Theology Geek NZ Theology Community for New Zealand

Both the Contestant and the Referee: A Review of The End of Secularism

Harold Kildow, of the Evangelical Political Scholars Association, reviews Hunter Baker’s new book The End of Secularism:

the political liberalism that perhaps marked a climax run in the history of liberty, had as one of its pillars religious toleration. A corollary is that government is not in the business of caring for souls—and thus a salutary separation of church and state is called for. It is but a short rhetorical step from there to the default understanding regnant to this day, to wit: toleration, liberty, and all the good things of our Western political patrimony depend upon a strict neutrality in government when it comes to religion. Thus secularism is the sine qua non of a well-ordered, and peaceful, democratic nation. Of course, Baker’s title announces the end of secularism, not its ascendancy; his brief but thorough treatment (194 pages not including notes and a very valuable bibliography) belongs in the hands of students and their professors, parishioners and their pastors, and everyone concerned that the referee has entered the game as a contestant.

Elite opinion, at least since the French Enlightenment, has tended to secularism and outright atheism. But the baleful effects of elite belief are less pronounced in societies or eras where government does not imagine itself to have authority over all or most of the public’s life. The era of Big Government is, sadly, still with us; and as its power and authority have increased, the number of perches for self styled elites has increased, and like the branches of a well watered tree, offers refuge and sustenance for many an obnoxious bird. What makes secularism especially obnoxious in Baker’s telling is its deceptive posture as morally neutral—and its concomitant assertion that the threat to social comity is solely from religion. Remove religion and its entirely unwarranted moral certainty from the public square, and, voilà!, problem solved, the era of life and light can begin in earnest.

But secularism, to bring another metaphor, has its hand on the scale while selling us the goods.

Read the whole thing here.

Arriving on shelves late last year, The End of Secularism challenges the notion that religion must be kept a private matter and therefore prevented from informing public life and policy decisions. Baker argues that secularism itself not only fails to be neutral, but does not solve the problem of religious difference.

For more details about the book, you can listen to an excellent interview with Hunter Baker on the White Horse Inn or download the book’s introduction here.

With many voices today claiming that Christianity poses a threat to freedom, this book looks to be a timely and persuasive call to reexamine secularism’s status as the “super rational public philosophy to trump all the rest”.

Go to Source

Sunday Study: Two Forms of Inerrancy

The discussion arising in response to my recent post Inerrancy and Biblical Authority both on this blog and on some of the blogs that linked to it, got me thinking a bit more about this topic. I was reminded of an interesting comment made by Alan Rhoda regarding the doctrinal statement of the Evangelical Philosophical Society “EPS,”

The Bible alone, and the Bible in its entirety, is the Word of God written and therefore inerrant in the originals. God is a Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, each an uncreated person, one in essence, equal in power and glory.

In a discussion with Bill Vallicella of Maverick Philosopher on the meaning, Alan Rhoda distinguishes two accounts of inerrancy,

It seems to me that the EPS statement is sufficiently vague to permit a few different readings.

The strongest is what’s known, I think, as verbal plenary inspiration (VPI). This is the view that each and every word used in the Biblical originals is exactly the word that God wanted used. Hence, since God is infallible, the Bible is inerrant. (VPI is the position of the Chicago Statement.)

A weaker, and I think more defensible view, may be called didactic plenary inspiration (DPI). This is the view that whatever the Biblical originals were intended to teach is inerrant. It is not necessary that the particular words of the Bible be chosen by God so long as the particular message that God wants to convey gets across. (VPI entails DPI, but not vice-versa.) If one accepts this view, then the question to be asked with respect to a Biblical text is “what was it intended to teach?” Is Genesis 1, for example, intended to teach that the world was created in six 24-hour days? Or is it, perhaps, a kind of literary framework intended to teach the absolute superiority of Yahweh over all other gods? Or perhaps its purpose isn’t primarily didactic at all, but something primarily evocative like poetry?

My point is that since the EPS inerrancy statement does not specify the primary locus of inerrancy (whether the words, the teachings, or something else) it permits a flexible range of approaches to Biblical interpretation.

Rhoda suggests two different ways of understanding the doctrine of biblical inerrancy; one that follows from affirming verbal inspiration and another that follows from didactic inspiration.

To see how DPI works consider a legal analogy, suppose that I want to write up a last will and testament. I approach a lawyer and tell set out precisely what I want put in my will. The lawyer then drafts a document that contains the provisions I stipulated but expresses them in standard legal terms and in accord with standard legal conventions and phrases e.g. “I, Matthew Flannagan, being of sound mind, hereby decree that…”

The document expresses, in first person, my will regarding my assets and property so I can be said to be its author, a court will call it my will as will my surviving family. However, I did not write it. The form, exact wording, turns of phrase, sequencing, choice of font and paper, etc are the lawyers’. Given that the will was drafted in New Zealand, in 2010 it will be in New Zealand English and drafted in accord with the styles and conventions of the statutes and precedents applicable to New Zealand wills and testaments. Nevertheless, as the content of the document express my wishes, despite my lack of authorship, it is a faithful expression of my will. Something like this picture of inspiration is suggested in Exodus 4:10-16.

Now it is important to note that a DPI model of inerrancy does not mean that people reject the entire biblical text as mythical and figurative stories, which illustrate theological and moral truths and assert nothing about space-time history. If the message is articulated through the literary and rhetorical conventions of human beings then a plausible interpretation, as opposed to a strained one, will take these conventions into account. When this is done, it is implausible to conclude everything in scripture is myth.

Take, for example, the genre of ancient biography, as mentioned in my previous post. This genre does not intend to affirm as true every detail it records but rather seeks to give an accurate picture of the person the biography is about. This still requires that much of what it records is true; no one would interpret biographies about Alexander the Great to read that they did not teach that he was king of Macedon, son of Philip, who conquered Persia, fought in the battle of Gaugamela, etc. Similarly, if Jesus did none of the things recorded in the gospels and said nothing at all remotely resembling what they attribute to him then these accounts do not give an accurate picture of him.  However, the genre of ancient biography does not require that Jesus’ teaching on divorce be presented verbatim, in precisely the same order or using exactly the same words in the various synoptic gospels. Neither does it require that every temporal or geographical detail mentioned within them is taught as correct.

Many historical books intend to teach historical claims. The Old Testament teaches, among other things, that Israel went into exile as a result of disobedience; it also teaches God lead the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. These texts are, as far as I can tell, historiographies. Admittedly they are ancient near eastern “ANE” historiographies and the fact that the genre of ANE historiography uses hyperbole, lack of precision, a degree of historical reconstruction, etc needs to be taken into account. Nevertheless, as are historiographies they intend to teach us the significance of events that occurred in the past.

Now a person would not take an Egyptian history as entirely figurative. One should take it to teach that a particular event happened. It is true that one should recognise the hyperbole present, the theological/political message the text affirms but this would not be taken to be all that the author teaches. Ramses’ campaigns into Syria are intended to tell us that the campaigns actually happened, that the battles actually occurred even if they use hyperbole, rhetoric and historical reconstruction to articulate a political/theological message over and above the mere reporting of history. Hence, DPI does not necessitate a licence to de-historicise the text or embrace biblical minimalism.

Of course, there are other books and literary forms in scripture, such as the parables or the apocalyptic, which are not intended to be read as history. Then there are the early chapters of Genesis or the books of Job and Jonah, where it is not clear that the text intends to teach that the events actually occurred in history and where it seems more likely that these were stories were meant to convey theological and ethical truths. What is needed when reading these texts is attention to the genre. Conclusions about what a text teaches must be based on defensible claims about the literary style and the context of the text in question.

DPI, therefore, is not the same as the view that scripture is infallible in faith and morals but not in history. It may simply be that at certain junctures scripture intends to teach us something about the past. On the other hand, DPI does allow for certain types of errors that a more verbal account may not allow for. Here are two examples. The first is one I alluded to in my previous post, cases where the form or way the message is articulated presupposes error. Consider Jesus’ comments in Matt 15:18-19, “But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and these things make a man unclean. For out of the heart comes evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander.” Some scholars take, as metaphoric, references to the heart as the seat of the will, emotions, intellect. However, others suggest that ancient cultures literally believed the heart was the seat of psychological states like this and conclude that these texts reflect and presuppose a false and erroneous view of anatomy. I am inclined to think that even if these scholars are correct, little of interest follows.

An analogue here would be a person who reads a 12th century account of a battle that is recorded to have occurred at “sun rise”. We know that 12th century people literally believed that the sun rose, in accord with the accepted pre-Copernican cosmology of the day. Hence, it is plausible to think that the human authors of these texts took the phrase “sun rise” to literally mean that the sun rose. Despite this, I think it would be a mistake to suggest that the phrase “the battle took place at sunrise” is false because of Copernicus’ discoveries. While the text presupposes an erroneous view of cosmology, it clearly does not intend to teach us pre-Copernican cosmology; all it teaches is that a battle occurred at dawn and it uses pre-Copernican cosmology to express this point. What the text teaches is true if the battle occurred and it occurred at dawn. It would be false if the battle occurred at another time of the day or never occurred at all.

I am inclined think that the references to heart, kidneys, etc in the scriptures function in an analogous way to the word “sunrise” in medieval texts. I would say the same thing about references to the “four corners of the earth” or “the waters above and below” even if the original human writers understood these to be literally true. The cosmology in question is presupposed by the text abut is not what the text is trying to teach us. The author uses these phrases them to teach something else and it is what the author taught not the author’s mode of presentation that matters.

A second example of an error that would be allowed under DPI would be where scripture affirms or states something which is unrelated to what is being taught. An example would be Paul’s instruction to Timothy in 2 Tim 4:15, “When you come, bring the cloak that I left with Carpus at Troas, and my scrolls, especially the parchments.” Suppose, for the sake of argument, Paul did not leave his cloak at Troas, perhaps he thought he had but in reality he had left it somewhere else. I am inclined to think this kind of error would make absolutely no difference to whether what Paul teaches in 2 Timothy is true or not. As the point of this letter is not to give an apostolic teaching on whether there is a cloak in Troas.

Paul’s teaching is authoritative because he is an apostle, what he teaches as an apostle is true. It does not follow from this, that every personal conversation, remark, Paul ever made in his life or every memory he had was without error. It’s rather that what he taught in the function of an apostle has divine authority. It seems to me that while the letter to Timothy expounds apostolic teaching and instruction and the whole book letter is therefore authoritative, the specific passage in v 4:13 records a personal aside Paul gives to Timothy regarding some property he left at Troas. To interpret Tim 4:13 as a divine command to collect Paul’s cloak, or a prophetic or apostolic utterance that a cloak existed in Troas seems to me to be excessively pedantic and implausible, hence I myself see nothing about the divine authority of scripture threatened by a discovery that there was no cloak in Troas. All it would show us was that Paul’s memory was not perfect, which we already knew.

So DPI is compatible with certain sorts of errors in the text provided they are not what the text teaches. Of course none of this means that scripture contains these errors. There may well have been a cloak at Troas. References to “the waters above,” “heart,” etc may be phenomenological language, the point is that even if these references do presuppose or  contain errors of a certain sort this does not really make any difference to the claim that whatever scripture intends to teach is true. Other examples could be given but I think you get the point.

I suspect something like what Alan Rhoda calls didactic plenary inspiration is the view I was elaborating in my previous post. It also appears to be the view defended (at least in some places) by William Lane Craig and something like it is the view expounded by Alvin Plantinga. I also suspect that Glenn Peoples holds this view; although Glenn considers himself to not be an inerrantist he would probably, on Rhoda’s classification, be a particular kind of inerrantist, one that rejected VPI and instead asserted DPI.

On the other hand, the sceptics I referred to in my previous post (people like Tooley, Fales, Brink, Loftus, etc) in their critiques, work with a fairly strong VPI view of inerrancy. John Loftus’ speaks of Jesus’ reference to “the heart” and how this reflects a primitive view of anatomy, Fales states that certain books may contain the genre of myth and Tooley suggests that Genesis contains a story in which God wipes out the human race. This suggests that they think that every word, illustration or literary convention used to teach us about God must itself be without error. If I am correct, then what sceptics attack is one particular version of inerrancy. They may or may not be successful in this attack but attacking one version of a doctrine does not show that all versions are false, and in this case many leading defenders of Christianity do not hold the version under attack any way.

RELATED POSTS:
Sunday Study: Inerrancy and Biblical Authority

Go to Source

The New Veritas Forum Website

The Veritas Forum have just launched their new website. Began in 1992 at Harvard, the campus ministry was established to provide a context for students to explore the ultimate questions of life. Today the organization works with more than 60 leading schools throughout North American and Europe, coordinating events with leading Christian thinkers such as Os Guinness, Alister McGrath, Dallas Willard and many more.

The website offers many great videos and resources that I encourage you to explore.

Here are a few:

The Existence of Evil and the Problem of God
Alvin Plantinga and Richard Gale Ph.D.
University of Tennessee

A Conversation with Tim Keller: Belief in an Age of Skepticism? (Edit)
Timothy J. Keller
University of California, Berkeley

Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense, Part 1 of 2 (Edit)
N. T. Wright
Georgetown University

Time for Truth (Edit)
Os Guinness
University of California, Los Angeles

Relativism (Edit)
JP Moreland
California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Go to Source

Authority and Application

“We learn the meaning of Scripture as we apply it to situations. Adam learned the meaning of “subdue the earth” as he studied the creation and discovered applications for that command. A person does not understand Scripture, Scripture tells us, unless he can apply it to new situations, to situations not even envisaged in the original text (Matt. 16.3; 22:29; Luke 24:25; John 5:39f.; Rom. 15:4; 2 Tim. 3:16f.; 2 Peter 1:19-21 – in context). Scripture says that its whole purpose is to apply truth to our lives (John 20:31.; Rom. 15:4; 2 Tim. 3:16f.). Furthermore, the applications of Scripture are as authoritative as the specific statements of Scripture. In the passages referred to above, Jesus and others held their hearers responsible if they failed to apply Scripture properly. If God says “Thou shall not steal” and I take a doughnut without paying, I cannot excuse myself by saying that Scripture fails to mention doughnuts. Unless applications are as authoritative as the explicit teachings of Scripture (cf. The Westminister Confession of Faith, I, on “good and necessary consequence”), the scriptural authority becomes a dead letter. To be sure, we are fallible in determining the proper applications; but we are also fallible in translating, exegeting, and understanding the explicit statements of Scripture.  The distinction between explicit statements and applications will not save us from the effects of our fallibility. Yet we must translate, exegete, and “apply” – not fearfully but confidently – because God’s Word is clear and powerful and because God gives it to us for our good.”

John Frame, The Doctrine of the Knowledge of God (Presbyterian and Reformed Publishing Company, 1987), pp 84.

Go to Source

Episode 033: In Search of the Soul, Part 5

At last, the series ends. Here is part five of the series on the mind/body problem. This episode steps completely away from analytical philosophy and is an overview of some of the biblical material that bears on the subject. Although it’s a comparatively long episode (just under fifty minutes), it’s still a very sketchy overview. [...]
Go to Source

Sovereignty and The Treaty of Waitangi

In the Theory of Morality, Alan Donagan has a concise discussion of the morality of contracts. At one point he makes the following plausible argument,

Obviously, the normal conditions of the existence of a contract are not fulfilled if the promisee misunderstands what the promiser intends. … a promiser is morally bound to perform whatever he believed his promisee to have understood him to promise. He cannot reasonably do less; for he should have corrected any misunderstanding he was aware of. And not even his promisee can fairly claim that he has knowingly bound himself to do more.[1]

Donagan here notes that when two parties enter into a contract they are bound by the terms of the contract because they agreed to them. Given this, they are only bound to do what they agreed to do, or what it is reasonable to assume that they agreed to do, given the circumstances. They cannot be required to do more than this as they did not agree to do more and could not reasonably have been expected to forsee needing to do more.

I think these points are fairly obvious; however, they have implications that are often less obvious. Today is Waitangi Day in New Zealand. One common argument proposed in the debate around the Treaty of Waitangi is that in the Maori translation, under Article 2, the Crown promised,

… to protect the chiefs, the subtribes and all the people of New Zealand in the unqualified exercise of their chieftainship over their lands, villages and all their treasures.[2]

Now there is some debate about whether the phrase translated “chieftainship” (tino rangatiratanga) entails the idea of sovereignty or self-determination in this context or whether it simply conveys an idea of property rights.

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that the former is correct. The fact that the Maori translation promises Maori sovereignty does not mean that the Crown promised this. In order for the Crown to be bound in this manner, the Crown would have to have believed (or been in a position where it was reasonable for them to have believed) that they were promising various Iwi (tribes) “sovereignty” in this sense. This clearly was not the case. The crown thought that they were merely promising what the English translation affirms they were:

Her Majesty the Queen of England confirms and guarantees to the Chiefs and Tribes of New Zealand and to the respective families and individuals thereof the full exclusive and undisturbed possession of their Lands and Estates Forests Fisheries and other properties which they may collectively or individually possess so long as it is their wish and desire to retain the same in their possession;[3]

It is clear that, under the English version, the Crown intended to guarantee Maori property rights in their land and it promised to protect these rights. Any promise of sovereignty was due to a translation error or not speaking Maori fluently. The representatives of the Crown could not have reasonably believed they were doing anything else. They relied in good faith on a translator to put their terms accurately into Maori and had no reason for thinking he had done anything other than this; hence, the Crown did not agree to provide Maori sovereignty and so did not promise it under the Treaty. It may be that some leaders mistakenly thought they did, but they were mistaken. Whatever the Maori version says, the Crown is not bound by it.

I can think of two objections to this line of argument. The first, as Madeleine tells me, is the contention that the majority of Iwi signed the Maori version and under international treaty jurisprudence, where there is a conflict in translation the version that the majority of the parties signed is the valid one.

This argument, however, misses the point. It is not that I am claiming that the English version is valid and the Maori one is not. I am quite willing to grant that the Maori version is valid, the point is that the Crown is morally bound only to do what they reasonably believed they were agreeing to do when they accepted the terms of the Treaty and the terms they believed they were agreeing to were those contained in the English version of the Treaty.

Moreover, this argument appeals to international law. International law recognises that the Crown is the legal sovereign of New Zealand as it has been a stable de-facto government, recognised as such, by the majority of its citizens.

A second objection is to note reciprocity; just as the Crown was not bound by what it reasonably believed it was agreeing to, so too the various Iwi are only bound by what they reasonably believed they were agreeing to. If one grants for the sake of argument that “tino rangatiratanga” means sovereignty, then Iwi were not bound to relinquish this sovereignty over to the Crown. They believed, quite reasonably given the translation they had, that they were not promising to relinquish sovereignty to the Crown but rather to maintain it.

If this were the case the problem still arises that today in New Zealand, in 2010, the Crown is Sovereign. We do not have independent tribal nations that hold sovereign political power over their lands. All land in New Zealand is under the sovereignty of parliament and is subject to English common law and NZ statutes. Hence, the question is not whether Iwi are required to relinquish sovereignty to the Crown under the Treaty as, for better or worse, justly or unjustly, they have done so. The question today becomes, whether, after 170 years of the Crown being sovereign, Iwi should attempt to gain this sovereignty back? On this issue the Treaty is silent. It says nothing about what various parties are entitled to if another party misunderstood the agreement.

The question then of Maori sovereignty is not a question of the Treaty at all. It is simply a question of morality in general. The real question is this, if one lives under a de-facto government that has been sovereign in practise for 170 years and if this government is relatively just then should one continue to defer to its sovereignty?

I think the answer to this question is yes. I believe that when a stable de-facto government exists and has existed for over a century and when there is an absence of gross abuses of human rights then its sovereignty should be recognised as legitimate by the citizens of that nation. I will not further advance this argument here but I will simply note that whatever the answer to this question it seems reasonable to say that the Crown never promised sovereignty to Maori and claims that it did are based on the mistaken idea that a person can be bound by the terms of a contract which he or she both did not agree to and could not reasonably have been expected to have agreed to – to expect anything else is nonsense.

[1] Alan Donagan The Theory of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1977) 91.
[2] “Treaty of Waitangi” Kawharu Translation Article 2.
[3] “Treaty of Waitangi” English Version Article 2.

RELATED POSTS:
Maori and Pakeha are Not Partners to the Treaty of Waitangi

Go to Source

View “Marae: The Great Waitangi Debate” Here

For those of you who slept in, got the time wrong or who just don’t get TV One because you don’t live in New Zealand, click on the link to watch “Marae: The Great Waitangi Debate,” as screened on national television this morning. The debate featured panelists Stephen Franks, Tim Wikiriwhi, Matthew Hooten and Hana O’Regan and an active studio audience, including Matt and I, who were expected to comment and ask questions from the floor (which we did).

Our review and thoughts is here.

Go to Source