy cannot, in one sense, be settled philosophically.

It is possible, however, to sketch the two camps. On the one hand, we have a reality which is quite literally unthinkable; a reality the very existence of which cannot be asserted without recourse to truth claims which cannot be meaningful if they are true; a reality in which even our own existence is unknowable (since unprovable). Our every instinct, our every thought, even the very arguments which may be advanced in support of such a reality, testify that in fact we do not and can not actually believe in it. To say that it exists is to deny it. Even to suggest it might exist on the basis of the evidence is to appeal to knowledge the existence of which is denied by our conclusion.

Now, such a theoretical reality does have one argumentative strength: it is irrefutable. Its fundamentally irrational nature strikes just as hard against attempts to demonstrate its impossibility (for it if is actual, then the reason I use to disprove its existence cannot be trusted) as against attempts to demonstration its actuality. But let us be clear about what it is: an unthinkable world, indefensible on its own terms, and without a shred of actual or possible evidence to speak in its defense.

The traditional argument against the existence of such a reality is to point out that it is prima facie indefensible. As Aristotle argues, he who denies the law of non-contradiction, tacitly affirms it by that very denial. Putting the point more broadly, the more convinced one is that knowledge is impossible, the more thoroughly one denies one’s own first principle. But perhaps this argument puts too much weight upon human cognition, and in so doing begs the question. Merely entertaining the possibility of a world utterly without knowledge and reason puts us so far beyond the threshold of human thought that no attempted refutation can survive.

So, I will repeat the concession that no chain of logic can drag away the possibility that all knowledge must be proven, and that therefore no knowledge is possible. If we give up the argument at this point, however, we have already conceded the central question. For, if not all knowledge must be proven, then logic is not the only source of truth.

Thus far I have spent little time defending the view that some knowledge is possible without proof, and no time at all clarifying what sorts of knowledge might be known without proof. Taking the latter first, I would suggest that the laws of reason, the basic reliability of the senses, and the existence of the self, at least, are known without proof. With slightly less certainty, I would also propose that the existence of other persons, the existence of God, and a rudimentary moral code are also known without proof; but my purpose here is not to provide an exhaustive list of innate knowledge (an uncertain task at best). So long as one item of knowledge is known without proof, the categorical proposition that nothing is known without proof is disproved.

The difficulty of defending such a position, of course, lies in the fact that the existence of knowledge that cannot be proven cannot be proven. In this case, the proof of the pudding is in the eating; and only in the eating. The skeptic may seize upon this fact as evidence against the possibility of innate knowledge, but it is worth remembering that proof is impossible for either side of the argument, a fact which is only problematic if we assume the premise that all knowledge must be proven. Absent that irrational prejudice, the actual cognitive experience of any normal human should be amply sufficient to convince him of the existence of innate knowledge.

In each case, we find ourselves treating the laws of reason, the basic reliability of the senses, and the existence of the self, at least, as being self-evidentially true, and most so when we are least aware of their operation. We do not experience them as matters of habit, instinct, or convenience, but rather as truths upon which only a sustained and focused operation of the will can cast the least doubt, and that only momentarily. It is worth noting that even so committed a theoretical skeptic as David Hume admitted that “it seems certain, that though a man, in a flush of humour, after intense reflection on the many contradictions and imperfections of human reason, may entirely renounce all belief and opinion, it is impossible for him to persevere in this total scepticism, or make it appear in his conduct for a few hours.” We know, and we know that we know; though the knowledge is of a sort which cannot, by its nature, be proven.

In closing, a quick comment should be made upon the matter of definitions raised above. Having objected to the definition of knowledge as “justified true belief,” the matter cannot be remedied by simply dispensing with the idea of justification to leave knowledge defined simply as “true belief.” Clearly, not all true beliefs can rightly be called knowledge. (It is almost certain that a few of the innumerable conspiracy theories now current are actually true, but that does not automatically bequeath the title of “knowledge” upon the proponents of those lucky few, despite the fact that their beliefs are in fact accidentally true.) Perhaps the solution is a subdivision of knowledge, somewhat along the lines of the medieval distinction between intellectus and ratio.

Polygamy, the Law, and the New Covenant

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The mother of one of my students recently emailed to ask for my thoughts on the question of why God allowed polygamy in the Old Testament, but prohibited it in the New Testament. (The question had come up in a Bible study.) It raised some interesting points having to do with the relationships between the Law and grace and between the Old and New Covenants, so I decided to post my response in edited form here as well.

When considering polygamy, it is important to begin by noting that permitting is different from sanctioning. God never specifically forbade the taking of multiple wives, but neither did He ever indicate that He approved of it. An obvious analogy is divorce, which was not forbidden in the Mosaic law, but which Jesus nonetheless condemned as wrong. “He said to them, ‘Because of your hardness of heart Moses permitted you to divorce your wives; but from the beginning it has not been this way. And I say to you, whoever divorces his wife, except for immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery'” (Matthew 19:8-9). Jesus says this despite the fact that Moses actually established rules for divorce in Deuteronomy 24:1-4.

As Jesus makes clear in Mark 10:2-9, when considering either polygamy or divorce the key principle is that, from the very beginning in the Garden, the model has been one man and one woman becoming one flesh. This principle didn’t change between Malachi and Matthew. Thus, we can assume that polygamy and divorce have never been right, and have in fact been wrong, throughout human existence. So why didn’t God outlaw these wrongs in the Law?

Answering this question requires consideration of the purpose of the Law. The Old Testament Law was never intended to make man righteous. “For if a law had been given which was able to impart life, then righteousness would indeed have been based on law. But the Scripture has shut up everyone under sin, so that the promise by faith in Jesus Christ might be given to those who believe.” The Law was a “tutor” that would “lead us to Christ, so that we may be justified by faith” (Galations 3). Even in the Old Testament, salvation came through faith in Christ, prefigured in the sacrificial system.

The purpose of the Law was to point us toward the Savior, not to provide an exhaustive catalogue of sin. It did not condemn every possible wrong action, and did not try to. Jesus confirmed that when he said that whoever hates his brother or lusts after a woman in his heart is guilty of sin (Matthew 5:21-28), even though the law did not specifically mention those actions as being sinful.

One could ask why God didn’t condemn polygamy, divorce, hatred, or lust in the law, but it seems clear why He didn’t intend the Law to list all possible sins. Human beings couldn’t even keep the Law as written, so adding additional forbidden behavior wouldn’t have helped us become any holier. It wasn’t the Law’s job to make humans holy or save them, even in the Old Testament.

Those who sinned in Old Testament times could only be saved through faith, whether they sinned by knowingly violating the written law or not (even today, every Christian does things that are actually sinful without being aware of it). If polygamy was forbidden in the Law, those who practiced it could only be forgiven through faith. If polygamy was not forbidden in the Law, those who practiced it could only be forgiven through faith. Since God can forgive unrecognized sin, the omission of a particular sin from the Law would not affect the possibility of salvation for those who unknowingly engaged in such sin. The question, instead, is whether inclusion of that particular sin would serve the tutorial purpose of the Law. Given polygamy’s exclusion from the Law’s prohibitions, it seems that question can be answered in the negative in its case. Presumably a similar explanation could be offered for divorce, hatred, lust, and other unlisted sins.

This does not mean that engaging in such sins would have been without consequence. Polygamy, for instance, is recorded as contributing to Solomon’s downfall (I Kings 11:4). Similarly, David’s lust for Bathsheba set in action a tragic domino effect that ended with the deaths of two innocents and a sharp chastening from the Lord (II Samuel 11-12). Neither Solomon nor David could plead ignorance, however. Even though neither polygamy nor lust were explicitly forbidden in the Law, warnings and counsel abounded. Not only did Solomon have the guidance of the “one man and one woman becoming one flesh” principle that recurs throughout Scripture, he also ignored the command in Deuteronomy 17:17 that the king “shall not multiply wives for himself, or else his heart will turn away.” And in David’s case, as Jesus pointed out in the New Testament, one who was truly seeking to please God would realize that fantasizing about the sin of adultery was hardly a recipe for spiritual health. Even when certain sins were not prohibited in the Law, the warnings were clear enough that those who indulged in them and suffered the consequences had only themselves to blame.

For the New Testament Christian, the situation has changed in several ways. It may appear odd at first glance that New Covenant freedom from the law would mean that sins such as polygamy, divorce, hatred, and lust are now impermissible in a way that they were not in Old Testament times, but in fact it makes perfect sense. The tutor is no longer needed to remind us of our need for a savior, but that is only because the Savior Himself has come – and that changes everything.

There is no standing still in the spiritual world. One is either moving toward God or away, and moving toward God means casting aside anything that separates us from Him, that is contrary to His character; anything that is wrong. And since we now have Christ working in us to do what we cannot by ourselves, it is possible to be holy in a way that was impossible under the law. Thus, even wrongs which were not prohibited by the Law must nonetheless be avoided by Christians today, because our goal is different. We are no longer seeking to follow a set of rules; now we seek to become like a person, the God-Man, with His help.

We must not practice polygamy, or divorce, or hate our brother, or lust in our heart, because doing so makes us less like our Lord. We aren’t breaking the Law (for the Law no longer needs to point to the Savior), but we are breaking our relationship with the Savior the Law pointed us toward. Of course, moral lapses can and will be forgiven graciously and repeatedly, but the one who knowingly chooses to walk in polygamy, or divorce, or hatred, or lust, or any other sin, is thereby choosing to walk away from his only hope of life.

The Old Covenant polygamist would face the consequences of his wrong in this life, but if he sought God in faith he could be forgiven for this unrecognized sin along with all others. In contrast, for those of the New Covenant some things which were merely dangerous three thousand years ago have become deadly, but only because we see with greater clarity and walk with nearer help.

On love of self

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I recently had an interesting conversation with a friend on Facebook who posted a quote which said that self-protection ought to be avoided because it was a form of self-love, the assumption being that self-love is itself wrong. Of course, the point of the quote was simply to argue against a selfish fixation on our own wellbeing above that of others, but I disagreed with the premise that self-love is morally wrong. The discussion that followed made me decide to post something on the topic here as well.

We can certainly begin by acknowledging that self-love is at the root of a deadly collection of sins. Ever since the time of the Fall, when Adam sinned by desiring to raise himself to equality with God, no idol has been worshiped with greater fervor than man has lavished upon himself.

This leads rather naturally to the assumption that self-love is itself sinful. However, such an assumption is unjustified. The mere fact that a thing may be corrupted does not prove that it is bad. (Before the Fall, all of creation was corruptible but good.) The question, then, is whether self-love is inherently bad or becomes bad under certain circumstances.

One starting point for considering this question can be found in the fact that God loves himself, thus proving that not all self-love is wrong. Furthermore, God loves human beings, which means that humans ought to be loved. (Note that this is not the same as saying human beings deserve to be loved.) Jesus makes this explicit when he commands, “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (John 13).

Now, it would be logically possible for a human to be obliged to love all human beings except himself. However, if self-love is not inherently evil, as is proven by God’s self-love, and if humans qua humans are to be loved as a general principle, such a position would be hard to justify without explicit scriptural backing, which is lacking. In fact, when we turn to Scripture we find Christ suggesting the opposite when he commands, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (emphasis added). At first glance one might conclude this was merely a concession to the unavoidable fact of human self-love, but can anyone seriously argue that the One who commanded “Be ye perfect” would have shied away from declaring “You shall love your neighbor and not yourself,” if that were in fact the right course?

How, then, does self-love become sin? When we begin to love ourselves above our God or our neighbor. Returning to Mark 12, Jesus declares, “The foremost [commandment] is, ‘Hear O Israel! The Lord your God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” God first, God most, always; our fellow man next, for he is created in God’s image. When this order is disrupted, and only then, self-love becomes sin.

Of course, leaving the theoretical for the practical, in our daily walk self-love does require constant control because it is so insistent on pride of place in our lives. Why not treat it as actually bad, since it is so inclined in that direction? Two reasons: First, because if in fact human beings ought to be loved, and if there is no scriptural exception for the particular human whom one happens to be, then failure to love oneself properly would actually be sin! Virtuous self-love dictates that we ought to always seek what is truly best for ourselves, provided always that it does not interfere with our duty to love God first and neighbor next.

Secondly, treating self-love as inherently sinful often leads to a dangerous misdirection of effort as we strive for virtue. When we believe that the existence of self-love stands between ourselves and God, we will naturally attempt to eradicate it. This leads to a difficult and ultimately harmful struggle to uproot a thing which is not actually bad; while at the same time, every ounce of effort devoted to this attack on self-love will not be devoted to our proper goal of seeking God’s grace to learn to love him and his human creation better.

Human freedom and divine sovereignty

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I was recently listening to R.C. Sproul in an audio series on divine sovereignty when he made an argument which is rather common in such discussions, that total freedom for man and absolute sovereignty of God are mutually incompatible. If man is absolutely free, then God cannot be fully sovereign; if God is absolutely sovereign, man cannot be completely free. Sproul took the position that God’s sovereignty is absolute, while man’s freedom, though real, is limited and bounded by that sovereignty. He pointed out that the existence of “one maverick molecule,” that is, a single molecule which is truly free from divine control and capable of acting contrary to God’s will, creates at least the possibility that any or all of God’s plans might be undermined. Since God’s plans cannot be frustrated, nothing in creation can be absolutely free.

While I agree with Sproul’s point as regards his maverick molecule, in making his overall argument he is unclear on the meaning of “freedom” and thereby reaches a conclusion which is misleading at best. In fact, man may be absolutely free and God absolutely sovereign without contradiction, depending upon what is meant by the word freedom.

When we speak of human freedom, we can mean one of three things: freedom of action, volitional freedom, and freedom from obligation. Working in reverse order, freedom from obligation refers to a state in which there is no “ought,” nothing which a man should do, regardless of whether he actually does it. This is the sort of freedom demanded by French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who declared that God cannot exist because “man is free, man is freedom,” and therefore there can be no “infinite and perfect consciousness,” for such a being would necessarily imply an objective Good that would have some claim upon man.

I introduce this sort of freedom first in order to dismiss it from the discussion, because Sproul, I, and any orthodox Christian would agree that man is not free from obligation; indeed, I would argue that such freedom is an ontological impossibility. It is the other two sorts of freedom which Sproul appears to conflate.

Freedom of action is the freedom to do whatever we please. Man does not have absolute freedom of action, and a moment’s reflection would suffice to convince even an atheist of this point. Sartre himself, apostle of freedom though he was, acknowledged that one’s circumstances are necessarily limiting. Even the freest man is not free to fly like a bird, breathe underwater, or exist in multiple locations at once. The world around us imposes multitudinous constrains upon our actions, most of which are so routine that we don’t even notice them.

As Christians, we would add God to the list of things which can constrain our freedom of action. The Red Sea blocked the Egyptian’s freedom of action and a sudden appetite for grass blocked Nebuchadnezzar’s, while a large hole in the ground effectively constrained that of Korah and his household. One could open practically any page of Scripture and find an example to support the point that our sovereign God, against whose will even Satan himself is powerless, can and does limit our freedom of action. If God could not constrain our freedom of action – or that of any would-be maverick molecules – he would indeed cease to be sovereign.

But there is a third and more morally significant kind of freedom: volitional freedom. This is the freedom to choose. When we speak of “free will,” we mean volitional freedom. It could be defined as the freedom to select from an array of options whichever one is most appealing to us at the moment of decision.

I said this freedom is more morally significant than the freedom to act, and that is because this freedom is the source of good and evil deeds. Our choices are the stuff of vice or virtue. Without choice a “bad” act is not sinful. This is why, for example, the church has always carefully distinguished between rape and adultery. On the other hand, a “good” act absent volition is not virtuous. If a man absentmindedly stumbles and knocks another out of the path of a falling brick his act was certainly convenient for the one who was saved, but it was hardly morally praiseworthy. Going all the way back in time to the Garden, Adam’s sin lay not in eating the fruit, but in choosing to eat it. Had Satan somehow compelled Adam to consume the forbidden fruit against his will, the Fall would not have occurred. The act of choosing matters. In fact, morally it is all that matters.

One may be volitionally free without possessing absolute freedom of action. Paul and Silas, imprisoned in Philippi, were severely constrained in their freedom of action, but they could still choose to respond to their situation in whatever manner they chose. In fact, man is always and absolutely volitionally free. The choice, whatever it is, is always ours to make. This, not due to any inherent power on our part, but merely because the sovereign God has decreed it so. If we were not free, then God could not justly hold us guilty for our sin, because, as noted earlier, free choice is a necessary ingredient of sin. To quote Augustine, “Evil deeds are punished by the justice of God. They would not be punished justly if they had not been performed voluntarily.”

How, then, does man’s volitional freedom coexist with divine sovereignty? Very easily. Remember that volitional freedom does not imply freedom of action. Our maverick molecule (or, perhaps, angel of light) may choose to rebel against God, but the actualization, circumstances, and fortunes of the actual rebellion are all controlled by God. “The lot is cast into the lap, but its every decision is from the Lord.” Man may choose whatever he will, but God determines the result. As the old proverb reminds us,

For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

The omnipotent, omniscient God who holds in his hands all horseshoe nails, horseshoes, horses, riders, battles, and kingdoms is as little threatened by the freedom he has granted to his human creation as a doctor is troubled by the freedom of an infant to kick while being delivered. As Mordecai reminded Esther when she quailed at the thought of risking her life to save her people, “If you remain silent at this time, relief and deliverance will arise for the Jews from another place and you and your father’s house will perish. And who knows whether you have not attained royalty for such a time as this?” Her choice rested in her hands alone, but the ultimate end was not in doubt.

Absolute human freedom of action is indeed incompatible with divine sovereignty. But a blanket statement that human freedom is incompatible with the absolute sovereignty of God ignores the more morally significant freedom of volition, because it is in fact possible for man to be completely free to choose without compromising the absolute sovereignty of God over all creation.

Manliness, initiation, and Twisted Sister

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Apologies in advance for what is likely to be a somewhat rambling post. I came across this music video for Twisted Sister’s 1984 hit “We’re Not Gonna Take It” somewhat randomly on a political blog and watched the first bit out of curiosity, then found myself engrossed and rewatching the whole five minute video. The imagery has stuck with me for the last couple days, tying in with a lot of the themes of maleness that I’ve been thinking about recently.

To start off, watch the video. (The whole thing. Seriously.)

What is so striking about this video is the way it echoes, in a dim and rather unwell way, the model of a male initiation. All the requisite players are there: father and family, son, and initiators in the form of the band; but it’s all off somehow, like a portrait done in Silly Putty and mashed almost past recognition.

The portrayal of the father immediately sets things off on a wrong note. He rants and spews incoherent spittle and disdain, but there’s no hint of real strength as he’s harried through his house and repeatedly defenestrated by the menacing band members. Bullying and loud, yet ultimately impotent, he exemplifies our cultural perception of unreconstructed maleness. As such, he is interesting, but the main question at the moment is how this father will affect his son’s initiation into manhood.

A common theme of male initiation is violence on the part of the initiators. They kidnap the boy, take him to a strange place, wound him. The initiation is a thing to be desired, yet feared; entering the fellowship of men is a dangerous thing because a man is a dangerous thing.

Consciously or not, in the video Twisted Sister clearly echoes the image of male initiators. They appear at a critical juncture to pull the boy from his home and family and offer him a new life, represented by the later shot of him at a Twisted Sister concert as they roar, “We’re not gonna take it, no we ain’t gonna take it, we’re not gonna take it anymore.” The band’s stylized, disguised appearance and menacing behavior complete the picture of a band of initiators. Yet the initiators in this story do not kidnap the boy – they rescue him.

As the boy faces his threatening, angry father, the band rushes in to confront the man. Their challenge is for the father, and he becomes an object of mockery as they reveal his true weakness. Rather than a danger, these initiators represent safety and excitement, away from the unpleasantness of dealing with challenging maleness. Saved, the boy joins the ranks of their headbanging fans, cheering enthusiastically while the band cries, “Oh you’re so condescending / your gall is never ending / we don’t want nothin’, not a thing from you / your life is trite and jaded / boring and confiscated / if that’s your best, your best won’t do.”

While it’s certainly possible to read too much into an 80’s glam rock production, I would argue that the video offers a vivid picture of the state of male initiation in America. Today, the cultural energy that might go toward ushering boys into manhood is instead directed at rescuing those boys from a manliness that is seen as brutal and loutish, or at best merely outdated and unnecessary.

In a culture where child custody cases end with sole custody for the mother 70-80 percent of the time, manliness is not seen as beneficial, but as an inconvenient or offensive obstacle to teaching a boy to be gracious, orderly, studious, sensitive, open, patient, and civilized. Because of this, boys must be saved from masculine tendencies and influences by schools, family, and media. As Harvey Mansfield writes in Manliness, “Even when ‘man’ means only male, ‘manly’ still seems pretentious in our new society, and threatening to it as well. The manly man is making a point of the bad attitude he ought to be playing down.” Like the band in the video, these would-be saviors rush in to separate the boy from masculinity and set out to shape him according to their ideal in a sort of soft, amoeba-like initiation.

Such pressure creates several different types of young men. Some simply absorb the message, give up, and cease to be manly in any meaningful sense. Fight Club and Wanted are anthems to the awakening and late initiation of such men. They are usually very nice and very civilized; women often like them because women tend to be fond of children. Though these men sometimes become more manly as they age, even then there is always a hint about them of someone who is trying to remember where he left something important.

Other men absorb the message but do not quite cease to be manly, so they respond as a man does when confronted with badness: they fight. Of course, the badness they confront and fight is maleness itself. They become Twisted Sister: “This is our life, this is our song / we’ll fight the powers that be, just / don’t pick our destiny ’cause / you don’t know us, you don’t belong.” They stand up in manly disdain to disdain manliness. Much of the American intelligentsia – among them, perhaps, President Barrack Obama – falls into this category.

And finally, some men reject the devaluation of manliness and, in the absence of mentors, initiators, or instruction, try to make themselves manly. Sadly, they usually become some variation of the father in the video, desperately aping the most obvious characteristics of masculinity without the solid inner core that only comes by absorption through long contact with true manliness, and without which the superficial attributes of manliness easily cave into wrongness. The hip-hop culture, with its loud rebellion, glorification of meaningless violence, and hypersexualization of women, is the result of boys trying to create their own masculinity. Less dramatically, our society is full of fathers who respond with everything from withdrawal to violence as they come to the choking realization that they have no idea, on a level deeper than mere intellect, of how to actually be the man their wife and children need.

“If that’s your best, your best won’t do,” declares the song, and it’s hard to disagree. Yet, as the father asks, “What kind of a man are you?” “What do you want to do with your life?” there’s a thinness to his son’s defiant response, “I wanna rock.” He is looking for identity and meaning, but there is no one to guide him; only well-meaning rescuers who pluck him away from the danger, challenge, and responsibility of becoming a man.

Christian decision-making

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I just finished reading Just Do Something by Kevin DeYoung, an argument against the semi-mystical attempts to discern God’s specific “will for your life” that are popular today in Christian circles. DeYoung lays out a clear case against the idea that God has some hidden plan that we have to ferret out before it’s safe to make any significant decisions. Yes, God has a sovereign plan, but it’s not our job to know each step before we take it.

As James reminds us, “You do not know what your life will be like tomorrow. You are just a vapor that appears for a little while and then vanishes away.  Instead, you ought to say, ‘If the Lord wills, we will live and also do this or that.'” Our lack of foreknowledge creates room for faith. Imagine Joseph’s story, or Daniel’s, if they had been granted the sort of detailed plan for the future that it is so tempting to demand from God.

Instead, DeYoung says God’s revealed will for us is very simple: “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness.”

He doesn’t call on us to seek a divine word before scheduling another semester of classes or deciding between bowling or putt-putt golf. He calls us to run hard after Him, His commands, and His glory. The decision to be in God’s will is not the choice between Memphis or Fargo or engineering or art; it’s the daily decision we face to seek God’s kingdom or ours, submit to His lordship or not, live according to His rules or our own. The question God cares about most is not “Where should I live?” but “Do I love the Lord will all my heart, soul, strength, and mind, and do I love my neighbor as myself?”…

So go marry someone, provided you’re equally yoked and actually like being with each other. Go get a job, providing it’s not wicked. Go live somewhere in something with somebody or nobody. But put aside the passivity and the quest for complete fulfillment and the perfectionism and the preoccupation with the future, and for God’s sake start making some decisions in your life. Don’t wait for the liver-shiver. If you are seeking first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, you will be in God’s will, so just go out and do something.

I strongly agree with DeYoung’s overall point, but I wish he had been less dismissive toward what he calls “nonmoral decisions” (i.e. decisions between two or more options, neither of which are sinful). He writes, “God doesn’t care where you go to school or where you live or what job you take,” and though he acknowledges that he’s using hyperbole to make a point, one still gets the sense that DeYoung wouldn’t much mind if we made most of our “nonmoral decisions” on the basis of a coin toss. On the one hand, that might actually be a better option than a frantic, paralyzing search for a specific, hidden Plan, but on the other it seems to reduce the importance of wisdom in the Christian’s life.

Some nonmoral options are better than others. As a teacher, I have to choose the cities where I’ll offer classes. It wouldn’t be sinful for me to teach in Wilmington while living near Charlotte, but it certainly would be foolish, because it would be a huge drive that would significantly reduce my time for other, more productive work. It wouldn’t be sinful for me to marry a godly girl who hated reading or the outdoors, or who I didn’t find attractive, but it would be pretty foolish.

Of course, one could say both of those are moral decisions, the first because it would affect my ability to serve God in other ways and the second because it would decrease the likelihood of a happy marriage. I would actually agree. However, if we adopt this view of decision-making we’ve essentially defined “nonmoral decisions” out of existence. If I have to choose between eating out at Taco Bell or Chick-fil-a, the decision has implications for my financial wellbeing, my personal pleasure, and my likelihood of becoming violently ill from food poisoning – each of which is a moral issue. It’s hard to imagine any decision which is utterly lacking in moral significance, if traced back far enough.

At this point, one can feel a hint of panic at the prospect of dozens and dozens of decisions to be made daily, each of which matters in one way or another. But frankly, that’s silly. We all know that even small decisions matter. Every morning, I choose to brush my teeth. The decision matters: My body is the temple of God, so I have a responsibility to maintain it. I don’t agonize over the decision though, or even think about it very much. I just brush my teeth.

Some decisions are easier than others, but either way we are commanded to be wise in our decision-making. Jesus instructed his disciples to “be shrewd as serpents and innocent as doves.” Proverbs declares, “Take my instruction and not silver, and knowledge rather than choicest gold. For wisdom is better than jewels; and all desirable things cannot compare with her.” And, having given the command, God also offers the means: “But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him.”

Wisdom is certainly needed for momentous decisions, but it is also a very everyday, practical thing. The Book of Proverbs promises instruction in wisdom, then offers such observations as, “He who gathers in summer is a son who acts wisely,” “In abundance of counselors there is victory,” “He who is guarantor for a stranger will surely suffer for it,” and “Where no oxen are, the manger is clean, but much revenue comes by the strength of the ox.” One gets the sense that only an accident of chronology prevents Solomon from reminding us to change our oil every 3,000 miles.

So how should we make decisions, whether large or small? First, ask for wisdom. Not merely for a specific decision, but in general. We ought not merely desire to make this or that decision wisely, but to be wise. Second, we must seek to be in right relationship with God, as DeYoung emphasizes. Peter warns his male readers to honor their wives, “so that your prayers will not be hindered.” The Christian who is rebelling against God in some area of his life is setting himself up to make foolish decisions. Third, know the Scriptures and seek wise counsel. And finally, consider the options and make a decision, confidently and in faith.

Sometimes we will make decisions based on the counsel of others. Sometimes we will ignore advice because we are sure some other course is better. Sometimes our decisions will be coldly rational, and sometimes we will “go with our gut.” Sometimes we’ll make mistakes, and that’s okay, because our sovereign God can alchemize even our mistakes into good. To quote from a faintly cheesy but wise Keith Green song, heard years ago, “Just keep doing your best, and pray that it’s blessed, and Jesus takes care of the rest.”

There is no secret, hidden plan for us to find, but we are called to be wise. So let us seek wisdom and incline our hearts to understanding, then just do something, trusting God to take care of the rest.

To love the true, the good, and the beautiful

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The great classical thinkers assumed that true virtue lay in loving the true, the good, and the beautiful; that the virtuous man would center his affection on this triumvirate of excellence, and that such attention would itself foster growth in virtue. During this morning’s sermon Pastor Phillips explained how love of what is true, good, and beautiful is also central to the Christian walk, and, this being a topic dear to my own heart, I was inspired to write something of my own on the subject.

As Christians, we have many compelling reasons to intentionally cultivate a love for all that is true and good and beautiful. To begin with, all such excellences ultimately originate with God. Some directly, such as a rainbow, the song of a thrush, or the sweep of constellations in a night sky, and some indirectly, like good music, a well-made meal, pleasant comradeship, or a thought-provoking book. Whether God created the good or created the creator of the good, ultimately all goods are His gifts. “Every good thing given and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights.”

No one who considers the impractically extravagant beauty of a butterfly, or the utterly unnecessary pleasure produced by certain combinations of sound, can doubt that God takes pleasure in His creativity. And what creator does not delight in the delight of others? God did not invent flame so that it could be put under a basket, but so that it might dance upon the lampstand and give light to all who are in the house, that they might see it and glorify their Father who is in heaven.

When we delight in what is true, and good, and beautiful, we worship God. “The heavens are telling of the glory of God; and their expanse is declaring the work of His hands.” Furthermore, such appreciation actually shapes us to love Him more and better.

Our every choice, our every affection, shapes us in some way. We become what we do; we become what we love. This is why Paul tells us, “Finally, brethren, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is of good repute, if there is any excellence and if anything worthy of praise, dwell on these things.” As our love of God shapes us to love what is good, so also our love of what is good shapes us to love God, the author of these goods, more and more fully.

This is a point that is perhaps most easily seen in the negative. Most would agree that a man who shuts himself up in a dank apartment, reading twisted novels and listening to dark music, is cultivating a spirit that is less open to the Father of lights. If our loves can draw us away from God, surely they can also draw us nearer, when we love those created goods through which “His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature” are revealed.

It is important to add a caveat here. Whenever one speaks of loving created things, there is a natural shrinking away on the part of the Christian: “Idolatry!” In fact, Augustine famously defined sin as nothing other than loving what is less above what is greater. Clearly, disordered affection – love of creation over Creator – is a deadly error. Yet, Augustine himself notes that the sin lies “in deserting what [is] better,” rather than in the love of created things themselves.

The error here lies in deficiency rather than excess of love. If a woman buys her husband a new car, then complains a few months later, “You love that car more than you love me!” it is unlikely that promising to love the car less will really address the heart of the problem. We want our gifts to be loved, and to be loved for themselves. In a healthy relationship, there is no fear that even the most wonderful gift will overwhelm the recipient’s love for the giver – on the contrary, such gifts illustrate and reinforce that love.

If we find that our love of created things, whether food, nature, or family, has come to exceed our love of God, trying to tamp down those loves is approaching the problem from the wrong direction. One cannot treat the disease by attacking symptoms. Instead, we must choose to love God first, to restore Him to His proper place in our lives. When we call upon Him, the God who once taught us to love Him is always ready to go over the lesson again. And once He is restored to pride of place, all our other lesser loves fall naturally into their appropriate positions as well. So long as we do not allow love of God’s gifts to distract us from love of the Giver, there is no reason to fear that they will separate us from Him. In fact, a proper love of what is true and good and beautiful may help us avoid those things which threaten our relationship with God.

There is much that is bad and unhealthy without being outright evil. Many books, movies, conversations, images, and thoughts sit just outside the boundaries of objective, clear “wrongness,” just far enough away that we feel justified in partaking. We don’t have to touch what is unclean, but we get used to the smell.

It’s hard to draw clear boundary lines in such cases. When we try, too often we swerve too far in the other direction and become legalists. Like the Pharisees, we “weigh men down with burdens hard to bear,” taking it upon ourselves to remedy the deficiencies in God’s commands. Some movies are bad, so we don’t watch movies. Drinking may lead to drunkenness, so drinking is banned. Dress may be provocative, so women should be unkempt for Christ.

Torn between two negative extremes, how much better to have something excellent for which to aim. I observed earlier that we become what we love; it is worth noting that we also love what we love. And the more we love what is good, the more we hate what is not. When God commands us in Amos, “Hate evil, love good,” He’s actually just repeating Himself. This is why a God of love can also hate, and hate passionately; in fact, a God of love must hate if He truly loves.

Better one love than a hundred laws. A man can try to avoid being drawn into pornography by carefully deciding exactly how many square inches of exposed skin and how provocative a pose it takes to make an image unacceptable – or he can teach himself to love purity and beauty. A woman can draw a flowchart to determine when conversation turns to gossip – or she can cultivate a fierce love for her neighbor. A parent can diagram exactly which words and chords makes music out-of-bounds for his teen – or he can teach him to love music that is good and beautiful. (This is not to suggest that rules are unnecessary. Objective boundaries are often valuable and helpful as we seek to grow in virtue, but without an organic foundation of love we will always end up spilling over into either corruption or legalism.)

It may seem odd to suggest that cultivating a love of botany or astronomy would help a man resist pornography, but that is in fact exactly what I am suggesting. Beauty is beauty and goodness is goodness, whatever form it takes. The more our very soul embraces what is truly beautiful, the more naturally we will respond with revulsion to what is filthy and perverted. Love of one good translates to all others. Show me a man who has cultivated a love of true womanhood, of purity, and of beauty, and I’ll show you a man who will find it far easier to resist the lure of pornography or other sexual impurity.

As Christians, we have every reason to cultivate a love of all that is true, all that is good, and all that is beautiful, for our good God gave us these gifts for our delight and to teach of His nature. This is the world which the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it.

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