The Enlightenment Needs Religion like Fish Needs a Bicycle

Enlightenment rationalism has failed as a worldview. There’s just something missing. And some of the Enlightenment’s most redoubtable defenders are willing to admit it. Sort of.

That’s the theme of Stanley Fish’s latest blog-column. He tells the sad story of Jürgen Habermas, a German philosopher who has admitted that the “humanist self-confidence of a philosophical reason which thinks that it is capable of determining what is true and false” has been “shaken” by “the catastrophes of the twentieth century.” In the wake of two world wars and many other secular atrocities Habermas has decided that reason needs religion. Again, sort of. (Read the whole piece to see for yourself.)

Fish sees even more clearly than Habermas, as his piece will demonstrate. I always crow about Fish’s New York Times blog-columns because God’s common grace has given him an uncommon measure of insight. I literally gasped with pleasure as I read paragraphs like this:

A political structure that welcomes all worldviews into the marketplace of ideas, but holds itself aloof from any and all of them, will have no basis for judging the outcomes its procedures yield. Worldviews bring with them substantive long-term goals that serve as a check against local desires. Worldviews furnish those who live within them with reasons that are more than merely prudential or strategic for acting in one way rather than another.

Fish relates a story Habermas tells about his own life. Habermas had a Swiss friend who, though never a religious believer during his life, elected to have a church funeral. Habermas says his friend “had sensed the awkwardness of non-religious burial practices and, by his choice of place, publicly declared that the enlightened modern age has failed to find a suitable replacement for a religious way of coping with the final rite de passage.” Fish sharpens Habermas’ point: “In the context of full-bodied secularism, there would seem to be nothing to pass on to, and therefore no reason for anything like a funeral.”

Fish is one of America’s premier academics writing in America’s “newspaper of record” (my and—I just found out, my pastor’s—favorite newspaper). This is about as high as the “popular level” goes. And here is Fish taking dynamite to the foundation of sand upon which much of our nation is built.

Praise the Lord and pass the demolition.

I’m no anarchist. I like the peace afforded me by the Empire’s New Clothes. But I’m thinking of the precious souls who live and die assuming that the foundation of reason standeth sure. Many of them can be seen making negative comments on Fish’s posts. They can’t fathom that science could be anything but the way, the truth, and the life. I pray that Fish, though a non-Christian, can cause some of these people I will never meet to realize that there is only one reliable Rock upon which to build their lives.

I also pray that Fish himself would follow his God-given reason to its intended telos. It is remarkable to me that he never does so. He is a dwarf for the dwarfs, shooting at both sides in the last battle of our times. (I admit that I speak with considerable ignorance on this point, having picked up only one of his books, but I am a religious reader of his columns.) The secular left has picked up on this failure as well, as his Wikipedia page shows.

May God give more light to our nation—and please do read Fish’s entire piece.

Lovest Thou Me More than These?

Are agapao and phileo really different in the New Testament? How about in John 21:15-17, Jesus’ famous conversation with Peter? What does the evidence say?

I just read a great little book which genuinely helped me understand my Bible better, Roy F. Butler’s little known The Meaning of Agapao and Phileo in the Greek New Testament (Lawrence, KS: Coronado Press, 1977).

I wrote an Amazon review of it:

This short, punchy work takes aim at the very common view that ἀγαπάω (agapao) and φιλέω (phileo) indicate very different kinds of love in the NT. Butler fires rapidly but with great precision, and he takes the time to do what few scholars seem to have done: he actually looks at all the uses of the two Greek words in the NT. He shows convincingly that every kind of use of phileo is matched by a synonymous use of agapao. The two words are synonyms, not denominators of vast and mutually excluding theological systems. He concludes that agapao and phileo both mean the same thing, and we have a perfect English word for it: “love.”

Butler was particularly helpful with John 21:15-17. He also writes with real verve, personality, and humor without going over the top.

Butler fails almost entirely to discuss linguistics and how it might enlighten the problem. For example, a discussion of sense and reference might have helped him not to overstate his case when it comes to what Moisés Silva might call a “technically charged” use of one of the Greek words in question. But Butler’s methods are still generally sound. Who can argue with usage? What this book may lack in linguistic sophistication, it makes up for in punchiness. A quick, genuinely helpful read—and this reviewer has been reading a lot on the topic.

Let me share just a few excerpts, too. These are Butler’s comments on John 21:15-17, the passage many have appealed to for a difference between agapao and phileo. I myself was already persuaded of almost all Butler’s views, but on this one I felt he tipped me over the fence I was riding and brought me down on his side. R.C. Trench was one of the earliest interpreters to see a difference between the two words for love in that passage, and Butler takes issue with Trench’s now classic interpretation:

Trench’s arguments have in them several elements that will not stand up under scrutiny. Of least importance is the fact that they make no logical sense. Inasmuch as Peter had used the verb phileo twice on his own account, why should he be distressed by Jesus’ use of it? Assuming that he might be so distressed, however, for reasons not perceptible to human intelligence, why in spite of his distress would he answer again with the same verb which so distressed him on Jesus’ lips? Most important is the fact that two plain and simple statements of John the writer are customarily overlooked by those who aspire to prove by this passage that agapao and phileo have different meanings. In point of fact, they must be overlooked if this passage is to be cited to establish a difference between the two verbs. They are…first: ‘He said to him for the third time’; and, second: ‘Peter was grieved because He said to him for the third time.’

After Jesus twice asked Peter, ‘Do you love me?’ using the verb agapao each time, John in his own person continues, ‘He said to him for the third time, ‘Do you love me’ using phileo. Now it ought to be obvious that unless the verbs are exact synonyms, John could not state that Jesus used phileo ‘for the third time’; as a matter of strict fact, Jesus had used agapao twice previously, and this was the first, not the third, time he had used phileo. Only if the two words are identical in meaning does John’s statement hold water. (p. 62)

I wanted to buy his argument, but I wondered if “for the third time” really demanded what Butler says. He anticipated my question. He argues in a footnote (pp. 83-84) that το τριτον never means “upon the third occasion,” but always, “for the third time.”

He argues in the next footnote against another common objection, this one voiced by Moulton and Milligan:, “In so severely simple a writer as John it is extremely hard to reconcile ourselves to a meaningless use of synonyms, where the point would seem to lie in the identity of the word employed.” Butler argues that “there are two mistakes in their thinking. The first is the assumption that a simple writer limits himself in the use of synonyms. The simplicity or complexity of a piece of writing is determined largely by its style. The second mistake lies in the implication that John himself does not use synonyms. John in fact customarily, even habitually, uses synonyms.” (p. 84)

One other big advance Butler made for me was to note that it’s not just that φιλέω and ἀγαπάω are used interchangeably in the NT. They are used interchangeably in very similar contexts and with the same objects: God, man, life, etc. In fact, he puts it this way: “For every occurrence of phileo there is an occurrence of agapao expressing exactly the same idea.” (p. 70)

Now, the reverse is not exactly true, but it’s close. It’s kind of complex!

Forward this Blog Post to 8 Friends and I will Prove that Your Worldview Is Right

Neil Postman has pointed out that when the flow of information in a society has become a flood, information filters become increasingly important. We need mechanisms to distinguish good information from bad, useful from worthless. Postman’s prescience amazes me, because he wrote Technopoly before the advent of the Internet—before the flood became a worldwide inundation that extends 15 cubits above the mountaintops. We’re drowning in information, and we’re inhaling good, bad, useful, and worthless in huge gulps.

Science is a generally trusted information filter, but it actually gave a big boost to credulity by giving us the Net, the international credulity club. Has your inbox, like mine, been filled with these bits of Internet detritus?

• Forward this e-mail and Microsoft will send you an iPad.
• Forward this e-mail and little Johnny won’t die.
• Forward this e-mail and President Obama was really born in the Kremlin, which is really in Saudi Arabia, which is really a hologram.

Snopes.com is one of the major trusted information filters out there for urban legends like these. As soon as they land in your inbox (which must mean that some people really do believe them) and beckon you to click “Forward,” you can go to Snopes to check out their validity. An interesting, must-read New York Times article quotes Snopes’ owners, who are quite perceptive about the failure of our public information filters:

“Especially in politics, most everything has infinite shades of gray to it, but people just want things to be true or false…. In the larger sense, it’s people wanting confirmation of their world view.”

Snopes nailed it. Our information filters fail us not because the facts aren’t there to be found, but because people have higher commitments. They have presuppositions. Their affections are pointing them toward some answers and not others. They want their teams to win at all costs, even if truth is the down payment. Or perhaps we could put it like Paul did: they “suppress the truth in unrighteousness.”

Another perceptive quotation in the Times article came from Brooks Jackson of FactCheck.org, a site similar to Snopes.com:

“The ‘news’ that is not fit to print gets through to people anyway these days, through 24-hour cable gasbags, partisan talk radio hosts and chain e-mails, blogs and Web sites such as WorldNetDaily or Daily Kos…. What readers need now, we find, are honest referees who can help ordinary readers sort out fact from fiction.”

But how do we know who’s “honest”? Some people think WorldNetDaily is an honest referee, and that its negative mention in the New York Times is only further evidence of the Gray Lady’s complicity in an international conspiracy against the truly true facts.

How can we get out of this mess? Where are the reliable information filters? We won’t find them until we all acknowledge that every one of us trusts certain authorities and not others.

Me? I believe in the inspiration of the Bible, both the Old and the New Testaments. I have an authority which is utterly trustworthy, because it comes from the only Person in the Universe with a truly objective view.

As for any other authorities, I’m not so sure. I did some research on the Internet, and I found out that Snopes.com is bankrolled by Saudi Arabian iPad sales.

One More

Just one more sad, sad quote from Nothing to Envy:

Dr. Kim staggered up the riverbank. Her legs were numb, encased in frozen trousers. She made her way through the woods until the first light of dawn illuminated the outskirts of a small village. She didn’t want to sit down and rest—she feared succumbing to hypothermia—but she knew she didn’t have the strength to go much farther. She would have to take a chance on the kindness of the local residents. Dr. Kim looked down a dirt road that led to farmhouses. Most of them had walls around them with metal gates. She tried one; it turned out to be unlocked. She pushed it open and peered inside. On the ground she saw a small metal bowl with food. She looked closer—it was rice, white rice, mixed with scraps of meat. Dr. Kim couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen a bowl of pure white rice. What was a bowl of rice doing there, just sitting out on the ground? She figured it out just before she heard the dog’s bark. Up until that moment, a part of her had hoped that China would be just as poor as North Korea. She still wanted to believe that her country was the best place in the world. The beliefs she had cherished for a lifetime would be vindicated. But now she couldn’t deny what was staring her plainly in the face: dogs in China ate better than doctors in North Korea.

The Great Vituperator

A sadly funny excerpt from Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea:

Mi-ran’s mother later told her that four of her father’s buddies in the mines, fellow South Koreans, had been executed for minor infractions, their bodies dumped in mass graves. Being a member of the hostile class meant you would never get the benefit of the doubt. A sarcastic inflection when referring to Kim Il-sung or a nostalgic remark about South Korea could get you in serious trouble. It was especially taboo to talk about the Korean War and who started it. In the official histories (and there was nothing but official history in North Korea), it was the South Korean Army that invaded, acting on orders from the Americans, not the North Korean Army storming across the 38th parallel. “The U.S. imperialists gave the Syngman Rhee puppet clique an order to unleash a Korean War,” goes the account in Rodong Sinmun [the official DPRK newspaper]. Anybody who remembered what really happened on June 25, 1950 (and which Korean could forget?), knew it was wise to keep one’s mouth shut.

I felt sad several times as I read this book and saw parallels between North Korean “puppet clique” bombast and the kinds of arguments that some conservative Christians have employed. There’s a certain turn of mind which is given to this kind of invective; apparently it’s a human universal. The Korean Central News Agency has been nicknamed the “Great Vituperator,” but I know some Islamists and some professing Christians who went to the same school of rhetoric.

New E-mail Subscription Option

You can now subscribe to my blog via e-mail and get each post in its entirety instead of only an excerpt.

If that interests you, click here. My old e-mail subscription option has been turned off.

Chronological Snobbery

I don’t want to be, but I think I’ve been stuck in what C.S. Lewis calls “chronological snobbery.”

I pick up an old book—most recently, Ferdinand de Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics—and I can’t really read it without my fingers crossed. I can never shake the suspicion that the science of whatever it is I’m reading about has progressed so far by now that I am wasting my time on old arguments.

I do not feel this way when reading Jonathan Edwards—or C.S. Lewis, for that matter. And I know in my head and heart that the latest book isn’t necessarily the best book. I want to escape the you’ve-got-to-read-this culture of the blogosphere—but I don’t want to, either. It’s so, well, beguiling. To be up on things is to have power other’s don’t. But, then again, the new books I have read recently have been genuinely helpful and edifying. And they speak my language.

Lewis said that he read old books on a regular basis in order to breathe the air of a different century, ventilating his own.

I need God’s wisdom to know what to read and when. He knows best what I need.

International Microsoft OneNote Appreciation Month is This Month, from April 2 to April 13th!

Limerick:

There once was a big dissertation
Filled with fact after asseveration.
But the skull of the writer
Was getting much tighter:
No outlets for his cogitation!

Ode:

Oh, OneNote, perfect system of filing!
Your skills are oh so beguiling!
I end all my study sessions smiling!
All of my thoughts and arguments you are stockpiling!

Song:

OneNote, OneNote, the only program for me!
Microsoft hit a home run—yes, finally!
You search all my tittles and jots!
You save all my screenshots!
You OCR even small dots!
How you do it I wot not!
OneNote, OneNote, the only program for me!*

*BibleWorks, if you read this, please remember to take it in context. You are good at filing notes, too. Very good. It is only a song.

Interesting News Item

The Wholly Holy Bible Diet has been a hit with Charismatics since it began releasing its series of Bible-themed foods and beverages in 1998. “All our ingredients come wholly from the pages of the Holy Bible” has been its slogan—and its practice—since the beginning. Now, however, Catholics and mainline Protestants can take part in the fun with new fruits and vegetables never before seen in WHBD products.

“There were certain seeds and Middle-Eastern fruits that the Old and New Testaments do not mention, but which show up in the Apocrypha,” says Kymberlee Smith, 32, wife of the late founder of The Wholly Holy Bible Diet. “Some of those ingredients were hard to locate, and two are illegal in the US, but we managed to find them all and incorporate them into our products. Orders have been pouring in from all over the world.”

North Korea

I took one day out of my paternity leave for pleasure reading. I selected a new Kindle book I bought after hearing the author interviewed on NPR: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea. It was utterly fascinating. I devoured it.

Demick weaves a gripping narrative which puts the reader in contact with daily life north of the DMZ. And the story is more than just exciting and interesting: the relationship between Mi-ran and Jun-Sang (not their real names) has to be one of the most romantic stories I’ve ever read.

Demick focuses on people from the area around the North Korean city of Chong-Jin. She can tell such intimate stories about citizens of a closed country under an oppressive regime because she spoke to them personally. They all defected (or, in one case, were tricked into defecting and only then defected!) to South Korea where Demick, the L.A. Times Korea correspondent, was able to interview them.

Not all of the defectors were born dissidents. Several were classic true believers in the regime who only reluctantly gave up their religious faith in the “Fatherly Leader.” Once inside South Korea, most of them expressed some desire (sometimes) to go back northward.

Reading this work gave me a deep sense of righteous anger at Kim Il-Sung and his son Kim Jong-Il. I had already viewed the latter as a ridiculous man: he wears silly jumpsuits and is always followed by fawning military officials in massive caps. Now I view him as culpable for the deaths of millions. Ideas have consequences, and when your economic policies kill your own citizens you need to take responsibility and change the policies. Instead, the North Korean propaganda machine went into overdrive: “Let’s all eat two meals a day!”

Kim Jong-Il appears to believe his own propaganda. If everyone around you agrees with everything you say and proclaims you an expert on everything from industrial glass production to the best bovine fertility practices, perhaps it’s inevitable that your pedestal’s height starts to put you out of touch with the people on the ground.

As I read I was filled with a desire to do something for these people—and then I started to realize what that might mean. South Koreans certainly have realized it, according to the book. Rehabilitating an entire half-nation and bringing them up to the high-tech standards of the other half would be costly and difficult. Add to this the fact that a lifetime of conditioning has influenced the thinking of everyone. Even defectors have a hard time making it in the South. They have to go through a special government deprogramming.

But nonetheless I have prayed that the true King of this world would depose the leader He, for His own purposes, set up decades ago (Psalm 75:7; Romans 13:1). Kim Jong-Il deserves to answer for his crimes, primarily that of defacing the image of God by putting such little stock in the lives of God’s image-bearers.

Buy this book for an education on the politics and history of North Korea, and read and enjoy this book for the many personal stories that you can follow from their beginnings under oppression to their breakthrough to (political, at least) freedom.

The Christian Science Monitor on the New Calvinism

The Christian Science Monitor (which, by the way, has little to do with Christian Science and is a respected mainstream news source):

Much of modern Christianity preaches a comforting Home Depot theology: You can do it. We can help. Epitomized by popular titles like Joel Osteen’s Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential, this message of self-fulfillment through Christian commitment attracts followers in huge numbers, turning big churches into megachurches.

I agree. And I thought this comment was quite perceptive coming from a more or less secular news source:

From conservative evangelical churches to liberal new-age groups, the message of much modern teaching is man’s need for betterment. Not New Calvinism; its star is God’s need for glory. And the gravity of His will is great: It can be denied, but not defied.

Calvinists cannot lay exclusive claim to a concern for God’s glory; all regenerated people have that desire planted in their hearts as part of the New Covenant, no matter their formal theological affiliation. But I recently heard an Arminian leader admit that New Calvinism’s rise has been a response to excessive man-centeredness in American Christianity. May all Christians learn to be increasingly God-centered!

Read the whole thing…

Seminary Survival Labs

Half of the readers of this blog, Duncan Johnson, will be giving a series of lectures you should attend if you’re in the Greenville area. Here’s the info:

Saturday, April 3, 9:00 a.m., 10:30 a.m., 1:00 p.m. Computer Classroom, Mack Library

Turning in quality seminary projects is hard work, and technological challenges don’t make it any easier. The Mack Library is offering three workshop labs for undergrad Religion majors, Seminary students, and faculty. These sessions will explain and demonstrate key technologies necessary for seminary research, including Greek and Hebrew fonts, a Turabian template for Microsoft Word and Zotero (the premier tool for research organization and citation). All sessions will occur in the Mack Library Classroom (the former Testing Center, next to the e-mail stations) Saturday, April 3 and are free of charge. Register at the LibGuide for the Seminary Survival Labs. Drop-ins will also be welcome.

• 9 a.m. Greek/Hebrew fonts – Demonstrates the two ways to use biblical language text in your documents, the BibleWorks fonts and Unicode.

• 10:30 a.m. Turabian – Demonstrates the Turabian Wizard, with some time for individual practice.

• 1 p.m. Zotero – Demonstrates using Zotero to organize your research and insert footnotes into your papers.

The LibGuide will soon include how-to videos demonstrating the techniques explained during the sessions.

Then again, the other half of this blog’s readership is Duncan’s wife, Meg, so I’m not sure why I’m bothering with this. Make sure to go support your husband, Meg.

I might add that if Meg can’t make it, she can read my series of Posts, “What is Unicode?” And, Meg, if your husband doesn’t mention it, though he probably will, OneNote is a viable alternative/addition to Zotero and StyleEase is the Turabian template I recommend.

Why Study Greek?

I have always enjoyed languages, especially English, because my father did for me what I hope to do for my son: he insisted that I express myself and he created a welcoming environment for that expression. I took Latin in eighth grade, and my eyes were opened not only to a bit of Latin but, more importantly, to the real nature of my own language.

I later took about six years of Spanish in high school and college, I am officially “proficient” in German (after 40 hours of grammar cramming and the judicious use of an online dictionary!), and, of course, I’ve taken a good bit of Greek and two years of Hebrew.

By my count, I’ve taken 9 semesters of Greek, including three semesters of intro, three of book classes, one of textual criticism, and two of grammar and linguistics.

But a shift has been going on in my thinking over the years, especially because of those last two classes. I learned through them that the value of Greek is not in original word meanings hidden to the lay public. That’s a farce, and a dangerous one. It’s not really in syntactical treasures which will wow your congregation, either. It’s not in besting available English translations. The value of knowing NT Greek is found in, well… It’s in…

Moisés Silva

I have found myself in just the position of Moisés Silva, and it’s partly his fault. He tells the story in one of his chapters in Foundations of Contemporary Interpretation of how he was asked to address a group of prospective seminary students on why to study Greek. Out of the abundance of his linguistically sensitive heart, his mouth spoke, so he began with some warnings and continued with some negatives. As time ran out, he squeezed in a few positives. He found out later that one prospect chose not to attend his school because of his talk. He was never asked to speak on that topic again!

The negatives of knowing Greek are better than the negatives of not knowing it, but they’re still present. That’s probably because linguistics needs to be made a part of the study process, or at least it needs to be a requirement for the undergraduate liberal arts training which should already be undergirding a future pastor’s seminary studies.

But I’ll allow Silva to bring us back to the title of this post: What are the positive reasons for a future pastor to study Greek and Hebrew?

A measure of proficiency in the biblical languages provides the framework that promotes responsibility in the handling of the text. Continued exposure to the original text expands our horizon and furnishes us with a fresh and more authentic perspective than that which we bring from our modern, English-speaking situation.

In my own preaching during the past twenty-five years, explicit references to Greek and Hebrew have become less and less frequent. But that hardly means I have paid less attention to the languages or that they have become less significant in my work of interpretation. Quite the contrary. It’s just that coming up with those rich exegetical nuggets is not necessarily where the real, substantial payoff lies.

Silva also points out that Greek grammar may not be the secret key to good theology, but it can certainly rule out the possibility of bad theology in a given case. Jehovah’s Witnesses can impress someone with the fact that “God” in John 1:1 has no definite article, but a rudimentary knowledge of predication and definiteness in Greek will soon show their view to be in error.

Silva also notes that pastors who do not know Greek will not be able to interact with commentary literature or evaluate different English translations. If a member of the church asks him why two translations differ, he’d have to shrug his shoulders.

Silva also points out that if seminaries don’t require Greek and Hebrew, students won’t take them. It’s the equivalent of removing algebra and history from the required list of high school courses. And if students in seminaries don’t take Greek, teachers of their other courses will have to lower the complexity of their lectures. They won’t be able to make subtler linguistic points to their classes. And students won’t be able to speak as intelligently among themselves. And someone who might have been a great scholar of Greek will never get the chance because we won’t be introduced to the topic—do gospel Christians want to cede all Greek and Hebrew scholarship to unbelievers?

Finally, Silva says, there are intangible benefits to studying Greek and Hebrew. In high school, you take algebra whether you will be using sine and cosine in ten years or not. It improves you. It makes you culturally literate. It lays down some brain pathways you will use in ten years. The biblical languages do the same.

Recommendations

I’m sure Silva and I have missed some good reasons for studying Greek, but let me say that all the reasons for it become better reasons if you also take advantage of the advances in linguistics which scholars like Silva have made available. So I’ll end with a few book recommendations on the topic (click to buy):

If you don’t read anything else on this list, read this book. And re-read it a few years later. It’s that good.

This is the second place to start. Silva is less difficult than Barr but goes more in-depth than Carson chooses to in his more introductory text.

This is a classic; Barr was a teacher of Silva’s. Difficult if you haven’t mastered some linguistic concepts already.

Poythress has a simple style that, like John in the NT, belies his intellectual and theological depth. In that he follows his mentor and friend, John Frame.

Haven’t gotten much into this, but I’ve read the opening and I’ve seen it recommended.

I’ve sampled this, and I found it quite helpful.

This isn’t a work of linguistics, per se, but it is very stimulating on hermeneutics in general.