The Binding of Isaac

Posted on March 19, 2015 by Matt

I’ve been giving the story of Abraham and Isaac some thought lately. It was only about a month ago that the sacrifice of Isaac came up in our lectionary. It as at about that same time that I watched an episode of Game Theory which explored the recent indie game, The Binding of Isaac. The premise of the game concerns a young child name Isaac who envisions his mother receiving a command from God to sacrifice him as proof of her faith. I have not played the game myself, but according to the show the entire game is in some ways an expression of its creator’s own childhood religious trauma.

For whatever reason, it seems a common fear among the vehemently irreligious that any devout Christian is liable to hear voices commanding him to kill and attribute it God at any given moment. While this seems an irrational fear to me, the sacrifice of Isaac has troubled many thoughtful Christians as well. Kierkegaard’s attempts to wrestle with the story are perhaps the most famous. He felt that God’s command to Abraham was so irrational that it helped lead him to believe that faith was an inherently irrational act—that ascending to faithfulness meant leaving one’s reason behind. Naturally, as a Christian with an interest in apologetics, I consider Kierkegaard’s ultimate conclusions to be anathema. As I’ve written elsewhere, faith and reason properly understood are complimentary to one another—not antagonistic. And yet, what is one to make of the story?

Part of the difficulty, I think, is how shallow the typical understanding of the story is—even among Christians. As it’s usually told, God wants to make sure he’s still number one in Abraham’s life, and so He commands Abraham to murder the miraculous son for whom he had waited a century. But once Abraham proves his love for God by raising the knife, God says He’s only kidding because He now knows Abraham’s faith is the genuine article. God then gives them a ram to sacrifice instead, which we’re told is symbolic foreshadowing of Christ’s sacrificial death on the cross. Told this way, the whole thing seems to reek of some pathological insecurity on God’s part and likewise seems like a rather drastic object lesson just for some Christ imagery that nobody would understand until more than a thousand years later.

What’s really going on in this story, however, is deeper than that. To be sure, God is testing Abraham’s faith, but not in the way that most people think. Generically, faith is just a trust in a benevolent higher power. This is where we get the whole “do you love me enough to murder your son for me” angle on this story. But generic faith is not the uniquely Christian kind of faith—the kind of faith that Paul attributes to Abraham. Christian faith or “saving” faith is a faith with a very specific object: the person and redemptive work of Jesus Christ. I believe this is the very specific faith that God was testing in Abraham.

But this was way before Christ, so how could Abraham have possibly held such a faith? Well, God promised Christ to us as a savior way before Abraham. The first thing God does after Adam and Eve confess their sin—his immediate response to the Fall—is to curse the Serpent and tell him, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall crush your head, and you shall crush his heel.” Though Adam disobeyed God in favor of Satan (and in so doing handed the devil Adam’s own dominion over the Earth,) God immediately promised that he would break up this alliance and put mankind back on His own side and defeat the devil.

This promise is what the entire book of Genesis is about, and it begins right away. Lo and behold, Eve conceives and bears an offspring. Her response is this very peculiar phrase in Hebrew. It is usually translated as “I have gotten a man with the help of the Lord” or “the Lord has given me a man,” but it is literally, “I have gotten a man the Lord.” Like Luther and other interpreters, I believe Eve thought she had just borne the Messiah. And really, this would be only natural for her. God had just promised that her offspring (singular) would crush the serpent’s head, and all of the sudden she has an offspring. But then she has this second offspring who they curiously named Abel (which means “useless,”) and things get complicated. Despite the hopes of his parents, we quickly find out that Cain was not the Messiah after all—not only did God hold no regard for Cain’s offering, he actually turns out to be a murderer. But they have another son, Seth, and the line and promise continue.

Next we move into the geneologies that everybody skips over, but which underscore this ongoing wait for the promised offspring. Offspring keep coming, but all they do is live a long time and then die. And yet, there is always another offspring to continue the promise.

Then we come to the Flood when God decides to wipe the wickedness of man off the face of creation. But what about the promised offspring? What about salvation and victory over Satan? Well, God preserves Noah, “a righteous man, blameless in his generation” along with his family. Could Noah then be the one? No, he turns out to be a drunk, and one of his sons a pervert. But Noah still passes on God’s promise to his son, Shem.

This continues until we reach Abram—a descendant of Shem whose wife is barren, but whom God singles out nevertheless. What then of the promised offspring? When Abraham and his wife are a hundred years old, God promises and then delivers a genuinely miraculous birth—a son who will be made into a great nation and a blessing for the entire world. And so, the reader is posed with another dramatic question: is Isaac finally the promised offspring?

By missing this central theme, we miss out on the real drama of the Genesis and therefore the real significance of the sacrifice of Isaac. The sacrifice of Isaac was no ploy; it was real. God promised a Messiah whose heel would be crushed by Satan. Whether this Messiah would be Abraham’s son, grandson, great grandson, or descendant, this promised offspring was going to be sacrificed to pay for the sins of the world. The question posed by the story is therefore not whether Abraham loves God enough to murder his son for Him; the question is whether Abraham really trusts in God’s promised redemption through a sacrificial Messiah that is bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh—in essence, whether Abraham trusts the person and work of Jesus Christ.

And Abraham believed. He was willing to carry out that sacrifice himself all the while believing that God would raise Isaac from the dead (he tells his servants that they would both be returning from the mountain.) When God has Abraham stay his hand, it is not to say “just kidding about the whole sacrifice thing because now I know for sure that you love me” it was to say “your faith is true and its object real, but it is not to be fulfilled yet; it is not Isaac, but another whom I will provide.” And the drama of the promise continues.

And so, the scandal inherent in the sacrifice of Isaac is merely the same scandal inherent to Christianity: that God so loved the world that he gave His only Son to die on a cross as an atoning sacrifice. Christ remains a stumbling block to the Jews and foolishness to the gentiles, but the binding of Isaac is not another stumbling block alongside him. Isaac merely began what was later fulfilled in Jesus Christ.

Posted in Apologetics, Theology | Leave a comment

Do You Believe in Magic? The Superstitious Pro-abortion Mind

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Matt

One of the ironies of America’s abortion debate is that I always hear about how pro-life people are moronic science deniers, with naught but religious reasons for their position. And yet, whenever I’ve argued the issue with a pro-abortion secularist, without exception, they not only bring up religion before I do, but they talk about it far more. They tell me what God would and wouldn’t want a young woman to be able to do. They tell me about how God would have designed pregnancy to work if He really thought abortion was a sin. They tell me all about souls and how they can’t be detected and thus cannot be used to validate the worth of an unborn child. Without my ever having mentioned God or souls at all, they happily provide their own religious beliefs on the subjects—reliefs which, being disconnected from anything God has actually revealed to us, amount to nothing more than superstitions.

To be sure, there’s no shame in having and acting on religious reasons when it comes to this and other political issues (though one should certainly hope they’re more thought out than the ad hoc pontifications supplied by the pro-choice.) After all, a religion that doesn’t affect one’s public life can hardly be called a religion at all. Nevertheless, as a matter of rhetoric, I don’t talk religion when arguing with the irreligious on issues like this. There’s no need to appeal to religious principles of which they are already skeptical when one can use the parts of the natural law which they already believe whether they realize it or not.

Any case against abortion always starts with a single principle: it’s wrong to intentionally kill an innocent human being. You don’t have to be religious to know this, and most unbelievers will admit it. While Neitzsche might have rejected notions of right & wrong and accepted murder as a legitimate means by which the strong self-actualize at the expense of the weak, today’s atheists and secularists are generally eager to prove how they’re so much more moral than the religious. Accordingly, popular defenses of abortion accept this moral axiom while denying that it applies to the unborn—usually by claiming that the unborn are not actually human beings.

This claim usually leads to a philosophical discussion about when life begins, but such an assertion implicitly raises a far more curious question: where exactly do humans come from? Though children might believe fables about storks, people generally discover the truth about sexual reproduction by the time they reach adulthood. In short, it all goes back to the concept of biogenesis. For around 150 years, science has firmly established that life only comes from other life—specifically, from the same kind of life. Dogs beget dogs, fish beget fish, flies beget flies, and humans beget humans. Biogenesis displaced the very old and (until then venerated) theory of spontaneous generation. Some life, it had been held, simply emerged on its own from non-living matter. Maggots, for example, were believed to be spontaneously generated by rotting meat. Thanks to the work of scientists like Louis Pasteur, we all know better today.

All of us, it would seem, except abortion supporters.

The way they tell the origin of human life has much more in common with spontaneous generation than with biogenesis. Rather than at conception, they claim that human life begins at birth, or at the first quickening, or when sentience is achieved, or at one of a dozen other points in time. But whatever the specifics, there is one thing all these claims have in common: the human reproductive system produces a non-human piece of matter that eventually spontaneously generates a human being just as sand was once thought to spontaneously generate clams and oysters.

But while the pro-choice implicitly rely on beliefs that are as outdated as flat-earth theory, science is solidly on the pro-life side, for conception is the mechanism of human reproduction that first creates a genetically distinct human being. Of course, the moment you mention genetics, Cancer Man shows up. Cancer Man will tell you that carcinogenic tumors also contain human DNA and then point out that we innocently cut them out all the time. He concludes that the unborn are no more genetically human than tumors, and that abortion therefore does not kill a “real” human being. What Cancer Man forgets is what every other adult in the world realizes: tumors are not human beings because cancer is no more a means of human reproduction than the fabled stork is. It’s not as though there are any doctors out there trying to offer cancer as a solution for infertile couples. His argument is simply a red, anti-science herring.

And so, not only do I hear more religious arguments from the pro-choice (and superstitious ones at that) they are also the origin of far more science denial than I’ve ever heard from the pro-life. One hopes that our nation will someday emerge from all of this dark superstition & magical thinking. Perhaps then the light of clear reason will eventually lead us away from our senseless slaughter of the most defenseless among us.

Posted in Abortion | 2 Comments

A Face for Radio

Posted on March 10, 2015 by Matt

The Federalist ran an essay of mine earlier this week:  Conservatism is Obsolete.  But if that piece leaves you wanting more, I am slated to talk about it on The Steve Deace Show this Thursday at around 4:15 pm ET.

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Do We Have to Amputate?

Posted on March 3, 2015 by Matt

There’s been an update on the Maryland family threatened by Child Protective Services for allowing their children (10 and 6) to walk to & from a local park on their own. According to the Washington Post, CPS has concluded their initial investigation and determined that this was a case of “unsubstantiated child neglect.” You can check out Maryland’s legal definition of this disposition here, but in layman’s terms, this particular status means that while CPS couldn’t prove there was any abuse going on, the couldn’t rule it out either and thus will be keeping a file on the family for 5 years just in case.

Try as I might, I cannot see how this status legitimately applies. It seems designed for cases in which CPS agents found a number of red flags, but simply couldn’t find adequate information to either confirm or disprove abuse. It’s fair enough that such a status exists, but there do not seem to be any disputed facts or gray areas in the case of the Meitiv family. At this point, everyone in the country knows what they did and why they did it. It is absolutely absurd to consider what we now call “free range parenting” and what used to simply be called “parenting” a kind of neglect or abuse.

At the root of these situations is a dismissive view of the offices of mother and father. Modern statists seem to see biological parents as a kind of circumstantial accident (just like every other fact of biology.) In other words, proximity has placed fathers and mothers in the generic role of caretaker, but in principle, any other person can fill that generic role just as well. Accordingly, many statist bureaucrats at CPS look at the act of removing children from their parents to be something akin to changing out a set of replaceable parts. If one set of caretakers isn’t performing at what they deem to be optimal levels, why not ‘upgrade’ them? It’s a diabolically inhuman view of the family.

In reality, however, our children are bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh. Parents don’t want to come home from the maternity ward at the hospital with a baby, they want to come home with their baby (and based on my own recent experience, hospitals go to great lengths to make sure that’s exactly what happens.) Likewise, when children are in distress, they don’t cry out for a generic caregiver, they cry out for a very specific mommy and daddy. There is nothing replaceable about parents.

In this human view, however, taking children away from their parents is not like swapping out your computer’s old video card for the latest and greatest. It is more like amputating a limb. There are extreme circumstances when the best medical option is to sever an arm or a leg, but it is never a good thing and always a last resort. You don’t do it because of a pulled muscle or because your leg is not as shapely you would like it to be; you do it because you will certainly die if you don’t. CPS should view seizing children with the same seriousness. There are circumstances when it is warranted. I recently read about a woman who starved her newborn to death because she was too busy using her milk in weird fetish videos. That would have been a legitimate reason to amputate. Whether or not you personally think its a good choice to let children take that kind of walk, no one with intact humanity could consider it worth amputating their parents.

Posted in Culture, Politics, Uncategorized | Leave a comment

In Which Some Nets Will Be Deemed More Neutral Than Others

Posted on March 2, 2015 by Matt

Back when I was in high school, I remember a history teacher of mine giving a not-exactly-unbiased perspective on the liberal/conservative divide in America. Conservatives, he said, were afraid of big government, but liberals realized that big government is the only thing powerful enough to protect the people from big business.

I’ve been hearing this same perspective quite a bit lately now that the FCC has given itself authority over the internet as a public utility for the sake of ‘Net Neutrality.’ The widespread narrative is that evil corporations are trying to impose fast lanes and slow lanes on your internet usage—so that some (big established corporate) content providers get privileged speed compared to others. They might charge you extra for some of your preferred browsing or even censor some of the material you consume—all at the discretion of a faceless board of directors who, when they look at their customers, see dollar signs instead of people. But now, with government regulation of the internet in place, these big mean companies won’t be able to get away with any of that stuff.

Unfortunately, the more facts one is aware of, the less plausible that story becomes. After all, Comcast (which as their customers can attest is surely an evil corporation if ever one existed) was lobbying in favor of government regulation—not against it. Likewise FCC chairman Tom Wheeler, who proposed this new authority in the first place, is a man who worked as a lobbyist on behalf of those very big evil cable companies. In other words, the corporations aren’t fearing these new regulations as something that could thwart their evil plans. They actually welcome them.

But why? Are they penitents who realize that they need help and welcome the gentle hand of Uncle Sam to restore them to virtue? Hardly. You see, my history teacher and liberals in general continue to make one giant mistake in their analysis. In the real world, big government is an ally of big business—not an opponent. No matter how big and powerful Comcast (for example) becomes on its own, there is one thing it cannot ultimately accomplish: hanging on to customers who want nothing to do with them. But with government regulation, all sorts of things (like government-protected monopolies) are possible. And big evil corporations have a huge advantage over both customers and competitive entrepreneurs when it comes to playing the lobbying game.

Wherever competition exists in a free marketplace, customers can vote with their dollars. If one company fails to be worth the cost, then consumers can ‘next’ them and move on to another provider. It gives dissatisfied customers an out when things get hairy and companies an incentive to not be entirely horrible. There might not be much competition among internet providers, but there is competition. Most Americans have at least a some degree of choice in the matter.

Granted, this is an imperfect level of choice because the market doesn’t always provide a good set of options at any given time. I, for example, am one of those Americans who only has one choice of broadband provider where I live. And they are absolutely abysmal. Every time my internet went out (and it happened a lot), I had to wait a week for them to send out a technician. When one of those technicians screwed up and left me worse off than when they first arrived, I had to wait another week for them to come back and spend (literally) 5 minutes crimping a cable. I was told by a technician that a large part of the delays I experienced was because the company didn’t even provide enough tools to go around among their crews. It wasn’t just a waiting list for a technician—it was a waiting list for a technician who could grab a toolbox from another technician.

So what did a helpless victimized consumer like myself do? I had to upgrade to their business service that had guaranteed 4-hour response times. In other words, I paid extra for a kind of ‘fast lane.’ This is exactly the kind of option that government regulation likes to take away because its unfair to people. And it is unfair. I resent my cable company for forcing me to pay extra to be protected from their own utter incompetence. But I am up and running reliably now, and I am a living, breathing opportunity for other providers in the area that are expanding their coverage area. The second they move a few blocks over to where I am, I will kiss my current company goodbye. On top of that, technology is constantly changing. The broad dissatisfaction with cable providers is also an opportunity for innovation. The next entrepreneur that finds a better way will be well rewarded for their efforts.

But because this level of choice is imperfect, liberals want to take it away and hand the reins over to government instead because they think it gives people a louder voice in how they’re served. But in practice, all it means is that I have to vote with ballots instead of dollars. What good is that going to do me when all of this regulation is being decided by unelected bureaucrats? 61% of Americans oppose this decision, but the FCC went ahead and made it anyway. So much for government listening to the voice of the people. All my vote does is give me one voice among millions to help decide whether a couple politicians who appoint the bureaucrats who appoint the bureaucrats who appoint the bureaucrats who actually decide these matters have an ‘R’ or a ‘D’ after their names when they show up on C-SPAN. Suddenly voting with my dollars doesn’t seem too shabby after all.

Many proponents of net neutrality thought they were pushing for more government power so that government could simply protect the open internet status quo that we all know and love—“preventing cable company f*ckery” as John Oliver put in his popular segment on the subject. Predictably, they’re already having second thoughts. As it turns out, the FCC assigned themselves very broad powers with very vague guidelines—vague enough that even the advocates of net neutrality are already worried about government overreach. Given the historical characters of American government, it’s hard to fathom why they expected anything different. It’s like giving a junkie a huge sack of crack and then telling him to only use a little bit responsibly. As Vox Day wrote on the subject, “Once you declare ‘the FCC has a role to play’, your part is done. You won’t get to tell them how to play it. The FCC will decide that for itself, thank you very much.”

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The Missing Letter

Posted on February 25, 2015 by Matt

About four years ago, I thought I was being clever when I used the phrase “GLBTQAZetc” to refer to the growing alphabet soup of sexual perversion. Turns out that Weslyan University’s unintentional self-parody takes it up a notch.

Open House is a safe space for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Transsexual, Queer, Questioning, Flexual, Asexual, Genderfuck, Polyamourous, Bondage/Disciple, Dominance/Submission, Sadism/Masochism (LGBTTQQFAGPBDSM) communities and for people of sexually or gender dissident communities.

They’re so diverse and inclusive they included B, G, T, and Q twice. But I can’t help but notice that the ‘C’ is missing. I’m referring, of course, to ‘chastity.’ If there is one group of people who are genuinely “sexually dissident” in the modern university, it’s the chaste.

Posted in Chastity | 3 Comments

Rainbow Lobby Trying to Take an Elderly Grandmother’s Business and Home over $7.91

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Matt

In what has become an increasingly common story, Barronelle Stutzman, a 70-year-old florist in Washington State, chose not to help two male customers pretend that they were marrying each other because she deemed such assistance a violation of her Christian faith. According to The Daily Signal:

In March 2013, when Robert Ingersoll asked Stutzman to design floral arrangements for his same-sex wedding to Curt Freed, she declined, citing her Christian faith.

“I put my hand on his and said, ‘I’m sorry Rob, I can’t do your wedding because of my relationship with Jesus Christ,’” Stutzman said. “We talked a little bit, we talked about his mom [walking him down the aisle]…we hugged and he left.”

Stutzman enjoyed a close relationship with Ingersoll, serving him for many years, and never expected what would happen next.

What happened next was a pair of lawsuits—one filed by Washington State Attorney General Bob Ferguson and the other filed by the ACLU on behalf of Ingersoll and Freed. After all, this was a massive setback for the tolerant couple who informed the court that the cost of driving to another florist amounted to a whopping $7.91.

The cost to Stutzman has unfortunately proven much higher. On top of the $7.91 fine decided by the court, there is an additional $2000 fine imposed by the state. But it doesn’t end there, because it is $2000 per violation of Washington’s anti-discrimination laws. According to Fox News, all this publicity has lead to a number of lavender fascists flooding Stutzman’s shop with requests for flowers for gay pretend-weddings just for the sake of punishing her for her refusal to participate in their lifestyle choices. Of course, even these costs are dwarfed by the legal fees the whole fiasco has forced on her—fees reaching into seven digit figures.

It’s tragic that liberal America’s sense of justice has forgotten so basic a concept as proportionality.  The left’s response to any offense is now a knee-jerk attempt to destroy the offender.  The material harm to Ingersoll and Freed (if indeed ‘harm’ is even an appropriate term) was valued at a mere $7.91.  How many different ways could they have reacted to it?  If Ingersoll responded to Stutzman’s refusal by taking his business elsewhere, it would be reasonable and perfectly appropriate.  If he and his partner warned their friends against doing business with her, it would be understandable.  Organizing a large boycott would perhaps stray into the realm of vindictiveness.  But relentlessly pursuing her through the courts until she loses her home, business, and everything she’s worked for over a matter of $7.91?  That is an unconscionable level of venom and spite.  These are kind of tender mercies Christians will enjoy if we fail to protect religious liberty.

The root of these kinds of injustices is the fact that Americans have acquired the confused belief that freedom of religion depends on an official religious neutrality in the public square. In other words, for everybody to be free, nobody can be allowed to actually act as though their religion is true whenever they might encounter someone who does not share their creed. Accordingly, our president talks about “freedom of worship” which amounts to nothing more than the option of going into a private building and participating in a liturgy exclusively with like-minded believers. But that is by no means what religion is. It is the nature of a god to be ultimate—to be a concern that trumps all others. If this is the case, then religious neutrality is an incoherent ideal, for gods demand public behavior as well. As J. Budziszewski has often pointed out, Religious neutrality cannot be practiced consistently in public or otherwise. If our freedom to practice religion by following a god is to mean anything at all, then it must extend into our public lives as well. It is for precisely this reason that the beating heart of religious freedom in America is the free exercise thereof—a public right granted to everyone rather than a prohibition that restricts the faithful.

The U.S. Constitution guarantees this free exercise of religion to American citizens. Its a freedom that has lead people of a multitude of creeds to come here seeking refuge from persecution and death. It is a freedom that is supposed to protect people like Stutzman from the bigots who want to take away everything she has because of her beliefs. It has become increasingly apparent that this centuries-old freedom that is so central to American identity is incompatible with contemporary anti-discrimination laws—laws that merely prevent the horror of having to drive to another florist. If the rainbow lobby wants to force Americans to choose between these two protections, then the choice should be clear to anyone who is not obsessed with cutting out a pound of Christian flesh.

Posted in Culture, Politics | 3 Comments

On Yoga Pants and Priorities

Posted on February 24, 2015 by Matt

It seems there’s some kind of lively debate going on about yoga pants and modesty among American Evangelicals. It’s not a subject that I’ve really been invested in. On one hand, I’m more inclined to see yoga pants as slovenly than as sexy. On the other, it has become impossible for American Christians to even broach the subject of modesty without some women getting hysterical about being fitted for burkas (as though there is no middle ground between skin-tight pants and a linen sack with an eye slit.) As a matter of practicality, one simply cannot discuss such a subject entirely in the abstract without ever touching on actual tangible items of clothing, which means it cannot be done without offending people who are self-righteously convinced that they could not possibly be dressing immodestly. If the subject is worth talking about (and I believe all virtues—modesty included—are) then the discussion is going to be impassioned. There’s no way out of it.

But whenever anybody has an impassioned discussion, there’s always somebody else who deems the passions of others misplaced when they do not match her own. Thus, Ashley Dickens took it upon herself to make a list of Ten Things We Should Get Angry About Before Yoga Pants. She then lists ten ongoing worldwide atrocities that she thinks “should fill up the Christian blogosphere before we consider talking about yoga pants.”

Now, one could take issue with this for a number of reasons, but what always gets me is Christians who play the Pharisee card without understanding what it means. Dickens does this, claiming an undue focus on rules and regulations by those peeved by tight pants–one that dishonors those who truly suffer. But the error of the Pharisees was not taking the Law too seriously—it was not taking it seriously enough. They displaced God’s laws with their own traditions, and in so doing, missed the most important point of those laws—revealing our own sinfulness and pointing us towards Christ.

Well, Dickens offers up some new laws when it comes to talking about yoga pants that amount to: don’t do it until you’re done addressing all the death and destruction in the world. Are they good ones? Rather than teaching as doctrines the commandments of men, I think it does us good to look at some of the things Christ actually taught that apply to these proposed rules.

“He who is faithful in very little is also faithful in much.”

There is no use calling for Christians to ignore the little things so that they can focus on the big ones, for no one is qualified to tackle the big ones if they don’t even handle the little. To be sure, yoga pants are a little thing while subjects like abortion and starvation are not. But neglecting our more mundane and close-to-home responsibilities so that we can be big global heroes is in no way heroic. And make no mistake: exhorting women to be modest is something God has done Himself and entrusted to the Church as a responsibility.

Dickens tells us to save our outrage for bigger issues, as though outrage is a limited resource and America is suffering from an outrage shortage (frankly, I see little evidence of this.)  Furthermore, our outrage is always a little thing whether it is about leggings or about ISIS. To be fair, many Christians go further and devote tangible resources to the relief of great suffering—they give out of their wealth to those who have none. This is wonderful! But are we really saying here that we spend so much time writing checks and doing volunteer work that we don’t have time to teach our daughters not to dress provocatively or to consider what that means in practical terms? Now, if someone is a relief worker who actually goes to these places and does the Lord’s work in helping the suffering, then I’m certainly not going to call them on accidentally letting modesty slip their minds. But let’s get real—this is not who most American Christians are. We do not actually have to choose between one and the other.

One of the atrocities on Dickens’ list is abortion. It is rightly regarded as such, but serves as an ideal example of why being faithful in little is so important. The only reason yoga pants are an issue at all is because actually teaching the virtues of modesty and chastity has become scandalous to Americans. But the only reason abortion occurs on the scale it does in America is because we have not been taught the virtues of modesty and chastity. In other words, it is only because we neglected the smaller things that this particular horror has emerged from the abyss.

Now, there are legal and ideological battles to be fought in this war, and good on those of you who fight them—your work is very important. But again, that’s really not most of us. We all have smaller opportunities to contribute, but many of us waste them because we want to pretend we’re slaying dragons. Raising awareness about the plague is pointless if we don’t do our job of keeping the sewers in working order; likewise, getting angry about abortion (aren’t we already there?) does little good when we drive up the demand for abortion by cultivating an unchaste and immodest culture. We should be politically active on the subject and fight the ideological war, but you know… parents will prevent more actual abortions by teaching their children (especially their daughters) to be chaste and to guard that chastity with modesty than they ever will by voting Republican or blogging about the subject.

“The poor you will always have with you.”

This world is broken beyond our ability and God’s intention to repair. Just as the Christian passes through death on his way to eternal life, so the restoration of God’s creation requires its destruction first. Despite what some Christians have made up concerning the Millennium, the Bible never teaches that we will transform the earth into a place of peace by our faithfulness (even when we add “oh, and by God’s power too” as an afterthought.) According to Peter, this creation is slated for fire. There will always be death, starvation, and mayhem until the Last Day. When the disciples asked Jesus for signs of the End, he starts off by telling them not to be deceived and lists some things that aren’t signs. Among them, “you will hear of wars and rumors of wars. See that you are not alarmed, for this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation and kingdom against kingdom, and there will be famines and earthquakes in various place.” War, famine, and pestilence will be here on one day and there on the next, but they will always be somewhere.

This is precisely why Christ taught us that the poor will always be with us (after his disciples rebuked a woman for not having her priorities straight, curiously enough.) This, of course, means that we will always have to care for them. But you don’t feed the hungry for the sake of winning a war on hunger—you do so because they are hungry. If we table Christ’s other commands until the poor and downtrodden are all taken care of, then we table them until he returns. Christ never instructed us to do any such thing. Once we start dropping Christ’s teachings to make more room for acts of mercy, we cease to be the Church and become a charity instead. When it comes to being merciful to those afflicted by the great evils of the world compared with promoting the virtue of modesty, “this you should have done without neglecting the other.” If some feel compelled to speak out about minor matters like yoga pants, then the hand has no business telling the eye “I have no need of you.”

“You search the Scriptures because you think that in them you have eternal life; and it is they that bear witness about me.”

And here we reach the biggest issue with Dickens’ post.

The Pharisees’ problem was deeper than not getting the law right—it was thinking that following the law made them pure before God. But the entire point of the Law and the Prophets is Jesus: the Incarnation by which manhood was assumed and made perfect by God; the Atonement by which our sins against the Law are forgiven and we are reconciled to God. Though Dickens calls the people yakking about yoga pants Pharisees, she falls into the same error of the historical Pharisees.

When she talks of “the redemptive work Jesus has charged us with,” she never refers to the proclamation of the Gospel—the forgiveness of sins for the whole world. She only speaks of generic works of earthly service to those in great need. Such works of mercy are wonderful, but make no mistake: while God’s love for us is the Gospel, our love for each other is the Law. These are the commands we are supposed to carry out but at which we fail miserably. To forget about modesty for the sake of acts of mercy is not the redemptive work of Christ; it merely trades one “list of do’s and don’ts” for a different “list of do’s and don’ts”—a trade Christ never authorized us to make.

If we think our identity as Christians is founded in our mercy rather than our modesty, then we are as wrong as those who find it in our modesty rather than in our mercy. Even the best of our good works do not define us (thanks be to God, because the best of my works certainly aren’t anything to write home about.) Our identity as Christians is found in the forgiveness of sins won by Christ and distributed to us by Word and Sacrament. Not in our yoga pants, not in our priorities, not in our moral outrage, not in our blog posts, and not even in our charity.

Posted in Ethics, The Modern Church | Leave a comment

Apologetics: Doing the Job the ELCA Won’t Do

Posted on February 20, 2015 by Matt

Well, one of them, at any rate. My wife alerted me to a recent question on the ELCA’s official Ask a Pastor [or Pastrix] page:

It’s evident that violations of the laws of nature do not occur in our universe. Christianity depends on the existence of events that violate those laws. How can an intelligent human being be a Christian? – Bob Lawrence, Chicago.

Two pastrixes and a pastor tried to provide Bob with an answer, but to call them underwhelming would be an understatement.

The first (after indicating that she could totally give an intelligent answer if she wanted to, she just doesn’t want to) essentially says that stupid people can believe in Christianity because of God’s gift of faith, so intelligent people can also believe by that same gift. This is true after a fashion, but dodges Bob’s question entirely (what is the intelligent person to do?) and thereby gives the distinct impression that intelligence must be voluntarily set aside to be a Christian.

The second is even worse. She defends the existence of God based on her own personal mysticism (“dreams and premonitions”) and suggests that Bob adopt mysticism as well because reason is just one way of knowing—and a faulty one at that. Now, reason may not be the only way of knowing something, but mysticism isn’t a way of knowing anything at all. Bob supposedly needs to try and feel God before trying to understand him. The message here seems to be “stop thinking so much and just feel instead.” Even if “feeling God” were an acceptable approach to Bob’s conundrum (it’s not), telling someone to feel a certain way is generally the surest way of making sure that they never do.

The third is better (kind of like how irritable bowel syndrome is better than smallpox or Ebola.) He tells Bob that he believes based on his own experience of the miraculous, and acknowledges that such experiences aren’t helpful to those who haven’t shared them. This is fair enough, but he doesn’t offer anything else. He says it’s impossible to convince somebody logically to come to faith and so doesn’t try (which is true, but that’s not the only reason to answer a question), then says that he does not believe this faith necessitates giving up on science, the laws of nature, and so forth. That’s it. He never explains why his faith is compatible with these things. He essentially tells Bob that he’s wrong but that he can’t explain why he’s wrong. It’s both honest and reasonable to admit that he cannot answer the question, but its pretty disappointing when “I can’t answer the question” is one of the three answers on a Q&A page. It’s doubly disappointing when the question is so common and has been answered so well by Christians over the past few centuries. Pastors, of all people, should be aware of this.

So much for always being ready to make a defense when someone asks for a reason for the hope that we have. Then again, given how much the Bible is ignored and/or denied by the ELCA, it’s not terribly surprising that 1st Peter 3:15 is likewise dropped along the way. Well, Bob Lawrence might not have received anything but fluff and nonsense from the ELCA, but for the sake of my Christian readers who have or know someone with this question, Bob’s question can be and has been answered.

First, its worth pointing out that Bob’s initial assumption should not be taken for granted. Whether it is indeed evident that violations of the laws of nature do not occur depends on what one means by “laws of nature.” If these laws are simply our summaries of how we observe nature working, then they can be “violated” whenever we come across new information, and they may have been violated in the past where our information is incomplete. If, for example, one presumes that “the dead stay dead” is one such law, then it is evident that this law has indeed been violated: all of the historical evidence indicates that Jesus Christ rose from the dead. When it comes to questions of nature and history, we need to allow the evidence to tell us what’s possible, and if the evidence tells us that what we consider to be laws of nature have been broken, then our philosophical protestations aren’t going to accomplish anything other than obscuring reality.

But what if one considers the laws of nature to be something akin to the laws of mathematics (e.g. that 2 + 2 = 4)? In other words, what if their violation is actually incoherent rather than merely unobserved by the skeptic? Even this concept leaves room for miraculous circumstances. Rather than the laws of nature being violated by the miracle, all it means is that there is more going on in such instances than just the laws of nature by themselves.

I’m a software engineer by day (lay theologian by night.) Throughout my career, I’ve received a myriad of comments from customers telling me that it is impossible to accomplish something with software I’ve had a hand in developing. They experience the software, they discover the various ways in which it works, and then find that it cannot do what they want. But very often, this is because they do not truly understand how the program works—their own experience of it is inadequate. I’ve been on support calls where I simply go into a menu, change a setting, and then immediately accomplish what they thought was impossible. Other times, I’ve fixed issues by changing data in the database that the customer was unable to access. By doing either of these things, did I change how the software works? Did I break the rules I programmed into it? No; there was simply more going on in the software than what the customer had seen and experienced for themselves—more even than what they were capable of doing themselves.

The laws of nature discovered by science are no different. As C.S. Lewis points out in Miracles, whenever anyone speaks of an action and reaction governed by the laws of nature, it is always conditioned by a sense of “all other things being equal.” His example was that if you hit one billiard ball with another, it will always react in a certain way governed by the laws of physics—unless somebody interferes. If someone reaches down and grabs the ball that was struck, then it’s not going to move the same way. This isn’t a violation of the laws of nature, it’s simply the addition of agency alongside those laws. Lewis writes,

If the laws of Nature are necessary truths, no miracle can break them: but then no miracle needs to break them. It is with them as with the laws of arithmetic. If I put six pennies into a drawer on Monday and six more on Tuesday, the laws decree that—other things being equal—I shall find twelve pennies there on Wednesday. But if the drawer has been robbed I may in fact find only two. Something will have been broken (the lock of the drawer or the laws of England) but the laws of arithmetic will not have been broken. The new situation created by the thief will illustrate the laws of arithmetic just as well as the original situation. But if God comes to work miracles, He comes ‘like a thief in the night’. Miracle is, from the point of view of the scientist, a form of doctoring, tampering, (if you like) cheating. It introduces a new factor into the situation, namely supernatural force, which the scientist had not reckoned on. He calculates what will happen, or what must have happened on a past occasion, in the belief that the situation, at that point of space and time, is or was A. But if supernatural force has been added, then the situation really is or was AB. And no one knows better than the scientist that AB cannot yield the same result as A. The necessary truth of the laws, far from making it impossible that miracles should occur, makes it certain that if the Supernatural is operating, they must occur. For if the natural situation by itself, and the natural situation plus something else, yielded only the same result, it would be then that we should be faced with a lawless and unsystematic universe. The better you know that two and two make four, the better you know that two and three do not.

The scientist studies nature, but the contention of the Christian is that nature is not all there is. The scientist forbids himself from considering supernatural options, and this is often a reasonable restriction in day-to-day life. If my car breaks down, I generally don’t have any reason to believe there is a supernatural force responsible, and so I take it to to someone who knows how cars work to repair it—a mechanic rather than an exorcist. However, science ceases to be the only useful tool whenever we do have good reason to suspect supernatural action (for example, when a man claims to be God and proves it by healing the sick, calming the storms, rising from the dead, and so forth.) When there is more than nature at work, a tool that is blind to everything but nature cannot be the only tool used to understand the situation—nor is such a tool capable on its own of affirming or denying whether there is anything more at work because it merely assumes there isn’t.

It is usually at this point that the complaint shifts away from “miracles are impossible” to “miracles are immoral.” In other words, the objection is raised that a good God would never “interfere” with nature in this way. As usual, anyone who starts making claims about what a good God would or would not do is merely stating what he himself would or would not do if he were God. The ancient Gnostics, for example, thought that the supreme God would never condescend to interact with this base physical world. But this is because the Gnostics believed the physical world was base and assumed that God must agree with them. What God said about Himself in this regard was never terribly important to them. The adherents of scientism take a similar approach. Because they idolize science and incoherently claim that it is the only way a person can know anything at all, they assume that any “God” they could imagine would never be so impious as to confound scientists by creating situations that science cannot properly analyze on its own.

But God does not respect our idols. Indeed, to what external standard can we expect God to conform? Did he gift us with an orderly creation? Yes. Did he gift us with intellects that help us understand that creation? Yes. Nevertheless, on what grounds do we forbid His interaction with that creation? The Deists thought of creation as God’s perfectly engineered machine—so perfect that any updates or adjustments would be both unnecessary and scandalous. But creation is not merely a machine; it is personal. It is personal because it includes persons such as ourselves and because it has character inasmuch as it reflects and expresses the character of its Creator. It is a work of art rather than of engineering. Why then should a God who is also three persons not have personal interaction with it—interaction that involves agency in addition to a set of rules?

Accordingly, miracles present no real difficulty to the intelligent as such. Granted, there are some forms of foolishness of which only the intelligent are capable, and these forms may pose difficulties. Miracles may be incompatible with philosophies like scientism, logical positivism, Humean skepticism, and the like. Nevertheless, God did not foist these philosophies on us, and our intellects do not demand adherence to them.

Posted in Apologetics, Science | Leave a comment

Sentamentalism & Leftism != Goodness

Posted on February 14, 2015 by Matt

Look out, Christians; it looks like godless parents raise more liberal kids than we do.

Wait… what do you mean that’s not news? But Jezebel just ran a big ‘gotcha’ story on it denouncing us. Well, they did headline it as Godless Parents Are Doing a Better Job (of course they did) but frankly, the way I framed it is more accurate. After all, Jezebel’s followup to their headline reads, “Overall, not believing in God seems to make people and their offspring more tolerant. Less racist. Less sexist. Enviro-friendly” defining morality entirely in terms of political leftism. The piece ends the same way, quoting the Zuckerman editorial that spawned it to indicate how the godless are more likely to believe in global warming, support gay rights, and embrace feminism. So from top to bottom, their claims of superior morality amount to nothing more than claims of being further left-of-center.

How very shocking.

It’s just another in a long line of “we don’t need God to be good” pieces—and a particularly bigoted one at that. After author Tracy Moore ends a full paragraph of hysterical ranting about all the horrible Christians who surrounded her in her youth, so goes on to say, “seriously: I’m not one of those people who thinks anyone who is religious is dumb, or narrow-minded, or any such thing.” Then, in the very next paragraph she clarifies that it’s really only 100 out of every 101 that she ever encountered who are actually like that.  I’m not kidding; she really says that. In the very next paragraph. She is truly the paragon of the acceptance and open-mindedness for which she perpetually praises herself.

A century or so ago, atheists actually had courage and conviction; they followed their beliefs to where they naturally led: “if God is dead, then everything is permitted.” Half a century and tens of millions of deaths caused by atheist regimes later, they began to realize that this wasn’t terribly good PR and instead started blaming Christians for spreading nasty rumors about how amoral atheists are. Today, atheists are much more liable to insist, like the Jezebel piece, that they actually are our moral superiors—that Christianity gets in the way of being a good person.

Now, which group comes out ahead in terms of earthly righteousness isn’t terribly important to me. As a Christian, my religion is based on the fact that Christians are forgiven in Christ—not that we’re better people than everyone else. Nevertheless, what goodness and morality actually mean are undoubtedly worthy topics to explore. Reading the Jezebel piece, it quickly becomes apparent that morality means something radically different to the kind of bigoted unbeliever who wrote it.

Amidst the sea of anti-god cliches littered throughout, Moore explains the moral superiority of the godless by continually underscoring a single point: empathy. “Morality,” she says, “comes not from a book, or a guy up in the sky, but from the idea that how you treat people matters, because how people feel matters.” “[Not believing] can give you a greater clarity about right and wrong, because you’re more likely to base it on empathy and decency than a guaranteed spot upstairs come Judgment Day.” In other words, the thesis presented in the piece is that atheists do better because they care so much more about how people feel. Now, if sentimentalism were the same thing as morality, as Moore assumes, then she might have a case. Fortunately, they’re not.

I say “fortunately” not for the sake of the reputation of the godly, but for the sake of civilization. Narrowly basing morality entirely on how sorry you feel for someone else altogether expels higher ethical concepts like justice and mercy. Because its easier to empathize with an unprepared mother than with an unborn child, the sentimentalist fights for the gruesome deaths of tens of millions of the latter. Because it is easier to empathize with rape victims than with men who are falsely accused, the sentimentalist embraces hoax after hoax in order to eliminate every facet due process that protects against false accusations. But at the same time, because they find it easier to empathize with poor ethnic minorities than with whites, the sentimentalist turns a blind eye to the actual rapes and sexual slavery of hundreds of young white girls in Rotherham out of fear of provoking a backlash of insensitivity against the Pakistani immigrants who were raping them. Because it is easier to empathize with current cultural underdogs, the sentimentalist brings up past atrocities like the Spanish Inquisition (responsible for the executions of around 1250 people total over three and a half centuries) in order to minimize the ongoing murders of tens of thousands every year at the hands of Muslim terrorists.

Sentimentalism leaves no room for justice, no room for mercy, no room for the rule of law. For the sentimentalist, questions of who to protect as a victim and who to punish as a perpetrator are resolved entirely by who they happen to feel sorry for. When they acquire political power, the force of the state is directed towards these ends. Far from being moral, sentimentalism is merely another means for the powerful to prey on the people they don’t like. If this is what the godless exclaim about themselves, then it is no wonder that those with whom the godless do not empathize (like Christians, based on Moore’s bigoted tirade) have no desire to let the godless acquire political power and cultural influence.

It has often been noted that if liberals didn’t have double-standards, then they would have no standards at all. This kind of sentimentalism promoted as morality is what enables virtually every kind of hypocrisy we find on the left—whether godless or not.

[Author’s Note:  Hans Fiene recently wrote a great take-down of the original Zuckerburg piece over at the Federalist.  It’s so much better than what you just read that I wouldn’t have bothered posting this at all if I hadn’t already written 80% of it by the time I read Fiene’s.]

Posted in Atheism, Culture, Ethics, Humanism, Politics | Leave a comment