Now I’m not saying that I am perfect, or that I haven’t harmed others as well, but I will say I try damned hard not to cause people harm and if I find out that I did harm someone, I make efforts to make it right.  We are all sinners, we all harm people, but some people seem to be really good at it. They “practice” their sin and some have even made it into a near art form.  I should also make two more qualifications.  I know that my stories are neither the only ones of their kind, nor are they near the worst of their kind.  Many of you reading this (all 9) have as many if not more stories than I do, and I am certainly aware that people have suffered far worse abuses; everything from sexual abuse to murder at the hands of the church. I am neither unique nor playing the martyr.; I’m just pissed.

The question then is – what is wrong here. Why does the church operate in a way so fundamentally contrary to the message of the gospel. Sure sure, we are “all sinners” and “fallible” and a host of other qualifications to justify treating someone else like a piece of shit, but shouldn’t the church be at least a little bit of a haven. To be honest, and I don’t think I am alone, I have felt more love and fellowship with non-believers than believers; and thats just wrong.

If you are ever pastor, fellow congregent, or God and Ordination willing one day, my flock – I just want to say two things. If I ever harm you, tell me. I can hear it, I can take it and I will make it right. Also, if you are one of those folks who regularly harm others then watch out cause I won’t allow you to persist in such a nasty sin. Christ values you too much to see you tear his flock apart. Christ loves you too much to allow you to turn his church into a hate factory, producing people burnt crisp by the ‘love of the brethren’ and seething at the church of Christ.

Would love to hear (assuming I have any readership left) some of your stories

To demonstrate this he uses the example of a series of white pebbles spread over a train station yard. Suppose that the pebbles spell out “Welcome to Wales, by British Railways” on the lawn. We would be right to assume that a stationmaster has spelled these words, rather than to think that natural occurrences have caused them to happen. He goes on to say that suppose that in the same yard, over 1000 years, the pebbles get dispersed and scatted so that they no longer spell any words. Here we might assume the lack of a station master. However in both cases the probability of the pebbles being in the spots they are in is exactly the same. In a given sized field, with a set amount of stones, either pattern would be equally likely to have arisen from chance. Without the conventions of language to decide that there is a seeming order to the earlier arrangement of pebbles we would not expect one outcome over the other. So probability cannot account for what actually has happened, but can only give us statistical guidelines as to what may happen, given certain parameters. Accounting for what actually happened is acutely a function of personal knowledge.

In another example he says “suppose you walked into a store and were informed that you were the 500,000^th customer.” You would speak about how improbable that was, and how unlikely it might be to occur to you. But no one would think it improbable to be the 522,796^th customer. This is because people attach significance to round numbers, and hence see 500,000 being highly improbable even though from a probability standpoint it is more probable to be the 500,000^th customer than the 522,796^th customer.

Hence in both cases the fact that we (the subjective knower) attach meaning to the events is what gives them their meaning. While still based on probability, the meaning is yet a derived function of the subjective knower, not an objective function of probability factors. In fact a thing which is less probable might be forgotten as common, while a more probable event might be praised as wildly improbable.

As an aside, I can’t help but here to think that this has a great deal of applicability to Hume’s famous maxim about miracles being highly improbable events. Hume argues that for a given occurrence X, we may have thousands of times where a certain outcome occurs. For instance, given a dead body (X) we have thousands of occurrences of the dead staying dead. So therefore given the claim that a dead body has risen, we should disbelieve it based on the improbability of such a thing. Hume argues t he the high improbability of that happening derails considering it an option. This, however, is problematic, since it uses probability as a function not of subjective knowledge, but of objective fact which (it would seem) he has literally no real access to. So Hume has then assumed what Polanyi warned us against, to think that probability makes a difference in real world events. What is interesting here is how this will relate to the positive gathering of knowledge, rather than the simple deconstruction of ideas. More on this topic later.

The form of post modernity then which seems the most able to accomplish this goal is that of realist post modernity, which is known variously as critical realism, practical realism or naïve realism. This set of philosophical systems is in distinction to the other more widely known post modern camp of anti-realism. Critical realism (which is meant here in to refer to any variety of realist post modernity) states that actual knowledge is possible, but such knowledge must be held with respect to the knower’s limitations.  It is a limiting factor to the ability of human epistemology, a necessary and purposeful corrective to the positivism of modernity,  without running like a lemming over the abyss of nihilism as its anti-realist cousins seem to do.

The critical realist perspective is attracting everyone from evangelicals such as Kent Sparks of Eastern University to famous atheists such as the late Bertrand Russell.  It promises to be a way forward, out of the impossible philosophical trenches which were dug by modernity. Likely there is no one more directly responsible for this forward march than Dr. Michael Polanyi. Dr. Polanyi was one of those rare people who begins his career as a chemist and mathematician, and decided at some point that he fancied economics (so he just takes it up and helps to change the face of that field) and then turned towards philosophy (again changing that field). He seems to have been the academic version of King Midas everything he touched yielding intellectual gold. Over the next several posts I am going to try and understand his system and offer some commentary of my own for its utility in Christian theological reflection. Ill begin by blogging through Dr. Polanyi’s text “Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy,”  and then move to “Meaning” a text he co authored with Harry Prosch. Finally Im going to examine a collection of critical essays by T.F. Torrance and others responding to Polanyi’s use of critical realist ideas and shaping them into a religious context.  If any of you are still listening/reading this blog your comments and thoughts would be helpful.

So congrats Rebecca; great prank – you sure know how to push my buttons ;

I had a lengthy discussion today with a fellow student on the subject of radical egalitarianism and yet the subject of women in ministry never came up. No one quoted qualifications for elders, the book of church order, or made references to Romans 16. Our discussion actually ignored the place of women in the church for a much odder and more interesting discussion. Specifically we were discussing the merits of personhood. Recent happenings in various fields of Philosophy of Mind, as well as advances in scientific processes have led to questions of what it means to be a person. What will follow on this blog is a series of posts which concern these questions; what does it mean to be a person, what does it mean to be made in the image of God, and how will future considerations change our theology of man?

The first topic under discussion is how artificial intelligence relates to questions of worship. Specifically; what are the limits of personhood and how might this become a problem for Christian theology.

Suppose someone enters your church with an artificial heart; is there any reason to deny him the ability to worship since he is less than “fully” human? I think most sane people would agree that he is still considered human, even with a mechanical implant which is necessary for life. But supposing science continues to develop, what percentage of a person must be “original” to be considered human? What about a man with an artificial heart and four artificial limbs, or a person with an entirely artificial internal organ system, or a human brain placed within a mechanical body? Does this sound ridiculously science fictionish to you? It shouldn’t!

Recently engineers and neurobiologists developed a robot whose central processing center is comprised of rodent brain cells which can successful navigate obstacles and solve simple problems. Simply put this is a very primitive brain within a mechanical device. Presumably, it is not a tremendous leap to have part or all of a human brain within a mechanical body. In fact one can imagine a person who underwent a severe trauma receiving a full body prosthesis in the future. Suppose that this mechanical body with a human brain had the range of human emotions, will, personhood, etc…Should he/it be allowed to serve you communion on Sundays?

What about memory implants – suppose that a person’s memory was supplemented by mechanical devices (and assume that the computer you are using to read this doesn’t already count as an extension of your memory.). Sound amazingly impossible. It’s not! Researchers have already begun work on neural implants which would supplant memory. Would a person with this implant be human? Probably so – but what if she had all her memory functions driven by neural implants? What if her brain was comprised entirely of artificial neural networks?

Combine these two examples, and you have a difficult question; is artificial intelligence possible and what does this do for our theology. Suppose you have an entirely artificial system of neurology combined with an artificial body; a machine, pure and simple. Does such a thing have a soul. If not, then where ought the line be drawn on the spectrum between a person with an artificial limb say and an artificial person.

In the near future it is at least feasible to see people who in part or whole have their various biological systems supplemented by machines? At what level of supplementation (if at any level) are these people considered less than people? – Could a partial human brain, supplemented with memory chips and artificial processors and housed within a mechanical body be considered “created in the image of God?” Should such a person (thing?) be allowed to worship God? Is there the possibility for a soul in the machine?

 

“VAna,gkh ou=n ta. me.n u`podei,gmata tw/n evn toi/j ouvranoi/j tou,toij kaqari,zesqai( auvta. de. ta. evpoura,nia krei,ttosin qusi,aij para. tau,tajÅ”

It is necessary then that on the one hand the copies of “things in the heavens” to be cleansed, but the things of heaven themselves, (are to be cleansed) with better sacrifices

The writer of the book of Hebrews is writing about the implements of the temple and the temple itself (Hebrews 9:21). He states that these things are copies of heavenly things. What precisely does he mean by copies of heavenly things, and the things themselves? In the next verse he compounds this language when he says…

Hebrews 9:24 - For Christ did not go into a holy place made by hands, which are an antitype of the true things”

The word for antitype which many translations render copies, is pivotal for understanding the viewpoint of the writer of Hebrews.

What does it mean to have a heavenly representation, a true thing, which on earth exists as mere copies of what it actually is? Well if you were a first century Greek it would mean you were a Platonist. The way in which the writer frames his theology is necessarily dependant on the Platonic philosophy of his day.

Some people are content to ignore evidence such as this. They simply gloss over the connection between this sort of language and the dominate philosophical themes of the era in which it is written. I personally find it impossibly dissonant to do so. It appears to me overwhelmingly the case that this is Platonic language. Others acknowledge the implications of the passage, but speak of it as a borrowing of a language and a culture for a purpose. These argue that the writer of Hebrew was not a Platonist but he used Platonic language as part of a missionary strategy to convert gentiles. In both cases the assumption of the a-cultural nature of the writer is being maintained. Why is it that we must frame the writer as a-cultural rather than see him as a product of his time? Why must the inspired writers of scripture be spiritually aloof from their own culture?

I think there are two or three psychological / sociological factors from our modern culture which lead us to reread the writers of scripture as a-cultural beings. The writer of Hebrews (some would reason) could not have had a metaphysical belief in Platonism for one or all of the following reasons.

(1) Truth is transcendent not culturally contextual. If we say this text represents Platonic thought we make the Bible dependant on a specific culture which we dont share, but for scripture to be true it must be a-cultural and transcendent.

(2) Platonism is wrong (because our culture has transcended it philosophically) and therefore to say that a human author is Platonic in his thinking is to say the Bible is sophmoric and unadvanced and in error.

(3) Some people are just mired in cultural classism, which unconciously assumes that one’s own culture is representative of all cultures in matters of philosophy and perspective. Therefore they reason that “The Bible’s culture must be essentially like my culture.”

In all three cases assumptions like these fail to take into account that their viewpoint is itself a product of its own specific philosophical culture. Unreflectively they assume that one’s own culture is “the right culture” when it comes to philosophy. Our post enlightenment minds read overtop the Platonic message of Hebrews because it is unthinkable to do otherwise for the modern man. To allow the writer of Hebrews to be a barbarous Platonist is tantamount to calling God’s word worthless. We have transcended that sort of base philosophical speculation and have come into true modernity.

This assumption of one’s own culture is what is responsible for much of the fundamentalist backlash against supposed “liberalism” which seeks to understand scripture from within its own contextual world. I am one of these “liberals.” I simply think that the human author of Hebrews is a Platonist, and he is framing his theology through Platonic patterns. There is nothing odd about this at all; all cultures try to do this. The question at hand then is which culture has the “right” philosophical worldview to properly understand the Bible?

The answer is all of them, instead of none of them. The message of the Bible is neither culturally centered nor a-cultural, but trans-cultural. It crosses over worlds, kingdoms, tribes and nations and somehow unifies them.

Take for example the modern evangelical Christian world. When it argues against evolutionary theory it does so to demonstrate that Genesis 1 has a literal fulfillment; and why is this important? It is important because in our culture literal is equated with true. Interesting enough St. Augustine when speaking about creation and the same passage of Genesis 1 argues that creation must be instantaneous. And why does Augustine depart into such rank heresy? Because he was a neo-Platonist, and what was “actual” was what was heavenly and of the world of the forms; not what was actual on the earth. What a different viewpoint Augustine held! Many today try to make the story of Genesis fit within a scientific framework, because what is naturalistic and material is what is real. Augustine, however, was the exact opposite. What happened in the material world was immaterial (this word itself is a vestige of our culture) only what happened in the invisible, metaphysical world of the forms counted.

WHich is the “right” answer? Which culture has the Biblical world view? I think the answer is both of them do. Biblical worldviews are conversations, not paradigms. The transcendent Logos speaks into the cultural world of its readers and produces a worldview which is a combination of them both. This is as true of the Bible’s writers as it is of its readers. We reproduce worldviews when we read scripture and transport them into our own world. What Genesis 1 meant to the original writer is different than what it meant to Augustine and different than what it means to a modern creationist. There simply is not “transcendant worldview” which we are supposed to appropriate. Rather there is “transcendant Logos” which appropriates itself contextually into our lives.

We ought not try and sort out which one of these is the one and only true philosophical world, but accept that God’s message crosses worlds, working within them not outside of them.

Perhaps if we would stop viewing the Bible through cultural lenses to identify the correct philosophical world from which to read scripture and would instead focus on Christ, in whom the panoply of philosophical worlds have been united, then maybe we could move beyond the debates which have so bitterly divided the church. In short I am suggesting a post modern turn, but then again…it is my philosophical world.

This post is in honor of what I consider to be the most influential (and prophetic) book of the 20^th century, so I thought I would write this homage to my old friend George. I reread this book on a fairly regular basis because its warnings serve as dire messages for our culture; especially to the politically correct, fundamentalist culture of the church that seems to be so prevalent.

Today I may have been vetted to debate someone on an internet radio show. It seems that the rational response squad, which achieved infamy some months ago with the “Blasphemy Challenge,” is trolling internet chat rooms looking for Christian cannon fodder to invite on their show. I volunteered to take a spot at some time as I’m sure they are not used to educated people engaging their often pedantic arguments. As I thought about possible topics and arguments something occurred to me today about the theology of the atheist.

Before jumping into the pool here, a word of thanks is in order. Thank you to Prof. Pete Enns, Prof. Steve Taylor and Prof. Mike Kelly.  I will likely never return to modernist arguments to try and defeat the skeptic of scripture because of your tutelage. The evidence the skeptics raise simply cannot be denied, and you helped me to understand that. Equally, however, the framework the skeptic uses can be understood in different lights, critiqued and even overthrown. Because of their work I find myself looking more and more at presuppositions of people and their assumed notions of modernity. Ironically, my Van Tillianism did not come from the various systematic and apologetic courses that were supposed to inculcate it in me. Rather watching how people responded with preconceived notions of what the Bible ought to look like to the sustentative points the BT department at Westminster made helped me to clearly see presuppositions in action. 

Now, to apply the excellent application of Van Tillian Presuppositionalism which Dr. Enns taught me.

The atheist who attacks the Bible as being hopelessly problematic, and therefore ineligible as the word of God, makes a tremendous mistake. He points to “errors” again and again; contradictions, anachronisms, and the like to try and destroy the claim that scripture is infallible. He, like many fundamentalists and TR folk I encounter daily, subjects the Bible to a modernist dock. He poses questions about the texts veracity and conformity to modernist standards of truth. The TR walks away, bending the facts to support his modernism. The atheist confirms his believe that the scripture “fails” the test of the facts and so it is declared non-divine. The atheist’s empirical cross examination vindicates his atheism, or so he thinks. 

The problem is that the atheist has just played a theist. He argued that if the Bible was truly the word of God, it wouldn’t have all the errors and mistakes it contains. Since it contains all these problems it must not be the word of God. Here is the problem; the atheist just formulated systematic theology. What the atheist is saying, in effect, is as follows… 

“Writings which are inspired by God must be without contradiction, error or scientific inaccuracy.”

It is amazing that an atheist, who claims to lack knowledge of or about God, could know how God ought to write his books, if he were to write. The atheist position which rejects scripture because it does not meet up to his standards of what inspired scripture ought to look like is making an implicitly theological argument about what God would and would not do, if he were to inspire a text. He has made an argument about the nature of God, which he cannot do since he lacks knowledge of or belief in a God!

Bart Ehrman, a self confessed agnostic, has written an entire book of his theology in the above manner. He writes;

“…how does it help us to say that the Bible is the inerrant word of God if in fact we don’t have the words that God inerrantly inspired, but only the words copied by the scribes – sometimes correctly but sometimes (many times!) incorrectly?  (Bart Ehrman on p. 7 of his book Misquoting Jesus).”

Ehrman’s life story is to surmise that this means scripture fails the test of divine revelation. Of course he has to hold to a theological tenet before he can pronounce that scripture does not meet up to it.

Since by definition an atheist or agnostic (such as Ehrman) cannot have theological convictions, then he cannot critique a text because it doesn’t line up with his “theological convictions” of what ”God would do if he were to inspire a text.”

So atheists simply cannot reject the Bible as the Word of God because of perceived errors. To do so gives them positive knowledge about a God which they claim not to have.

Pax Christi…Nick