Ode of parting to libertarianism

Woe is me,
My libertarian soul,
My brain thinks it's free,
But perhaps it ain't so.

They told me that guilt,
They told me that blame,
And all the world's praise,
High fives and shame,

Only made sense,
Could only carry,
Their fully moral weight,
With power to the contrary.

Behold and beware,
It seems now to me,
That this isn't true,
Dear determinacy.

To say 'shame on you',
No metaphysics requires,
Save a shared understanding,
And no crossed wires.

This grasp of the good,
This agreement of life,
Is what makes blame and praise,
Clear and sharp as a knife.

Good bye libertarian,
You've ceased to make sense,
Compatibilist self,
You're not quite as dense.

The world is in flux,
And my will is free,
The two are related,
But how, it beats me.

Wright on Jesus and marriage

Bishop Wright offers a crucial insight in his analysis of Jesus' saying on marriage and divorce. Attentive readers of the New Testament will have noticed two appeals to Scripture in the resolution of the question. First, the Pharisees appeal to Moses (i.e. Deuteronomy); second, Jesus appeals over Moses' head, back to Creation. The key point is this:

"Jesus responds with an assertion which reveals that he stands at a vitally different point in Israel's story. Deuteronomy, he says, is part of a temporary phase in the purposes of YHWH. It was necessary because of the ambiguous situation, in which Israel was called to be the people of god, but was still a people with hard hearts. Israel cannot be affirmed as she stands. She is still in exile, still hard-hearted; but the new day is dawning in which 'the Mosaic dispensation is not adequate', since 'Jesus expected there to be a better order' [quoting Sanders].
By quoting Genesis 1.27 and 2.4 to undermine Deutoronomy 24.1-3, Jesus was in fact making it clear that the story to which he was obedient was that in which Israel was called by YHWH to restore humankind and the world to his original intention." (Wright, Jesus and the Victory of God, 285 - italics his, bold mine)

First, notice that Wright has correctly shown the narrative logic which undergirds Jesus' prescriptions. It is not a matter of universalizable maxims (Kant), maximal utility (Mill) or some other 'principle' (e.g. 'love', 'liberation', etc.); rather it is the story of Scripture, in all its glorious thickness and oddity, that grounds the leap from 'is' to 'ought' in Jesus' thinking. Hopefully the Church will follow suit.

Second, the fact that Jesus' life, death and resurrection are taken as the giving of a new heart, far from allowing more sexual 'freedom', in fact requires (actually, frees us) to return to the ideal of Creation. A more relevant point could not be made...

Peace,
-Daniel-

NT Wright on Hades

Inevitably, when the topic of 'hell' comes around, I point my interlocutors back to the distinction in Scripture between the place of the dead (Hades, or Sheol) and apocalyptic metaphors for judgment (e.g. 'Gehenna'). Whereas some conservative evangelicals like to claim that Jesus talked more about hell than love, or peace, or what have you, I cannot but point out the absence of 'hell' from all New Testament texts. Hell, I tell them, is a post-biblical construct. We may have arguments about how closely it conveys similar meanings to Hades or Gehenna, but the point is the former is not in Scripture, the latter are.

But what about, you ask, the parable of the rich man and Lazarus? Glad you asked. Here's what NT Wright has to say about it:

"The parable is not, as often supposed, a description of the afterlife, warning people to be sure of their ultimate destination. If that were its point, it would not be a parable: a story about someone getting lost in London would not be a parable if addressed to people attempting to find their way through that city without a map. We have perhaps been misled, not for the first time, by the too-ready assumption, in the teeth of the evidence, that Jesus 'must really' have been primarily concerned to teach people 'how to go to heaven after death'. The reality is uncomfortably different." (Jesus and the Victory of God, p. 255)

Thank you bishop Wright, for the helpful reminder. If readers are curious as what what that 'uncomfortably different' reality might be... good. Do a little bit of research and report back. ;-)

Christ's peace,
-Daniel-

On voting

A Reuters report helpfully reminds me today that if I, with fear and trembling, decide to vote in the upcoming presidential elections, it cannot be with any enthusiasm. How can a pacifist vote for violence?
Witness Clinton's rhetoric: "Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton warned Tehran on Tuesday that if she were president, the United States could 'totally obliterate' Iran in retaliation for a nuclear strike against Israel."
Obama is barely better: "Meanwhile, Obama said he would respond 'forcefully and swiftly' to an Iranian attack against Israel or any other U.S. ally, whether conventional or nuclear."

And Christians get excited about these people! Don't be deceived folks. If you vote, you vote for what you think is the lesser of three evils--though of course, you might be wrong. Consequentialist reasoning has always been dangerous.

Christ's peace.

A story of unshod feet.

Some months ago, I learned a very interesting fact about my feet. Perhaps I should say I remembered this fact, because it certainly seems like I knew it at some point, but just forgot it. Either way, the knowledge is presently in my head. My feet like being naked. Shoes are well and good, don’t get me wrong, but God has stuffed my flippers full of nerve endings, and they do enjoy a good tickle.

And so whenever it’s warm, I make a point of walking barefoot. I don’t just mean walking barefoot in my back yard. Or on the beach. No, I mean barefoot everywhere. In the car, in the street, in the store, and, yes, in my back yard. It’s amazing what a little gesture like this can do to change your life. I’m a pretty average-looking guy; a little on the tall side, but not a freak show by any means. I’m white, and most of the places I find myself, that puts me in the unremarkable majority. And yet, when I take my shoes and socks off, it’s like a gust of wind has just come up and blown up the skirt of my invisibility cloak. Goodness gracious, look at that man! He’s not wearing any shoes! The scandal!

The point, of course, is that such a way of being in the world is unintelligible to most people. They don’t understand that human feet like to be barefoot, and that it’s just because we’ve pinned most of Creation down in heavy concrete manacles that this fact isn’t immediately obvious to everyone. We’ve homogenized the ground so that we don’t have to listen to what it’s telling us (‘slow down!’, ‘lose some weight!’).

You’d never imagine the kinds of things people have said to me as I walk around in my nature-soles. “Do you know you’re not wearing any shoes?” Why yes, I do! Seriously, do you think people are that clueless? “Where are your shoes?” At home, why do you ask? “Don’t your feet hurt?” No, my Creator didn’t make me to be fragile. And of course, the necessary chorus “No shoes, no shirt, no service.” People tell me this on the street. Not even in the parking lot on the way to the store or anything. Just minding my own business in town. Good thing I’m not lookin’ for any kind of service right now, I tell them.

Of course, in spite of all the benefits of walking barefoot (it feels nice, it strengthens the arch and the toes, it enhances one’s awareness of one’s surroundings, etc.), there are reasons to be cautious. Along with our concretization of the world, we’ve gone and strewn broken glass and rusty nails all throughout it, as if to say, if you get hurt it’s your own damn fault! If I take the world for granted, then yes, it is my own fault if I cut myself while barefoot (though this is actually much harder to do than some people think). But taking the world for granted is precisely what I’m not doing when I walk barefoot. Rather, my naked feet are an announcement to the concrete jungle that it is what’s unnatural. It is the problem. It is the source of my pain. Not me or my bare toes.

They tell a story of man who was barefoot once, long ago (but not too long) and far away (but not too far). The world he inhabited was as harsh and uninviting as any junkyard, full of jagged rocks and broken bottles. But he walked barefoot through it anyway, and in doing so, he spoke judgment on that world. He was truly human, and in his naked humanity, the world was revealed in the full measure of its inhumanity. The managers of the junkyard were furious, of course. Maybe the man would sue. Mostly though, they hated that people were realizing how crappy the whole dump was. More people started walking barefoot, and were becoming aware of how wrongly uncomfortable and uncomfortably wrong their lives had become.

So the junkyard managers went out of their way to teach the man a lesson. They forced him into a path strewn with the harshest gravel they could find, and they threw thorns and scraps of twisted metal down on his path, crowning it all with a gnarly old rusted monster of a nail. And they made him walk on it. Or he willfully walked on it. I suppose it depends which perspective you take. Either way, I suppose you could summarize the whole ordeal by saying that he got tetanus and died (like I said, this was a long time ago, before compulsory tetanus vaccinations and the such).

Jesus is our barefoot God. Having kicked off the heavenly slippers of divine aseity, the man from Nazareth walks barefoot through a world at war, and impales his hands and his feet on the rusty nail of Roman oppression and Jewish faithlessness. A warning to all who would walk barefoot through a world no longer suitable for unshod feet.
In his death, Jesus absorbs the corruption of the world’s disease and brokenness, and it kills him. It is not the end of the story, of course. For in his resurrection, Jesus’ wounds become a fountainhead of antibodies. The raw gashes are healed and are stripped of their killing power. The way of barefootedness is vindicated and Jesus’ followers are equipped once more to face an unforgiving world of rusted nails and broken glass.

A wild story, I know. But in spite of all this, some still say that a violent world calls for shoes. Not wearing shoes is just not realistic! I never said it was. Being barefoot is asking for trouble! I never said it wasn’t. But if we really follow the barefoot man from Nazareth, the one who refuses to conform to the world and in so doing reveals precisely where it has gone off track, how can we be content with anything less than full barefootedness? How can we be content to lie and cheat and kill, when our master died for his unwillingness to do so? Christians, let your yes be yes and your no be no. Christians, put down your handguns and your rifles. Christians, take off your shoes and your socks. And be barefoot as your heavenly Father is barefoot.

Amen.

Aquinas on divine foreknowledge

Well, this is my 100th post, and I've been holding off posting to see if something incredibly profound could sprout out of my brain onto this page, but this doesn't seem to be happening. So I'll just be posting on some work that I've been doing of late.

Thomas Aquinas, that great doctor of the Church, wades into the problem of divine foreknowledge and essentially reaffirms Boethius' take on the issue (rather than, e.g., Augustine's). His point is this: human beings are rational beings. To reason is to deliberate, and in deliberation, our wills can be directed towards opposite things. In short, we have free will (in a libertarian sense). Of course, Aquinas inherits both philosophical and theological prejudices against women and their rational capacities, so when I summarize Aquinas' view by saying 'we' have free will, perhaps it would be best to say "Aquinas thought men had free will." It's a sad truth, but we won't be able to move beyond it until we realize what a patriarchal mess we've inherited.

Moving on. The future outcome of free choices is contingent, that is, not settled, determined, or necessary in any way. And Aquinas firmly argues that, 'in its causes', the future CANNOT be foreknown as certain.
Nevertheless, he does seem fairly enamored with the Boethian suggestion that divine foreknowledge isn't foreknowledge at all, but is rather knowledge. This is a function of God's mode of being--God's timelessness. Though the future cannot be known certainly 'in its causes', God can know it 'in its presentiality', that is, insofar as it is present to God in eternity.

The problem with this of course (and it is the problem that plagues all such attempts to justify the doctrine of foreknowledge on the basis of God's supposed 'timelessness'), is that God's mode of being is irrelevant to the mode of being of the future. And if the future does not exist, it doesn't matter if God is timeful, timeless, time-whatever. There's nothing there to 'know'.

Aaah, but the astute Thomist will point out that for Aquinas, 'knowledge' is a word we use analogically of God. Because God is essentially impassible, God does not 'receive' knowledge from the world in any passive sense. Rather he knows the world through himself, as its First Cause. His knowledge is thus activity, rather than passivity.
Of course, the point is well taken. For Aquinas, though we may speak of God's 'knowing' and God's 'causing' because of their semantic differences, for God these are in fact the same thing. God's action is entirely simple and undivided, and so what we call 'knowledge', 'providence', or 'creation' are in God all the same act.

The trouble here, is as follows. What the doctrine of divine simplicity entails is either A) that God foreknows what he predestines, such that his certain foreknowledge of the future is related to his certain causing of the future--and this undermines the conception of free will he has worked so hard to maintain; or B) we take seriously Aquinas' point that God's 'causation' of the world is compatible with 'contingent causation' (and thus with human free wills) and therefore insist that God's knowledge extends only as far as God's causation--which means that God 'knows' the future as it is--as contingent--which makes Aquinas an open theist.

What I'll be arguing in the paper I'm writing is that the source of this confusion is probably the linguistic habit we have (and all people seem to have) of referring to the future in the singular. But taking Aquinas' conception of free will seriously requires that we speak of futures rather than simply 'a' future. To the extent that indeterminacy results from human deliberation, there are several possible futures. Within Aquinas' scheme, if God's causation is compatible with a plurality of futures, then God's knowledge must be as well.
The philosophically inclined will recognize this as some form of so-called 'neo-Molinism'. The key metaphor here is of time as a tree lying on its side. The trunk is the past, the branches are possible routes for the future (or, we could say, the futures), and the point connecting the two halves is the present.

Long story short: if Aquinas can't reconcile exhaustive definite foreknowledge and libertarian free will, who can? Perhaps one or the other doctrine should be thrown out (/reformulated)...

Peace,
-Daniel-

Movie Recommendation

'I am Legend'. Just watched it last night. Highly recommended.

It's a 'zombie movie' in the same way that Signs is an 'alien movie'. The subject matter provides the driving force for the plot, but there are deeper philosophical questions below the surface. Ok, to be fair, Signs was more blatantly about NOT aliens than I am Legend is about NOT zombies, but watch the movie(s) and tell me if the comparison is apt.

All I can say is, I was scared out of my skin, and I was also deeply moved. A surprising combo for a Will Smith apocalyptic movie...