Apologia Fall 2016

Fall 2016, Volume 11, Issue 1

Theology of Terrorism: Exploring the Roots of Religious Violence

cover feature by Joshua Tseng-Tham '17: p. 24

p. 2 Interview: The Reality of the Resurrection & the Mission of the Church

p. 18 Discerning Fact from Fiction: Christianity's Middle Eastern Heritage

p. 32 The Role of Han in Korean Christianity

with N.T. Wright

Sharidan Russell '18

Joyce Lee '19

A Letter from the Editor Why do we suffer? This question constitutes one of the greatest quandaries to ever plague the human race. Every day we witness tremendous suffering in the world—whether it be from terrorism, government oppression, or domestic crime. While the prevalence of suffering can be discouraging and disheartening, I am always amazed by man’s desire to live on, persisting in the struggle for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” even when such goals seem naïve and delusional. While many have given up on these ideals and consequently adopted a nihilistic view of existence, one group has been uniquely consistent in its resolve to understand meaning in the world and the suffering that pervades it. This group was born in 33 AD after the death and resurrection of a man named Jesus Christ.

His followers have been called “Christians” ever since.

The Christian view of suffering stands in stark contrast to the world’s response to it.

For many, pain is a villain that must be expunged at all costs. Indeed, the proliferation of self-help guides and medical painkillers attests to the West’s growing obsession with ameliorating pain. By constrast, Christianity’s solution to suffering lies in a man who suffered—Jesus Christ, an innocent man who willingly paid humanity’s crushing debt to God by dying on the cross. Our sufferings, while a consequence of our unimaginable brokenness, pale in comparison to those that Christ had to endure on the cross. This is not meant to belittle man’s suffering, but rather shows that the enormity of Christ’s pain was the only payment that equaled the enormity of sin. Doestoevsky’s Brothers Karamazov presents an image of Christ as one who “can forgive everything, all and for all, because he gave his innocent blood for all and everything.” Humanity, which remained so hostile to God after Adam and Eve’s original sin, was finally reconciled to God through Christ’s suffering and death. Through this understanding of our redemption Christians find hope, rather than meaninglessness, in suffering.

As you read this edition of the Apologia, I hope you will find new ways of approaching the topic of suffering and the critical roles that redemption plays in its resolution. Indeed, while Christianity offers hope in the face of pain, it by no means teaches that we ought to ignore how pain is manifested throughout the world. In fact, only by recognizing pain in all its forms can one properly demonstrate the hope of the Gospel message. The authors of this edition, whether they are discussing religious terrorism, cultural perspectives on grief, or God’s punishments in the Old Testament, operate under the assumption that pain, when viewed together with Christ’s death, has its proper place within the divine plan of salvation. While we by no means suggest that our writings can provide a panacea for the world’s pain, we do hope to offer interpretations of the human condition that will strengthen your resolve in the face of ubiquitous strife. Ultimately, we, the members of the Apologia, hope that you will find this resoluteness grounded in Jesus Christ, the person to whom St. Augustine famously, and we believe correctly, addressed the beautiful statement: “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

Richard A. Williams Editor-in-Chief

Submissions We welcome the submission of any article, essay, or artwork for publication in The Dartmouth Apologia.

Submissions should seek to promote respectful, thoughtful discussion in the community. We will consider submissions from any member of the community but reserve the right to publish only those that align with our mission statement and quality rubric. Email: The.Dartmouth.Apologia@Dartmouth.Edu Front cover by Chenchen Li ’18 Back cover by Jacob Kupferman ’14

Letters to the Editor We value your opinions and encourage thoughtful submissions expressing support, dissent, or other views.

We will gladly consider any letter that is consistent with our mission statement’s focus on promoting intellectual discourse in the Dartmouth community.

Fall 2016, Volume 11, Issue 1

Editor-in-Chief Richard Williams ’18 Managing Editor Amanda Wang ’18 Executive Editor Luke Dickens ’18 Editorial Board Jake Casale ’17 Marissa Le Coz ’17 Sara Holston ’17 Jessica Tong ’17 Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17 Trevor Davis ’18 Samuel Ching ’19 India Perdue ’19 Sonia Rowley ’19 Business Manager Peter O'Leary ’19 Production Manager Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17 Production Staff Aimee Sung ’17 Chenchen Li ’18 Rachel Matsumoto ’19 Lynette Long ’20 Photography Jacob Kupferman ’14 Contributors Sharidan Russell ’18 Joshua Lee ’19 Joyce Lee ’19 Jessica Heine ’19 Advisory Board Gregg Fairbrothers Eric Hansen, Thayer James Murphy, Government Lindsay Whaley, Classics Special thanks to Council on Student Organizations The Eleazar Wheelock Society Apologia Online Subscription information for the journal or bi-weekly blog is available on our website at dartmouthapologia.org.

Past issues of the journal are available online for archival viewing.

The opinions expressed in The Dartmouth Apologia are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the journal, its editors, or Dartmouth College. Copyright © 2016 The Dartmouth Apologia.

INTERVIEW: 2

The Reality of the Resurrection and the Mission of the Church The Rt Revd N.T. Wright, Ph. D. University of St Andrews

PROVING THE EXISTENCE OF GOD: 8 Defending Descartes' Causal Argument Jessica Tong ’17

SELF, SOCIETY, AND THE 12 TRINITARIAN POSTURE Amanda Wang ’18

DISCERNING FACT FROM FICTION: 18 Christianity's Middle Eastern Heritage Sharidan Russell ’18

THEOLOGY OF TERRORISM: 24 Exploring the Roots of Religious Violence Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17

THE ROLE OF HAN IN 32 KOREAN CHRISTIANITY Joyce Lee ’19

REVISITING BIBLICAL CLAIMS ON 36 GENERATIONAL PUNISHMENT Joshua Lee ’19

GOD OF WRATH, GOD OF LOVE 40 Jessica Heine ’19

BOOK REVIEW: 44

C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce

Sara Holston ’17

T

he Dartmouth Apologia exists to articulate Christian perspectives in the academic community.

A JOURNAL OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT

the mission of the church

the reality of the resurrection &

The Resurrection by Andrea Mantegna, 1459

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conducted by Joshua Tseng-Tham

A Q&A with N.T. Wright

Nicholas Thomas Wright, otherwise known as N. T. Wright, is the Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. Formerly the Bishop of Durham in the Church of England, Wright is hailed by Time as “one of the most formidable figures in Christian thought.” He is one of the world’s leading Bible scholars, and is widely known for his scholarship on the resurrection of Jesus and second coming, as well as the Pauline Epistles and their impact on the Christian doctrine of justification. Wright is the award-winning author of Surprised by Hope, How God Became King, Surprised by Scripture, and many other volumes. He also engages with the public in mediums such as ABC News, Dateline, The Veritas Forum, and Google.

The Resurrection Q: What criteria do you use to judge whether a historical document is a reliable source of evidence?

Why do you think the Gospel accounts fulfill these criteria?

A: Any document from the past raises questions: how do we know whether we can trust it? What angle of vision does it seem to use? Are there independent sources by which we can verify what is being said? This applies to everything, whether to a historical document from the fifth century BC or to a newspaper report from last week. Of course, if the source is a letter from somebody we know, love, and utterly trust, we will be strongly inclined to believe it even if it says some extraordinary things—though, if we then wanted to explain the contents to someone who did not know the sender, we might well use other arguments to convince them.

That is rather what it is like with a Christian reading the gospels. We are used to reading and praying these texts not just as historical documents but as living words from God himself. (That is why Christians have often spoken of the inspiration of Scripture.) But since many people (both ancient and modern) do not share this perspective, it is important as well to be able to say that actually the gospels make really good sense in their own frame as well. Within that kind of task— explaining and expounding the gospels to people who do not share a personal trust in them—it is impossible to give proof for everything they contain. As with almost all ancient history, most events are reported once and once only, and that applies to many things in the gospels.

But the question, then, must be whether the reports as a whole ring true, and whether they make sense in their historical and social context (i.e. Palestine in the first half of the first century). There are all sorts of reasons—which I explore in detail in several of my books—for saying, “Yes, they do.” One small example

must suffice. People have often said that perhaps the gospels were written up later to address controversies in the early church; but it is curious that the sharp controversies in the gospels (like Jesus healing on the Sabbath) are not reflected elsewhere in the New Testament, and that the sharp controversies in early Christianity (like the admission of Gentiles without circumcision) are not mentioned in the gospels. This is not a knock-down proof, but it is a straw in the wind.

Q: For the gospels to be interpreted as the Word of God delivered within the temporal and cultural context of first-century Palestine, it would follow that its overarching messages and story must speak to all generations and nations that follow if the universality of Scripture is to be accepted. Yet there are moments and stories in the gospels (indeed, in all of Scripture) that seem vitally significant for understanding the overall picture and yet approach inscrutability without a detailed, unintuitive knowledge of the cultural context in which they were written. Can Scripture be universally understood without some form of external aid, and if not, what form must this aid take?

A: God can and does, by the Spirit, enable people of all sorts to glean the overall message of Scripture in a thousand ways. You do not need to know ancient Greek and Hebrew to understand “He loved me and gave himself for me.” But it is vital for every generation that church teachers and leaders, and as many of their folk as are able to do it, should study and ponder and probe the original meanings in fresh ways using the finest tools available. This always has the potential to refresh and rejuvenate the church’s witness—which is why, I guess, this exercise itself can be corrupted by sceptics and cynics into a negative mode, which then generates the reaction of many Christians (“Don’t give us that academic stuff, it will destroy our faith!”). The gospel was and is public truth, not private or secret knowledge. There is always a danger in saying, “This

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The main argument for taking seriously the unprecedented and (under normal circumstances) incredible claim that Jesus was indeed bodily raised from the dead is that you cannot understand the rise of early Christianity without it—i.e. why the disciples of Jesus so quickly did what they did and said what they said. is for all times, so we must back off from the firstcentury specifics.” If the living God reveals himself and accomplishes salvation in actual space/time/matter/ historical reality, then the more we know about that reality, the better. It always seems safer to back off from this into a timeless statement, but that is the kind of safety that Peter wanted for Jesus in Matthew 16.

Q: Does the case for the reality of the resurrection depend on the reliability of the Gospels? Do you think that the resurrection can be established on independent grounds? If so, what are they?

which poses the great challenge: how else can you explain the rise of Christianity? And serious historical investigation can actually be very good at showing just how inadequate all other answers to that question really are. Thus, all the lines of historical investigation point inwards to something that really must have happened two or three days after Jesus’ death, but they cannot in themselves prove that God raised Jesus from the dead, and so launched the new creation. I have said a lot more about this in Surprised by Hope.

A: No: one cannot first establish the reliability of the gospels and then say, “So therefore, the resurrection stories must be true.” That would be a kind of rationalist attempt at an apologia and it would not work, because the resurrection would itself always be cited back as a reason for not believing the gospels as a whole. If anything, it works the other way round (though I would not really want to put it like that). The main argument for taking seriously the unprecedented and (under normal circumstances) incredible claim that Jesus was indeed bodily raised from the dead is that you cannot understand the rise of early Christianity without it—i.e. why the disciples of Jesus so quickly did what they did and said what they said. But— this is really important—this is not a matter of establishing the resurrection on independent grounds.

What could such grounds be? The whole point of the resurrection is not that it is a very odd event within the present ongoing world (in which one would find such independent grounds), but that it is the defining, programmatic, and symbolically dense event which launches the new world, the new creation in which the old (corruptible, decaying) is transformed into the new heavens and new earth.

So you cannot start somewhere else and work in towards that, because in the nature of the case, the resurrection of Jesus is itself the center and starting point for a truly Christian epistemology. But since a Christian epistemology is rooted in the renewal of creation, not the abandonment of creation and the setting-up of a different, unconnected parallel universe, the resurrection tears a hole in ordinary history Icon Depicting the Early Church at the First Council of Nicaea, unknown

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A Christian Lighting a Candle to Worship God, 2014

Q: Could you further define what you mean by a Christian epistemology? How does the reality opened by the resurrection offer different ways of knowing what is true?

A: The resurrection of Jesus is simultaneously the major act of new creation, the launching of the new creation that will one day do the same for the whole cosmos, and also the major act of redemption and transformation of the old creation. Knowing the new is thus not entirely separate from knowledge of the old, but rather gives the fresh dimension to the latter—indeed, this is what the old was intended for all along. Knowing the risen Jesus in Scripture, prayer, sacrament, holiness, suffering, and service to the poor will mean that as we look out on all his creation, not least its presently broken and wounded parts, we see it all in a new light—not to ignore the evidence that anyone else might see, but to give it a new dimension. This, I think, is what Paul means by “having the mind of the Messiah” (1 Corinthians 2:16; compare Philemon 2:5) or “being transformed by the renewal of the mind” (Romans 12:2).

thus both challenges people to think differently and, by the power of the Spirit, opens people’s minds to do so. There is, to be sure, a mystery here which many theologians and philosophers have pondered, but it certainly is not circular. The resurrection, as an event within real history, launches the new creation, and the new creation sets the context within which new forms of knowing are generated.

To believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, you have to believe in a life-giving creator God. It is not just something you can believe as an odd fact that just might be true, like learning that someone had flown around the world on a new kind of personal jet pack...

Q: Some may argue that an appeal to Christian epistemology to properly understand the resurrection is circular reasoning. For example, you claim that Christian epistemology is required to fully understand the resurrection, but the resurrection is required to launch a new Christian epistemology.

So why believe in a Christian epistemology in the first place?

A: The question of a new-creational epistemology is fascinating, isn’t it? But an epistemology is not something you believe in; it is the lens through which you look, not the thing you look at. The resurrection of Jesus, as witnessed to by his followers from the first Easter to now, makes its impact on human beings through the power of the Spirit in the preaching of the gospel (however that happens; i.e. overt preaching in church is only one of many ways). The resurrection

Q: New Testament scholar Géza Vermes once dismissed the belief in a literal resurrection as being “not susceptible to rational judgment.” Indeed, there is a sense that a lot of Christians and skeptics see the belief in the literal resurrection as one that is dependent on faith. How would you respond to Vermes’ assertion? If you believe that the evidence for the resurrection to be compelling, why do you think so many people nonetheless reject it?

A: To believe that God raised Jesus from the dead, you have to believe in a life-giving creator God. It is not just something you can believe as an odd fact that just might be true, like learning that someone had flown around the world on a new kind of personal jet pack, the kind of thing where you would say, “Well, I didn’t know that would have been possible, but I guess he did it.” This is of a different order altogether, and that

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Conversion of Saul by Michelangelo Buonarroti, 1542

is why believing in the resurrection is a key element in justifying faith (Romans 4:24-25; 10:9-11), not just an odd item of information.

Géza Vermes (whose own very candid autobiography says quite a bit about why he lost his early Christian faith) is in this sense correct: if by “rational,” you mean conforming to the standards of modern European/American rationalism, then of course he is right. The question is whether the rather shrunken world of modernist rationalism is really good for very much. Falling in love is not susceptible to rational judgment, but for a lot of people, it is the most important thing in the world. Ditto for the beauty of music, or of a sunset. But this does not mean that believing in the resurrection of Jesus is simply dependent on faith in the sense people normally mean by that.

When people look closely at who Jesus actually was, and when they ponder the claims about what happened to his body and how early Christianity began—and, in particular, when they meet the announcement that he is alive and that he is the true Lord of the whole world—then something can happen deep inside, again, like falling in love or discovering music, which alters their entire worldview. Faith is a key part of that alteration—not in the sense of credulity, but in the sense of finding oneself grasped by the love of the creator God made known in the “faithfulness unto death” of his Son; and, since all of that is about the new creation happening in the person themselves, it is natural, then, to believe that actually the new creation began when Jesus came out of the tomb on Easter morning.

When people look closely at who Jesus actually was, and when they ponder the claims about what happened to his body and how early Christianity began–and, in particular, when they meet the announcement that he is alive and that he is the true Lord of the whole world–then something can happen deep inside, again, like falling in love or discovering music, which alters their entire worldview.

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I do not say, and would not say, that the Church works to usher in the Kingdom of God. Only God brings God’s kingdom. That is really important. What we are called to do, however, is to work for the Kingdom; to build for the Kingdom.

The Mission of the Church Q: In Surprised by Hope, one of the topics you touched upon was that the church works to usher in the Kingdom of God. However, the church has not been viewed in the best light historically. How can we look for the church ushering in the Kingdom throughout history despite its many failures?

A: The church at its best has never been triumphalistic.

Obviously, that has been a regular temptation and the church has not always resisted it; but the prayer Jesus gave us included the line, “Forgive us our trespasses,” and there is a reason why we need to pray that every day.

So, yes, the church has got a great many things wrong again and again. The litany is well known: crusades, inquisitions, witch-burning, and so on. However, we often forget that the church was the first company ever to believe in, and to start to practice, education and medicine for all, irrespective of social status or wealth; that the church has, throughout its history, taken the side of the poor against the oppressors (with some horrible exceptions, of course); that the church is not basically about big, pompous people making big, pious announcements, but about ordinary praying people loving their neighbors and being, in their own localities, the light of the world. The best book I know on this recently is John Ortberg, Who is This Man?, which I strongly recommend to anyone wanting to find out more.

Saint Peter's Basilica at night by Livio Andronico, 2015

However, let me correct one thing. I do not say, and would not say, that the church works to usher in the Kingdom of God. Only God brings God’s kingdom.

That is really important. What we are called to do, however, is to work for the Kingdom; to build for the Kingdom. We are like the stonemasons carving small bits of stone for a great cathedral; we are not building the cathedral, but we are working for that building. The key thing is 1 Corinthians 15:58: “In the Lord, your labor is not in vain.” What we do in the present, in love and wisdom and justice and beauty and preaching and teaching, is not wasted; when God brings in his kingdom, like the master mason actually putting the building together, he will take all the smaller things we have done and put them in their proper place, in ways we could never have imagined. The church’s failures will be burnt up… that is all there in 1 Corinthians 3.

Q: What are practical ways that individual churches can work for the Kingdom in their local communities?

A: In Surprised by Hope I propose three things which go together: justice, beauty, and evangelism. When the church tries to do evangelism without any care for justice and beauty, what people hear and see is a message that says, “Don’t bother about the world— just turn to Jesus.” But the Jesus to whom they ought to be turning is one who has already launched the new creation in which (a) all things are to be put right at the end, and he has already begun that; and (b) the beauty and power of the present creation will be enhanced and fulfilled in ways we can hardly imagine—that that, too, has already begun. So when the church is active in working to put things right, in the local or international context, talking about Jesus will make the sense it ought to make; and when the church is active in promoting and celebrating art, music, dance, etc. it is saying, “Just imagine! There is a whole new world out there, already launched, and we get to be part of it and in our small way help to create it.” Then, too, when we talk of Jesus, that talk will mean what it ought to mean: that to repent and turn to Jesus is to join a family who, though broken and wounded, are already celebrating new creation and struggling to see it come to birth.

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Proving the Existence of God Defending Descartes' Causal Argument

By Jessica Tong

A

staunch belief in a God is often seen as irrational. But a staunch disbelief in God is also seen as irrational. Instead, many would state that a belief in God cannot be proven definitively true or definitively false. If a belief in God is rational, it is only rational on the grounds of empirical evidence and/ or reason. Whether this judgment of the rationality of a theistic faith is justifiable, let us assume for the sake of this article that it is. Contrary to popular belief, belief in God was not always so blind and utterly removed from reason as we might assume. In 1647, René Descartes, the French philosopher, published Meditations on First Philosophy in Latin. Through this philosophical work, Descartes sought to prove by reason alone the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. Descartes was in fact prompted by rationalism, the view that truth can be derived by sheer reasoning, to disregard all sensory perceptions, lest they be illusionary. Consequently, without appealing to sensory perceptions, Descartes’ Meditations offers three rational arguments for the existence of God, the first of which is often called “the causal argument.” The premises of his argument as it stands are not irrefutable. Nevertheless, his premises allow for changes to maintain the truth of the conclusion. These changes do not modify his argument to falsely fit his conclusion. Instead, they address loopholes and offer modern day readers a way in which reason alone may lead to an understanding of God’s existence.

Descartes’ causal argument relies on two major premises that supposedly lead to his conclusion.

Premise 1: “The objective reality of any of our ideas requires a cause which contains the very same reality, not merely objectively but formally or eminently.”i In other words, the reality of any representative idea in the intellect must have been caused by something that exists outside of the intellect, which either contains the same amount of reality as the idea or even more.ii

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Premise 2: “We have an idea of God and the objective reality of [our idea of God] is not contained in us either formally or eminently.”iii Put simply, the reality that our idea of God represents cannot be one conjured by us, nor by our own thoughts. Moreover, nothing could formally or eminently possess the attributes contained objectively in the idea without being God. For something to possess the attributes of our idea of God formally would be for something to actually, or perhaps already, possess those attributes. For something to possess the attributes of God eminently would be for something to be capable of possessing those attributes, without necessarily already possessing those attributes.

Therefore, since all ideas require a cause, and the cause for the idea of God exists outside of us, only God himself could contain the reality that the idea of God represents.

Conclusion: God exists.

Is it that simple? No. Under critical analysis, this progression of logic fails to prove God’s existence for two reasons. Firstly, according to Descartes, a perception is only clear if it is “present and accessible to the attentive mind,” and distinct if “it is so sharply separated from all other perceptions that it contains within itself only what is clear.”iv If some ideas, which are not clear and distinct by Descartes’ standards, do not require causes, Premise 1) no longer holds true.

This is because the idea of God would not need to be caused by God himself. Instead, the idea of a divine being, being perhaps unclear and undistinct, would be caused by something other than that being itself.

Secondly, if we ourselves, as substances, can eminently cause all ideas, as long as these ideas are made up of the qualities found in substances, Premise 2) is also false. After all, it might be possible that the ideas we have of God and all other things are simply creative combinations of mental or physical qualities that we have found in ourselves, such as intelligence, shape,

Mandelbrot Set by Maloq, 2009

Portrait of René Descartes by Frans Hals, c. 1649

extension, etc. Accordingly, we could have caused the idea of God, as opposed to God himself. To save Descartes’ argument from the errors of his two major premises, both Premise 1) and Premise 2) must be modified without changing Descartes’ intended argument.

Furthermore, an additional premise, implicit in Descartes’ original argument, must precede his second. Fortunately, these changes are not only essential but also justifiable. With these changes, Descartes’ argument logically proves that God exists.

Two assumptions underline Premise 1). Prior to Descartes’ main claim that any objective reality is an effect of a formal or eminent reality, he asserts that the “mode of being by which a thing exists objectively <representatively> in the intellect by way of an idea…is certainly not nothing.”v By the natural light (of reason and/or of God), Descartes also assumes that anything that exists, even if only as an idea, cannot come from nothing.vi Descartes refutes this second assumption, however, by offering

separated from all other perceptions. Thus, the validity of the new Premise 2) now rests on whether or not the idea of God is indeed clear and distinct.

Unfortunately, the two ways in which Descartes defends his idea of God as “clear and distinct” are unsatisfactory. He first claims to “clearly understand that there is more reality in an infinite substance than in a finite one” in order to negate the possibility that the idea of God “represents something unreal.”xi In other words, an infinitely large house has more reality for Descartes than the finitely large house you and I may live in. For this claim to be valid, reality must be quantifiable, rather than absolute. Indeed, Descartes has been said to fall in the tradition of accepting the idea of degrees of reality; while humans are real, God and angels of greater perfection are more real.xii At the outset, however, this appears unreasonable; an object, once real, cannot be made more or less real. The only way reality can be quantified is if an infinitely large house contains more reality by consisting of more real materials, like bricks and tiles, and taking up more real space. Even if Descartes intended this interpretation of reality, more reality in the idea of God does not in fact guarantee a clearer and more distinct idea. After all, he found his idea of cold to lack clarity or accessibility as a mere material falsity, in spite of the “real and positive” quality of his idea.xiii Therefore, the reality of the idea

Descartes has been said to fall in the tradition of accepting the idea of degrees of reality; while humans are real, God and angels of greater perfection are more real. the idea of cold as an example of an objective reality that represents a “non-thing,” namely the absence of heat.vii Even though his mind represents the idea of cold as “something real and positive,” the cold is only a material falsity and can only “arise from nothing.”viii If the idea of cold is materially false, so could the idea of God be materially false and not require a cause. If the idea of God has no real cause, Descartes’ Premise 2)— that the cause of the objective reality of his idea of God is not found in us—would no longer be meaningful, since the cause would not exist.

Therefore, Premise 1) can reclaim its truth if it instead states, “the objective reality of any of our ideas [that are clear and distinct] requires a cause …,” for unlike the ideas of heat and cold, “[the idea of God] is utterly clear and distinct.”ix This modified Premise 1), however, can only apply to the idea of God in Premise 2) if Premise 2) is also modified as follows: “we have a [clear and distinct] idea of God…”x Remember that Descartes defines a perception as clear if it is present and accessible, and distinct if it can be sharply

of God has little to do with its clarity and distinctness.

Descartes again unsuccessfully defends his idea of God as clear and distinct, when asserting that “it is enough that I understand the infinite, and that I judge that all the attributes which I clearly perceive and know to imply some perfection—and perhaps countless others of which I am ignorant—are present in God either formally or eminently to make the idea … of God … clear and distinct.”xiv If, however, certain attributes of God are not and can never be accessible to him by his own definition of clear perception, he can never have a clear idea of God.xv He claims he can “understand the infinite,” and therefore access the infinite without truly grasping it, as one can touch a mountain without embracing it.xvi This mountain analogy does not suffice here, though.xvii A mountain cannot be embraced due to its sheer size, like God’s infinite nature. The sides of the mountains, however, are still within reach to a human being, while all of God’s attributes are infinite and should be inaccessible to Descartes, a finite being. Descartes believes he

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understands God’s infiniteness by acknowledging that some attributes of God are inaccessible. This is precisely what prevents him from having a “clear” understanding of the idea of God, however. Since his “perception…cannot be distinct without being clear,” Descartes’ idea of God, according to his own defense, is neither clear nor distinct.xviii Based on both of Descartes’ defenses, the modified Premise 2) appears unjustifiable. Nevertheless, the idea of God cannot be so easily deemed inaccessible and unclear because it is a mere absence. While the absence of heat can only lead to cold, an absence of finiteness can be construed in two ways—nothingness or infiniteness. The infinite nature of God is certainly not equal to nothingness. Consequently, unlike the idea of cold, the idea of God cannot be a total absence. On the other hand, God’s infinite nature cannot simply be an inaccessible, unclear absence of boundaries. Just as the nature of heat consists of more energy and activity in atoms than the nature of cold, the nature of infiniteness, within our own space-time continuum, would consist of more energy and activity than anything finite. For example, drawing a finite line requires one to actively stop drawing and create an absence of line that an infinite line would not have.

Therefore, the idea of God cannot be a mere absence, like the idea of cold, and in that sense can indeed be accessible to the attentive mind.

supremely intelligent, supremely powerful, and which created both myself and everything … that exists,” there cannot possibly be another perception that overlaps with this one.xix If there is another idea of a being that shares God’s supreme power, this being would naturally encompass the power of the first idea of God, making the first idea of God no longer supremely powerful. Similarly, if another being could have “created both myself and everything … that exists,” the original idea of God could not also have created everything. Therefore, as long as the idea of God is clear, by definition, it is also distinct from all other perceptions.

Consequently, the idea of God is clear and distinct, justifying the modified Premise 2) that “we have a [clear and distinct] idea of God.” It now follows from the modified Premise 1) and Premise 2) that all clear and distinct ideas require a formal and eminent cause, that we have a clear and distinct idea of God, and that the idea of God, therefore, does require a formal or eminent cause. Since Premise 2), that “the objective reality of [our idea of God] is not contained in us

Handwritten Letter by Descartes, December 1638

The infinite nature of God is certainly not equal to nothingness.

Consequently, unlike the idea of cold, the idea of God cannot be a total absence.

Likewise, although Descartes’ incomplete understanding of God may prove that God’s infinite nature is inherently inaccessible to finite beings like ourselves and therefore unclear, the idea of God’s infinite nature must be at least somewhat accessible to Descartes if the idea is conceivable at all. Of course, this might imply that every idea, even the idea of cold, must be conceived and accessed by us and is therefore clear. Descartes’ idea of cold was deemed unclear by Descartes himself, however, only because it represented an absence. Since we can be sure that the idea of God cannot simply be an absence of boundaries, Descartes’ idea of cold is accessible, because it is conceivable; his idea of cold is not an idea of an absence, which would be impossible to be clear.

Of course, we cannot modify Premise 2) to be “we have a [clear and distinct] idea of God,” unless this modified Premise 2) is in fact true. Thus, we still need to prove that the idea of God is distinct. By the definition of God as “infinite, <eternal, immutable,> independent,

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either formally or eminently,” assumes that a cause for Descartes’ idea of God does exist, both modifications to his premises necessarily fix the initial loophole in Premise 1) to maintain the truth of this assumption.

Although this assumption of Premise 2) is now justified, like the original Premise 1), Premise 2) still falls short in its second assumption, namely that some causes of ideas cannot originate in ourselves. Descartes suggests that this key assumption in Premise 2) is false, because although we are thinking substances and therefore do not possess qualities of corporeal beings like “extension, shape, position, and movements,” because we ourselves are substances, we are able to cause the elements or qualities of corporeal beings.xx In other words, because Descartes himself is a substance, just as he does not need to possess “the clear and distinct elements in my ideas of corporeal things” in order to be their eminent causes, he may also not need to possess the clear and distinct elements of his idea of God to be its eminent cause, provided that the elements of God

are elements of substance, duration, or number that can arise from himself.xxi Since Descartes explicitly calls God a substance, the objective reality of the idea of God can easily be a mere effect of thought. Therefore, Premise 2)’s claim that “the objective reality of [our idea of God] is not contained in us either formally or eminently” cannot be true. Instead, Descartes would only be able to conclude that the objective reality of his idea of God can be contained in us. Therefore, God cannot exist.

Fortunately, the loophole in Descartes’ second assumption is inconsistent with our true thinking capacity, and his Premise 2) can still be true and clarified by an additional preceding premise. Descartes ignores the fact that if we possess the potential to produce all elements of substances without possessing them formally, we should be able to create new shapes, colors, and forms of movement at any moment at will. Despite this, when I try to conjure in my mind other elements and modes of substance not already mentioned, I fail to be able to do so. This suggests that shapes, colors, duration, and other corporeal do indeed exist outside of us. Therefore, a preceding premise, that we ourselves cannot be the formal or eminent causes of all objective reality, is not only true, but also necessary to explicitly close the loophole in Premise 2).

Now, according to the two modifications of the first and second premises, the clear and distinct idea of God requires a cause with the same reality as the idea, either formally or eminently. According to the added preceding premise to Premise 2), because we, thinking substances, cannot be the formal or eminent causes of all objective reality, it is necessary for the cause of the idea of God to not be found in us. Given that it is possible and evident that the cause of the idea of God is not contained in us, the cause of the idea of God must be contained outside of us, as God himself.

Descartes’ original premises could not logically lead to his conclusion for two reasons. First, he allowed for the possibility that the idea of God, like the idea of cold, did not need a cause at all. Second, he suggested that all ideas, including the idea of God, could in fact be caused by ourselves. These loopholes require us to modify both premises and supply an additional preceding premise to the second, and this modified argument allows us to make the logical inference that Descartes originally wanted to make. These changes facilitate a sturdier and more truthful argument, proving that God exists by Descartes’ causal argument.

Descartes’ work offers an enlightening perspective on the commonly spouted claim that Christianity is a game of blindness. Common modern beliefs about religion assume that we cannot by reason alone prove that God exists nor that he does not exist. Instead,

faith, a separate mode of thought altogether, must be applied to conclusions about God that reason alone cannot bring about. However, Descartes’ reliance on and confidence in human reason radically opposes modern assumptions about reason and faith. Instead, he esteems reason so much that he argues that reason is not just compatible with faith. He in fact seeks to use reason alone to argue for and justify faith in God. While Descartes’ original argument may not be bulletproof, it is nonetheless redeemable. Therefore, neither his argument nor his conclusion should be immediately rejected. Instead, we ought to reconsider the vital, and perhaps essential, role of rational thinking in the pursuit of truth about God’s existence.

René Descartes, Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 2, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 118. ii.

Descartes, Volume 2, 28-29. iii.

Descartes, Volume 2, 118. iv.

René Descartes, Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 1, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 208. v.

Descartes, Volume 2, 29. vi.

Descartes, Volume 2, 29. vii.

Descartes, Volume 2, 30. viii.

Descartes, Volume 2, 30. ix.

Descartes, Volume 2, 31, 118. x.

Descartes, Volume 2, 118. xi.

Descartes, Volume 2, 31. xii.

Special thanks to Samuel Levey for his helpful comments. xiii.

Descartes, Volume 2, 30. xiv.

Descartes, Volume 2, 32. xv.

Descartes, Volume 1, 208. xvi.

Descartes, Volume 2, 32. xvii.

Descartes, Volume 2, 32. xviii.

Descartes, Volume 1, 208. xix.

Descartes, Volume 2, 31. xx.

Descartes, Volume 2, 31. xxi.

Descartes, Volume 2, 30. i.

Jessica Tong ’17 is from Sydney, Australia. She is a Philosophy major and a Government minor.

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 11

Self, Society, and the

Trinitarian Posture

By Amanda Wang

Statue of Liberty by Will Hedington, 2006

12 â&#x20AC;˘ The Dartmouth Apologia â&#x20AC;˘ Fall 2016 ]

D

uring his presidential inauguration, President-elect John F. Kennedy called upon the nation to act according to this principle: “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.”i Fifty years later, Kennedy’s call for a more collaborative society appears to have been rendered moot by another zeitgeist, best encapsulated by Oprah Winfrey’s call to “only make decisions that support your self-image, self-esteem, and self-worth.”ii These contrasting messages represent two opposing ideologies: collectivism and individualism.

The polarization between the two often underlies the difference between political parties, government systems, and world cultures. But more fundamentally, collectivists and individualists seek to assert what is the best way to live. They can only do so, however, by assuming vastly different understandings of human nature.

There is no doubt that collectivism and individualism are portrayed as diametrically opposed, and many people claim to adhere to either individualist or collectivist values. In reality, most people tend to live as if they believed in an inconsistent amalgam of the two ideologies. For example, the collectivist may claim to uphold the community over his own well-being, but may hesitate when asked to give away all his wealth to the poor. Similarly, the individualist may support the idea of personal freedom, while in practice he may force his own opinions on those he disagrees with.

This detachment between theory and practice presents an interesting problem: if collectivism and

individualism claim that their message is grounded in a correct understanding of human nature, why is it so difficult to adhere consistently to these labels? The answer is simple: both outlooks fail to acknowledge the complexity of human experience. Collectivism fails to recognize humanity’s selfish tendencies, while individualism fails to capture the human need for social interaction and collaboration. Christianity, on the other hand, rejects the assumption that collectivism and individualism are in conflict. The Christian understanding of human nature instead presents a picture that merges collectivism and individualism into one coherent whole. People who live in accordance to this Christian understanding are rewarded with the personal satisfaction that their desires can now be resolved in a coherent framework that effectively explains why these desires are present and what their ultimate purpose is.

Before undertaking this analysis, it is important to clearly define collectivism and individualism. For the purposes of this article, these ideologies will be defined as following: Collectivism: a set of political, social, and cultural beliefs that emphasizes the moral worth of the community.

Individualism: a set of political, social, and cultural beliefs that emphasizes the moral worth of the individual.

The collectivist ideology calls individuals to orient their duties toward the community over self-centered

Inaugural Address of John F. Kennedy by Donald Mingfield, 1961

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 13

Both the collectivist and individualist ideologies, however, fail to account for fundamental aspects of human nature, and thus they both fall short of providing a practical framework for living. personal fulfillment. The end goal of the collectivist is the good of the community or group unit. On the other hand, individualism encourages individuals to define their own goals and pursue their own happiness, preferences, and rights, valuing individual satisfaction over social norms and obligations. For the individualist, the ultimate end goal is self-actualization—maximizing one’s own potential.

Both ideologies arose to provide a framework for relating the individual to the state. One of the more prominent portraits of collectivism came from Plato, who believed in the organic theory of the state. This theory proposed that the state is a separate and distinct body from the individuals that make up the state, and that this state is the unit of ultimate value.iii He advocated that individuals have a political obligation to prioritize the goals of the state over individual happiness. 1,500 years later, Jean-Jacques Rousseau built on Plato’s political theory by calling this political obligation an obligation to submit to the general will and noted that individuals should submit their own will to the will of the collective.iv Underpinning both of these philosophers’ works is a common understanding of mankind’s capacity and responsibility to work together for the good of the whole. Because of its emphasis on unity, the collectivist mindset is associated with stronger societal and family ties. It is therefore not surprising that lower rates of suicide, divorce, homicide, and drug abuse are reported among collectivist communities and cultures.v

In contrast, modern individualism rose to prominence in response to the great injustices committed by communist, fascist, and socialist governments in the mid-20th century. The West grew disillusioned with the idea that societies could achieve prosperity, harmony, and unity through a collectivist approach. Advocates of individualism instead aligned themselves with the viewpoints of political philosophers like John Locke. Locke championed the concept of natural rights—the inherent rights to life, liberty, and property that each individual possesses.

He argued that individuals have the ability to consent to (or willingly join) a society but are not intrinsically obligated to society. Only by consenting to join a political society do they willingly take on obligations beyond themselves. He also believed that humans were fundamentally rational creatures, with each person possessesing the faculties to pursue knowledge and understanding.vi In modern American culture, these ideals are often defined as calls for non-judgment and tolerance, underpinned by the belief that each person has the right to define their own values and morality, and that people should not impose their own beliefs on anyone. The individualist emphasis on “creativity, [...] mastery, and achievement” is plausible and attractive, which is why those with individualistic mindsets highly value personal self-esteem and freedom.vii Both the collectivist and individualist ideologies, however, fail to account for fundamental aspects of human nature; and thus they both fall short of (left) Portrait of JeanJacques Rousseau by Maurice Quentin de La Tour, 18th century (right) Portrait of John Locke by Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1697

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providing a practical framework for living. Although collectivism emphasizes the benefits of humans in groups, it assumes that individuals ought to submit their own desires for the good of the group, which might be overly idealistic. Even Rousseau acknowledged that most societies would fail to have the collectivist political organization he proposed if individuals “refuse[d] to accept the restrictions on their own conduct which the collective interest requires.”viii It is clear from the disunity present within all states that individuals are never fully able to give up their individual desires over the collective’s. The selfish acts of government officials, business moguls, and ordinary citizens saturate our news cycle every day. However, there is also a practical concern to collectivism: because the needs of the individual are viewed as less important than the group’s as a whole, the unique needs and identities of individuals may be ignored. This may undermine self-esteem, which explains why the collectivist mindset is correlated with lower individual happiness levels as people feel the “burdens of doing one’s duty and the suppression of strivings toward selfactualization.”ix Ironically, the most dramatic expressions of collectivism throughout history have limited the social aspect of human nature. Because collectivism is vague about what constitutes a group, some collectivist

understanding of human nature. Humans are social creatures and cannot operate completely outside the influence of society and those around them. The social contexts of human life demand that individual desires inevitably conflict. In some situations an individualist mindset may motivate people to pursue their own ends in opposition to the wants and needs of others.

However, the social nature of humans suggests that we need relationships, and being in a functional relationship ultimately calls for the sacrifice of at least some individual desires for the sake of other people.

The effects of these practices may be seen in the higher divorce rates in more individualistic cultures, or the loneliness and poor social support that individualistic people are associated with.xii Psychologist Harry Triandis noted how an individualist mindset can “leave people vulnerable to feelings of alienation and narcissistic self-absorption and tempts them to pursue narrow self-interest.”xiii These psychological symptoms show that individualism fails to acknowledge individual interdependence and prevents us from fulfilling our need for caring, mutually beneficial relationships.

Viewing either individual happiness or the interests of a collective as an ultimate goal in a secular context is bound to fail. Most people operate under a blend of the two, choosing an arbitrary balance between the self and others, falling on a perceived spectrum between

In the Christian framework, the integration between the individual and the collective is no surprise—it reflects God’s nature, expressed as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. societies may foster exclusion and discrimination by creating distinctions between those inside the group and those outside the group. While the group itself contains strong bonds, it may inadvertently breed distrust against outside groups.x In a way, this is also a form of selfishness, because it limits one’s perceived group to a specific circle of people with whom the individual has more in common and looks only to the interests of that particular group. Thus, collectivism may express itself as nationalism, racism, or classism.

Nazism is a striking example of how the collectivist mindset can be twisted in a way that leads to great atrocities. Nazism sought to unite Germans into a strong collective after World War I humiliated the country.xi However, the distinction between in-groups and out-groups led to one of the most tragic injustices that the world has known. Nazism serves as a stark reminder of how inherently unstable and vulnerable a collectivist society can be if it does not recognize the reality of human selfishness.

Individualism similarly fails to provide a full

full individualism and full collectivism. However, the fullness of human nature is not addressed when the two are seen as a dichotomy, or in separate spheres of influence. Rather, a cohesive picture of human nature is provided in the Christian worldview, which unifies the individual and the collective. In the Christian framework, the integration of the individual and the collective is no surprise—it reflects God’s nature, expressed as the Christian doctrine of the Trinity. While the full mystery of the Trinity cannot be adequately expressed in this article, Christianity claims that three persons—God the Father, the Son (Christ), and the Holy Spirit exist as one God. These three persons have existed for all time in perfect harmony and express a perfect relationship of love. Each person perfectly submits and serves the others and is in turn glorified and loved by the others in a perfect give-and-take that has no full analogy on earth. This is called perichoresis, or a “dance of God.”xiv This dance, where the individual is loved personally and submits to others fully, is the relationship that

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 15

Christians are called to participate in. And this life, where Christians seek out God’s agenda with love and service towards others, is only possible due to Christ’s sacrificial love. In other words, self-actualization is a gift of grace made possible through God’s love, which in turn empowers the individual to then turn that love outwards and show it to others. Each person in the Trinity remains unique and distinct while fully loving the other persons of the Trinity. Similarly, Christianity in practice exalts the individual and motivates individuals to use their own individual gifts for the collective while freeing people from futile self-centered strivings and from the pressure of fitting into society.

The Christian worldview reframes the relationship between the self and the collective with greater clarity, balance, and joy by placing the triune God—not the self or the group—at the center of one’s life­. With this God at the center, Christianity provides a worldview in which the core of reality is a relationship of love.

mindset. A helpful metaphor to illustrate this freedom is the image of the church as the body of Christ.

Just as our bodies are made up of individual parts, each of which has its own unique purpose, the body of Christ consists of the individuals that make up the church, with each serving his or her God-given purpose. Furthermore, this purpose extends beyond the church. Christians are called to love and serve all people, regardless of whether they belong to the same socioeconomic, ethnic, or religious background. In fact, Christianity spread because of the indiscriminate charity and kindness of the early church. Early Christians were generous with their money, took in orphans, and cared for the sick.

Most importantly, Christianity acknowledges the reason for the ultimate failure of secular collectivism: the sinful and selfish nature of man. Christianity recognizes that people have a natural tendency to seek their own desires and fall short of the communitarian

Christianity lends itself to an inclusive community because all humans have worth and value bestowed upon them by being made in the image of God. Because of the sacrifice of God on man’s behalf, believers are called to give up their own selfish desires to serve one another, in imitation of Christ, fulfilling the human need for interpersonal relationship and dependence. For instance, Paul asked the church in Philippi to imitate Christ, who “emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.”xv At first glance, this affirms the collectivist teaching of prioritizing the group goals over individual needs.

Some assume that Christianity teaches self-denial and stoicism, an ascetic way of giving up individual needs, goals, and desires in order to serve others.

However, Christian collectivism does not advocate ascetic self-denial for the good of the whole, or that the interests of the group always take precedence over the needs of the individual. B. B. Warfield, an apologist and seminary professor, remarked that Christian collectivism calls us “not to unselfing ourselves, but to unselfishing ourselves,” which is a stark contrast to the homogenizing nature of collectivism.xvi By living for service to God and others, Christians do not give up their individual desires, needs, and personalities, but rather use the attributes of their individual God-given personalities to best serve others.

This frees us from the spiral of self-serving narcissism commonly caused by an individualist

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standards set by society. After all, any society made up of flawed individuals is bound to have conflict and cultivate unhealthy mentalities that harm human flourishing. Christianity lends itself to an inclusive community because all humans have worth and value bestowed upon them by being made in the image of God; and because, first and foremost, God has humbled himself to us.

With that in mind, Christianity also affirms the reality and intrinsic value of the individual because everyone is made in the image of God. For instance, King David in his Psalms describes himself as one who is “fearfully and wonderfully made” by God.xvii Furthermore, the fact that each person is intrinsically valuable means that God cares intimately about each person. God, in his infinite love for his creation, calls individuals to a personal relationship with him.

And there is no better example of this call than the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Christian Scripture teaches that God took the form of a human, sacrificing himself through crucifixion in order to redeem a fallen humanity and reconcile mankind to a relationship with himself. This sacrifice is the epitome of love and encapsulates God’s desire for human salvation.

Like its posture towards collectivism, Christianity rejects individualism’s two fundamental assumptions: that the ultimate goal of life is to define one’s own happiness, and that this goal is clearly discernable.

Christianity is clear that all humans have fallen short

perspective on the self and the group uniquely reconciles individualism and collectivism, offers a new path that makes self-sacrificial love possible, and aligns humans with the divine nature best understood by the Trinity.

Depiction of the Trinity at Holy Trinity Church Leicester

by PJ Parkinson, 2011

“Inaugural Address,” John F. Kennedy Presidential Library & Museum, 20 January 1961, accessed 23 August 2016, <https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/ Research-Aids/Ready-Reference/JFK-Quotations/ Inaugural-Address.aspx>. ii.

“Oprah Winfrey Quotes,” Goodreads, accessed 1 September 2016, <https://www.goodreads.com/ author/quotes/3518.Oprah_Winfrey?page=2>. iii.

“Plato’s Political Philosophy: Collectivism and the Philosopher-King,” Ayn Rand Institute, accessed 22 July 2016, <https://campus.aynrand.org/campus/ globals/transcripts/platos-political-philosophycollectivism-and-the-philosopher-king>. iv.

Christopher Bertram, “Jean Jacques Rousseau,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 21 December 2012, <http://plato.stanford. edu/entries/rousseau/#IdeGenWil>. v.

Harry C. Triandis, Individualism & Collectivism (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995), 175. vi.

Alex Tuckness, “Locke's Political Philosophy,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 21 March 2016, <http://plato.stanford.edu/ entries/locke-political/>; William Uzgalis, “John Locke,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed.

Edward N. Zalta, 21 March 2016, <http://plato. stanford.edu/entries/locke/>. vii.

Triandis, 178-179. viii.

Bertram, 3.2. ix.

Triandis, 175. x.

Triandis, 178. xi.

“Nazi Germany,” History Channel, accessed 15 August 2016, <http://www.history.co.uk/studytopics/history-of-ww2/nazi-germany>. xii.

Triandis, 179. xiii.

Triandis, 180. xiv.

Timothy Keller, Reason for God (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008), 224. xv.

Philippians 2:7-8 (ESV). xvi.

B. B. Warfield, “Imitating the Incarnation,” The Gospel Coalition, 22 July 2016, accessed 17 July 2016, <https://blogs.thegospelcoalition.org/ justintaylor/page/files/2010/09/Warfield-Imitatingthe-Incarnation2.pdf>. xvii.

Psalm 139:1-3, 13 (ESV). i.

of God’s perfection. Because of human imperfection, there is no way to find deep and lasting joy by chasing after self-motivated desires. The ever-changing dynamic of human desire precludes it from being a reliable end goal of life.

Instead, Christianity points to something greater than mankind: a God that is infinite, unchanging, and good. True joy and fulfillment are offered through grace, because man has been lifted up through Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Thus, real achievement is bestowed by God’s sacrifice rather than through merit.

The individual, while intrinsically valuable, is not free to choose subjective values or moral codes because God replaces the selfish nature as the center of the human life. Counterintuitively, this actually liberates the self since it is no longer dominated by an imperfect human will. The burden of trying to formulate a framework for merit and worth is lifted because value is given by God through grace.

Without Christ, human nature prevents us from achieving satisfaction and happiness by seeking the interests of the group or the self. In many ways, it is a classic example of cognitive dissonance—we yearn for sacrificial communities but are unwilling to sacrifice so that those communities can emerge. Without the proper framework for understanding the relationship between the self and the collective, a secular individual may find it difficult to find lasting joy from selfish or communitarian pursuits.

Christianity offers a framework whereby each individual is united to Christ and his body, joining a diverse and unified community. Christians serve a God who is unchanging and faithful, anchoring joy in something greater than themselves. Christ empowers the believer with the strength and resilience to humbly serve others and grants the believer mercy during periods of failure. In doing so, the Christian

Amanda Wang ’18 is from Dallas, Texas. She is majoring in Geography modified with Economics.

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 17

Discerning Fact from Fiction

Christianity’s Middle Eastern Heritage

By Sharidan Russell

I

once owned a book series called Alice in Bibleland. It was a water-color illustrated set of 28 Bible stories, and starred a young blond girl named Alice who would sit in her window nook and read her magical Bible.i After opening the Bible, she would journey to the ancient, pastoral Bible-land. She met Jesus, Jonah, and baby Moses. Every time I opened the series as a little girl, my imagination was enlivened by a blond-haired Jesus walking through Jerusalem.

Alongside Alice, I was transported into a fairy tale, witnessing ancient events in a land far away.

As for the real Bible-land, I—like many children— knew very little. As a Christian living in the post-911 era, I had a two-dimensional understanding of the true Holy Land. I conflated modern Israel with the biblical, imagined Israel I knew from my stories.

My view of the Arab world was even more distorted, with familiar images of scorching deserts inhabited by barbaric nomads and zealots of a hostile, anti-Western, and anti-Christian religion. I did not know that there

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A cross in the sky of Bethlehem by Lux Moundi, 2012

were Christians living in the Middle East, and was hardly aware that it was the setting of my cherished Bible stories.

I eventually visited the real Bible-land—the Palestinian West Bank and the modern state of Israel. My trips to the Holy Land have enriched my Christian experience in many ways, but it has more importantly replaced my imagined Bible-land images with the truth. By uncovering the true Middle East, I have noticed a complex diversity that many in the West are blind to. In Bethlehem, Sunday morning church is followed by a bustling market where the Christian and Muslim communities mix. Cathedrals that commemorate important Christian sites are full of pilgrims, some of which are tended by Muslims.

For instance, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, commemorating Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, is opened and closed each day by two Muslim families who live in Jerusalem.

Most importantly, however, going to the Holy

The Jesus story should be grounded in the Palestinian region, which encompasses modern Israel and the Palestinian territories, the strip of land stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. Land helped me better understand the story of Christ, thereby strengthening my own spiritual connection to it. My trip led me to adopt two conclusions. First, the Western-Christian imagination has in many ways hijacked the Jesus story, and changed it into a distinctly Western narrative that deviates from the history and truth of the real biblical setting. Second, the geopolitics and realities of the Middle East, then and now, are crucial to grounding the Jesus story.

As a devoted Lutheran who grew up in the West, I do not deny the great contributions Western theologians have made to Christian doctrine. I also do not regret growing up with Western portrayals of Jesus.

It was a portrayal that I, and many of my Christian peers, could relate to, and was especially useful for understanding biblical concepts at a young age. At the same time, the danger of this Westernization comes when imaginations and preferences downplay the role of the Middle East within Christian history. A mature understanding of Christianity and its scriptures must have a Middle Eastern reality in mind. The Bible was, after all, written about and by Middle Eastern people.

More specifically, the Jesus story should be grounded in the Palestinian region, which encompasses modern Israel and the Palestinian territories, the strip of land stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.ii In order to understand Christianity as a tradition rooted in the Middle East, there must be some recognition of the ways in which Western imaginations have negatively distorted that heritage.

Two examples come to mind. The first is often referred to as “the tale of two tombs.” Today in East Jerusalem, two places claim to be Christ’s tomb.

The first is the Church of the Holy Sepulchre—a large Orthodox basilica that dates back 1,800 years and sits just inside Jerusalem’s old city walls.

It is one of three churches Queen Helena—the mother of Emperor Constantine—had built in the Holy Land to commemorate the ascension, resurrection, and birth of Christ.iii It stands over the ancient historical site where the Romans crucified criminals—referred to as Golgotha, or “The Place of the Skull,” in Scripture.

Inside the building is a covered tomb,

which dates to the time of Christ and was new enough to fit the scriptural description of the tombs Joseph of Arimathea would have lent to Jesus.iv The research Queen Helena did for the early Christian church has stood as legitimate for centuries, and thousands of pilgrims visit the church each day.

However, an equally popular Christian tourist site in Israel is a place known as the Garden Tomb, which was discovered in the late 1800s during Protestant mission work in Palestine. It was identified by a military hero of the era, General Charles Gordon, as the true Golgotha.v The Garden Tomb is peaceful and quaint, exactly what one might imagine Joseph of Arimathea’s garden looked like on Easter morning. The site simply does not, however, have the archaeological legitimacy to back up these claims. Gabriel Barklay, writing for the Biblical Archaeology Review, concluded that Jesus was not buried at the Garden Tomb, since the burial cave “was first hewn in Iron Age II…[and] was not again used for burial purposes until the Byzantine period.”vi Unfortunately, this evidence may not be enough to sway pilgrims. While reflecting on the Garden Tomb, anthropologist Glenn Bowman admits that “whether or not [pilgrims] are convinced that the Garden Tomb is the literal site...pilgrims assert that ‘it is easier to imagine Jesus here than inside that dark pile of stones they call the Holy Sepulchre.’”vii The very existence of this tomb, then, is a disregard for the respected history of the Sepulchre church in favor of Western-Christian

The Garden Tomb – East Jerusalem by Ilana Shkolnik, 2012

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 19

imagination. It crosses the boundary between using an image for the sake of relating Christ to a different culture and erasing the truth of Christ’s own culture and history altogether.

Another egregious example of Western imagination overtaking the truth of history is in the popularized image of Jesus as white, with long flowing brown hair and beard. There is a legitimate argument that Jesus’ ethnicity does not matter, since he has been depicted by artists as other ethnicities, such as Asian, Latino, and African. This is a good way to make Jesus relatable to all believers. At the same time, the fact that the white Jesus is assumed and rigorously defended in popular Western culture reveals the extent to which this cultural practice has distorted Christ. When a forensic scientist used skulls from the Palestine of Jesus’ time to recreate his face, the outcome was something few Western Christians are likely to recognize as Jesus Christ.viii As Palestinian theologian Mitri Raheb noted in the introduction to his book Faith in the Face of Empire, “Jesus was a Middle Eastern Palestinian Jew. If he were to travel through Western countries today, he would be ‘randomly’ pulled aside and his person and papers would be checked.”ix While the white Jesus started as an innocent cultural practice, it soon became entangled with a popular style of thought in the West called “orientalism.”

One of Edward Said’s definitions of orientalism is a school of thought “based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction between ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Occident.’”x Essentially, those in the Middle East and the Far East are irreconcilably different from those in the West. They do not think the same way—a concept that often leads to harmful stereotypes. The stereotype of barbaric, violent Arabs is one of them.

From the beginnings of orientalism, the West has been pitted in an ideological battle against the East, and part of this was an ideological battle between Christianity and Islam. In earlier periods, Christian scholars, such as Dante, felt the need to delegitimize Mohammed and his followers, and the white Jesus became a symbol that stood in defiance to Mohammed.xi To those European Christians, Jesus is painted to look like them because he is like them. Mohammed is the East’s poor attempt at recreating what they had already achieved with Jesus.

Today, that practice is seen through offensive cartoons and the vilification of Arabs in Hollywood. It is blind to the fact that, were Jesus and Mohammed to walk the earth together today, both of them would be treated equally by the TSA. Throughout the 19th century, certain parts of Western-Christian orientalism expanded to include Judaism, particularly as the state of Israel was created.

Despite Christianity’s complicated relationship

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The Baptism of Christ by Leonardo da Vinci, 1475

with Judaism and anti-Semitism, modern Western Christianity has shown a remarkable degree of solidarity with the Jewish tradition. The popularization of the phrase “Judeo-Christian tradition” shows the extent of this olive branch, and implies that there is an Abrahamic tradition which binds Jews and Christians together. The Judeo-Christian construct is an example of what Mitri Raheb identifies as “imperial theology,” the concept that a certain people has a divine right to a particular land.xii It parallels manifest destiny, and it is not exclusive to one culture or religion. It has especially existed in historic Palestine through centuries of occupation, from the Byzantines to the Ottoman Empire.

Modern Jewish and Christian Zionism is only the latest of these theories that apply manifest destiny to Israel, and is used “implicitly against the Palestinian people and within the context of the clash of civilization against Islam.”xiii Thus, for the sake of justifying Zionism, Arabs have become scapegoats.

Islam is synonymous with terrorism while Israel is lauded as America’s greatest ally in the Middle East.

Each year, Christian Zionists from Europe, the United States, and Asia gather in Jerusalem for the Tabernacle March; an annual parade to support the state of Israel in its struggle to complete biblical prophecy.xiv The sect

By enforcing the narrative that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a Jewish-Muslim conflict, the West inadvertently adds to the cultural animosity against Muslims and ignores the complex relationship between politics and religion in the conflict. of Christianity that feeds off this imperial theology believes that the Jewish people have a divine right to the Holy Land regardless of the cost. Unfortunately, this popular movement is harmful to Christianity in the Middle East today, ignores the history of the Middle East, and finds little grounding in Scripture.

Christian Zionism is steadfast in a literal interpretation of the Bible, and often cites Genesis 15:18 and 17:8 to support their beliefs: “To your descendants I give this land…the whole land of Canaan, where you are now an alien, I will give as an everlasting possession to you and your descendants after you; and I will be their God.” Many Christian Zionists use this verse to show that the future borders of Israel must spread to the land of Canaan. They also advocate the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple on Temple Mount, and therefore the destruction of the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa Mosque which have stood as Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem since 690.

This is, they believe, pre-ordained by God and excuses any action against Arabs—Christians included— performed by Israel.xv Because modern adherents to imperial theology believe that God chose the Israeli government and endorsed all their actions, they ignore the human rights violations and terrorist attacks that are perpetrated against Christians in Palestine and Israel. In one instance, former President Jimmy Carter described a meeting he had with a Palestinian-Christian priest who suffered when the Israeli government began building a wall through his monastery’s land— effectively separating the congregation from their place of worship.xvi In another, a radical Jewish arson in 2015 burned the Church of the Multiplication on the Sea of Galilee, a typical event within a growing trend of church bombings, burnings, and vandalism over the past three years.xvii To add insult to injury, daily life for all Palestinians is unimaginably difficult to begin with.xviii By enforcing the narrative that the Israel-Palestine conflict is a Jewish-Muslim conflict, the West inadvertently adds to the cultural animosity against Muslims and ignores the complex relationship between politics and religion in the conflict.

On the contrary, reading the Jesus

story from a Middle Eastern perspective sheds this conflict in a different light. By grounding Scripture in historical reality, there are clear parallels between first century Palestine and Palestine today. Mitri Raheb describes a particular instance waiting in line to cross the modern checkpoint from Bethlehem into East Jerusalem. The Bethlehem of today is surrounded on three sides by the Israeli separation wall, which, in the Bethlehem segment as well as various others around major Palestinian cities, is thick concrete and stands 32 feet high. Palestinians wishing to worship, work, visit family, or seek medical attention in Jerusalem must pass a congested checkpoint. They must obtain the proper permits (someone with a medical emergency, for instance, will not be permitted with a business permit), and queue outside the checkpoint for hours.

It is common in this environment to hear loud cries of “Wenak ya Allah?”, meaning “Where are you, God?”xix “Where are you, God?”, Raheb goes on to write, is a question that echoes throughout the Bible—through the exiles, returns, and laments of the ancient tribes of Israel, to the Roman occupation that was active when Jesus was born. Jesus was, in fact, the answer to that question. He arrived in Bethlehem, in a situation very similar to that of Bethlehem today. When Jesus was born, ancient Palestine was under Roman occupation.

Today, the Palestinian territories are by international law under Israeli occupation, since their territory “has been seized by a state during armed conflict and is not part of that state’s sovereign territory.”xx

Dr. Mitri Raheb, Evangelical Lutheran Theologian in Bethlehem by Gied ten Berge, 2010

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 21

Of course, scrutinizing the actions of the Israeli government is not equivalent to criticizing the Jewish people as a whole. Vast historical anti-Semitism and moral injustices against the Jewish people are undeniable, which means that developing a posture of respect and maintaining Jewish right to sovereignty is still extremely important today. However, the many organizations that criticize the actions of Israeli governments throughout history suggest that the Israeli government has participated in many questionable practices. For instance, the Israeli Human Rights NGO, B’Tselem, points out that Israel’s actions on the ground indicate that it apparently considers the West Bank part of its own sovereign territory: seizing lands, using natural resources and establishing permanent communities. Israel also evades its legal obligations to safeguard and uphold the human rights of Palestinian residents.xxi

There are interesting parallels between the current Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories and the Roman occupation of ancient Palestine. The Roman Empire practiced actions that are common during political occupation; they utilized the resources of their subjects for the success of the occupation, built settlements on occupied land, levied taxes, and destroyed sacred buildings.xxii In fact, Jesus was born after his parents were forced to leave Nazareth due to a government-mandated census.xxiii It did not matter that Mary was a pregnant teenager and unfit to travel.

Furthermore, Jesus’ family did not return to Nazareth right away; they spent two years in Bethlehem and then had to flee to Egypt because the Romans tried to massacre all the young boys in the area.xxiv Similarly, many children today are born in an occupied Bethlehem, and many of those children are born into one of two refugee camps within the little town.

Because of wars and terrorism, thousands of children in the Middle East have been forced to flee their homes, just like Jesus and his family did thousands of years ago.

It was under this context of absolute pain, devastation, and hopelessness that God made himself present on earth. It was not in a triumphant glory that the ancient Jews and modern Christian Zionists imagined. It was in a setting as mundane as a shepherd’s cave, in a town occupied by a powerful military, and in a place that has been both holy and ravaged by war for most of human history. The Palestine of today is still, in many ways, the Palestine of Jesus’ time.

And this is why the West—Western Christians especially—must pay attention, because within a setting that is eerily similar to the one Jesus lived in is a reaction inspired by Christ’s own reaction. Mitri Raheb,

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An ancient church in the city of Nablus in Palestine by Heba Batta, 2015

for instance, founded the ecumenical organization called the “Diyar Consortium” in the West Bank.

“Diyar” is the Arabic plural for home, and so he has established a number of homes for Palestinians to live a flourishing life through engagement with their own culture.xxv A lesson often taught in Sunday school explains that the ancient Jews anticipated the coming Messiah for a long time. They thought he would be a big war hero, who would dismantle the oppressive Roman Empire and set up a new empire just for them. Their ideas of the Messiah blinded them to Jesus when he came. Jesus did not come to dismantle the occupiers in the way the Jews had expected; instead, he came to offer an alternative. The alternative was community in God and everlasting life; it was transcendence over occupation.xxvi Jesus posed neither a political nor a military threat to the Romans, yet his rhetoric was still dangerous enough to merit crucifixion.

The Diyar Consortium is not alone in its attempt to emulate that transcendence. A Palestinian-Christian organization called “Musalaha” (for the Arabic word meaning reconciliation) brings Israeli and Palestinian children together to facilitate friendship and understanding.xxvii While Syrian and Iraqi-Christians have struggled for survival against the Islamic State and have become refugees scattered throughout the world, they have held onto Christ. The film Victory in Christ, made by a Palestinian-Christian filmmaker, Elias Nawawieh, follows the stories of Iraqi-Christian

Christians do have the responsibility to draw a distinction between the imagined Bible-land and the true Holy Land that has housed Christianity for 2,000 years. refugees in Jordan, who recite Romans 8:31 as their stronghold through suffering. “If he is with us, who can be against us?” they cry out, knowing that God’s presence is in their midst.xxviii All of these things do not mean that Western Christians need to burn children’s books or destroy centuries of Christian artwork. However, Christians do have the responsibility to draw a distinction between the imagined Bible-land and the true Holy Land that has housed Christianity for 2,000 years. This means turning away from imperial theology, and respecting the history and reality of Christians in the Middle East today. It means rejecting violent religious radicalism as it plagues all cultures and religions, and respecting Islam as part of a shared Abrahamic tradition alongside Christianity and Judaism. Christians do not need to erase centuries of tradition rooted in the West, but must recognize the East as a foundational part of its tradition, history, and future.

Alice Joyce Davidson, Alice in Bibleland (Nashville: C.R. Gibson Co, 1987). ii.

Jimmy Carter, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2007), 55-56. iii.

Yaniv Belhassen, Kellee Caton, William P. Stewart, “The Search for Authenticity in the Pilgrim Experience,” Annals of Tourism Research 35, no. 3 (July 2008): 680. iv.

See Matthew 27: 59-60. v.

Gabriel Barkay, “The Garden Tomb: Was Jesus Buried Here?” Biblical Archaeology Review 12, no. 2 (Mar/Apr 1986): 40-53, 56-57. vi.

Barkay, 56. vii.

Glenn Bowman, “Christian ideology and the image of a holy land,” in Contesting the Sacred: The Anthropology of Christian Pilgrimage, ed. John Eade, Michael J. Sallnow (Champaign, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 117. viii.

Mike Fillon, “The Real Face of Jesus,” Popular Mechanics, 23 January 2015, <http:// www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/ a234/1282186/>. ix.

Mitri Raheb, Faith in the Face of Empire: The Bible through Palestinian Eyes (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 2014), 9. x.

Edward Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 2. xi.

Said, 68-70. xii.

Raheb, 67-69. xiii.

Raheb, 69. i.

Daniel K. Eisenbud, “Thousands of Christian Zionists flock to Jerusalem’s annual Tabernacle March,” The Jerusalem Post, 1 October 2015, <http:// www.jpost.com/Christian-News/Thousands-ofChristian-Zionists-flock-to-Jerusalems-annualTabernacle-March-419696>. xv.

Steven Sizer, “Christian Zionism: Justifying Apartheid in the Name of God,” Churchman 115, no. 2 (2001): 147-171. xvi.

Carter, 194. xvii.

Andrew Lawler, “Jewish Extremists Attacks Rattle Christians in the Holy Land,” National Geographic, 24 December 2015, <http://news. nationalgeographic.com/2015/12/151224israel-jewish-terrorism-arson-christian-churchmultiplication/>. xviii.

Peter Beaumont, “Gaza Could Soon Become Uninhabitable, a UN Report Predicts,” The Guardian, 29 August 2016, <https://www. theguardian.com/world/2015/sep/02/gazabecoming-uninhabitable-as-society-can-no-longersupport-itself-report>. xix.

Raheb, 72. xx.

“Israeli Occupation is Here to Stay,” B’Tselem The Israeli Information Center for Human Rights in the Occupied Territories, accessed 13 June 2016, <http://www.btselem.org/publications/47_year_ long_temporary_occupation/summary>. xxi.

“Israeli Occupation is Here to Stay.” xxii.

Raheb 59-63, 103. xxiii.

See Luke 2:1-5. xxiv.

See Matthew 2:1-18. xxv.

“Who We Are/About Bright Stars,” Bright Stars of Bethlehem, accessed 13 June 2016, <http:// brightstarsbethlehem.org/who-we-are/about-brightstars#>. xxvi.

Raheb, 107-109. xxvii.

“Who We Are/About Musalaha,” Musalaha, accessed 29 August, 2016, <https://www.musalaha. org/who-we-are/>. xxviii.

Elias Nawawieh, Greg Williams, Victory in Christ, Documentary, directed by Greg Williams (2015; Jerusalem: Kings School of Media, 2015.), Online. xiv.

Sharidan Russell ’18 is from Polson, Montana. She is a double major in Asian & Middle Eastern Studies and Arabic Language & Literature.

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 23

THEOLOGY of

TERRORISM:

The TheWorld WorldTrade TradeCenter Centerininthe theAftermath Aftermathofofthe the September September11 11Attacks Attacksby byPreston PrestonKeres, Keres,2001 2001

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EXPLORING THE ROOTS OF RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE

By Joshua Tseng-Tham

I

n 2006, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a speech at the University of Regensburg that focused on the relationship between faith and reason. It was a wide-ranging lecture that referenced ancient Jewish and Greek thinking, modern secularism, Christian conceptions of God, and Islam. Unsurprisingly, the Islamic portion of the speech drew the most controversy. During the speech, the then-pope quoted the early 15th-century Byzantine emperor Manual II Palaiologos, who commented the following during a dialogue with an educated Persian: Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.i

That quotation, especially when taken out of context, set off a firestorm of controversy throughout the Muslim world that included strong public condemnations by Muslim leaders and outcry from millions of Muslims, many of whom took to the streets to protest the remarks. There is no doubt that the pope’s words touched a nerve—both in the Islamic world and the Western one. This is unfortunate, since the Regensburg Address, when taken in its entirety, is

of terrorism today, and the brutality and scope of these terrorist acts cannot be denied. Christian terrorism, while vastly less common, has also been an issue over the past decade in developing nations such as the Central African Republic and Uganda. The list can go on, which only serves to emphasize that a causal analysis between a particular religion and terrorism is extremely difficult, and while this analysis is not impossible to conduct, it is beyond the scope of this article. For instance, one could derive conclusions based on the relative frequency of such acts in a particular religious denomination, or one could use proof-texts to support the notion that a certain religion justifies terrorism to its adherents. Still, such studies already exist in many volumes. The purpose of this article is not to determine whether a terrorist organization is properly representative of the religion it claims to follow. Instead, this article aims to construct a philosophical-theological framework that can apply equally to all religions and explain how certain ideas about God can predispose any monotheist—Muslim, Christian, and Jewish alike—to commit terrorist acts under the right circumstances.

Similarly, it is also important to establish a definition of “terrorism,” since different forms

…the Regensburg Address, when taken in its entirety, is more of an indictment against particular conceptions of God that subsume divine reason into divine will. more of an indictment against particular conceptions of God that subsume divine reason into divine will.

Properly understanding this distinction can go a long way to further understanding how and why religious terrorism continues to fester in many areas of the world.

Framing This Analysis It is important to preface this analysis with a clear declaration of what it is not: a thesis regarding whether a particular religion is intrinsically susceptible to terrorism. Religious terrorism comes in many forms. Islamic terrorism is the most prevalent mode

of terrorism have their own moral nuances and implications. Unfortunately, the question of what “terrorism” actually means is a surprisingly difficult one, considering its near-constant use by the media today. After all, there is surely a moral difference between killing officials in an oppressive government and planting a bomb in a hospital in order to kill innocent people. And yet, both actions have been routinely labelled as “terrorism.”

These situations have led philosophers to distinguish between two types of terrorism. According to its “wide” definition, terrorism includes any violent actions of an individual or group which are aimed

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 25

at intimidation or the furthering of some political, social, or religious end. According to its “narrow definition,” terrorism includes only acts of violence and intimidation performed against innocents.ii This article will presume this narrow definition of terrorism for two reasons. First, a wide definition of terrorism is too morally nuanced for a sufficient analysis in this article—depending on one’s views on political and religious resistance, terrorism against certain individuals may be justifiable. For instance, political historian Brian Brivati argued that the Umkonto we Sizwe (the military wing of African National Congress) was a terrorist group whose actions were morally justified, since they “deployed terror for the political purpose of destroying an obscene system that would not have been defeated otherwise.”iii Because of the countless moral ambiguities in the wide view, an extended debate on this topic is beyond the scope of this article. Secondly, the narrow definition of terrorism more closely reflects what the West typically thinks of as terrorism, especially with regards to the morally repugnant actions of ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq and Syria). When ISIS beheads ten villagers indiscriminately, we do not wonder about the moral status of those actions. What we do wonder

Pope Benedict XVI during his canonization Mass by Kancelaria Prezydenta RP, 2010

One of the central themes of Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Address is that abandoning reason as an essential feature of God’s nature has profound implications on the way a believer might judge the morality of a particular action. about, however, is why members of groups like ISIS commit such acts. This article attempts to diagnose one important reason why this might be the case.

Following a Capricious God One of the central themes of Pope Benedict’s Regensburg Address is that abandoning reason as

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an essential feature of God’s nature has profound implications on the way a believer might judge the morality of a particular action.iv The context in which Pope Benedict quoted the Byzantine emperor’s controversial comment was in fact a discussion of a theological mistake called voluntarism, a view which some prominent Muslim thinkers defended in the late

Sunset panorama view of Regensburg and Danube at sunset by Karsten Dörre, 2006

14th and early 15th centuries. Voluntarism is a theory that conceives of God as some form of a supreme will.v To put it philosophically, God’s will is so transcendent as to be metaphysically prior to God’s intellect.

To better understand what “metaphysically prior” means in this context, consider this analogy: imagine that the universe is a game, and the laws of physics, mathematics, and ethics are rules about what is and is not prohibited in the game. God, in this analogy, is the game-maker. Voluntarism states that the rules of the game are fixed by a decision of the game-maker, while the non-voluntarist would state that the gamemaker simply knows the rules and then wills that the players abide by them. Thus, to say that the will is metaphysically prior to the intellect is to say that the will of God (the game-maker) that determines the relevant facts (the rules of the game) is prior to the intellect (of the game-maker) that grasps these facts.

For the purposes of clarity, then, this article will define voluntarism as the following: Voluntarism: The belief that God’s willing that p is what makes it the case that p for some domain of facts D (e.g., moral facts, logical facts, natural facts, etc.)

The type of voluntarism that I am concerned with in this article is the voluntarism that considers ethical facts and reasons to be determined by God, although this article also applies to forms of voluntarism that encompass all domains of facts. According to a voluntarist conception of ethics, also known as Divine Command Theory (DCT), a good action is good merely because God wills that it be done, and bad merely because God wills that it should not be done.vi Or, to put it in philosophical terms, God’s willing that p, where p is some ethical fact (e.g., murder is wrong), is what makes p to be an ethical fact.

If it is the case that God’s will determines ethical

facts and reasons, then it is plausible to infer that God’s ethical will is ultimately unintelligible, or without reason. To elaborate, if God’s will constructs a complex ethical paradigm that presumably encompasses many ethical situations, there must be some primordial ethical principle that grounds this paradigm. Imagine, for the purposes of argument, that this ethical principle is “Do unto others as others would do unto you,” and all other ethical commands are derived from this primordial principle. But if God’s will determines ethical facts, then it must also determine the primordial principle. The answer to the question: “Why should we ‘do unto others as others would do unto you?’” is simple—God wills it. There is no further reason why God endorses this ethical principle in particular rather than something else. Thomistic philosopher Edward Feser characterizes this predicament quite well—if God’s will lacks reason, since the will itself determines what is or is not a reason, then God “simply wills what he wills, arbitrarily or whimsically, and there is ultimately no sense to be made of it.”vii Thus, a voluntarist conception of God has profound ethical implications, not only in terms of the metaphysical status and origin of moral content, but also in terms of the practical ethics of day-to-day life.

If ethics is ultimately grounded in divine fiat, then it is ultimately just as unintelligible as the will and actions of the God who creates it. It is common for people to ask why a particular action is good or bad. We often think equality is good because it promotes the virtue of justice. Similarly, the prohibition of violence is explained by invoking the right that humans have to life.

On the contrary, DCT implies that God could, in principle, command us to perform cruel actions and that would be a positive moral principle. If God decided to change the primordial ethical principle to something more nefarious, he could command us to lie to our parents, steal from the poor, or murder the

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Mass killings in the Vendée during the Reign of Terror in France from the National Library of France, c. 19th century

innocent; those commandments would be intrinsically no different than God commanding us to honor our parents, feed the poor, or respect life. If altruism is morally superior to murder, it is not because of a coherent ethical framework grounded in objective, necessary facts but rather God’s arbitrary decision to endorse altruism rather than violence. In turn, the only reason why humans should follow such commands is not because they are an essential component of human flourishing but rather because God’s commandments have an obligatory force that compels us to follow them.

Terrorism De-Rationalizes Interpretation Under ethical voluntarism, morality is fundamentally unintelligible. This means that any study of God’s ethical commandments through a rational lens (such as theology) is bound to be fruitless,

because it needs to discard reason in order to justify its morally repulsive actions.

Before elaborating on this point, first consider the modern example of ISIS, which has its roots in Wahhabism, an ultraconservative form of Islam that originated in Saudi Arabia during the 18th century.

Religious scholar Paul Marshall noted how the “Wahhabis… seem to believe that they can start the process of interpretation of the Koran and the hadith anew, without reliance on traditional Islamic schools of law, theology, and philosophy.”viii The founder of Wahhabism, Ibn Abd al-Wahhab, sought to use this methodology to uncover the true Islam that had been abandoned by his contemporaries. He wanted to return to the fundamentals of his faith by rejecting materialism and worldly ambition and by putting God back on top of the political order. But by proclaiming that only his form of Islam had validity, Ibn Abd al-

If God decided to change the primordial ethical principle to something more nefarious, he could command us to lie to our parents, steal from the poor, or murder the innocent. since God’s commandments (the most basic ethical principles in particular) are ultimately transcendent over rationality and cannot be even remotely understood by it. Therefore, any study of ethics merely consists of interpreting what God has commanded, either through personal revelation or sacred texts, since rational morality has been supplanted by the sheer will of God. Taken together, these consequences often lead to a hermeneutical framework that prioritizes a literal interpretation of sacred texts and disregards philosophical and theological reflection. Religious terrorism feeds off this hermeneutical framework

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Wahhab inadvertently sowed the seeds for radicals who use violence against those whom they consider heretical. Subsequent generations of Wahhabis oscillated between merely religiously conservative and explicitly militaristic applications of the ideology.ix But underlying these trends was a broader movement of Wahhabis that proceeded “in a mechanical way from the ancient text to its present application in sheer disregard of the myriad hermeneutical problems over which they glide,” thereby leading to the conclusion that their pure form of Islam was exclusively true.x It is no surprise, then, that extremists such as Osama bin

Ar-Raqqah, Syria, the Capital of ISIS by Bertramz, 2009

Laden, who were influenced by Wahhabism, developed violent and intolerantly sectarian interpretations of the Quran, since they had rejected all the hermeneutical traditions that preceded them.

Perhaps the greatest irony behind ISIS’s extremism, not to mention religious terrorism generally, is that the extremist thought process of moving from theology to violence is relatively rational, even though their underlying ethical theology is fundamentally arational.

A voluntaristic God determines what the moral facts

by checking them against what one knows to be true by experience, empirical inquiry, or rational reflection, the fundamentalist takes the texts themselves as the sole authority and source of evidence for how one should act. If the Muslim believes that the Quran says X, then X is true. Similarly, if the Christian believes that the Bible says Y, then Y is true.

Of course, a lot of terrorists do not operate independently—Al-Qaeda operated for years under the leadership of Osama bin Laden, and it is doubtful that members of the group saw themselves as the sole authorities over sacred texts. Regardless, this same sort of voluntaristic thinking might be involved in the way terrorist groups organize under leaders. If leaders are seen as spokesmen of God and are followed in a voluntaristic spirit, then these leaders’ interpretation of the sacred texts cannot be questioned, since the interpretation promulgated by the leader simply is the correct interpretation. For instance, Joseph Kony, leader of the Christian terrorist group called “The Lord’s Resistance Army,” developed a cult of personality around himself after claiming that he received prophecies from spirits.

It was through these prophecies, as well as his claimed mantle as the spokesman of God, that he ordered

Perhaps the greatest irony behind ISIS’s extremism, not to mention religious terrorism generally, is that the extremist thought process of moving from theology to violence is relatively rational, even though their underlying ethical theology is fundamentally arational. are. If one holds this view of God, then one cannot rely on an independent grasp of what the moral facts are to check one’s interpretation of God’s commands.

If God commands X (e.g., murdering innocents), then, according to voluntarism, X is morally right.

Moreover, one cannot deny or dispute that X is right on the grounds that X is intrinsically wrong or contrary to the independently-holding moral facts, since the voluntarist holds that nothing is intrinsically wrong and that the moral facts are just what God commands (which, in this case, is to murder innocents).

If fundamentalists believe that God’s commandments are expressed through sacred texts, then it is not far-fetched to see how voluntaristic thinking can affect their reading of these sacred texts.

After all, if God is voluntaristic, then his word ought to be voluntaristic as well. Thus, rather than trying to figure out what truths are being expressed in the texts

his followers to commit violent atrocities against the people of Uganda.xi It is likely a similar scenario played out in other terrorist organizations such as Al-Qaeda.

It is doubtful that Al-Qaeda’s followers would have followed bin Laden so fervently had they not believed that bin Laden was the true interpreter of God’s word. Moreover, had they believed that interpreting God’s commands requires an independent grasp and application of moral facts, they would have been more likely to closely analyze and question bin Laden’s violent ideology. Thus, voluntarism is undeniably a significant factor in religious terrorism, because it encourages a non-reflective reading of holy texts (where interpretations are undoubtedly influenced by personal vendettas), eliminates the need to find a rational justification for putative divine commandments, and encourages unquestioned loyalty to leaders who claim to be God’s voice.

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Moses and the elders see God by Jacopo Amigoni, c. 1753

reject the theological worldview that underlies many terrorist paradigms. His address sought to propose an alternative theology by reiterating the commitment of the Catholic Church to reason and the implications of this commitment for conceptions of God. He began by studying the first verse of the Gospel of John, which provides the clearest validation of this approach: Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, the first verse of the whole Bible, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: “In the beginning was the λόγος”. This is the very word used by the [Byzantine] emperor: God acts, σὺν λόγω, with logos. Logos means both reason and word—a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason.xii

Rediscovering Logos Within Transcendence Many theologians, such as Scholastic philosopher William of Ockham, believed in voluntarism without becoming hardened terrorists, which suggests that the existence of terrorism on the basis of voluntarism does not intrinsically invalidate voluntarism as a whole.

Benedict’s solution to the problem of voluntarism aimed at recovering a theology that understood the God of the Bible as Divine Reason. Reason is not just a fact that God constructs arbitrarily, but rather an essential aspect of his nature. To act against God, the Logos, is to act against reason itself. But conversely, it also means that to act against reason is to act in defiance of God. A God that is fundamentally rational, rather than voluntaristic, completely flips the fundamentalist approach to religiosity on its head. It profoundly changes the believer’s hermeneutic approach to sacred texts from one that uncritically follows its sayings to one that attempts to discern an underlying exegetical framework that renders these sayings consistent with the rest of one’s theoretical and experiential knowledge.

After all, if God’s ethical commandments are ultimately intelligible, then his word is subject to rational inquiry.

And if his commandments are grounded in divine

To act against God, the Logos, is to act against reason itself. But conversely, it also means that to act against reason is to act in defiance of God. Indeed, the purpose of this article is to provide an explanatory account of terrorism, not to delve into the complex philosophical debate between voluntarism and non-voluntarism. Still, the fact that voluntarism provides a significant justification for terrorism should at least give pause to those who support the theology.

Similarly, the fact that voluntarism ultimately reduces all the ethical facts to an arbitrary divine decision appears to contradict moral experience and could lead to a form of ethical nihilism that is highly undesirable.

Pope Benedict knew that the growing trend of implicit voluntarism has led to the unraveling of rationality and the proliferation of religious violence.

The best way to avoid this violence, therefore, is to

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reason, then morality is grounded in a natural law that is accessible to all who possess the capacity to reason. Benedict sought to rehabilitate philosophy in the eyes of modern Christians who had since relegated Christian philosophy to the ivory towers of academia.

In the words of one commentator, Benedict’s point was to reemphasize that the “Christian faith needed philosophy. It needed the tools of rational inquiry inscribed into man’s very reason: the same reason which itself is derived from the same God revealed in the Scriptures.”xiii But Christianity need not have a monopoly on the intellectual God. The Mu’tazilites, a school of Islamic theology dominant in the 8th-10th centuries, “sought

A God of logos bridges the divide between the Abrahamic religions, as well as that between theists and non-theists, by providing a common avenue to debate and discuss important issues with civility and respect.

Prologue of the gospel of St. John from the Clementine Vulgate by Marie-Lan Nguyen, 2005

“Papal Address at University of Regensburg,” Zenit, 12 September 2006, accessed 19 May 2016, <https:// zenit.org/articles/papal-address-at-university-ofregensburg/>. ii.

Igor Primoratz, “Terrorism,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 21 March 2015, <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ spr2015/entries/terrorism/>. iii.

Brian Brivati, “Yes, terrorism can be justified,” The Guardian, 19 August 2009, <https://www.theguardian. com/commentisfree/2009/aug/19/terrorism-milibandtaliban-anc>. iv.

Dr. Samuel Gregg, “Regensburg Revisited: Ten Years Later, A West Still in Denial,” The Catholic World Report, 4 April 2016, <http://www.catholicworldreport. com/Item/4686/regensburg_revisited_ten_years_ later_a_west_still_in_denial.aspx>. v.

“Voluntarism,” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, accessed 15 June 2016, <http://www.iep.utm.edu/ voluntar/>. vi.

Edward Feser, “Voluntarism and PSR,” Edward Feser (blog), 2 November 2014, <http://edwardfeser. blogspot.com/2014/11/voluntarism-and-psr.html>. vii.

Feser, “Voluntarism and PSR.” viii.

Paul Marshall, “Islamic Counter-Reformation,” First Things (August 2004). ix.

Karen Armstrong, “Wahhabism to ISIS: how Saudi Arabia exported the main source of global terrorism,” New Statesman, 27 November 2014, accessed 28 June 2016, <http://www.newstatesman.com/worldaffairs/2014/11/wahhabism-isis-how-saudi-arabiaexported-main-source-global-terrorism>. x.

Marshall, Islamic Counter-Reformation. xi.

“Joseph Kony,” Encyclopædia Britannica Online, accessed 19 August 2016, <https://www.britannica. com/biography/Joseph-Kony>; “The deadly cult of Joseph Kony,” The Independent, 7 November 2008, accessed 19 August 2016, <http://www.independent. co.uk/news/world/africa/the-deadly-cult-of-josephkony-1001084.html>. xii.

“Papal Address at University of Regensburg.” xiii.

Gregg, Regensburg Revisited: Ten Years Later, A West Still in Denial. xiv.

Marshall, Islamic Counter-Reformation. xv.

Marshall, Islamic Counter-Reformation. xvi.

Special thanks to Chris Hauser ’14 and Hamza Abbasi ’16 for their helpful comments. i.

to enrich their religious reflection through the study of Greek philosophy.”xiv In doing so, they argued that the will of God was subject to rational thought and inquiry, subsequently seeing reason as the final arbiter of knowledge, whether it be natural or divine. Centuries later, “the greatest minds of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam—such as Thomas Aquinas, Maimonides, AlFarabi, and Averroes—were engaged in fundamental debate about the nature of revelation, faith, reason, law, and political authority. In their disagreements they created a common discourse across their religious boundaries.”xv There is no reason why Islam or Judaism cannot participate alongside Christians in the pursuit of divine truth through reason. A God of logos bridges the divide between the Abrahamic religions, as well as that between theists and non-theists, by providing a common avenue to debate and discuss important issues with civility and respect. But more urgently, by incorporating reason into faith and by applying this reason to ethics and exegesis, one can avoid the dangerous conclusions that many religious terrorists have unfortunately made.

Obviously, not every single terrorist is consciously pondering the nature of voluntarism when performing his or her atrocious acts, nor are all terrorists voluntarists.

But it is the case that an implicit voluntaristic mentality pervades some schools of religious thought, many of which adopt such viewpoints solely for the innocent purpose of elevating God’s transcendence.

This quest, however, has led to such a major distortion of the way monotheists view God’s transcendence that God’s ultimately unintelligible ethical commandments provide the means to justify otherwise irrational and immoral actions. A God without logos is a terrifying God, and not a God worth worshipping.xvi

Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17 is from Toronto, Ontario, Canada. He is a double major in Economics and Philosophy.

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 31

The Role of Han in Korean Christianity

By Joyce Lee he skyline of Seoul, South Korea is a view dotted by red neon crosses that mark the numerous churches in the city. Just as these crosses blaze at the horizon, the spirit of evangelization passionately manifests in the hearts of Korean believers.

In fact, South Korea sends more missionaries into the world than any country but the U.S. Despite the fact that Korean culture is indelibly linked to these two countries, Christianity has somehow taken root in Korea where it has not in China or Japan. This anomaly may be inherently related to Korea’s cultural concepts that originate from its history of both internal and external oppression, especially a concept known as han. While han is a difficult concept to characterize at first glance, it plays an important role in the past and future development of Christianity in Korea.

Han is a uniquely Korean concept that is described

by Korean theologian Suh Nam Dong as a “feeling of unresolved resentment against injustices suffered, a sense of helplessness because of the overwhelming odds against one, a feeling of acute pain in one’s

T

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Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Korea by m-louis, 2006

guts and bowels, making the whole body writhe and squirm, and an obstinate urge to take revenge and to right the wrong—all these combined.”i In practice, han is untranslatable, and can be most simply viewed as an emotional state that combines grief, anger, and resentment at injustice. Methodist theologian Andrew Sung Park compares it to a black hole, where “suffering reaches the point of saturation, it implodes and collapses into a condensed feeling of pain. This collapsed feeling of sadness, despair, and bitterness is han.”ii As one of the more distinctive aspects of Korean culture, han permeates everything, from the nature of domestic films and literature to national reactions against tragedies, such as the sinking of the Sewol ferry in 2014, in which over 200 high school students died.

The outpouring of grief and anger towards this tragedy marks the national state of mind that subscribes to the concept of han—bitterness and resentment at the preventability of the accident, and grief and devastation at the lives lost.

To better understand the roots of han in Korean culture, an outsider must look at the country’s history

of oppression, especially the Japanese colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945. Still fresh in the national mindset, the Japanese occupation of Korea signified a loss of national identity and dignity as Koreans were forced to adopt Japanese names and the Japanese language, while being treated as second-class citizens in their own country. It was during this time that Christianity, which was first introduced to Korea

Korea’s traditional religious background, which consists of Shamanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism, focuses on this overwhelming desire for good fortune—from praying to the spirits of ancestors for longevity and good luck, to praying at a Buddhist temple for aid with a child’s exam scores or job interview. In “Christianity and Korean Culture: The Reasons for the Success of Christianity in Korea,”

A history of pain and suffering is deeply rooted in the national identity, and subsequently, so is a cultural inclination towards relief from misfortune and receiving material blessings. through the diplomat Yi Gwang Jeong, became popular as Korean Christians joined the independence movement against the occupation.iii The signing of a declaration of independence by their leaders and their resistance against worship of the Japanese emperor allied the Christian cause with Korean nationalism in the eyes of many Koreans.iv The Japanese occupation of Korea in the 20th century is a more modern example of what many Koreans consider to be a 5,000-year struggle under the oppression from Korea’s neighbors, a rigid social structure, and political turmoil. Heroes lauded in Korean history books and literature consist of those who stood against such oppression, such as General Yi Sun Sin, who defeated hundreds of ships in the Japanese navy with only twelve of his own, and Hong Gil Dong, a folk tale hero akin to Robin Hood, who fought the corruption of the upper classes and eventually established his own utopian Korea.v A history of pain and suffering is deeply rooted in the national identity, and subsequently, so is a cultural inclination towards relief from misfortune and receiving material blessings.

Jung Han Kim attributes the spiritual roots of Korea to a syncretistic, shamanistic, and blessings-oriented religion; indeed, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism in Korea all contain elements derived from Korean Shamanism.vi When Christianity began to take root along with the beginnings of modernization in Korea, the situation was no different—elements of Shamanism were added to make Christianity another blessings-oriented faith. The core message became one of individual success and national prosperity that came with accepting Jesus Christ as Lord. This message is still prevalent, as recently evidenced by the faith of blessing preached by Cho Yong Gi at the Yoido Full Gospel Church, which is presently one of the largest churches in the world.vii Beyond its ability to synchronize with the blessingsoriented philosophy of Korean culture, Christianity also ensured its growth by addressing Korea’s history of oppression and the concept of han. Thus, it is not surprising that Korean Christianity is sometimes seen as a cultural identity instead of a religious belief; the growth of the religion is directly tied to one of the

Memorial for victims of Sewol Ferry accident by Piotrus, 2014

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 33

Prayer cave at Yeoju Pyungkang Jeil Conference Center near Yeoju by unknown, 2007

more traumatic experiences in the nation’s history, making Christianity an essential part of a period that is now a fundamental component of Korean culture.

Unlike Rome with Catholicism and Germany with Protestantism, the root of Christian growth in Korea is not spiritual but cultural. Christianity was able to speak to the indignant suffering that is engrained in the concept of han by making itself one of the key figures in the struggle against Japanese oppression.

Han eventually became an essential part of a uniquely Korean branch of theology called minjung shinhak, also known as “the people’s theology.”

Developed in the 1970s, minjung theology was defined by its authors as “a development of the political hermeneutics of the Gospel in terms of the Korean reality.”viii At the time of the theology’s conception, South Korea witnessed several military regimes that were criticized for their dictatorial methods of government and violence against student activists.

For Koreans, the Christian concept of the individual became important during the struggle for human rights and democracy at this time; thus, minjung theology spoke to the people suffering under the oppressors, and stems primarily from the social and political injustices suffered by the Korean people, rather than the Bible. Minjung theologian Suh Nam Dong observed that “God works through history…

History itself is God,” which implied that God was present in the nation’s history before Christianity was introduced to Korea.ix This brand of theology is not for export; it instead interlinks Korea’s cultural roots with Christianity, so that the painful national history that is an essential part of every Korean’s identity can find a place within an outside religion and reconcile

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its foreign nature with what is fundamental to Korean culture.

Korea’s aptitude towards condensed grief and anger is one that often festers as a grudge, whether the offense is personal or national. Though it is easy to view Christianity as a balm of sorts for this phenomenon, its relationship to han and, through it, to the Korean people, is actually more complex. Han is not only a festering wound to be healed, but also a look into the nature of sin. Andrew Sung Park writes that han can been seen as the latter, an often unrecognized partner to sin.x Where Western theology largely pays attention to sinners and their actions and struggles, Korean theology focuses on the victims of the sin who must experience some form of han. By understanding han, one also understands the completely devastating nature of sin in what it leaves behind—a black hole.

After all, despite being a uniquely Korean concept, han is a universal phenomenon; accounts from residents of Japanese internment camps in the 1940s, victims and survivors of the Holocaust, and former slaves in the United States all indicate an unspeakable amount of suffering that stems purely from the sins of others. The extent of this suffering is han—it is hard to articulate and hard to define, and yet it is felt by anyone who has a personal or cultural history of oppression.

The fact that han is so essential to Korean culture allows Korean Christians to develop a high level of awareness of the devastating effects of sin—not only on other human beings, but also on God himself.

Park discusses the idea of divine han, where God is also capable of suffering in the way Koreans and other cultures of oppression have suffered.xi The image of a suffering God is prevalent in the Old Testament,

In this way, the history of oppression that has become Korean culture can be resolved with a realization of God as Savior and healer, rather than as an indifferent source of material blessings that do nothing for an entire nation’s sense of emotional anguish. notably when he is depicted as a woman in labor as he bemoans Babylonian rule over Israel: “For a long time, I have held my peace, I have kept still and restrained myself; now I will cry out like a woman in travail, I will gasp and pant.”xii But perhaps the most prominent image of a suffering God is as Jesus Christ on the cross—it is the ultimate suffering for all the sins of humanity.

Coming to realize that God also suffers with han can allow Korean Christians to transcend the blessings-oriented, Shamanistic element of Korean Christianity and understand a more complete and spiritual faith. The growth of Korean Christianity to modern times has been reliant on a traumatic past that subscribes to a Shamanistic type of faith which evolved from the feeling of han. Yet through this same emotion, Korean Christians must be able to move past a blessings-oriented, religious culture that stems from han, and instead link han to a realization of sin and their own spiritual journeys. Han in and of itself is a toxic emotion that needs to be resolved—by bringing han to light, juxtaposed against sin, the suffering of victims comes to the forefront with divine forgiveness.

In this way, the history of oppression that has defined Korean culture can be resolved with a realization of God as savior and healer, rather than as an indifferent source of material blessings that do nothing for an entire nation’s sense of emotional anguish.

While the millennia of oppression experienced by Koreans has created a form of suffering that is hard to articulate, Korea is distinct as a beacon of faith in East Asia. Korea found God in one of its most crucial cultural concepts, and through him, may find a path not only to relief but also to redemption. Understanding han as a second part to sin is crucial in Korea’s evolution from maintaining a foundation of blessings-oriented Shamanism to truly seeking resolution for its history of oppression.

Boo-wong Yoo, Korean Pentecostalism: Its History and Theology (New York: Verlag Peter Lang, 1988), 221. ii.

Andrew Sung Park, The Wounded Heart of God (Abingdon Press: Nashville, 1993), 17. iii.

Han-sik Kim, “The Influence of Christianity,” Korean Journal 23, no. 12 (1983): 5. iv.

Colin Whittaker, Korea Miracle (Eastbourne,

Korean church building constructed in 1895 by Korean Christians

by Lillias H. Underwood, 1908

Sussex: Kingsway, 1998), 63. v.

Yi Sun-sin, Nanjung Ilgi: War Diary of Admiral Yi Sun-Sin, ed. Pow Key Sohn (Republic of Korea: Yonsei University Press, 1977), 312. vi.

Jung Han Kim, “Christianity and Korean culture: The reasons for the success of Christianity in Korea,” Exchange 33, no. 2 (2004): 132-152. vii.

Wonsuk Ma, “David Yonggi Cho’s Theology of Blessing: Basis, Legitimacy and Limitations,” Evangelical Review of Theology 35, no. 2 (2011): 140159. viii.

David Kwang-Sun Suh, “A Biographical Sketch of an Asian Theological Consultation,” in Minjung Theology, ed. Commission on Theological Concerns of the Christian Conference of Asia (Singapore: The Christian Conference of Asia, 1983), 17. ix.

Yeong Mee Lee, “A Political Reception of the Bible: Korean Minjung Theological Interpretation of the Bible,” SBL Forum, n.p. x.

Park, 69-85. xi.

Park, 111-127. xii.

Isaiah 42:14 (ESV).

i.

Joyce Lee ’19 is from Valencia, California. She is a Government major and a Chinese minor.

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 35

Normandy American Cemetery and Memorial in France by Myrabella, 2013

Revisiting Biblical Claims on Generational Punishment

By Joshua Lee

T

he 1950s in North Korea marked the rise of the songbun system in which citizens were ranked according to their allegiance to the North Korean government. By examining ancestors’ roles in the Korean War and their social status, the system inevitably created divide and discrimination within the community. It is hard to imagine anything of the sort finding its way into modern, civilized society. In fact, in America we pride ourselves on a justice system that assumes innocent until proven guilty. The generational system, however, hauntingly echoes the bestselling book in the world: the Bible.

God proclaims: “For I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the

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parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me.”i The same God that claims a forgiving and understanding spirit declares the sovereignty of past sins. As a child of South Korean immigrants, I find nothing more painfully invisible than the North Korean government and its generational punishment.

But also as a child from a Christian household, I am disappointed to read this verse in Scripture—the very book I defend every day. Must I repent for and be punished for the sins of my ancestors? Am I my grandfather’s keeper?

The short answer is no; Christians are not held accountable for sins they do not commit. As written in Ezekiel, “The one who sins is the one who will die.

The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child.”ii Here, the Bible makes it clear that people are accountable for their own actions and not for the actions of others. However, the portrait that Christianity paints of sin does not exclude the idea that the sins of one person can have consequences that are felt by other people. As inherently social creatures who are bound

be affected. Thus, it is hard to argue that generational curses contradict or are even mutually exclusive with God’s love. To be human is to be connected, integrated into other peoples’ lives, and affected by the decisions that others make. Thus, because of this aspect of our natural humanity, the passing of sin’s impact through generations actually makes sense. 13th century Catholic theologian and philosopher St. Thomas Aquinas writes

As inherently social creatures who are bound together through a network of relationships, humans corporately share in suffering the consequences of each others’ sins. together through a network of relationships, humans corporately share in suffering the consequences of each others’ sins.

Nevertheless, while Christians are not punished for their ancestors’ sins, it is not because God tolerates such sins. When Moses’ people rebelled against the Lord, Moses affirms: “Now may the Lord’s strength be displayed, just as you have declared: ‘The Lord is slow to anger, abounding in love and forgiving sin and rebellion. Yet he does not leave the guilty unpunished; he punishes the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation.’”iii This is yet again a clear indication of God’s intention to punish based on the sins of ancestors. When humans disobey God’s orders, he “does not leave the guilty unpunished.”

And the guilty party seems to include more than the perpetrator.

Then, if God hates sin, do Christians escape punishment for their ancestors’ sins because they are worthy of that redemption? Christianity claims that when Adam and Eve ate from the forbidden fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, sin was introduced into the world. Their newfound understanding of the difference between good and evil made them accountable for the evil decisions they chose and thus made sin a possibility. Later on in the Bible, Jesus clarifies the modern definition of sin by examining topics such as lust, envy, and anger, warning his audience against such actions.iv Therefore, from a Christian viewpoint, one cannot say that he or she deserves forgiveness because everyone is susceptible to the same temptations and sins. As the apostle Paul writes: “The wages of sin is death.”v However, this idea that no one deserves redemption does not justify generational punishment.

As a species that depends so heavily on relationships, we cannot affirm that we are accountable only for ourselves. My decision to go to college is likely to affect my future grandchildren. If I were to go to jail, my entire family—living and unborn—would

on the topic of generational punishment: Consequently when a man is brought up amid the sins of his parents, he is more eager to imitate them, and if he is not deterred by their punishments, he would seem to be the more obstinate, and, therefore, to deserve more severe punishment.vi

God must address sins that pervade through generations because the influence of those sins still affects every individual in the family. The Bible describes this relational aspect of Christ’s body as such: “But God has put the body together…If one part suffers, every part suffers with it; if one part is honored, every part rejoices with it. Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.”vii When

St. Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli, 15th century

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 37

humans sin, they affect other people to whom they are connected. Thus, must Christians sit down and repent for their ancestors’ sins?

One of Moses’ mandates for the new land was: “Parents are not to be put to death for their children, nor children put to death for their parents; each will die for their own sin.”viii While this verse tells Christians that they will never pay for the sins of their ancestors, the earlier verses we examined in Leviticus and Numbers told us that Christians will be punished as the children of sinners and that they should repent. Here, we see what seems to be a contradiction; however, if we take a look at the Hebrew translation of “punishing” in Leviticus and Numbers, we see that the “punishing” translates to paqadh, which more accurately means to “inspect, review, number, deposit, or visit in the sense of making a call.”ix If we revisit the Exodus verse (“for I, the LORD your God, am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the parents to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me”) in this light, we see a more accurate representation of God revisiting and overseeing the sins of past generations.x According to Scripture, God is concerned with the numerous iniquities that inevitably follow Christians because of humanity’s natural embeddedness; in the Christian framework, sin percolates both within and outside of the human.

While Moses’ commandment for the new land frees children from the sins of their ancestors, they still must deal with the rippling consequences of sins throughout generations. Children will not be put to death for their parents; in other words, children

Moses Breaks the Tables of the Law

by Gustave Doré, 1866

daily burdens and sins, God’s generational forgiveness is already strong enough to cover it all. Jesus died fully aware that his death would cover not only the sins of the past, but also the sins of the future. Christ’s sacrifice redeems more than just individual sins; it delivers families from the burdens of the past. Therein lies the difference between God’s definition of generational punishment and the North Korean songbun system: we are not doomed to pay and repent for the sins of our ancestors; rather, we are impacted by the consequences.

Therein lies the difference between God’s definition of generational punishment and the North Korean songbun system: we are not doomed to pay and repent for the sins of our ancestors; rather, we are impacted by the consequences. will not be directly punished for the sins of their ancestors. Rather, the subtle difference is that we suffer consequences of those sins even though we do not directly pay for those sins. Again, back to my earlier example; if I go to jail for stealing, my children will not go to jail with me, but they will have to live without a father. As another example, mankind still deals with the sins of Adam and Eve; people suffer every day with the consequences of sin running rampant on Earth because both Adam and Eve directly disobeyed orders from God and chose to be their own rulers. Their lack of trust and subsequent folly released sin into the world and affects us today.

Thus, the beauty of the Gospel is that despite our

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It is actually quite interesting to examine the particular way through which Christ provides that forgiveness. If one person’s sin can affect others through social connection, it makes sense that one person’s act of atonement can provide forgiveness through those same social connections. Christ came down from heaven as a human and died as a human to remedy a problem the same way it began: through our web of social influence. Paul writes: “But God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us.”xi That word “while” is particularly important because it explains that Christ atoned for sins while his beloved creations were still flawed humans; and if humans suffer the consequences of

A desert in Israel with the Dead Sea in the background by Tiia Monto, 2016

Therefore, when he chooses to forgive all of humanity, despite the magnitude of sin, he reveals a deep and profound love for mankind. each others’ sins, they must receive forgiveness through another human: Jesus Christ.

Furthermore, the fact that our God is so wrathful and powerful demonstrates that he truly understands the full nature of sin and its detrimental effects in our lives. He possesses a just and righteous nature that tells us the serious and harmful nature of sin. Therefore, when he chooses to forgive all of humanity, despite the magnitude of sin, he reveals a deep and profound love for mankind. It is somewhat ironic that his wrath, in a way, serves to reveal his love, but it is also easy to recognize that a being who understands what it means to possess anger can understand what it means to be possess love.

The reality of Christianity is that God possesses strength in both wrath and love. We cannot truly admire his strength and love when we hide and deny his just nature. After all, God would not be allpowerful if he could not justly punish those who acted immorally. Both God’s love and strength are not meant to contradict each other; instead, they highlight each other. Safety from the dangers of evil is assured because God is so powerful. And therein lies the beauty in the gospel; that God the all-powerful and all-knowing protects his people with his infinite strength and wisdom by coming down to them. Because in all the human connections that believers can make on earth, the one connection that matters the most is that which consists of the one who loves the most.

Exodus 20:5 (NIV).

Ezekiel 18:20 (NIV). iii.

Numbers 14:17-18 (NIV). iv.

See Matthew 5-7. v.

Romans 6:23 (NIV). vi.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica 1-2. 87.

8. <http://www.newadvent.org/summa/2087. htm#article8>. vii.

1 Corinthians 12:24-27 (NIV). viii.

Deuteronomy 24:16 (NIV). ix.

Beth Moore, “Is There a 'Generational Curse' for Sin?” Today’s Christian Woman, May 2004, <http:// www.todayschristianwoman.com/articles/2004/may/ beth-moore-breaking-free-generational-curse-sin. html>. x.

Exodus 20:5 (NIV). xi.

Romans 5:8 (NIV). i.

ii.

Joshua Lee ’19 is from San Diego, California. He is a double major in Physics and Chemistry.

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 39

God of Wrath God of Love

By Jessica Heine

C

hristians and non-Christians alike are sometimes horrified by God’s actions as portrayed by the Old Testament. Christians are taught that God is infinitely loving, understanding, and merciful. However, some of the stories of the Old Testament appear to suggest that God can be temperamental, intensely angry, jealous, and in our eyes, often unjust. Many have struggled with the question of whether the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament are even the same.

Many Christians, even those who never toy with this question consciously, often think about the God of the Old Testament as an entirely separate entity from Jesus. Despite the many prayers that express the oneness of the Trinity (God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), some Christians who study their Bibles and think about God find it difficult to treat the actions of God throughout time as those of a single being.

If God is truly constant and eternal, then any changes we perceive in his actions must be the result of humanity’s changing relationship with him over time. Because God is perfect and transcends time, Christians must reconcile these diverse characteristics as belonging to a single God. Finally, they must reassess their understanding of true justice, remembering that the gift of salvation comes not as a worthy reward, but rather as an undeserved act of mercy. Remembering this, Christians can see how justice underlies all of God’s actions in the Bible, as it is satisfied in Christ’s sacrifice.

One strong explanation for the apparent changes in God’s behavior is that God’s revelation to humanity takes place slowly over time, and that different circumstances require different actions to satisfy his unchanging will. For instance, this explanation would argue that in the Old Testament, people initially had a very limited understanding of God. But over time, through the prophets sent by God, people grew in their understanding of the divine, and by extension viewed God’s actions more clearly. When Jesus arrived, God was as close as he could be to his people on earth,

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allowing him to powerfully clarify his true nature.

Christians are still left, however, with a struggle to reconcile certain traits attributed to the Old Testament God, such as jealousy and violence, with the God of infinite love and forgiveness described by the New Testament.

These seemingly opposed characteristics become compatible, however, when considering Jesus. Jesus spent his entire life preparing for his own act of ultimate sacrifice. The idea of suffering as a result of sin is present in both the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament, however, emphasizes the punishment God gives to sinners, while the New Testament emphasizes his mercy towards sinners.

The attitude of God in the Old Testament is not surprising—after Adam and Eve chose to reject moral perfection through their sin, he revealed suffering to be the just consequence of every sin.i This punishment stems directly from his justice, just as the reward he

God the Father on a throne, with Virgin Mary and Jesus by unknown, late 15th century

gives to the virtuous does. After Adam and Eve sinned, the knowledge of these consequences cultivated a sense of moral restraint as people tried to avoid suffering and gain the reward for virtue.ii But, as a race of fallible creatures, humanity oscillated between obedience and defiance, a phenomenon to which the Old Testament bears strong witness. The New Testament, on the other hand, paints a picture of hope. In God’s love for mankind, his mercy found a way to save us while still fulfilling all justice. He sent his only son to die on the cross in

a man who lived in 30 AD and began a new religion, but rather that Jesus was truth itself, a reconciliation between God and mankind made necessary by the consequences of original sin. Jesus’ purpose on Earth and his message to humanity can be understood fully and exclusively in the light of evidence from the Old Testament.

Jesus did not come to Earth to replace people’s understanding of God and wipe away their religious practices. Instead he fulfilled his covenant with Abraham to bless all nations. He came to fulfill the

The early success of the church was a testament to the numbers of people who recognized their inability to live up to the law. order to make the ultimate sacrifice, suffering in the place of every sinner throughout all of time. Thus, Jesus’ mission was to turn a fallen people back to God—in a time when the people did not know God, God’s system of justice brought them to him. When the world fell far from God, his plan of forgiveness through sacrificing his son opened up the way of salvation. Thus, by considering the contexts of the Old and New Testaments, and God’s changing relationship with his people, Christians can better understand why God has revealed himself in such different ways throughout time.

Consider the message that Jesus gave to his apostles, who spread the word through their communities until the gospel writers produced the written accounts we have today. The Gospels did not claim that Jesus was

Mosaic law as they then knew it, and to teach them to obey God more effectively with a better understanding of God and his will.iii The early success of the church was a testament to the number of people who recognized their inability to live up to the Law. After all, the Old Testament Israelites, despite having full access to the Law, rejected the holy prophets that pleaded for repentance. Indeed, even the most righteous Christians, such as the Apostle Peter, had flaws which would have precluded him from attaining salvation had it not been for Jesus’ divine mercy.iv It is precisely this divine mercy that has attracted generations of Christians to the beauty of God’s church.

God presented himself to mankind as the man Jesus who, despite widespread rejection and his audience’s inability to understand, did successfully

The Destruction of Sodom And Gomorrah

by John Martin, 1852

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plant his message on the earth. Yet, without having first learned about the omnipotence of God through Moses, mankind could have comprehended neither the miracle of the incarnation nor the infinite beauty and strength of the crucifixion. Without having first experienced the destruction wrought by sin and their inability to save themselves, the early Christians would not have placed themselves as eagerly at the feet of Jesus in humble acknowledgment of their need for him. As described by the Catholic Catechism, “God communicates himself to man gradually. He prepares him to welcome by stages the supernatural revelation that is to culminate in the person and mission of the incarnate Word, Jesus Christ.”v Some modern Christians shudder at the violent stories in the Old Testament, thinking that God’s actions seem excessively harsh or even unjust.

with him in eternal bliss. Christians argue that heaven is not one’s right as a human, nor can one earn a ticket there. Even the best attempts to imitate Jesus end in failure. After all, everyone turns away from God at some point in their lives. They sin against God even with the knowledge of their complete dependence on him, the creator of the world and everyone in it.

Thus, in the Old Testament, when a person receives a severe punishment without having personally sinned, the fallen nature of mankind almost guarantees that at some point he committed the greatest sin of all: rejecting the God who gave man everything, from a life he did not earn to the mercy he did not deserve. While God is eternal, the expression of his relationship with mankind has evolved over time. Humans have rejected God since the beginning of creation and could have, at any point, received their just punishment.

Humans have been rejecting God since the beginning of creation and could have, at any point, received punishment justly. Only Jesus suffered for sins he did not commit.

Accordingly, they tend to ignore these uncomfortable violent stories when piecing together their conception of God, thinking this harshness incompatible with the love of the God they believe they know. Perhaps as time has passed since Jesus’ first coming, Christians have wrongly replaced the Old Testament view of God with the image of the loving, merciful God they see in Jesus, instead of reconciling the two.

Yet modern Christians forget that God is infinite in every way. Thus, when God showed his great power through punishment in the Old Testament, he remained fully just and fully merciful. When Jesus humbly died on a cross, requesting forgiveness for the murderers who crucified him, he remained allpowerful and fully divine. In the Old Testament, God ruled through divine justice, and people suffered the consequences of their sin. In some cases, it was not just the perpetrator who suffered—the entire community suffered the consequences of a sin. Often, as in the cases of entire nations receiving harsh chastisement, readers vehemently declare that it was unjust that every person of that nation be made to suffer. After all, there were surely innocents among the community, such as the people who had not participated in the sinful act.

Regardless, Christianity maintains that all humans have fallen short of God’s ideal for humanity. If that is true, then even the holiest of saints is a sinner and could be justly punished for turning away from God. However, through the intense suffering of Jesus Christ, a man free from sin and undeserving of pain, God, in his infinite mercy, granted all people the chance to live

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Christianity teaches that man must turn his heart to God with faith in Jesus to enter heaven.

Yet Christianity also recognizes that even with Jesus’ example to follow, Christians fail to justify themselves through their own efforts. Jesus responded to inquiries about how to enter heaven by saying, “For mortals it is impossible, but for God all things are possible.”vi In the Christian worldview, people are valued not for their actions, which are laced with sin, but for the love God their creator has for them. God knows the contents of every heart and thus judges perfectly, while people can only estimate the goodness of others through the snapshot-evidence observed in their outward actions.

While God understands humans perfectly because he has perfect knowledge, humans have yet to overcome their own desires in order to walk on a path free from sin. Thus, Christians must accept the undeserved gift of God’s mercy, offered freely to every person on Earth.

Accordingly, Christians cannot assess the justness of a punishment God gives to a person whose mind and heart they do not fully understand. They must read these disturbing stories in the light of their own sin, and the punishment they deserve for doing so. The incredible love of Jesus Christ, who went so far as to sacrifice himself upon the cross for every sinner, is thus all the more beautiful and worthy of gratitude.

Rather than viewing those stories of violence in the Old Testament as insurmountable challenges to Christianity’s claims, it may be helpful to see them within the context of the longer narrative of the growing revelation of God to his people. With this in

Jesus heals a man born blind by Phillip Medhurst, 2008

mind, these stories fit seamlessly with Christianity’s claim that mankind is unworthy of the rewards God has granted us. Justice alone would require the suffering of even the best people for occasionally turning away from God. Thus, Christians should be grateful that Jesus suffered for them, so that they can confess their sins and renew their relationships with God, knowing that one day they can be in perfect union with him.

Thus, when some read the Old Testament and shudder at a story that seems unjust, they must remember that a truly just system based upon deserved punishment and reward would only increase mankind’s suffering. The heavenly rewards Christians have come to expect are not rewards merited by their own worthiness, but rather gifts of a merciful God. The most influential act of suffering was undertaken

by Jesus Christ, a man of moral perfection whose suffering on the cross was profoundly unjust. Every person on earth sins, and thus would suffer in a system of merciless, perfect justice. Therefore, rather than desiring that biblical stories appear more palatable, Christians should feel gratitude that Jesus sacrificed himself upon the cross to atone for everyone’s sins as if they were his own. Understanding that Jesus’ sacrifice saved everyone from enduring the just punishments of their sins is essential to cultivating a posture of hope that anticipates the day where one can enjoy the fruits of God’s mercy and love.vii

See Genesis 3.

See Genesis 4:26. iii.

See Matthew 5:17 and Hebrews 9:15. iv.

See John 18:15-27. v.

Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd. ed., 22072210, sec. 53, accessed 20 August 2016, <http:// www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/ p1s1c2a1.htm>. vi.

Matthew 19:26 (NRSV). vii.

Special thanks to Sara Holston ’17, Jake Casale ’17, Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17, and Keenan Wood ’18 for their extensive comments and revisions. i.

ii.

Jessica Heine ’19 is from Cranford, New Jersey. She is a prospective Philosophy major and Religion minor.

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 43

Book Review: C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce

By Sara Holston

The Last Judgment by Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1516

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A

controversial topic in Christianity, the doctrine of the afterlife has inspired a multitude of questions and concerns regarding its existence, details, and morality. Indeed, heaven and hell have been variously represented in church sermons, pop culture, and Christian philosophy; moreover, the debate over the nature of the Christian afterlife features a dynamic range of perspectives and arguments. Given the broad scope of material on the subject, it can be hard to find a reliable source that serves as a logical entry into the discussion. C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce is one such accessible and useful resource for understanding a more conservative conceptualization of hell and engaging with the broader conversation involving various interpretations of the doctrine. Though Lewis’ text presents only one of many perspectives on heaven and hell, it provides a comprehensive explanation of his understanding of them and addresses a full complement of questions about the afterlife, as well as many about the nature of God and of Christianity. In so doing, Lewis’ The Great Divorce offers a holistic discussion of the concerns associated with the afterlife, ultimately emphasizing the role of an individual’s choice in determining his or her fate and utilizing a metaphorical tone to argue that we cannot, and perhaps are not meant to, know precisely the nature of hell or its operation but should focus on understanding general facets of the afterlife necessary to help us make the best choice.

Questions about hell are many and complex, with the most basic question asking what hell actually is.

Indeed, hell is variously seen as a fiery pit of misery and punishment for wrongdoings, a psychological state for those individuals who hate the presence of God, or a fiction concocted by the early Church. But there are many secondary questions as well: what must one do to enter heaven, and how can a loving God

C.S. Lewis by Arthur Strong, 1947

believe that people send themselves to hell.

It is no surprise that there are many answers to these hell-related questions—the breadth of representations and perceptions of hell likely stems from the Bible’s infrequent and ambiguous discussion of the nature of the afterlife. In fact, the word “hell” only appears three times in the English Standard Version of the Bible, and it is unclear whether other references to the afterlife are intended as metaphorical, literal, or figurative.i In the midst of this cacophony of questions and answers surrounding the afterlife, Lewis champions a relatively traditional view of hell, in which heaven and hell are literal places people will go depending on the choices they make. His text, however, is not intended to be read as a literal account of what will happen to souls after death. Rather, his text acts as a metaphorical narrative that seeks to articulate Lewis’ understanding

Lewis’s text presents only one of many perspectives on heaven and hell, but it provides a comprehensive explanation of his understanding of them and addresses a full complement of questions about the afterlife, as well as many about the nature of God and of Christianity. send people to hell? Again, each of these questions has its own range of proposed answers. Regarding the first question, some believe that only those predestined for salvation are able to enter the presence of God, while others believe that all will enter heaven upon death.

Regarding the second question, some have explained God’s use of hell as a natural consequence of his justice, whereas others reject the question entirely because they

of the afterlife.ii Lewis presents hell as an endless cityscape in which souls live in apartments, quarrel with their neighbors, and move further into the city to new homes. All souls in hell can ride a bus to heaven in order to see it. Upon arrival they discover they are Ghosts—less substantial than the rest of heaven and its inhabitants. They have the choice, however, to stay and to grow solid enough to dwell fully and comfortably in

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 45

this more concrete land, before travelling inland towards God, or they can choose to return to hell, rejecting eternal life in heaven. Lewis, then, does not present hell as a place of eternal punishment or a prison into which God forcibly throws individuals who disobey him; instead, he depicts a realm that many opt to stay in, despite the exhortation of the souls in heaven for the Ghosts to choose a different way.

The openly fictional nature of The Great Divorce allows Lewis to explore the topic of the afterlife while maintaining his position that the exact details of heaven and hell should not be the focus of any discussion or contemplation. Rather than forwarding a distinctly Protestant or Catholic idea of the afterlife, Lewis combines aspects of both traditions and offers a unique perspective, offering an account of elements of the afterlife that both sects could agree on. Indeed, his portrayal of Purgatory, a plane of the afterlife embraced primarily by Catholics, demonstrates Lewis’ more ecumenical representation; in Lewis’ fictional afterlife, the first realm Ghosts find themselves in is either hell, where everyone begins, or Purgatory, should they choose to leave for heaven.iii In this sense, Lewis’ metaphor allows for a Purgatory that is both real and not, in the sense that he nods to its existence, but does not represent it as a physical place, even in his metaphorical narrative. Thus, Lewis does not attempt

however, he advocates that we focus instead on the choices we must make concerning where we will spend our afterlife and what we need to know about how to live and cultivate our hearts in order to optimize those choices.

Further promoting a transfer of focus away from the details of the afterlife, Lewis presents his discussion of hell in the context of the rest of Christianity.

Although he considers the exact nature of heaven and hell as somewhat irrelevant, he also views discussion of the afterlife as rightly situated within contemplation of Christianity’s other teachings. Both the conversations that the narrator of The Great Divorce witnesses and those that he participates in address topics such as the nature and proper place of true love or the role of humility and selflessness in the Christian life. In Lewis’ view, thinking about the afterlife plays a significant role in helping us to understand the nature of God and Christian faith as a whole, but it is not the central concern of the

Marriage of Heaven and Hell cover by William Blake, c. 1790

Lewis does not just present an image of the afterlife. Instead he connects each element of his metaphorical heaven and hell and the Ghosts encountered there to the values and lessons that Christianity champions. to argue for any exact construction of the afterlife and, in fact, includes an explicit discussion of the futility of understanding the finer details of heaven and hell, saying: All answers deceive. If ye put the question from within Time and are asking about possibilities, the answer is certain. The choice of ways is before you. Neither is closed. Any man may choose eternal death. Those who choose it will have it.

But if ye are trying to leap on into eternity, if ye are trying to see the final state of all things as it will be (for so ye must speak) when there are no more possibilities left but only the Real, then ye ask what cannot be answered to mortal ears.iv

Lewis argues that within the boundaries of time we cannot truly understand all the details of the realm of the afterlife, which exists outside the confines of space and time that comprise the world. Rather than dwell on these comparatively unimportant details,

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Christian life and should not be treated as such; it is properly considered as one facet alongside many other dimensions of equal importance. Thus, Lewis does not just present an image of the afterlife. Instead, he connects each element of his metaphorical heaven and hell and the Ghosts encountered there to values and lessons that Christianity champions. He uses short episodes between newly arrived Ghosts and souls who have grown wise in heaven to highlight the perspective and behavior Christianity encourages and the philosophy behind the lifestyle.

Ultimately, Lewis emphasizes the importance of an individual’s choice in determining whether a soul will end up in heaven. From each soul’s determination to take a chance and board the bus travelling from hell to heaven, to the soul’s decision whether or not to remain in heaven, Lewis insists that no person can be saved unless by his or her choice. In two encounters, one between a great Lady and a Tragedian-and-Dwarf duo and the other between an angel and a man with

a demon on his shoulder, the citizens of heaven plead with the respective Ghosts to let go of their sins and sufferings from earth and stay in heaven.v Ultimately, the Dwarf-Tragedian duo chooses to remain embroiled in bitterness and shadow, while the man with the demon decides to accept help. In the case of the Ghost who chooses heaven, only by his permission can he be saved. Despite the angel’s great power and the ease with which it can defeat the Ghost’s demon, the demon only dies when the Ghost, desperate and reluctant, gives permission for the angel to kill it.vi Both Ghosts freely choose which realm of the afterlife they wish to dwell in, rather than their deeds or decisions leading to their being forcibly sent into one or the other against their will.

Lewis’ work builds on the tradition of previous works to insert his perspective into the existing debate about the nature of the afterlife. The Divine Comedy responds to a previous work by William Blake titled The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, which itself invoked Emanuel Swedenborg’s highly influential Heaven and Hell.vii Blake sought to imitate the medieval tradition of vision literature—a literary form in which the writer or narrator claims to have had visions of the afterlife.

This writer often encounters and communicates with departed souls therein and returns at the end of the journey to share his or her acquired wisdom with others who may be saved or improved by it.viii Though Lewis primarily challenges Blake’s views, Lewis’ text also draws from the perceptions of the afterlife championed by other authors, such as St. Augustine, Dante, Milton, and Lewis Carroll, engaging their views in his discussion as he challenges some and defends others to propose a holistic treatise on the nature of heaven and hell.

For example, from the opening scene, Lewis’ The Great Divorce alludes to Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Both texts begin with a narrator who wakes up in a strange place and embarks on a journey through hell and to heaven, ultimately tasked with returning to earth to share the story of the journey with others.ix Both narrators encounter a host of different characters, including authors and other figures who influenced them on earth, learning their stories and how they have come to be where they are. But while Dante’s interactions with the figures, also Engraving for Inferno Canto 1 by Paul Gustave known as “shades,” examine how Dore, 19th century different sins or virtues will be

punished or rewarded in the afterlife, Lewis’ episodes with the Ghosts are designed to address common questions and concerns about the nature and morality of the doctrine of heaven and hell. For example, the previously mentioned episode between the great Lady and the Tragedian-and-Dwarf duo in The Great Divorce confirms the idea of souls in heaven existing in perfect bliss, despite the suffering of those in hell. Similarly, the narrator’s conversations with the Big Ghost explore the stereotype of overly legalistic Christians who lack true faith.x Lewis also uses interactions between his characters to discuss concepts such as the literal status of heaven and hell and the accountability of people who unknowingly committed sins during their lives.xi Using the Divine Comedy as a foundation, Lewis is able to uphold parts of Dante’s classically medieval view of the afterlife while countering elements he disagrees with and drawing in other writers in the process of carving out his own place in the continuing discussion of the afterlife. The Great Divorce, then, not only offers a compelling case for Lewis’ understanding of hell, but also contextualizes that view within the larger debate and allows readers to consider how Lewis’ ideas stand up against those of other writers and thinkers.

See Matthew 10:28, James 3:6, and 2 Peter 2:4.

C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, A Dream (New York: Harper Collins, 2001), x. iii.

Lewis, 35, 68. iv.

Lewis, 140. v.

Lewis, 120-133, 106-112. vi.

Lewis, 110. vii.

Lewis, vii. viii.

Alison Morgan, Dante and the Medieval Other World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 3. ix.

Lewis, 1; Dante Alighieri, The Inferno (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), I.1-106. x.

Lewis, 25-31. xi.

Lewis, 36. i.

ii.

Sara Holston ’17 is from Wayne, Pennsylvania. She is an English major.

[ Fall 2016 • The Dartmouth Apologia • 47

A Prayer for Dartmouth This prayer by professor of religion Lucius Waterman appears on a plaque hanging outside Parkhurst Hall.

O Lord God Almighty, well-spring of wisdom, master of power, guide of all growth, giver of all gain. We make our prayer to thee, this day, for Dartmouth College. Earnestly entreating thy favour for its people. For its work, and for all its life. Let thy hand be upon its officers of administration to make them strong and wise, and let thy word make known to them the hiding-place of power. Give to its teachers the gift of teaching, and make them to be men right-minded and high-hearted. Give to its students the spirit of vision, and fill them with a just ambition to be strong and well-furnished, and to have understanding of the times in which they live. Save the men of Dartmouth from the allurements of self-indulgence, from the assaults of evil foes, from pride of success, from false ambitions, from hardness, from shallowness, from laziness, from heedlessness, from carelessness of opportunity, and from ingratitude for sacrifices out of which their opportunity has grown. Make, we beseech thee, this society of scholars to be a fountain of true knowledge, a temple of sacred service, a fortress for the defense of things just and right, and fill the Dartmouth spirit with thy spirit, to make it a name and a praise that shall not fail, but stand before thee forever. We ask in the name in which alone is salvation, even through Jesus Christ our Lord, amen.

The Reverend Lucius Waterman, D.D.

The Nicene Creed The Dartmouth Apologia invites people from all intellectual, philosophical, religious, and spiritual backgrounds to join in our discussion as we search for truth and authenticity. We do, however, reserve the right to publish only that which aligns with our statement of belief.

We, the members of The Dartmouth Apologia, affirm that the Bible is inspired by God, that faith in Jesus Christ is necessary for salvation, and that God has called us to live by the moral principles of the New Testament. We also affirm the Nicene Creed, with the understanding that views may differ on baptism and the meaning of the word “catholic.”

We [I] believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.

We [I] believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made. For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried. On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We [I] believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father [and the Son]. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.

He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

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Image by Andrew Rigler

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[1 Peter 3:15] a journal of christian thought