Wilson and Wade on the nature of European religion

Nicholas Wade writes,
"In his book Darwin’s Cathedral [David Sloan Wilson] argues, with the help of several case studies, that group selection can indeed explain many features of religion.

"His thesis is that human groups function as units subject to natural selection when behavior within the group is regulated by a moral system or religion. Supernatural agents are an essential part of the moral system because they operate as the sanction that enforces it. Well-functioning groups coordinated by such a moral system out-compete other groups. The social coordination provided by the moral system enables groups to secure resources and other items of value that would be beyond the reach of individuals.

“Wilson’s concept draws on several works already described here, such as Durkheim’s theory of religion as the embodiment of society and Boehm’s description of egalitarianism among hunter gatherers, as well as his own research on group selection. He distinguishes between what religion achieves— the social coordination for which religious behavior was selected— and what its practitioners feel, which he acknowledges is entirely different. ‘Since writing Darwin’s Cathedral, I have spoken with many religious believers who feel that my focus on practical benefits misses the essence of religious experience, which is a deeply felt relationship with God ,’ he writes.  But there is no necessary connection, he points out, between an end that evolution has favored and the means it has arrived at to get there. People fall in love in part to have children, he notes, ‘but that doesn’t remotely describe the subjective experience of falling in love.’ Similarly, the experience of communing with the deity is one of many benefits that make people practice a religion.

“Wilson rejects the view of many social scientists and others that belief in the supernatural and nonrational elements of religion should be seen as some kind of mental aberration. To the contrary, religious belief ‘is intimately connected to reality by motivating behaviors that are adaptive in the real world— an awesome achievement when we appreciate the complexity that is required to become connected in this practical sense.’

“One of the ways in which religion connects to reality is through its use of sacred symbols. These symbols evoke emotions, and emotions are ancient, evolved mechanisms for motivating adaptive behavior, often doing so beneath or partly beneath the level of consciousness. “Sacred symbols organize the behavior of the people who regard them as sacred,” Wilson notes. It’s this organization— not the implausibility of certain elements in a religion’s sacred narrative—that should be seen as the criterion of a creed’s effectiveness. The adaptedness of religious beliefs “must be judged by the behaviors they motivate, not by their factual correspondence to reality,” Wilson says."  Wade, Nicholas, The Faith Instinct: How Religion Evolved and Why It Endures (Kindle Locations 1255-1277). Penguin Group US. Kindle Edition.

Comment:  In The Disenchantment of the World, a Political History of Religion, Marcel Gauchet argues (among other arguments) that while Christianity was necessary to the creation of Western Europe, it is now superfluous in that all of Christianity’s practical virtues have been incorporated into its culture.  As to its impractical attributes, like the worship of God and the rituals Wilson is quoted as describing, they are as harmless as any other fad or fancy and can be safely tolerated.  While Nicholas Wade does not single out Christianity, it was Christianity which (according to Gauchet) was vital to the creation of Western Europe and perhaps (if we can overlay Wade upon Gauchet) we might now suggest that Christianity is still vital, not perhaps to any further development of Western Europe, but to the well being of its citizens. 

Freud argued (consistent with Wade) that there is indeed a moral overseer that governs our behavior, but whereas Wade calls it a belief in God or gods, Freud called it the Superego.  Wade, I suppose, will propose that Religion has ongoing viability.  Freud believed that we should reject the Christian input to our Superegos and substitute something more rationale, something Freud himself was willing to suggest (if memory serves me -- although I can't recall what it was). 

The sort of Christianity that has always interested me involves a church in which the pastor is heavily steeped in theology and philosophy and capability of debating all the interesting issues.  I would have enjoyed being in Jonathan Edwards' church, for example, but Wade isn't interested in that sort of Religion, and perhaps most American Christians aren't either.  They are more interested in the sort of Christianity Wade describes, one in which a church becomes unified by its rituals and customs.  Alas, if Wade is right, I don't seem to be a Christian at all.

Falling on a grenade and other morals

I don’t for a minute believe that people only sacrifice their lives for kin. My last serious study was of the American Civil War. Countless men gave up their lives and it strikes me as preposterous, something no Civil War historian would ever say, to assert that they were all doing it for their kin. While it is doubtful that many of them had a comprehensive view of what was at stake, they nevertheless, most of them, fought bravely. And if a group’s officer ordered them to make a “suicidal charge,” they would usually do it.

Military historians have puzzled over the motivation of soldiers who will literally give their lives in battle. There are many cases, for example, of soldiers falling on grenades in order to save their comrades and these comrades were in almost all cases not their kin. The consensus view, a view I have never read anyone dispute, is that they do it for their comrades. They fight for each other. Saving their friends becomes more important than saving their own lives.

Perhaps someone who jumps in the water to save his dog doesn’t think he is going to be killed. Maybe he overestimates his ability to swim out of trouble, but someone who falls on a grenade can be in little doubt.

The same sort of thing occurred in many of the Civil War battles. At Cold Harbor for example, Grant sent charge after charge against an impregnable position. General Hood did the same thing in another battle. In World War One, waves of soldiers were sent against positions defended by machine guns. It took countless lives lost before generals realized that superior enemy tactics or technology necessitated a change in their own tactics, but what about the soldiers who were sent on those “suicidal” charges? Why did they do it? Stephen Crane, though he never fought in the Civil War, in his The Red Badge of Courage, is credited with perceptive insight into this matter. The soldiers believe they “ought” to be brave. If they don’t perform as commanded in an attack, then they were (typically) ashamed of themselves, and if they have a chance to redeem themselves by giving their lives in the next charge, they may do it. Crane’s “coward” turned “hero” didn’t lose his life, but he was willing to lose it. And here, by using the word “ought” we are entering into Nicholas Wade territory.

We know more about the Chimpanzee than we once did. It is now known that in the wild they engage in almost constant warfare with neighboring tribes of chimpanzees. One tribe will try to kill off the males of an enemy tribe, one by one, and eventually take over its females. The Chimpanzee and the line that became homo sapiens split about 5 million years ago. Wade infers that man’s pre-hunter-gatherer ancestors behaved just as the chimpanzee does today, but when man entered into hunter-gatherer societies, the old ways didn’t work. These societies no longer needed an alpha male. They needed to become egalitarian; so, according to Wade, Natural Selection developed “morals” in the Hunter-Gatherer society so that tribe members would behave as they “ought.” Wade lists what he believes were the critical “oughts,” and tribe members who didn’t abide by them, when found out, would be ostracized. Being kicked out of a tribe in those days was tantamount to a death sentence; so it was in their interest to conform.

Do I have a religious instinct?

I wouldn’t say I was raised to religion; although I might have been.  My grandmother, who was self-taught because she spent part of her childhood deaf, raised me until I was ten.  She didn’t teach me anything about religion as far as I recall.  What she did urge me to do was read all sorts of things.  She got me a library card as soon as I was eligible, and I did.  My siblings and I were sent off to church; the First Christian Church of Wilmington California, so I suppose that comprises a sort of “raising,” but my parents didn’t attend.  I recall that my younger brother used to keep the money we were given to put in the collection plate and later buy candy with it.   

By reading “all sorts of things” I eventually got to the point where I could no longer accept the literalism of the sort of religion I was being presented with by the First Christian Church.  My mother did become excessively religious after I went into the Marine Corps, but she gravitated to a denomination that was decidedly not “main-stream,” the World Wide Church of God.  I used to have regular debates with her about it. 

During my agnostic period I read a lot of Marxist and Communist literature, got in some debates with some fellow-travelers if not communists, but was never convinced by anything I read.

I decided I needed to pursue religion a bit more and went through something reminiscent of Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha.   I wasn’t comfortable being a non-believer, but my mother had turned me off of Christianity because at the time I thought her denomination or sect was typical.  I wasn’t sophisticated enough to realize that Herbert Armstrong and the World Wide Church of God was something like a cult.  I spent time studying Zen, the writings of Gautama Buddha Buddhist, Taoism – I liked Taoism, or at least the writings of Lao Tsu quite a lot.  I didn’t join anything, however.  I then studied the Yoga third path to wisdom; which involved study rather than doing weird stuff with your body or sacrificing yourself in some weird way.  

I went through a divorce and then found that the only woman who interested me in marrying again was a committed Christian.  It didn’t hurt that she was gorgeous, but I wouldn’t have been interested in a woman who was caught up in any of the other religions I had studied up until then.  This young Baptist lady suited me quite well.  Except, as usual, I spent the next 8 years studying theology and we ended up in a “reformed” Presbyterian Church. 

Continuing to read all sorts of things I now wouldn’t say that I fit any particular denomination extremely well.  Nicholas Wade would say that one can’t be religious unless he belongs to a religious “pack” of some sort.  I don’t agree with him.   I am technically a member of such a “pack” but no longer attend.  My wife would attend if she were able, but she is now an invalid.  Does my being “technically a member” satisfy Wade’s argument that I need to be part of a religious “pack” (btw he doesn’t use the term “pack,” but I can’t recall the term he does use)?  I rather think not, on the other hand our church made two physical moves, each time further away from where we live and surely if we are physically unable to make the drive, they’ve got to accept that; so maybe we are still part of it. 

Eugene Marais, baboons, and religious "instinct"

Not remembering correctly, I searched African Genesis (written by Robert Ardrey) looking for references to Raymond Dart in regard to the baboon story, only to learn it was not Dart but Eugene Marais who had written about the baboons. He wrote a book entitled The Soul of the Ape in 1919, published posthumously in 1939. He also wrote some articles one can find collected under the title My Friends the Baboons.

I’ve gotten Dart and Marais confused, but I’ll leave them that way and simply quote Robert Audrey describing the Baboon story I sort-of remembered. The following is from pages 82-83:

“Marais could always tell when a leopard was in the neighbourhood of his own band. Protected by nothing but the rocky hollows in the krans and concealed only by the limbs of the massive wild fig, the troop would begin to move uneasily. He would sense the restlessness, and then hear a particular cry of disturbance. Helplessly the troop would wait for unseen death to pass unseeing. But one night the leopard came early.

“It was still dusk. The troop had only just returned from the feeding grounds and had barely time to reach its scattered sleeping places in the high-piled rocks behind the fig tree. Now it shrilled its terror. And Marais could see the leopard. It appeared from the bush and took its insolent time. So vulnerable were the baboons that the leopard seemed to recognize no need for hurry. He crouched just below a little jutting cliff above him.

“The two males moved cautiously. The leopard, if he saw them, ignored them. His attention was fixed on the swarming, screeching, defenceless horde scrambling among the rocks. Then the two males dropped. They dropped on him from a height of twelve feet. One bit at the leopard’s spine. The other struck at his throat while clinging to his neck from below. In an instant the leopard disemboweled with his hind claws the baboon hanging to his neck and caught in his jaws the baboon on his back. But it was too late. The dying disemboweled baboon had hung on just long enough and had reached the leopard’s jugular vein with his canines.

“Marais watched while movement stilled beneath the little jutting cliff. Night fell. Death, hidden from all but the impartial stars enveloped prey and predator alike. And in the hollow places in the rocky, looming krans a society of animals settled down to sleep.”

Comment: I have this account in quotes because I’m quoting Ardrey, but he doesn’t have it in quotes. I checked a few Wikipedia references, couldn’t find any other reference to this story but found this one interesting: http://www.authorsden.com/categories/story_top.asp?catid=32&id=22445 I especially noted the paragraph, “In 1948, twelve years after Marais’ death, Nikolaas Tinbergen[2] (1907-1988) reformulated Marais’ extremely important concept of the phyletic (inborn) and causal (acquired) memory.”

I’m assuming that Marais had informed the difference between instinctive and acquired memory in apes in some clever way; which caused me to wonder if the human genes governing the learning of language are considered “instinct.” Growing up I was taught that nothing in us is instinctive, Locke’s influence no doubt, but does anyone still say that? The ability to learn language is instinctive – or does the fact that we don’t all know the same language but can instead at a certain age rapidly learn any language, disqualify it as “instinct”?

Nicholas Wade argues that our religious inclination is as instinctive as language, contra Locke. We don’t all practice the same religion – no more than we learn the same religion, but most (not those raised by wolves or apes, perhaps) of us learn some language. But we all (perhaps) have the God-shaped vacuum referred to by Blaise Pascal. But what about the fact that some of us have become atheists? Does that disprove this idea? Not necessarily. I’ve noticed that many who claim to be atheists have taken up other religious-like beliefs. Carl Jung wrote a very interesting book on Flying Saucers: http://www.amazon.com/Flying-Saucers-Modern-Things-Skies/dp/0691018227 I read this book years ago and no longer have it, but if I recall correctly Jung argued that the belief in Flying Saucers was driven by the modern “abandonment” of religion. He argued that humans have something like an “Oversoul” that satisfies the human need for religion, or God, by projecting the image of perfection (the mandala) in the sky. Also, many turn to other things, astrology, for example. Pascal believed that people couldn’t be completely satisfied by such ideas, but they did have the Locke-like freedom to fulfill this instinct-like need for God with other things. But if Wade and Jung are right, could a person still manage a sort-of “pure” atheism in which he felt no “toward-God” urge? I don’t know. I have known people who claimed to have managed something like that, but then some of them later became believers in God. Perhaps also there is the option of continuing in a state of unbelief, without flying saucers, astrology or anything equivalent, but having to suffer psychologically for this state. I suppose one could choose to not-believe in God . . . or even speak for that matter.

Escriva's Opus Dei & Frame's Doctrine of the Knowledge of God

With John Frame’s The Escondido Theology and Evangelical Reunion in the back of my mind (but not the reason I decided to watch the movie There Be Dragons – I was skimming through the Netflix movies and thought it would be an action movie about the Spanish Civil War J. Instead, I discovered the movie to be based upon the life of the Opus Dei founder Josemaria Escriva. The “action” surrounds the relationship of Escriva and a perhaps fictitious childhood friend Manolo. The more important part of the movie describes Escriva’s saintly development and his influence on others.

In regard to the “Second Kingdom” and Frame’s “Escondido” conflict and debate, I noticed that Escriva was very-much involved with Christian “application.” Frame’s criticism of the Escondido professors includes his assertion that they teach that “Those who try to show the application of Scripture to the daily problems of believers are headed toward a Christless Christianity.” Did Escriva and his Opus Dei drive his followers toward a “Christless Christianity”? Without knowing fully what the Escondido Professors are arguing (or the effects of Opus Dei), and perhaps having them wrong, if we have our “eyes upon Jesus” which is something urged upon us through Scripture (and in countless sermons I can bear witness to), won’t we want to “behave” and “act” as He would? If so then we have entered the theological world of “application.”

On page 76-77 The Escondido Theology, Frame defends himself against R. Scott Clarke when he writes, “the application of God’s word” was his [Frame’s] focus in the first seventy-five pages [of the Doctrine of the Knowledge of God]. After describing this focus he responds to R. Scott Clark’s criticism by asking, “am I not permitted to make mention of what we do with God’s word? Even after speaking elaborately about the primacy of God in revelation? Theology is certainly something we do . . . and it is certainly the application of the revelation of the Word.”

Perhaps we can’t see it if we just look about us today, but we can learn about it from reading Church history, that is, the swing back and forth between faith and works, or more specifically between the extremes of “one needs only faith and needn’t at all concern one’s self about what one does,” and “one won’t make it to heaven unless his good works qualify him for the trip.”

In reading the excerpt from Escriva’s book it is clear that his works-like injunctions aren’t taught from the average Protestant, and probably not from the average Catholic pulpit. But surely, since we have been saved for good works, it isn’t out of line to describe some of them. [See an excerpt from Escriva’s book The Way at http://www.amazon.com/Way-Essential-Classic-Opus-Founder/dp/0385518293/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355755042&sr=1-1&keywords=escriva+the+way

I wouldn’t support all of Escriva’s injunctions, nevertheless it is refreshing that Escriva saw the lack of “application” in the church of his day and chose to do something about it. Also, it is notable that his superiors, perhaps up to the pope himself, allowed him to create his Opus Dei organization.

When I was in the Charismatic Church “Faith Fellowship” back in perhaps 1979 or 1980, a recent graduate from Talbot, Ron Galla Rini wanted to do something that I now take to be similar to what Escriva advocated (although Ron never mentioned Escriva as far as I can recall). I was influenced by Galla Rini and as a result started a Prayer Meeting at Douglas Aircraft Company. Galla Rini didn’t specify what we should do, and I don’t think Escriva did either, but he urged us to “do something,” to embrace “application.” I was as caught up in application as the movie portrays Escriva’s followers as being. The prayer meeting that resulted was remarkable. Everyone who attended at Douglas was as caught up as I was. We prayed for something one week and then the next week reviewed my notes and asked for a report on whether the prayer was answered. Week after week the prayers were answered. A Plymouth Brethren member (and skeptic) attended and couldn’t reconcile the answered prayer to his belief that his denomination comprised the only true church.

But when the Faith Fellowship eldership discovered what Ron Galla Rini had put in motion they demanded that it be abolished. I was very upset at the time, but years-later suspect that most protestant churches would have acted as the Faith Fellowship eldership acted. It is threatening to have a recent seminary graduate urge a group of church members to go out into their neighborhoods doing what Christ did, or might do. Yet the Catholic Church permitted Escriva to do what he did, and beyond that in 2002, canonized him.

Someone might at this point observe that the Catholic Church has always been more “works-oriented” and as a consequence a natural home for Escriva’s Opus Dei. This is probably true. One recalls that Luther had a lot of trouble with the book of James. But should we also have trouble with it? Is it for Catholics only and not for us? If it is for us as well, we must take seriously James 2:14-20, “What use is it, my brethren, if a man says he has faith, but he has no works? Can that faith save him? If a brother or sister is without clothing and in need of daily food, and one of you says to them, "Go in peace, be warmed and be filled," and yet you do not give them what is necessary for their body, what use is that? Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being by itself. But someone may well say, "You have faith, and I have works; show me your faith without the works, and I will show you my faith by my works." You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder. But are you willing to recognize, you foolish fellow, that faith without works is useless?”

If we think there is a conflict between Faith as we understand it and what James wrote in 2:14-20, then we don’t have an adequate grasp of Faith. I am not, by the way, accusing the Escondido professors of that. I haven’t read them as much as I’ve read Frame. I’m merely asserting this passage of James as relating to Frame’s beliefs -- and Escriva’s as well – mine too.

Ezekiel's theological agenda and qualifications (3)

Paul Joyce on page 33 of Ezekiel, a commentary, writes, “The theological agenda [Ezekiel] addresses is defined by a range of traditions that appear to have broken down and to be in crisis: ‘the land’ divinely promised to the patriarchs; Israel’s status as a special people, chosen by YHWH; the city of Jerusalem; the temple; the monarchy.”

Ezekiel was going to “speak” to these issues, but what sort of language was he going to use – or to put it theologically, what sort of language did he have available for God to use? On pages 190-1 of The Message of the Prophets, Gerhard von Rad writes, “In matters of general knowledge and culture alone Ezekiel’s intellectual horizons were unusually wide. . .”

“Ezekiel was familiar with a variety of traditional material of a mythological or legendary kind (the primeval man, Ezek. 28:11ff.; the foundling, Ezek. 1.1ff.; the marvelous tree, Ezek. 31:1f.) . . . When we further notice that Ezekiel is as well-informed about the technical details of shipbuilding as about the places from which the necessary materials had to be imported (Ezek.27:1ff.j) , we arrive at a picture of a man of not only all-round general culture, but of intellectual powers of the first rank. Fore Ezekiel, more even than Jeremiah, needed to express his prophetic message in writing – in an ordered form. He makes scarcely any use of the shorter units of expression, the diatribe and the threat, which classical prophecy had employed. When he speaks, the results are as a rule literary compositions, even large-scale discussions, for example, the literary category of the dirge, which he develops to almost baroque proportions (Ezek. 19:1ff., 10ff.; 27.1ff.; 28:1ff.; 21.1ff., 32.1ff).”

Von Rad provides several more examples of Ezekiel’s wide-ranging knowledge and then writes, “No other prophet feels so great a need to think out problems so thoroughly and to explain them with such complete consistency. In other swords, Ezekiel is not only a prophet, but a theologian as well. And this double office was essential for him, because he confronted a presumptuous and indeed rebellious generation for which a prophet’s preaching was not enough: he had to debate and argue with it.”

On page 193 von Rad writes, “The richest quarries for information [about Ezekiel] are, of course, the great historical retrospects in chs. 16, 20 and 23. There is no mistaking that these were written from a priestly pint of view. No doubt, Ezekiel is above all else a prophet, but the world of ideas in which he lives, the standards which he apples, and the categories according to which he sees Israel’s existence ordered before Yahweh, are expressly those of a priest. . .”

Comment: Am I reading anything in Joyce or von Rad that isn’t “orthodox”? I don’t think so; quite the contrary. Here, both Joyce & von Rad are sticking with Scripture, letting Scripture explain Ezekiel. This is a refreshing change from the non-Scriptural “end-times overlay” the Dispensationalists use to deal with Ezekiel’s book.

Mercersburgism, John Frame, Theonomy, etc.

 

If Steven Wedgeworth is accurate (see http://wedgewords.wordpress.com/category/mercersburg/) when he writes, “Another difference [between Modern Theology and Mercersburg Theology] is in their central idea. Modern theology makes the atonement or death of Christ, Mercersburg the person of Christ or the incarnation, its central idea. The importance of this difference can be seen in the fact, for instance, that the atonement itself, or justification by faith, cannot be maintained successfully by adopting the former. According to it, the atonement is made to rest primarily on what Christ has done, not on what he is. It apprehends Christ as a mere individual, God and man in one person, it is true, but yet as a mere individual. Mercersburg theology apprehends Christ as the embodiment of the universal life of humanity, the second Adam or federal head of the race’ and his obedience and death receive their atoning merits from this fact.”

If accurate Mercersburg theology as well as “Modern Theology” comes athwart something I encountered in New Testament Introduction in regard to the Synoptic Problem, it was never a problem for the first generations of Christians. They didn’t have the whole Bible, the New Testament or very likely more than one of the gospels. Neither were they concerned about the theology of the atonement. They were focused almost completely upon the Resurrection, the Easter message: Christ is Risen. For if he is risen then he is as he is the first born among many brethren; which includes us.

Others I read seem to think that Mercersburg Theology was headed in the same direction as Neo-Orthodoxy. Barth took the wind out of their sails because he did it better than they did. I have nothing against Barth btw, one of my few criticisms of Van Til is that he was too harsh on some philosophers and theologians that I admire, R. G. Collingwood for example, but also Barth . . . but whenever I’ve dabbled at reading Barth he is saying something that bears out Van Til’s criticism.

I read Frame’s Evangelical Reunion, Denominations and the Body of Christ back in 1993 just at the time that my OPC pastor asked me  to teach a study on “The Church.” I was heavily influenced by Frame’s ideas on Evangelical Reunion no doubt included some of those ideas in my talk.  Afterward an OPC missionary who happened to be visiting took me to task: There could be no merging with other denominations because there was something wrong with everyone of them.

“What about Christ’s prayer that all those in his Church would be ‘one’?” I asked him.

“That’s all well and good, but we can’t sacrifice sound theology for the sake of a merger. Why not go all the way and merge with the secular world. A merger should never be accomplished at the expense of sound theology.”

This missionary didn’t convince me, but neither did I convince him. Frame seems to have met with the same reaction on a larger scale. His enemies seem to be taking him to task for the same sorts of things. I haven’t pursued Frame’s idea in recent years, but Christ’s prayer is still out there. Something is wrong with the Universal Church if it doesn’t pursue reunion.

I thought about this matter when I began attending the EPC. What, for example, would prevent the merger of the OPC and the EPC. As far as I could tell from reading the EPC charter and listening to the pastor, the only differences were the use by the EPC of modern hymns and women elders, both of which were left open to individual EPC churches.

In regard to Mercersburg, I have been impressed by some of the publications coming out of Princeton & so looked especially at (and finally ordered) the following:

Speculative Theology and Common-Sense Religion : Mercersburg and the Conservative Roots of American Religion by Linden J. DeBie (2008, Paperback)

Synopsis

Evangelicals in nineteenth-century America had a headquarters at Princeton. Charles Hodge never expected that a former student of Princeton and his own replacement during his hiatus in Europe, John W. Nevin, would lead the German Reformed Church's seminary in a new, and in his mind, destructive direction. The two, along with their institutions, would clash over philosophy and religion, producing some of the best historical theology ever written in the United States. The clash was broad, influencing everything from hermeneutics to liturgy, but at its core was the philosophical antagonism of Princeton's Scottish common-sense perspective and the German speculative method employed by Mercersburg. Both Princeton and Mercersburg were the cautious and critical beneficiaries of a century of European Protestant science, philosophy, and theology, and they were intent on adapting that legacy to the American religious context. For Princeton, much of the new European thought was suspect. In contrast, Mercersburg embraced a great deal of what the Continent offered. Princeton followed a conservative path, never straying far from the foundation established by Locke. They enshrined an evangelical perspective that would become a bedrock for conservative Protestants to this day. In contrast, Nevin and the Mercersburg school were swayed by the advances in theological science made by Germany's mediating school of theology. They embraced a churchy idealism called evangelical catholicism and emphatically warned that the direction of Princeton and with it Protestant American religion and politics, would grow increasingly subjective, thus divided and absorbed with individual salvation. They cautioned against the spirit of the growing evangelical bias toward personal religion as it led to sectarian disunity and they warned evangelicals not to confuse numerical success with spiritual success. In contrast, Princeton was alarmed at the direction of European philosophy and theology and they resisted Mercersburg with what today continues to be the fundamental teachings of evangelical theology. Princeton's appeal was in its common-sense philosophical moorings, which drew rapidly industrializing America into its arms. Mercersburg countered with a philosophically defended, churchly idealism based on a speculative philosophy that effectively critiqued what many to this day find divisive and dangerous about America's current Religious Right.

In regard to Kuyper, it seems to me he was a natural ally of both Theonomy and the Escondido Theology. He believed very strongly in the Christian’s role in modern States. I do as well, but could never embrace Kuyper, although he was urged upon me by the first OPC (sort of) pastor we had in Moreno valley. I can’t recall his name but he was ordained in some denomination not approved of by the OPC (or something line that); which didn’t bother him because he was semi-retired and when they cut him loose he retired completely.

In regard to Theonomy I was attracted to it initial and read Rushdoony’’s Institutes, for  if we considered a future in which the Postmillennial time arrived where everyone was Christian (some nominally but most sincerely) then we would be able to create laws consistent with Christianity. What sorts of laws should they be? 

However, I didn’t get very far with this before learning that the Theonomists thought they were in position to know what these laws should be and  furthermore had decided to urge them at once upon the Church and even the nation at large.

A failure Theonomy but also of several other points of view, including the Escondido School, is a lack of appreciation for the fact that God does not create language or societies out of whole cloth. He deals with people as they are and with what they know and believe. Thus, the Mosaic food laws, for example, were appropriate for the people that Moses led into the Wilderness but aren’t appropriate to subsequent social situations.

God deals with people where they are, using their language and their societies as they are. He does not urge a change of language or society. I read Dabney’s biography of Stonewall Jackson in which is a very well-reasoned defense of Slavery. The fact that Paul didn’t urge the abolition of Slavery, I believe, doesn’t mean that he, let alone God, was advocating that economic practice. God’s (and Paul’s) interests lay elsewhere.

The same sort of thing is true, in my opinion, of Paul’s injunctions against women in the Church in his day. That society was a patriarchal society in which women were not educated. But in these modern times women receive the same education as men; so in my opinion Paul’s injunction against women in the church was not intended to be a universal principle. In looking at Paul’s concern we might very well embrace a universal principle against poorly qualified people ascending to important positions of responsibility in any modern denomination.

Ezekiel 18 and individual responsibility (2)

In my plain reading of Ezekiel, I took chapter 18 to be a milestone, a moving away from the earlier principle whereby the sins of the fathers would be visited upon the children without (apparently) reference to the children’s individual sins. See:

Deuteronomy 5:9 You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, and on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me,

Exodus 20:5 "You shall not worship them or serve them; for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children, on the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me,

Here in Ezekiel we see the (apparent) change I am referring to:

“Then the word of the LORD came to me saying, 2 "What do you mean by using this proverb concerning the land of Israel saying, 'The fathers eat the sour grapes, But the children's teeth are set on edge '? 3 "As I live," declares the Lord God, "you are surely not going to use this proverb in Israel anymore. 4 "Behold, all souls are Mine; the soul of the father as well as the soul of the son is Mine. The soul who sins will die. 5 "But if a man is righteous, and practices justice and righteousness, 6 and does not eat at the mountain shrines or lift up his eyes to the idols of the house of Israel, or defile his neighbor's wife, or approach a woman during her menstrual period-- 7 if a man does not oppress anyone, but restores to the debtor his pledge, does not commit robbery, but gives his bread to the hungry, and covers the naked with clothing, 8 if he does not lend money on interest or take increase, if he keeps his hand from iniquity, and executes true justice between man and man, 9 if he walks in My statutes and My ordinances so as to deal faithfully-- he is righteous and will surely live," declares the Lord God.”

Am I alone in assuming that there has been a change? I don’t take this to be precisely a changing of God’s mind but rather a sociological, societal, change whereby individuals are no longer “breeding true” in the sense referred to in Deuteronomy 5:9 and Exodus 20:5 – at least as I take these verses to infer. Individuals living in the days of Deu 5:9 & Exo 20:5 were moral duplicates of their fathers (it seems to me), but in Ezekiel’s day that was no longer the case.

Here is the ICCs G. A. Cooke writing in 1936 agreeing with me (p. 194) “The popular view is wrong; national misfortunes are not to be explained by the sins of the fathers, vv. 1-4. There can be no question of the divine justice. Each man will be treated exactly as he deserves; he is responsible for himself, and no one else can take his place, vv. 5-20. . .

“In a style which reflects the labour of his thought, the prophet is feeling his way towards a general principle . . . If we are being punished for the sins of the fathers, what avails the moral struggle? And is it just? A note of self-acquittal, fatalism, despair, can be heard in the people’s voice, and something deeper still, a question of God’s justice. Ezekiel detects the point at once, and argues it out.

“God deals with men as individuals responsible for their conduct; neither the sins nor the righteousness of others can affect the issue; the bad will ‘die,’ the good will ‘live,’ that is, forfeit or enjoy God’s favour, as each deserves. And similarly in the case of each man’s life: there is no such thing as a bondage which cannot be broken; each is free to renounce his past, whether for good or for evil. And the sinner can always repent; the door is open; God is ready to welcome the sinner who turns to Him. . .”

Does Ezekiel’s teaching appear elsewhere? Not exactly; Cooke writes “This line of teaching was not entirely strange. Jeremiah had seen that the old tribal conceptions must give way to a more spiritual religion, based upon personal relation to God (Jer. 14, 15, 17:10, 31:31-34). Both prophets quote the saying about the sins of the fathers; but whereas Jeremiah declares that it will cease to be uttered in the ideal future, Ezekiel says now.

Cooke goes on, “The nation was on the verge of ruin. According to popular beliefs, if the nation fell to pieces, the national religion would perish too; it was urgent, therefore, to insist that each man, however much involved in the general ruin, could enter into direct fellowship with God. Yet neither prophet dreamt of teaching a purely individualist type of religion; their aim was to build up a nation out of converted individuals.”

Still, “The responsibility and freedom of the individual lie at the root of all moral living; to have proclaimed this as the outcome of God’s justice and desire for man’s recovery was Ezekiel’s great achievement. . .”

That is, more or less, the way I understood Ezekiel’s eighteenth chapter, but Paul Joyce “one of the world’s leading scholars of Ezekiel” has a different opinion. In his Ezekiel, A Commentary (2009), page 24 he writes: “This chapter has been seen as a charter for individual responsibility. However, it is vital to see that the context of the whole discussion is one in which Ezekiel and his audience have already been exiled. The situation is one of national calamity, which has to be explained. . . Ezekiel cleverly manoeuvres [his fellow exiles] towards acknowledging that they are in fact sinful [that they are not unjustly being punished for the sins of their fathers] and the justice of God is vindicated. . . So not even these passages support the view that Ezekiel is the great exponent of individual responsibility some have portrayed. . .”

Surely we need a better explanation of the significance of God’s justice being vindicated by his not punishing the exiles for the sins of their fathers. Is God being just by punishing the exiles for their own sins rather than for the sins of their fathers? If so, was he unjust in the days of Exodus and Deuteronomy when he behaved differently? If Ezekiel had reiterated the Exodus & Deuteronomy principle and merely told his fellow exiles that they shouldn’t feel self-vindicated for they too had sinned, that would support of Joyce’s argument, but Ezekiel isn’t saying that. Going on at some length he describes individuals, some of whom behave righteously and some unrighteously. The righteous shall live, Ezekiel tells his fellow exiles, but the unrighteous shall surely die. No doubt Joyce is right in seeing Ezekiel stripping away his fellow exiles self-justification, but he is wrong, it seems to me, by not recognizing that in the process Ezekiel has abrogated an earlier principle whereby sins of the fathers are visited upon their children and replaced it with a principle of individual responsibility.

Neither Joyce nor Cooke wish this new principle of Ezekiel’s to be seen as advocating an individualistic religion, but I never took Ezekiel to be making that argument. The situation in Ezekiel’s day (I believe) was that the Jews had become individualistic through a variety of causes, e.g., exposure to the ideas of foreign nations, and through self-study of one kind and another. They were no longer like the generations of the days of Exodus and Deuteronomy; so a different law or principle was needed.

Van Til's Fideism and Historical Criticism

In Classical Apologetics, Gerstner, Lindsley, and Sproul do a hatchet job on Cornelius Van Til. One of their criticisms, if I recall correctly is that Van Til was a Fideist whereas the Classical Apologeticists produced effective ontological arguments that are still serviceable today. The implication was that Van Til took a problem-avoiding Fideistic approach to all apologetic problems, but this wasn’t true and those students of Van Til should have known it. One of Van Til’s volumes is The New Hermeneutic in which Van Til critics a number of theologians whom he classifies as “New Hermeneuticists”, i.e, Fuchs, Bultmann, Ebeling, Dillenberger, Buri, Polman, Kuitert, Zuidema, Wiersing, Hartvelt, Koole, Baarda, and Augustijn. In the process he voices opinions on several philosophers including Kant, Ritschl, Collingwood, Gadamer, and Bonhoeffer. This book alone should make it clear that Van Til never refused to address the difficult issues. Van Til addressed them.

I was raised in a true Fundamentalist Fideism, one that didn’t deal with the difficult issues. Thus, when I was in college and encountered those issues I didn’t know how to handle them. If God created the earth in 6,000 years and Moses was writing “the very words of God,” then how does one explain The Epic of Gilgamesh which archeologists argue was written long before Genesis? My Fundamentalist mother believed that Satan planted false information in the earth in order to mislead future generations.

I wonder how many children fall away from Christianity each year because Fundamentalist teaching doesn’t prepare them for the real world. If they are taught that it was created in 6,000 years. When they later learn that isn’t true, what does that new knowledge do to their faith? Facing the evidence of science or the history of the Old Testament texts shouldn’t destroy a Christian’s faith. The facts of science and history pertain to how God operated, not whether he did. Fundamentalists who make it an article of faith that the world was created in something like 6,000 years (or even 60,000 – I don’t recall how far they fudge that number today) do young believers a tragic disservice.

Van Til’s Apologetics were “presuppositional,” meaning that he assumed God rather than needing to prove Him. He had studied all the material and arguments, but assuming God, he argued, was far more rational than assuming “Chance.” In fact it was the only stance that was rational. When one applies the laws of chance to the universe there is not enough time for it to have happened. The atheist can argue that while current laws of chance based on current scientific knowledge may not provide enough time for the creation of the universe, new evidence is sure to be found that will one day validate “chance.” The atheist is thereby expressing his “faith” that science will in the future validate his belief. The Presuppositionalist believes that he can safely “assume” God and that no “evidence” produced by current or future atheists will endanger that assumption.

The Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis, also known as “Source Criticism” began what is called the Historico-Critical Method. Does believing in this method require that one become an atheist? Wellhausen himself seemed to think so in later life, but later theologians interested in “Old Testament Introduction” have not found their faith in God or in the creeds of Christendom threatened. What they are finding are the ways in which God created the Old Testament not whether he created it. But just as with the Young Earth thesis, if one is raised with a simplistic view of the creation of the Biblical Text and later encounters some of the difficulties non-Fundamentalist theologians regularly wrestle with, one’s faith is going to be tested.

In philosophy one hears the question “is it better to be a happy fool or an unhappy Socrates?” The young philosophy student will be expected to select the latter, but the Christian ought not to be forced to choose the former. Abraham Kuyper famously wrote that there is nothing in the entire world where Christ cannot lay his hand and pronounce “mine.” Perhaps the lazy or limited can’t wrestle with the difficult problems in science, philosophy and theology, but there are those in the Church world who can and have. It is not necessary to pull a fundamentalist blanket over one’s head to retain one’s faith. I am currently reading Brevard Childs’ Introduction to the Old Testament as Scripture. Would that he were available to read when I was in college reading such books as James Pritchard’s Ancient Near Eastern Texts Relating to the Old Testament.

The Protestant Work Ethic in the U.S. & the West

In 1513 Luther nailed his 95 theses on the Wittenberg Door (1513). In Luther's day they fought wars for religious principles. In fact they wore each other out, economically and in most other ways and gave up fighting each other (Catholic against Protestant) and subscribing to the "Peace of Westphalia" in 1648.

In a way, the Peace of Westphalia was a victory for the Protestants because it in effect established that religion was not something that we in the West are willing to die for anymore. Every man after that could indeed be "his own priest" without having to worry about some Church authority taking his head. The Founding Fathers were probably all alive in 1648 and while they didn't invoke the Peace of Westphalia they adhered to its principles. They would not fight over religious principles. The principles they were willing to fight for were "Enlightenment Principles."

However, as sociologists such as Max Weber, Karl Durkheim and Karl Marx argue, in effect, "enlightenment principles" are Christian principles cleansed of God. Thus, we Christians and non-Christians alike agree that we should take care of the poor; provide for the elderly, care for widows and orphans; forgive those who sin against us (at least in terms of our laws), etc. Karl Marx and Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin after him made a good living promising to provide the material blessings promised by Christianity more efficiently than they had been by the Church (whether Catholic or Protestant). An excellent modern statement of that concept is provided by Marcel Gauchet's The Disenchantment of the World, A Political History of Religion.

Thus, we can see that the war to establish Liberal (more or less) Democracy in America (1776) occurred not so long (in historical terms) after the Peace of Westphalia (1648) and not so much prior to the war over "Economic Management of the people") (1917).

Most Sociologists today would probably agree that the U.S. is the most Christian of all Western nations and would probably attribute that fact to our Founding generations (not necessarily "fathers") being more intensely religious than those remaining behind in Europe. It is a truism that the West became an economic powerhouse because of its "Protestant Work Ethic." (a term first coined by by Max Weber.) Puritan Protestants especially believed that God would economically bless those who did their duty, and for farmers and others that meant working as hard as they were able to.

Obviously the Protestant Work Ethic isn't as popular as it once was. In France for example workers aren't willing to give up entitlements or tax themselves to pay for them. We see some of that in the U.S. as well but the "Protestant Work Ethic" is perhaps more alive in the U.S. than it is in Europe, (probably) accounting for America's slightly better economy.

But back in the years leading up to 1776 no one was worrying about Social Security, public supported hospitals and other such entitlements. They worried about such enlightenment principles as "freedom," "democracy," and "equality." It needs to be understood, as Marcel Gauchet tells us, that "Enlightenment Principles" are not antithetical to Christian Principles, they are merely principles that have been excised from Christian dogma.

Take "equality" for example. You won't find the words "all men are created equal" in the Bible, but the New Testament is shot through with that principle, e.g., in the heaven the first shall become last and the last first. Powerful religious leaders such as the Pharisees were despised by Jesus and his disciples not because of their political positions but because they thought themselves better than "lesser" people. Thank God, a Pharisee prayed, that I am not like that beggar over there. And perhaps most tellingly, is the beatitude "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth."

In the twentieth century, the Fascists denounced Enlightenment Principles by declaring that they were better than others. The Communists gave lip-service to them by declaring themselves the "meek," i.e., "workers," but they never gave up the idea that the "workers" needed a "vanguard," i.e., a group of superior people to rule over the workers.

In the West, on the other hand, Enlightenment principles are still held sacred. No Western politician would dream of standing up before the people he wanted to vote for him (or her) and saying, "you should vote for me because I am more competent than you are" even though he might think that. Instead he will present any modest & meek attributes he can dig up from his past and present them for public approval.

So is the matter of which of our Forefathers was Christian a non-issue? In the Max Weber and Marcel Gauchet sense it is. Even if we ask whether the Forefathers were members of the mainline churches extant in the days before 1776 we are on shaky ground. Were these Forefathers members of those churches, such as Presbyterian and Episcopalian sincere believers or were they members in order to show that they were no better than those they wanted to vote for them?

In days prior to the Civil War (1861-1865) there were a lot of mixed marriages. Catholics and Protestants married amicably in the West at least, but there wasn't much softening of sincere Christian belief. The father of Christian Liberalism (Liberal here meaning "less than orthodox") in Europe is generally considered to be Frederick Schleiermacher (1768-1834). Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) brought the ideas "higher Criticism" to England; so who would have brought them to America prior to the Revolution?

Various Americans such as Thomas Jefferson were very well read for the time; so there may have been a "climate of opinion" in Europe that was giving rise to "higher criticism" that Jefferson was aware of and even influenced by, but it doesn't seem reasonable to assume that those ideas were widespread in America prior to the Revolution. Could there have been something equivalent taking place in America: our own "higher criticism"? I doubt it.

God, Religion and the Lost Cause

"God and General Longstreet" is the title of the First Chapter of the book God and General Longstreet by Connelly and Bellows, first published in 1982. In it they provide insight into the religious element of the "Lost Cause" myth. Through the first ten years after the Civil War, Lee was considered to have been to blame for the loss of Gettysburg and no one was saying anything negative about Longstreet. The Myth changed all that. Why?

We know that it was widely if not totally believed in the South that God was on its side. From the pulpit and newspaper Southerners were regaled with the theological certainty that their cause was righteous and God would not let it fail. Fighting on the side of the South wasn't merely a military experience; it was a Religious experience as well. "The Great Revival that swept the Confederate camps in the winter of 1863-1864," Connelly & Bellows tell us "has never been appreciated fully by observers of the southern mind. It was a massive outburst of evangelical religion. . . In army camps from Virginia to Texas, Rebel soldiers by the tens of thousands became religious converts. In Virginia, whole brigades stood barefoot in several inches of snow to hear chaplains warn that the military reverses proved that Jehovah was angry with the Confederacy. Log tabernacles were erected in the lines of General Joe Johnston's army in Georgia. Before Sherman's bluecoats advanced on Johnston in the Atlanta campaign, the religious fervor had touched even the high command of the Army of Tennessee. During the spring of 1864, Episcopal Bishop Leonidas Polk, one of the army's corps leaders, baptized almost everyone in the upper echelons, including Johnston and Generals John Bell Hood and William Hardee."

Connelly and Bellows go on at some length developing the theological evolution in the South that provided the underlying assumptions demanding that they account for their failure to win the war after being assured by their Religious and Political leaders that God was on their side.

James G. Leyburn in The Scotch Irish, A Social History, tells us that King James in the 17th century in one of his attempts to subdue the warlike Irish transported Lowland Scots to Northern Ireland. These Scots had been evangelized by the Presbyterian John Knox. This is one of the ways one can tell whether his ancestors were Scot or Irish. If they came across the Atlantic as Presbyterian, they were most likely Scot. If they came across as Catholic then they were most likely Irish, although Highland Scots (too incorrigible to be sent by James to Northern Ireland) were also Catholic.

As Leyburn tells us, the Scots in Northern Ireland became very proficient in the making of cloth and managed to outperform and undersell British clothiers. That was intolerable to the British so they created taxes to favor the British and discriminate against the Scotch-Irish. As a result huge numbers of Scotch-Irish immigrated to the "New World." The Pennsylvanians were the only group who would take them in -- as long as they took land on their western border to provide a buffer against the Indians.

The Scotch-Irish thrived on that border. Fighting the Indians was no worse than the sort of fighting they'd done back in Scotland and Ireland. Their population grew and they moved south into Virgina and the Shenandoah Valley. It wasn't until they began moving west that they encountered religious difficulties. They started out as good John Knox-Presbyterians, but Knox demanded that pastors and preachers be educated; which took a long time, too long for the anxious Scotch-Irish who were seeking land and wives in the West. There was a dearth of Presbyterian Pastors that young Scotch-Irish men and women could go to to be married.

Enter Baptists, Methods and other "Arminian" pastors who didn't need to study for years to be a pastor. All they needed was "the call" to be a pastor or evangelist. And it was no longer God who decided who was to be saved (as John Knox taught) but the individual who must choose to accept "the call" (via an evangelist) to be saved. Then, if you did your part, God would do His. If you worked and fought, ye fellow Christians, God will make you victorious.

So when it became apparent to most that the South was losing, "nurse Cumming" wrote that Confederate sins "must have been great to have deserved such punishment. "Her conviction," Connelly & Bellows tell us "was no different from that expressed by Robert E. Lee in the winter of 1863, when he could see the tide turning on the eastern front. Lee mused, 'We do not know what is best for us. I believe a kind God has ordered all things for our good.' The same theology was expressed in 1863 by an Atlanta editor who mourned that while for a time the South must endure Yankee victories, 'we still believe, nay, have an abiding faith that HE chasteneth those whom he loveth, and that in HIS own good time, HE will deliver the South from its oppressors.'

"When God did not grant the deliverance, southerners felt that they were experiencing a vast calamity. Reading through the political and patriotic rhetoric of postwar military apologies or historical justifications for secession, one views something far deeper than the literary polemics of men who were confused, angry, and frustrated by defeat. In essence, the South was spiritually unprepared for Appomattox."

Comment: I had read the account of Hood being baptized by Polk in several books but not until reading this account by Connelly and Bellows did I read that this was part of a widespread "revival." Historians, objective though they strive to be are, most of them, not equipped to deal seriously with religious matters, but by not dealing thoroughly with the situation surrounding Hood's baptism, we are left with the false implication that Hood had lost his nerve. That this was a widespread revival puts an entirely different light on the matter.

Some Southerners seemed to be thinking (even during the Reconstruction period) that if they could cleans their hearts from iniquity, then God might even yet provide them a victory. I don't recall reading that the "iniquity" they believed they were guilty of was slavery. They looked elsewhere, and where many of them looked would have been declared theological heresy by their better-education Presbyterian compatriots (or maybe not. One wonders about Dabney). It was after Lee's death in 1860 that Jubal Early, Fitzhugh Lee, Charles Marshall, Walter Taylor, Reverend John William Jones and others began seeing and describing Robert E. Lee as "the invincible military leader," acquiring in the process an enthusiastic cult of followers.

Connelly and Bellows tell us that "The Inner Lost Cause movement . . . lasted for over fifty years although the prime emotional drive was demonstrated in the two decades after Appomattox.

". . . unlike the standard Calvinist [Presbyterians were Calvinists in those days] faith, the southern version, born out of frontier individualism, made man the prime agent of his own salvation [alluded to above as "Arminianism"]. The southern concept of the Trinity was not the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but God, man and Satan."

What these Southern religious folk did with Robert E. Lee would have been declared "idolatry" in sounder Christian times. Whenever I think of Dabney contributing to the exhalation of Lee I wonder what he could have been thinking -- or did the myth-makers take his honest respect for Lee & Jackson out of context?

R. L. Dabney's Defense of Slavery

 

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R. L. Dabney in 1865 wrote Life and Campaigns of Lt. General T. J. (Stonewall) Jackson. Dabney was Jackson's Chaplain and after the Civil War became a renowned theologian at Union Theological Seminary. Since assumptions are being made about what Southerners believed about "slavery" it seems useful to consider what R. L. Dabney, a very intelligent and articulate advocate has to say on the subject. I'll comment below:

Page 166: "When pointed to the rest of Christendom, they boldly declare, that this results from an exclusion of the Southern people form a hearing in their own defence and a perverse and indolent reception from their enemies, of the most monstrous tissue of slanders and falsehoods, which ever confounded a human mind. The world has been told a myriad times until the world believes it, that Virginian slavery makes a human being a chattel, a piece of property, thus violating the first intuitions of justice. Yet, all this is absolutely false; every slave-law of Virginia treats the slave as a person, a responsible, reasonable being; and not a thing; the only property which the laws recognize in him, is the property in his involuntary labor. . ."

Page 168: "And when we look into the ethics of the relation, we find that it was never suspected of immorality by any of the great masters of moral science, classic or scholastic, nor by any of the luminaries of the Church, patristic or reformed, until the dogma of modern abolition was born of atheistic parentage, amidst the radical disorganizers of France, in the Reign of Terror. In the Word of God, the only infallible standard of morality, that doctrine finds no support. Moses legalized domestic slavery for God's chosen people, in the very act of setting them aside to holiness. Christ, the great Reformer, lived and moved amidst it, teaching, healing, applauding slaveholders; and while He assailed every abuse, uttered no word against this lawful relation. His apostles admit slaveholders to the church, exacting no repentance nor renunciation. They leave, by inspiration, general precepts for the manner in which the duties of the relation are to be maintained. They command Christian slaves to obey and honor Christian masters. They remand the runaway to his injured owner, and recognize his property in his labor as a right which they had no power to infringe. If slavery is in itself a sinful thing, then the Bible is a sinful book.

"Strong in the truth of God and history, the people of the Confederate States therefore calmly breast the adverse opinion of the world. They fortify their position by the fact that their right to the labor of their slaves is not only protected by the laws they inherited from their fathers, but by the laws of God, and by eternal rectitude. Had they been unable to assert the latter truth, their resistance to anti-slavery aggressions would have been proper; because the Constitution, which alone united the States, recognized and protected it. But now their attitude is in every respect impregnable; for God protects it as well as the Constitution. To infringe the rights of slaveholders under the laws, was therefore a usurpation, and a violation of the primary compact. But a covenant broken by one party is broken for the other. The Southern States therefore had the clearest right to select their own redress. And especially is their secession justified, when the malignant intentions of the aggressors, and the ruinous nature of the wrongs they sought to inflict, are considered. . . ."

Comment: How do we understand his arguments while at the same time believing that it was right to abolish slavery? Jesus said, "in this world ye shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer for I have overcome the world." Slaves of the past endured the tribulation, but the world has been overcome in that respect.

Also, while Dabney is correct in saying that Slavery is not condemned in the Bible, neither is there evidence that the world is to remain static and that Slavery is to be retained. Christian theology must apply itself to the changes in the world that are not counter to important doctrine. Difficulties arise when the Bible is used for purposes never intended. For example, it was once used as evidence that the world was flat. It was also used as evidence for a geocentric universe. There are still groups using the Bible as evidence that the universe is only 7,000 or so years old.

The eschatological view called Postmillennialism makes room for increased understanding and the elimination of inequities such as slavery. There is a never-ending theological debate between those who advocate theological change to accommodate some change in the world and those who consider any change whatsoever counter to the (in their view) never-changing nature of Scripture.

Christians would be on safe ground, in my view, if they said "if you are a slave in a slave society, you should behave thus and so." They would be wrong if they said the Bible commands a slave society.

Urban's Scientology and Schpayer-Makov's Sherlock Holmes

The 26 January 2012 issue of the London Review of Books has two reviews that seem related.  The first is a review entitled “Religion, grrrr” by Rachel Aviv of Hugh Urban’s The Church of Scientology: A History of a New Religion.  Urban, as all historians strive to be, is objective in his analysis of Scientology, too much so to suit Aviv.  “Urban takes no position on whether or not Scientology should qualify as a religion.  Also, “Urban avoids the controversies and crimes that have shaped Scientology’s public image – he doesn’t consider them part of his remit – but in leaving out details about the church’s more sordid traditions, he gives only an incomplete view of the afterlife of Hubbard’s ‘rather postmodern view of the self and of reality.”

“Urban details Hubbard’s obsession with surveillance, and attributes his paranoia to the influence of the Cold War. . .  But Hubbard suffered from paranoia before it became fashionable.  In the 1940s and 1950s he sent letters to the FBI, complaining that Communists were going to attack him, that Russians were stealing his work, that a stranger had broken into his apartment and given him a 100-volt electric shock.  ‘Appear mental,’ an FBI agent wrote on his file.  His paranoia created a world in which nothing was trivial.  The paranoid person ‘logically weaves all events, all persons, all chance remarks and happenings, into his system’, a character in Philip K. Dick’s story ‘Shell game’ explains.  Paranoia functioned as a religious worldview, and bound his followers into a community.”

Aviv tells us that “Hubbard told a group of doctoral students in Philadelphia in 1954 that his followers were more convinced of Scientology’s cosmology than he was.”  Hubbard is conscious of having created a cosmology, and is the paranoid truly mad if he realizes that he has created his own reality?  His followers on the other hand are not paranoid but have been convinced to accept Hubbard’s.  We hasten to call them naïve, dupes, fools, etc. but as Pragmatists we recognize that some of these followers derive benefit.  William Burroughs for example testified that Scientology had allowed him to “become a more imaginative writer.”  Burroughs later criticized Scientology not because it encouraged him to believe in his own reality but because “Scientology” had become “a model control system, a state in fact with its own courts, police, rewards and penalties.  It is based on a tight in-group like the CIA.” 

Six pages after we leave Tom Cruise, John Travolta and the others who demonstrate that the acceptance of Hubbard’s cosmology has made them better at what they want to do, we find John Pemble’s “Gaslight and Fog,” a review of The Ascent of the detective: Police Sleuths in Victorian and Edwardian England by Haia Shpayer-Makov.  Just as Hubbard’s followers believed more in the cosmology he created than he did; so did Doyle’s followers believe more in the world of Sherlock Holmes than he.  One gathers that Doyle didn’t believe in Holmes at all.  He wrote A Study in Scarlet as a pot-boiler because he needed the money, and Pemble tells us “It’s gone on boiling ever since.  We’ve had reprints, pastiches, parodies and adaptations galore.  Holmes migrates effortlessly between cultures and languages because, like Robinson Crusoe, he’s fiction that’s become myth.  ‘Fictions,’ according to Frank Kermode, ‘can degenerate into myths whenever they are not consciously held to be fictive.’”

To add credence to this fiction-becoming-myth hypothesis, Pemble tells us “The fictiveness of Sherlock Holmes was uncertain from the start.  The letters addressed to him sent to Conan Doyle for redirection, the landladies who wanted to keep house for him when he retired, the tourists who came to baker Street looking for his lodgings: these are more than mythical, they are legendary.  And addicts who know he’s fictive pretend that they don’t.  There’s a whole archive of mock research in pseudo-academic publications dedicated to his life and work.  In 1954, when the BBC broadcast a 100^th-birthday tribute, the contributors all said they hoped he was listening. . . .”

Scientology allows its followers to work more effectively if they embrace the myth as reality.  The Holmes myth presents us with an intellectual who can solve all our social mysteries.  These are two major choices available to the Post-Christian who seeks to fill his void, a system that works, and a Guru that does. 

Those not willing to leave reality far enough behind to embrace fictive systems or heroes are faced with depressing alternatives.  Some of us might argue that neither Communism nor Fascism avoided fictiveness to any marked degree, but huge numbers embraced it and made it real in the same way that Scientology has become so for its followers.  Stalin and Hitler were as paranoid, and they believed in their fiction more single-mindedly than Hubbard did. 

Standing apart and skeptically striving to find “the truth” as Nietzsche did can drive us mad.  It is much better, the post-Christian tells himself, to accept some paranoid’s reality, preferably a benign one, but beggars can’t always be choosers:  The poor indeed we have with us, and their numbers are on the increase.

On the Wisdom of Madness

The Middle ages closed, Foucault tells us with the end of leprosy as a major concern. He traces the decrease in the number of leprosariums throughout Western Europe. He speculates upon the “strange disappearance, which was doubtless not the long-sought effect of obscure medical practices, but the spontaneous result of segregation and also the consequence of the Crusades, of the break with the Eastern sources of infection. Leprosy withdrew leaving derelict these low places and these rites which were intended, not to suppress it, but to keep it at a sacred distance, to fix it in an inverse exaltation. What doubtless remained longer than leprosy, and would persist when the lazar houses had been empty for years, were the values and images attached to the figure of the leper as well as the meaning of his exclusion, the social importance of that insistent and fearful figure which was not driven off without first being inscribed within a sacred circle.”

“Leprosy disappeared, the leper vanished, or almost, from memory; these structures remained. Often, in these same places, the formulas of exclusion would be repeated, strangely similar two or three centuries later. Poor vagabonds, criminals, and ‘deranged minds’ would take the part played by the leper, and we shall see what salvation was expected from this exclusion, for them and for those who excluded them as well. With an altogether new meaning and in a very different culture, the forms would remain – essentially that major form of rigorous division which is social exclusion but spiritual reintegration.”

At the Marine base at 29 Palms years ago I subscribed to “The Classics Club” and read every book the Black company sent me. One of them was Erasmus’ In Praise of Folly. How could Erasmus get by with such a book I wondered when enemies of the church, heretics, were being put to death? Was his prestige so great that he was immune? The Middle Ages transitioned into the Renaissance at the same time that Leprosy transitioned into The Ship of Fools. Many, Foucault illustrates, wrote as Erasmus did.

Why “does the figure of the Ship of Fools and its insane crew all at once invade the most familiar landscapes? Why, from the old union of water and madness, was this ship born one day, and on just that day,” Foucault asks? “Because it symbolized a great disquiet, suddenly dawning on the horizon of European culture at the end of the Middle Ages. Madness and the madman became major figures, in their ambiguity: menace and mockery, the dizzying unreason of the world, and the feeble ridicule of men.

“First a whole literature of tales and moral fables, in origin, doubtless, quite remote, but by the end of the Middle Ages, it bulks large: a long series of ‘follies’ which stigmatizing vices and faults as in the past, no longer attribute them all to pride, to lack of charity, to neglect of Christian virtues, but to a sort of great unreason for which nothing, in fact, is exactly responsible, but which involves everyone in a kind of secret complicity. The denunciation of madness (la folie) becomes the general form of criticism.”

Foucault takes la folie as a substitute for death. Instead of being faced with an external death that leprosy reminds us of, we are faced with the internal death of an empty mind. It could as well be said, based on the illustrations Foucault provides that madness, rather than the denunciation of madness, becomes (at least in later times) the general form of criticism (of society, societies members, and societies leaders). Mort Sahl was once a comedian whose prop was the morning’s newspaper. He would find humor in whatever he read and was very popular at “The Hungry Eye” and later on Television. Was he not a fool? He was certainly tolerated as a fool until he became very serious about the second gunman on the grassy knoll. Don’t most comedians bear some resemblance to the fool who is so mad he can insult the king (or Pope) and make him laugh?

Also, the Humanism of the Renaissance deviated from the Medieval (Judeo-Christian) teaching, “raise up a child in the ways of the Lord and when he is old he will not depart from them.” We still raise up a child to respect law and order and hope he will conform to them, but the madman doesn’t conform. He has his own way of seeing thing. He may ridicule Judeo-Christian teaching and modern law and order. And the madman has a great following.

Or think of Heidegger. When he graduated from University he was considered a great treasure by the Catholic Church. It offered him security and a good paying position if he would teach Thomistic Philosophy (the ways of the Lord), but he didn’t want to be constrained in that way. He wanted to follow the humanistic (madness) of being able to think at variance with these ways.

Certainly the scientific method has followed the ways of the madman. We take the old way of thinking and attack it to see if it has flaws and perhaps find a new and better way of doing science.

No doubt it is “early days” in terms of following the great advancements that have come from such madness. But if it is wonderful to be able to find wisdom by thinking at variance with all that was previously considered wisdom, where is there a standard we can teach our children?

Pfaff on Fukuyama’s Origin of Political Order

http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/article.php?storyid=546

The above article appears in the November 24^th edition of the NYROB. It is a review by William Pfaff of Francis Fukuyama’s The Origins of Political Order: from Prehuman Times to the French Revolution.

Pfaff doesn’t think much of Fukuyama or his book. He refers to both Samuel P. Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations and Fukuyama’s The End of History and the Last Man with disapproval A biographical article at http://www.williampfaff.com/modules/news/index.php?storytopic=4 provides some insight into why he does so:

“In a long assessment of William Pfaff’s work and influence in The New York Review of Books (May 26, 2005 . . . Pankaj Mishra wrote ‘His broad-ranging intellectual and emotional sympathies distinguish him from most foreign policy commentators who tend to serve what they see, narrowly, as their national interest.’ Pfaff is also indifferent to, and often brusquely dismissive of, the modish theories that describe how and why dominoes fall, history ends, and civilizations clash....

“[In his book, The Bullet’s Song], a long essay on utopian violence, he reiterates his conviction that the idea of total and redemptive transformation of human society through political means is ‘the most influential myth of modern political society from 1789 to the present days.’ Pfaff is especially wary of its ‘naïve American version,’ which, ‘although rarely recognized as such, survives, consisting in the belief that generalizing American political principles and economic practices to the world at large will bring history (or at least historical progress) to its fulfillment.”

I have not been “dismissive” of Fukuyama’s and Huntington’s theses, but have been inclined to pit them against each other in the evaluation of current events and of future possibilities. If Fukuyama were indeed proposing a utopian future based on Liberal Democracy then I would agree with Pfaff, but I haven’t seen that in anything of Fukuyama’s thus far. Could that argument be in the book Pfaff reviews (which I have not yet read)? I doubt it. Fukuyama’s thesis is based upon Hegel’s as “interpreted” by Alexandre Kojeve. This thesis argues that the “end of history” will not be a Marxian one (who turned Hegel upside down) but Hegel’s (thus turning Hegel right-side up). Marxism is indeed Utopian but in all my reading of Fukuyama I have never seen any suggestion that Liberal Democracy, even as the “end of history” comprises a Utopia (unless Pfaff views the end of war as constituting a Utopia). Quite the contrary as his reference to “the last man” signifies.

Pfaff in his review writes “Fukuyama assumes that what Huntington called the ‘third wave of democratization’ has already largely taken place, since at the time he was writing this book the number of ‘democracies and market-oriented economies,’ forty-five at the start of the 1970s (according to Freedom House), had increased to some 120 – ‘more than 60 percent of the world’s independent states.’ Fukuyama therefore claims that liberal democracy is now ‘the default form of government.’ To increase that total and ensure the enlargement of a new democratic international order, it will be necessary to rescue ‘collapsed or unstable governments,’ the issue he says has most interested him as a Washington scholar and think-tank analyst. . .”

We see Pfaff’s “dismissiveness” when he writes “his interpretation of prehistory and history, despite his disclaimer, is close to what the British historian Herbert Butterfield in 1931 termed ‘the Whig interpretation of history,’ which is to say that the past has been a progressive process leading up to us. ‘Us’ is not only England and the United States but Denmark, Sweden, and other exemplary democracies.” The foundation for Fukuyama’s thesis is in Germany (Hegel) and France (Kojeve) not in the ideas Butterfield criticized.

I was surprised later in his review to see this criticism: “He acknowledges the influence of the Enlightenment’s conception and promotion of the rights of man and human equality, and the challenge of its humanist ideas to religion, which widely replaced religious with secular values. But he ignores the most important political consequences of this introduction of the possibility of an earthly utopia, which largely replaced religion’s teaching and that the afterlife was where men and women would find salvation.” Pfaff doesn’t sound here as though he read Fukuyama’s The Great Disruption, Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order. If he discusses these matters in The Great Disruption, is he guilty of ignoring them if he doesn’t repeat himself in The Origins of Political Order? Perhaps, if their absence comprises a logical inconsistency, but I am more incline to think the dismissive William Pfaff hasn’t read the former book.

Pfaff might be saying that if Fukuyama were more aware of myths about “an earthly utopia” he might have avoided creating such a myth of his own (a view that a wider reading of Fukuyama would disabuse him of), for further down Pfaff writes, “Post-Enlightenment secular theories of history, as generally recognized today, had the characteristics of substitute religions. Marxism-Leninism and National Socialism, the most important of them, were teleological and utopian. Marxism claimed to provide a comprehensive explanation of society’s existence and its foreordained outcome. It expected to transform the human condition, and, when achieved, to explain and justify all that had gone before.”

Pfaff spends most of the rest of his article arguing that there is no evidence that human nature has in any way improved since the beginning of recorded history. I agree with him here, but so does Fukuyama. Fukuyama treats human nature, at least in The Great Disruption as unimprovable. He begins that book with a quote from Horace, which translated reads “You can throw out Nature with a pitchfork, but it always comes running back and will burst through your foolish contempt in triumph.

Thomas Hart’s “Reading”

http://web.mac.com/tehart/Jurassic_Rants/Books_and_Rants/Entries/2011/10/16_Reading.html

I attempted to respond to Thomas Hart’s blog note on “Reading” but his blog wouldn’t let me; so I’ll respond on mine. The first difference I noticed is that Hart’s reading program is much more organized than mine. Also, he seems to have mapped out the reading he expects to do in the next ten to twenty years he expects to live (barring accidents). I haven’t any such schedule but my doctor leads me to believe I can expect to accompany Hart through most of the next twenty years – barring accidents and illnesses such as cancer which doctors can’t always anticipate.

Hart is a Carmelite secular, we read in his note “About Me” at http://web.mac.com/tehart/Jurassic_Rants/About_Me.html . He maps out the books he expects to enjoy through his remaining years which savors of monastic order, and a resting in secure belief. I on the other hand am Presbyterian, of a denomination consistent with the early American Presbyterians whom George III accused of starting the American Revolutionary War. The early Presbyterians were Calvinists and it was Calvinism, according to Max Weber, that gave rise to the “Protestant Work Ethic.” I didn’t become a Presbyterian until I was in my early 40s, but I always had something like the Protestant Work Ethic. I wouldn’t have been out of place in Pre-Revolutionary America.

I have a library like the one Thomas Hart has in his basement. Perhaps we have some of the same books. I have a substantial number of Catholic Theologians on my shelves, but perhaps not the same ones that Hart has. I had a very brief interest in Aquinas after having been called a Thomist by a Process Theologist (Process Theology was derived from the Process Philosophy of A. N. Whitehead). At the time I knew little about Aquinas and nothing about Process Theology. In the course of debating this fellow I rectified my lack of knowledge about the latter. My counter arguments caused this fellow to resort to insult in lieu of anything better. I set out on a mild quest to read Aquinas, but in the absence of a strong incentive my interest waned. I respect Aquinas and have nothing against him. I would probably have studied him at greater length were I Catholic. I recall that Martin Heidegger was offered a permanent position if he would agree to being a Thomistic philosopher. He rejected the offer believing it would confine him too much. I had no such worry in my own study of theology. I was doing it on my own without oversight.

While I haven’t too terribly much about theology on my blog, I studied it for about eight years back in the 80s. When I retired to San Jacinto in 1998 I may have had one of the largest theological libraries in town. Mine was larger than the pastors of the Presbyterian churches we were members of. I came to Presbyterianism because it was closest to what I believed not because I was brought up in it. I was never interested in restricting myself to Presbyterian writers. On Church history I was very impressed by Jaroslav Pelikan, especially his five-volume series on The Christian Tradition. In an on-line discussion at the time a Professor at Westminster Theological Seminary (the seminary which educates most of the conservative Presbyterian pastors) asked me why I spent so much time with Lutherans so I asked him for the names of some alternatives. He mentioned Heiko Augustinus Oberman. I appreciated Oberman but I appreciate Pelikan as well. As to Catholics, I have appreciated among others Aloys Grillmeier’s series Christ in Christian Tradition, although I have not read Grillmeier in a systematic way.

My theological presuppositions, a la Cornelius Van Till, were centered on the canon. I accumulated a wide variety of points of view on each book of the Bible and would pit them against each other as I studied. After several years and numerous debates, the aforementioned professor asked me why I kept on. I wasn’t going to be a pastor or teach in a seminary, so why did I keep studying? I didn’t have a good answer.

Later I thought the best answer was that I was a sort-of lower-case polymath who believed in the ethic presented in Proverbs which isn’t inconsistent with the Protestant Work Ethic, “whatever thy hand finds to do, do it with all thy might.” I haven’t just studied theology. I mastered engineering well enough while working in aerospace. At one time I was interested in geology and went on rock and mineral expeditions in Southern California. At another time I was interested in astronomy and cosmology. I had an even greater interest in archaeology and anthropology. Later I became interested in genetics. I am very interested in European, Medieval, and Military history. All the while I have been interested in writing. I have written a good deal of poetry and seven novels, although I haven’t tried in any more than a perfunctory way to get any of them published.

Unlike Hart, after 9/11 I studied Islam, Islamism, and the histories of the most of the Muslim nations. I tend to do everything with “all my might”; which sometimes translates into a great deal of thoroughness.

Most recently I have taken up an interest in photography. One can see a number of these photographs at www.lawrencehelm.smugmug.com A few people asked if I intended to become a “professional photographer.” I understand that to be asking whether I intended to sell any of my photographs. I told them I did not. I am pursuing photography with the same intensity I have pursued everything else. Perhaps because of this I have become a better photographer than most people are willing to become, but so what? Christians are taught not to compare themselves with others but to compare themselves with themselves; which I take to mean an evaluation of one’s gifts and then a determining through self-examination whether one is exercising them to the fullest extent. I haven’t the comfort of a Carmelite framework. When I expire during the next twenty years, I hope to be “about my father’s business.”

Trilling on Eliot, VI, the notion of human progress

Trilling writes that the “. . . notion of progress [is] a belief shared by the bourgeois and the Marxist, that the direction of the world is that of never-ceasing improvement.  So far as Marxism goes, this idea seems to have a discrepancy with the Marxist dialectic, for it depends on a standard of judgment . . . the judgment of direction, the certainty of what ‘higher’ signifies and what ‘better’ signifies.  One has only to hear a Marxist defend (as many a Marxist will) the belief that through the ages even art shows a definable progress and improvement to understand how untenable the notion is in any of its usual statements.  And the progress which is held to be observable in art is held to be no less observable in human relations. 

“And from the notion of progress has grown that contempt for the past and that worship of the future which so characteristically marks the radical thought of our time.  The past is seen as a series of necessary failures which perhaps have their value as, in the dialectical way, they contribute to what comes after.  The past has been a failure: the present – what can it matter in the light of the perfecting future?  And from – or with – a sense of the past as failure, and of the present as nothing better than a willing tributary to the future, comes the sense of the wrongness of the human quality at any given moment.  For while they have always violently reprobated any such notion as Original Sin and by and large have held the belief that, by nature, man is good, most radical philosophies have contradicted themselves by implying that man, in his quality, in his kind, will be wholly changed by socialism in fine ways that we cannot predict:  man will be good not as some men have been, but good in new and unspecified fashions.  At the bottom of at least popular Marxism there has always been a kind of disgust with humanity as it is and a perfect faith in humanity as it is to be.”

COMMENT:  What is being described here is a Marxist eschatology.  The Christian eschatology this most closely approximates is Postmillennialism.  They both hypothesize a future time when humans will be much closer to perfection than they are today.  Close enough so that human failings the world is used to become almost nonexistent.  This is another case, perhaps, where Marx addresses a Christian ideal and proposes to accomplish the same thing by material means.  

Postmillennialism envisions this improvement in human nature to be accomplished by the work of the Holy Spirit.  Marxism envisions this improvement to be accomplished by Socialism.  Atheists will argue that there is no Holy Spirit to improve man by changing him in such a way that he more closely approximates the image of Jesus Christ.  Very well, I would ask the Socialistic atheist, what in a material system is to effect this change?  Marx wasn’t specific, but Socialists have had a long time since his death to think about it  We have seen Socialism at work in many forms and stages.  Has anyone at any time in any place seen the sort of human improvement here alluded to?   

Postmillennialism is described as an “optimistic eschatology.”  There will be a time when the “Word of God will cover the world as water covers the floor of the sea.”  It is “optimistic” because this will occur on earth prior to heaven.  The other two major eschatologies, Amillennialism and Premillennialism are “pessimistic.”.  There will be no improvement in human nature and only small numbers will be saved.   The Marxists from Trilling’s time sound “optimistic” about a Materialistic future.  I wonder if that optimism exists in the Marxist remnant that survives today.

Trilling picks up Eliot’s arguments after this to say that while they are no more tenable than Marxism, at least Eliot is not deceiving himself. 

Trilling on Eliot, V (Marx, Wordsworth, Hardy, Henley)

Trilling writes, “. . . it is incidentally significant that . . .  in every nation touched by the Revolution, the novel should have taken on its intense life.  For what so animated the novel of the nineteenth century was the passionate – the ‘revolutionary’ – interest in what man should be.  It was, that is, a moral interest, and the world had the sense of a future moral revolution.  Nowadays the novel, and especially in the hands of the radical intellectuals, has become enfeebled and mechanical: its decline coincides with the increasing indifference to the question, What should man become?

“The heightened tempo of events will go far toward explaining the change – the speed with which calamity approached, or sense of the ship sinking and our no doubt natural giving to survival the precedence over the quality of the life that was to be preserved.  Much of the change can be laid to the account of Marx, for it was Marx, with his claim to a science of society, with his concept of materialistic and dialectical causation, who, for his adherents, made the new emphasis seem unavoidable.  Considerations of morality Marx largely scorned; he begins in morality, in the great historical and descriptive chapters of Capital, but he does not continue in it, perhaps because he is led to believe that the order of the world is going to establish morality.  He speaks often of human dignity, but just what human dignity is he does not tell us, nor has any adequate Marxist philosopher or poet told us: it is not a subject which comes within the scope of their science.

“Yet not merely upon the tempo of events nor upon Marx himself can we lay the indifference to the morality and to aims.  It must fall . . . on the total imagination of our time.  It is the characteristic of this imagination so to conceive the human quality that it diminishes with ever-increasing speed before the exigencies of means.

“Lenin gave us the cue when, at the end of The State and Revolution, he told us that we might as well postpone the problem of what man is to become until such time as he might become anything he chose.   One understands how such a thing gets said; but one understands, too, that saying it does not make possible a suspension of choice already made and the making of it was what gave certain people the right to wonder whether the ethics and culture of Communism were anything else than the extension of the ethics and culture of the bourgeois business world.  For many years the hero of our moral myth was the Worker-and-Peasant who smiled from the covers of Soviet Russia Today, simple, industrious, literate – and grateful.  Whether or not people like him actually existed is hard to say; one suspects not and hopes not; but he was what his leaders and the radical intellectuals were glad to propagate as a moral ideal; that probably factitious Worker was the moral maximum which the preoccupation with immediate ends could accommodate.

“[This] diminished ideal . . . represented by that Worker is what Mr. Eliot would perhaps call, in his way, a heresy.  But from another point of view it is also a practical, a political, error.  It is the error which lies hidden in materialist and rationalist psychology.  Against it a certain part of the nineteenth century was always protesting.  Wordsworth was one of the first to make the protest when he discarded the Godwinian view of mind . . . it was in protest of the view of man shared alike by Liberal manufacturing Whig and radical philosopher, the view that man was very simple and individually of small worth in the cosmic or political scheme.  It was because of this view that Wordsworth deserted the Revolution; and it was to supply what the Revolution lacked or, in some part, denied, that he wrote his best poetry.”

COMMENT:  It is pertinent to think again of Ferry & Renaut’s French Philosophy of the Sixties, subtitled “an Essay on Antihumanism.” Ferry & Renaut’s essay was written in 1985, 45 years after Trilling’s essay on Eliot.  Not all of these Antihumanists could have been known by Trilling, but the idea of them would have been.  That is, Foucault is mentioned, but he is mentioned as deriving from Nietzsche, and Derrida from Heidegger, Bourdieu from Marx and Lacan from Freud.  Trilling didn’t assert that any of the (latter) philosophers had set out to dehumanize man, nor do Ferry and Renaut make this allegation, but an effect of their philosophies has been to diminish man.  What can the “good life” be in the face of such destructive arguments?  What can the intelligent novelist, i.e., the novelist who accepts some form of anti-humanism, write about that is not colored by despair?  Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure, The Return of the Native, and The Mayor of Casterbridge come to mind as examples. 

Is there some way to rise above or repudiate the rampant anti-humanism that pervades our thinking?  Religion has that potential.  The Anti-Humanists have all declared God Dead, but backing away from that un-provable hypothesis is a start.  In the West we are used to Christianity.  We Christians are not left in doubt as to what we should become.  The Holy Spirit, Scriptures tell is, is transforming us into the image of Jesus Christ.  Transforming us kicking and screaming seems to be the case for most of us, but the ideal, the goal is out there for us to see and we don’t repudiate it. 

Many Christian thinkers today oppose what they perceive as an exalting of man over God, calling it “humanistic.”  But the modern philosophers they have in mind aren’t interesting in elevating man.  There is very little of that in their philosophies.  I was most recently reading Heidegger and a major concern of his was a despairing harking back to tradition as a probably-vain hope that something better could be made of Germany.   The Russian followers of Marx exalted the Worker as Trilling describes, but that Worker and his paradise were shams. 

Wordsworth was no Christian, but he saw the emptiness of a belief in Godwin’s philosophy.  He didn’t advance any alternatives that impressed Trilling.  Eliot turned to Christianity for several reasons.  Anyone who has become a Christian later in life can trace the path through several reasons (or arguments) that led to his becoming a believer.  At least one of those reasons was pragmatic.  Eliot couldn’t survive the conclusions of The Waste Land.  He couldn’t survive the conclusions he drew of the First World War and its aftermath.  

Could Eliot have been faking it, using Christianity as a means and not an end?  That doesn’t seem possible.  What benefit could he have found in a Christ he didn’t really believe in?  Paul wrote in First Corinthians 15 words to the effect that if Christ was not raised from the dead then we are the most miserable of men.  In order to be a Christian one must so believe, and if this belief is entered in to optimism becomes a possibility.  Jesus said, “In this world ye shall have tribulation, but be not afraid for I have overcome the world.” 

Or one can take the approach of Hardy who envied those who can experience optimism:

. . . At once a voice arose among

    The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

    Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,

    In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

    Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings

    Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

    Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

    His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

    And I was unaware.

Or one might try for the self-encouragement of William Earnest Henley partially recovering from a disease writing,

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the Pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll.

I am the master of my fate:

I am the captain of my soul.

I tend to take a pragmatic view of these matters.  Henley was a sickly fellow who spent years in hospitals.  His unconquerable soul lasted him only 53 years.