Randal Rauser's Blog, page 101

Pro-life Carpet-bombers: On the moral incoherence of neocon conservative Christians

What does it mean to be pro-life? Time and again, I find that Christian conservatives seem to endorse a pro-life vision that is almost completely limited to the fetus-in-utero. Consider, for example, this tweet from Michael Brown:

I was just interacting with a pastor friend who referenced a mega church in his area that supported a pro-abortion presidential candidate. The blood of the unborn cries out as a witness against them!

— Dr. Michael L. Brown (@DrMichaelLBrown) April 21, 2018

For Brown, a politican’s stance on elective abortion is enough to indict them and condemn those who would support them with the “blood of the unborn”.

Being Pro-life and the Gospel of Life

My conception of what it means to be pro-life was shaped by the sweeping moral vision of Pope John Paul II which you can read in his 1996 encyclical Evangelium Vitae. Chapter 1 is titled “The Voice of Your Brother’s Blood Cries To Me From the Ground.” But the blood of which the Pope speaks is not limited to the fetus. Instead, his encyclical surveys a catalogue of threats to the holistic Christian Gospel of Life. To be sure, elective abortion is included in that list, but so is contraception. Some contraception is condemned because of its abortifacient potential, but more generally contraception is condemned for treating natural fertility cycles as pathogenic. You may not agree with that calculus, but at least Catholics are consistent and holistic in their moral vision.

And the Gospel of Life doesn’t stop with elective abortion and the contraceptive mentality that makes it possible. It also indicts the self-serving attitude that inflicts violence on the environment:

“man has a specific responsibility towards the environment in which he lives, towards the creation which God has put at the service of his personal dignity, of his life, not only for the present but also for future generations.”

(By the way, contrast that with conservatives who even now support a president who denies human-induced climate change and supports the obliteration of pro-environmental policies in the EPA.)

The Gospel of Life also indicts inequitable trade practices that perpetuate social inequality around the world:

“And how can we fail to consider the violence against life done to millions of human beings, especially children, who are forced into poverty, malnutrition and hunger because of an unjust distribution of resources between peoples and between social classes?’

The Gospel of Life eschews retributive jurisprudence — and particularly capital punishment — in favor of personal reformation and societal reconciliation.

And perhaps most notably, the Gospel of Life eschews militarism and the violence of war:

“Among the signs of hope we should also count the spread, at many levels of public opinion, of a new sensitivity ever more opposed to war as an instrument for the resolution of conflicts between peoples, and increasingly oriented to finding effective but ‘non-violent’ means to counter the armed aggressor.”

To sum up, to speak of being pro-life in light of the Gospel of Life illumines a truly holistic moral vision.

Pro-life Carpet-bombers

With that in mind, return to Michael Brown. He is incredulous that any Christian could support a politician who supported access to elective abortion. And yet, he enthusiastically supported Ted Cruz for president. In his endorsement, Brown wrote that Cruz is “is a man of unshakable, conservative moral convictions” and “unshakably pro-life”.

Sadly, “pro-life” here is apparently limited to the fetus. You see, Cruz also regularly boasted of his plan to “carpet bomb” ISIS. For example, in an interview with Megyn Kelly, he promised;

“If I am elected president, we will defeat radical Islamic terrorism, and we will utterly destroy ISIS. And yes, that means carpet bombing them into oblivion.” (source)

Let’s be clear: carpet-bombing is a military strategy that involves indiscriminate saturation bombing over large territories to the end of utterly devastating the territory and all life within it. Here is a description from the entry on “Carpet Bombing” in Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide:

“Carpet bombing is distinguished from military bombing because it is not aimed at a particular military objective but targets an entire city. Carpet bombing is justified for a number of reasons: to destroy an enemy’s industrial base, to demoralize an enemy population, or simply as retaliation.” (p. 66, emphasis added)

For an example of carpet-bombing, consider the Allied bombing of Dresden in February, 1945 that killed more than 140,000 civilians. The bombing was so intense that it created a firestorm of tornadic winds while melting asphalt streets and even granite blocks and vaporizing untold civilians.

Fortunately, given the utterly heinous and immoral nature of carpet bombing, it was banned under international law in 1977 by ading Additional Protocol 1 to the Geneva Convention (“Carpet Bombing,” in Encyclopedia of War Crimes and Genocide, 66).

So Cruz was endorsing a military strategy banned under international law. But the offense didn’t stop there. Even worse, Cruz regularly couched his plans with an utterly deplorable, nationalistic jingoism. Consider this excerpt from an Iowa speech:

“we will utterly destroy ISIS. We will carpet bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.” (emphasis added)

Needless to say, this is utterly shocking commentary coming from a candidate for the Republican nomination for president. And so, in a Republican debate, Wolf Blitzer pressed Cruz on his intentions by asking if he would bomb cities, including Raqqa, the capital of ISIS territory. Keep in mind that the indiscriminate targeting of cities is part-and-parcel of the meaning of carpet-bombing.

Cruz replied:

“You would carpet bomb where ISIS is — not a city, but the location of the troops. You use air power directed — and you have embedded special forces to direction the air power. But the object isn’t to level a city. The object is to kill the ISIS terrorists.” (source)

Let’s be clear about one thing at the outset. Cruz is a lawyer by training, and apparently, he is a very intelligent lawyer. As such, he pays very close attention to words and their definition and he most certainly knew what carpet-bombing is. Consequently, there is no reasonable interpretation in which he was confusing carpet-bombing with strategic military bombing.

So what’s going on here? Is he now denying what he initially affirmed? That would be disturbing enough.And his reference to directing air power suggests that he may be equivocating between carpet-bombing and conventional strategic bombing.

But if you read his words carefully — and remember, the man’s a lawyer — it is also possible to read his words as continuing to endorse carpet bombing. The key is that he distinguishes between action and intention so that the intention is not to destroy a city per se but to “kill the ISIS terrorists.” Nonetheless, that is consistent with destroying the city in order to kill (and defeat) the terrorists.

By the same token, the Allied forces could have said their intention was not to destroy Dresden per se, but rather to defeat the Nazis. Nonetheless, the carpet-bombing of Dresden became the means to that end.

To sum up, Cruz never explicitly repudiates his initial vow to carpet-bomb ISIS. Instead he engages in the kind of deceptive wordsmithing that gives lawyers a bad name. (It reminds me of the time another lawyer-turned-politician, Bill Clinton, answered a question with “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.”)

Unshakably Pro-life Carpet Bombers

To conclude, Cruz claims to be a Christian and yet regularly endorsed indiscriminate saturation bombing of large tracts of territory, an action that is banned under the Geneva Convention. To make matters worse, he defended the action with flippant, jingoistic language. And when pressed, he obfuscates between strategic bombing and carpet bombing while still allowing for the latter.

Michael Brown wonders how a Christian could support a candidate who supports elective abortion. And I wonder how a Christian could support a candidate who supports carpet-bombing. Brown says the blood of the unborn cries out as a witness against the pro-choice political candidate. But whose blood cries out against the conservative Christian carpet-bomber?

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Hymns vs. Choruses: Are the Worship Wars Worth Fighting?

This article is based on a section from my book What’s So Confusing About Grace?

In a 1960 interview on Meet the Press, Martin Luther King, Jr. famously observed, “It is one of the tragedies of our nation, one of the shameful tragedies, that 11 o’clock on Sunday morning is one of the most segregated hours if not the most segregated hour in Christian America.” While King was talking about race, today the same point might be made about music as churches increasingly segregate into “traditional” and “contemporary” services, with each offering a music and worship style that is tailored to a particular constituency.

This tendency to segregate congregations into various special interest factions, each with its own music and worship style, represents a sort of uneasy détente, an attempt to restore peace to congregations that have been divided by the so-called worship wars. Hymns vs. choruses; drums vs. organ; emotion vs. reverence. Now we don’t need to choose sides and we don’t need to seek a way to find a deeper unity: everyone can have the service that they like.

The Cost of Worship Segregation

But that kind of resolution comes at a significant cost. To begin with, segregation seeks détente by sacrificing the diversity that is to characterize the church (1 Cor. 12:4-6). More fundamentally, it feeds into a consumer mentality that church exists to meet my needs rather than to equip me to meet the needs of others. This attitude was perfectly captured by a friend of mine who once said he’d stopped going to a particular church because he “didn’t get anything out of the worship.” But worship is about giving, not getting.

So if segregating the congregation into special-interest services isn’t the answer, how might we begin to change attitudes on the nature of church and worship? In the remainder of this article, I’d like to suggest one approach that draws on what psychologists call the contrast effect. A contrast effect involves strengthening or weakening a perception by juxtaposing it with a contrasting state of affairs. For example, the first warm spring day after a long winter is unforgettable, precisely because it is contrasted with the spell of long bleak cold weather you just endured. That’s the contrast effect at work.

With that in mind, I would like to suggest a contrast that would put our current worship wars into proper perspective. While I recognize that many people believe the worship wars are a great reason to argue with and divide from one another, I think our attitudes might change if we contrasted our current battles with the kinds of divisions that other churches face, and which they seek to overcome. With that in mind, allow me to present two contrasting Sunday mornings at 11 o’clock.

11 o’clock at a church in North America

Our first church is one of those typical North American congregations which has been divided by musical and worship styles. We join the service in progress:

As everybody rose to sing, Al stayed seated in the pew, arms crossed defiantly. He never stood during the choruses: driving drums, distorted guitar, and vacuous lyrics. “They make it sound like Jesus is my boyfriend,” he muttered darkly. “Everything sounds like it came straight off secular radio.”

Al scanned the sanctuary. Granted, a number of new young families had started coming to church in recent months. But that seemed to be all this foolish young “worship” pastor cared about: “New, young families.” Al made eye contact with Fred across the aisle. Fred was standing, arms crossed, with a scowl that could make paint peel. “I’ll have to speak with Fred after church,” Al thought. “We need to take action. It’s time to get rid of that twit up there with his ‘Jesus boyfriend choruses’.”

11 o’clock at a church in Rwanda

We now turn to our second congregation. This church is in Rwanda, an African nation that suffered an infamous genocide in 1994 during which Hutus slaughtered 800,000 Tutsis in three months. Now ask yourself what would it look like for a church composed of Hutus and Tutsis to find unity in the shadow of that unspeakable horror? Again, we join the service in progress:

Emmanuel always felt the pain, especially at Easter. It had been over twenty years since his wife and children had been massacred in the genocide. People had said that the pain would lessen over time. Emmanuel had believed them for a while. But he didn’t any longer. Every day he thought about his precious daughters. Today they would be young women, but instead, they were cut down as innocent children…

Emmanuel looked around the congregation at the Hutu Christians is his midst. He’d never know all that they had done and failed to do during those dark months of terror. But he did know that as the killing continued, Paster Sebahive had refused to offer Tutsis sanctuary. Some reports suggested that Pastor Sebahive had done even worse things. Emmanuel couldn’t be sure, but he had his suspicions. Even so, he also knew that Pastor Sebahive had long pleaded for forgiveness for his role. He had admitted that he had not done enough to help his Tutsi congregants. And since those bloody days, he had long been among the most active members of the reconciliation movement in the community. “Emmanuel,” he had once said with tears in his eyes, “I will forever live with the consequences of my sins and failures. It is my great sadness that you must as well.”

At that moment, so many years ago, Emmanuel had finally decided to forgive Pastor Sebahive for the things he’d done and the things he’d left undone. But it wasn’t easy. Nonetheless, as Pastor Sebahive’s deep baritone voice rose up from the congregation and out over the green misty hills of Rwanda with an impromptu rendition of “Amazing Grace,” Emmanuel felt just enough strength to forgive for yet another day.

Conclusion

My intention is not to trivialize the worship wars: I recognize that some folks are very passionate about this topic and sometimes they have a good reason to be. (For example, loud choruses can wreak havoc on the hearing aids of the elderly, and some contemporary songs are simply not suitable for corporate singing.)

Nonetheless, when I contrast our North American suburban concerns with a Christian like Emmanuel seeking unity in the aftermath of genocide, I can’t help but think that it is a real luxury that North American churches have the privilege to debate musical styles. Genocide vs. electric guitars: the contrast kind of puts things in perspective, doesn’t it?

Here’s the bottom line: when we find unity in Christ despite our differences – whatever those differences may be – we begin to live out the ministry of reconciliation to which we, as a church, have been called (2 Cor. 5:11-21). Even if that means singing some music you really don’t like.

So let it be.

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An Interview with Me that You Should Read (because I said so)

Yesterday the blog Quaestiones Disputatae posted the following interview with me. In the interview, I tackle questions like the strongest argument for theism, the biggest problem with contemporary apologetics, and the one book I would recommend to start studying philosophy (psst, and the book is by an atheist!).

Let me cut to the chase: you should definitely read the article.

 

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101. Atheism vs. Christianity with Adam Lee and Andrew Murtagh

This time on The Tentative Apologist Podcast I’m delighted to introduce two guests, Andrew Murtagh and Adam Lee. Andrew is a Christian apologist who blogs at Soapbox Redemption on the Patheos platform. He is also the author of the 2013 book Proof of Divine.

Adam Lee is an atheist and writer living in New York. He has written articles for Alternet, Salon, Free Inquiry among other sources and he regularly blogs at Daylight Atheism also on Patheos. Adam is also the author of the 2012 book Daylight Atheism. And how’s this for an interesting factoid: one of Adam’s articles was referenced positively in Richard Dawkins bestselling book The God Delusion.

Some years ago Andrew and Adam developed an unlikely friendship which led to them coauthor a book of dialogue and debate titled Meta: On God, the Big Questions, and the Just City. Meta is a lively book which presents a conversational exchange on life’s biggest questions. But it does so while retaining a friendly, irenic spirit, one which is all too rare in this age of loud voices and hardened opinions.

There are two things I really appreciate about Andrew and Adam. The first is the above-mentioned commitment to generous and friendly conversation despite some formidable ideological differences. The second is their concern to find unity in concrete ways, particular with a commitment to joint work on social justice, specifically to end human trafficking.

If I may give a personal example, my own blog is the site of debate between atheists and Christians and we sponsor a lending team at Kiva, a micro-lending agency. And this is our slogan:

We loan because…

Debating the existence of God and the meaning of life means little if you don’t lend a helping hand to those in need. (Psst, you can join us here!)

That is a point on which Andrew, Adam, and I all surely agree. So on that note of agreement, we can turn to our wide-ranging discussion.

You can order a copy of Meta here.

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Can a soldier be a Christian?

The catalyst for this brief rumination is a tweet from Bruxy Cavey:

"One cannot be aware both of the history of Christian war and the contents of the Gospels without feeling that something is amiss. One may feel that in the name of honesty, Christians ought either to quit fighting or quit calling themselves Christian."
– Wendell Berry

— Bruxy Cavey (@Bruxy) April 15, 2018

Here’s my tweeted reply: “I’m deeply sympathetic with the pacifistic impulse. That said, I can’t accept the claim that those who participate in battle are always engaged in actions fundamentally inimical to their Christian commitment. Pacifists and just war theorists sharpen one another.”

In the remainder of this article, I’ll unpack these comments.

First, my sympathy with pacifism. There is an old saying that truth is the first casualty of war. Truer words have rarely been spoken. War does not welcome nuance and subtlety and it most certainly does not reward those who invest time in humanizing the enemy and contextualizing their struggle. Rather, victory in war encourages the dehumanization and objectification of the enemy. It also requires an unwavering commitment to the rightness of one’s cause. As one of the characters in Clint Eastwood’s film Flags of our Fathers (about the propagandistic usage of the Iwo Jima flag-raising photo in WW2) observes, “We need simple truths and damn few words.”

That’s the problem with war in a nutshell. Before you know it, you’re justifying atrocities like the firebombing of Dresden to beat the Nazis or the firebombing of Tokyo and nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki to beat the Japanese. And that’s why we need pacifists who act as prophetic witnesses to challenge the insatiable drumbeat of war.

But while war has these deeply disturbing tendencies toward dehumanization of the other, I cannot accept the claim that Christians who fight ought to “quit calling themselves Christian.” Consider, for example, a case like the genocide that unfolded in Rwanda between April-July 1994. In a matter of three months, close to 800,000 civilians were massacred while UNAMIR (the United Nations Assistance Mission for Rwanda) could do little to stop it. And it could have been stopped if western nations had sent in military forces.

The Rwandan genocide is an extreme instance, but it is also to my mind a clear instance where a Christian could fight in a war. And all we need is one clear instance to challenge Berry’s sweeping claim.

And this brings me to my final point: idealistic pacifists and realistic just war theorists need one another. They keep one another honest as the Christian lives in the difficult space of the already and not yet, seeking Christian faithfulness in a way that maximizes love, minimizes harm, and furthers God’s kingdom.

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The Complementarian Dilemma

Egalitarianism is the view that all offices of church ministry and leadership should be open to both genders. By contrast, complementarianism insists that some offices of ministry and leadership should be restricted to males. I am an egalitarian and yesterday I posted this tweet expressing my concern that complementarianism is not just wrong, but potentially sexist as well:

Here's one way to put my concern that Christian complementarianism is sexist:

If the pre-1978 Mormon policy of excluding black people from the priesthood was racist, then why isn't the traditional Christian policy of excluding women from church leadership sexist?

— Tentative Apologist (@RandalRauser) April 13, 2018

Not surprisingly, a couple people responded by pointing out that (in their estimation), the Bible teaches complementarianism. Arguably, the most explicit passage to this point is found in the letter of 1 Timothy chapter 2:

11 A woman should learn in quietness and full submission. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to assume authority over a man; she must be quiet. 13 For Adam was formed first, then Eve. 14 And Adam was not the one deceived; it was the woman who was deceived and became a sinner.

Interpretive Control Texts

Since I accept plenary inspiration, I am committed to the view that all Scripture is inspired and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness. But that doesn’t mean scripture is easy to interpret and apply, and this is an excellent example. Egalitarians have extensive discussions of this and other complementarian passages. And they also have a set of prima facie egalitarian texts that they would bring to bear as interpretive guides for the difficult complementarian passages like 1 Timothy 2.

Let me hasten to add that every Christian follows a similar procedure — whether they recognize it or not — of choosing one set of biblical texts as the interpretive control for another set of texts. If you’re a Calvinist, you have a set of texts that frame your interpretation of prima facie Arminian texts; if you’re pedobaptist, you have a set of texts that frame your interpretation of prima facie believer’s baptist texts; if you’re annihilationist, you have a set of texts that frame your interpretation of prima facie eternal conscious torment texts, and so on. This practice of interpretive controls involves an application of the principle that Scripture interprets Scripture.

Posing the Question

In my response to my Twitter interlocutors, I wanted to back up the wagon to a previous step. And so, I asked one of them, Samuel, whether he believed that slaves and children should be beaten. And I then provided a link to my review of William Webb’s book Corporal Punishment in the Bible. At this point, Rick interjected:

“Randal, maybe you could clarify. It sounds like your [sic] dismissing Sam’s cited verses by saying there’s [sic] other difficult verses. So does that mean we don’t trust the Bible? Or where are you going with this?”

Great question! No, my point was not that there are other difficult verses, a response which would be the equivalent of dangling a shiny object. And I’m not much for dangling shiny objects.

Nor am I aiming to argue that we ought not to trust the Bible. Rather, the point is that we need to question a complementarian interpretation of the Bible. And this brings me to the dilemma…

Setting Up the Dilemma

The point of my tweeted response was to challenge my complementarian interlocutors’ tacit assumption that any time a biblical author makes a theological, moral, or prudential claim, that claim must be inerrant.  Webb’s work on corporal punishment provides a precise analogue to the complementarian issue. And that results in what I call the complementarian dilemma.

In the book, Webb recalls that he tried for years to follow the biblical teaching on corporal punishment by physically hitting his child. But eventually, he concluded that this teaching was both morally wrong (it conflicted with his moral intuition) and ineffectual (it was not an effective means to enforce prosocial compliance). And so, Webb found that he simply disagreed with the consistent biblical teaching on child (and slave) discipline.

Webb is in good company. The overwhelming consensus of child developmental psychologists is that corporal punishment is wrong and harmful. And legislation in developed nations recognizes that fact. Follow the biblical directives to beat children in many jurisdictions and you’ll soon end up in jail. And Christians likewise recognize this fact. As Webb points out, even conservative Christians who attempt to retain corporal punishment as a putative biblical teaching end up endorsing a practice that is very different from the biblical mandates. Like the unhappy compromise of the NKJV, they end up with the worst of both sides: distorting the actual teaching of biblical authors whilst adopting harmful parental disciplinary strategies.

So it turns out that pretty much everyone disagrees with the directives of the biblical authors on the matter of corporal punishment. We must not lose the significance of this fact, for it follows that the tacitly held principle that any time a biblical author makes a theological, moral, or prudential claim, that claim must be inerrant has been abandoned. Precisely nobody is actually following that principle.

Presumably many folks prefer to delude themselves into thinking they do retain that principle because they assume it is required by the belief that the Bible is plenarily inspired and so useful to teach, rebuke, correct, and train in righteousness. But that doesn’t follow. If it turns out that biblical corporal punishment does not accomplish these useful ends, then the Christian need only conclude that the Bible does not actually commend child beating, even if some biblical authors did. The reasoning works like this:

(1) Everything the Bible teaches is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness.

(2) X is not useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, or training in righteousness.

(3) Therefore, the Bible does not teach X.

And thus, if child beating is not useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, or training in righteousness, it follows that the Bible does not teach it, even if some biblical authors did (appear to) teach or commend it.

Concluding with the Complementarian Dilemma

And this brings us to the complementarian dilemma. I’ll state it succinctly as follows:

If the evidence justifies a rejection of the pro-corporal punishment commendations in Bible, could the evidence likewise suggest a rejection of the pro-complementarian reading of the Bible?

It is at this point that one can proceed to all those egalitarian control texts. In addition, as with the debate over corporal punishment, one should consider the general evidence for/against the complementarian claim. Historically, complementarianism has been defended with the claim that women are less rational and more emotionally unstable than men (an argument that many have seen in 1 Timothy 2). Needless to say, the publicly available evidence does not support this claim.

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Calvinism and God’s Love: A conversation with Guillaume Bignon

Guillaume Bignon. (Source: https://www.jbu.edu/news/press_releas...)

In this article I have a conversation with Guillaume Bignon about Calvinism and the concept of God’s love. Bignon is a French analytical philosopher (yes, there are such things!) and an executive committee member of Association Axiome, a society of French-speaking Christian scholars. He also works in New York in the financial industry. Perhaps most importantly for this conversation, Bignon is theologically Reformed and is the author of the fine new book Excusing Sinners and Blaming God: A Calvinist Assessment of Determinism, Moral Responsibility, and Divine Involvement in Evil (Pickwick, 2017).

You can learn more about Bignon from this fascinating Christianity Today article in which he shares his conversion story. And let us not forget the essential question of family: Bignon is married with three young children and a Labradoodle. Now that’s a full house!

* * *

RR: Guillaume, thanks for agreeing to this conversation on Calvinism. I’d like to focus in particular on some common theological and pastoral objections to this theological perspective. As I’m sure you know, there are many people who treat “Calvinism” as a four-letter word. The concept of God in Calvinism has been derided as an idol, monstrous, a perversion of the Gospel.

With that fiery backdrop in our mind, in our conversation, I’d like to explore some of the reasons why this theological position elicits such strong feelings and to offer you the opportunity to provide a response.

But first, we should begin with definitions. Could you define Calvinism? And as you do, please give special attention to the Calvinistic doctrine of election.

GB: Randal, it’s my pleasure. I get the golden opportunity to come across as defending a monstrous idol and a perversion of the Gospel? What could go wrong? For good measure, I should point out that the concept of God in non-Calvinism too has been called all sorts of names, if not by Calvinists, at least by Richard Dawkins who puts you and me in the same bag, as defenders of the “capriciously malevolent bully”. See, if I’m going down, I’m taking you down with me.

Now, more seriously, what is (actually) meant by a “Calvinist concept of God”? Named after the French reformer John Calvin, this theological viewpoint is not concerned with everything Calvin believed, but it more specifically refers to his views on God’s sovereignty over human free will. It’s a longstanding puzzle in theology and in philosophy of religion: if God sovereignly controls human choices, how are those choices free? and if human choices are free, how could God be said to sovereignly control them?

The Calvinist, motivated by strong scriptural affirmations that God is in control of everything that happens (the good and the bad), places the premium on divine providence in that area.

More specifically, there are two things people typically have in mind when they speak of “Calvinism”: there is Calvinist soteriology, and Calvinist determinism. That helpful distinction is made by Daniel Johnson and David Alexander in their recent volume Calvinism and the problem of Evil (Pickwick, 2016).

Calvinist soteriology is a set of theses about how God sovereignly saves sinners. Sometimes gathered under the helpful acronym T.U.L.I.P., they are called the “five points of Calvinism”, and affirm:

That all humans are born spiritually dead in sin and incapable of coming to faith unless the Holy Spirit opens their heart and draws them (that is Total depravity)
That those humans who do come to saving faith in Jesus and are saved, only do so because God has elected to sovereignly and graciously save them, not because of anything he saw in them, not even foreseen faith. (that is Unconditional election)
That Jesus died on the cross to pay the penalty for the sins of these elect, and not for others. (that is Limited atonement)
That when God extends his saving grace to those whom he has elected, they necessarily and irresistibly come to saving faith. (that is Irresistible grace)
And that God not only secures that his elect will come to saving faith, but also that they will remain in the faith until the end. Once a believer comes to genuine, saving faith, he will never depart, because God graciously keeps him in the faith. (that is Perseverance of the saints)

That’s for Calvinist soteriology. And we can quibble over some of the best words to say these things, but I as a Calvinist basically affirm all of that.

And then there is Calvinist determinism. It is a more philosophical affirmation about the metaphysics of human free will. It is taking a position in another long-standing philosophical debate: are human choices determined by antecedent factors, or are they free in such a way that their outcome remains undetermined? Calvinist determinists say that God indeed sovereignly determines the outcome of human choices…And that there is nothing wrong with that! (the defense of which is the burden of my book Excusing Sinners and Blaming God.)

Many Calvinists (though not all), believe as I do, that Calvinist soteriology—at least unconditional election and irresistible grace if not perseverance of the saints—requires Calvinist determinism. We don’t necessarily need to resolve that question here, as I personally affirm both: Calvinist soteriology and Calvinist determinism.

There. It’s probably much more than you asked for on mere definitions, but at least it’s all clear what we’re talking about.

RR: Awesome, that overview provides an excellent framework for our conversation. As for trading insults, Calvinists have returned the favor by accusing Arminians of “defending a monstrous idol and a perversion of the Gospel,” so there’s no need to go nuclear with Richard Dawkins!

As far as Arminians are concerned, I regularly hear two big concerns with Calvinism: one pertaining to the free will of the individual and the other to the nature of God’s love. In our exchange, I’d like to focus on the latter since it seems to me the more serious.

But first we must get an important distinction out of the way. I did not detect in your helpful summary any commitment to the relative ratio of elect (saved) to reprobate (lost). So do you believe it is possible in principle to be a Calvinist universalist, i.e. one who believes that all are ultimately elect and thus all will eventually be saved, in Christ? This is important because adding universalism would go a significant ways (perhaps all the way) in addressing the Arminian concern I want to raise.

GB: Ok, good. Make sure you count me in the camp of Calvinists who don’t reciprocate the charge of idol worship, then. Disagreeing with me on free will makes one mistaken (did I mention I believe I’m right?), but it doesn’t make one a heretic.

Yes, I suppose universalism is the easy way out of all your coming difficult questions (which I foresee without the gift of prophecy). And indeed, I see no explicit contradiction between Calvinist determinism and universalism. One could affirm that God determines all humans to be saved eventually—although it would probably also require post-mortem salvation, since it doesn’t appear that everyone who is already dead has come to saving faith! And strictly speaking, there’s no contradiction either between universalism and the 5 points of Calvinism: God could elect everyone, irresistibly draw everyone, preserve everyone, and so forth. But that’s almost never the way Calvinists see things. Typically, they will affirm (with the Bible!) that God unconditionally elects some and not all, that limited atonement is intended to save these and not others, that God irresistibly draws to and preserves in saving faith some (the elect) and not others. So, while the cowardly philosopher in me feels the genuine appeal of a retreat (I’m French after all) into universalism, I don’t think the Bible allows for it, and hence I have to deal with your hard questions that follow. So, fire away, and we’ll see how I do.

RR: To sum up, the universalist lifeboat is there, but you don’t plan to use it. Sounds good!

So let’s proceed on the assumption that some people are lost eternally. With that in mind, consider the following possibility that Billy Graham is saved but his daughter Anne is lost. Whether you’re Arminian or Calvinist, that’s a truly unthinkable prospect for a parent to consider. Nonetheless, it seems there is one important difference between these two theologies. On Arminianism, God wanted to save Anne but he was unable to do so in a way that respected her libertarian freedom. By contrast, on Calvinism God could have saved Anne without impinging on her free will but he chose not to. On the contrary, God has willed — either through an active election to reprobation or a passive withholding of a decree of salvation — that Anne be lost forever.

Countless Christians have recoiled in horror at this picture, a picture where God seems to be capricious in his choice to save some creatures whilst subjecting others to the unimaginable horrors of damnation.

What say you?

GB: Alright I see several concerns in there, so let me try to say something meaningful about each issue:

1. Recoiling at that picture of God

2. The charge of capriciousness

3. Whether God isn’t even “willing”

That countless Christians have recoiled at a picture of God isn’t a good reason to think that picture is false. Countless Christians have recoiled at the picture of a God who spends 48 verses enumerating all sorts of devastating curses he’ll bring down on his sinful people in Deuteronomy 28, only to add that he will “take delight in bringing ruin to you and destroying you” (v.63). The crude reality is that a holy and righteous God is bad news for the guilty. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Heb 10:31), and Jesus tells the crowds to “fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Mat. 10:28).

With respect to salvation and election, the Christian must start with the fact that all are fallen guilty sinners who rightly deserve condemnation. Leave aside for a moment the debate on the compatibility of determinism with moral responsibility, since it’s not the point under dispute here: we should all agree on the biblical starting point that “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God”.

So from that starting point where no one deserves eternal life, God decides to save some and not all. Is that capricious? No. In his sovereign choice of election, God isn’t given to sudden and unaccountable changes of mood or behavior (hat tip to Wikipedia for a workable definition of ‘capricious’). God doesn’t make the choice on a whim or irrationally. What must be behind this language of capriciousness, is rather the common charge that God is arbitrary. But here again, inappropriate arbitrariness need not follow from unconditional election. To say that the choice is arbitrary is to say it is made without (good) reasons. The Calvinist claims that for salvation, there is no reason found in us (“What do you have that you did not receive? If then you received it, why do you boast as if you did not receive it?”, 1-Cor 4:7) But there are reasons in God. He just doesn’t tell us much about those reasons, beyond the big “what if” challenge in Romans 9: “Has the potter no right over the clay, to make out of the same lump one vessel for honorable use and another for dishonorable use? What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory?” (v.22-23)

This might be telling us some of God’s reasons behind reprobation. But even if we don’t have the full picture, as long as God has good reasons for what he does, he remains just. And simply because we don’t know (all) his reasons doesn’t mean there aren’t any.

If you think I’m starting to sound like Peter van Inwagen talking about the problem of evil, I sure do! The question of reprobation is really a subset of the problem of evil and suffering, and for more details on the intersection with skeptical theism, I wrote this piece that may be of interest.

That leads me to my comments on whether God is “not even willing” to save all.

I don’t necessarily read the objection as a claim that Calvinism must be false. “At least on Arminianism…” seems to claim that Arminianism just isn’t as bad, that it’s easier to swallow, or more palatable.

So I guess Calvinists can just claim the Bible isn’t easy to swallow or palatable, but let me also try to argue a bit more, pressing the claim that Arminians and Calvinists are after all not so far from each other on this issue of willing, and that whatever they (both) say actually makes good sense.

We are here raising the question of whether it’s coherent to say that God wills X, but does Y instead, knowing that Y entails not-X.

Both Calvinists and Arminians can (and do) say something like that.

In Still Sovereign (Baker, 2000) edited by Bruce Ware and Tom Schreiner, John Piper has a good essay on whether there are “two wills” in God.

Calvinists do say it is God’s will (in one important sense of ‘will’) that all repent and believe. It’s the so-called ‘prescriptive’ will of God, whereas God sovereignly brings about his ‘decretive’ will in all things. Sometimes (often!) the two differ. This is broadly what Arminians must say too: God wants X to some extent, but he wants Y more,  so he brings about Y even though Y entails not-X. Indeed, the Arminian God wants to save everyone, but he wants to give us libertarian free will more, so he gives us libertarian free will despite the fact that libertarian free will (on this view) entails that not all are saved. Calvinists agree God has a reason not to save all, they just disagree that it’s libertarian free will.

In the second part of my book, I say more things on whether God is “willing” sin and whether that involves him inappropriately in evil (my answers: he is, and that doesn’t).

RR: Thanks Guillaume, that’s very helpful. I’d like to come back to your point that finding a picture of God repulsive or problematic (and so recoiling from it) isn’t a good reason to think that picture is false. To make the point, you then quote Deuteronomy 28:63 in which God declares he will “take delight in bringing ruin to you and destroying you.”

At this point, I may need to lodge a note of dissent. I think moral intuitions provide a legitimate (though hardly infallible) guide for theological reflection. I believe God is maximally good and loving and I must assume I have at least some basic and intuitive grasp of what it means to be good and loving. And the notion that God might take delight in the destruction of human creatures is inconsistent with that basic and intuitive grasp. I would submit that this, in turn, provides a good prima facie reason not to take that description in Deuteronomy 28:63 as literally true.

This leads me to ask: Do you grant moral intuitions any role in biblical interpretation and theological reflection? If so, do you think a person could find the Calvinistic view of God sufficiently problematic that they would be justified in rejecting it based on their intuitive moral objection to it?

GB: I see your concern. By “not a good reason”, I meant “not good enough”. That many Christians recoil at a view isn’t reason enough to reject it. It’s a somewhat modest point, as it’s made true by the mere existence of a single belief that ought not to be rejected and yet is such that many Christians have recoiled at it. I’m suspecting we can find something like that even if Deut.28 isn’t the one for you.

The initial point, too, was about “countless Christians” recoiling at a view, but we didn’t suppose I was among them. That might be a different story indeed, if I thought that unconditional election was abhorrent. But I don’t, and so I go with what I take to be the teaching of scripture on the matter. Do I grant a place for moral intuition in theological reasoning and interpretation? Surely I should. It seems clear (and biblical) that human conscience can provide reliable (though clearly not infallible) moral knowledge. In turn, we interpret the Bible partly in light of everything else we already know, so that includes our moral knowledge, of course. My concern is that it can get very thorny very quickly. I’m just not sure where to draw the line on that front: when should my intuitions push back on what I read in the Bible, to tell me “God probably doesn’t mean that”, and when should they not? I think you’ll want to agree with me that we shouldn’t systematically nullify the scriptures when they conflict with our moral intuitions that may or may not be correct. There must be a large space for the word of God to educate our moral intuitions. How do we do that well? God help us, I’m not sure I can give you the perfect recipe. I just think unconditional election is one such place, where the scriptures seem to me to be clear enough that even if one had intuitions going against it (which I personally don’t), one should likely revise them in light of the text.

Now, do I think that somewhere someone could be justified in rejecting Calvinism on the basis of their moral intuitions? I guess it depends on what we mean by justification, but if I take it in the deontological sense of fulfilling one’s epistemic duties, I suppose the answer is yes. One could. But in that sense, having read my Plantinga, I’d say justification comes rather cheap! One could be justified in believing something that’s quite false, as long as one didn’t flout any supposed epistemic duty to acquire (and hold on to) that false belief. I suppose that’s true of some (perhaps many?) who reject unconditional election, but of course it isn’t all that satisfying. What the Arminian should want besides justification, is knowledge that Calvinism is false, and that I’m afraid doesn’t obtain inasmuch as Calvinism is, well, true.

RR: You say, “I think you’ll want to agree with me that we shouldn’t systematically nullify the scriptures when they conflict with our moral intuitions…” Of course, I agree with that. The question is not about nullifying the scriptures, however. Rather, it is about nullifying a particular interpretation of the scriptures. For example, there are countless places in the Bible where God is described as undergoing emotional fluctuations and changes of mental state (i.e. growing in knowledge; changing his mind; having regrets). By interpreting these descriptions as anthropopathic (as most theologians have done) I nullify a literalistic reading of those scriptures. But I certainly don’t think I’m rejecting the scriptures, per se. Mutatis mutandis for the Arminian.

GB: Yes, we’re on the same page here: we agree there’s a place for intuitions to educate us on whether or not a passage should be interpreted literally, and we don’t want our intuitions to systematically rule the day whenever they conflict with the face-value teaching of scripture. Since they may well be incorrect, in that case they’d need to be educated by scripture, such that if they won instead, they would nullify the text. The Calvinist plea is: don’t do that with election.

RR: Thanks for fielding my questions, it’s been a great exchange! In closing, I’d like to turn to your new book, Excusing Sinners and Blaming God. You said above that your central burden in that book is to defend God’s sovereign determination of human action. That brings us from the love topic back to freedom. Arminians commonly insist that determinism is incompatible with free will. And some Calvinists seem to agree. What’s your view? Do you think it is possible to have freedom in a world determined by God?

GB: Yes, it’s been great, thank you for your challenging questions!

The free will topic is the one I tackle in most details in the book. The big debate is on whether free will is compatible with determinism. Arminians say no, and Calvinists say yes.

When Calvinists seem to agree that we don’t have “free will”–like Martin Luther forcefully claimed (ad nauseam) in The Bondage of the Will, calling it an “empty term whose reality is lost”–it’s normally because they work with a different definition of “free will” than I (and most contemporary philosophers) do.

What Luther meant by “free will” is what Erasmus meant by “free will”, i.e.: libertarian free will: that view of free will which is undetermined, and incompatible with determinism. If that’s what free will means, then sure enough I (and Calvinist determinists) reject that.

But what philosophers normally mean by “free will” is simply the control condition for moral responsibility. To say of someone that he has free will is just to say that he’s enough in control of his choices, that he’s a suitable target for praise or blame: he can be morally responsible. And that, all Calvinists worth their salt should affirm: humans are morally responsible for what they do. It’s just that “what they do” is also fully determined by God’s providential control of the world. That’s the point at which Arminians attack with a countless army of arguments each alleging that determinism is incompatible with free will and moral responsibility (the Consequence Argument, the Principle of Alternate Possibilities, the Manipulation Argument, the Direct Argument, etc…).

The modest goal of my book is to face that army, and defeat every single one of them.

Wish me luck, pick up my book, and tell me how I did.

* * *

You can buy a copy of Excusing Sinners and Blaming God here.

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Trump, Comey, and Credibility

James Comey’s much-anticipated book A Higher Loyalty comes out next week and I just read a glowing review in The New York Times. The book does not promise bombshells so much as a powerful and sober inside look at the Trump presidency from the former head of the FBI. And Comey does not mince words as he compares Trump and his corrupt White House to a crime syndicate.

As with so much in life: the core issue is credibility. Trump or Comey: who is the more credible?

As I write, the Republican National Committee is apparently planning a new campaign to brand James Comey as “Lyin’ Comey”. In other words, the White House and RNC want Americans to believe that Mr. Trump is more credible than Mr. Comey.

Now that’s funny. This is how the New York Times review of A Higher Loyalty describes the contrast between these two individuals:

Put the two men’s records, their reputations, even their respective books, side by side, and it’s hard to imagine two more polar opposites than Trump and Comey: They are as antipodean as the untethered, sybaritic Al Capone and the square, diligent G-man Eliot Ness in Brian De Palma’s 1987 movie “The Untouchables”; or the vengeful outlaw Frank Miller and Gary Cooper’s stoic, duty-driven marshal Will Kane in Fred Zinnemann’s 1952 classic “High Noon.”

One is an avatar of chaos with autocratic instincts and a resentment of the so-called “deep state” who has waged an assault on the institutions that uphold the Constitution.

The other is a straight-arrow bureaucrat, an apostle of order and the rule of law, whose reputation as a defender of the Constitution was indelibly shaped by his decision, one night in 2004, to rush to the hospital room of his boss, Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, to prevent Bush White House officials from persuading the ailing Ashcroft to reauthorize an N.S.A. surveillance program that members of the Justice Department believed violated the law.

One uses language incoherently on Twitter and in person, emitting a relentless stream of lies, insults, boasts, dog-whistles, divisive appeals to anger and fear, and attacks on institutions, individuals, companies, religions, countries, continents.

The other chooses his words carefully to make sure there is “no fuzz” to what he is saying, someone so self-conscious about his reputation as a person of integrity that when he gave his colleague James R. Clapper, then director of national intelligence, a tie decorated with little martini glasses, he made sure to tell him it was a regift from his brother-in-law.

One is an impulsive, utterly transactional narcissist who, so far in office, The Washington Post calculated, has made an average of six false or misleading claims a day; a winner-take-all bully with a nihilistic view of the world. “Be paranoid,” he advises in one of his own books. In another: “When somebody screws you, screw them back in spades.”

The other wrote his college thesis on religion and politics, embracing Reinhold Niebuhr’s argument that “the Christian must enter the political realm in some way” in order to pursue justice, which keeps “the strong from consuming the weak.”

Yes folks, it’s all about credibility.

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Bad Arguments for Atheism. Bad Arguments Against Atheism.

I recently had the pleasure of appearing as a guest on Catholic apologist Trent Horn’s new podcast “Counsel of Trent.” (Yeah, I know: great name!)

Trent is an outstanding young apologist. And I’m not just saying that by the way: Read my debrief of Trent’s debate with Raphael Lataster, for example. Trent also kindly provided an endorsement for my book An Atheist and a Christian Walk into a Bar and he mentioned my book Is the Atheist My Neighbor? on the radio show “Catholic Answers Live.”

As for the podcast, you can learn more about it here: trenthornpodcast.com

Trent kindly sent me the audio recordings of the two interviews, so I have included them below. And be sure to check out Trent’s excellent podcast on iTunes.

Part 1: Bad Arguments for Atheism
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tentativeapologist/CoT+Premium+-+Randal+Interview.mp3
Part 2: Bad Arguments Against Atheism
https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/tentativeapologist/CoT+Premium+-+Randal+Part+2.mp3

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Post-Apocalyptic Family Values: A Review of A Quiet Place

A Quiet Place opens with a family searching an abandoned drugstore for supplies. It soon becomes clear that we are in a familiar post-apocalyptic trope. But one feature of the scene stands out: the silence. Everyone is using sign language and proceeding with the utmost care not to make a sound. Before the final title credit, it becomes clear why.

The source of the destruction is not a microscopic pathogen. Rather, it is an alien creature, one that has presumably invaded the planet approximately three months before. And it hunts by sound: if they hear you, they hunt you.

Plot Quibbling Interlude

I have a couple complaints about this scenario, and I’d like to get them out of the way now. Feel free to skip the quibbles if you like to continue the main review below.

The first is that while the aliens are apparently blind, they also make clicking noises. This strongly suggests that their mode of navigation in the world is something like echolocation. With that in mind, note that in several scenes, human beings move past the aliens and remain undetectable so long as they don’t make a sound. But this seems inconsistent since presumably, they would be detectable as large moving objects by way of echolocation. In short, why would movement alone not be sufficient to hunt humans?

Second, it’s not clear how this plague would have overrun the earth so quickly. (In one scene, the father, played by John Krasinski, is shown failing to get any response to an SOS distress signal that he is broadcasting on frequencies across the entire globe.) Interestingly, a newspaper on sale in the town is shown with a title like this: “It’s the Sound!”, suggesting that the most basic discovery of the aliens’ modus operandi came the very day before there was no more print media distribution.

Perhaps alien dominance came about through a shock-and-awe campaign where human beings were overrun in a couple days. Nonetheless, it does seem a bit implausible. Surely, it would not have been that difficult to figure out that the aliens hunt by sound. Nor, once that discovery had been made, should it have been that difficult to turn the tables and hunt the aliens. After all, the United States alone has 300,000,000 guns and it turns out a shotgun blast to the head is enough to take one of these aliens out. They also seem rather simple-minded: running like rabid dogs toward any sound. To sum up, one can readily envision human beings fashioning alien traps not much more sophisticated than flypaper.

In short, the plot requires some suspension of disbelief. That said, it’s a small cost to pay for some big cinematic dividends.

The Verdict

As I said, John Krasinski plays the father of the family. He also directed the film and his wife Emily Blunt plays the mother/wife.The family unit also includes three children. Beyond that basic family unit, you only encounter 1 1/2 other people through the entire movie. (Though it is clear that there are people living on the nearby hills, they are never seen.)

All this is to say that a handful of actors carry the entire story, and they do a great job. A Quiet Place is like a mashup of Shyamalan’s Signs with the 2017 film It Comes at Night (and the silence of 2016’s Don’t Breathe), though it surpasses all those films. A Quiet Place is an edge-of-your-seat thriller from the beginning, with intense performances by all the actors, a deceptively bucolic setting, and terrifying aliens that look like the scary older brother of the demogorgon from Stranger Things (complete with the scariest freakin’ Dumbo ears you’ll ever see). If you like nail-biting suspense and the occasional jump scare, you’ll love A Quiet Place.

Family Values

My favorite aspect of A Quiet Place wasn’t the intense acting, the brilliant silence motif, or the demogorgon’s older brothers. Rather, it was the surprising family values. Not since the 2009 film The Road has post-apocalyptic desolation been illumined by such deep and powerful family bonds. There is an undeniable chemistry between Krasinski and Blunt, most obviously when they slow dance (with headphones) to Neil Young’s “Harvest Moon.” Then there is the bonding of father with son, the welcome of a new baby under the most unthinkable of circumstances, and above all, the searing reconciliation of father to daughter. Later, as the daughter views her father’s legacy of love laid out on a workbench, it became clear that this is one of the most powerful family values films that I’ve ever seen.

And that is a fact worth dwelling on. As I write, there are several “Christian” movies in the theater. By “Christian” I mean movies that are produced and marketed for an explicitly conservative Christian audience: e.g. I Can Only Imagine and God’s Not Dead 3. The cinematic quality of those films is middling at best. But Christians go to see them anyway, not least because they promise “family values”.

The fact is, however, that the most powerful display of family values is found not in the tired tropes of evangelical Christian cinema, but in the post-apocalyptic silence of a bucolic, alien-infested farm. A Quiet Place does not promise us that this family will survive. But love wins in the end just the same. As Paul said,

“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. […] And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.”

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