What’s Wrong with the World

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The foolishness of preaching

For after that in the wisdom of God the world by wisdom knew not God, it pleased God by the foolishness of preaching to save them that believe. (I Corinthians 1:21)

It is easy enough to characterize this verse from St. Paul, and indeed the entire chapter, as a broadside attack on and wholesale rejection of philosophy, and many have characterized it in that way. Naturally, philosophers have an interest in interpreting it differently, and I am no exception. I suggest that we compare this passage from G. K. Chesterton:

There is such a thing as a human story; and there is such a thing as the divine story which is also a human story; but there is no such thing as a Hegelian story or a Monist story or a relativist story or a determinist story; for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgement.

And that is the reason why the myths and the philosophers were at war until Christ came. That is why the Athenian democracy killed Socrates out of respect for the gods; and why every strolling sophist gave himself the airs of a Socrates whenever he could talk in a superior fashion of the gods; and why the heretic Pharaoh wrecked his huge idols and temples for an abstraction and why the priests could return in triumph and trample his dynasty under foot; and why Buddhism had to divide itself from Brahminism, and why in every age and country outside Christendom there has been a feud for ever between the philosopher and the priest. It is easy enough to say that the philosopher is generally the more rational; it is easier still to forget that the priest is always the more popular. For the priest told the people stories; and the philosopher did not understand the philosophy of stories. It came into the world with the story of Christ.

And this is why it had to be a revelation or vision given from above. Any one who will think of the theory of stories or pictures will easily see the point. The true story of the world must be told by somebody to somebody else. By the very nature of a story it cannot be left to occur to anybody. A story has proportions, variations, surprises, particular dispositions, which cannot be worked out by rule in the abstract, like a sum. We could not deduce whether or no Achilles would give back the body of Hector from a Pythagorean theory of number or recurrence; and we could not infer for ourselves in what way the world would get back the body of Christ, merely from being told that all things go round and round upon the wheel of Buddha. A man might perhaps work out a proposition of Euclid without having heard of Euclid; but he would not work out the precise legend of Eurydice without having heard of Eurydice. At any rate he would not be certain how the story would end and whether Orpheus was ultimately defeated. Still less could he guess the end of our story; or the legend of our Orpheus rising, not defeated from the dead.

The Everlasting Man

What is wrong with man? Man is a sinner, and man's sin brings much evil on the world, yet it seems to man that this ought not to be so. As Chesterton says just a bit above the passage just quoted, evil "is the prince of the world, but it is also a usurper."

Contrary to what one might be tempted sometimes to think, what is wrong with man is not that man is not smart enough. Very smart men can be among the most evil, though we should hasten to add, in a Thomist spirit, that such evil men are not following the proper course of Reason itself in discovering and following their own highest good.

My point here, however, is that what is wrong with man is something contingent. It is something that seems to have its origin in a historic rupture (which Christians, knowing the actual story, call the Fall) between what man ought to be and what man actually is. This contingent problem requires a contingent solution. Just as man did not have to sin, God did not have to save. The entire Christian message, the most vital truth in all the world, is a history from beginning to end, and as a history, it cannot be deduced by pure wisdom or pure reason. "The world by wisdom knew not God." That God saves must be revealed. And if it is revealed, that revelation must come with some sign or signs that allow us to know that it is a true revelation. Those signs will take place at particular points in time and will require particular witnesses, aka preachers. St. Paul again: "How shall they hear without a preacher?...As it is written, how beautiful are the feet of them that...bring glad tidings of good things." (Romans 10:14-15)

The salvation of man, then, cannot be attained or even known to be possible in the real world by a priori philosophy but must be known by revelation in history proclaimed by agents on the earth. This process of making known is what St. Paul calls the "foolishness of preaching."

What this means for philosophical types is that when we are doing Christian theology and/or apologetics we must get over any preference we have for purely a priori arguments. I am not here saying that there is nothing to be said for any of the a priori arguments for the existence of God. What I am saying is that Christianity (and, before Christianity, God's revelation of Himself in Judaism) really leaves very little space for the thesis that such arguments are better than reasons based on the messy contingencies of real history. "I am the Lord your God which brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage," begins God when he addresses His people Israel. Not "I am the necessary First Cause" or "I am the Being than which none greater can be conceived."

We may feel that historical reasons are shaky and uncertain and that a priori reasoning is preferable, more solid, more sure and certain. That's all well and good if we're talking about mathematics, but when it comes to applying the preference to theology, God apparently doesn't agree.

Not to be unclear: Of course the God who brought Israel up out of the land of Egypt and who sent His Son to be Incarnate, to die and rise again, actually is the First Cause and the Perfect Being. I'm not denying that at all. What I am warning against is a preference for non-empirical arguments for His existence and attributes over arguments based on contingent premises about His self-revelation in the real world. Both Scripturally and theologically, it seems that we should have a preference in the opposite direction, if only because a God who is known only as the God of the philosophers is a God who might or might not have actually done anything to save mankind.

Our great cause for gratitude, then, should be that God has not left Himself without witness. God has in fact spoken in the world, telling us who He is, who we are, and how we can be right with Him. It is through the "foolishness" of preaching that message that God will save those who believe in Him. And those who have been called to show the world why the message is deserving of belief are among the evangelists of whom it was spoken, "How beautiful are the feet of them that bring glad tidings."

Comments (43)

God's story for creation easily could have been a different story. He could have created a different race of rational animal, related to the raccoon instead of the primates, he could have invented a different sort of physical world, etc. Man might have been created in 3 sexes instead of 2. Man might not have succumbed to temptation, or might have been prevented from being tempted a la Perelandra. He might have been saved by a different salvation. There is finally no a-priori pathway from "God is" to "man is" through "man is fallen" to "God became man."

"I am the Lord your God which brought you up out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage," begins God when he addresses His people Israel. Not "I am the necessary First Cause" or "I am the Being than which none greater can be conceived."

Yeah, but that was later. This came earlier, chapter 3 of Exodus:

" 'I am,' tell them 'I am' sent you." or
I am that I am. or
I am who am.

Which leads me to recount the out-take version of chapter 3, the one that ended up on the editing room floor before Moses got the version just right:


Moses: "Who shall I say sent me?"
God: " 'I am.' Tell them 'I am' sent you."
Moses: "Ahhhhh...", stops for a moment, and plays that out in his head:

[Moses: "The God of our fathers sent me to free you!" ]
[People: "Who is He, what is his name?" ]
[Moses: " 'I am.' " ]
[People: "What are you?"]
[Moses: "I am a shepherd." ]
[People: "Who cares what you are, WHO SENT YOU?" ]
[Moses: "No, I mean, 'I am.' ]
[People: "Don't you mean, "I did?" ]
[Moses: "I did what?" ]
[People: "Sent you." ]
[Abbot: "Sent me where? ]
[Costello: "Sent you to us. ]
[Abbot: "Who sent me to you? ]
[Costello: "That's what WE want to know." ]
[Abbot: "I already told you - 'I am' ". ] ...

(To be repeated every day for 40 years.)

Moses: "Uh, gee, thanks 'I am', thanks for clearing that up. I am so much more confident about this. If can I get all the royalties on this business, I think we have a deal. Um, can can I get it written in stone, please?"

God: "Oh sure. But pay attention to the fine print."

I just had this conversation with my Sunday School teacher at church on Sunday. I was trying to explain the three-day debate that went on here some years ago, between Feser and Bauman. It was quite the education for me.

I'll send this link onto him. He'll appreciate this post.

Gina, my hope is that I represent the perfect Aristotelian mean on this subject between Prof. Feser and Prof. Bauman. :-) This post may _sound_ more "Bauman," but he probably wouldn't agree entirely with me either if we talked long enough. And there are hints even here. E.g. I did say that the God of the Bible _actually is_ the Perfect Being.

Lydia, first of all, I really liked this article.

I don't understand something Chesterton said, though. What does he mean that there can't be a Hegelian, relativist, or determinist story? If he means that there's no story that's 100 percent Hegelian, relativist, etc., then this seems to be a typical instance of Chestertonian sleight of hand: Hegel's philosophy is not true, therefore no "true" story could be "100 percent Hegelian." It seems paradoxical, as I'm sure it's supposed to, that there can't be a story that's Hegelian, when Hegel was Mr. Historical Philosopher.

Naively, I see the whole Marxist narrative as a Hegelian story (lifted from the Judeo-Christian story); I see John O'Hara's Appointment in Samsarra as a determinist story (named after a Muslim or pagan story), and so on. In Chesterton's taxonomy, these must be human stories, because presumably they're not divine. Why, according to Chesterton, are these stories not also Hegelian or determinist?

Aaron, I think GKC answers your question:

for every story, yes, even a penny dreadful or a cheap novelette, has something in it that belongs to our universe and not theirs. Every short story does truly begin with creation and end with a last judgement.

Certainly for the relativist and the determinist, there is no such thing as an "ending" to the story at all. Whatever state of affairs you have at any one point, that just leads to another, and another, and so on without any "conclusion" that "explains" and wraps up the whole shebang. So whatever they have, they don't have a *story* with its proper narrative elements as such, all they have is a travelogue that may have interesting moments. I am not as sure about the Hegelian, I suppose that he might argue that history is aiming at a specific _condition_ and that condition constitutes the end of the narrative in the storybook sense, but doesn't need to mean the end of all things (any more than the Christian eschatology is the end of all things) - from there on out it is "happily ever after" of which nobody can write a story, not even Christians.

I wd. guess that Chesterton's idea is that a Hegelian "story" would never have a satisfactory ending because each "ending" would become the thesis of a new cycle.

But Chesterton is a master of hyperbole, therefore not hard to counterexample.

David Bentley Hart's new book, The Experience of God, addresses questions of this sort. He writes not of "the god of the philsophers" so much as the idea of God as understood by the major theistic traditions, and argues that the New Atheists haven't a clue about the God worshipped and prayed to by actual believers. It's good bracing stuff.

Chesterton seems to be saying that a "story" rightly understood is not simply a recitation of necessary facts in a necessary sequence, but rather something that could have been otherwise. To remove all personal agency, and to replace it with the operation of purely impersonal forces that could never be otherwise, is to remove the romance that is a component of any real story.

It is similar (and related) to his statement that, according to the materialist account of the universe, "Nothing interesting had happened since existence happened." If you want to accuse him of "sleight of hand" by saying that you do in fact find the materialist account "interesting," then I'd say you're just trying to score points by refusing to engage him on his own terms.

He writes not of "the god of the philsophers" so much as the idea of God as understood by the major theistic traditions,

Because there are those who deny that the "god of the philosophers" has any possible identification with the God revealed in Scripture, (cf. Michael Bauman et al), I suppose it would be equally fair to ask whether there is any coherent meaning to the phrase "God as understood by the major theistic traditions." For instance, since Hindus mean by "god" many different gods, whereas Jews, Muslims, and Christians mean the One, is there any meaningful sense that they are talking about the same thing? Perhaps not equally difficult but still not problem free, is the meaning of "God" to Muslims in any sense the same as the meaning to Jews and Christians, or is their concept, exemplified by "master / dog" relationship with us, so different as to be a null intersection. Bauman, I think, is forced into saying the same problem holds for Judaism as compared to Christianity, that what the Jews understood by the term "God" is radically other than what Christians mean so that they are not even worshiping the same God, but I think that this resolves to a religious absurdity.

Going the other direction, then, seems possible: that although the concept under consideration as the "god of the philosophers" is not notionally identical to the God of Abraham, and Isaac, and Paul of Tarsus, and (potentially) Mohammed, nor is it notionally so other as to be unrelated. One part of the quest of "faith seeking understanding", then, is to spell out the relationship. Maybe not all are called to do that spelling out, but then not all are called to be apostles, nor all to speak in tongues, nor all to heal.

Don't have time to comment right now, but here's a review of Hart by Edward Oakes, S.J.

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/359260/god-against-materialism-edward-t-oakes-sj

I suppose it would be equally fair to ask whether there is any coherent meaning to the phrase "God as understood by the major theistic traditions."

I definitely agree with this concern. In fact, the very point that God as revealed in Scripture is engaging in real actions in the world which He might not have done tends to support the conclusion that the God of x major religion is not going to be the same as the God of y major religion, inter alia because the same crucial acts in history will not be attributed to them.

Hart's contention is that the Gods of the major reflective theistic traditions all exhibit what could be called the same "ontological" characteristics -- "being" outside of time, immanence and transcendence, He is that in whom we live and move and have our being, etc., etc. Christians, of course, believe that this God is the Father spoken of in the Creed. But Hart is attempting to get the New Atheists and their followers to see that the God they reject is decidedly NOT God as understood by the major theistic traditions, but rather a sort of Deist demiurge, a god at the top of the Chain of Being but not ultimately distinct from it.

By "major reflective theistic traditions" do you include or exclude Hinduism? And why?

Tony,

By "major reflective theistic traditions" do you include or exclude Hinduism? And why?

Doesn't 'hinduism' split into a variety of sub-schools here? Brahman under some of those views sure sounds a lot like the Unmoved Mover.

Marmot,

But Hart is attempting to get the New Atheists and their followers to see that the God they reject is decidedly NOT God as understood by the major theistic traditions, but rather a sort of Deist demiurge, a god at the top of the Chain of Being but not ultimately distinct from it.

I like Hart, but I think he often takes the approach with the Cult of Gnu that 'Gosh, this is all just a big misunderstanding, if they only really understood what God theists had in mind they'd mayhap moderate their tones a bit'. It's believers who will benefit from reading Hart, or open-minded, relaxed irreligious - not the New Atheists, for whom their atheism is every bit as much political as it is anything else. In fact, they'd probably give a lot of credence to the 'Deist demiurge' in one way or another.

Not "I am the necessary First Cause" or "I am the Being than which none greater can be conceived."

Well, there is Exodus 3:14... ;)

I know people are bringing up Ex. 3:14 in a somewhat lighthearted spirit, but it's an interesting point to answer: I don't see that verse as at all in tension with the point made about God's not introducing himself as the "necessary first cause" or the "being than which none greater can be conceived."

I know it's extremely interesting to ponder what Moses understood by "I AM sent you," but it is rather implausible to take it that he or the Israelites would have gotten the metaphysical arguments out of that utterance. What we know is that they understood transcendence and monotheism very well and understood that those ideas must be taken with the utmost seriousness. That God was not *a* god or *one* god among others but the one and only true God, above all things, who made all things. Of course these properties are related to the metaphysical arguments; that's impossible to deny. But they don't amount to them, and that doesn't seem to have been the point of God's statement to Moses. In fact, God's statement to Moses was made in the very context of God's _action_, of God's sending Moses to the people and to Pharoah to bring them up out of Egypt. There was no question of concluding that God existed in the form of the God of bare theism and by means of abstract inference. In the same conversation God gives Moses exceedingly crude miraculous signs to help to convince the people that he is a real messenger.

"Doesn't 'hinduism' split into a variety of sub-schools here? Brahman under some of those views sure sounds a lot like the Unmoved Mover."

Yes, that's what Hart says -- majority Hinduism has a lot of gods but only one God, Brahman, in the sense in which he is speaking of God.

It's quite apparent from reading him that Hart realizes that the New Atheists are both ill-informed and politicized and he's not sympathetic to either characteristic. I don't think he's attempting to convert the N.A.'s as much as offer a counter to intelligent readers who might be open-minded enough to look at the other side -- uncommitted readers of the N.A.'s perhaps.

Not sure what your point is. I gather from the article that as far as researchers can tell they have no concept of God at all unless missionaries can succeed in teaching them one. Which they appear not to have been able to do as yet, chiefly because the language is almost impossible to learn to speak.

I am saying that there may be other, justifiable, possibilities for the experience of the divine - a Divine Spirit - separate from the God of the philosophers or the God of Revealed Faith. Why so? We know from Genesis that at some point in their past, the ancestors of people such as the Piraha must have had knowledge of, and a language for, the Revealed Faith - which they have now forgotten (before Abraham and formalisation of Judaism there does not seem to have been a name for the true Revealed Faith). This discussion really is a comment on Tony's point that it is not unlikely that the Gods of the various theistic traditions have some commonality to Our Lord of the New Testament (here talking about pre-Christian faiths such as Buddhism, rather than post-Christian faiths such as Islam). We know from Genesis that they did all start off as talking about the same thing, and then gradually diverged from the true Revealed Faith of the time. As this process continued it is likely that a belief in a Divine Spirit, at least, did not die out in the sense that a partial form of the true Revealed Faith continued. As CS Lewis wrote in the Screwtape Letters, the teachers of faiths other than Christianity have similar moral messages. From this point of view, the Hindu, Buddhist, Piraha (even if currently unknown) represent a degenerated, but also partly valid version of the True Faith.

I'm less sanguine about that. Probably even less sanguine than Lewis was. I think that the Fall did terrible things to mankind and that this has resulted among other things in mankind's having a lot of really evil religions--e.g., the worship of Baal and Astarte. The Apostle Paul in Romans 1 doesn't seem to have thought of pagan devolutions as being able to tell us much about the true God, and in fact one of the major points of the Old Testament was that the gods of the heathen are mere idols.

That many, possibly millions, of years ago Adam and his children existed and knew the true God really does not give us much reason to believe that the actual religious beliefs of his far-scattered descendants will reflect some kind of true experience of the true God as a "experience of Divine Spirit" or "represent a partly valid version of the True Faith."

It's more interesting to me from a purely anthropological view that, from what I could tell (unless I missed something in the article) the Piraha don't seem to have _any_ religion, neither animist nor otherwise.

Every human has a pull towards God as the inevitable result of his being made in God's image. The created image "naturally" resonates with its Divine Creator. The fall however has twisted and obscured humanity's ability to respond to that resonance, hence, while the experience of the Divine in the various religions may be authentic the interpretation and explication of that experience will necessarily be lacking, and in some cases extremely negative and even quite evil.

I am on Barth's side. He knows that God is Christologically revealed and Christologically defined. He also knows the difference between natural revelation (which, because God does it, is highly reliable) and natural theology, (which, because we do it, is not). That's another way of saying that the problem with philosophy is philosophers. We human creatures are not objective seekers after truth. We suppress the truth and exchange it for a lie. Or, in Calvin's terms, the human heart is an idol factory.

He also knows the difference between natural revelation (which, because God does it, is highly reliable) and natural theology, (which, because we do it, is not).

Even if it were true that natural theology were unreliable "because we do it", it would still be the case that, like in mathematics or physics (which we do also) we can arrive at SOME truths in that discipline. Unless one wants to posit that all of our reasoning under natural efforts is damaged through and through so that every single conclusion is wrong, natural theology can still be a source of truth to us.

I am on Barth's side. He knows that God is Christologically revealed and Christologically defined.

Which kind of supports my point that in this view, even the Jews did not actually worship the God of Christianity, since they did not have Christ to reveal Him to them.

Some of us hesitate to imagine a loving God creating a universe where the overwhelming majority of His Creation were idol factories - even counting Christians among them.

http://www.neamericandiocese.org/orthodoxy/original-sin.aspx

"Some of us hesitate to imagine a loving God creating a universe where the overwhelming majority of His Creation were idol factories - even counting Christians among them."

This fails to take the Fall into account.

"...God is Christologically revealed and Christologically defined."

Well, of course he is, but you don't need Barth to tell us that (Hint: it's in the Church Fathers). However, this does not mean that any pre-Christian revelation or any coming-to-truth of non-Christian religions is automatically erroneous. All truth is God's truth, and all the great religions of the world have gotten some things right, including, occasionally, their picture of God, as far as it goes.

NM, I agree with your post.

It isn't possible to be a Christian without accepting of the theology of the Fall. Yet, this does not naturally mean that human race is therefore an idol factory. The number of Christians in the world increasing rapidly especially in Africa and Asia (China is projected have nearly 500 million Christians by the middle of this century, Vietnam's Christians have increased by nearly 200% since the end of the war in the face of repression). Not every Christian has had personal revelations. In my experience, at least, Christians have the simple faith that following the way of life described in the Gospels leads to salvation. The world is gradually becoming a better, more Christian world. There is more peace and less conflict in the world today than at any time in history. Crime is decreasing. Academics such as Dr Steven Pinker have noticed this, too, but have failed to make the connection with the growth of Christianity in the past century.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111904106704576583203589408180

The world is gradually becoming a better, more Christian world. There is more peace and less conflict in the world today than at any time in history.

In my opinion, this cannot be substantiated. For one thing, one would probably have to define "more peace and less conflict" so as to write off abortions (including those due to abortifacient contraceptives) as not being counted, which kind of implies a damaged lens. And plays into whether one can say that the Christians are "following the way of life described in the Gospels" if about 85% to 95% of the Christians in the western countries are engaged in the contracepting and aborting.

While there are fewer numbers of distinct wars for the last 65 years than in most prior 65 year periods, it's mostly because the players on the board are bigger that before, and any single war involves 10 or 20 times as many people. Do you say there is "more peace" if there is only one war instead of 8, but in that one war 3 times as many people are killed than in all 8 little wars combined? Also, there are more people in the world today than ever before. Do you say there is "more peace" if it used to be 1/2 of the total population was at peace and that was 1 billion, or is it "more peace" if now 1/4 of the population is at peace but that is 1.7 billion? Do you count the entire US as at war from 2002 to 2013, or only the soldiers, or only the industrial-military complex? Or do you count also the US at war from 1990 to 2002 to include the luke-warm war with Iraq under Clinton where we went back and forth between hot, cold, and warm every other month? Do you count the entire Soviet Russia at war with all of eastern Europe during the cold war, when they basically were an occupation government, or is that to be called "peace?" This is kind of why I doubt that measurements about amounts or degrees of war and peace can be measured usefully.

Deaths from war are decreasing overall, whatever the numbers. For example, the total number of US military casualties in the Iraq conflict was less than 5000, pretty amazing for modern war. The current Middle Eastern civil wars have a horrendous death tally, no doubt, but much fewer than the partition of the Indian subcontinent or China's Cultural Revolution.

As for abortion deaths, those numbers are going down too, both in Western Europe and the USA. The highest numbers in Europe were the ex-Communist nations, and their numbers are trending down as well.

http://www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/Life-stages/sexual-and-reproductive-health/activities/abortion/facts-and-figures-about-abortion-in-the-european-region

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2012/11/23/surprise-the-abortion-rate-just-hit-an-all-time-low/

Christianity, however imperfectly practised, has been a major influence on other religions. Polygamy, for instance, or infanticide are pretty much uncommoner than they used to be (even though practiced in China and India) , or have been driven underground. The UN Declaration of Human Rights is pretty much a secularised restatement of Christian principles. And this is happening at a time when the absolute number of people in the world has never been higher, as you yourself point out.

In the context of this topic, which is the effectiveness of preaching, Christian preaching has been a major force for peace and stability, and increasing through the past century. The fact is also true that the other major world religions which themselves had a form of the universal divine message have themselves been changed by Christian preaching.

It is likely that the modern, largely peaceful, non-militant version of Christianity with the abandonment of the imagery and metaphors of war and conquest and reconquest (such is is exploding across China today) is partly responsible for its especial success. It has partly put to rest the unedifying spectre of successful Christian nations exploiting Africa, Asia and warring with each other until World War 1.

Deaths from war are decreasing overall, whatever the numbers. For example, the total number of US military casualties in the Iraq conflict was less than 5000, pretty amazing for modern war. The current Middle Eastern civil wars have a horrendous death tally, no doubt, but much fewer than the partition of the Indian subcontinent or China's Cultural Revolution.

So (a) you are measuring "peace" by number of deaths from violent warfare, and (b) you are measuring a trend that has started since China's Cultural Revolution? In foregone centuries, eastern Europe was Christian, ruled by Christian rulers of one stripe or another. From 1945 to 1989, it was ruled instead by anti-religious zealots who suppressed religious belief of all forms and especially Christian faith, through means violent and not directly violent (such as by propaganda and by cultural pressure such as loss of jobs for failures, etc). Yes, by defining "peace" as the absence of violent death by war, this situation was peaceful. The same regime killed upwards of 20 million peasants to institute its flawed agricultural revolution before WWII. By starting the measurement after the 1960s we can ignore that.

As for abortion deaths, those numbers are going down too, both in Western Europe and the USA. The highest numbers in Europe were the ex-Communist nations, and their numbers are trending down as well.

Right - but only if you don't count abortifacient contraceptive deaths. Even the articles you cite (including the Post's incredible "all time" idiocy) point to increased use of contraceptives for decline in abortions.

There are certainly ways in which the world is getting better. There are other ways in which the world is getting worse. As I indicate above, one of the latter is the number of people killed by their own mother instead of through war. Another is the way in which world institutions run roughshod over lower-level entities, contradicting the orderliness of subsidiarity. Taken overall, both the good and the bad together, and properly weighing moral evils against other sorts like physical suffering, it is impossible to be justifiably confident that the human situation is truly better now than it was 100 years ago.

I definitely do not think that the "world is getting better and better." Human nature being what it is, the world will never be that great until the eschaton. I myself do not look back to older ages as utterly golden, except to the actual paradisal state before the Fall of man. Therefore I'm not the kind of reactionary who says, "Hey, what was a little burning people at the stake? Things were definitely better in the year 1600." At the same time, I'm definitely going to oppose any sort of positivist (in the old sense) progressivism that says that things are definitely better now.

Certainly, Christianity has been a force for good, though it appears to me that it will be less so as it loses its self-confidence. (That self-confidence was often accompanied by singing such "bad" hymns as "Onward Christian Soldier" and the like, which did not refer to actually killing people, so it takes a little nuance to understand this notion of self-confidence, and a pacifist bias will make that nuance too difficult to grasp.) All over the Western world right now we see governmental attacks on Christian institutions. Those institutions exist for doing good and influencing the culture for good. The attacks involve demanding that the institutions give up their Christian character or be hounded out of existence.

To make a probably futile attempt _actually_ to relate this point to the main post, even indirectly, part of the problem that is beginning to bedevil Christians around the world is the idea that actually _preaching_ the Gospel, explicitly, with doctrine, is "proselytism" and is wrong, that only bare good works and social gospel without the Gospel of Jesus Christ, are acceptable. Ultimately, if you abandon eternal things, you lose the this-worldly things as well. I do not believe that effective Christian missions with their good works can survive without a clear and unapologetic doctrinal basis.

Tony,
One has to admit that the Jews weren't very good at knowing God. When He showed up, they killed Him. Even John the Baptist, who was given the highest commendation possible by Jesus Himself (Matt. 11: 11), says twice in John 1 that when Christ appeared he did not know Him (vv. 31, 33). If John the Baptist was in the dark, we all are. Philosophers are no exception.

Further, after having been delivered from slavery in Egypt and seeing the angel of death pass them over, and after being led across the sea on dry land and watching their enemy drowned behind them, after being led for years and years across the wilderness following the pillar of cloud and the pillar of fire, and after being fed manna day upon day for years, when Moses was on the mountain receiving the the law, they were down below making a golden calf. That's what we do. We are human beings. We are idol makers. We share that with the ancient Jews and all others. Calvin was right: the human heart is an idol factory. From this human failing philosophers are not exempt. They just make idols of a different sort, and out of different material. In this case, not gold but concepts, concepts like "thought thinking itself," an "uncaused caused" and an "unmoved mover."

NM:
Indeed we do need Barth to tell us. We need someone who has not ceded over Christian theological rubric and methods to Aristotle or to Plato. And to understand that we are desperately sinful and hopeless without Christ is exactly to take the Fall seriously. Barth also tells us this: the analogia entis is the one invention of anti-Christ. And that error is the staple of those who try to know God by philosophy and science.

Dan,
Check out Rummel's book Death by Government, which shows that in the 20th century alone, allegedly a civilized century, more than 160 million citizens were killed by their own governments -- by their own governments, mind you, not by war. Some estimates go as high as to over 200 million. That is, government killed on average about 2 million of their own citizens every year for a hundred years. Rummel does not include abortions in the number, which is a barbarism that drives the numbers even higher. We make an idol of government, and it kills us. We all are born barbarians. We achieve civility, if ever, only later.

"Indeed we do need Barth to tell us. We need someone who has not ceded over Christian theological rubric and methods to Aristotle or to Plato."

You might want to go to the Touchstone magazine archives and read whatever's there on the subject of God and His Fatherhood by Patrick Henry Reardon. His work demonstrates that one can be thoroughly Christocentric, thoroughly Patristic, and philosophic at the same time.

Start here:

http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=13-06-022-f

One has to admit that the Jews weren't very good at knowing God.

Well, admittedly some, but not all of them. Not Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Isaiah, Elijah. Yet none of these had Christ's explicit revelation to teach them, to reveal God to them "properly". Not Mary, who was full of grace and who "found favor with God" before Christ became man. So, somehow it was possible within the incomplete revelation of the Jews before Christ to come to know God suitably enough to be accounted saved, holy, blessed.

From this human failing philosophers are not exempt. They just make idols of a different sort, and out of different material. In this case, not gold but concepts, concepts like "thought thinking itself," an "uncaused caused" and an "unmoved mover."

From the truth that philosophers are subject to the same ills that attack all men it does not follow that all philosophy is error, any more than the fact that mathematicians have evil in their hearts due to sin implies that all math is error. Rejecting the thesis there is a cause that has no cause requires in its place instead accepting the thesis that every cause has a cause, which is certainly contrary to the Bible, whatever else is true about philosophy. The fact that mathematicians can rightly prove the Pythagorean Theorem without using the Bible does not make it error, nor does the fact that the philosophers can prove there is an uncaused cause without using the Bible make that thesis to be error. If it is true, then either that same uncaused cause is to be identified with God or not - there are no other options. Either God, the God of revealed truth, is caused, or he is not, there are no other options.

Tony,
Most of them got it badly wrong. Some did not. As for them being without Christ, that is a debatable point. Jesus, for example, seems to say that Abraham saw His (Jesus') day and rejoiced to see it (John 8: 56). Simeon also understood. Yes, there are exceptions to the rule of national blindness, but just a handful over a thousand years, and it isn't obvious that the exceptions had no contact with the pre-incarnate Son.

NM
I've already that and more, and am 98% finished with a book-length response to that view.
Cheers.

As for your father Abraham, his heart was proud to see the day of my coming; he saw, and rejoiced to see it.

Paul accounts salvation to Abraham in virtue of Abraham's faith in the coming to be of the Messiah, not in virtue of any special revelation to Abraham (that is not recorded) on the exact nature and character of the Messiah to come. This "to see the day of my coming" needs nothing more, to explain it, than the "seeing" of faith that it would happen, not in any special knowledge about it than what is handed down to us in the Jewish Scriptures.

Lydia, sorry to have taken this thread so far OT, when my point was really about how effective the preaching of the Christian message has been. There are many things wrong with the world. We waste so much - upto 50% of the food that we grow. People are still enslaved in awful working conditions. Some of this is the result of the speed of implementation of technology outstripping our ability to deal with its outcomes - the conservative virtues of frugality and disciplined needs sits ill with a consumerist society. Of course these conservative virtues will need to be re-learnt, and, as ever, the poor of the world will show the way to re-learning them better than the fortunate.

I agree that some governments have been killing their own people, but this was not a result of idolising or trusting governments. The Bolsheviki or Chinese Communist Party or NSDAP or Khmer Rouge were not installed by popular choice, but rather by hyperviolent cliques of revolutionaries. While it is also true that 60,000 Allied and German soldiers were forced to die on the 1st day of Passchedaele by their Christian governments, this does not happen today to anything like the same extent. Where governments have been given a larger role in society by their citizens, as in Western Europe, or Scandinavia, or North America, the massacre of citizens has not happened, rather the reverse, in that there is provision of social welfare for the indigent (and I claim a Christian influence in this, from the Salvation Army down). As for men being "idol factories", I refuse to accept that the end result of the act of Creation must be to condemn the overwhelming majority of rational beings to eternal damnation with no possibility of redemption because they are/were not aware of Christ. That is not the letter or spirit of the Gospels. The Gospels speak of the necessity of man born in sin to be born again of the Holy Spirit, which it is the grace of God to provide. The Church does not condemn unbaptized infants (and presumably the unborn dead who bear sin in possibility only) - on whom it is likely that the Holy Spirit descends from grace. The Good Samaritan was not a Christian, and it is twisting the teaching of Christ to suppose that that Samaritan was an "idol factory" simply because he did not know Christology. Neither did the parable end with the teaching that the act of goodness performed was theologically meaningless because it was not done by a Christian.

As for the discussion about abortion, the topic seems to have switched to contraception. We can agree, though, that actual abortions have indeed gone down in numbers, in part to the influence of Christian teaching which did not give up even when the secular establishment tried to pass them off as having no consequence. I really have little knowledge about whether all contraceptives are abortifacient or not, and suspect the science (and doctrine) on the issue is not yet settled about which methods are licit and which not. It is very possible that Christian views and teachings will influence decisions away from abortifacients.

"either that same uncaused cause is to be identified with God or not - there are no other options. Either God, the God of revealed truth, is caused, or he is not, there are no other options."

Right -- that philosophers have been able to come to a partial, yet accurate, understanding of God without recourse to either Christ or Scripture, does not make their understanding completely erroneous (Am I detecting the ghost of Cornelius Van Til lurking around here?). It only makes it incomplete. One can say that it's erroneous by being incomplete and from a certain angle that's true. But it would be incoherent to say that it's totally wrong, because it does in fact correspond on certain points with the Christian understanding of God.

As Tony says, either God is unoriginate or He's not. If He is, it cannot be true when the Church says it, but false when the philosophers do.

This, by the way, does not contradict the Church's understanding that God has ever, only, and always dealt with Creation through the Divine Son. If the philosophers are able to reason to a partly correct understanding of God, even that is in no manner achieved "outside" of the Son. That the philosophers do not apprehend this does not make it false. Ditto the other world religions.

Dan Zachariah,

Three counterpoints right off the bat:

-Rwanda, 800,000 massacred in living memory of the Millennial Generation.
-Syria: approaching 100k dead
-Mexico: approaching 100k dead

World Wars 1 and 2 were flukes of history in their level of violence. Most war has never been anywhere near as violent or total, and that is widely seen as why Europe is peaceful today. Two total wars back to back would be enough to make even the Middle East collectively turn its swords into plowshares.

The biggest reason why war has largely become developed versus undeveloped instead of one advanced civilization on another is the advent of nuclear weapons. Absent nuclear weapons, it is certain that at some point NATO and the Warsaw Pact would have fought World War 3.

Dan Zachariah, I"m sure that your and my views on many of these subjects diverge--to name but one example, I do not share your enthusiasm for Western socialist states. I could name many reasons, but just one among many is that they kill off their elderly and disabled as part of their oh-so-kind provision. I would say, however, that what is bad about them is not the result of Christianity but of post-Christianity and increased secularization.

As for the alleged drop in the number of abortions, there is a very real cherry-picking going on of the years measured. The drop now in the U.S. is relative to the sky-rocket in the decades after Roe v. Wade. So what we have going on is definitely not any sort of steady bettering trend within the last, say, 100 years.

I agree that the preaching of Christianity makes the world better and has done so. I just don't think you and I agree on many of our instances. You would do better for instances to look at things like infanticide (mostly of girls) in ancient Rome and the Christian influence upon this.

Perhaps a good example of improvement is the near eradication of legal slavery in Christian countries, a condition that is certainly due in part to the influence of Christianity even if it took many centuries to unfold fully.

And a good example of retrograde movement is the near universal failure of both laws and customs against pre-marital promiscuity in (formerly) Christian countries.

Whatever is valid of Dan's point, the fact that most formerly Christian countries are no longer Christian must of necessity suggest at least the possibility that they are not continuing to improve the condition of mankind any more, at least not by reason of Christian sentiment.

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