Barth on Anselm (1)

Since graduating seminary I’ve been doing some personal study projects to keep learning.  My initial triad was Christ’s resurrection (systematic theology), Hebrews (Bible), and Anselm (historical theology).  I started a new triad during the summer of 2010, focusing on Habakkuk (Bible), justification (systematic theology), and then classic texts of pre-reformation church history (historical theology).  Now that I’ve finished Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosophy, my final pre-reformation text, I’m considering that second triad done.

Through my pre-reformation study, I got some good exposure to some of the theologians I wanted to become familiar with, like the Cappadocians, Boethius, Gregory the Great, and John of Damascus.  Letham’s The Holy Trinity was an especially significant book for me.  The justification study was all too brief, and there were lots of conversations that I was only able to skim over briefly, such as the Piper-Wright debate – but it affected me personally and helped ground me in at least the basics of what justification means.  Hebrews and Habakkuk will be life-long books to struggle with (I always find its the Bible that is most inexhaustible).  My resurrection project is finished, although I continue to tweak the article I wrote on how Christ’s resurrection relates to his messianic offices, hoping to shorten it enough to submit it for publication.

Now, for 2011, I am doing away with triads to focus in on historical theology, and in particular Anselm.  He is my abiding interest, and I now feel ready to specialize more after having focused in diverse fields for breadth.  One book that I am going to particularly sit with this year is Karl Barth’s Fides Quaerens Intellectum: Anselm’s Proof of the Existence of God in the Context of His Theological Scheme.  My goal is to make this book as familiar and comfortable to me as Bilbo’s hobbit hole was to him.  I want to so thoroughly ingest it that its thought patterns and content become well familiar territory, like the sidewalk outside my front door or the ceiling of my bedroom.  Sometimes a narrow door is the path to a much wider terrain, and I think that narrowing in on this one relatively small piece of scholarship will be a strategic stepping stone that will open up lots of further doors.  In my next post I will talk about why.

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Humans and Chimps: Some Tentative Thoughts

I’ve been reading through Intelligent Design 101: Leading Experts Explain the Key Issues (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2008), which has an appendix dealing with theistic evolutionist Francis Collins’ arguments for common ancestry between humans and chimps in his The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (New York: Free Press, 2006).  It raised several questions/thoughts:

1) You often hear people say that humans and chimps have 96-98% similar genetic structure, and it can initially seem like a strong argument for common ancestry.  But all living things share a great deal of genetic similarity, and the greater the morphological similarity between two living things, the more genetic similarity we find.  We have about 40% genetic similarity with lettuce, 60% with fruit flies, 80% with cows, 90% with cats.  I’m not a scientist, but in light of these facts, and in light of the great morphological similarity between humans and chimps, isn’t a high degree of genetic similarity to be expected?

2) Supposing for the sake of argument that the genetic similarity between humans and chimps is beyond what we would naturally expect from morphological similarity, does this fact really prove common ancestry?  It seems to me that common design can explain the data just as cogently as common descent.  All designers use similar building blocks in the construction of different materials.  No builder of a house would make every brick differently.  No designer of car models would start from scratch each time.  To do so would be almost infinitely inefficient.  Genetic similarities between humans and chimps – as well as other homologous traits – are only proof of common ancestry if we assume that an ultimate Designer operates differently from all human designers.

Further, Jonathan Wells has pointed out that if genetic similarities and other homologous traits did point us towards common ancestry, it would mess with the Darwinian tree.  For example, there is striking similarity between the eye of a mouse and the eye of an octopus – two animals never seen near each other on a tree of life model.

3) Evolutionists – from Dawkins to Collins – make much of the similarity between human chromosome 2 and chimpanzee chromosomes 2a and 2b.  It is claimed that this can only be explained by a chromosomal fusion in our past, and that this chromosomal fusion is proof of a link from humans back to chimps.  Not being a scientist, I find it difficult to assess the claim that human chromosome 2 must have been formed by a fusion of two prior chromosomes – but supposing there was such a fusion, why should we preclude the possibility that this fusion happened within human history?  Luskin and Gage make this point, “the fusion evidence does not tell us whether human chromosomal fusion took place in a line that leads back to a common ancestor with chimps or in an independent line that was designed separately” (p. 223 of ID 101).

4) Evolutionists  also argue from “junk DNA,” i.e., DNA that has no purpose for a living creature, and has supposedly been discarded at some point in the evolutionary process.  Time and time again, however, scientists have found that DNA which has been thought to have been “junk” plays a crucial purpose in the life of the organism.  In light of this history, we should be wary of labeling something “junk” just because it has no known purpose.  Even evolutionists such Richard Sternberg and James Shapiro have written, “one day, we will think of what used to be called ‘junk DNA’ as a critical component of truly ‘expert’ cell control regimes” (quoted on 226 of ID 101).

Moreover, for this objection to persuasive, one would have to preclude the possibility that junk DNA was originally designed with purpose but then became “junk” in the recent past, within human ancestry.  Again, even when evolution is a possible explanation for the data, it need not be macro-evolution.

5) For all my objections to naturalistic neo-Darwinism, I’m open to creative possibilities in terms of the precise timing and mechanism(s) of how God created humanity, and what kinds of continuity there may be between Adam and an ape.  I’m not a scientist, and at the end of the day I have to admit I don’t know how it happened, and I’m even not always totally sure in my interpretation of Genesis 1-2 and the other relevant Scriptural data (though I affirm a historical Adam and Eve as my best effort).  But contemporary evolutionary theory is defined as an unguided, blind process by the current scientific establishment.  For example, the National Association of Biology Teachers defined evolution in 1996 as a “unsupervised, impersonal, unpredictable, and natural process.”  How can any thoughtful theist make peace with that?  No matter where we fall on the “how much can evolution explain?” spectrum, belief in the Christian God places us diametrically at odds with an unguided, blind account of biological origins – which is the reigning paradigm among the current scientific establishment.

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Boethius (4): Divine eternality, foreknowledge, and sovereignty

Upon concluding The Consolation of Philosophy, I would say that its great theme is divine providence.  Unjustly imprisoned and awaiting execution, Boethius reasons his way to the conclusion that an understanding of God’s government of the world is the key to happiness in any situation.  Along the way, as he is explicating the meaning of divine providence, Boethius is drawn into a consideration of how divine foreknowledge and human free will relate.  The flow of thought is thus: human suffering –> theodicy –> exhaustive divine foreknowledge –> human freedom.  This discussion of human freedom in light of divine foreknowledge is the climax of the book, and arguably its most significant theological contribution.

In essence, Boethius argues that divine foreknowledge does not infringe upon human freedom because it is qualitatively different from human knowledge.  Like Kierkegaard centuries later, Boethius appeals to the Soctratic principle that knowledge is determined not only by its object, but by its subject.  As he puts it: “things that are known are not comprehended according to how knowable they are by nature but rather according to the ability to know of those who are doing the knowing” (161).  In other words, the knower affects knowledge just as what is known affects knowledge.  Angelic knowledge is different than human knowledge, for example – even when they are considering the same things that we are – because they are different kind of beings doing the knowing.

Boethius then argues for a distinction between everlastingness (perpetual duration in time) and eternality (the state outside time altogether).  He writes: “it is one thing to proceed through infinite time, as Plato posits, but quite another to embrace the whole of time in one simultaneous present….  God should not be thought of as older than the created world but different in his grasp of time in the immediacy of his being” (169).  For Boethius, God’s eternality means more than that he is infinitely old and never going to die.  It means that He is Lord over time, and thus equally in all times.  Therefore, divine foreknowledge is not really foreknowledge at all – at least not in any way like temporal creatures can imagine foreknowledge.  The tension felt between foreknowledge and freedom is permanently relativized by the engulfing difference between God’s knowledge as One who is outside of time and our knowledge as creatures in time.

Boethius did not apparently believe in divine sovereignty in the way that John Calvin did.  However, I find the central principle of his argument equally illuminating with respect to the classical divine sovereignty/human responsibility dilemma.  Is not divine willing qualitatively different from human willing, just as divine knowledge is qualitatively different from human knowledge?  Can we not tweak Socrates to say, “everything that is willed is willed not only according to its own nature, but according to the nature of the one willing it?”  Or put it in terms of my favorite metaphor: does not an author’s will over a story work itself out differently than the will of a character in that story?  Just as Tolkien can see farther than Gandalf, so he can alter the story in ways Gandalf cannot, and in ways that would be unrighteous for Gandalf but are not unrighteous for him.  For example, it would be unrighteous for Gandalf to will Sauron into existence.  But I cannot say that it is unrighteous for Tolkien to do so.

The more I reflect upon God’s nature, the more I come to feel that exhaustive divine sovereignty over all things – for all the zillion conundrums it raises – is the only way God could relate to the world as God.

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Staying Fresh amidst Busyness

“Lord, its only 2:00 in the afternoon – why am I so tired?” I confess I’ve had that thought very often during busier seasons of life, such as the end of seminary, my internship in DC, and my job here.  Life is very busy for me these days.  Ministry can sometimes feel like trying to drink an entire lake.  Its a consuming task.  There are always more students to spend time with, more details to attend to, more projects to squeeze into an already busy schedule of meetings and events and contact time.  I’m a pretty pronounced introvert, so being in a heavily relational job like youth ministry is very challenging for me.  But I’m learning that there are some basic things that I can do that really help me stay fresh amidst a busy schedule.

1) The biggest thing I am learning is that its most often not the amount I work, but the way I work, that leads to burnout/fatigue.  Am I living in my gifting and visiting my areas of weaknesses, or am I living in my weaknesses and only visiting my gifting?  Visiting our areas of weakness is good because it humbles us and makes us trust God and value other people who are different from us.  If we never step outside of our comfort zones and work on things we are not naturally good at, we become lopsided and eccentric.  But living in our weaknesses is not sustainable over the long haul.

It helps me to stay in my gifting when I realize: what I actually love doing – what makes come alive – is why God has called me here.  I love teaching.  I love spending time with students.  I love talking with others about their spiritual lives.  I love planning times of corporate worship.  I literally have joy every day because of the opportunity to do these things.  While I want to keep growing in my weaknesses, too, its liberating to realize that the way God has wired me is not an accident, but a strategy, and that focusing on my God-given passions is not wrong.  Though sometimes the demands of my schedule don’t allow it, I’m trying to spend at least some time each day serving others from my passions.

2) I am learning to say no sometimes, and learning to let things drop sometimes and not be a perfectionist.  By focusing on the finite things that I am able to do, I create space for others to fill the needs I cannot meet.  When I try to do everything myself, I inadvertently deny others the ability to help me.  I am learning that trusting and leaning on the people God has put around me is absolutely essential.  I’m also learning that being flexible and adapting to others’ visions and habits is essential.  I need other people.  Self-reliance is not an option.

3) I am blogging less (perhaps you’ve noticed), and in general focusing less on my personal study projects.  God is calling me into a new season of life, in which I will not get to read as much as I would like, and as much as I have in the past.  I can truly say that I embrace that calling with joy, because I will now learn in new ways (like how to lead, and how to preach), and the point of life is not knowledge, its Jesus.  As I surrender my passions for study to Christ and his purposes for me, I find life opening in new ways and am conquering old fears and experiencing true joy.

4) I’m learning to be both disciplined and creative about my down time.  Sometimes my temptation is to simply collapse in front of the TV after a long day.  I’m learning that while that might be the most initially relaxing, its not the most rejuvenating long-term.  Recreation, like anything else, can be done carnally or spiritually.  It takes work to rest well!  I have to put thought into it, and effort.  But then, its more life-giving in the long-run.  Life is not found in TV.  Life is not found in being like a zombie whenever I have free time.  I want life.  So lately, instead of watching TV, I’ve been helping Esther set up the house of Christmas, and learning a song on piano.  I try to play the piano once a day for at least 5 minutes.  Its soothing, and it slows me down.  (I don’t really play much, but I am trying to learn a song or two.)  Its amazing how refreshing down time can be when I put effort into it!

5) Exercise is a must for me.  For me these days, its hiking.  I love it.  There are some awesome trails within walking distance of our house.  Its great exercise, and so refreshing to be out in the beautiful San Gabriel Mountains.  A good hike in the middle of the day can re-energize me to work the rest of the afternoon and even into the evening.

6) I am learning to work with rhythm and balance, rather than frantically.  My personality is such that left to myself, all work would be hyper-work.  Think of the difference between flooring it and being on cruise control when driving a car.  I can “floor it” the whole time I am working before I even realize what I am doing.  I love to accomplish, and I love working hard, so its easy.  But I’m learning to pace myself, so that I can more productive over the long-term.  So now, if I notice that I am in hyper-drive one day, I will try to work more calmly the next day.  I don’t work multiple days into the evening if I can help it.  I deliberately slow down sometimes, even when I don’t think I need it, so that I can speed up later.

7) The gospel.  There is a difference between starting out the day with the peace of Christ guarding my heart, and starting out the day rushing at my tasks like William Wallace rushing at the British with a battle axe.  Prayer makes a difference.  Doing devotions makes a difference.  Personal worship makes a difference.  (Shocking, right?)  Above all, not walking out my front door down to my office until I have thoroughly reflected on the fact that my sins are forgiven makes a difference.  There is fresh energy in that reality every day.  If it seems stale, I think about who God is to forgive, and what sin has been forgiven, and how it came to pass that it could be forgiven, and what joys I know because it is forgiven.  It makes the difference for the rest of my day.

As I gear up for the busy spring, my greatest desire is that Jesus would be greater than ministry in my life.  I want to know his power and love so deeply in my life that ministry is the overflow of His fullness, not main thing in my life.  I believe that is possible, and I am asking God for it.

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Boethius (3): God is Happiness

Some scholars make much of the fact that Boethius, as he is writing The Consolation of Philosophy at the end of his life, frames his book as a dialogue with Lady Philosophy rather than with Christ or God.  Some have even suggested that it represents Boethius’s turn, in his final days as his life is falling part, from Christ to paganism or neo-Platonism.  I don’ think that this is very helpful at all.  For starters, we have to remember that Boethius lived at a time in which philosophy was less clearly distinct from Christianity.  Its easy to dismiss medieval Christians like Augustine, Boethius, and Anselm as “Platonic,” as though that fact itself discredited them.  It would be far more helpful, however, to examine the specific ways in which Platonic influence is at work in a particular thinker’s thought, and how this influence affects them, because Platonic thought and Christian thought have many areas of overlap.  In many ways, C.S. Lewis is just as “Platonic” as Boethius or Anselm.

In addition, its very difficult to see Lady Philosophy as representing an alternative to Christianity when throughout the book she continually points Boethius back to God as the highest good and the goal of all things.  For example, this past week I read Book III, which is an extended argument in which Lady Philosophy shows Boethius that God is happiness.  Its interesting that in III.X, Lady Philosophy sets forward an argument that is strikingly similar to Anselm’s famous ontological argument for God’s existence.  It really makes me wonder if Anselm may have been directly or indirectly influenced by Boethius, although I suppose its also possible that the similarity is simply the influence of Augustine on them both.  In any case, I’m convinced that Lady Philosophy simply serves in The Consolation as a representation of Truth, and the handmaiden to Boethius’ Christian faith, not an alternative.

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