Theology Archives - Page 3 of 5

Zeno of Elea and understanding ultimate reality

July 17, 2014 by David Vogel

Zeno of Elea was one of history’s first recorded philosophers, living about four hundred and fifty years before Christ. Zeno is remembered for creating paradoxes, such as his famous argument that it’s impossible to ever arrive at a destination. The difficulty, Zeno explained in what is called the “dichotomy paradox,” is that before one arrives at the destination, one must travel half the distance there. Yet, as soon as one arrives at that halfway mark, there’s a new halfway distance which must be traveled before you can get to the destination. And so on. Since any distance, even the very shortest, can be halved, there’s always a half-distance to travel before one can arrive at the destination. With an infinite number of halfway points to reach before the destination, it does seem as if logic demands the conclusion that you can never get there.

One suspects that Zeno may not have been popular in high school, but my point in bringing him up is not to complain about dead Italian philosophers, but to illustrate an unfortunate tendency that most of us have when thinking about theological uncertainties. As an example, consider the question of how God can justly punish us for our sins (thus implying we are guilty for them) despite the fact that human nature is fallen and therefore we cannot help sinning.

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Thoughts on evolution

September 6, 2016April 17, 2014 by David Vogel

J: “I know you probably get this a lot, but I was just wondering what your opinions on evolution are.”

Before we start talking about evolution, it’s important to consider why the issue matters. From a scientific perspective, even infallible proof that evolution occurred (by “evolution” I mean the theory that biological complexity can be explained through natural processes as opposed to intelligent design) would hardly remove the need for some sort of God to explain the world. Throughout history, scientists and philosophers have recognized that various aspects of the universe strongly suggest the existence of a Designer: the simple existence of “something rather than nothing,” to quote Leibniz; the strange suitability of the universe for life, called the Anthropic Principle; the existence of any sort of biological life; and finally, the remarkable complexity of biological life.

Because evolution operates through the mechanism of the survival of the fittest, and because being alive in the first place is a fairly universally acknowledged prerequisite for survival, evolution can only appear on the scene once biological life exists. This means it has nothing to say about the sheer existence of the universe, nothing to say about the Anthropic Principle, and nothing to say about the very first appearance of biological life. All of these still appear to demand a creative Intelligence which evolution is absolutely unable to replace.

But that’s not really why we talk about evolution. Evolution matters because it appears to contradict the creation account found in Scripture. The first few chapters of Genesis describe the creation of complex life forms from nothing, over the course of six days. Evolution requires millions upon millions of years. The two pictures cannot both be right. Well, where does that leave us?

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Virtue, vice, and double negatives

May 29, 2015April 19, 2012 by David Vogel

You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit.

Christian virtue offers just one example of the mysterious coexistence of divine sovereignty with human freedom and responsibility. Even for those who are saved, any attempt at self-reliant virtue promises to be about as successful as Peter’s stroll on the Sea of Galilee. We cannot foster our own holiness any more than a bee can conjure honey through sheer willpower. Yet on the other hand, the Christian walk is described as a fight, a race; we are exhorted to “run in such a way that you may win.” Like Peter, we’re entirely dependent on Christ for any hope of reaching our destination, but, also like Peter, it’s still our responsibility to fight our way over the waves.

Part of that fight is to resist sin. “A good tree cannot produce bad fruit”; being a Christian means learning to hate what our Father hates. In fact, one might easily imagine virtue as a sort of path threaded safely among various “thou shalt nots.” So we pray that our children will not fall into bad company and we exhort teenagers to avoid premarital sex and we counsel men on how to avoid being pushovers, and very often we completely miss the point.

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Could Jesus have sinned?

May 12, 2014February 6, 2012 by David Vogel

A discussion after church today raised the question whether the possibility of sin entailed, in itself and apart from any actual evil, a diminution of goodness. The question led me to suggest that Jesus could have sinned (suggesting, if true, that perfection is not incompatible with the possibility of sin), a position which seemed in retrospect to require further consideration.

Could Jesus have sinned? One can begin by stipulating that God is incapable of sin (e.g. Hebrews 6:18, James 1:13), but even this incapacity raises some interesting questions. I cannot fly, see through walls, or live a perfect life, because something limits me–whether external constraints or internal deficiency. Obviously, such a definition of “cannot” does not apply to a perfect, omnipotent God. Perhaps the closest human analogy to the divine incapacity for sin is “will not,” rather than “cannot”?

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Christianity and epistemic certainty

October 4, 2011 by David Vogel

“I believe everything I believe is true”: It’s an equivocal assertion, obviously true in one sense while obviously foolish and hubristic in another. While talking it over with a group of students, I was struck by the way in which unraveling the two possible meanings of this statement brings us to the heart of the modern allergy to intellectual confidence, while throwing light on a common struggle within the church over what it means to be sure of our doctrine.

If by, “I believe everything I believe is true,” I merely mean that, given any individual belief which I hold at a particular moment, at that moment I believe that particular belief to be true and all other, contradictory beliefs therefore false, the proposition goes beyond truth to settle in the realm of the painfully obvious. When I say that I believe a particular proposition, if I do not mean that I think that proposition is in fact true and not false, then what exactly is the meaning of “believe” at all?

When I say, “I believe that guy is untrustworthy,” if I do not mean that I am convinced of the untrustworthiness of the presumably-duplicitous male in question, any and all known evidence to the contrary notwithstanding, then what else can I mean? Of course, this conviction may be only momentary. My declaration may elicit such a flood of testimony in defense of the character of the hypothetical object of our consideration that my opinion promptly changes and I am able to confidently declare, “I believe that guy is trustworthy.” But in both cases, for as long as I hold the particular belief, I believe it is true and all contradictory beliefs false. In this sense, the statement that “I believe everything I believe is true” is simply a tautology.

On the other hand, if we widen our focus from microscopic to telescopic, pulling back from our consideration of individual beliefs to look instead at the entire shifting and interconnected mass that makes up our belief system, the proposition that “I believe everything I believe is true” takes on a very different meaning. If I believe that I have achieved the Cartesian ideal of an epistemic structure so perfectly constructed as to ensure that every single component belief is in fact true, I am guilty of arrogance bordering on insanity. Obviously, I don’t know where I might be wrong (if I knew the particular belief which was wrong it would be much simpler, since the very act of acknowledging the falseness of a belief sends the prior error up in flames along with the belief itself), but surely even the most conservative gambler would be willing to stake all he had on the proposition that any given individual is wrong about something?

So we have an apparent contradiction: Viewed individually, it is insane to deny the truth of a particular belief, but, viewed collectively, it is insane to affirm the truth all of one’s beliefs.

This paradox leads to two common errors. The first is the error of the man who is so committed to avoiding the folly of universal certainty that he flies off in the other direction and winds up denying that he even believes that what he believes is true. His humility becomes nonsense and ends in incoherence (see “Higher Education, Postmodern”). The second error is that of the reactionary (often Christian) who is so eager to avoid the first error that he affirms–in fact if not in theory–the absolute truth of every iota of his belief system, resolutely ignoring the very real possibility that he might truly be wrong even about something of which he is wholly convinced. As G.K. Chesterton wrote, “It is not bigotry to be certain we are right; but it is bigotry to be unable to imagine how we might possibly have gone wrong.”

As is its habit, Christianity doctrine manages to embrace the paradox without tumbling off into either extreme. In the Christian model of reality we discover a solid substratum of absolute, objective truth, imperfectly known by finite and fallen men. The late Richard Rorty had a point when he spoke of a “God’s-eye view,” and pointed out that men don’t have one. Of course, Rorty went too far in the other direction and concluded that it is therefore pointless to even pursue objective truth (a proposition which he proceeded to defend as actually true, thus validating Hume’s reluctant observation that it is “impossible for [a man] to persevere in total scepticism, or make it appear in his conduct for a few hours”), but such a dispirited conclusion does not necessarily follow.

If reality is indeed designed, created, and governed by the Logos of which our intellect is a tiny droplet, it follows that we can know real truth, though the limitation of our minds and the corruption of the Fall should make us humble about asserting with certainty that we do know real truth. Even that which is explicitly revealed by our Creator may be imperfectly understood, as, for example, the Messianic prophecies were for hundreds of years. Like an apprentice painter copying the master’s work, we should always try for as much doctrinal accuracy as possible, and we can and should critique the work of other apprentices (while welcoming their critique of our own efforts), but the standard for such critique is the original artwork, not our copy. Even when our version appears to accurately represent the true model, we must remember that our eye is not sufficiently keen, nor our hand sufficiently skilled, to ensure that all the beauty and nuance of the master’s work is reflected in our own model. “For now we see in a mirror dimly… now I know in part.”

Thus Christian humility embraces the burly confidence that belief may be true, alongside the clear-eyed recognition that a belief may be false. The beliefs which I hold about worship style, church government, baptism, or predestination, I believe are true. And if you disagree, I believe you’re wrong (unless and until you convince me otherwise). But I must disagree with an awareness that we both see through a mirror dimly; that we both squint at a reality imperfectly understood, and neither of us has the right to claim perfect certainty until that day when we shall see face to face, knowing fully just as we also have been fully known.

Same as it ever was

May 10, 2014September 27, 2011 by David Vogel

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

May 15, 2011 by David Vogel

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

May 13, 2011 by David Vogel

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.

Polygamy, the Law, and the New Covenant

December 15, 2010 by David Vogel

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

May 29, 2015November 14, 2010 by David Vogel

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.

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