Christians, even those of us who don't know Hebrew, have an interest in studying the OT as carefully as we can. For good or ill, the interpretation of the first chapter of Genesis has become a theological hot-spot, and it raises questions for laymen like me, who yearn for the unity in the family of Christ, but who also are committed to the purity of doctrine. Before addressing the text directly, I will say a few words about inspiration in general, then procede to investigate the cultural context in which the text was written.
There seem to be two kinds of processes by which a divine revelation is given in human language. First, something like a voice from heaven may directly announce the message. Second, God may use an inspired author's natural abilities to produce the message. When Paul wrote his epistles he was writing as himself, by means of his own natural abilities; he is not reporting what he heard spoken by a voice from heaven. Rather, God, who forordains whatsoever comes to pass, forordained that Paul, in writing out of his own natural abilities, would produce a letter that is also the very word of God, infallible and inerrant.
On which of these models should we understand the Pentateuch? Certainly, there are many places where it is recorded that God spoke directly--in giving the ten commandments, for instance. But the work as a whole is not that way. It is rather a reporting of something that the author was eyewitness to (assuming, as I believe, that most of the Pentateuch was written either by Moses, or by someone closely connected with Moses). How did the author of Numbers know, for instance, that "the people of Israel, the whole congregation, came into the wilderness of Zin in the first month, and the people stayed in Kadesh. And Miriam died there and was buried there"? Because he was there when it happened; not because God spoke those words from heaven.
For this reason, the historical facts about Moses are relevant to understanding the original meaning of the text. Now, if the Pentateuch was written by a Hebrew man educated in the royal house of Egypt, a knowledge of what the Egyptians thought about the origin of the world, and of how they talked about that sort of thing, would help in understanding the first chapter of Genesis. I want to suggest that Moses is using symbols common in Egyptian mythology in order to criticize and repudiate Egyptian theology.
Ancient Egytptians, of course, didn't write abstract philosophical treatises. They told stories. But their stories weren't just stories. According to Egyptologist R.T. Rundle Clark, the stories were understood to be symbolic, particularly in the Hermopolitan and Memphite traditions, which become relatively abstract in their speculations, even though they always retain a connection to the concrete story. And this is so important to my argument that I am going to repeat it: the Egyptians themselves -- some of them at least -- understood their stories to be, at least in part, symbolic representations of more or less abstract ideas.
Rundle Clark writes, "The basic principle of Egyptian cosmology is the Primeval Waters. It is common to all the accounts of the origin of the universe however much they may differ in detail. Every creation myth assumes that before the beginning of things the Primordial Abyss of waters was everywhere. ... all was dark and formless. The present cosmos is a vast cavity, rather like an air-bubble, amid the limitless expanse. ... For the Egyptians as for the Hebrews, the sky was a 'firmament' which 'divides the waters from the waters.' The universe is the abode of light. Thus, all the legends of origin are ... explanations of how the positive region of light and form was generated amid the indefinite watery nothingness of the timeless night." (Myth and Symbol in Ancient Egypt, 35)He continues, "Water is formless, it has no positive features and of itself assumes no shape. The Primeval Waters being infinite, all dimensions, directions or spatial qualities of any kind are irrelevant. Nevertheless the waters are not nothing. They are the basic matter of the universe ..." (ibid.) But in some traditions the Waters are identified as nothingness. "At Hermopolis, ... there was a doctrine that the idea of the abyss could be best conveyed by saying what it was not. ... The Shu Texts of the First Intermediate Period [c. 2250 B.C.], which are strongly influenced by Hermopolitan ideas, have preserved a phrase: 'in the infinity, the nothingness, the nowhere and the dark.'" (54)
The Egyptian creation account begins in these waters, and this is how they begin: In the beginning, something comes into existence of itself, emerging out of the nothingness of the abyss.
Rundle Clark again: "The emergence from the waters has four aspects: it signifies the coming of light, life, land and consciousness. The legends of how things began--the cosmogenies--differ according to which elements are stressed. ... There is no recorded cosmogony where only one of these four elements is considered in isolation; every account is a compound of several symbols." (36) In the most common version what arises is the high god Atum, who is a mound of earth. After coming into existence, the first thing Atum does is masturbate. His hand is therefore (!) deified as a goddess. Atum's semen becomes two deities, the god Shu (Life) and the goddess Tefnut (Order); it is also said that those two came from Atum's spit, or breath, or word. Throughout the mythology, to a greater or lesser degree, the deity who begets is identified with those things that are begotten. And those things -- the structural elements of the world -- are also treated as deities in their own right. Rundle Clark, again, "The basic arrangement of the universe is, then, a combination of Atum as Primary Spirit, Life and the World Order." Sometimes Shu and Tefnut are portrayed as the limbs of Atum, which Atum forms the earth out of. In one place it says that Shu is "coextensive" with Atum. and sometimes it is said that Atum was still in the Primeval Waters when he engendered Shu and Tefnut. This might be an attempt to express the idea that Atum created himself while he was still non-existent. Atum is called "Self-Creator" in the Coffin Texts.
From the union of Shu and Tefnut come to two more deities, Geb (Earth) and Nut (Heaven). At first Geb and Nut are joined together. Shu separates them, lifting the Heavens above the Earth. From the union of Geb and Nut come Osiris, Isis, Seth and a few other gods. Osiris (who represents fertility and agriculture) rules over Egypt in a golden age. Then Seth kills Osiris and scatters his body parts. Isis gathers the body parts of Osiris, partly revives him, and, in spite of the fact that he is still mostly dead, copulates with him. She then gives birth to Horus, who fights with his uncle Seth for the rule of Egypt. In this struggle, Seth stands for brute strength and Horus stand for law and order. Horus is declared the winner, and becomes Pharaoh. Every time Egypt's Pharaoh dies, he becomes Osiris, and his son (the next Pharaoh) becomes Horus. The reigning Pharaoh is thus always Horus, responsible for law and order, and his dead father is always Osiris, responsible for the fertility of the crops.
A: The historical context.
Now let's return to Genesis. One of the things that always used to puzzle me, before I had read anything about Egyptian mythology, was the fact that there was no account of the creation of water. God makes light, and then separates it from darkness, but when he separates the waters, he doesn't make them first. It's as if they were already there. Does this mean that water was some kind of preexisting stuff, coeternal with God?
But of course I didn't have a similar puzzlement concerning darkness. Obviously, darkness is just an absence of light, a nothing rather than a something. God doesn't need to create it before separating it from light. Now, in the Egyptian culture, the Primeval Waters also were understood, at least by some, as symbolic of nothingness, emptiness, non-being. Thus I think it makes sense to see the waters over which the Spirit broods as symbolic of the non-being of the world before creation, and parallel to the words "formless and void" that describe the "earth" (but remember this is before earth, in the sense of "land", was created). This conjecture is coroborated by the fact that throughout the scriptures this symbolism is repeated: the sea represents the threat of uncreation. In the great flood, God repents of his having created, and destroys all except those who are in the ark, which is a type of Christ. And when the Israelites pass through the waters of the Red Sea, they experience a kind of baptism into death, while the Egyptians are swallowed by that death. And when Jonah is tossed into the sea, he speaks of being in the belly of Sheol (the place of the dead); Jonah's three-day sojourn beneath the Waters represents Christ's three days in the grave (As Tim Keller puts it: your maker was unmade that you might be remade). This symbolism may also explain why the disciples are so astonished when Christ commands the wind and waves, and when he walks on the sea: perhaps they understood these things to be symbolic of the kind of ex-nihilo creative power that belongs to God alone. It also explains why, when God creates the new heavens and earth, there is no longer any sea (Revelation 21.1), and no more night (v.25).
Some Hebrew scholars [citation needed] hold that the word usually translated "beginning" should, by the grammar of the sentence, be understood as an active verb in a dependent clause, rather than as a participle; that is, not "In the beginning God created ...", but, "When God began to create the heavens and the earth, ..." and now note the parallelism that comes to light if we understand what follows as three ways of symbolically speaking of the non-being of pre-creation: "When God begant to create the heavens and the earth: 1) the earth was formless and void, 2) darkness was over the face of the abyss, 3) and the Sprit of God was brooding over the face of the Waters."
And God said, 'Let there be light', and there was light.
One sees here the repudiation of three core ideas in Egyptian cosmology. First, God does not arise out of nothingness, he is eternal; when all else is nothing, he is already there. This is implicit in the structure of the story -- it doesn't have to be stated explicitly. Secondly, God does not engender the world, he creates it, not out of himself, but out of nothing, in such a way that the creature is entirely distinct from Him. Thirdly, the lineaments of the world are never deified. The creator alone is divine, never the creature.
Now we approach the heart of the controversy: "God called the light 'day' and the darkness he called 'night', and there was evening and there was morning, the first day." Are we to understand this first day as a 24 hr. period? One argument often urged against that interpretation is that the length of a 24 hr. day is defined by the cirucuit of the sun, and the sun has not yet been created. It only comes in on the fourth day. But the more important point is this: if my basic approach is right, we are in a highly symbolic context here. The creation of light is the dawn of time. It is that light that is called "day", and the preceding time of darkness, which was over the face of the abyss in v.1, and which God separated light from, is called "night". What sort of "separation" is this? The distinction between night and day, evening and morning, is not spatial. The separation of night and day represents the distinction of before and after. The darkness of non-being (pre-creation), followed by the light of created being.
So we can undestand the evening of the first day as the darkness of pre-creation. If we wish to think of this less picturesquely and more abstractly, we must say that the evening of the first day is either infinite in past time, or else that it is outside of time altogether. We might even interpret the "separation" of night and day as the creation of time itself: God created time by making a distinction between "before" and "after". In any event, just as the first day is not a 24 hr. period, neither are any of the others, for all the days of creation are of the same sort, whatever sort of days they may be. On this interpretation, each evening-morning sequence can be seen as a recapitulation of the sequence: pre-creation darkness, followed by created light.
Concerning the Egyptian cosmogeny as it occurs in Spell 75 of the Coffin Texts, Rundle Clark writes, "Creation is not a series of events in time but a speculation about the principles of life and the arrangement of the cosmos." If this is a correct understanding of the Egyptian text, then it is at least possible that Moses, using the same symbolic "language", in speaking of evening-and-morning, evening-and-morning, also was not speaking of a series of events in time, but rather of the mystery of God's calling being from nothingness, form from formlessness, life from non-life, time from "the indefinite watery nothingness of the timeless night", and, in general, each of the various lineaments of the world, ex nihilo.
In sum, given that we know Moses was raised and educated as an Egyptian, given the symbolic, quasi-philosophical character of Egyptian creation accounts, given the role that such motifs as water, abyss, darkness, night, light, day, heaven and earth play in those accounts, a reasonable conjecture seems to me to be that the seven days (seven represents completeness and perfection in both Egyptian and Hebrew literature) should not be interpreted as consecutive time-periods, whether 24 hr days, or "ages" of indefinite length. They are not sequential time-period at all. Rather, each of the six days of creation can be seen as re-expressing, each in its own different way, how God began with absence, emptiness, formlessness, chaos, and by his power brought being, fullness, form, and order. And the seventh day represents God's satisfaction in his work and its perfection.
B: The textual context.
Let us look now at the context of ch.1 in relation to the rest of Genesis. Notice that ch. 1 comes before the first "toledot" (usually translated "generations") . The most prominent structural feature of the book of Genesis is that it is divided into ten sections, each beginning, "these are the generations of ...". History was conceptualized, in Genesis, as a series of "generations". Thomas Cahill, in The Gift of the Jews, notes how, by means of the toledots, the Hebrew scriptures introduce the idea of "history". This was a radical idea in its time. For the first time, the most important stories by which a people defined themselves were stories about particular, unrepeatable events in their past. Before, the important stories of a culture were always situated in an ever-recurring cycle. (Horus is always defeating Seth as the Pharaoh's laws conquer the elements of brute force in society; Osiris is always dying as each year seed is planted in the ground). Now, for the Hebrews, the most important stories of their culture came together to form a connected story about the chosen people.
But the first chapter of Genesis precedes the toledots, standing as a kind of introductory section. I think we could say that in a certain sense it precedes history. The dawn of time is not a historical event, but a pre-historical event. Note, I'm not saying it didn't really happen in the past. It certainly did. And in that sense it is "history". But it is possible to describe past events in a non-historical way. It is possible to describe them in a highly symbolic way. And this is how I am suggesting that we should understand Genesis 1, if, as I surmise, the Hebrew concept of "history" has to do with human beings and their geneologies, so that things that happened in the past before there were human beings would not be "history" in that sense. (I once heard a story about some missionaries who were ministering to a secluded tribe somewhere, and it wasn't until they they started translating the geneologies that the tribe members realized that the Bible was about real people).
On the other hand, I could be wrong. I am neither an Egyptologist nor a Hebrew scholar. What I have written is a layman's conjecture. Even so, it should cast doubt on the statement that I have often heard made that the book of Genesis "very clearly" contradicts the current scientific consensus that the universe is some billions of years old. A more careful investigation of the text and of the cultural context in which it was written could lead one to accept or to reject my conjecture. But this is something about which reasonable Christians, who care about understanding God's word aright, can disagree. One thing at least should be clear: I am not squeezing the text to fit a modern scientific theory. I am trying to understand it in terms of the context in which it was written.
The question of how long ago God created the world is not one that vexes me much. God, being omnipotent, certainly could have done it a few thousand or a few billion years ago. If he had decided to do it differently than he did, my faith in Christ's atoning work would not be affected, I would not worship God any less, my hope in the resurrection would remain undiminished, my submission to the apostolic teaching of the NT, and my commitment to the plenary verbal inspiration of the whole Bible, would remain intact. And for this reason I am deeply vexed when Christian brothers are disfellowshiped or called heretics, Christian ministers defrocked, Christian teachers removed from their posts, all on account of their interpretation of one passage, which has no significant theological ramifications.
All of the great eccumenical doctrines, which Christians have historically regarded as essential to their faith, and all of the Calvinistic distinctives, which Reformed churches have historically believed to be important for maintaining the purity of the gospel, remain untouched by this question. The church has never regarded Augustine as apostate simply for believing, as he did, that the creation was instantaneous, rather than taking 6 times 24 hours. Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield retain their status as two of the most important conservative Reformed theologians, even believing, as they did, that the testimony of Scripture was consistent with a universe very much older than 6,000 yrs. Those who would raise this question to the level of an essential doctrine are guilty of theological innovation of the worst sort. It is destructive of the unity of the brethren; it undermines the teaching ministry of the church; and it should be loudly repudiated by those in positions of authority among the people of God.
Does it matter, then, what the first chapter of Genesis means? Certainly. And not just the agreed upon aspects (for we all agree it means, among other things, that God is eternal, that nothing else is, that God alone is the ultimate source of both the existence and the order of all things, that what God made was good and perfect, that he made it out of nothing, and that the creature is distinct from the creator and is never to be worshiped). Every exegetical question matters. It matters because it is the word of God, and whatever God says matters to his people. And the best way to come to a true understanding of what God in fact is saying to his people in this, or any passage, is to hash it out together, as brothers, united in faith, guided by the Spirit, working out our differences in interpretation, ideally from a framework of basic agreement on the system of doctrine passed on to us in Scripture as a whole. This goal is not attained by making every exegetical question a test of orthodoxy.
Whatever your interpretation of Genesis 1, whether you agree with me or not, I plead with you to stand boldly against the theological innovation that would make a shibboleth of this.
Here I really do have a beef with Doug Wilson. And this time I'm not being jocular. What he says in this post is very foolish. Let me be clear: It's not his young-earth exegesis that's foolish (just incorrect). It's the atrocious interbreeding of a slippery slope with an ad hominem, along with his intolerance w/r/t adiaphora, that makes him come out sounding like a fundamentalist.
Here are some (mostly) reasonable comments from those tolerant of the old-earth position:
Is there any wiggle room for a non-literal 24 hour day since the sun and moon were not created until the 4th day? When did God set the earth in motion? I also see no problem with God creating each plant and animal in two's and allowing them to go forth and multiply in the same manner that humans did (according to their kind). Prior to sin and death entering the world, this would still take awhile. Secondly, I think the Genesis account is more concerned with informing us that Jehovah created the heavens and earth. That man was once in perfect fellowship with the Lord and now he is a fallen sinner in need of redemption. Trying to turn the Bible into a scientific textbook presents many interpretive problems for the inerrancy defender. By what standard do we maintain that the "four corners of the earth" is symbolic and yet Isaiah's "circle of the earth" presents us with Biblical scientific insight? Lets leave wooden literalism to the dispys. I agree that unbelief is the root of the problem but differances in interpretation are not necessarily all springing from this root. Or are all amillenialists who do not beleive in the literal 1000 years suffering from the sin of unbelief too? One can assert that the Earth is more than 6000 years old without damaging the orthodox soteriological position. (Chris Maluta)I think you have to admit that many evangelicals are not merely assuming an old earth by default but actually believe it for what seem to them (okay, us) good reasons. Maybe we're wrong and if so it might be because we're blinded by the spirit of the age but isn't it possible at least some of us aren't? It's true that the desire to avoid looking stupid militates against embracing a young earth. So what? There are desires pushing both ways, some noble and some not. And even if you perfectly understood the motives behind every opinion it wouldn't tell you anything about the age of the earth.
I would love to hear your arguments for a young earth. They'll go down easier if they're not mixed with accusations of bad faith. (Rob Steele)
Unfortunately not all defenders of the old-earth position are reasonable. Some are trying too fool around with Relativity in order to have God saying something true about how long it took to create the earth from the perspective of an inertial reference frame zooming about in space, even though it took much longer as measured in an earth-bound reference frame. Xon's response to this nonsense is pretty good. Yet I think he hasn't quite got everything right. He says,
I think the issue of "scientific correctness" misses the point, though. The fact that the Scriptures are true (even in a "literal" sense) doesn't mean that they are providing a "scientifically correct" way of describing things. We still to this day talk about a "sunset", rather than a more scientifically-correct "earthturn" (as Doug pointed out in a Credenda article/book a long time ago). And this is a perfectly accurate way to describe reality. Our realm of experience involves a sun that moves across our field of vision. The Bible is generally written in terms of appearances, not in terms of some "deeper" scientific truth of what is "really" going on. And the "appearances" are not mirages or falsehoods, mind you. They are completely accurate and appropriate. As true as anything else.Is my table a solid continuous object or not? Science says it's "really" an electron cloud, but that isn't how it looks and it's not how I interact with it. And people are communicating quite effectively and can gain a fine understanding of the world by thinking of tables as being something pretty close to what they appear to be. The "real" physico-chemical explanation of electron clouds is interesting for science class, though. But it doesn't trump the appearance to learn the science.
So this seems like a rabbit trail to me, although it has been interesting. God revealed to us that the world was made in six days, and that is a communication to us in terms of how we perceive things. Which, frankly, shoots the Hugh Ross old-earth view in the foot. God is telling us about a pattern that He is building into our world of experience, so if there is some both/and thing going on then the youth should still be on the side of our planet and the age should be from the "perspective" of the universe. But the view endorsed by Jon Beck and others in this thread has things the other way around.
Genesis clearly makes a claim about this world of our experience when it describes creation, not the universe taken in its totality from a perspective that no human will ever have. The Bible is not a science text; it is a covenant document in which the maker of the world reveals things to His people. Thus, the revelation is directed to our minds in terms of the world we actually live in experientially. Scripture tells us nothing of atoms or other microscopic particles, for instance. It also doesn't give us dates and times in terms of some "universal" perspective that is completely meaningless to us here on Earth. The point of revealing dates and times is to teach us something about this world in which we live. Not the abstract totality of everything.
And so when we turn around and take those dates and times and either a) deny them in any sense whatsoever, b) say that they don't matter as long as we just stick with the "big picture" that God made everything, or c) make them true from some universal perspective but not from our own living-life-where-God-put-us perspective (which is what the Hugh Ross-style "Old and young" view does), then we are simply not taking the text seriously on its own terms. There is no inconsistency here between the "traditionalist" reading of Joshua's account of the sun and Genesis's account of creation. In both cases, the text communicates to us in terms of our perception of the world. From that perspective, the world took six days to make (where a "day" is a length of time familiar to us, not some cosmologically-adjusted super-time), the entire world (at least since the creation of the light on Day One) has only existed for under 10,000 years, and the sun stood still in the sky one day while the Israelites fought a battle. What's the problem? All perfectly clear and adequate revelations of events from the perspective of our field of vision, which is the field of vision into which God is speaking when He reveals Himself to us (otherwise we it is hardly "revelation").
The problem is that science tells us that the world CANNOT be so young, and so we try to play a shell game to salvage respectability. But the thing about the modern academy and all its certainties is that it is dying. At this point, there is hardly anything that the philosophers (and they always lead, don't you know) would stand up for as absolutely undeniably true, and that includes any particular account of the world's origins. If anything, standing up and saying something different than the last 150 years of scientific orthodoxy is kinda cute, really, like when visitors come from a faraway country and don't know how traffic lights work. It's all perfectly innocent, in this patronizing "postmodern" world we live in. So trying to find a "workaround" for Genesis so that the academy will take you seriously is a serious miscalculation of the way the winds are blowing, in my opinion. Nobody takes anything seriously anymore in the academy, so it just doesn't matter.
First point (of agreement, I think): the division "literal" versus "metaphorical" is far too facile and blunt to do what almost everyone wants it to do in discussions of this sort. "Literal" just means someone isn't using a figure of speech. Thus a novel is filled with literal discourse. That doesn't mean that the novelist is lying. It's not presented as a true story. Similarly when Jesus uses literal discourse in a parable we don't have to say he's telling a true story. What he's saying is true. But not in the way a "true story" is true. [this isn't quite right. What he said is just as true, and true in the same sense of "true", as a true "true story"; but he didn't mean what you think he meant if you think he was claiming that it was a "true story".] Interpreting according to the author's intent (insofar as that is discoverable from the text) means reading something intended as parable as a parable, not history. Jesus isn't claiming that those things actually happened at some time in the past, so we aren't giving him the lie when we say they didn't actually happen at some time in the past.
Second point of agreement: the Bible is not aiming at scientific correctness. Nowhere in Scripture does God intend to assert "such and such is scientifically correct." So we aren't (yet) giving God the lie when we say that something in the Bible isn't scientifically correct.
Third point of agreement: it's not good exegesis to treat Genesis 1 as saying just that God made everything. It's saying lots more than that. The question is what all is included in that "lots".
And here we have a problem. Xon wants to read Genesis 1 as saying something about the past (which it does) and, more than that, making a claim about the "world of our experience". It describes the past, Xon says, "in terms of our perception of the world. From that perspective, the world took six days to make (where a "day" is a length of time familiar to us, not some cosmologically-adjusted super-time), the entire world (at least since the creation of the light on Day One) has only existed for under 10,000 years, ..." The problem with this is twofold.
First: certain (well-established) scientific claims have implications for the world as we perceive it, implications that seem to contradict a young-earth reading of Genesis 1. Scientific correctness and ordinary experience are not two entirely disjoint universes of discourse. Scientific claims must, at some point, connect with what can be observed in a laboratory, and in ordinary life (the universe doesn't operate differently inside and outside laboratories). We don't live in two different timelines, a scientific timeline, measured by clocks, and a timeline of "our perception of the world." There is one timeline, which can both be measured by clocks and can be experienced without clocks. An hour long stretch of time can seem like more or less than an hour. But there isn't that much variation. If a day (as we experience it) means a stretch of time that seems to be about as long as the time that it (presently) takes to get from one sunrise to the next, then old-earth cosmology implies that the earth is very much older than 10,000 years.
Now, for a postmodernist, this is no problem. Some postmodernists have gone so far as to say we do live in a multiplicity of worlds, and a cacophony of mutually inconsistent narratives is simply to be rejoiced in. But 1) I think Xon is wrong to say that postmodernism is triumphing in the academy. On the contrary, while some of the postmodern criticisms of modernity have ceased to be shocking and are now generally accepted, postmodernism as a whole has already lost a lot of steam. In some disciplines, it never did have much influence. In others it's now regarded as passe (yup!). Perhaps it's still holding on here and there. But a great many scientifically minded philosophers still wear the title "naive" as a badge of honor; it's their way of scoffing at idealists, postmodernists, and all other soi-disant sophisticates. And plenty of ordinary working scientists have a similar attitude. (The scientists who write popular quasi-philosophical books aren't a representative sample.) And 2) Even if Xon's right about academia, it's irrelevant. Because we old-earthers (contra DW's ad hominem) aren't interested in pleasing academia. We're interested in getting to the truth of the matter. And the truth of the matter is: post-modernism is wrong. We live in one world. Scientific claims and "ordinary experience" claims are capable of contradicting each other. They don't do so as often as some wooden modernists think (the table really is solid, and the sun really did rise this morning), but they do sometimes.
Second problem: It's not clear what it means to say that Genesis 1 ("clearly"!) makes a claim about the "world of our experience when it describes creation." In fact this is a very queer claim. None of us were there at creation (at least not till day 6). What then could it mean to say it describes creation as we experience it? That we would experience it as six days if we were transported back there in a time-machine? That hardly fits with Xon's (laudably) contextually sensitive approach to the Bible.
I have no problem talking about the earth as being made in six days, just as we talk about sunrises rather than earthturns, nor with the claim that such talk is true (and not a metaphor). Similarly the earth is fixed; it shall never be moved. If you think this boulder is hard to move, imagine trying to move Mt. Everest! What's more immovable than Mt. Everest? How about the whole earth! Most of us modern people, when we get to the level of the whole earth, switch out of our common-perception picture-thinking and into quasi-scientific picture-thinking (a ball zooming through space). But it doesn't take all that much cultural sensitivity to get what the Hebrew poet was driving at. But to say that the earth is less than 10,000 years old is something else entirely. Scripture doesn't say that. That's an implication drawn on the basis of treating Genesis 1 as historical and chronological. And if you do that, then you are going to have scientists contradicting you.
I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to read Genesis 1 as making a common-sense claim (you know how long six days is, right? Well that's how long it took) that contradicts currently accepted scientific cosmology. Not unreasonable, just wrong. But it's a difficult question, on several levels. Simply having (in principle) a contextually sensitive attitude toward the Bible isn't enough to answer the question. We have to get our hands dirty and actually take a look at the specifics of the literary and cultural context of Genesis. I wrote something on that about a year ago, and I suppose I'll dust it off (or not) and make it my next post, assuming I can find it.
I hope you all understand how jocular I was being in my last post. Life is too short for arguing, seriously, about whether or not so-and-so's essay, the substance of which I affirm, had an insufficient emphasis on this or that point. If I seemed to be doing that, it was only for the fun of calling Doug Wilson (of all people) baptistic! But behind my jocularity there was a serious point. The truth that, in the Lord's supper, we feed upon the very body and blood of Christ is a truth I care very much about. And I am sad that this truth is not taught in our churches (I only discovered it by reading Calvin). Of course, it isn't Doug Wilson who is leading the way in this forgetfulness of our theological tradition. Quite the contrary. When it comes to sacramental theology, Wilson and the other FVers are leading the way in exposing and correcting such forgetfulness. So, in my last post, I was really (if you can belive it) expressing my appreciation for FV theology. In this post, I want to continue expressing my appreciation for FV theology, this time in the area of ecclesiology and election.
Like FV proponents, I want to emphasize the importance of the church-which-is-visible, and like them I have concerns about the term "invisible church". The WCF defines the invisible church as the totality of the elect. Now, the distinction between the elect and the reprobate is very important, and I would stand against any attempt to downplay or deemphasize it. But I don't think it is helpful to speak of elect pagans as belonging, in any sense, to the church. They will belong to the church in future, but they do not belong to the church now. They must first be regenerated (and they will be, for God has chosen them before the creation of the world to be regenerated), and they must be joined to the visible church, normally through baptism (and they will be, for God has chosen them before the creation of the world to be members of his bride). But even regenerate persons who have not yet been baptized are not yet members of the church -- at least, not full members. They are spiritually alive, and thus eminently fit for church membership. But they do not actually become members until they are baptized. Moreover, every regenerate person will be (sooner or later) joined to the body, and glorified with her. And no unregenerate person will be a member of the church when she is glorified.
The WCF states that the invisible church is the bride of Christ. This is not exactly false -- after all, on the day of the wedding, the invisible and the visible church will be coterminous. But it is, I think, problematic. It suggests that that body of persons who compose the invisible church is currently the bride of Christ, and that no other body of persons is. And the problem with this is twofold. First, the members of the invisible church do not currently compose any body of persons, nor will they till judgement day. Talking about the invisible church is an abstract way of talking about all of the elect, but the elect do not currently compose a corporate unity. Secondly there is a body of persons that is not the invisible church and that is the bride of Christ. The visible church is a corporate unity (distinct in membership from the invisible church) that is, right now, the bride of Christ. She herself, and no other. On the day of the wedding, any nonelect member of the visible church will be removed from her, and any elect non-member of the visible church will be joined to her, at which point it will still be she and no other who will be wed to Christ: she, the visible church, who will then be coterminous with the so-called "invisible church". This makes it clear that even unregenerate persons who have been baptized (and who have not apostatized) are really part of the bride of Christ -- that's how important baptism is, and that's why it is so important for Christians to be baptized. But just because you are in the church now doesn't mean you will be tomorrow, or at judgement day. Not so with election. Election is irrevocable.
I allow for both corporate and individual senses of "election". The elect body is the visible church. Her election is irrevocable. The bride of Christ cannot lose her corporate salvation. She will certainly be saved. But that doesn't mean that every individual in her will be saved. They will be saved only if they remain in her (and just because you haven't been formally excommunicated when you die doesn't mean God won't remove you from his church at judgement).
Individuals are also elect. Their election is irrevocable. No one whom God has chosen before the creation of the world can fail to be saved. But what does that "salvation" consist in? It consists (among other things) in their being joined to the totus Christus, head and body. The WCF says that outside of the visible church there is no ordinary possibility of salvation. I agree. I would even be willing to say it without the "ordinary": Outside of the visible church there is no possibility of salvation. But I would add that God may join someone to the visible church at the last day, even if that person had not joined the church in his lifetime.
I would not follow some FV proponents in speaking of individual church members who are not predestined for glory as "elect" in a revocable sense. It's latin etymology makes "election" unavoidably a technical theological term. If Scripture speaks of such individuals as being in some sense "chosen", then use the anglo word "chosen". God certainly "chose" that they would belong, temporarily, to the visible church. But they are not among the "elect." This is a matter of terminology, though, not substance. As for substance, I'm agreeing with FV here.
Here's a point on which I'm more FV than Doug Wilson: I take a more realistic view of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper. Wilson's view, as he expresses it here, is rather wishy-washy. Which is unusual for him. A Lutheran, Matthew N. Petersen, has been very deftly defeating Wilson in the comments.
Actually, Petersen goes beyond the Lutheran view when he says "I say Christ used a trope to say the Wine is quite literally his Blood." -- I always thought that Lutherans denied this (?), saying instead that the blood was co-located with the wine, not identical with it. So when the wine literally passes into our mouth, so does the literal blood of Christ, in such a way that there are two distinct substances literally passing into our mouth -- wine and blood -- rather than only one (blood and not wine, as the RC church says) or the only the other (wine and not blood, as every other Protestant church says). Petersen seems to think there is one substance which is, a la fois, both blood and wine. This position has a rather serious problem: it directly contradicts the obvious fact that blood and wine are different substances!
Petersen tries to avoid this by pointing to the dual nature of Christ. Jesus is a la fois both God and man, so why can't what's in this cup be both blood and wine? But the analogy doesn't hold. "God is man" isn't like "blood is wine". The term 'blood' refers to a physical substance of a sort that, by it's very definition, is different from the physical stuff that 'wine', by its definition, refers to. 'God' does not refer to a physical substance of any sort. Our apprehension of the meaning of what we're talking about when we say 'God' isn't based on our grasping, in some positive way, what sort of a thing God is. So we can't pretend to know that a person of that sort couldn't possibly be the same as a human-being. But we can pretend to know -- indeed we do know -- that the sort of thing blood is couldn't be the same sort of thing as the wine in this cup: blood and wine have different molecular structures!
Unlike Petersen's view, the traditional Lutheran view (unless I've misunderstood it) is at least coherent: two distinct substances occupy the same space at the same time, one of which is made imperceptible to our senses (we don't taste blood in our mouth when we partake) and is known to be locally present only by faith. There's no reason that couldn't happen in a miracle. But there's also no reason to believe such a miracle takes place. The Lutheran view isn't self-contradictory; it's just wrong.
But what Wilson says is wrong in the other direction. It's downright baptistic. And I'm using that word 'baptistic' in the quasi-technical way that Wilson himself does. It refers to a view that, without being quite baptist, is a departure from robust, red-blooded Calvinism in a baptist direction, a departure influenced by baptist religious habits of thought, especially as those developed in America during and after the Second Great Awakening. Wilson writes:
The third view [which he defends] is the covenantal view. One of the features of God's covenant is attendant blessings and curses. As we consider the teaching of Scripture, we should clearly see that God connects both to His covenant meal with us. The Lord's Supper, approached in godly faith, is a clear means of blessing and grace on the one hand, and chastizement on the other. First, the blessing -- "The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not the communion of the body of Christ? For we, through many, are one bread and one body; for we all partake of that one bread" (1 Cor. 10:16-17). But there is also the covenantal cursing that is possible. "For he who eats and drinks in an unworthy manner eats and drinks judgment to himself, not discerning the Lord's body."This is covenant reality because the Lord Himself is present with us in the meal. Because we are Protestants, we deny that He is locally present in the bread and wine, but because we are Reformed Protestants, we do affirm that the Lord is really present with us in the meal. We must affirm this because we deny the doctrine of "real absence." But His presence with us is spiritual and covenant, not material, and we feed on His presence by faith. So with God's blessing and cursing in mind, we must come to the Table with joyful solemnity. We must discern the Lord's body in one another. We must judge ourselves. We must submit to God's judgments, thankful we will not be judged with the world. We must seek God's blessing on us in the body.
First off, presenting something called the "Covenantal view" as a tertium quid in this debate is a bit misleading: wouldn't all agree that the sacrament is a Covenant sign? Surely they would. That's not what the controversy is about. Nor is it about what the nature of the Covenant is. There's a real debate there, but it's not this debate. This debate is about what relation that Covenant sign has to the physical body and blood of Christ. So let's skip to the next paragraph.
Wilson seems to think he is affirming the "real presence", but where exactly is the real presence in what Wilson affirms? "The Lord Himself is present with us in the meal." But this is something baptists also affirm. No Christian is going to deny that "wherever two or three are gathered in my name ..." The doctrine of the "real absence", if it means that the Lord Himself is absent, is a mere strawman.
The traditional, robust Calvinistic view says far more than Wilson says here. It says that the literal, physical body and blood of Christ are really present. This is, moreover the biblical position. As Petersen ironically puts it (in a classic FV move, to boot) the Covenant is
kinda like a marriage, and no one wants to be physically present with their wife, we just want "spiritual and covental union"--you know the kind St. Paul had with the absent Colossians--with her.
Classic, robust Calvinism agrees with Luther that the very body and blood of Christ -- those physical realities -- are really present, and are really fed upon by the faithful partakers. The disagreement is this: Christ's body and blood are not ubiquitous: they remain in heaven, they not located anywhere on earth. The supernatural work of the Holy Spirit makes us able really to feed upon what is distant from our physical bodies, but not absent from us.
Wilson sort of maybe gets around to saying this:
"I believe in the real presence, but I don't need to assert that Christ's body is physically present (local presence) in order to feed on His body and drink His blood."
But only at the end of a long back-and-forth. Why didn't he say it earlier? Why didn't he say it in his post (which was ostensibly about the Real Presence)? Why didn't he say it right after Petersen introduced the marriage analogy? Because Wilson is just a little bit baptistic, and the hallmark of baptistic theology is not what is said but what is left unsaid. Baptistic presbyterians are very good at saying what the sacraments are not. It's not transubstantiation, it's not consubstantiation, and it's not "merely" a symbol and memorial. What is it then? What do we mean when we say this is the body of Christ, broken for us; the blood of Christ, shed for us? ... to which the baptistic Presbyterian answers: "Let's change the subject and talk about the Covenant."
Hooray for Covenant realism. We are indeed federally united with Christ, what is true of him, as the Second Adam, is really true of us who are united with him. And the Supper is indeed effectual in maintaining and embodying that spiritual union. All good stuff. But what do we mean when we say this is the body of Christ, broken for us; the blood of Christ, shed for us? If, as an answer to that question, you say that the Supper is an effectual means of maintaining our covenant union with Christ, then you will be understood as DENYING that the physical body and blood of Christ are really fed upon by those who eat the bread and drink the wine.
Has anyone else noticed how often scholars who aren't themselves part of the Calvinistic tradition get Calvinism so egregiously wrong -- I mean when they are writing as scholars specifically about Calvinism and Calvinists? Two quick examples -- one a blatant error of fact on a specific doctrine, the other a myopic inability to "get" the most basic ground-motive of the Reformed faith:
The Calvinists took the bread and wine as symbols only, simple reminders of the Last Supper. When Calvin was questioned about the Real Presence, he said that Christ was everywhere and hence present at the sacrament also. (p. 29 From Dawn to Decadence. Jacques Barzun. Harper-Collins, Perennial: 2001.)
Independence of mind ... was stimulated by the new Calvinistic faith. The Kirk had removed from its members any assurance of eternal salvation by the work of the Church and its sacraments. On the contrary, a man's salvation depended on himself: he must prove himself to be one of God's elect -- a congenial doctrine to people who had always believed in self-reliance and a man's importance to himself. (p. 70 The Scotch-Irish: A Social History. James G Leyburn. Chapel Hill U of NC Press: 1962.)
If scholars are so befuddled when it comes to a tradition that still exists contemporary with their scholarship, how much can we trust the conclusions of modern scholars when they tell us about the mindset of, say, second-temple Jews? Don't take that question as more cynical than it was meant to be. I think such scholarship needs to be given a serious look. But I also want to be cautious: the potential for unnoticed (and perhaps uncorrectable) mistakes needs to be taken into account. Stepping back from the work of examining the scholarship itself to see how compelling it is -- even the most compelling-seeming (from our vantage point) scholarship may face a reliability issue. I assume it is not completely unreliable. It is, then, "somewhat" reliable. What are we to make of this somewhat-reliable historical scholarship? What role should it play in our interpretation of Scripture?
It started when R.S. Clark challenged FVers to repent of "trying to enlarge faith in the act of justification to be more than simply 'receiving and resting' on Christ and his finished work, of trying to include fruit and sanctity in the act of justification in either faith or the ground of justification rather than simply allowing them to be fruit and evidence of justification."
There is potential ambiguity in this language of faith in the act of justification". Does he mean 1. faith when it plays its role in justification; or 2. faith insofar as it plays its role in justification. From what he says later it is clear that he meant 2. But as the debate continued Wilson kept taking him to mean 1, in spite of his clarifying remarks.
Clark never denied that regeneration precedes faith. That notion came from an argument Wilson was making against a thesis he wrongly took Clark to hold. Clinging to interpretation 1, Wilson figured Clark was saying that faith had no holiness about it when justification happened. Wilson argued against this by using the premise that regeneration precedes faith and drawing the conclusion that justifying faith is, from the start, obedient faith; He then "dared" Clark to deny the premise. But Clark does not deny the premise. In fact, he accepts the whole argument as sound, but he thinks it misses the point. And on this I agree with Clark.
What is at issue here is not chronology. Clark calls that a "red herring". What is at issue is not whether justifying faith IS always already living faith. Yes, Wilson's argument proves that to be the case, but that was never in question. What is at issue is not a matter of IS but a matter of BECAUSE (as Clark put it in a later response to Wilson). The issue is: Does faith play the role it plays in justification [which we all agree is an instrumental role only] in part BECAUSE it is a living, obedient faith. Wilson says yes:
The fact that my faith is alive makes it possible to see Christ, the sole basis or reason for anyone's justification. If my faith were dead, it would be blind also, and incapable of looking to Christ as the sole ground of justification.Faith looks to Christ, and sees Christ for justification, according to Wilson, BECAUSE IT IS ALIVE. It is this proposition that Clark thinks is heretical, and that I think is within the bounds of orthodoxy as long as you don't go further and affirm the proposition I labelled (b) in my prior post.
(Clark's response to Wilson's argument by analogy, by the way, is just that the analogy fails. While in some respects the analogy of the seeing eye is a good one; like all analogies, when pressed too far, it falls apart; as my alternative analogy shows: although it is because it is alive that an eye can see, it is not because the compasses are red that they aid in navigation of the ship, and it is not because faith is active, obedient, and holy that it plays its role as instrument of justification.)
Here is Clark in his own words:
There's no question whether faith obeys. The question is why and to what effect and what are the logical (not chronological - that is a red herring) relations between my obedience and my justification? Yes, obedient faith is the only kind of faith that God gives to his elect, Amen, but faith doesn't justify because it obeys. To say that is to forfeit the Reformation. Faith obeys because it unites to Christ, because of God's grace. That is why all the Reformed confessions are structured: guilt (law), gospel (grace) and gratitude (sanctification). The last flows logically from the former. No one is defending dead faith. ...
It's as simple as the difference between is and because. The accompanying graces and virtues are a matter of "is." They do exist. They must exist, but they don't play any role in justification other than evidence and fruit.
I have long wished to engage with Xon Hostetter's blog, Post Tenebras Lux, which has been represented by a link on my side-bar for quite some time now. Most of his recent posts have been in defense of Federal Vision Theology. My attitude toward "FV" is mixed. I don't think it's heretical; I do strongly disagree with some of the stances they take; I am very sympathetic with them on some other points; and I see reason to worry that a small number of individual participants in the FV conversation (not the FV as a whole) may be rejecting something that is at the heart of the Reformed understanding of sola fide. The ultimate judge of Christian doctrine is, of course, not what the Reformed understanding has been. But if the Reformers were wrong in their understanding of the Bible on that point -- not just wrong about some details, but centrally wrong -- then we ought to be clear that that is what is being claimed, if indeed that is what is being claimed. (Whatever may be the case with those few individuals, FV proponents in general are not making such a claim, as far as I can see.)
But even if FVers are far worse than I have made them out to be, there is no excuse for the unjust treatment they have received at the hands of many of their detractors. They have been misrepresented, often grossly. Among those who have not studied this directly, but get their info from their non-FV pastors and elders, I have met several who who think FV = it's possible to lose your salvation. That's a sorry situation, and those charged with oversight of Christ's sheep have some responsibility here. When faithful, orthodox ministers are widely rumored to teach a false doctrine, which they do not in fact teach, that constitutes an injustice. If I am going to criticize the FV in this atmosphere, I feel that I have a duty to say this, but I also want to say it in a way that is properly respectful. I'm certainly not in a position to say that all opponents of FV are guilty of willful misrepresentation. Misunderstanding can in some cases be due to honest mistake.
Obscured behind the smoke of misrepresentation, rhetorical bombast, and political machinations, there are genuinely interesting theological issues. The best place to start, if you want to get a sense of what it is that FVers share in common (as opposed to the idiosyncrasies of particular proponents) is the joint FV statement. In the rest of this post I am going to comment on some of the affirmations and denials contained in that statement. This will give a broad overview of my complaints and sympathies.
I. The first section is titled, "Our Triune God":
We affirm that the triune God is the archetype of all covenantal relations. All faithful theology and life is conducted in union with and imitation of the way God eternally is, and so we seek to understand all that the Bible teaches—on covenant, on law, on gospel, on predestination, on sacraments, on the Church—in the light of an explicit Trinitarian understanding. We deny that a mere formal adherence to the doctrine of the Trinity is sufficient to keep the very common polytheistic and unitarian temptations of unbelieving thought at bay.
There is obviously much to agree with here. But there may also be -- here as in several other places -- a genuine difference between FV and their opponents, which perhaps has not been clearly articulated. It's also not clear to me how differing attitudes in this locus are related to disagreements elsewhere.
II. The next section concerns postmillennialism.
We affirm that God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but rather so that the world through Him would be saved. Jesus Christ is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world—He is the Savior of the world. All the nations shall stream to Him, and His resting place shall be glorious. We affirm that prior to the second coming of our Lord Jesus, the earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. We deny that eschatological views are to be a test of fellowship between orthodox believers, but at the same time we hold that an orientation of faith with regard to the gospel’s triumph in history is extremely important. We deny that it is wise to imitate Abraham in his exercise of faith while declining to believe the content of what he believed—that through him all the nations of the world would be blessed, and that his descendants would be like the stars in number.
I come down somewhere in the range of optimistic amil to cautious postmil. What I most object to in this section is the apparent implication that amils "declin[e] to believe the content of what [Abraham] believed—that through him all the nations of the world would be blessed, and that his descendants would be like the stars in number." The dispute between amil and postmil is less significant than FV would make it out to be. It is not a dispute about whether the church will triumph, or whether the earth will be as full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea. It is only a dispute about whether this will be accomplished before or after the second coming. Let the dispensationalists spend their energies arguing interminably about the befores and afters of future eschatological events. We Reformed folks have better things to spend our energies arguing interminably about.
III. I agree with the general import of the next section, called, "The Next Christendom". When I have no substantive comments, I won't quote.
IV. Next, the FV document asserts that Scripture cannot be broken
We affirm that the Bible in its entirety, from Genesis to Revelation, is the infallible Word of God, and is our only ultimate rule for faith and practice. Scripture alone is the infallible and ultimate standard for Christians. We affirm further that Scripture is to be our guide in learning how to interpret Scripture, and this means we must imitate the apostolic handling of the Old Testament, paying close attention to language, syntax, context, narrative flow, literary styles, and typology—all of it integrated in Jesus Christ Himself. We deny that the Bible can be rightly understood by any hermeneutical grid not derived from the Scriptures themselves.
While I agree that Scripture is relevant to hermeneutics, I don't think one's hermeneutics can simply be "derived" from Scripture, as if Scripture provides the axioms and the rest is inferred by logical deduction.The problem of circularity should be evident here: you can't derive your hermeneutics from Scripture unless you correctly understand Scripture; and you can't correctly understand it unless you've properly interpreted it; but you can't properly interpret it (says FV) until you've derived your hermeneutics from Scripture.
The way it actually works, I think, is that we begin by interpreting Scripture in light of the hermeneutic we have inherited from tradition, a hermeneutic which contains some elements faithful to the prophetic-apostolic origin of our religion, and others unfaithful to it. We then revise that imperfect hermeneutic in light of what Scripture (thus imperfectly interpreted) seems to be saying. The hermeneutic circle that results is non-vicious, whereas it would be viciously circular to say that the Scriptures cannot ever be rightly understood except by a hermeneutical grid already derived from the Scriptures themselves.
It may be that FV people have merely expressed themselves poorly here; It wouldn't surprise me if they were willing to revise this.
V. There seems to be an incoherence to the next section.
We affirm that God's Spirit has chosen the best ways to express the revelation of God and reality, and that the divine rhetoric found in Holy Scripture is designed to strike the richest of all chords in the hearers of the Word of God. For this reason, we believe that it is pastorally best to use biblical language and phrasing in the preaching and teaching of the Bible in the Church. We deny that it necessarily unprofitable to “translate” biblical language into more “philosophical” or “scholastic” languages in order to deal with certain problems and issues that arise in the history of the Church. At the same time, we do deny that such translations are superior to or equal to the rhetoric employed by the Spirit in the text, and we believe that the employment of such hyper-specialized terminology in the regular teaching and preaching of the Church has the unfortunate effect of confusing the saints and of estranging them from contact with the biblical use of the same language. For this reason we reject the tendency to privilege the confessional and/or scholastic use of words and phrases over the way the same words and phrases are used in the Bible itself.How can the use of "philosophical" or "scholastic" language be profitable for "deal[ing] with certain problems and issues that arise in the history of the Church" if the laity, who live in history and face those problems, never learn anything of that language? And how can they learn that language if it never enters into the regular teaching and preaching of the church? Or are we supposed to believe that those "problems and issues" do not affect the laity?
I don't think it makes sense to speak of language or rhetoric as being objectively "the best". The authors of Scripture wrote with the language and rhetoric that was best for the times in which they were speaking. Although the Bible is for the whole church throughout the ages, and not just for the original audiences, its language and rhetoric bears the marks of its original contexts. The fact that it was written in Greek and Hebrew does not imply (I'm sure FVers would agree) that those languages are the best for expressing the Gospel in. And they certainly are not the best languages to use if you're preaching to Americans. Indeed English is superior to Koine Greek, if your goal happens to involve communicating with English speakers. It seems to me that the same could be said for higher-level language issues. The particular terminological decisions of the apostles were made in light of issues the church faced in the first century. Modern Christians face different issues (as well as some of the same issues). So it is at least possible that, in some cases, different terminology may be more effective in communicating the same gospel in a different historical context.
So far I have been assuming that the term "hyper-specialized" refers to all the "philosophical" and "scholastic" language referred to above (as the grammar of the sentence suggests), and that the prefix "hyper" is simply an unfortunate question-begging epithet. If, on the other hand, they only mean to say that you shouldn't get into theological esoterica ('hypostatic union', 'perichoresis') when teaching your average layman, then I doubt anyone will disagree. But that's not what the controversy is over. The controversy is over terms like 'justification' and 'election'. The theology that goes with these terms may be too much for the very youngest Christians. But one hopes that the laity make some progress in their years of being taught, and I think quite a few of them can handle at least the rudiments of systematic theology.
For these reasons I disagree with the claim that the use of technical theological terminology in the regular teaching and preaching of the Church "has the unfortunate effect of confusing the saints and of estranging them from contact with the biblical use of the same language." The reason the saints are estranged from contact with the biblical use of certain terms is that they don't read the Bible much. I would have things as they were in centuries past, among the Reformed, when ordinary people studied deeply both the Biblical texts and the theology by which the church tried to understand the prophetic-apostolic teaching systematically.
VI. I don't see anything in the next section that I disagree with.
VII. The next section is titled "Decrees and Covenant". Nothing in it is clearly wrong. But I'm not sure what it would mean to say the decrees "trump" the covenant, so I don't think it is very clear what they are denying there.
VIII. I agree with the section on the Church.
IX. I agree with the following section as well. And I also share the concern that the FV has about the way the visible/invisible distinction is used in some 19th/20th c. Reformed theological traditions in America. I disagree with anyone who denies that the visible church is the bride of Christ.
X. I agree with the section on Reformed Catholicity.
XI. But I'm not happy with the FV stance on the prelapsarian Covenant.
We affirm that Adam was in a covenant of life with the triune God in the Garden of Eden, in which arrangement Adam was required to obey God completely, from the heart. We hold further that all such obedience, had it occurred, would have been rendered from a heart of faith alone, in a spirit of loving trust. Adam was created to progress from immature glory to mature glory, but that glorification too would have been a gift of grace, received by faith alone. We deny that continuance in this covenant in the Garden was in any way a payment for work rendered. Adam could forfeit or demerit the gift of glorification by disobedience, but the gift or continued possession of that gift was not offered by God to Adam conditioned upon Adam’s moral exertions or achievements. In line with this, we affirm that until the expulsion from the Garden, Adam was free to eat from the tree of life. We deny that Adam had to earn or merit righteousness, life, glorification, or anything else.
I don't mind calling Adam's trust in God and in his promises "faith". But it is misleading to speak of him receiving the blessings of the Covenant of life by "faith alone". The traditional Protestant doctrine of sola fide, when it says that we receive salvation (under the new Covenant) by faith alone, means to deny that we are in a situation like the one Adam was in, in which his "trustful" obedience was a precondition for his receiving the blessing. In the Covenant of Life, there was no monergistic act of God that guaranteed the reception of the blessings. If Adam had remained faithful to the Covenant, this would have been through the synergistic activity (which, like our sanctification, and like everything else that comes to pass, would have been forordained by God, but would also have involved Adam's genuine moral activity) by which Adam would have had the graciously promised blessings. I think this is a significant disagreement, because of potential implications for what sola fide means under the new Covenant. If sola fide means nothing more, for us, than what (according to FV) was true of Adam, then I've got a serious problem. Our justification (which guarantees eternal life) is not dependent on our behavior. Though we shall be judged in accordance with our behavior, the verdict of that final judgment is guaranteed by the justification we already posess, irrespective of our behavior. But, if God had not forordained the fall, Adam's reception of glory would not have been guaranteed by anything irrespective of his behavior. It would have been guaranteed by a divine decree, but not one irrespective of his behavior; rather the decree would have been a decree about how he would behave.
For this reason, when FVers tell us they believe in sola fide, they have not yet distanced themselves from heresy in the Pelagian vicinity (even if they have shown that they don't believe exactly what Pelagius believed). That doesn't mean that FVers are heretics. It does mean that they should say more to assure us of their orthodoxy. For, by redefining sola fide, they have put themselves in a position where the question naturally arises: do they believe what was traditionally meant by sola fide? Or do they at least believe something close enough to it to guard against the sorts of heresy that sola fide, as traditionally undestood, guarded against? We cannot assume they are heretical, as has too often ben done, but we can ask the question. I see no evidence that FV as a whole is guilty of heresy here. (Section XVI elaborates further on this)
In addition, there seems to be a contradiction in saying, "Adam could forfeit or demerit the gift of glorification by disobedience, but the gift or continued possession of that gift was not offered by God to Adam conditioned upon Adam’s moral exertions or achievements." If Adam could demerit the gift by disobedience, then the gift (or the continued possession of it) was conditioned upon Adam's not demeriting it by disobedience. Certainly this is not work of supererogation -- it wouldn't give Adam a "positive" balance, so to speak. But I know of no Reformed thinker who says otherwise. Those who speak (contrary to FV) of Adam's "meriting" eternal life make it clear that he would have merited this, not by supererogation, but simply by maintaining a "zero" balance, so to speak. This is why they insist on the phrase "pactum merit". Here is their reasoning: If God promises "as long as you don't do wrong, I'll give you X" then, if you don't do wrong, God in some sense owes you X. Not because your behavior in itself deserves X as a reward, but solely because of the (conditional) promise God made -- that is, solely because of the pact. God owes you (in the non-absolute, pactum sense) X because he owes it to himself (in the absolute sense) to keep his promise. The only way I can see for FVers to maintain consistency here is if what they mean when they say "the gift or continued possession of that gift was not offered by God to Adam conditioned upon Adam’s moral exertions or achievements" is that it was not conditioned upon any positive, supererogatory, moral exertions or achievements. But in that they have not distinguished their view from the view of their opponents.
XII. I agree with the substance of the section on baptism. In the statement, "But we deny that trusting God's promise through baptism elevates baptism to a human work," there seems to be the hint that some Reformed people think otherwise. None do. For that reason, I would have left that sentence out. Though of course, I agree with what the sentence says.
XIII. I agree with everything in the section on the other sacrament, except for the bit about paedo-communion. I think they could have said more here to distinguish their high view of the sacrament's efficacy (which is in line with Calvin and most of the older Reformed tradition) from the views of some bits of more recent American Presbyterianism theology. And I would still agree with them if they had done so.
XIV. Union and Imputation: I agree with this section. But I would have a problem with most FV proponents when they start further elaborating on their particular views.
XV. Law and Gospel:
We affirm that those in rebellion against God are condemned both by His law, which they disobey, and His gospel, which they also disobey. When they have been brought to the point of repentance by the Holy Spirit, we affirm that the gracious nature of all God’s words becomes evident to them. At the same time, we affirm that it is appropriate to speak of law and gospel as having a redemptive and historical thrust, with the time of the law being the old covenant era and the time of the gospel being the time when we enter our maturity as God’s people. We further affirm that those who are first coming to faith in Christ frequently experience the law as an adversary and the gospel as deliverance from that adversary, meaning that traditional evangelistic applications of law and gospel are certainly scriptural and appropriate. We deny that law and gospel should be considered as a hermeneutics, or treated as such. We believe that any passage, whether indicative or imperative, can be heard by the faithful as good news, and that any passage, whether containing gospel promises or not, will be heard by the rebellious as intolerable demand. The fundamental division is not in the text, but rather in the human heart.
I'm not entirely clear on what it means to speak of law and gospel as a hermeneutic. But I do agree with FV in rejecting the Lutheran-ish view of law/gospel that some Reformed people take. As in many other loci, I line up with Calvin here. I don't think this is an earth-shattering issue.
XVI. Sola Fide:
We affirm that we are saved by grace alone, through faith alone. Faith alone is the hand which is given to us by God so that we may receive the offered grace of God. Justification is God’s forensic declaration that we are counted as righteous, with our sins forgiven, for the sake of Jesus Christ alone. We deny that the faith which is the sole instrument of justification can be understood as anything other than the only kind of faith which God gives, which is to say, a living, active and personally loyal faith. Justifying faith encompasses the elements of assent, knowledge, and living trust in accordance with the age and maturity of the believer. We deny that faith is ever alone, even at the moment of the effectual call.Certain opponents of the FV want to say that it is not as living that faith justifies. Justifying faith is indeed living and active, but, they say, it is not as active that it justifies, but only as passive and receptive. According to them, faith justifies only because by it we receive Christ. (analogy: suppose every working compass on this ship is painted red; the only non-red compasses are broken. This enables us to distinguish compasses that will function in helping the ship find its way from those that will not. Still, it is not as red things that the working compasses function in the navigation of the ship; it is only as indicating north that they play that role. In the same way, the fact that justifying faith is always living and active doesn't show that its life and activity have anything to do with our being justified by it, though it does enable us to distinguish true, justifying faith from false faith.)
The FV statement seems to be mounting an implicit argument against this. God gives only one kind of justifying faith, that justifying faith cannot be understood as anything other than justifying faith; anyone who understands it to be something other than what it really is misunderstands it. And justifying faith really is a living and active faith. FVers may wish to infer from these things that it is as living and active that faith is the sole instrument of justification. That would be unsound. To see why, without getting into logical details, think about red compasses.
I don't know whether the FVers or their opponents are right here. All I'm saying is that the implicit argument that FVers seem to be making doesn't work.
What if the FVers are right? What if it is as living and active that faith plays its role as instrument of justification? The more important question then arises: does this mean a) it plays this role by producing an obedience that is distinct (but not separate) from the living faith that produces it, so that obedience does not itself become an aspect of the instrument of justification, or b) is obedience itself included in the aliveness of faith, so that that faithful obedience functions, together with the rest of what faith is, as instrument of justification?
It seems to me that (b) is wrong, and is seriously unReformed. But the statement doesn't affirm (b). I think there is a legitimate worry that some people associated with FV might hold to something like (b). But, as far as I can see, that position cannot be pinned on FV as such. An FVer who affirms (a) has relieved us of the worry I raised in section XI. He has already affirmed (in XVII) that "those who have been justified by God’s grace through the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ are saved to the uttermost and will spend eternity with Christ and his saints in glory forever." From this it follows that whatever is the sole instrument of justification is that through which alone (instrumentally speaking) eternal life is forensically guaranteed. And since, in affirming (a), he has said that obedience is not part of, but is rather a result of, the faith that is the sole instrument by which eternal life is forensically guaranteed, he has distinguished our situation from that of Adam by telling us that we have a guarantee Adam didn't have -- a guarantee that is not only unmerited, but also undemeritable, and this not simply because of God's sovereign decree that we will continue in faithful obedience, but because we have received Christ, by faith, and in receiving him we have received that irrevocable guarantee, our faithful obedience playing no instrumental role in our reception of Christ or of that guarantee that is in Christ. This is what was important in sola fide, which was left out of FV use of that term.
XVII Assurance: No disagreement from me here.
XVIII Apostacy: I agree with this as well.
XVIV. Intramural: I have disgreements with certain segments of the FV. In particular, I disagree strongly with any one who won't affirm the meritorious character of Christ's work on our behalf. And I disagree strongly with anyone who denies that human beings have a nature or essence, or who denies that there is, in any sense, a change of nature involved in the passage from darkness to light. (We were, by nature, objects of wrath.)
[this post is unpolished, in progress, needs further editing]
It's been a while since Kevin posted his piece, "The Apotheosis of God." He expresses partial agreement with what I wrote here. He also says some things that I didn't say, (but which I agree with) and that are more important that many of the things I did say. Principally: Our apotheosis is rooted in the apotheosis of Christ.
It is my habit to spend most of my time talking about our disagreements. I sometimes get the awkward feeling that this gives the misleading impression that we disagree more than we agree, or that I regard our disagreements as more important than our agreements. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Where we agree, Kevin said it so very well that I have nothing to add. Where we disagree, I'm eager to get into the argument so that we both may come closer to the full truth of the matter.
First, I'm going to accuse Kevin of a historical error. He writes, "Under the intellectualist school, God had been a cosmic manager who, himself, bowed to an even higher authority." The problem with this is that the intellectualists all held to a robust understanding of divine simplicity: according to them, God's justice was not some exterior standard, existing independently of God. Rather, God's justice is God. He himself is the justice by which he is just, He himself is the highest standard, the ultimate authority, and it is precisely because his character is such that he cannot fail to give creatures their due: God cannot send an innocent person to hell because he will not do so, because justice is his essence. On this question, I believe that, while Kevin rejects what he says the intellectualists thought, he agrees with what they actually thought: "justice is an integral part of who God is."
But there is a difference. Like the voluntarists, and unlike the intellectualists, Kevin sees divine justice (vis a vis creatures) as always
(?) in the context of covenant. In this he follows Meredith Kline. I'm not familiar with Kline's work first-hand, but Lee Irons sumarizes the Klinean way of approaching this issue here. One of the problems I have with this approach is that I believe it overemphasizes the influence of late medieval Aristotelian philosophical theology on Reformed soteriology. Irons writes,
It was left to the Reformation to take the fundamental covenantal insights put forward by the via moderna ["voluntarists" -cm] and develop them several steps further. Justification was now by the imputation of the righteousness of another -- a purely covenantal act with no ontological aspects. Original sin inherited from Adam was further developed and refined to become an immediate imputation of the guilt of Adam’s covenant breach instead of an Augustinian realist participation of the human race in Adam’s sin. The ontological elements in the medieval view of the sacraments were removed, so that they became signs and seals of the covenant rather than rites which ex opere operato infused the divine nature into the soul. All of these developments flow from the nominalistic development of the notion of pactum. And, therefore, to a certain extent we in the Reformed camp today are all the theological heirs of the via moderna.
I contend that the Reformers got their notion of pactum, or covenant, not primarily from the philosophical theology of the scholastics, but from the Bible. "Dixitque ei Deus ego sum et pactum meum tecum erisque pater multarum gentium." (Gen 17:4) If we must look for a more recent historical influence, the ad fontes movement in Rennaissance classical studies influenced the way the Reformers read the Bible, and the superior role of the Bible in Reformed theology came about as a reaction to the medieval hierarchy's claimed authority to define the apostolic tradition.
Why did the Reformers get rid of the ontological aspect of medieval theologies of justification? It wasn't primarily because of how the voluntarists dealt with a puzzle in philosophical theology. It was because the Reformers read Paul, and tried to understand what he meant in his original context. And they discovered that he used the term "justification" in a forensic sense, not an ontological sense. From there, they followed the parallel Romans 5 draws between the way we recieve righteousness from Christ, and the way we are made sinners in Adam. That too is understood in forensic terms. Similarly with the sacraments. I think it is misleading to say that the ontological elements were removed. Calvin and Luther at least allowed a high degree of what we would call covenantal realism in their understanding of the sacraments. The reason they are viewed as signs and seals of the covenant is that Scripture ties them to the covenant ("this is the new covenant in my blood"), and they don't work ex opera operato because they are signs and seals of faith -- (Romans) -- and tied in that way to justification.
One may wish to criticize the Reformers interpretation of Scripture. But it was from their interpretation of scripture that these doctrines primarily flowed, not from the speculative theology of the via moderna. That's not to say that voluntarism had no influence at all. It is simply to recognize that the things the Reformers themselves felt were most important provide the the best place to look for the sources and principles of their theology.
If I'm right about this, then I'm, probably also right to find the following argument-sketch unconvincing: "The dubious voluntaristic presuppositions of the Reformation had set the course for Protestantism in general. Either maintain technical orthodoxy by retreating into the anti-intellectual propositions of fundamentalism; or go soft on doctrines the contrary of which do not pose an immediate logical contradiction to salvation." To the extent that general Protestantism is afflicted with this dilemma (and it is), I believe that it derives from the influence of anabaptistic and Enlightenment sources, not from anything in the theology of the Reformers.
But to come nearer the heart of the issue: What I think Kevin needs most of all for his reasoning to go through is the idea that justice requires that God act a certain way toward man, simply because God had already created man in his own image, and God owes it to himself not to treat his own image in a way that would dishonor him. The concept of justice involved in this claim does not require us to have read Vos or Kline. It is available to those who would restrict the notion of covenant to a pact imposed after man was created. We do not have to say that justice is always in the context of covenant. All we have to do is say that God is his own standard of justice and owes it to himself to honor his own name.
I would like to respond, briefly, to one other thing Kevin said,
Contrary to what Chris’ says further down in his post, the incompatibilist libertarian claim that libertarian free will is possible (because they are using these words to define the will as the person choosing) is not true. Nor is it the case that the force of my assertion that libertarian free will is impossible is lost against the incompatibilist. I may have conceded free agency, which is all that they mean by free will, but I have not conceded everything that the incompatibilist includes in the concept of free agency. Their idea of free agency is, in my estimation, far too broad. It is not enough that a person is able to act according to his desires, but, in order to be held morally responsible for his actions, it must have been possible for him to desire any one of the full range of natural options related to that choice.
Remember the context of my claims to which Kevin is responding: Edwards argued that libertarian freedom is impossible. He therefore concluded that the libertarian is wrong to ascribe libertarian freedom to human beings. But this argument won't work if, in fact, libertarian freedom is possible. Kevin grants that libertarian freedom is possible, so he can't use this argument.
Kevin is quite right to point out that he still has an important disagreement with the incompatiblist. But not over the question of whether libertarian-free agency is possible. My point is not that Kevin grants free agency. Of course he does. So does Edwards. My point is that Kevin grants something more than Edwards, something more than free agency: Kevin grants the possibility of libertarian-free agency. Kevin and I both agree (with Edwards against the incompatiblist libertarian) that libertarian-free agency is not the same as free agency simpliciter. But we also both agree (with the libertarian incompatiblist against Edwards) that libertarian-free agency is possible -- indeed actual. God has it. Thus, Kevin's claim that libertarian-free will is impossible (using the word "will" differently than the libertarian) is of no force against the libertarian. To be sure, there still is disagreement between Kevin and the (typical) libertarian about free will/agency ("free" simpliciter): they disagree about whether it is compatible with pre-determination. But they don't disagree about whether libertarian-free will/agency is compatible with pre-determination. It isn't. By definition. That's what "libertarian-free" means. And they both agree further that this incompatiblist kind of agency is possible.
Agreements:
1. Libertarian-free will/agency is possible
2. Libertarian-free will/agency is incompatible with predetermination
3. Human beings have free will/agency ("free" simpliciter)
Disagreements
4. Free will/agency = libertarian free will/agency.
5. Free will/agency is incompatible with predetermination.
6. Human beings have libertarian-free will/agency.
If the incompatiblist libertarian insists on making his incompatiblism (4) part of the meaning of his use of the term "free will" and "free agency", then 3 will not be an agreement after all. It will be (in his mouth) equivalent to 6. But if we let the incompatiblist get away with defining "free" this way then we will have to move 4 and 5 into the area of Agreements: 4 will be true by definition, and 5 will be equivalent to 2 (which is also true by definition). Because this would be confusing, I don't recommend we let our common enemy get away with defining words that way. But that doesn't matter w/r/t the point I was making, which was that there is no disagreement over 1, and that therefore Kevin cannot derive ~6 from ~1, as Edwards would do.
It all began when Clifton said that monergism entails monothelitism. I think Kevin has made it clear that the issue isn't really the general Protestant doctrine of monergism but is rather the specifically Calvinist doctrine of total depravity. Kevin summarizes Clifton's argument in this post. A key premise in Clifton's argument is that genuine personhood, with real free will, requires libertarian freedom. In other words, in order to derive monothelitism from Calvinism Clifton must assume (or establish) the truth of the philosophical thesis known as "incompatiblism".
By the way, I think this shows the uselessness of Clifton's argument: Calvinism, as any Calvinist will tell you, is incompatible with incompatiblism. Thus Clifton, before he could infer monothelitism from Calvinism, would have to establish the truth of something incompatible with Calvinism. But if he does that he will have ipso facto refuted Calvinism. There's no need to go any further. When he goes further and infers monothelitism, he is no longer arguing against Calvinism but against the nonsensical combination, "incompatiblist Calvinism". In other words, he isn't deriving monothelitism from premises Calvinists believe, but from a contradictory mix of premises Calvinists believe with premises Calvinists don't believe. "Incompatiblist Calvinism" is nonsense. Does anybody really care if it entails monothelitism? Compatiblist Calvinism on the other hand, which is really the only kind of Calvinism, does not entail monothelitism. And Clifton has not argued that it does. He has only argued against incompatiblist Calvinism, a position nobody holds.
Kevin, noting the importance of the incompatiblist premise, responded to Clifton by deploying Jonathan Edwards's theory of the will in defence of compatiblism. I then entered the frey, objecting to Edwards's theory, and sought to provide an alternative way of maintaining compatiblism. What I find objectionable is this: Edwards's theory implies an unbroken chain of secondary causes from the creation of man to the fall. This in turn implies that Adam could not have done otherwise -- his choice was determined, not only by the divine decree, but by the "set-up" of the universe. Moreover, Edwards's view entails either that Adam desired sin as such prior to the fall, or at least that his motives were disordered, so that, by natural necessity, he prefered a lesser to a greater good.
I think I have shown that Edwards's view does entail this objectionable conclusion. But now it seems Kevin's view is rather different from Edwards's. On Edwards's view, the act of inclining the will, or making a decision, is always determined by the relative strengths of preceding motivations. But Kevin allows a personal act to interpose between the motivations and the motion of the will -- a personal act that may be undetermined by the preceding motivations. On account of this, everything about Edwards's view that I objected to in my initial post (and still object to) does not apply to Kevin. In fact, I see Kevin agreeing with what I tried to show in that post: that there is an alternative to Edwards that allows for human acts undetermined by secondary causes, that the fall was (or was initiated by) such an act, and that this alternative theory has no particular difficulty explaining how a well-made Adam could sin -- by choosing a lesser good over a greater in a way not predetermined by his preceding motivations. As far as I can tell, Kevin agrees with all of this.
Kevin misunderstands me, thinking that I hold that Adam did not intend to sin. What I actually hold is precisely what Kevin affirms: that "when Adam fell, this involved good motivations towards an act that was, in itself, good." I also hold that "along with these good motivations, Adam knew what he was doing, he knew that the action he was about to take was against the express command of God, he had both the moral and natural ability not to act, and yet he chose to sin anyway. The fall was not determined and God was just in judging it as he did." All of this I agree with. And I would add that, in addition to each of his motives being good, individually speaking, the whole complex of his motives was at no point (before the fall) disordered. This thesis, incompatible with Edwards, is, as far as I can tell, compatible with Kevin's clarified view.
Now that that's settled, two further things remain to be addressed.
FIRST: is there a distinction to be drawn between the initial act of inclining the will and the motion of the will itself? It is this distinction that allows Kevin to retain something verbally similar to Edwards's talk of motives determining a person's actions: Kevin speaks of inclinations determining the motion of the will. By this he means that, once a person has engaged in a personal act by which he inclines the will, a distinct event is necessitated: the the will necessarily moves as it has been inclined. On this view, what the will does and what the person does are distinct events. Kevin sees these two distinct events as part of a larger single "doing", which is the act of choosing, but because we have two distinct entities (person and will) both of which are doing things within the larger "doing", two events can be distinguished if not separated. And one event precedes the other, in the order of causation if not in time.
Our dispute is over the question of whether the will is actually a something-that-does-something every time I choose, or whether I choose all by myself, merely on account of my having a natural ability to choose. This question is peripheral to the issues I raised in my entry into this discussion. It is also (I say) peripheral to the original question of whether total depravity entails monothelitism. But Kevin doesn't think so. Hence I must respond to Kevin's arguments (a) and (b) against my proposal that the will is an ability, not a mechanism.
Before doing that, let me explain where I'm coming from. It's not that I feel certain that the natural will is nothing more than an ability. It's just that 1) I'm not aware of any good reasons for thinking it is something more, and 2) I have trouble understanding Kevin's characterizataion of what that "more" is, other than that it looks like a mechanism of some sort.
Kevin characterizes my notion of "the person choosing" as "vague". I think he has it backwards. All of us are quite familiar, pre-theoretically, with people choosing. But what does it mean to speak of the will "moving", if this is not a metaphor for a person choosing? Clearly it's a metaphor for something -- the will doesn't physically move: it's not located in space to begin with. But a metaphor for what? And what does it mean to speak of the will (as distinct from the person) being "inclined"? What is the will inclined to do? Surely not to choose. It is the person who chooses. Kevin is quite clear about that. Nor to act. I, not my will, am the one who is typing this sentence just as I, not my will, am the one who chooses to type this sentence. If my will is a mechanism, what is it doing? How does it bring it about that I choose and act? I suppose Kevin might say that it does so by moving as I have inclined it, but the problem is: what does this mean? The idea seems to be that I do something (it's not clear what) to something (the will, but it's not clear what that is) which, as a result, does something, or has something happen to it (but, again, it's not clear what) and somehow (it's not clear how) this results in me making a choice. Or perhaps it would be better to say not that a choice results, but that this whole complex of "person-acting-upon-something, something-being-acted-upon, something-doing-something-or-having-something-happen-to-it" just is the person's making a choice. That expresses about as much of the proposal as I understand. Even that little bit contains something that seems objectionable: wouldn't the person have to choose to act upon the "something" to begin with? --which would lead to an infinite regress.
Another way to put this point: suppose that we use slightly different words to express the metaphor -- words other than those that are already involved in our pre-theoretical talk about voluntary action. What is going when a person makes a choice? First, Kevin might respond, the person acts upon his elective-mechanism, impelling it to undergo a change-of-state, and that change-of-state in the elective-mechanism constitues the person making a choice. Clarus per obscuris non explanandum est.
That's my argument against Kevin. Now to respond to Kevin's argument against me.
a) Kevin argues first as follows. The church condemned monothelitism because they held that it entails monophysitism. (True.) If they were right, then the natural will must be associated with the nature in such a way that a single natural will entails a single nature. (Right.) But this cannot be if the will is an ability (and why not?), because that ability is not something a nature has but is something the person has. (from this the conclusion does not follow).
On my view the will is an ability. An ability is not something a nature has, it is something a person has. Therefore, on my view, the will is not something a nature has, it is something a person has. But surely Kevin agrees with this? Does he really believe that it conflicts with the condemnation of monthelitism? If the will is part of the nature, as Kevin so frequently insists, then it had better be the person that has it: the person has the nature, part of the nature is the will, therefore the person has the will as part of his nature. Both Kevin and I hold that will and nature are related as part and whole. It is not that the nature is able to will, but that part of my nature -- part of my being the sort of creature I am -- is my being able to will.
Part of having a human nature is being able to choose. It is because I am a man, rather than a stone, that I have the ability to make choices; and it is because I am a man, and not God, that I have certain limits on my ability to choose. Thinking of the will as an ability does not prevent us from associating it with nature in this way. And if we associate will (ability to choose) with nature in this way (as we should), then we shall certainly get the result that Christ, having two natures, must have two wills. For part of being human is having a finite will: if Christ is human he has a finite will, that is -- on my view -- a limited ability to will. And part of being divine is having an infinite will. If Christ is divine he has an infinite, omnipotent will: an ability to do whatever he wishes. Christ, then, as God, has a limitless ability to choose, and as man he has a limited ability to choose. He has two natural wills. And if we say otherwise, if we say he has only an omnipotent will, then he is not truly human, for it is of the nature of man to have a limmited ability to choose. Or if we say he has only a limmited ability to chose, and is in no way omnipotent, then we deny his divinity. For it is God's nature to be able to choose to do whatever pleases him.
Thus, it seems to me that thinking of the will as an ability fits very nicely with the church's condemnation of monothelitism.
b) Kevin's argues, secondly, that by calling the will an ability I deprive myself of an argument against libertarianism. This is an odd thing to say. Should I be disturbed that there is an argument from a premise I think false to a conclusion I think true? Does the existence of such an argument give me reason to think the premise isn't false after all? Surely not. It's just as easy to find a valid argument from false premises to a true conclusion as it is to find one from true premises. (All animals are white; Chalk is not white; Therefore chalk is not an animal.) This is, perhaps, simply an infelicity in the way Kevin expresses his objection, not in the substance of that objection. But the odd way of expressing it makes me somewhat doubtful about whether I've correctly understood what he's driving at.
The substance of his objection, as far as I can make it out, is that unless I treat the will as a mechanism, I cannot say what compatiblist freedom consists in, and so I cannot give any cash-value to the distinction between what is in my power and what is possible for me.
If this is his argument, I simply deny the premise: I can say what compatiblist freedom consists in. I can say it consists in the same thing Kevin says it consists in: a man chooses freely when he chooses in accordance with his desires. I couldn't say this if I failed to distinguish between desire and choice. But I do make such a distinction. The only distinction I fail to make is that between the personal act of inclining the will, and the motion of the will itself. Both of these things are posterior to desire.
In sum, Kevin's elective-mechanism is not something implicit in our pretheoretical talk about persons who make choices, act voluntarily, etc.; it is a theoretical posit. And a rather vague one at that. I can put up with some vagueness if the theory is supported by cogent reasoning. But neither of Kevin's reasons seem convincing to me.
SECONDLY: there is the issue of Kevin's account of the fall. He disagrees (so it seems) with the Reformed consensus on this point, arguing that Adam had, before the fall, a natural tendency toward sin, but that tendency was obstructed, as it were, by the presence of the Holy Spirit. After the fall, the Holy Spirit departed, leaving the corrupt nature. The nature was no different than it was before the Spirit departed, but now it was allowed to have its natural effects, producing actual sins. At the incarnation, the logos acquired a nature just as corrupt as Adam's -- before and after the fall -- but, on account of his divinity, he was able, through his atoning work, to heal and perfect that nature.
I haven't addressed this aspect of Kevin's writings yet. I'll do so in a separate post.
The following fictional dialogue represents my attempts to crystallize the hermeneutical issue that divides me from Rome. I think many of the same things could be said, mutatis mutandis, regarding Eastern Orthodoxy; and much of what I say will be a reflection of Kevin's discussion of sola scriptura with Clifton; but, as you will see, I want to approach it in a different way. My character, Thomas, speaks for Rome rather than Byzantium because I know Rome a bit better, and am more likely to give her a fair representation. That being said, corrections are welcome from Roman Catholics, who, of course, know their own tradition better than I do.
THOMAS: I can understand, and agree with, your desire to have theology rooted in Scripture. What I don't understand is the idea that the interpretation of Scripture should be ultimately up to the individual, placing each Christian's own interpretation over the consensus fidelium. Surely such a doctrine is destructive of the unity of the Church. Can you explain to me why you think this is the right way to interpret Scripture?
JOHN: I'm afraid I can't.
THOMAS: Um, ... why not?
JOHN: Because that's not what I believe.
THOMAS: Oh, well I guess I did describe the doctrine in a negative way, not as you would. But you do believe in sola scriptura, don't you?
JOHN: No.
THOMAS: What? Do you then believe, as I do, that we are not permitted to depart from Holy Tradition?
JOHN: Yes, I agree with you there.
THOMAS: Do you believe that the Church is infallible?
JOHN: Yes, I believe that too.
THOMAS: Have you undergone a conversion since last we spoke? For I know that you used to hold beliefs that were quite contrary to the teaching of the Church.
JOHN: You know no such thing. I remain a Protestant. Our protest is not against the Church but against some of her officers, principally the bishop of Rome. But let me ask you a question: if, as we agree, the Church is infallible, who speaks for the church? Priests?
THOMAS: Well, yes. That's part of their job: to convey the content of Tradition to the laity.
JOHN: But you don't hold that everything a priest says is infallible, right?
THOMAS: Right: I don't hold that. Just because a priest says that something is the teaching of the Church doesn't mean it is. Priests are supposed to be faithful in that, but they aren't always, and sometimes they just make mistakes.
JOHN: So can we agree that, whether we call them priests or presbyters, they transmit fallibly an infallible Tradition.
THOMAS: Yes, I think that captures it. But when all the Bishops of the church agree in ecumenical council, or when the Pope speaks ex cathedra, that's a different story.
JOHN: So our disagreement concerns the question: Which officers of the church can speak for the church officially, in the sense that their teaching defines the Church's position.
THOMAS: Which officers do you think play that role?
JOHN: The Apostles.
THOMAS: But the Apostle's aren't here. Their Tradition must be transmitted to us. Of course, it is transmitted in Scripture, but Scripture needs to be interpreted, and I