Avdat

In which I teach the ontological argument to undergraduates

I'm teaching Intro to Religion this summer at a local community college. Last night we did the chapter in the textbook on Faith and Reason, in which numerous philosophical proofs for God's existence are analyzed. Anselm's ontological argument generated by far the liveliest discussion. (If you're unfamiliar with the argument, I will direct you to the Wikipedia article, or Anselm's own words, rather than rehashing it here.)

In order for the argument to carry water, you have to accept Anselm's definition of God as "that than which nothing greater can be thought," and you have to grant that existence is a perfection. Put differently, to exist in reality is greater than to exist in the mind alone.

I expected push back on the definition. I also expected a certain amount of not-understanding for as long as it would take Anselm's tongue-twisting definition of the term "God" to sink in. I wondered if someone might not object along Guanilo's lines, i.e., Just because you can imagine a perfection doesn't mean said perfection exists, an objection that, by the way, Anselm disposes of when he points out that not just any mental construct of perfection necessarily exists, but only this one, given its unique features. I doubted that anyone would say what the textbook says, that the ontological argument doesn't prove God's existence, but only that you've defined the word "God" in a non-contradictory manner, but had someone proffered that objection, I'd have given them an A for the course on the spot.

Instead, what I got what push back on was the idea that existence is a perfection. "We can all agree, can't we, that to exist in reality is better than to exist in the mind alone, right?" I asked. Vigorous shaking of heads. No, no, no. Mental constructs are unlimited. Things in the real world are limited by time and space.

I was completely taken aback. Completely unprepared to defend this seemingly common-sensical assertion. I floundered around for a while until a student piped up, "Y'all think what's in your head is more real than reality? Y'all crazy!" I grabbed this lifeline and ran with it: "If you think the voices in your head are more real  than my voice telling you they aren't real, then we need to stop this class and get everybody to a hospital." And with that I moved on.

It was fascinating to watch facial expressions once they fully comprehended the argument. I could see a knowing, almost sly smile develop on the face of one bright student who self identifies as a Christian. Another good student who self-identifies as an agnostic pointed vigorously at the chalk board and exclaimed "That's really cool!" A third student, whose religious views are unknown to me, but plays the role of class cynic, almost came out of his chair. "Nah, man! But that... you can't... Nah man!" It was as if he'd realized he'd been had by Anselm's deceptively innocuous definition.

I identify with the third student because that's basically the same way I reacted when I first read and comprehended the argument.  I kept re-reading ch. 2-4 of the Proslogion in a disbelief bordering on anger thinking, "It can't be that simple, can it?"

The rest of the class? Who knows? They did seem entertained by all the arguing.

But I keep going back to the students' flat-out refusal to concede that real things are more real than mental images of them or anything else. What's that all about? Is it something about young adulthood that is reluctant to trim down unrealized potentiality into particulars, a particular job, spouse, locale, etc? Or is it me? Any tips in the comments on how better to teach the Ontological Argument will earn you an A++ in my grade book.

Sunday's sermon

Here's all the rest of the words that the cloud didn't show!

Sermon preview

HT: Kathleen Sheets

The good ol' days weren't all that good

If you ask the people I roll with when the Church went wrong, you usually get one of three answers:

1. 15 years ago when the Church caved to popular culture,
2. 90 years ago when the Church caved to modernity and liberalism,
3. 1,700 years ago when the Church caved to violence and/or fuzzy math (1+1+1=1). 

I got a new answer this week in a little book--part-scholarly and part-devotional--on the Didache, a second century handbook for converts to Christianity. Tony Jones' The Teaching of the 12 is an extended conversation about the Didache with an oddball group of Christians in Missouri  who call themselves the Cymbrogi.

They're fond of the Didache because it's long on a simple ethic of love thy neighbor, and short on doctrine and hierarchy. And that was true, primitive Christianity, they say. But along came Ignatius of Antioch who, on his way to the lions in Rome, spread the idea of apostolic succession as a bulwark against Gnosticism. And so it was as early as 110 AD, when Jesus of Nazareth may yet have been a living memory for some, that the Church traded its birthright for the pottage of heretical head-hunting and bureaucracy-building.

Well now.

It seems as unfair to me to blame Ignatius for the present day Church's bloated arrogance as it is to blame everything wrong in the world on Eve eating the forbidden fruit. I mean, this was a guy who was willingly, even cheerfully eaten alive by wild animals for Jesus'  sake. 

You know when I think the Church lost its way? That day at the lake when Jesus called Peter, James and John. Peter, what a hypocrite. And all you have to do is attend a Church this Sunday where they use the Revised Common Lectionary to find out what jackasses the sons of Zebedee were.

The Church never fell because the Church was born in sin. Jesus says as much when he declares that he came not to call the righteous, but sinners. This big problem with the contemporary Church is not that we've strayed from our roots, but that we remain firmly planted in the cowardice and cluelessness that characterized the primitive Church. 

Oh hey, you know what? I've just blogged my way into another excuse to link to Eliot's now classic takedown of all lapsarian myths!

Reproducing "Didachean Christianity" in the 21st century, no less than repristinating Protestant Orthodoxy or clinging to Tridentine Catholicism, is more fool's errand than faithfulness. It mistakes a museum for the household of God built with living stones.

So by all means let us listen for God's will in the company of the saints. But they're dead and gone. They can only answer our questions obliquely. It is up to us to live faithfully in the present, and no ancient Christian, no matter how righteous, can do that for us.

Which half of government do you want to cut?

I used to think that Richmond area Tea Partiers were all Michigan transplants. Their homemade signs tended toward yellow lettering on a blue background. (At least I assume they're Tea Party signs. Nothing says cranky populism like a homemade anti-government rant posted in a highway right-of-way, and Tea Partiers seem to want to be the voice of the heretofore silent, cranky, populist "majority.")

But lately they've branched out. One I see every day is a red hammer and sickle inside a prohibited symbol. Yes, now that the Democrats have passed Mitt Romney's health care reform, can the gulags be far off? "They came first for the insurance companies, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't an insurance company..."

One in particular deserves rebutting: "Cut government by half." Why half? Why not one-third? Or two-thirds? Did you pull that fraction out of your you-know-what? Or maybe, since I'm a liberal and want all the government, and they want no government, they decided to meet us halfway. In that case, I accept their magnanimous proposal, and invite them to start cutting, with the help of this handy-dandy pie chart:

As you can tell, you cannot get to 50% by eliminating foreign aid, welfare and grants for obscene art. Not even close.

If you want to make it easy, you could just get rid of half the programs where the pie pieces naturally add up to 50% more or less. That means you could fund the military, welfare (including unemployment benefits) and Medicare, but you'd have to kill Social Security, auction off the national parks, shutter every foreign embassy in the world, pull the plug on NASA, default on the national debt, and adopt an open borders policy because there'd be no money for border patrol agents.

Or flip it. Keep all the little stuff, plus Social Security, and close the Pentagon and Medicare. Costa Rica doesn't have an army; if they can get along without one, why can't we?

I vote for option two because I was endeared to Yellowstone by the summer I spent working there. And I'm a lover, not a fighter.

The point is, Yes, the government is big and expensive, but that's because it does some very big and important and expensive stuff! Like run a pension system and medical insurance for the elderly. Tea Partiers might like to imagine a Brave, New Philanthropic World would blossom if only we weren't taxed so much. Why churches and charities could care for the aged, and they'd have the means to do so! But in fact, we tried that once, and it didn't work. Before Social Security and Medicare were enacted, the elderly were the population demographic most likely to be poor. Now they're the least. Which is as it should be.

But I don't think there's that much hard, libertarian thinking going on in the Tea Party movement. I think it's a lot of throwing a hissy fit over the bank bailouts, the stimulus bill, and the takeover of GM. All this stuff cost a bunch of money, and it was distasteful, especially the bank bailouts. Heck, I'm cranky about it, and I'm a big gubmunt librul!

But it saved the economy from going off a cliff. We're in the worst recession since 1982, but we aren't in a depression, and that's because the government stepped in prop up the banks, save jobs and create jobs when the private sector was unable to do so.

Sooner or later we will have to deal with the mounting debt, and we'll have to deal with it by raising taxes and cutting benefits. There's ample room to do both. We could raise taxes back to where they were under the Clinton administration, and as I recall, those Clinton-era tax rates were accompanied by strong economic growth. And as life expectancy increases, the retirement age should go up.

But not now and not even next year. The economy is still very weak. When FDR pulled back on the New Deal in 1937, the economy descended yet again.

Tea Partiers have a right to be cranky, but crankiness isn't a governing philosophy. They need to put down their paint brushes, come out of their basements and educate themselves on how economies actually work, and what their tax dollars actually pay for.

Better basketball

After 15 years of disinterest, I picked this year to tune into in the NBA again. Lucky for me, since last time around I was a Laker fan, and I didn't see any reason to pick a new team this time around.

The NBA is better than it used to be. Gone are the days when Patrick Ewing would drive to the basket butt first. Gone are the days of 72-69 finals. Scores don't climb into the 120s like they used to, but today's NBA teams know how to move the ball and put it in the basket.

But what really stands out is how bad college basketball has become in comparison. Every NBA player can shoot jump shots and drive to the hole. Every NBA player (except for Shaq) can knock down free throws. Every NBA player is big, fast and most of all, graceful. It's not quite like watching the ballet, but it is a thing of beauty to watch a fast break to develop, or even a set play in the half court.

By contrast, college players are smaller and less agile. Few can boast the complete game that the average NBA player can. The game itself is much less smooth. Plays unfold in a much more herky-jerky manner. College basketball is, well, ugly in comparison.

Late in game seven a Celtic (was it Wallace or Allen? can't remember) chased down a loose ball near the baseline headed toward the end of the Laker bench, planted his foot just beyond the arc, twisted in mid-air and drained a three-pointer. I looked at Laura and said, "College players can't do that."

And then there was this:

The quality gap between college football and the NFL is, if anything, greater than that between college basketball and the NBA. There are no LeBrons in the NFL. Nobody comes straight out of high school to be a starting middle linebacker, much less a quarterback, and I doubt that anybody ever will. But at least college football retains the best players in the 18-22 year age range. I knew in my mind that college basketball would have been better had KG, Kobe, LeBron and others played four years of the college game, but not like I knew it after tuning into the NBA for the first time in a long time.

I will continue to be a college basketball fan because I'm a North Carolinian by birth, and hating Carolina and Dook is in my DNA. But if I want to see the game played at its best, I'll watch the NBA.

Rediscovering precritical exegesis

Taking Old Testament from Walter Brueggeman was not only an education in Israel's sacred texts. It was a schooling in a deep suspicion bordering on contempt of Greek metaphysics, not to mention the Reformed tradition. Heck, any theological tradition.

Brueggemann's literary method of interpretation absolutely refused to smooth over the rough edges of the Bible with philosophical or dogmatic sand paper. If Moses got God to repent of the evil he thought to do to his people, then that's what he did, immutability be damned! If God expresses surprise that things didn't work out the way he imagined, then God was genuinely surprised, omniscience be damned!

This was bracing stuff. I took to it like single malt Scotch. This was the way I preached early in my ministry. It disturbed some of my parishioners, thrilled others and always, always made for interesting sermons. "You made the God of the Bible sound like a Greek god," said the chair of the search committee that called me to Salisbury. At the time, I could not have been paid a higher compliment.

I'm not a good preacher, if by good you mean original. I was handed a exegetical and hermeneutical method that was guaranteed to lay bare "the strange new world of the Bible," if I may quote a theologian whom Brueggemann tolerated because he stuffed his dogmatics with exegetical fine print. And the Bible is much more interesting than me.

Fifteen years in, I have some reservations about the method, and some (most, OK, nearly all) of the stuff that's come out of my mouth in the pulpit.

On boycotting BP

Like a lot of people I've bought my last gallon of BP gasoline for a while. But which gas station should I patronize? Exxon? Yeah, now's there's a company that really cares about the small people, not to mention the puffins in yonder Prince Edward Sound. Texaco? Shell? Chevron? The only difference between those companies and BP is that their time hasn't come yet.

There is no Whole Foods of gasoline. Boycotting BP is a great way to stamp your feet at an intolerable situation, but it won't solve the problem, namely, our over-reliance on dirty yet cheap sources of energy.

What's so depressing about this  situation, aside from the ghastly damage to the Gulf of Mexico's ecosystem and to the wallets of those who make a living off the Gulf's beautiful beaches and rich sea life, is that even a disaster of these proportions has moved neither the public nor our elected representatives in Congress to take real steps toward shifting our society to a greener energy foundation.

If this won't do it, what will?

Yes, wind and solar power are more expensive than oil and coal, but only because the price at the gas pump doesn't reflect the social, medical and environmental costs of fossil fuels. Gas is cheap because kids with asthma and soldiers in the Persian Gulf and pelicans in Louisiana subsidize your purchase.

That has to come to an end. And it will. By choice or by necessity, sooner or later.

P.S. I'm not all that upset about the Chairman's "small people" comment. If he'd have said "the little guy" nobody would have batted an eyelash. I'm willing to give a non-native English speaker the benefit of the doubt.

Job--WTF?

So in chapel today the extended campus students presented a play based on the book of Job. A truly baffling book. No sooner does the narrator praise the long-suffering Job for refusing to accuse God of wrongdoing than Job lets forth a torrent of accusations against God's justice matched only by Job's even more strenuous assertions of his righteousness.

In the end, God doesn't so much answer Job as reduce him to silence with a demonstration of his creative power delivered in rhetorical bombast. He says in effect, "Who are you to question me, the One who made you and the entire world? What are your problems to me? I make it rain in the desert where nobody lives. I am not at the beck and call of needy human beings. I answer to no one."

Oh snap!

But that's not the end.

Canon within the canon meme

"All scripture is inspired by God and is useful for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness." True dat. But most people subscribe to a canon within the canon, whether they admit it or not. In other words, some texts or books are more important than others.

My Old Testament professor, Walter Brueggemann, suggested that we consciously adopt a canon within the canon. Pick 40 indispensable Old Testament texts and 20 indispensable New Testament texts, and that collection can be the core of our personal biblical theology.

Brueggemann was not endorsing Jefferson's taking a pair of scissors to the Bible and excising the texts he didn't like. Rather, he wanted us to think long and hard about what is peripheral and what is central. Jesus himself does this when he argues that the scripture's myriad of laws and prophetic utterances are but commentary on two verses, Deuteronomy 6:5 and Leviticus 19:18. Brueggemann does this in his Old Testament Theology when he adopts the metaphor of the courtroom, and explicates the Old Testament under the categories of Israel's core testimony, its counter-testimony and its unsolicited testimony.

For theological reasons some would want to reverse the ratio, but Brueggemann pointed out that the Old Testament is at least twice the size of the New. Plus, he's an Old Testament professor, so you could hardly expect him to slight his own field.

I never got around to doing it, but was reminded of the exercise last night at church when a text that would surely be in my canon within the canon, Galatians 2: 15-21, was read and discussed. So last night, tired of moving stuff from our old house to our new one, I took a break and worked on it a bit.

What I came up with were 40 OT and 20 NT texts that have been indispensable to me, which is slightly different than choosing texts to be the core of your biblical theology. In other words, I was trying to figure out what my unexamined biblical theology is. Below is what I came up with. I was generous in deciding what constitutes a "text." Sometimes I chose an entire book. Other times, just one verse.

I would encourage the two or three readers of this blog to post their own canons within the canon, and to critique my own. What images of God, world and humanity does this canon within the canon generate? More importantly, what is left out, and how is my biblical theology deficient as a result?

Old Testament

• Genesis 12: 1-9
• Genesis 28: 10-22
• Genesis 32: 22-32
• Exodus 3: 1-15
• Exodus 5:6-6:1
• Exodus 12: 1-14
• Exodus 20: 1-17
• Exodus 32: 7-14
• Deuteronomy 8: 1-20
• 1 Samuel 16: 1-13
• 2 Samuel 11: 1-27
• 1 Kings 17: 8-16
• 1 Kings 19: 1-18
• 2 Kings 5: 1-19
• Esther 4: 13-17
• Job 38:1-40:2
• Psalm 1
• Psalm 23
• Psalm 27
• Psalm 32
• Psalm 42
• Psalm 57
• Psalm 63
• Psalm 65
• Psalm 84
• Psalm 112
• Proverbs 15: 17
• Proverbs 17: 12  (TEV translation)
• Isaiah 2: 2-5
• Isaiah 40: 1-9
• Isaiah 61: 1-4
• Isaiah 65: 17-25
• Jeremiah 1: 4-9
• Jeremiah 2: 9-13
• Jeremiah 12: 1-6
• Jeremiah 20: 7-18
• Amos 5: 21-24
• Jonah (entire book)
• Micah 6: 6-8
• Haggai (entire book)

New Testament

• Matthew 5: 3-10
• Matthew 5: 31-38
• Mark 1: 14-20
• Mark 8: 31-38
• Mark 10: 17-31
• Mark 16: 1-8
• Luke 1: 26-38
• Luke 2: 1-20
• John 4: 7-15
• John 15: 1-11
• Romans 12
• 1 Corinthians 1: 18-31
• 2 Corinthians 3: 18
• Galatians 2: 19b-20
• Philippians 2: 5-11
• Philippians 3: 10-21
• Hebrews 5: 7-10
• Hebrews 11: 1
• 1 Peter 5: 1-11
• Revelation 21: 1-5