Spring 2017, Volume 11, Issue 2
cover feature by Jeffrey Poomkudy ’20: p. 26
p. 2 Interview: The Evidence for Christ's Resurrection
p. 32 Postmodernism and the Paradox of Tolerance
p. 40 The Separation Between Church and State in America
with Gary Habermas
Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17
Sara Holston ’17
A Letter from the Editor Why do civilizations rise and fall? This is a question which has been the subject of much scholarly debate. Historical periods are often defined by the origins of empires as well as their ends. The Old Testament itself chronicles the rise and fall of civilizations across the course of revelation. The limitations of humanity, such as greed, weakness, apathy, and pride, are often proposed as ways to explain these changes. Reflecting on the transient nature of such institutions can be unsettling. After all, we live in a world in which human institutions ground our everyday experiences. Across time, humans have established societies as a means to improve their chances of survival. We established laws that sought to maintain peace and balance within these societies. Authority figures reigned with the notion that as long as they maintained power and enforced these laws, society would remain intact, relatively peaceful, and unchanging. However, as history has shown us time and time again, change is inevitable. Power changes hands, and peace can become chaos with a single command. This is because, as humans, we adapt and change over time. For the Christian, this ability to adapt was, perhaps ironically, granted by an unchanging God who is unfettered by the constraints of time. Our laws and customs may change, but God remains a constant in the chaotic equation that represents our world. As a result, Christianity understands God to be a source of stability within a turbulent world often tossed about by change. God even transcends the concept of death, shattering one of the greatest limitations that can often throw our world into uncertainty and chaos. It is, in fact, God’s constancy that allows us to grow and survive despite change. Human institutions and civilizations may experience unfavorable changes, or even fail, but Christians believe that God sustains us through it all. God, in his power and immutability, sustains humanity in the midst of societal upheaval. The civilizations that survive are those that are willing to change and adapt in order to provide for the needs of God’s creation rather than those that only seek godhood for powerful individuals. The changing needs and desires of the people are reflected by social change, ranging from the authoritative level to the households of regular civilians. Ideas regarding the appropriate means for interacting with one another, political institutions, and the environment continuously fluctuate. We, the members of The Dartmouth Apologia, invite you, the reader, to journey with us throughout these pages, exploring the question of human nature, the fallibility of mortal institutions, the problem of tolerance in the modern era, and the Christian approach to mental health. Some articles look into the distant past while others focus on our modern world. Nevertheless, these articles all share the same mission: to inform, to propose, and to create discussion on a campus dominated by social change and religious uncertainty. We hope to provide a wide variety of insights and perspectives that reflect the expansive, complex nature of a loving God, a beautiful world, and the diverse population that inhabits it.
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 and back cover by Kevin Soraci ’18
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.
Spring 2017, Volume 11, Issue 2
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 Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17 Eddie Pyun ’18 Keenan Wood ’18 Samuel Ching ’19 India Perdue ’19 Sonia Rowley ’19 Business Manager Peter O'Leary ’19 Production Manager Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17 Production Staff Rachel Matsumoto ’19 Lynette Long ’20 Photography Kevin Soraci ’18 Contributors Josh Alexakos ’17 Keenan Wood ’18 Lynette Long ’20 Jeffrey Poomkudy ’20 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 © 2017 The Dartmouth Apologia.
INTERVIEW: 2
The Evidence for Christ’s Resurrection Dr. Gary Habermas, Ph. D. Liberty University
HUMANITY REDEEMED: 8
A Biblical Vision for Humanity
Josh Alexakos ’17
VEGANISM AND THE 14 CHRISTIAN RESPONSE Lynette Long ’20
BREAD OF LIFE: 18
Why Some Christians Believe the Eucharist is Literally Jesus Marissa Le Coz ’17
WHY STATES FAIL: 26
Lessons from Augustine
Jeffrey Poomkudy ’20
POSTMODERNISM AND THE 32 PARADOX OF TOLERANCE Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17
THE SEPARATION BETWEEN 40 CHURCH AND STATE IN AMERICA Sara Holston ’17
THE HEART OF MENTAL HEALTH 44 Jake Casale ’17
HEAVEN, HELL, AND TIME: 52
Marbles, Rivers, and Choice Keenan Wood ’18
T
he Dartmouth Apologia exists to articulate Christian perspectives in the academic community.
A JOURNAL OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT
The Evidence for Christ’s Resurrection
Resurrection of Christ by Giovanni Bellini, between 1475 and 1479
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conducted by Luke Dickens
A Q&A with Gary Habermas
Gary Habermas (Ph.D., Michigan State University) is the author, coauthor, or editor of more than 40 books, of which over 20 concern various aspects of Jesus’ resurrection. Other subjects include near-death experiences, religious doubt, and personal suffering. He has also contributed more than 70 chapters or articles to additional books, plus well over 100 articles and reviews to journals and other publications. He has been a Visiting or Adjunct Professor at some 15 different graduate schools and seminaries in the US and abroad, having taught dozens of graduate courses in those venues. Currently, he is Distinguished Research Professor, teaching in the Ph.D. program at Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary. He is also Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Liberty University, where he has taught since 1981. Q: In the book you coauthored with Michael Licona, The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus, you mention that the “Minimal Facts” approach does not require a defense of the reliability of the New Testament text, but rather only rests on “those data that are so strongly attested historically that they are granted by nearly every scholar who studies the subject, even the rather skeptical ones.” What characterizes the “Minimal Facts” approach? A: Before I answer your question, I would like to clarify that these “strongly attested” historical facts may come from the New Testament, but only if they are individually well-established and then allowed by critical scholars, not because critics think that the NT is generally thought to be reliable or inspired. Now, the Minimal Facts Argument is an approach, or a method; it is not a theology or a system. It is a method to use with a system. And the point of the Minimal Facts method is that, when making a case for the Resurrection of Jesus, you use only those facts that have two characteristics: 1) most importantly, each fact that is used is attested by multiple evidences (in other words, there are many reasons that argue for the facticity of each one), and 2) as a result, almost all critical scholars, say some 90% or more, will grant the facticity of those historical claims. Many skeptics who have encountered our approach have accused Mike and me of committing the fallacy from authority. This simply is not true— it happens to be a useful side benefit that the wellevidenced facts we use enjoy very widespread scholarly support. Still, we do not argue that since these claims enjoy such support, they are therefore true. The Minimal Facts approach has been somewhat successful in that critics have, as one scholar said, fewer and fewer boulders to hide behind. So even if many critics were to stop granting the facticity of these data, what remains are the good arguments in favor of each fact that I use. If critics decide later that they no longer
want to grant these facts, they are still going to have to explain the evidences that support them, and that will be very difficult for them. That is why they are currently accepted as historical facts. Q: Are certain New Testament scholars really shifting away from granting facts that they previously granted? A: In only a few cases now, some critics seem to be pulling back a little, as if they were getting too close to the resurrection itself. For years I have told my Ph.D. students that I think we are going to see more of this, with critics starting to grow “iffy” about facts that they previously had been on record as having accepted. If they do not like where the data are heading, what else can they do? Perhaps they feel that they are losing the debate. It’s hard to say. Q: Given those two criteria that you mentioned earlier, what historical claims about Jesus’ final days would qualify as minimal facts? A: I sometimes use slightly different numbers of facts, like five to seven, depending on those with whom I am conversing, because critical scholars actually affirm more than just my short list. If I were to choose six facts, I would generally take these: (1) Jesus died due to the rigors of crucifixion. (2) Afterwards the disciples had experiences that they believed were appearances of the risen Jesus. There is hardly a critical scholar out there who will not concede these initial two facts: the crucifixion and the fact that the disciples had some kind of real experience are as widely admitted as are any New Testament facts. (3) As a result, the disciples proclaimed the resurrection of Jesus at a very early date. If Jesus was crucified in 30 A.D., then this material began to be preached almost immediately. James D. G. Dunn, as influential as any New Testament scholar today, states that it
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While many people’s lives are transformed by religious beliefs, and a lot of people die for teachings that are actually false, though they think they are true, we will have to look hard throughout history for anybody who dies willingly for what they know to be a lie. didn’t take any longer than a few months after the crucifixion for the proclamation of the risen Christ to be formalized into a creedal tradition. Larry Hurtado, another exceptionally well-known scholar, states that the resurrection preaching began just days after the crucifixion. (4) The disciples’ lives were turned upside-down: they were transformed. While many people’s lives are transformed by religious beliefs, and a lot of people die for teachings that are actually false, though they think they are true, we will have to look hard throughout history for anybody who dies willingly for what they know to be a lie. You can find numerous examples of people dying for what they believed to be true, but not for what they know to be false. So someone could ask, “Ok, what’s the difference between the disciples and everyone else who died for their faith?” The difference is that the disciples are the only ones on earth to know whether or not they most likely saw the risen Jesus. The disciples are the only ones who know best what the original experiences were, and they were so sure that it was actually the risen Jesus that, as far as we know, none of them recanted and they all were willing to die for their faith. Of the “big four”—Peter, John, James the brother of Jesus, and Paul—we have first century martyrdom accounts for three of the four.
a minimal fact (which is our first rule), but it does not meet the threshold of, say, 90% acceptance by scholars. The acceptance figure for the empty tomb is more like 75% of recent critical scholars. However, it is possible that there are as many or more evidences for the empty tomb than there are for any of the minimal facts. First of all, the reason that is most-recently cited by most critical scholars as the strongest is the fact that the first witnesses to the empty tomb were women. The reason that really strikes home with critics is this: the four Gospel authors, writing in far different locations around the Mediterranean, all mentioned that the women were the first witnesses to the empty tomb. Now, if I am trying to convince you a generation later that the tomb was empty why would I say, “The women did it?” Carolyn Osiek, an authority on GrecoRoman culture, states that given the attitude of the entire Mediterranean world, female testimony was
(5) Saul of Tarsus, alias Paul the former persecutor, came to believe in Jesus Christ as his Lord because he also thought he had witnessed an appearance of the risen Jesus. (6) James, the brother of Jesus, another previous unbeliever, came to Christ after he also experienced what he thought was an appearance of the risen Christ. Q: In The Case for the Resurrection, you separated the claim regarding whether Jesus’ tomb was empty or not from the other minimal facts. So what sort of positive evidence for the historicity of the empty tomb would you put forth if talking to a skeptic? A: Let me make a clarification as to why in that book Mike Licona and I kept the empty tomb in the discussion, without actually counting it as one of the minimal facts. Our reason for this is that the empty tomb is certainly well-enough evidenced to be Burial of Christ by Carl Heinrich Bloch, 19th century
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So why did all four authors attest that the female testimony came first? The answer is that they reported the truth: the women were indeed the initial witnesses. not well-received in legal situations, especially if male testimony was available. So, if you have a choice, take the male testimony. So why did all four authors attest that the female testimony came first? The answer is that they reported the truth: the women were indeed the initial witnesses. So it is almost impossible to imagine the same story being told in roughly four different geographical areas if the women were not the first who went to the tomb and found it empty. Critics find this very compelling. Another argument that is probably just as good is what Licona and I call “the Jerusalem Factor.” The basic idea here is that because Jesus was buried in Jerusalem, and that this is also where the apostolic preaching began, critics would simply need to walk over to the tomb to determine whether it was empty, or whether it contained the corpse of a crucifixion victim. If they wanted to destroy the Christian message, they simply needed to exhume a corpse. Now critics sometimes make an intriguing
comeback. They will say, “Well according to your own book, Acts, the disciples didn’t even preach the resurrection for 50 days at Pentecost; and in 50 days, the body wouldn’t be recognizable.” Well, Mike and I have both talked to pathologists, the ones who examine dead bodies, and they have said that the corpse would still be recognizable after 50 days, even in a Middle Eastern Spring climate. Furthermore, note that the New Testament proclaims that Jesus’ tomb was empty. So if someone found any body in the tomb, the Christians lose. You don’t have to prove it is Jesus: any body in the tomb refutes the disciples’ message. So those are the two best reasons. A third would be that we have multiple independent sources for the empty tomb. As ancient historian Paul Maier of Western Michigan University states, many things in the ancient world are based on one source—a single source. Christians have several independent sources for the empty tomb, as well as the sermon summary in Acts 13—that’s four to five sources the way critical scholars count. Then if Paul implied it in the prePauline creed in First Corinthians 15:3-4, that makes at least five sources. Q: How would you respond to those who maintain that Matthew and Luke used Mark as a source? A: I personally have no problem with that. So let’s say that Matthew and Luke often got their material from Mark—then on those occasions, that would count as just one source. John counts as a second one. The Acts 13 sermon summary, which Bart Ehrman dates to about a year or two after the crucifixion—would then be a third source for the empty tomb. Ehrman and others count the Gospel of Peter as another source for the historical Jesus, and hence for the empty tomb. So if Paul implies the empty tomb in his chief prePauline creed—that makes five. So even if Matthew and Luke drew from Mark, we have at least four or five sources. But on the empty tomb, many critical scholars count either two or even three sources from the Synoptic Gospels, since in this case there appears to be some deviation from Mark, in which case there could be between six and seven independent sources for the empty tomb reports. Q: How do the six minimal facts you mentioned, plus the empty tomb, cohere to provide evidence for the Christian Resurrection narrative?
Resurrection of Christ and Women at the Tomb by Fra Angelico, 1440-1441
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Conversion of St Paul on the Road to Damascus by Hans Speckaert, between 1570 and 1577
A: If we used the historical facts that confirm the six Minimal Facts plus the empty tomb, these data alone can establish the heart of the historical Christian Gospel message, refute the major naturalistic theories that come against this message, and thirdly, do all of this with what we might term the lowest common denominator (or minimal number) of evidences. What fascinates me is that some of the best-known atheist and agnostic New Testament scholars will grant all or almost all these data. The vast majority of these specialists will usually grant at least the six Minimal Facts, while some also admit all six plus the empty tomb. In fact, until recently, Bart Ehrman granted all of these facts, but he has since pulled back from the additional fact of the empty tomb. He still states in one of his latest books that while Jesus’ resurrection cannot be proven historically, neither can it be disproven historically, either! Q: When seeking to explain, say, the disciples’ belief that they had witnessed the resurrected Jesus, the literature I have read suggests that skeptics are not in accord with each other about which naturalistic explanation is most plausible. Is there some truth to that?
A: Yes, that is certainly the case. For example, Ehrman, if I am not mistaken, used to hold the hallucination hypothesis, whereas in his latest books, he indicates that he no longer holds that position. He writes that he is not going to pick a naturalist theory at all. It is incredible that he is not going in that direction, if the evidence for an alternative view is more likely, as he also states. Of course, other critical scholars do prefer natural theories. In a dialogue with an atheist college professor a long time ago, I remarked, “Well, I’m a supernaturalist, and I think God raised Jesus from the dead. You are the atheist, so why don’t you tell me what you think happened?” The professor responded that he was not going to answer that question. He continued with something quite revealing, like: “If I pick a natural theory, you are going to train your guns on that point and I am going to be in a corner.” When I pushed, though, he did pick a theory—one of the very worst, I may add. After noting problems with his view, I responded, “If you cannot pick a theory that doesn’t leave you without a way out, who’s got the best case here?” He finally said, “As far as I am concerned, we’re done. This dialogue is over right now!” This is not usually the way these dialogues go, but responses like
He writes that he is not going to pick a naturalist theory at all. It is incredible that he is not going in that direction, if the evidence for an alternative view is more likely, as he also states. Of course, other critical scholars do prefer natural theories. 6 • The Dartmouth Apologia • Spring 2017
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If I were a naturalist, near-death experiences—NDEs—would really bother me. They are one of the best ways to argue for supernaturalism. this seem to point out that the naturalistic arguments that seek to explain the Minimal Facts plus the empty tomb can be in trouble. Q: How do near-death experiences come to bear on questions of supernaturalism versus naturalism? Can naturalism explain such experiences? A: If I were a naturalist, near-death experiences— NDEs—would really bother me. They are one of the best ways to argue for supernaturalism. There are now over 300 published NDE reports that present evidence that the person experiencing the NDE presented truthful reports that he or she witnessed within the operating room or even from many miles away. Also, in over 30 of these cases, the individual has no measureable brain or heart activity, and yet can report things sometimes immediately, which are then confirmed. The existence of such experiences is powerful evidence for an initial look into supernatural realities. However, they are not miraculous, since NDEs seem to be what normally happens to humans at the end of life. Q: Are there some examples of NDEs that stand out to you?
A: Here are some evidential categories for NDEs that I have mentioned recently. Some skeptics want cases that present strong evidence for NDEs from inside the operating room—information on machine dials or properly reading a number near the ceiling. There are dozens of these cases. Many of the best-evidenced NDE cases come from evidential reports from outside the room, anywhere from down the hall to many miles away. There are cases of NDEs from blind persons, even the congenitally blind, who properly report something that they experienced. Some NDErs claim to have seen deceased relatives or friends who have been dead for years, concerning which various sorts of confirmed information was learned. There are NDE reports that are apparently witnessed by more than one person, where healthy people not close to death (perhaps inside the room with the NDEr), apparently witness the same supernatural events that the NDEr claims to have seen. Once I had a dialogue with a prominent skeptical scholar who refused to discuss this topic, apparently because it was potentially troublesome for his naturalistic view. This is the sort of data I mentioned above that would make me very uneasy if I were a naturalist today.
Near-Death Experience Illustration by Jesse Kraub, 2016
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O Humanity Redeemed: A Biblical Vision for Humanity By Josh Alexakos
ne of the challenging realities of being human is the difficult but inescapable actuality of interacting with other humans. The difficulties arise because people are enigmatic. At our best, we can be selfless, creative, and loving, improving upon even the highest of our ideals. At the same time, we can easily be selfish, lazy, and hateful, shocking our collective conscience with destructive and vile acts that suggest that we are in a historical race to the bottom. The distance between both of these points is vast, yet this range has existed throughout human history. The question then arises: how do we understand ourselves? This article argues that the best way to understand humans is through two of the major ideas in the biblical narrative: we are created in the image of God, with all the abilities, privileges, and responsibilities that this fact entails, and that we are also fallen beings who exist in a fallen world, simultaneously aware of our own moral shortcomings yet frustratingly unable to prevent those failings fully. Undoubtedly this claim is contentious, and so this article will operate in three stages. First, there will be an explanation of the idea of the image of God and what it means for humanity. Second, there will be an account of the fall of humanity and its implications, both public and private. Third, this article will offer a biblical solution: individual and communal renewal through the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ and the continual reorientation and reformation found in his church. Each of these points could be argued at book length, let alone all three in an article, but a basic introduction will at least be helpful in understanding why many believe the Bible makes the best case for an accurate and full anthropology. Creation (Imago Dei) So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.i
Genesis 1, the opening chapter of both the Christian Bible and the Hebrew scriptures, begins in a manner that was both familiar to those in the Ancient Near East and contemporaneously radical. It has all the signs of an Ancient Near Eastern creation account, but it also challenges much of the philosophy found in competing stories, such as the Babylonian work, Enuma Elish.ii One of the most shocking differences in the Bible is the role humanity is created to play. Genesis claims that humans are created in the image of God, granting them immense distinction within the created order. God bestows on humanity incredible privilege and status, as well as significant responsibility—we Christ the Redeemer at Sunset by By Lima Andruška, 2011
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A coffee farmer in rural Brazil from the United States Agency for International Development, 2008
are divine image-bearers. Thus, irrespective of worldly stature or accomplishment, every human is worthy of respect and love.iii For example, our modern concept of human rights—that each individual, regardless of any identifying factor, has certain inalienable rights—
to fruition. This is why we are especially important in comparison to other living things—we have a chief role to play in creation as image-bearers. These dual realities of the image of God—our value and our mandate—are key to this discussion not just because they make claims about how human society should ultimately look, but also because we are subconsciously aware of these realities. Underlying all the social progress over the past century is the belief that dignity is innate in all of us—that all humans have worth, regardless of apparent inequalities (e.g. social, cultural, physical, or intellectual). The way we aspire to live is also evidence of the image of God. Humans desire to see justice done, to see mercy shown, to live in communities, and to do good. There lies within us a strong sense of wrong and right, to live morally in a just society. Instinctive in all of us is also a desire to create: to write books, to build homes, to paint landscapes, to cultivate gardens, to knit clothing, to teach the young, to make music. Creation is such a natural tendency because we find ourselves dissatisfied with the state of things and seek to improve it. Even though we may joke about the drudgery and dislike we have towards work, we often find that without work we lose a sense of purpose. This is often seen when those who retire find themselves longing to get back to work, to do something with their time that feels productive. All three of these intuitive realities find a logical underpinning in the image of God, which illuminates why we exist with a sense of significance, a
God creates humanity in his image for a vocation: to rule the creation well while reflecting God’s goodness throughout it. is derivative of the Imago Dei. There is a clear line that can be drawn from this idea of divine image bearing to ideas of human dignity and individual worth.iv This value, however, does not come alone. Immediately after God creates humanity in his image, he gives the archetypal couple, Adam and Eve, a “Creation Mandate”: “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”v God creates humanity in his image for a vocation: to rule the creation well while reflecting God’s goodness throughout it. Old Testament scholar John Walton puts it well: “The idea that people would ‘subdue’ and ‘rule’ is based on the idea that they would have a continuing role as God’s vice-regents (in his image) to preserve order and to extend it under God.”vi Humans have a role to play in furthering God’s work to order his creation and allow it to bring goodness and beauty
sense of moral truth, and a sense of purpose. The Fall Now the serpent was more crafty than any other beast of the field that the LORD God had made. He said to the woman, “Did God actually say, ‘You shall not eat of any tree in the garden?’”vii
Sadly, the story does not end in Genesis 1. The Fall, as it is known in the Judeo-Christian tradition, allows for sin to enter into the world and corrupt God’s creation. The effects are ubiquitous, touching all aspects of existence and leaving nothing unmarred. Ontologically, sin is not a substance per se. Rather, it is a constant perversion of God’s creation, a ceaseless disordering of the creational order. Within humanity it is both personal, affecting each of our lives individually, and societal, affecting human societies and institutions. Nothing is left untouched by sin. The easiest way to understand sin, however, is
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A bright light beams out on Adam and Eve from behind the tree of knowledge by J. Haeyler, c. 1580
to see it through the binary of order and disorder. In ancient Jewish cosmology, the world as God created it was seen as ordered in a certain way, such that creation flourished and things functioned in the proper manner. Sin is a distortion of that equilibrium, such that things are out of place and not acting as they should be. To illustrate this reality, consider a symphony orchestra. All the instruments produce vastly different sounds, yet when played according to the sheet music, those sounds work symbiotically to produce a masterpiece. However, should any instrument play outside the sheet music, the sound produced would be cacophonous. Such is God’s creation. When the different parts are working interdependently, they produce the work of art that is expected of God’s handiwork. But when there is disorder, creation loses much of its inherent
Biddle highlights how sin uniquely affects humans: “The biblical model sees sin as the disequilibrium pervasive in a system in disarray… Authentic human existence… aspires to realize its full potential of godlikeness while consistently acknowledging its creatureliness and limitations. Sin is disequilibrium in this aspiration: humanity failing to reflect its divine calling, humanity forgetting its limitations.”ix Biddle notes the beginning point of sin: idolatry—an attempt to make ourselves god, to subvert the creational order and put ourselves at the pinnacle. Idolatry can only ever lead to disaster, as humanity’s limits outweigh its abilities. It is analogous to a child demanding to be President of the United States: the child is simply wholly unfit for the role, incapable of managing the many burdens and responsibilities. Much in the same
Idolatry can only ever lead to disaster, as humanity’s limits outweigh its abilities. beauty.viii And humans, tragically, play a large role in this continued distortion of God’s creation. Because of our role as image-bearers, as vice-regents of God’s creation, our initial work to unfold God’s creation and continue to rightly order it was corrupted. Rather than furthering God’s goodness and ordering in the world, our attempts to do so tend to bring more disorder into God’s creation. The Old Testament scholar Mark
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way, we have told God to hand us the reins, yet we are even more unqualified than the child is. A brief exploration of human history bears out the biblical claims. Often, despite our best efforts, we have caused more destruction in our attempts to rule than we have when we wisely noted our own flaws and cautiously attempted to build societies with those in mind. The reality of a fallen humanity may be most evident in the times when we have aspired to achieve
The Last Judgment by Otto III., c. 1000
utopia, a sort of “bringing heaven to earth.” The horrors of the Third Reich, for instance, are so abhorrent that they are universally seen as embodiments of true evil. Even certain achievements hide great sins. The success of the United States economically and culturally is often hailed as a great victory for humanity, yet we quickly forget the despicable realities of chattel slavery and the near total annihilation of indigenous peoples that occurred for centuries. Sociologist James Davison Hunter says that the Creation Mandate, the calling that God gave to humanity, should be “a source of shame because of the astonishing abuse of that potential in acts of exploitation and destruction.”x Ultimately, the biblical truth and the historical record agree that humans have never escaped their own sinfulness in any of their endeavors. With these two truths—humanity as image bearers, but as fallen ones—questions arise: Where do we go from here? Is there hope for humanity? Or are we forever destined to a Sisyphean struggle in our attempts to engage in something truly good and beautiful?
God comes into the world in the flesh to rescue humanity and provide us with a true image of what humans should look like. The Bible does not just offer a holistic picture of humanity; it also provides a solution. And it is here that we find the answer to the problem of sin and the Bible’s new vision for humanity. Christ’s life is a powerful statement of full humanity, an example of what it looks like to truly image God. He heals the sick and injured, preaches a radical ethic of selflessness, halts the storm, and even raises the dead.xii These acts, when seen in light of the order/disorder binary discussed previously, are acts of ordering the creation, returning it back to a state of shalom, or great peacefulness and harmony. These are acts that show what the new vocation of humanity must be: ordering the disorder of creation to usher in the new creation, the “Kingdom of God.” This is a world in which the people of God act in all spheres of human life—in our personal relationships, in our communities, and in our governments—to help bring back creation rightly ordered. We must play a new role: establishing just governments, helping the poor and sick, advocating for the outsiders, and showing love to all, even our enemies. In short, we must become new creations. The problem of sin is the biggest impediment to fulfilling this vision. God solves this tension himself, by dying on the cross for us. In Jesus, God acts to reconcile us to himself by confronting the evils of this world and freeing us from our slavery to them by “nailing [our record of debt] to the cross,” thus “forgiving us all our trespasses” and freeing us to be who we are supposed to be as image-bearers.xiii The biblical scholar N.T. Wright sums it up: “The purpose of forgiving sins…is to enable people to become fully functioning, fully image-bearing human beings within
Redemption For in [Jesus] all the fullness of God was pleased to dwell, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether on earth or in heaven, making peace by the blood of his cross.xi
The climax of the Bible is reached in the gospels, the four accounts of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection.
The Sermon on the Mount by Carl Heinrich Bloch, 1877
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God’s world, already now, completely in the age to come.”xiv The Bible sees sin as a disorienting force, one that enslaves us to evil spiritual forces. When we sin, it is like choosing to give ourselves over as slaves to those forces and allowing them to dominate us. We are captured by the forces of sin, and thus we cannot get rid of sin entirely even if we wanted to. Yet on the cross Jesus frees us from our chains by canceling the debt with his own death. We can thus be free of our past failures and shortcomings, wrong decisions, and even evil acts. Jesus’ resurrection on the third day announces that the Kingdom of God has come, a kingdom in which we work as the new people we are.
story of the whole world.” Our imaginations need to be restored, recalibrated, and realigned by an affective immersion in the story of God in Christ reconciling the world to himself. That’s what intentional, historic Christian worship does.xvi
Christian worship, the heart of the church, provides the reorientation that our hearts need to focus us back on God and his purpose for us in this world. It re-locates ourselves in the story of God, who has redeemed us and works through us to bring his purposes about. Thus, we need the church in order to be the people God calls us to be. It is a safe-haven in difficult times, a hospital in shameful times, a place of reformation in
Jesus frees us from our chains by canceling the debt with his own death. We can thus be free of our past failures and shortcomings, wrong decisions, and even evil acts. Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection are the climax of the story, but they are not the end of the story. The tension of our day and age—nicknamed by theologians as the “already but not yet”xv—is that despite Jesus’ accomplishments, which have won the victory, we still live in a world in which sin is rampant and evil spiritual forces work to corrupt and enslave us. How can we become who we were always meant to be and who we can be through Jesus, if we have to battle sin until the day we die? The Bible again speaks: the Holy Spirit working through the Christian church. Of course, many questions arise from this statement: “But what about the evils of the church, like the Crusades? What about all the religious wars? What about all the hypocrisy?” While these are valid concerns, there are two points to be made in response. First, these examples validate the reality of a sinful and fallen world. The fact that humans are capable of taking teachings such as “turn the other cheek” and distorting those to allow for atrocities seems to indicate that a radical perversion occurs in all human institutions because of human nature. Second, the failings of the church in the past do not define the church in its entirety: throughout its history the church had provided moral vocabulary (e.g. to fight slavery), helped the poor, fed the hungry, and clothed the naked. And as the philosopher James K.A. Smith has argued, the mission of the church is embodied in Christian worship itself: …innovaters and restorers and makers and designers also need the church to be an imagination station, a space for rehabituating our imagination to the “true
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all times, and so much more. Simply put, Christians need the church. Conclusion The Bible ends with a vision of the future, the new creation—a place so beautiful that it seems to be, in some ways, everything we long to one day be a part of. It is worth quoting at length: Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of
The reconstructed medieval Church of St. George in Kyustendil, Bulgaria by Plamen Agov, 2011
heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband. And I heard a loud voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling place of God is with man. He will dwell with them, and they will be his people, and God himself will be with them as their God. He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.” And said, new.” these
he who was seated on the throne “Behold, I am making all things Also he said, “Write this down, for words are trustworthy and true.”xvii
Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, bright as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb through the middle of the street of the city; also, on either side of the river, the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, yielding its fruit each month. The leaves of the tree were for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be anything accursed, but the throne of God and of the Lamb will be in it, and his servants will worship him. They will see his face, and his name will be on their foreheads. And night will be no more. They will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be their light, and they will reign forever and ever.xviii
Until the day comes where these words are reality, Christians push forward, with a vision of humanity’s purpose laid out by the Bible and a belief that the Holy Spirit works in the church, bringing transformation daily. The Bible models an image of humanity that corresponds well to the world as we see it. When we see the incredible things humans have produced— skyscrapers, systems of justice, musical compositions that bring us to tears—we can often find ourselves amazed by our own creative abilities. But we also see the distortion in our work: human-caused climate change, the justice systems that discriminate against the marginalized and vulnerable, and even the hurt we can cause in our own actions towards others. If the Bible provides an anthropological theory that explains the complex realities of humanity, then perhaps it is worth revisiting the solution it offers.
Irony, Tragedy, and Possibility of Christianity in the Late Modern World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 94. iv. For more on this, see Larry Siedentop, Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press 2014). v. Genesis 1:28 (ESV). vi. John H. Walton, The Lost World of Adam and Eve: Genesis 2-3 and the Human Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, an imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2015), 109. vii. Genesis 3:1 (ESV). viii. For more on the ancient Jewish cosmology and worldview, see Peter J. Leithart, Delivered From the Elements of the World: Atonement, Justification, Mission (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, an imprint of InterVarsity Press, 2016). ix. Mark E. Biddle, Missing the Mark: Sin and Its Consequences in Biblical Theology (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2005), xii-xiii. Originally found in The Lost World of Adam and Eve, 142. x. Hunter, 99. xi. Colossians 1:19-20 (ESV). xii. See Mark 3:1-6, Matthew 5-7, Mark 4:35-40, and John 11:38-44. xiii. Colossians 2:14; Colossians 2:13 (ESV). xiv. N. T. Wright, The Day the Revolution Began: Reconsidering the Meaning of Jesus’s Crucifixion (San Francisco: HarperOne, 2016), 155. xv. For a brief explanation of this idea, see Daniel Dunlap, “Living in the Tension,” Ligonier Ministries, 1 May 1992, <http://www.ligonier.org/learn/articles/ living-in-the-tension>. xvi. James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: the Spiritual Power of Habit (Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, a division of Baker Publishing Group, 2016), 180. Emphasis added. xvii. Revelation 21:1-5a (ESV). xviii. Revelation 22:1-5 (ESV).
Genesis 1:27 (ESV). For more on this, see John H. Walton, The Lost World of Genesis One: Ancient Cosmology and the Origins Debate (Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 2009). iii. James Davison Hunter, To Change the World: The i.
ii.
Josh Alexakos ’17 is from Hingham, Massachusetts. He is a Government major.
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Veganism & the Christian Response A Question of Compatibility By Lynette Long
M
odern Western society is often critiqued for being superficial. For many people in the United States, there is a sense that they reside in an age of material excess where instant gratification means frivolous waste—both in a temporal and physical sense. Conveniently processed foods, branded consumerism, and environmentally destructive behaviors substantially contribute to this socially-conditioned trend. In many ways, veganism is a symbolic push against this excess in American culture. While not every vegan is motivated by asceticism, many in the movement carry the message of simplifying life in a sustainable way by cutting out meat from their diets. Statistics show that the processing and manufacturing of animal products unnecessarily consumes a large portion of the world’s fresh water, increases the production of greenhouse gases, and adversely affects the health of a country where heart disease is the number one killer.i Furthermore, there is an ethical component to the conversation. Vegans argue that consumers of animal products sacrifice several moral considerations by indirectly supporting the factory farming and laboratory testing models, where male chicks are shredded alive, cows are artificially inseminated, and caged monkeys are driven mentally insane from lack of environmental stimulation.ii Because of this reactionary ethos, veganism comes with a lot of misconceptions. For one, mentioning the word “vegan” causes people to conjure up images of oversensitive hippies who never kill mosquitoes and subsist on salad leaves alone. For another, people often associate veganism with a radical form of social
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Green Lake by Lynette Long, 2016
liberalism, since similar movements commonly operate in similar locales. For Christians who value tradition and are skeptical of subversive movements, veganism is instinctually unpalatable and seems contrary to their faith. This article will serve to clear up some of the misconceptions by focusing on the core principles of veganism, subsequently showing how the essence of the movement is compatible with Christianity. While this short article will not advocate absolute conversion to the vegan lifestyle, it will show the potential for ideological partnership between veganism and Christianity. First, I will investigate the reasoning of the early church fathers who rejected the consumption of meat. Next, I will outline supporting scriptural passages that point to God’s depiction of a perfect world—with veganism as the ideal diet. I will then explicate why a Christian understanding of veganism does not condemn meat-eaters. Finally, I will reiterate the values of respect and love, ultimately calling for tolerance and unity at the discussion’s close.iii There exists both logical reasoning and preference behind the imposition of an unorthodox dietary restriction. Several early church fathers and other prominent Christians made their philosophical views publicly known. The plea “[o]h, God, enlarge within us the sense of fellowship with all living things, our brothers the animals to whom Thou gavest the earth in common with us” is widely attributed to Saint Basil.iv In addition, Saint John Chyrsostom in the Homilies explained that we ought to be kind and gentle to the animals primarily because they originate from the same divine creator as humans.v Both church
and contextualize this claim, in Genesis 1:30, God declared, “[t]o all the beasts of the earth and all the birds in the sky and all the creatures that move along the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.” So, in the perfect Garden of Eden which God himself deemed good, humans and other animals were herbivores whether those creatures are known presently to us as carnivorous, herbivorous, or omnivorous. Interestingly, it was only after the Great Flood, when God cleansed the world of its most wicked inhabitants and after most plant life was destroyed, that God allowed meat consumption. Likewise, in heaven, again rendered a place of perfect good, no killing or suffering of any kind is permitted. In the book of Isaiah, the prophet describes heaven as a place where:
Schussenreied Chorgestuhl Basilius by Andreas Praefcke, 1715
members sought to honor creation by fulfilling the uniquely human mission of caring for animals and the earth. Such understanding was further developed by later Christians. For instance, Leo Tolstoy posited if a man is “seriously seeking to live a good life, the first thing from which he will abstain will always be the use of animal food.”vi Based on his advocacy for non-violence and passive resistance, it makes sense that his sentiment extended equal regard to all sentient species. In addition to these characters, many others purportedly abstained to some extent from eating meat, including Ellen G. White, John Wesley, Saint Jerome, Francis of Assisi, C.S. Lewis, Saint Clement of Alexandria, and Tertullian. This view was not unanimous, however. Church thinkers such as Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas were skeptical about the merits of veganism. Particularly, the former had concerns that practices like veganism were superstitious and heretical. In City of God, he associated veganism with the Manichaeans, a gnostic religious group that believed in moral dualism, who interpreted the commandment “Do not murder” to apply to animals. Augustine argued that this interpretation lacked the scriptural basis and context to apply to animals. He determined that the interpretation distorted God’s actual intention for the Ten Commandments to apply strictly to moral agents, humans. The Church Fathers’ generally favorable view of rejecting meat, however, is not completely unfounded—it is plausible to think that the biblical framework of creation supports their affirmation of veganism. Both heaven and Eden were intended as ideals—the former as an eternal dwelling place after death and the latter as a good, inhabitable place on earth. Initially, in Eden, animal meat and byproducts were not created for human consumption. To preface
The wolf will live with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and the yearling together; and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear, their young will lie down together, and the lion will eat straw like the ox. The infant will play near the cobra’s den, and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest. They will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain…vii
Veganism appears to be the only diet that is consistent with the descriptions of these two worlds, and it clearly would not exist in these ideal worlds if it were not consistent with God’s ideal plan. Even if the preceding verse is interpreted metaphorically to portray harmony among humans, it still shows that ridding harm between living beings is a worthy end. Ideal biblical worlds appear to be places where animal consumption does not occur. Moreover, the reasoning behind this conclusion rests on assessing the nature of God. He values animals—many of which display human-like characteristics like love, pain, and loyalty—as living reflections of the good. In Psalms, David states that the Lord saves both man and beast,viii and in Revelations 5:13 John implies that creatures in both heaven and earth praise the Lord. Though these passages can be interpreted figuratively, vegans do not commit heresy by interpreting them literally, nor are they mistaken in encouraging general peace. There are several shocking comparisons in Isaiah 66:3, where the prophet notes that “he who slaughters an ox is like one who kills a man; he who sacrifices a lamb, like one who breaks a dog’s neck…” In Proverbs 12:10, Solomon writes, “whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel.” Biblical text even contests the practice of animal sacrifice in the Old Testament with Isaiah 1:11, where God says, “I do not delight in the blood of bulls, or of lambs, or of goats.” Instead, in Hosea 6:6, God
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shows that he “desire[s] steadfast love and not sacrifice, the knowledge of God rather than burnt offerings.” Furthermore, Solomon authoritatively proffers in Proverbs 21:3 that “to do righteousness and justice is
from Adam and Eve fundamentally corrupted human nature. The allowance of omnivorous behavior, therefore, was a divine concession to human weakness and sinful taste, comparable to the ordainment of King
While Christianity prioritizes human life and gives humans dominion over creation, it also holds that humans are endowed with this power conditional on being responsible for the stewardship of God’s gifts. more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.” Without the necessity of animal sacrifice and death, carnivorous behavior can realistically disappear under the right circumstances without interjection from God. Since everything is from God, and reflects his majesty, his creation ought to be maintained in the best condition. While Christianity prioritizes human life and gives humans dominion over creation, it also holds that humans are endowed with this power conditional on being responsible for the stewardship of God’s gifts. Humans are called to protect rather than ruin creation under this pretext. For instance, genetic modification of crops can be beneficial at times, but only if blight and patent monopolization do not occur unbounded. Likewise, the use of natural resources is not necessarily sinful or evil, but only if creation is rightfully honored. Veganism is accordingly implicit through descriptions of the earth as originally designed and of heaven as portrayed in the Bible. The question for the Christian vegan, then, is whether the above framework entails that all nonvegans are sinners. That is not necessarily the case. Today, it is not cruel that the bear captures salmon in its jaws. Carnivorousness is certainly not prohibited, though the practice may arise as a post-Fall corruption. After Adam and Eve disobeyed God in the Garden, they fell from their original and perfect state into a broken one. Women had to go through labor; men had to toil; the serpent was confined to slithering. Most importantly, however, the introduction of sin
David Playing the Harp before King Saul by Charles Foster, 1897
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Saul for the people of Israel, the provision of quail among manna, and the implementation of divorce laws during Moses’ time.ix Veganism is a practice designed to emulate and embody the pre-Fall terrain in the present broken world. For the Christian vegan, advocacy for veganism is not voiced from explicit biblical justification or mandate; instead, its compatibility should be highlighted as a message of mercy and compassion. After all, the Bible suggests that each person should be fully convinced in her own mind regarding dietary practices.x Paul proposes sensitive and relative terms of preference, noting that nothing is unclean in itself but that something can be unclean for a particular person. xi Earlier, he writes that fellow Christians ought not treat others with contempt or judge them for their actions because God has accepted them. Christian vegans emphasize that moral judgment should not be passed on meat-eaters in our time.xii Nowhere in the Bible does God demand his people to be vegan. In fact, he ensured that meat consumption was completely rational and morally acceptable. Notwithstanding the ultimate allowance of meat consumption, Christians can still make a case for veganism based on personal conviction and ethical prudence to avoid meat, considering the biblical framework and the modern culture surrounding food. One way to illustrate this distinction is to consider the zero-waste movement. It may be prudent to minimize trash, protect the environment, and live frugally, but it is not a sin to produce waste. Both movements simply represent a personal choice about the way one would like to best live. Paul, in his letter to the Corinthians, notes, “‘all things are lawful,’ but not all things are helpful. ‘All things are lawful,’ but not all things build up.”xiii Often, the Christian vegan’s personal choice is to abstain from animal consumption because that is what best builds up the biblical ideal. While veganism does not equate to moral superiority, it is certainly a more conscious way of life. The movement symbolizes a stand against the material idolatry that Scripture explicitly warns about. It is a call to emulate the original design of creation, one that promotes harmony between all elements of God.
Above all, Christians should strive to glorify their creator and to act in love no matter what personal practices are assumed. By this rationale, veganism is an expressed desire to participate in divine nature itself. For many vegans who are concurrently Christian believers, they attempt to align their practices and faith daily by striving for what they believe is Christ-like behavior and by asceticism through food, an indescribably large part of human life. This practice is already prevalent in the Christian community—during Lent, for example, many Christians give up meat short-term. Origen observed that when Christians abstain, they do so to subject the body’s desires for uncleanness, inordinate affection, and evil concupiscence.xiv For all, peace and mutual edification are always worthy goals.xv Veganism seeks to reconnect human life with original creation. One action in line with this goal is to promote understanding among Christians of different habits, for this parallels the same attitude that vegans have toward animals. For example, Paul instructs Christians to “eat anything sold in the meat market without raising questions of consciousness.”xvi In Romans 14, he asks “who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.” Above all, Christians should strive to glorify their creator and to act in love no matter what personal practices are assumed. This sort of reasoning must extend to other areas of life, especially in a world as polarized as it is currently. The holdings of veganism are also reflected in this desire for peace and understanding between different Christian lifestyles. Today, perhaps, it is reasonable to encourage Christians to consume ethically-sourced animal products, like grass-fed beef or cage-free eggs. But in the so-called First World, these options are pricier. The choice to be vegan is a privilege, as is the zero-waste movement and the avoidance of sweat shop products. The effort to return to the natural in a modernizing world or purchase specialized goods is a luxury catered to a more affluent consumer base. Thus, veganism may not be feasible for everybody. Even if abstaining from meat is a luxury, though, it is a luxury grounded in good intentions. Veganism certainly ought not be idolized and based on legalism, which commonly results in disordered eating patterns. The stomach is not God. But many Christians subscribed to a sustainable vegan lifestyle believe in minimizing the suffering of creatures that humans were ordered to protect and govern, and at the same time, fall in line with the intended good and perfect wishes of a merciful God.
“Leading Causes of Death,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, last modified 7 October 2016, <https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/leadingcauses-of-death.htm>. ii. “Male Chicks Ground Up Alive at Egg Hatcheries,” CBC News, 1 September 2009, <http://www.cbc.ca/news/male-chicks-groundup-alive-at-egg-hatcheries-1.823644>; “Artificial Insemination Technique,” Penn State Extension, last modified 2003, <http://extension.psu.edu/ animals/dairy/health/reproduction/insemination/ artificial-insemination-technique>; Melinda Novak and Stephen Suomi, “Psychological Well-Being of Primates in Captivity,” Institute for Laboratory Animal Research 31, no. 3 (1989): 5-15. iii. For the record, vegetarianism and veganism will be addressed together under the title and common spirit of veganism. While vegetarianism is a less extreme approach in allowing the consumption of eggs and dairy products, there are similar rationales behind both practices. iv. Craig G. Bartholomew, “Creation and Natural History,” Where Mortals Dwell: A Christian View of Place for Today (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2011). v. Saint John Chrysostom, “Commentary on the Epistle to the Romans. Homily XXIX: Rom. 15. 1424,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Father of the Christian Church Vol. XI, ed. Philip Schaff (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1979), 546. vi. Leo Tolstoy, The First Step trans. Aylmer Maude (New York: H. Frowde, 1909), p. 91. vii. Isaiah 11: 6-9 (NIV). viii. Psalms 36:6-7 (NIV). ix. Genesis 9:3, Romans 14:21, 1 Samuel 8, and Numbers 11:4-10, 32-34 (NIV). x. Romans 14:5b (NIV). xi. Romans 14:14 (NIV). xii. Acts 10:12, Mark 7:19 (NIV). xiii. 1 Corinthians 10:23 (NIV). xiv. 1 Corinthians 9:27, Colossians 3:5, Romans 8:13 (NIV). xv. Romans 14:19 (NIV). i.
xvi.
1 Corinthians 10:25 (NIV).
Lynette Long ’20 is from Norman, Oklahoma. She is majoring in Government and Cognitive Science.
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Bread of Life: Why Some Christians Believe the Eucharist is Literally Jesus
Polski: Krzyż (etymologicznie z łac. crux) by Piotr Frydecki, 2013
By Marissa Le Coz
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Lord's cup and Bread. Fruit of the vine and bread by John Snyder, 2013
Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.i
T
he above verses spoken by Jesus in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John provide the basis for perhaps one of the most significant doctrinal differences distinguishing Catholic and Orthodox Christians from their Protestant sisters and brothers. While most Christians honor Christ’s command to celebrate his Last Supper of bread and wine “in remembrance” of him, the nature of this celebration has long been a matter of contention.ii At the Last Supper, Jesus said of the bread he had broken, “This is my body,” and of the wine he was to drink, “This is my blood.”iii Did Jesus transform the bread and wine into his actual body and blood and intend for us to do the same, as Catholics and Orthodox Christians believe? Did Jesus actually mean to instantiate a merely symbolic memorial, in accord with the notion that some Protestant denominations espouse? Or did Jesus intend some hybrid view, as still other Protestant groups have suggested? For Christians, this is a weighty question; Jesus says in the above passage that without eating his flesh and drinking his blood, we have “no life” in us, and that if we do eat his flesh and drink his blood, he abides in us. If the Catholic view is correct, then Protestants lack the gift of the Eucharist that Jesus intended for his followers to have; inversely, if Protestants are correct, then Catholics are guilty of idolizing an ordinary piece of bread as God. This article seeks to articulate and explain the Catholic belief that Jesus Christ is truly present in the bread
into the actual Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ, called the Eucharist.iv This transformation is known as transubstantiation.v The Council of Trent (1545-1563), held in response to the Protestant Reformation, affirmed belief in the Real Presence of the Eucharist by stating that “after the consecration of the bread and wine, our Lord Jesus Christ, true God and man, is truly, really, and substantially contained under the species of those sensible things.”vi The Real Presence of the Eucharist is most certainly a mind-boggling proposition—how could Jesus give us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink? This is not a new point of confusion; after Jesus spoke in John 6 of the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, some of his disciples left him, saying, “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?”vii Just as the human mind can never fully grasp God, the Holy Trinity, and certain other spiritual concepts, the Eucharist, too, ultimately remains a great mystery of faith. That does not mean, however, that Catholics do not have good reasons for believing in the Real Presence of the Eucharist. This article will apply Aristotle’s work to provide a framework for how the Real Presence is metaphysically intelligible, examine New and Old Testament evidence in support of the Real Presence, and investigate how early Christians interpreted Jesus’ assertions in John 6. But How? – Underpinnings in Aristotelian Metaphysics Over 300 years before the birth of Christ, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote and taught his students that all our classifications of things fall into one of two categories: a statement about the substance of an item or a statement about some accidental quality of an item.viii While substances identify individual objects in existence, accidents describe particular attributes of substances.ix (Note that in this context, accidental and
The Real Presence of the Eucharist is most certainly a mindboggling proposition—how could Jesus give us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink? and wine blessed in remembrance of him at Catholic Masses, a doctrine more formally known as the Real Presence of the Eucharist. For centuries the Catholic Church has taught that the words Jesus spoke at the Last Supper are to be taken literally when understood in the context of the verses from John 6 that open this article. In other words, Catholics believe that at Mass when the priest blesses (consecrates) the bread and wine as Jesus did at the Last Supper, by the grace of the Holy Spirit this ordinary food and this ordinary drink are transformed
accidents are philosophical terms that are unrelated to our everyday use of these words.) I, Marissa, would be an example of a substance, as I am an individual object in existence. The statement that I have brown hair and blue eyes gives information about some of my accidental properties. The important distinction between substances and accidents is that an item is its substance, while accidents are properties that “are said of ” or “exist in” some substance.x I can say that I am Marissa, but I cannot say that I have Marissa. Similarly,
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I can say that I have brown hair, but I cannot say that I am brown hair. Observing the world, we see that almost all changes in persistent items are purely accidental ones. Although my hair will someday change from brown to gray, my substance will not change; I will still be Marissa. If the Real Presence is true, however, a very different change seems to occur when the Eucharist is consecrated—namely, a change in substance but not accidents. In other words, if the Real Presence is true, then the substance of bread and wine must change to the substance of Christ, while the accidents of bread and wine remain the same, which our eyes tell us is the case. In the thirteenth century, the great Catholic priest, philosopher, and theologian St. Thomas Aquinas revived Aristotelian metaphysics in his discussion of Eucharistic theology and said just this. He wrote: Therefore He [God] can work not only formal [i.e., accidental] conversion, so that diverse forms succeed each other in the same subject; but also the change of all being, so that, to wit, the whole substance of one thing be changed into the whole substance of another. And this is done by Divine power in this sacrament; for the whole substance of the bread is changed into the whole substance of Christ’s body, and the whole substance of the wine into the whole substance of Christ’s blood. Hence this is not a formal, but a substantial conversion; nor is it a kind of natural movement: but, with a name of its own, it can be called “transubstantiation.”xi
An item’s transformation from one substance to another, which St. Thomas terms “transubstantiation,” is atypical in the Aristotelian worldview; as noted earlier, accidental changes are the common way the laws of nature work. According to Aristotle, the only changes in substance occur in the creation or destruction of items.xii St. Thomas argues that this unnatural transformation of substance that is neither creation nor destruction is indeed supernatural and miraculous, enacted by “divine power.” With this metaphysical framework for understanding how Christ could possibly be present in what appears to be ordinary bread and wine, we turn to the textual evidence for the Real Presence to illuminate why Catholics believe God would use his “divine power” to allow for transubstantiation. New Testament Evidence: A Closer Look at John 6 At the beginning of this article we discussed a few verses from John 6, where Jesus told his disciples about the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood (verses 53-56). Before Jesus said these words, he had made a similar statement in verse 35 as he was teaching a crowd of his disciples, claiming that he is the bread of life. This, verse 41 reads, prompted quarreling among some Jews who were listening. Rebuking them, Jesus said: “I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”xiii
In verse 52, some Jews who were listening then argued over whether a man could give them his flesh to eat. Jesus responded by saying, “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.”xiv Up to this point, the writer of the Gospel of John, who is believed by most scholars to be John of Jesus’ Twelve Apostles, uses the Greek verb phago to communicate the idea of “eating.”xv Starting in the very next verse, John begins using the Greek verb trogo, which can be more accurately translated as “to gnaw on” or “to chew on,” in the way that animals eat their prey.xvi This intensified language suggests that, due to his listeners’ incredulity regarding this teaching, Jesus wishes to emphasize that he truly means what he says:
Bust of Aristotle by Lysippos, 330 B.C.
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“Those who eat [trogo] my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; for my flesh is true food and my
Peter and James), goes on to write the Gospel of John and makes the verb choices we examined above. Also notable about Jesus’ discourse in John 6 is the fact that it was at the time of his penultimate Passover, as verse four of the chapter states, which brings us to another reason for Catholics’ belief in the Real Presence of the Eucharist.
Allegory of the Eucharist by Juan Correa, 1690
blood is true drink. Those who eat [trogo] my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats [trogo] me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which you ancestors ate [trogo], and they died. But the one who eats [trogo] this bread will live forever.”xvii
Because of what Jesus has said, in verse 66 many of his disciples leave him, and he lets them go. In verses 67 and 68, he asks his twelve apostles whether they, too, would like to leave, but they choose to remain with him. One of these steadfast apostles, John (a member of Jesus’ inner circle, along with the apostles
Old Testament Evidence: The Jewish Passover Transformed In chapter twelve of the Old Testament book of Exodus, God establishes the Jewish Passover as a sign of his covenant with the people of Israel. He tells the Israelites that he will strike down their enemy, the Egyptians, by killing the firstborn child in each household across the land. In order to have their own households “passed over,” the Israelites must follow the Passover ritual of slaughtering a year-old male lamb “without blemish” and putting some of its blood on the doorposts of their homes.xviii As verse eight states, they are then to eat the lamb that night as part of this ritual. The Lord commanded that the Israelites repeat this ceremony every year as a “perpetual ordinance,” celebrating the divine deliverance of the Israelites from the harsh rule of the Egyptians.xix Just as sacrificing a lamb delivered the Israelites from their enslavement by the Egyptians, so too did the sacrifice of Christ deliver humanity from the slavery of sin once and for all.xx This is why St. John the Baptist proclaims, “Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world!” when Jesus approaches him at the beginning of his public ministry.xxi On the first night of Passover circa 33 AD, Jesus celebrated the Passover meal (his Last Supper) saying of the bread, “Take, eat; this is my body,” and saying of the wine, “this is my blood of the covenant.”xxii One year before, at the time of Passover, Jesus gave the Bread of Life discourse from John 6, the topic of the previous section of this article. He had prepared his disciples to understand what he would do at his next and last Passover: transform ordinary bread and wine into his Body and Blood.xxiii If Christ is the Passover lamb, then he must be eaten; this was God’s command to the Israelites regarding the Passover: “They shall eat the lamb.”xxiv Since Jesus was the lamb sacrificed at Passover, would it not have been more appropriate to take his
Just as sacrificing a lamb delivered the Israelites from their enslavement by the Egyptians, so too did the sacrifice of Christ deliver humanity from the slavery of sin once and for all. [
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Jesus, the new lamb, brought his sacrifice to completion on the Cross, transforming the Passover of the Old Covenant into the Passover of the New Covenant. Body down off the Cross and eat it? This clearly would not have been an appropriate way to consume Jesus. Instead, Christ transformed the Passover at his Last Supper so that he was the lamb and so that this new Passover could still be perpetually celebrated: in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, which Catholics believe Christ instituted when he commanded that the Last Supper be celebrated “in remembrance” of him. All of this is not to say that Jesus’ sacrifice was completed at the Last Supper. Jesus, the new lamb, brought his sacrifice to completion on the Cross, transforming the Passover of the Old Covenant into the Passover of the New Covenant.xxv Through Christ, God saved the world in a new and more complete way—not merely from the enslavement of the Egyptians, but from the enslavement of sin and death. Affirmation by the Church Fathers Writings from as early as the second century confirm that there was widespread support for the Real Presence of the Eucharist among the Church Fathers. As J.N.D. Kelly, a twentieth-century historian at Oxford and expert in early Christian doctrines, wrote, “Eucharistic teaching, it should be understood at the outset, was in general unquestioningly realist, i.e., the
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consecrated bread and wine were taken to be, and were treated and designated as, the Savior’s body and blood.”xxvi What follows is a sampling of passages from the Church Fathers in support of the Real Presence. For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these; but in like manner as Jesus Christ our Saviour, having been made flesh by the Word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which our blood and flesh by transmutation are nourished, is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.xxvii
St. Justin Martyr (c. 100 AD – 165) Consider therefore the Bread and the Wine not as bare elements, for they are, according to the Lord’s declaration, the Body and Blood of Christ; for even though sense suggests this to you, yet let faith establish you. Judge not the matter from the taste, but from faith be fully assured without misgiving, that the Body and Blood of Christ have been vouchsafed to you.xxviii
St. Cyril of Jerusalem (c. 313 AD – 386) For what you see is simply bread and a cup -
The Disputation of the Sacrament by Raphael, 1510
The Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci, 1498
this is the information your eyes report. But your faith demands far subtler insight: the bread is Christ’s body, the cup is Christ’s blood … So how can bread be his body? And what about the cup? How can it (or what it contains) be his blood?” My friends, these realities are called sacraments because in them one thing is seen, while another is grasped.xxix
St. Augustine of Hippo (c. 354 AD – 430) Two Church Fathers who are often cited by those who advocate for a symbolic understanding of the Eucharist are Tertullian (c. 155-240 AD) and St. Augustine of Hippo (quoted above for his support of the Real Presence). Both of these authors frequently speak of the Eucharist as a “figure” (Latin figura), which sounds strikingly like a “symbol” to a modern audience. Tertullian, for example, writes that at the Last Supper, Jesus made the bread “His own body, by saying, ‘This is my body,’ that is, the figure of my body. A figure, however, there could not have been unless there were first a veritable body.”xxx St. Augustine writes that the Eucharist is a “figure prescribing that there be communication in the Lord’s passion.”xxxi Indeed, at first glance, this sort of language appears to support a figurative interpretation of John 6. In actuality, Tertullian and St. Augustine’s description of the Eucharist as a “figure” reveals belief in the Real Presence. The aforementioned scholar J.N.D. Kelly writes
that “we should be cautious about interpreting such expressions [i.e., that the Eucharist is a “figure”] in a modern fashion” because, “according to ancient modes of thought … the symbol in some sense was the thing symbolized.”xxxii Tertullian and St. Augustine’s choice of words, Kelly argues, simply suggests that they “remain[ed] conscious of the sacramental distinction” between the so-called “figures” of the Eucharist (ordinary bread and wine) and their deeper metaphysical reality (that they are the Body and Blood of Christ).xxxiii To use St. Thomas Aquinas’s later language, the word “figure” merely referred to the Aristotelian “accidents” of the Eucharist, discussed earlier in this article. Examining Tertullian and St. Augustine’s seemingly symbolic statements in context elucidates these two Church Fathers’ motivations for speaking of the “accidents,” or “figures,” of the Eucharist. Tertullian, for example, was countering the false claim that Jesus never possessed a physical body.xxxiv He argues that if Jesus (i.e., the Aristotelian “substance” that is Jesus) is present in the figure of bread (i.e., under the Aristotelian “accident” of bread), then Jesus must first have had a physical, human body to house the “substance” that is him. St. Augustine, in his above statement, was explaining that Jesus did not intend for his followers to slice off some of his humanly flesh and eat that.xxxv Instead, says St. Augustine, Christians receive the “figure” of Jesus, i.e., Jesus under the “accidents” of bread and wine. Given
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According to Catholic teaching, the sacraments bestow grace upon their recipients: in the same way that the waters of Baptism cleanse the soul of its sin, so too does the Eucharist nourish the soul with Christ himself. Communion received in the hand. Île-de-France students' mass in Cathedral Notre Dame de Paris celebrated by Mgr André VingtTrois by Marie-Lan Nguyen, 2012
a full understanding of how early Christians used the word “figure,” as well as the previously cited passages from Church Fathers that opened this section (among others), it is reasonable to conclude that there was widespread belief in the Real Presence within the early Church. Conclusion: The Bread of Life The Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence of the Eucharist stems from Jesus’ words in the New Testament which perpetuate and transform the Old Testament ritual of Passover. Jesus explicitly tells his followers that they must eat his flesh and drink his blood in John 6, and he institutes the sacrament of the Eucharist at his Last Supper and Passover. He is the new sacrificial lamb given up to save God’s people. Belief in the Real Presence was the general consensus among the Church Fathers. While the details of how ordinary bread and wine become Jesus’ flesh and blood remains a great mystery of faith, St. Thomas Aquinas’s application of Aristotelian metaphysics to Eucharistic theology helps to elucidate this mystery. In his 1964 dogmatic constitution Lumen Gentium, Pope Saint Paul VI called the Eucharist the “source and summit of the Christian life.”xxxvi The sacrament of the Eucharist is celebrated and received by Catholics at Mass, strengthening them amidst the trials of life and
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preparing them to go forth and spread the Gospel of Christ. According to Catholic teaching, the sacraments bestow grace upon their recipients: in the same way that the waters of Baptism cleanse the soul of its sin, so too does the Eucharist nourish the soul with Christ himself.xxxvii As Pope Saint John Paul II pointed out in his 2003 encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia, “Eucharistic communion brings about in a sublime way the mutual ‘abiding’ of Christ and each of his followers: ‘Abide in me and I in you’ (John 15:4).”xxxviii Not only is this “abiding” a personal matter, but it also takes on a communal significance. In his Biblical epistles written for the early church communities, the apostle St. Paul emphasizes the idea that all Christians are “one body in Christ.”xxxix By receiving the Body of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist, Catholics find themselves united in a mystical way with the Body of Christ, the Church.xl John 6:53-56 (New Revised Standard Version) See Mark 14:22-24, Matthew 26:26-28, Luke 22:19-20, and 1 Corinthians 11:23-25. iii. Luke 22:19 (NRSV); Matthew 26:28 (NRSV). iv. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2nd ed., 1374. v. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1376. vi. Council of Trent: Session 13 (5 September 2016), “Decree Concerning the Most Holy Sacrament of i.
ii.
the Eucharist,” <https://www.ewtn.com/library/ COUNCILS/TRENT13.HTM>. vii. John 6:60 (NRSV). viii. Aristotle, Metaphysics, The Internet Classics Archive, <http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/ metaphysics.4.iv.html> (accessed 5 September 2016) bk. 4. ix. For the purposes of this article, “substance” can be understood as Aristotle’s “primary substance.” This article will not discuss secondary substances. x. “Natural Philosophy – Substance and Accident,” Thomistic Philosophy Page, accessed 4 February 2017, <http://www.aquinasonline.com/Topics/substacc. html>. xi. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, New Advent, <http://www.newadvent.org/summa/4075. htm#article4> (accessed 4 February 2017) 3.75.4. xii. S. Marc Cohen, “Aristotle on Change,” University of Washington Philosophy 320, accessed 4 February 2017, <https://faculty.washington.edu/ smcohen/320/archange.htm>. xiii. John 6:48-51 (NRSV). xiv. John 6:53 (NRSV). xv. Lee Strobel, The Case for Christ (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 1998), 27-28; Tim Staples, “What Catholics Believe about John 6,” Catholic Answers, 13 September 2011, accessed 17 January 2017, <https://www.catholic.com/magazine/printedition/what-catholics-believe-about-john-6>. xvi. Staples, What Catholics Believe. xvii. “Trogo,” Bible Study Tools, accessed 17 January 2017, <http://www.biblestudytools.com/lexicons/ greek/nas/trogo.html>; John 6:54-58 (NRSV). xviii. Exodus 12:3, 5-7 (NRSV). xix. Exodus 12:14 (NRSV). xx. Brian Pizzalato, “Eucharist foreshadowed in Old Testament writings,” Catholic News Agency, accessed 17 January 2017, <http://www.catholicnewsagency. com/resources/sacraments/eucharist/eucharistforeshadowed-in-old-testament-writings/>. xxi. John 1:29 (NRSV). xxii. Matthew 26:26-8 (NRSV). xxiii. Scott Hahn, “The Lamb’s Supper,” recorded lecture, Lighthouse Catholic Media. xxiv. Exodus 12:8 (NRSV). xxv. Scott Hahn, “The Institution of the Eucharist in Scripture,” EWTN, accessed 17 January 2017, <https://www.ewtn.com/faith/teachings/euchc2. htm>. xxvi. J.N.D. Kelly, Early Christian Doctrines (San Francisco: Harper & Roe, 1978), 440. xxvii. St. Justin Martyr, First Apology, Christian Classics Ethereal Library, <http://www.ccel.org/ccel/ schaff/anf01.viii.ii.lxvi.html> (accessed 5 September 2016) ch. 66. xxviii. St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures,
New Advent, <http://www.newadvent.org/ fathers/310122.htm> (accessed 5 September 2016) lecture 22. xxix. St. Augustine, Sermon 272, Early Church Texts, <http://www.earlychurchtexts.com/public/ augustine_sermon_272_eucharist.htm> (accessed 7 March 2017). xxx. Tertullian, Against Marcion, Internet Sacred Text Archive, <http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/ ecf/003/0030439.htm> (accessed 7 March 2017) 4.40. xxxi. W. A. Jurgens, The Faith of the Early Fathers, trans. W. A. Jurgens, vol. 3 (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 1970), 1587. xxxii. Kelly, 212. xxxii. Kelly, 212. xxxiv. Tim Staples, “Did Tertullian and St. Augustine Deny the Real Presence?” Catholic Answers, 12 December 2014, accessed 7 March 2017, <https:// www.catholic.com/magazine/online-edition/didtertullian-and-st-augustine-deny-the-real-presence>. xxxv. Staples, Tertullian and St. Augustine. xxxvi. Pope Paul VI, Lumen Gentium, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, 21 November 1964, <http://www.christusrex.org/www1/CDHN/ v3.html>, 2.11. xxxvii. Baltimore Catechism #3, Q586. xxxviii. Pope John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, Encyclical Letter, Vatican Website, 17 April 2003, <http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/special_features/ encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_20030417_ ecclesia_eucharistia_en.html>, sec. 22. xxxix. Romans 12:5 (NRSV). xl. Pope John Paul II, sec. 23; Special thanks to Fr. Raymund Snyder, O.P., for his helpful comments.
Marissa Le Coz ’17 is from Essex Junction, Vermont. She is a Computer Science major.
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Panoramic view of the Imperial Forum of Rome by José Ramón Polo López, 2006
Why States Fail:
Lessons from
Augustine By Jeffrey Poomkudy
Sunset at the Roman Forum by Benson Kua, 2010
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R
einhold Niebuhr, a theologian and intellectual, once opined that “the tragedy of man is that he can conceive self-perfection but cannot achieve it.”i Even though humans can envisage and conceptualize a perfect society, human existence appears to be a narrative of fallen kingdoms and empires. Although we have improved our systems of government and have developed inclusive declarations of human rights, perpetual strife and conflict remain. Problems of justice rear their ugly heads in different forms, causing discord in every century. In the grand scheme of human history, civilizations bear an uncanny resemblance to the humans who built them: beautiful, yet deeply flawed; brilliant, yet persistently ignorant; innovative, yet remarkably short-sighted. Human civilizations are simply that—human. Understanding the nature of human societies requires a reductionist approach; this involves examining the nature of their simplest units: the individuals that compose them. There are certain qualities that bind persons together and define human nature. If we can ascertain our nature, we can begin to understand what makes societies perpetually problematic. Augustine of Hippo, a 4th-century Christian theologian and philosopher, gives an intimate and explanatory account of human nature from both a theological and personal perspective. While he chronicles his struggle with sin and his conversion to Christianity in his magnum opus, Confessions, it is in De civitate Dei, or The City of God, that Augustine gives us insight into the imperfection of human societies. He wrote The City of God in response to pagan claims that the capture of Rome in 410 CE was punishment for Rome’s conversion to Christianity.ii Rome was seen as a city that would last forever and where human perfectibility was an attainable ideal.iii In The City of God, Augustine posits ideas regarding human nature and original sin and explores the nature of politics. It is helpful, then, to look at the framework of Augustinian political thought to provide an explanatory account of our human nature and its relation to our stubbornly flawed political systems. Augustine’s political philosophy is built on the idea that we cannot create a perfect political order here on Earth because human nature is inclined toward sin. Politics is largely motivated by a lust for power or rule, a libido dominandi, that results in a constant struggle for power.iv This forms the basis of the City of Man, or the Civitas Terrena, his conception of our human society, which can never attain perpetual peace or lasting justice. The City of God, or the Civitas Dei, on the other hand, is a place of perpetual peace and justice, but is only attainable in the next life. It is there that divine law would reign supreme. It is important
to consider these ideas in more depth to understand whether Augustine’s sociological analysis is accurate, what implications it has for a Christian worldview, and what it means for us today. The most fundamental part of any political system is the individual. Our political systems are reflections of us, and it is important to understand what we truly are. Augustine attributes our nature to the Fall of Man, or Original Sin. In the Christian tradition, Original Sin is man’s turning away from God “and making his own will and desires the center of his existence.”v Due to Adam and Eve’s rebellion against God, human nature was ontologically changed; it became marred by concupiscence.vi Concupiscence, the core of our fallen nature, is defined by the Catechism of the Catholic Church as “the movement of the sensitive appetite contrary to the operation of the human reason.”vii Put simply, concupiscence is our inclination toward that which is sinful or evil, in direct opposition to our faculties of reason. Concupiscence itself is not a sin, but rather inclines humans toward it.viii From a theological perspective, concupiscence is a battle between our spirit and our bodily inclinations. Augustine writes that it is only through God’s grace that one can overcome concupiscence.ix Augustine also
Saint Augustine in His Study by Sandro Botticelli (Uffizi), 15th Century
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The Garden of Eden with the Fall of Man by Peter Paul Rubens and Jan Brueghel the Elder, 17th century
appealed to everyday experience to demonstrate the existence of concupiscence. After all, it is easy to be forgetful, lazy, or ignorant, but it is far harder to be attentive, hardworking, or knowledgeable.x Augustine argues that because of concupiscence, we are a condemned lot, or a massa damnata, which renders us forever dysfunctional.xi We are by nature selfish due to concupiscence—naturally inclined to pursue our own ends. On the political scale, we wield power to achieve those selfish ends. Augustine contends that the state of political systems is therefore
expected to resist that urge to dominate. For example, when considering our noble beginnings in the United States, we tend to brush aside the brute power hunger that characterized our treatment of Native Americans, the policy of Manifest Destiny, and our 18th-century imperialistic tendencies. Even in democracies, power subdues and conquers when wielded by the majority. Today, individuals in Congress continuously utilize unwavering obstructionism to maintain power for themselves and for their party. In addition, concupiscence corrupts our virtues by
If we are inclined to desire power, respect, and our self-interest in our daily lives and relationships, our political systems cannot be expected to resist that urge to dominate. marked by the human lust for domination or power. Political systems are simply power struggles among groups vying for domination. We, too, in our own lives want to be powerful in every regard, however slightly: we desire to be stronger, more respected, and more successful than those around us. We are inclined to detest those that are better than us and envy those that have more than us; all of these are results of concupiscence. Since society is a collection of individuals like us, then society is a reflection of the predilections of the masses. If we are inclined to desire power, respect, and our self-interest in our daily lives and relationships, our political systems cannot be
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providing ulterior motives for action. Niebuhr notes how humans have a unique ability to pursue power under the pretext of caring for others: …men are inclined to take the moral pretensions of themselves or their fellowmen at face value; for the disposition to hide selfinterest behind the façade of pretended devotion to values, transcending self-interest is wellnigh universal… Man is a curious creature with so strong a sense of obligation to his fellows that he cannot pursue his own interests without pretending to serve his fellowmen.xii
The people who reject their self-loving, powerseeking nature and truly work for the common good are praised, and rightfully so, for their nobility and dedication to an ideal higher than their lives. But the harsh reality is that, taken on the whole, our concupiscence makes us selfish and power-hungry, translating to power struggles on a political scale. The concept of concupiscence in relation to the imperfection of political systems and the idea of the two cities were analyzed and synthesized in Niebuhr’s book Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics. Niebuhr claims that although individuals can overcome their tendencies toward concupiscence (as Augustine would say is possible through the grace of God), large groups cannot do so. In essence, large groups will not be able to resist the impulses of concupiscence because of the impossibility of “establishing a rational social force” that can withstand natural inclinations.xiii Societies are products of a
as its weakest link, a society too is only as good as the character of its weakest people. The ideas of Niebuhr’s books form the basis of the political idea now known as Christian realism, a political doctrine that has influenced multiple politicians in America from both sides of the aisle, including John McCain and Barack Obama.xvi Christian realism claims that, as Augustine argued, a lasting and just political system reflective of God’s kingdom could never be established here on Earth because of the innately disordered tendencies of societies, which in turn came from the inability to resist the collective forces of concupiscence. In other words, the Civitas Dei, or anything that reflected it, was not possible. This was in stark contrast to the liberal idealism that was in vogue during Niebuhr’s time. Liberal idealism, adopted largely by Woodrow Wilson, claimed that human nature was intrinsically altruistic and that violence and other deplorable behavior was not the product of humanity’s flaws but
Just as a team is only as good as its weakest link, a society too is only as good as the character of its weakest people. collective egoism, a more amplified and more powerful egoism than that expressed by individuals.xiv Niebuhr explains that “in every human group there is less reason to guide and to check impulse, less capacity for selftranscendence, less ability to comprehend the needs of others, therefore more unrestrained egoism than the individuals, who compose the group, reveal in their personal relationships.”xv Just as a team is only as good
rather evil institutions that promoted selfish action. xvii It held that war, too, was not inevitable and could be reduced greatly by moral institutions.xviii Wilson’s League of Nations arose out of this idea, and American exceptionalism is firmly planted in it. Niebuhr’s realism was the antithesis of liberal idealism, planting Niebuhr against the idea of human perfectibility. Indeed, historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote of Niebuhr:
A page from Augustine’s The City of God, 1475
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Caesar’s Coin by Domingos Sequeira, 1790
[His] emphasis on sin startled my generation, brought up on optimistic convictions of human innocence and perfectibility. But nothing had prepared us for Hitler and Stalin, the Holocaust, concentration camps and gulags. Human nature was evidently as capable of depravity as of virtue. Niebuhr made us think anew about the nature and destiny of man…Ordained authority, he showed, is all the more subject to the temptations of self-interest, self-deception and selfrighteousness. Power must be balanced by power.xix
So, for those who accept the ideas of Augustine and Niebuhr, what is the right course of action? Augustine would say that any true believer in the City of God can only be a sojourner in the City of Man. Jesus Christ himself said, “My kingdom does not belong to this world,” and, “Repay to Caesar what belongs to Caesar and to God what belongs to God.”xx St. Peter echoes those sentiments, saying, “Be subject to every human institution for the Lord’s sake.”xxi Augustine therefore argues that Christians must merely submit to their broken political regimes and not interfere with the government of the world, which imitates Christ’s tolerance and submission to earthly-ordained power. They should instead live intently for the City of God, where glory will come from God alone and where there will finally be a perpetual peace. Taken as a whole, the ideas of Augustine provide an explanatory account of broken political systems throughout history. His account of human nature and the implications of his view, however, are highly pessimistic. Augustine minimizes the ability of humans to do good and combat concupiscence without God’s help. He is caught in a bind between a Manichaeistic view, which held that humans were by nature evil, and
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a Pelangianistic view, which argued that humans were free from the guilt of original sin and could attain moral perfection without divine help.xxii Augustine’s view of human nature through concupiscence, though accurate, is influenced by Manichaeism, the school of thought to which he adhered before converting to Christianity.xxiii Likely due to this influence, he argues that humans need God’s grace to overcome our depraved nature and do good. This view, however, is hard to defend without falling into determinism. It is a contradiction to contend that we have both free will and the inability to choose to do good without the grace of God. Though concupiscence exists and weakens our free will by inclining us to sin, it is central to Catholic theology and divine justice that humans have the ability to do good from their own free choosing. To know and love God to the extent required by divine justice requires divine grace, but we, of our own free will, can overcome our inclinations and choose to accept the grace that allows us to be just. Thus, the Augustinian view underestimates the ability of humans to do good independently. The Augustinian view also has pessimistic implications that, practically speaking, would render political systems unviable. The idea that people, especially Christians, should submit passively to their political regime and wait for the City of God would be pernicious to any social order. Indifference and nonchalance about what occurs in politics could lead to more suffering, corruption, and tyranny. Political engagement is the only means to prevent these atrocities from occurring. It is well-intentioned political activity and engagement that allows us to create relatively equitable societies. The City of God is a paradigm toward which people can meaningfully
Without the burden of achieving institutional perfection, humans are free to pursue justice and peace within institutional deficiency. strive in their personal lives. Incorporating the social teaching of Jesus Christ into our daily lives could allow us to cultivate the values of a better society. Despite the drawbacks to the pessimistic Augustinian view, however, its overall themes need to be addressed. Augustine’s pessimism is comforting in one way: he shows that our political structures are by nature imperfect, and therefore their failures are not caused by something of our own specific doing. On the other hand, admitting that human flaws preclude creating a political utopia fundamentally changes the posture by which one approaches the political realm. Without the burden of achieving institutional perfection, humans are free to pursue justice and peace within institutional deficiency. For the Christian, this means first and foremost focusing on the character of persons that comprise society. Augustine’s work, understood alongside the political ideology of Niebuhr, argued that the quality of society depends on the character and the nature of the people who compose it. They help us realize that the key to peace and justice, however imperfectly they may be realized, has to come from the good will of individuals. Indeed, if human character hinders society, it can also improve it. It therefore makes sense that Christ left no instructions for a political system. He did, however, instruct us to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength” and to “love your neighbor as yourself.”xxiv Properly living out these principles may not create the perfect society, but the Christian message assures us that it will create a virtuous one. Alden Whitman, “Reinhold Niebuhr Is Dead; Protestant Theologian, 78,” The New York Times, 2 June 1971, PDF. ii. Henry Paolucci, introduction to The Political Writings of St. Augustine, by St. Augustine (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1962), xvii. iii. Paolucci, introduction, xvii. iv. Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (Peabody, MA: Hendrickson Publishers, 2009), 3, digital file. v. Herbert A. Deane, The Political and Social Ideas of St. Augustine (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963), 16. vi. Augustine, City of God, 396. vii. Catechism of the Catholic Church (New Delhi, Theological Publications in India, 2013), 2515. viii. Catechism of the Catholic Church, 2515. ix. Augustine, “On Grace and Free Will,” ed. Kevin i.
Knight, trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, New Advent: The Fathers of the Church, accessed March 14, 2017, <http://www.newadvent. org/fathers/1510.htm>. x. St. Augustine, The Political Writings, ed. Henry Paolucci (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 1962), 3. xi. “Original Sin,” in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, ed. F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone, 3rd ed. (Oxford University Press, 2009), digital file. xii. Reinhold Niebuhr, The Essential Reinhold Niebuhr, ed. Robert McAfee Brown (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), 123, digital file. xiii. Reinhold Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral Society: A Study in Ethics and Politics (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 1932), xxix, digital file. xiv. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral, xxix. xv. Niebuhr, Moral Man and Immoral, xxix. xvi. Benedicta Cipolla, “Reinhold Niebuhr is Unseen Force in 2008 Elections,” Religion News Service, 27 September 2007, PDF. xvii. Michelle A. Benson, “Liberal Idealism,” Dr. Michelle A. Benson Personal Website, accessed 12 February 2017, <https://www.acsu.buffalo. edu/~mbenson2/PSC326.htm>. xviii. Benson, “Liberal Idealism.” xix. Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., “Reinhold Niebuhr’s Long Shadow,” The New York Times, 22 June 1992, <http://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/22/opinion/ reinhold-niebuhr-s-long-shadow.html>. xx. John 18:36 (NABRE); Mark 12:17 (NABRE). xxi. 1 Peter 2:13 (NABRE). xxii. The Editors of Encyclopædia Britannica, “Manichaeism,” in Encyclopedia Britannica (Encyclopedia Britannica, 1998), accessed 12 February 2017, <https://www.britannica.com/topic/ Manichaeism>; “Pelagius and Pelagianism,” in New Advent Catholic Encyclopedia, ed. Kevin Knight, accessed 12 February 2017, <http://www.newadvent. org/cathen/11604a.htm>. xxiii. Michael Mendelson, “Saint Augustine,” in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. 21 December 2016, <https://plato.stanford. edu/archives/win2016/entries/augustine/>. xxiv. Mark 12:30-31 (NABRE).
Jeffrey Poomkudy ’20 is from Old Westbury, New York. He is a prospective double major in Biology and Philosophy.
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Postmodernism & the P a r a d ox o f T o l e r a n c e
By Joshua Tseng-Tham
C
onsider the following scenario: a group of sincere, well-meaning college students successfully lobby their college administration to create a safe space for peers affected by a recent tragedy. These students argue that such spaces—which generally correspond to a physical area (such as an office, classroom, or building)—provide an opportunity for those marginalized by tragedies or injustices to communicate, dialogue, and share their experiences comfortably, without fear of retaliation.i These spaces exist, in other words, to validate the marginalized, to resist the cultural forces that perpetrate oppression, and to provide a safe avenue for authenticity in a world that seems contrived and uninviting. Critics of safe spaces claim that these spaces, while grounded in noble intentions, inadvertently foster an environment that perpetrates another
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Empty Classroom by Max Klingensmith, 2008
form of marginalization—against ideas, creeds, and worldviews. Facts ought to matter in the academy, the argument goes, and safe spaces intrinsically violate the central tenants of the university by prioritizing identity over the pursuit of knowledge. Thus, the dialogues that safe spaces promote are one-sided, existing within an echo chamber that unfairly blocks out unsavory viewpoints on the basis of emotion and ideology. To be clear, both sides have valid concerns, and this article does not take a position on the politics of safe spaces. Rather, the safe space debate is fascinating because it underscores a much more fundamental reality: that tolerance exerts a powerful pull on the moral discourse of our modern society. At first glance, both sides of the safe space debate seem to represent differing conceptions of tolerance—one that prioritizes the tolerance of identities and another that
How one defines the basic characteristics of truth and how that truth is known implicitly determines who can be tolerated and how tolerance can be expressed. prioritizes the tolerance of ideas. It is easy to attribute these differences to an ideological clash where people with different worldviews talk past one another, but the truth is more complicated. On one hand, the safe space debate is not a semantic or ideological debate over the meaning of tolerance per se, and there is a good case to be made that people of many political persuasions understand the spirit of tolerance in a remarkably consistent fashion. On the other hand, the roots of disagreement are undoubtedly influenced by competing worldviews, which affect how people perceive truth and its relevant domains. How one defines the basic characteristics of truth and how that truth is known implicitly determines who can be tolerated and how tolerance can be expressed. The safe space debate is a symptom of a wider societal progression towards a postmodern conception of truth, which under closer examination fails to provide any meaningful framework for tolerance. The Christian worldview, by contrast, subscribes to a view of truth that not only makes tolerance a theoretical possibility but a moral necessity.
It is important to first establish what exactly this “spirit” of tolerance is supposed to mean, since, as mentioned earlier, it is tempting to approach the safe space debate as a debate between different conceptions of tolerance. Indeed, philosopher Rainer Forst distinguishes between four conceptions of tolerance. The first conception, which he calls the “permission conception,” is a relation between an authority (or majority) and a dissenting minority, where the minority is permitted to live according to their beliefs insofar as the minority does not threaten the dominant status of the ruling class. The second is called the “coexistence conception,” and shares similar pragmatic goals to the first conception (that is, of avoiding conflict), but exists in an environment where there is no asymmetric distribution of power between competing groups. Forst’s third conception, the “respect conception,” consists of tolerating parties who differ fundamentally in their worldviews, but who also recognize their opponents as equals who share in the benefits of a common socio-political framework. Lastly, the fourth conception of tolerance, the “esteem
Campus Protest March Against Hate Speech from Wikimedia Commons (“Fibonacci Blue”), 2016
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conception,” expands what it means to “recognize” an opposing side by demanding an ethical esteem for their beliefs—in other words, recognizing that such beliefs, while misguided, are ethically valuable and attractive, derived from rational principles that one could easily embrace.ii Forst’s first and second conception primarily ground themselves in power dynamics between different interest groups in society, which no doubt is important in understanding tolerance from a superficial standpoint. However, what makes these conceptions less relevant to the spirit of tolerance is their emphasis on the practical necessity of tolerance. Tolerance, according to these conceptions, exists primarily as an instrument in the utilitarian’s toolkit to avoid conflict and suffering wherever possible. This approach to tolerance carries some risks. In particular, there seems to be several scenarios that are consistent with the underlying principles of the first and second conception, but which intuitively contradict our moral sensibilities. For instance, imagine a society that, writ large, subscribes unilaterally to a certain religion. This religion demands universal submission and regards other worldviews with moral disdain. In this society, however, there is a very small religious
of the second conception, conflict is actually preferable to social peace for Group A. After all, making Group B disabled and mute gives Group A control of society. But this appears to contradict common moral sense. It is clear that we need to think of tolerance another way, at least in the context of the current debate. When tolerance enters Western discourse, it is evoked in moral terms. For instance, tolerance is typically evoked in the safe space debate to resolve ethical disputes (e.g. “We ought to affirm the marginalized.” “We ought to cultivate the central mission of the university”). This moral dimension in modern debates about tolerance cannot be understood through the lens of the first or second conceptions of tolerance. Thus, the third and fourth conceptions—which almost sound like moral imperatives—are more pertinent when determining the spirit of tolerance as presently understood. Both conceptions ultimately promote respect as the dominant feature in an understanding of tolerance, which comes from the desire to confront the reality of diversity and the profound disagreements that diversity brings about constructively. But rather than tackling the problem of difference by resorting to tribal power struggles, the modern understanding of tolerance presents a moral framework grounded
The modern understanding of tolerance presents a moral framework grounded in a metaphysical truth—that all persons are equal by virtue of sharing a nature as intrinsically rational individuals, who likewise desire to pursue truth. minority. Their values conflict with the values of the dominant class. Thus, society regards the presence of this minority (however small) as a deep threat to their religious and cultural hegemony. Under the first conception of tolerance (where tolerance is available to people who do not pose a threat), eliminating this group can be practically, even morally, justified. After all, the presence of the minority is regarded as a risk to public peace and the society has an ideological reason for minority eradication. Now consider another similar example whereby that same religious minority instead comprises a group roughly equal in size to the “dominant” class described previously. Let us call them Group A and B, respectively. This time there is no asymmetric distribution of power between the two groups. According to the second conception, tolerance is justifiable because social peace is a preferable compromise to conflict—neither side is confident that conflict will rule in their favor. But suppose that one day, a member of Group A discovers a biological weapon that makes every member of Group B mute and disabled. Given the utilitarian assumptions
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in a metaphysical truth—that all persons are equal by virtue of sharing a nature as intrinsically rational individuals, who likewise desire to pursue truth. Respect, therefore, is a practice extending from this conception of tolerance to foster and cultivate this recognition, so that the acquisition of truth can be a social endeavor. If our modern understanding of tolerance is imbued with this respect, then the spirit of tolerance exists when one fundamentally disagrees with another without personally disapproving of or denigrating the opponent in question. Christianity is no stranger to this understanding of tolerance—in fact, its theology demands it. Christian tolerance is inspired by two theological ideas. The first is a particular expression of theism which emphasizes the innately rational nature of God. “In the beginning was the Logos,” proclaims John in the prologue to his Gospel, indicating—with the use of “Logos”—the idea that God is reason, but is also deeply personal and capable of creating the entire universe.iii Establishing God as fundamentally rational is essential, because if God did create the entire universe, as Christians claim,
Because truth is fundamentally separate from the human person, Christians are motivated to separate the beliefs that persons have about truth from the persons themselves. then he did so rationally, meaning that the universe itself is intelligible and subject to rational inquiry. The Christian proclaims that truth is woven into the fabric of reality and is, therefore, something we interact with instead of something we create subjectively. Of course, there are different levels of truth, some more subjectively inclined than others (one’s favorite ice cream flavor versus the second law of thermodynamics, for example). But ultimately, all truths are reflections of God himself, worshiped by Christians as Truth incarnate. The second theological idea is that the whole person is ordered to truth. Philosophically, this idea is not unique to Christianity; it was Aristotle who first argued that man has a rational principle (or nature) that separates him from other living organisms, which in turn imbues man with a natural disposition toward the acquisition of truth.iv While Christianity did not invent this definition of man, it heavily presupposes it, and it is impossible to properly understand Christian theology and practice without first recognizing this principle. If God created us so that we could experience perfect communion with him—even dying for humanity after we fell astray from that purpose—there must be a sense in which our natures are, in principle, capable
of relating to God. And since God is Logos, the Truth incarnate, human nature must be essentially rational in order to fulfill this relational purpose. Even if ideas themselves may be irrational, human nature could be counted on to perform rational activity so that truths can eventually be found. Indeed, in the First Letter of Peter, Christians are called to always be prepared to give an answer to questions about their faith.v Far from being a practical directive for evangelization, Peter’s directive affirms that the Christian hope is grounded in truth. Rationally defending this hope both reflects the Christian’s relationship with God and participates in the divine wisdom through Logos. For the Christian, then, all truth is contained in the divine personhood of God, and as sub-creations and image-bearers of the divine, humans have the rational capacity and inclination to interact with and apprehend truth. Because truth is fundamentally separate from the human person, Christians are motivated to separate the beliefs that persons have about truth from the persons themselves. Christian tolerance is a recognition of this metaphysical reality—that, in the eyes of God, all humans have inherent dignity because they, by nature, understand and desire truth, not because they are successful at
Sun in the Pieniny, Poland by Bartosz Kosiorek, 2007
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St. Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli, 15th century
comprehending truth in its entirety. In fact, the mystery of God makes such a quest impossible, and so the Christian understands that everyone deserves respect regardless of the opinions they happen to hold, or how close they are to the truth. The discovery of truth is both an individual and social activity, bound to encounter roadblocks as individually fallible people disagree with the conclusions drawn by their peers. The Christian response to this inevitable disagreement is nonetheless an act of love and cooperation, drawn from a seemingly naïve but theologically grounded vision that their mistaken interlocutors ultimately desire the same thing they do, and are worthy partners in the quest for wisdom. Nowhere is this practice better exemplified than by Saint Thomas Aquinas’ approach to theology. Professor A. J. Conyers, in an article for First Things, draws attention to the incredible diversity that populated the thirteenth-century intellectual community—Muslim, Jewish, pagan, and Christian thinkers frequently dialogued and exchanged ideas without any sense of religious betrayal. It was in this oft-neglected period of history that Aquinas made his contribution to the Church. His approach in his theological studies begins, according to Conyers, “by calling attention to various important insights into the meaning of truth
For Aquinas, practicing Christian tolerance meant recognizing that God’s truth is universally relevant, unbounded by creed or nationality, and is thus reflected to varying degrees in other cultures because Christ himself gives universal witness to that truth. from a number of sources, not all of them Christian.”vi Aquinas first quotes three Christian thinkers, and, without skipping a beat, proceeds to quote Avicenna and Aristotle, a Muslim and pagan philosopher respectively. Conyers draws two remarkable insights from his study of Aquinas: [Aquinas] does not call attention to the fact that he is drawing from a plurality of sources that represent diverse faiths. Nor is there the lazy air of relativism here. Instead we find the resolute pressing forward to an idea of truth that can be common to everyone because it is real for everyone…It promotes not a unity that is assumed and goes unquestioned at the beginning, but one that is found at some cost to those who search.vii
To Conyers, the fact that Aquinas’ magnum opus, the Summa Theologica, is unfinished reflects how much Aquinas internalized Christian tolerance. He was not afraid to declare truth as he saw it, but he was also open to truth as it was discovered. For Aquinas, practicing
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Christian tolerance meant recognizing that God’s truth is universally relevant, unbounded by creed or nationality, and is thus reflected to varying degrees in other cultures because Christ himself gives universal witness to that truth.viii The shift from Aquinas to postmodernism was a slow one, the roots of which lie in the decline of Scholasticism during the Enlightenment period. During the Enlightenment, a new understanding of tolerance arose that claimed to provide a more expansive application of tolerance’s spirit, but which in practice marginalized religious thought in the public square. Two developments accounted for this change. The first was cultural—Conyers argued that the religious wars that decimated Europe during the early modern period led to “the growth of regional political authorities that gradually eclipsed the local, familial, ecclesiastic, and sometimes informal authorities that governed (and to some extent still govern) public life.”ix Post-wars European society saw religion as a source of
If humans are rational animals, characterizing religious thought as irrational (or arational) devalues the persons who hold those beliefs, since it refuses to recognize the rational activity performed (e.g. contemplating religious ideas).
Great Miseries of War by Jacques Callot, c. 1630
social unrest, and thereby relegated religious authority from matters of public life to the realm of private conviction. This meant that most political discussions, whether they be about the role of the state or the nature of a just society, marginalized religious judgment by default. The second development was philosophical— the rise of positivism threatened the epistemology of religious belief by denying it any rational legitimacy. Positivism, a philosophical doctrine first proposed by Auguste Comte and later expanded upon by Émile Durkheim and Moritz Schlick, restricted epistemic validity to facts obtained by the scientific method.x Observation and verification, they claimed, trump intuition, theological reasoning, and divine revelation. Thus, positivism abolished the old religious approach to reason, which incorporates many different forms of knowledge into one holistic practice of wisdom. The hostility toward Christianity inherent in both developments, whether it be political or philosophical, had a profound impact on the practice of tolerance. Both movements claimed to advance the cause of tolerance—the political establishment thought that a society free from religious authority could better pursue alternative ideas, and positivists thought that the scientific method could create a framework of truth that offered a systematic way of adjudicating truth claims while offering a means to separate ideas from personhood. But what Enlightenment tolerance entailed in practice was an underlying intolerance that
targeted a broad segment of the religious population. At the very least, intolerance was expressed when religious thought was assigned no epistemic weight in the public sphere, since these ideas were only permitted to function as private speculation about the unknown. This marginalization, combined with positivism’s hostility towards religion, meant that religious thought was not just ignored, but considered fundamentally irrational. If humans are rational animals, characterizing religious thought as irrational (or arational) devalues the persons who hold those beliefs, since it refuses to recognize the rational activity performed (e.g. contemplating religious ideas). By decrying the entire religious category as intrinsically irrational, positivist thinkers imply that people who cultivate religious wisdom are acting against their rational nature. But while Enlightenment tolerance fails to be as expansive as it claims, postmodern tolerance is a philosophical oxymoron. Any attempt to understand this oxymoron must first consider postmodernism’s metaphysical dream, which R.R. Reno, editor of First Things, characterizes as the “Empire of Desire.” Every culture has a metaphysical dream—a desire for happiness and fulfillment grounded in a particular metaphysical understanding of the world. Our culture today, argues Reno, has a postmodern metaphysical dream, consisting of pure, primal desire emancipated from the stifling discipline of moral norms. For the
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postmodernist, pure desire “must be seen as the deepest, truest source of life.”xi Anything that seeks to control these desires, whether it be moral law, cultural norms, or religious authorities, is an illegitimate vehicle of oppression, dooming the human person to a life of frustration and conflict. Of course, this dream must have metaphysical claims, but it is easy to see how the Empire of Desire approaches the question of truth. Reno’s thesis makes a bold, yet plausible claim: if desire is the truest source of life, then all other determinative principles and authoritative truths are secondary. Objective truth, far from being an unchanging reality grasped by the pursuit of knowledge, is instead another vehicle for oppression, no different from the moral codes that prevent the human person from achieving his or her desires. Thus, the existence of objective truth is not so much denied necessarily by the postmodernist paradigm, but is rather deprived of any epistemic weight in rhetorical exchanges (just as the religious viewpoint
it], then we can discuss it and disagree about its content without involving ourselves personally, at least not right away. But if the only truth for me is my own personal truth arising from my identity and circumstances, then any and all disagreement about what is is by definition personal.xii
No longer is intellectual disagreement a mutually beneficial exchange that brings its participants closer to truth. Instead, disagreement is a power struggle between various actors who seek to impose their worldviews on each other. Force and persuasion become indistinguishable in this Darwinian battle for personal gratification, and any concession made is grounded in identity submission—the recognition that you, in some sense, are flawed and inferior to your opponent. Therein lies the central paradox of postmodernism—that its only tool for claiming the mantle of tolerance actually deprives tolerance of any real meaning and significance. It is thus no
The unfortunate irony is that postmodernism, taken to its rational conclusion, even undermines the very idea of safe spaces. was denied epistemic weight in Enlightenment discussions regarding the public sphere). Objective truth, if it exists, does not matter; what matters to the postmodern vision is a truth ontologically dependent on the primal desires of the human person, unfettered by laws that claim authority over these desires. In theory, the postmodern metaphysical dream seems to promote tolerance quite expansively. After all, if there are no universal truths that can be properly apprehended by human persons, then there is no need to harmonize or integrate a wide cacophony of different truth claims. All opinions are welcome to the table, because all opinions are in some sense true (in the respect that both opinion and truth are grounded in human desire). Subsequently, the tradition of finding unity in the midst of diversity is rejected in favor of one that upholds a vaguely complacent form of diversity that desperately tries to avoid disagreement wherever possible. It is precisely in the area of disagreement, however, where postmodernism runs into a problem—because all ideas are personal, any disapproval of ideas is inherently disapproving of the person who holds those ideas. Indeed, writer Molly Oshatz argued that the nature of “debate” to a postmodernist would be unrecognizable to those who maintain a traditional understanding of truth: If truth is something neutral that exists outside of all of us, [as the classical thinkers understood
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surprise that safe spaces are such a contentious issue today. In a postmodern age, disagreement is not just a personal act, but an inherently violent one. For victims of tragedies and marginalized communities, it is completely understandable, even rational, to create a space as a refuge from this violence—postmodernism (and natural desires for human dignity) demands it. But the unfortunate irony is that postmodernism, taken to its rational conclusion, even undermines the very idea of safe spaces. Because all disagreements are inherently violent, even small disagreements are ultimately threatening in a postmodern framework. And since there is some gradient of difference between any two people, there will always be some element of insecurity in any given space. A safe space may unite persons affected by a tragedy, but that same group may exhibit profound differences in other areas, which opens the group up to power struggles when those differences eventually emerge. Postmodernism reduces all differences to potential avenues for violence— hence, so long as variation exists between individuals, there is no shared space in which a person can be truly safe from danger. Postmodernism conflates truth and personhood, and in doing so confines the person to a state of perpetual insecurity and vulnerability. It is this fear of violence that prevents modern persons from recognizing the inherent dignity of their peers. But while the postmodern metaphysical dream
Stained Glass in the Church of St. Efigenia from Wikimedia Commons (“The Photographer”), 2014
envisions truth as fundamentally personal, the Christian metaphysical dream understands truth as fundamentally predicated on the divine—Christ as Logos, Truth incarnate. Objective truth is real, and is not ontologically equivalent to human experience or applications of the human capacity for rationality. This dream, like the postmodern one, promotes personal conviction, but does so in a way that understands conviction as an attempt to understand the world rather than as an abstract expression of primal desire. On its face, the Christian understanding of truth appears intolerant, since any personal conviction necessarily understands conflicting convictions as false. But this critique entirely misses the point on the purpose of tolerance, which was desired because it promoted unity in a pluralistic society through the search and discovery of universal truths. No doubt this unity is difficult and costly to achieve. But Christian tolerance ultimately allows such cost to be shared— the Christian worldview emancipates believers from their natural tendency to devalue their opponents and redirects them onto a path that sees every person as a fellow searcher who deserves support and respect. This freedom provides the only stable foundation for tolerance, which, when properly cultivated, embodies the love that Christ has for mankind.
college-students-mean-when-they-ask-for-safespaces-and-trigger-warnings/>. ii. Rainer Forst, “Toleration,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta, 21 June 2012, <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ sum2012/entries/toleration/>. iii. See John 1:1. iv. Aristotle, “Nicomachean Ethics,” in Classics of Western Philosophy, 8th Edition, ed. Steven M. Cahn (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2012), 283-284. v. See 1 Peter 3:15. vi. A. J. Conyers, “Rescuing Tolerance,” First Things (August 2001). vii. Conyers, Rescuing Tolerance. viii. Conyers, Rescuing Tolerance. ix. Conyers, Rescuing Tolerance. x. Jorge Larrain, The Concept of Ideology (London: Hutchinson, 1979), 197. xi. R. R. Reno, “Empire of Desire: Outlining the Postmodern Metaphysical Dream,” First Things (June 2014). xii. Molly Oshatz, “College Without Truth,” First Things (May 2016).
Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17 is from Toronto, Canada. He is a double major in Economics and Philosophy.
Teddy Amenabar, “The New Language of Protest,” The Washington Post, 19 May 2016, <http://www. washingtonpost.com/sf/style/2016/05/19/whati.
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The Separation of
Church
and in
State
America
By Sara Holston
T
hough it has become one of the most widely recognized terms in contemporary culture’s discussion of the American political system, the phrase “wall of separation between church and state” does not appear in the Constitution of the United States of America. Instead, the First Amendment to the Constitution includes the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause as its statements on religious freedoms, which were further developed and clarified by Court decisions in Emerson v. Board of Education and Lemon v. Kurtzman years later. Though these clauses and subsequent court actions laid out a relationship between church and state that is characterized by their respective disentanglement from any potential influence on the other, the idea of the “wall of separation” first appears in the writings of Roger Williams and in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut. Though the words are often taken to refer exclusively to an attempt to protect the state from religious interference, the intention behind the doctrine was originally to protect both institutions from any interference by the other. Just as the state was considered to be a more just and effective governing body when left unhindered by the rules and expectations of any one religion, so the church was thought to be able to operate more freely without the intrusion of legal constraints. Beyond the institutional level of church and state, the theory was also intended to allow individuals of religious faith to live out their beliefs without the interference of laws that might discriminately force or prevent certain practices. The idea of the separation of church and state and its place within American politics is firmly intertwined with the historical development of the new nation. That has provided both institutions, as well as individuals of various faiths, the ability to operate free of restrictions from either establishment. The early roots of the “wall of separation between church and state,” even before religious freedom became a Constitutional issue, are found in the
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writings of Roger Williams, who was a founder of both the state of Rhode Island and the First Baptist Church of America, and a staunch supporter of religious freedom in the fledgling British colonies. Williams, a non-pluralist Christian himself, believed that “an enforced uniformity of religion throughout a nation or civil state, confounds the civil and religious, denies the principles of Christianity and civility, and that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh.”i Williams coined the now-famous phrase when he wrote: When they [the Church] have opened a gap in the hedge or wall of separation between the garden of the church and the wilderness of the world, God hath ever broke down the wall itself, removed the Candlestick, etc., and made His Garden a wilderness as it is this day. And that therefore if He will ever please to restore His Garden and Paradise again, it must of necessity be walled in peculiarly unto Himself from the world, and all that be saved out of the world are to be transplanted out of the Wilderness of the world.ii
Williams felt strongly that the separation of church and state was necessary both for the liberties of all men, as well as for the benefit of the church itself, which he perceived to be hampered by its own attempts to intervene in matters of state. This perspective was furthered by others who similarly felt that the church was also to benefit from its separation from the state, which in turn was expected to avoid interfering with the decisions of the church and the daily religious practice of its constituents. Among these other supporters was Isaac Backus, who asserted that “religious matters are to be separated from the jurisdiction of the state, not because they are beneath the interests of the state but, quite to the contrary, because they are too high and holy and thus are beyond the competence of the state.”iii Even many years after the establishment of religious freedom within the new United States, writers such as John Leland continued to maintain that “experience…
By shifting how religious freedom was understood, Madison turned the still-vague concept into a legal responsibility of the government. has informed us that the fondness of magistrates to foster Christianity has done it more harm than all the persecutions ever did.”iv While Roger Williams laid the foundation for the separation by claiming that it was better for both church and state if the church refrained from intervention in state affairs, many who fought for religious freedom further proposed that both institutions would also benefit from the cessation of government involvement in church affairs. James Madison was one of the strongest early proponents of religious freedom, and fought to create and maintain a legal basis for religious freedom within the legislature of Virginia, a prolonged struggle that ultimately laid much of the groundwork for the later institution of religious freedom in the Constitution of the United States. Madison co-wrote Virginia’s Declaration of Rights in 1776, which claimed freedom of conscience and religion as inherent rights of each individual. By shifting how religious freedom was understood, Madison turned the still-vague concept into a legal responsibility of the government. It then became a hotly debated issue within the Virginian legislature, with religious taxes becoming the primary vehicle for the ongoing discussion on religious freedom. Many states allocated part of their tax revenue to support certain churches, helping those churches to flourish above and beyond other institutions. These practices were supported by many colonists, such as Patrick Henry, who hoped they would forestall the decay of morality and piety by providing for the continued thriving of religious education. Henry proposed a bill
Portrait of James Madison by John Vanderlyn, 1816
that would create such a tax within Virginia, competing with Thomas Jefferson’s Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom for the support of the General Assembly.v In support of Jefferson’s bill, Madison penned the treatise Memorial and Remonstrance, which defined and defended religious freedom. Alongside Jefferson’s bill, the treatise became one of the leading documents on the subject and a significant foundation for the later protections of religious freedom.vi Fittingly, Madison wrote the First Amendment, which contains the Constitution’s provisions for religious freedom: the Establishment Clause and Free Exercise Clause. Together the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses declare that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”vii Madison’s dedication to religious freedom had been so complete that, at first, he had resisted the idea of the Constitution’s including any declaration on the subject of religion whatsoever; Madison felt that even having the government declare religious freedom was too close to state intervention into religious practice. The Continental Congress had, however, agreed to pass a Bill of Rights following the initial ratification of the Constitution in order to cover the gaps in protections that the Continental Congress had been unable to come to consensus on quickly enough. One of the rights to be defended in this series of Amendments was that of religious freedom, and Madison drew from his own previous writings on the subject to pen the First Amendment. He intentionally kept the clauses simple and non-invasive; later interpretation of the text expanded the protection into the understanding of separation of church and state that we have today. The phrase “wall of separation between church and state,” then appears for the first time in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association. The phrase represents Jefferson’s interpretation of what the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses attempt to accomplish. The Danbury Baptist Association had initiated the discourse, asking President Jefferson why he did not follow in the footsteps of his two presidential predecessors in declaring national days of fasting and thanksgiving.viii President Jefferson responded that it was not the place of the president, nor of any branch of the government, to take any action that took steps toward establishing any official religion for the country, stating: Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that
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he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof, thus building a wall of separation between church and state.ix
Jefferson also argues for an understanding of the “wall of separation” as a defense of the freedom of individuals to profess any religion. Regardless of how his perspective compares to those of others, however, the application of the notion of the “wall of separation” to the Constitution in Jefferson’s letter comprises Jefferson’s interpretation of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, not any officially Congressional- or Court-mandated connection between the theory and the Clauses. This interpretation was solidified by several court cases that drew from the writings of Williams, Madison, and Jefferson to establish the reading of the clauses on religious freedom as providing for the complete separation of church and state. One of the major hallmark cases in clarifying religious freedom was Reynolds v. Virginia, an 1878 case in which George Reynolds, a Mormon, was put on trial for practicing
polygamy in violation of the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act.x Reynolds claimed it was his religious duty to the Mormon Church, but the court returned to Madison’s Memorial and Remonstrance and Jefferson’s words in his letter to the Danbury Baptists and ruled that the law did have the power to regulate religious action, just not religious belief. The Court projected that if any religious practice were allowed, such rituals as human sacrifice and others that directly endangered the lives and safety of others could not be prevented. The Court thus agreed with Jefferson’s statement that “the legislative powers of the government reach actions only, and not opinions,” and declared that allowing claims of religious duty to supersede criminal indictment “would be to make the professed doctrines of religious belief superior to the law of the land, and in effect to permit every citizen to become a law unto himself.”xi One of the most significant religious freedom cases in recent history was the 1947 Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing, in which the Establishment Clause was ruled to apply to states as well as the federal government. Previously, individual states had still been able to pass laws that would privilege some religions or religious institutions over others by selectively supporting them. Following this case, however, the ban on any legal interference that selectively benefited some religious practices,
Supreme Court building from Wikimedia Commons (“Daderot”), 2008
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The purpose of the separation was actually twofold: to protect the state from church interference, and to protect the church from state interference. which had long held true for the federal government, prevented states from any such show of favoritism, as well.xii In the case of this decision, the court upheld the need to defend religious practice from the interference of the state; in a pluralistic society no one religion should be preferentially benefitted by the actions of the state in the religious sphere. While the phrase “separation of church and state” was used in both the majority and the dissenting opinions, demonstrating its increasing prevalence as the defining interpretation of the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses, it was used in this instance to defend the “church,” or the realm of religious faith and practice, from the state, just as Reynolds v. Virginia defended the state from the intervention of the church.xiii Though the statement that there is a “wall of separation between church and state” does not originate from the American Constitution, the idea has a long and complicated history rooted firmly in America’s unique desire for freedom from religious oppression. The purpose of the separation was actually twofold: to protect the state from church interference, and to protect the church from state interference. Roger Williams’ distinct desire to see the state freed from religious influence in order to allow both to flourish was later expanded to prevent the state’s intervention in religious affairs, as well. The Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses within the Constitution balance both perspectives, declaring that the government ought to neither privilege any one religion or religious sect, nor interfere with the religious practices of individuals. Only through later interpretation and development did the “wall of separation” become more prevalent. Even so, the court decisions do not expressly claim that the separation is for the sole benefit of the state: in the first case, the interference of religious beliefs and practices on state law impeded the state’s actions, while in the second the decision benefits a plurality of faiths, defending religion from the state’s preferential support of one belief system or sect. Indeed, only in the public perception of these cases has the issue been narrowed to one of defending the state from religion, rather than an affirmation that the two institutions cover different spheres. The Founding Fathers believed that keeping religious and secular authorities separate would be to the authorities’ mutual benefit, which by extension would promote peace within the nation.
Roger Williams, The Bloudy Tenet of Persecution for Cause of Conscience, (London: J Haddon, 1848). ii. Roger Williams, “Mr. Cotton’s Letter Lately Printed, Examined, and Answered,” in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams Vol. 1 (New York: Russel & Russel Inc., 1963), 108. iii. Isaac Backus, “An Appeal to the Public for Religious Liberty,” sermon delivered 1773. iv. John Leland, “The Government of Christ a Christocracy,” in The Writings of the Late Elder John Leland: Including Some Events in His Life (New York: G.W. Wood, 1804), 278. v. “Religion and the Founding of the American Republic,” Library of Congress <http://www.loc. gov/exhibits/religion/rel05.html>. vi. Vincent Phillip Munoz, Religious Liberty and the American Supreme Court: The Essential Cases and Documents, (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 76-77. vii. U.S. Constitution, Amendment 1. viii. “Jefferson’s Letter to the Danbury Baptists,” The Heritage Foundation, 2017. <http://origin. heritage.org/initiatives/first-principles/primarysources/jefferson-s-letter-to-the-danburybaptists>. ix. Thomas Jefferson, “Letter to the Danbury Baptists,” 1802. x. Munoz 13. xi. Munoz 16. xii. Munoz 13-5; 67-80. xiii. Mr. Justice Black, opinion, Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing. 330 U.S. 1. Supreme Court of the United States; Mr. Justice Jackson, dissenting opinion, Everson v. Board of Education of the Township of Ewing. 330 U.S. 1. Supreme Court of the United States i.
Sara Holston ’17 is from Wayne, Pennsylvania. She is an English major.
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Sunset over the Ocean by David Ramirez, 2011
The Heart of Mental Health By Jake Casale
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he relationship between religious belief and mental health is negatively portrayed in modern Western culture. The most accessible historical facts about how systems of belief have shaped societal understandings of mental health phenomena tend to be accounts of witch hunts and demon possessions, contemporarily construed as the Christian churchâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s hostile misinterpretation of common mental illnesses. While there is certainly truth to these accounts, taking them in isolation creates a myopic portrait of how the Christian faith both perceives and interacts with notions of mental health. Restricting the evidence to a narrow set of historical moments, during which mental illness had not yet emerged as a scientific or cultural category and its manifestations were shrouded in uncertainty for both religious and secular populations, encourages the belief that Christianity has always existed in conflict with the science of psychiatry and the pursuit of mental well-being. This is not only
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historically inaccurate, as the church largely accepted proposed natural causes to mental disorders prior to a post-Middle Ages emphasis on demonology, but it also obscures the capacity of the Christian worldview to uniquely locate, enrich, and deepen how the concept of mental health is understood.i Before clarifying what constitutes this unique understanding, it is important to establish some parameters for the following discussion, the first concerning terminology. There is no simple definition of mental illness, which is why the term is often associated with diagnosable psychological abnormalities that clearly impair regular human functioning, such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or depression. Moreover, the range of factors that can underlie a mental disorder is broad, encompassing the neurological (brain structure and function), psychological (thoughts, feelings, and behaviors), and social (interactions between subject and environment).
As the science of psychology and psychiatry developed, the models that arose by the late 1970s primarily treated these factors as independent of one another, but more recent research has given rise to an integrated neuropsychosocial model that casts them as “usually involved simultaneously and constantly interacting […] through feedback loops.”ii Given the complex etiology of many mental disorders, it follows that the Christian worldview makes few universal claims
reveal the differences in how each practice constructs the ultimate end of mental health care writ large and how this shapes the management of uncertainty for the care provider. CBT is widely touted as an evidence-based psychotherapy and is one of the most extensively researched mental health treatments of the past 30 years, with over 325 published studies on the impact of cognitive-behavioral interventions on
[This article] seeks to provide a glimpse of what the Christian framework claims as mental wholeness, the goal that all mental health care (secular and spiritual) is bent toward. on sources of causality across the wide spectrum of psychological dysfunction. The crucial exception is the foundational Christian tenet that the world has been ravaged by the presence of sin in the created order, which has adversely affected all elements of the human person—mind, body, and spirit.iii The specific ways that mankind is affected by this core brokenness, mentally and otherwise, are innumerable. The Christian worldview also provides hope for restoration through the death and resurrection of Christ, through which all sin is defeated. This redemptive work, and the healing it offers to the mind, manifests with the same diversity and particularity as the brokenness that prompted Christ’s sacrifice— numerous tools exist to facilitate the process of recovery from mental illness, from medicine to many forms of psychotherapy. The Christian worldview provides a framework that contextualizes the meaning of these interventions; it does not lay out exactly how they should be implemented in every case, save for the command to show love and respect to the sufferer as a fellow bearer of the image of God. Thus, the discussion that follows is not an exhaustive consideration of how Christianity explains mankind’s understanding of every unique manifestation of mental disorder that is observable in our world. Rather, it seeks to provide a glimpse of what the Christian framework claims as mental wholeness, the goal that all mental health care (secular and spiritual) is oriented towards. Finally, it is intended to show that this framework, undergirded by the sufficiency of Christ’s restorative work, expands our understanding of the role that human care providers play and what is considered healing practice for mental health challenges. This will be explored by comparing the underpinnings and aims of two forms of mental health care: cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and biblical counseling (BC). The goal of the comparison is not to claim which one “works better” (indeed, many Christian counselors blend the two approaches), but to
various psychological disorders and 16 meta-analyses that collate and quantify CBT’s efficacy relative to other psychotherapies.iv CBT’s strong association with empirically-derived authority closely aligns it with the Western historical shift toward prizing knowledge produced through scientific epistemology; thus, CBT is validated by the mechanisms that have elevated general biomedicine to cultural authority. The foundational premise of CBT is that “emotions are difficult to change directly […] so emotions [are targeted] by changing thoughts and behaviors that are contributing to the distressing emotions.”v The treatment captures the modern idea of consciousnessraising in psychotherapy, which stipulates that “the content and process of our thinking is knowable” (as opposed to the Freudian school of thought that popularized the notion of the unconscious mind) and that thinking can be intentionally modified to produce new responses to external phenomena.vi This is accomplished through collaborative skill-building that empowers clients to “identify how situations, thoughts, and behaviors influence emotions and improve feelings by changing dysfunctional thoughts and behaviors.”vii
Witch burning at the stake by Robert Benner, c. 19th century
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The therapy is usually administered through “a 20-session treatment protocol” during which therapists work with clients on “observable, measurable, and achievable” goals for behavioral improvement.viii These goals include challenging and reforming maladaptive thoughts, adopting active behaviors that work against feelings of passivity and defeat, and creating problemsolving strategies.ix In-session work is complemented by homework assignments that a client completes to “integrate the concepts learned in sessions into daily life.”x Thus, CBT is structured from the outset with an endpoint in sight and tools designed to facilitate
healing and find ways to integrate secular therapeutic techniques into their practice. Indeed, Sarah Rainer, a secularly trained PsyD and professing Christian, summarizes the push-and-pull between the two frameworks by noting: The intricacies of the human brain, the environmental influences on our personality, and the social and cultural impact on our lives remind me that pathology cannot simply be reduced to issues of morality or sin […yet] due to the love of […] God, I also cannot reduce all pathology to a naturalistic model of humanity.xi
By contrast, the practice of BC is rooted in the theological tenets of Protestant Christianity over scientific validation. smooth re-entry into regular life with CBT’s imparted benefits in tow. By contrast, the practice of BC is rooted in the theological tenets of Protestant Christianity over scientific validation, although counselors often affirm the contributions of biomedicine, psychology, and neuroscience to the body of knowledge on health and
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, 2009
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Many Christian counselors echo this statement, claiming that “there is a large body of tools that secular theorists have developed that are very useful” as aids in achieving the goals that emerge from the foundational premise of BC: “God’s answer to all needs is the sending of his son.”xii The death and resurrection of
Family Worship by Jean-Baptiste Greuze, 1780-1800
Christ is thus the precipitator for all processes of mental healing. Dr. John Street, the Chief Strategy Officer for the Biblical Counseling and Discipleship Association of Southern California, describes the contours of the healing processes that occur in BC: “Biblical counseling discerns desires, thinking, and behavior that God wants to change.”xiii This change is enacted using “God’s Word, through the Holy Spirit” (referring to the Bible) for “the sanctification of the Christian (into Christ-likeness) for the glory of God.”xiv The treatment
that his graduate training described the heart as “not just the seat of human emotion but also decisionmaking and desire.”xvii This de-physicalized concept of the heart allows for a moral reading of human instinct that stands in opposition to the portrait painted by secular psychologists. For instance, Abraham Maslow’s “Hierarchy of Needs” cognitive schematic paints human drives as “‘pre-moral,’ neither good nor evil.”xviii Yet a biblical anthropology paints the heart’s ultimate function as “worship,” an action that envelops processes of appraisal, valuation, and prioritization. The Christian worldview understands worship as the animating principle of human action; Groves states that “all of life is about worship […and] every single person comes through every single situation with some kind of worship disorder.”xix Mental health care, thus, is incomplete without recognizing this dimension of humanity and presenting a vision of what human worship is meant for. A final distinguishing marker of BC involves its connection with the Christian practice of discipleship, in which believers are personally directed by spiritual mentors on how to build character reflective of the person of Jesus Christ. Street claims that counseling is targeted discipleship that exerts work on problems that people have tried to fix themselves but could not, implicitly defining a goal of BC as changing a client’s response patterns to be emblematic of the behavioral schematic offered by the character of Christ
The most central biblical counseling target is the “heart,” a therapeutic object that functions as a proxy for the whole individual. course that purports to realize these goals varies from practitioner to practitioner, but usually involves a client-centered approach that includes setting goals, addressing experiences through a biblical lens, and changing the “heart” by reforming thoughts and behavior. BC does not have a set length of treatment, but usually concludes when the client is equipped to manage their problem on a self-sustained, ongoing basis or when counseling does not appear efficacious.xv The most central biblical counseling target is the “heart,” a therapeutic object that functions as a proxy for the whole individual. A presentation for an introductory BC course at the Master’s College renders the heart as the seat of habit, possessing the capacity to both love sacrificially and manipulate for selfish gain.xvi Accompanying course notes reference Old Testament lexical studies that identify the heart as “the richest biblical term for the totality of man’s inner being or immaterial nature.” Biblical counselor Alasdair Groves related a similar concept, claiming
as glimpsed in the Bible.xx This reveals a picture of mental wholeness that recognizes the human inability to independently intuit what it fully means to live well, which contrasts strongly with Western values that idealize the self-determined individual. Indeed, secular conversation around mental wellness is deeply rooted in capability; it paints the ideal world as one where individuals are equipped with the knowledge necessary to make preventative decisions that steer them away from lapses into mental illness, implicitly rendering counseling itself obsolete. In this world, the onus rests on the individual to optimize mental health, which often appeals to purely mechanistic framings of the body and mind. If the operations of the human machine are discernible, then improving those operations is simply a matter of willpower and potentially pharmacological resources. This is inherent in CBT’s assertion that one’s own thoughts can be known and influenced. By targeting agency, CBT and similar treatments claim to empower
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Early Christians Worship in the Catacombs of Saint Calixtus, c. late 19th century
humans to exert control over their own functionality through intimate knowledge of that functionality. Wholeness, thus, emerges from such self-sufficiency. Yet the Christian worldview uniquely portrays mental wholeness as deeply other-centered. The goals of BC are not inseparable from notions of optimal human functionality; rather, proper operation of the human machine is a beginning rather than an end. Street’s definition of BC indicates that God has the ultimate authority to define the problems that require healing, but the end goal of all healing practice through which God works is the glorious restoration of humanity to a thriving relationship with himself. This is the apex of human flourishing that BC is concerned with. Indeed, according to Street, the end goal of counseling is a mature and “complete” heart that is “more like Christ.”xxi If the heart is oriented toward God,
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whom it was designed to worship, then it begins to be molded in God’s image and achieves true flourishing. Moreover, Street claims that the “changed heart” is fixed as the dividing line “between pre-counseling and counseling.”xxii A change in heart can be viewed as the patient’s reorientation in stance on the nature of their problem; this newfound recognition equips the patient with receptivity to a narrative that promises to reveal what living well looks like. This state of living well is intentionally encouraged by the therapist because it brings glory for God; the therapist’s motivation is other-centered in a multi-modal sense, connecting the betterment of the patient to honoring God. Moreover, the healing process itself is understood as ultimately directed and mediated by God, not the therapist. This creates an entirely different set of expectations about where the causality of change in
Moreover, the healing process itself is understood as ultimately directed and mediated by God, [...] this creates an entirely different set of expectations about where the causality of change in mental health care is located, removing the weight of the human therapist’s limitations from encounters with uncertainty in therapuetic practice. mental health care is located, removing the weight of the human therapist’s limitations from encounters with uncertainty in therapeutic practice. Such weight is apparent in the experience of Daniel Mackler, a secularly trained psychotherapist who describes how his education did not prepare him to manage uncertainty well: “I feel that a lot of my mental health training made me arrogant […] it taught me to feel that I should know the answers, that I should be a foundation of wisdom and maturity and confidence. Well, what about all those times when I had no clue what to say?”xxiii Repeatedly experiencing the limits of his knowledge taught him that a principal part of his job was to “shut up and listen,” a conclusion that implicitly condemns attempting to construct an artifice of authority that will eventually be revealed hollow by human error. In contrast, biblical counselors are persistently made aware that they cannot be the authority in a healing process with a client; the only truly proficient knowledge in the therapeutic endeavor rests with God, an idea reflected in Street’s claim that BC “is not for experts.”xxiv Biblical counselor Ryan Thomas Neace argues that attempting to act outside the bounds of human knowledge’s proper role is dangerous, claiming that counselors make “themselves soothsayers at best and gods at worst” when they speak to clients without
Christian crosees on sunrise background by Geralt 2014
humility.xxv This sort of posture attempts to mimic the mind and authority of God. For Neace, a stance of therapeutic integrity in relation to the divine involves “embrac[ing] my weakness, unknowing, my lack of clarity […] my insensitivity to [the client’s] plight, my sinfulness, and ultimately, [the client themselves].”xxvi Being a suffering participant in a healing process that resists incisive penetration by the human mind, but can be trusted in the directive hands of a God understood to be good, captures the role uncertainty plays for the biblical counselor. A key characteristic of this dynamic is that the management of uncertainty in BC is fundamentally socially situated, since God is understood to guide the therapist within murky situations and minimizes the ominous power of uncertainty. This engenders a persistence in treatment that is rooted in a fundamental sense of peace; commitment to action along an obscure pathway is made possible through the security provided by God’s presence in the endeavor. Moreover, the therapist’s own experience of guidance within his or her relationship with God expands the credible epistemological capacity afforded to intuitions that are uncovered through the therapist’s own experiences of living and being. As the therapist grows to see themselves as conduit of change over cause of change, the implications of belonging to the same category as the client (“human”) and possessing the same object of therapy (“heart”) involve the notion that ontological commonality provides the tools to sufficiently, though not completely, reduce uncertainty in constructing an accessible portrait of the client’s heart. Groves emphasizes the importance of being able to say “we” with counselees, since “if you can’t say, ‘Yes, I know something about this person’s struggle from my own life, my own experience of suffering and sin and temptation,’ then you haven’t listened well and you have to keep going until you can say that.”xxvii The therapist cannot walk alongside a client in a healing process that they, as a fellow human being categorically afflicted with worship disorder, have not begun to experience themselves. Within a biblical anthropology, words are a therapeutic tool that carry mysterious efficacy to act upon the heart, and the authority to bring God’s words to bear on a patient’s situation is relationally bequeathed
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World Mental Health Day by Clemens Nitsche. 2015
Beyond learning new behavioral patterns, growing in relationship with God becomes the core epistemological unit for internalizing notions of what is good within the human heart. to the therapist from God. This is evident in the National Christian Counselors Association’s (NCCA) first article under the Statement of Faith in the Code of Ethics: “We believe the Bible is the inerrant, inspired Word of the Living God. The Bible is the final authority on all matters of life, faith, and practice.”xxviii The therapist’s job is to sketch out the connections between the core set of claims revealed to humanity through God’s Word and the unique context of the patient. The contours of concepts valued by biomedically-informed psychotherapy are altered by this set of claims; human agency is redefined as freedom within relationship, both the patient’s central relationship to God and the valuation of responsibility toward others that this relationship encourages. Since the Christian worldview articulates man’s ontological nature as both material
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and spiritual, the stakes in Christian counseling are inherently higher. Beyond learning new behavioral patterns, growing in relationship with God becomes the core epistemological unit for internalizing notions of what is good within the human heart, itself a force that resists unambiguous physical categorization, yet exerts a palpable influence on an observable mankind. This, then, is the crux of the conception of mental health suggested by the Christian worldview: being mentally well is more than reducing a negative display of symptoms. It is the cultivation of a positive trajectory toward relationship with God, producing a way of living and being that fulfills the core design of humanity. Experiencing healing and freedom from mental illness is undoubtedly crucial to pursuing this way of living, TheWorld WorldTrade TradeCenter Centerininthe theAftermath Aftermathofofthe the but the deep interconnections between The all elements September September11 11Attacks Attacksby byPreston PrestonKeres, Keres,2001 2001
True flourishing is existing in harmony with, rather than in opposition to, God’s goodness. of humanity—mind, body, spirit, and heart—imply that the roots of human brokenness continuously impact the whole person. A successful fight against mental illness, while reducing impairments to living and being that said illness produces, cannot inherently produce holistic mental well-being if the heart remains unreconciled with God. Repairing some domain of the human machine is not equivalent to ensuring that all components are working together according to design. True flourishing is existing in harmony with, rather than in opposition to, God’s goodness. Indeed, in the Christian worldview, this understanding of mental wellness is a pathway to infinite joy. Alexander Moreira-Almeida, Francisco Lotufo Neto, and Harold G. Koenig, “Religiousness and Mental Health: A Review,” Revista Brasileira de Psiquiatria 28 (2006): 243. ii. Robin Rosenberg and Stephen Kosslyn, Abnormal Psychology (New York: Worth, 2011), 25. iii. Matthew Stanford, Grace for the Afflicted: A Clinical and Biblical Perspective on Mental Illness (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 2008), 12. iv. A. Butler, J. Chapman, E. Forman, and A. Beck. “The Empirical Status of Cognitive-behavioral Therapy: A Review of Meta-Analyses,” Clinical Psychology Review 26.1 (2006): 18. v. J.A. Cully & A.L. Teten, “A Therapist’s Guide to Brief Cognitive Behavioral Therapy,” Department of Veterans Affairs South Central MIRECC, 2008 <https://www.mirecc.va.gov/visn16/docs/Therapists_ Guide_to_Brief_CBTManual.pdf>. vi. Deborah Dobson and Keith S. Dobson, EvidenceBased Practice of Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (New York: Guilford, 2009): 4. vii. Cully et al, “Guide to Brief Therapy,” 2008. viii. Cully et al, “Guide to Brief Therapy,” 2008 and Dobson et al, Evidence-Based Practice, 6. ix. Cully et al, “Guide to Brief Therapy,” 2008. x. Cully et al, “Guide to Brief Therapy,” 2008. xi. Sarah Rainer, “The Integration of Christianity and Psychology,” The Exchange | A Blog by Ed Stetzer for Christianity Today 25 September 2014 <http://www.christianitytoday.com/edstetzer/2014/ september/concerning-psychology-and-christianityguest-post-by-sarah-.html>. xii. Barney Armstrong, “How to Become a Christian Counselor,” Colleges & Degrees - Your Local College Guide, accessed 13 November 2016 <http:// www.collegesanddegrees.com/programs/christiancounseling>. xiii. John Street, “An Introduction to Biblical Counseling,” Biblical Counseling and Discipleship i.
Association of Southern California’s (BCDASoCal) 1st Annual Fall Basic Training Conference. Reseda, CA. 23 Sept. 2011. xiv. Street, 2011. xv. Deepak Reju, “When Do You Stop Counseling?” Biblical Counseling Coalition, 27 July 2016 <https://biblicalcounselingcoalition.org/2015/07/27/ when-do-you-stop-counseling/>. xvi. Ernie Baker and Jeff Miller, “Understanding the Heart” BC 300: Introduction to Biblical Counseling, September 2015 <https://masters.instructure.com/ courses/308/assignments/syllabus>. xvii. Alasdair Groves, interview, 15 November 2016. xviii. Baker et al, “Understanding the Heart”, 2015. xix. Groves, interview, 2016. xx. Street, 2011. xxi. Street, 2011. xxii. Street, 2011. xxiii. Mackler, Daniel, “Reflections on Being a Therapist,” Mad In America, 12 September 2013 <https://www.madinamerica.com/2013/09/ reflections-therapist/>. xxiv. Street, 2011. xxv. Ryan Thomas Neace, “But Aren’t You a Christian Counselor?” The Huffington Post, 28 June 2013 <http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ ryan-thomas-neace-/but-arent-you-a-christiancounselor_b_3176008.html>. xxvi. Neace, 2013. xxvii. Groves, interview, 2016. xxviii. National Christian Counselors’ Association, “Code of Ethics,” 1 February 2014 <https://www. ncca.org/Members/CodeofEthics.pdf>.
Jake Casale ’17 is from Redmond, Washington. He is a Psychology major and a Geography minor.
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Heaven, Hell, and Time: Marbles, Rivers, and Choice By Keenan Wood
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hat is hell? Is the popular image of a fiery pit filled with demons and the damned all there is to it? And what of heaven—is it simply a castle in the clouds, complete with winged angels and white-robed saints? These simplistic images give a good starting point in better understanding the true natures of heaven and hell, but believing this by itself leads only to an incomplete (and, quite frankly, fanciful) understanding. Heaven and hell are states of the soul after death, not just places where souls are sent after death. This is not to say that they cannot be different places, only that the most meaningful parts of each have more to do with what they are. To understand what this means, there are three main questions to ask concerning the afterlife: how time plays a fundamentally different role in heaven and hell, what the experience of being in each is like, and why souls go to one rather than the other. To better understand time’s role in the afterlife, it makes sense to start with its normal definition—the measure of change. To know something of what God is like, a distinction must be drawn between potentialitythe possibility of being changed- and actuality (what something is changed into). Thomas Aquinas explains in the Summa Theologica that God cannot be anything but act since he is the Prime Mover (First Being):
The Last Judgement by Michelangelo, 16th century
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The first being must of necessity be in act, and in no way in potentiality. For although in any single thing that passes from potentiality to actuality, the potentiality is prior in time to the actuality; nevertheless, absolutely speaking, actuality is prior to potentiality; for whatever is in potentiality can be reduced into actuality only by some being in actuality. Now it has been already proved that God is the First Being. It is therefore impossible that in God there should be any potentiality.i
God must therefore be unchanging and immeasurable in time. As the soul approaches him and draws nearer to heaven, it is made increasingly perfect (God-like) and so changes less and less, seeming to go through time slower. A good way to visualize this is by picturing a big spinning bowl with a light at its center. If someone rolls marbles around in it, some would roll towards the center, pulled by gravity (perhaps analogous to God’s love), and others would roll further and further from the center, flung off by centripetal force (analogous to the desire to remain as one is; to follow one’s own desires). The marbles rolling in the center do so very slowly, while those near the rim whip around at ever-increasing speeds. Viewing God as the light in the center, the marbles as souls, and time as speed allows this analogy to capture the gist of what
Adams The Tetons and the Snake River by Ansel Adams, 1942
heaven and hell are like. For those in heaven, time begins to slow, while in hell (in this analogy the outer rim of the bowl), the souls feel the full weight of time. In heaven, all of eternity feels as if it were a single moment of joy, while in hell, each miserable moment feels eternal. Those in the intermediate part, between the rim and the center (analogous to hell and heaven, respectively), are still able to change their course, although that becomes more difficult the further from the center they are. Another useful aspect of this spinning bowl analogy is that it captures what happens to an individual’s personality in either case. In the bowl’s center, illuminated by the central light, each marble glows brightly with its own color, while out at the rim far from the light, each becomes less and less distinct and is eventually cut off in darkness, first from the other marbles around it, and finally even from an awareness of itself. The soul likewise finds fulfillment, community, and the completion of its personality in
As another character explains, the city appears empty because all who stay try to get as far away as possible from their neighbors, whom they view as enemies or irritations. Those people move so far away from the bus that they are lost in the darkness, appearing as tiny specks of white in the blackness of space, each a shadow of a human, utterly alone.ii These analogies provide a slightly better general picture of heaven and hell, but there is still something that must be considered: What determines whether a person goes to heaven or hell? To begin answering this, let us now shift perspectives and view time as the unfolding of God’s will. Since we usually view free will as a characteristically human trait, we can consider humans as either being more in time (following God’s will), or less in time (fighting God’s will). Imagine this version of time to be like a river, down which everything flows (including humanity). While floating down gently, man opens his eyes and realizes where he is. He could simply keep floating down the river gently, remaining more like a
The soul likewise finds fulfillment, community, and the completion of its personality in heaven, while it finds only confusion, isolation, and blindness in hell. heaven, while it finds only confusion, isolation, and blindness in hell. One of the masters of analogy, C. S. Lewis, provides an insightful perspective of hell in The Great Divorce. At one point, the narrator finds himself in an empty, gray “twilight” city that souls come to after death. Most start off waiting in line for an unknown bus to arrive (nobody remembers why), but many decide to give up on waiting in their impatience or tempestuousness and wander off to live by themselves.
part of it than something separate. Instead, he flails in the water, feeling as if he is drowning in some sort of strange, vast river. With the river as God’s will, this image distinguishes the timeless peace that comes with following God’s will from the painfully self-aware fear that comes with acting against it. This is where the analogy includes an account of concupiscence, or the Christian idea that humanity is fundamentally imperfect. The results of this fallen form of human nature are the corruption of human faculties
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Maria Dreieichen, Basilica Fresco by Paul Troger, 1752
of reason and perception, the weakening of human consciences, and a break in humanity’s relationship with God. This manifests itself in the river analogy as the feeling of separation from the river and everything in it: a sort of shame at the unnatural separation from God and each other. This uncomfortable feeling of our own stark individuality is not very different from a painful kind of loneliness, mixed with a shameful naked feeling, as Adam and Eve felt after the fall in Genesis: “Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves.”iii It is from this feeling that questions like “Why am I
any soul should suffer forever. Justice is, of course, a good and necessary attribute for God to possess. As Deuteronomy 32:35 says of the wicked, “It is mine to avenge; I will repay. In due time their foot will slip; their day of disaster is near and their doom rushes upon them.”iv It is impossible for God to act unjustly, and there are few who would think it good or logical for him to be unjust. We can therefore view justice as having a fundamental role in determining whether one goes to heaven or hell. Yet, how could we call it “just” to throw a person who may have done evil in one instance (perhaps even in ignorance) into a fiery pit for all of eternity? We can address this using another
How could we call it “just” to throw a person who may have done evil in one instance... into a fiery pit for all of eternity? here?” and “Who am I? / Who should I be?” derive their weight. Heaven, in this analogy, would be the state of someone who decides to relax and float gently down the river, completely at peace with not knowing where he is going. Hell, on the other hand, would be the state of one who tries with all his strength to swim upriver until the water rubs him raw and the sound of the water thundering past blocks out his memories, thoughts, and even concepts of self, so that he is left with nothing but a faint, unquestioned urge to keep swimming against the current. The former is characterized by a sense of connection that brings peace, while the latter by a feeling of being completely cut adrift in despair. With all these characteristics in mind, it is easy to see how moving beyond the basic ideas of heaven and hell leads to some surprising realizations. Perhaps chief among these is the idea that heaven and hell are states of the soul, more than physical places. This idea begins to address concerns over how unjust it may seem that
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component fundamental to heaven and hell—choice. The importance of choice springs readily from the view of heaven and hell as states of the soul. Over the span of our lives, people act in ways that shape their character and make them who they are. In recognizing and responding with enthusiasm to God’s grace, they grow in every virtue, becoming naturally disposed to love what is right and good. On the contrary, acting in accord with whatever they may desire, in opposition to justice or kindness or prudence, disposes people to love wrong things, or right things in the wrong way, both of which keep them from fulfillment as human beings and make them incapable of loving purely. In Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis writes of this choice. If we let Him—for we can prevent Him, if we choose—He will make the feeblest and filthiest of us into a god or goddess, a dazzling, radiant, immortal creature, pulsating all through with such energy and joy and wisdom and love as we cannot now imagine, a bright stainless mirror which reflects back to God perfectly
Heaven is nothing more or less than union with God—complete acceptance of his love and the embracing of his grace with open arms. Hell is what heaven is not: an aching nothingness brought about from the rejection of everything. (though, of course, on a smaller scale) His own boundless power and delight and goodness.v
It is God’s grace that forms a person over their life and makes them good; and it is their free will that determines whether they cooperate with this process or shun it and attempt to stay as they are. What happens to the soul after death? It can be helpful to think of both the righteous and the wicked soul as starting in the presence of God. The wicked soul, accustomed in life to hating what is good and loving itself more than anything, will curl up into itself in its hatred when in the presence of pure goodness. The soul used to loving the good would feel completion in the presence of God and would joyfully embrace the good as an old friend. In this example, we can almost think of heaven and hell as sharing the same “place”— the presence of God—with the key difference being the soul’s reaction to this powerful presence based on the soul’s character. This perspective allows us to see how hell is not something God forces on people, but rather a situation they choose themselves; just as it is written in Sirach 15:16-17, “He has placed before you fire and water; stretch out your hand for whichever you choose. Before each person are life and death, and whichever one chooses will be given.”vi God has opened the gates of heaven for those who seek him; and in giving humanity free will, God has allowed them to choose whatever they please, even allowing them to pervert their desires, abilities, and identities. Hell is complete darkness, filled with nothing but incoherent self-loathing: a state of abject misery where each moment feels eternal. Heaven, on the other hand, is the coming together of righteous souls, closer to God and to one another, until it almost seems like God’s light pierces each and rebounds off in a rainbow of colors. From this communion each person’s personality is made complete and distinct. Heaven is an eternity in the form of a single joyous moment, a million times more potent than our glimpses of the eternal in the present. Whether it is watching clouds drift by with a loved one on a warm summer’s day, practicing a sport early in the morning or late into the afternoon with close teammates, or simply marveling at the beauty of nature or of truth in a moment of silence: it is through these moments of living in the now, of abandoning ourselves to the flow of time and God’s will, that we experience a glimpse of heaven on
earth. Looking at heaven and hell from fresh perspectives makes it easy to see past the basic facades of a cloudparadise and a fiery pit and deeper into their true natures. Heaven is nothing more or less than union with God—complete acceptance of his love and the embracing of his grace with open arms. Hell is what heaven is not: an aching nothingness brought about from the rejection of everything—including, in the end, the self. Hell is not a “place” where God puts souls to be somewhere that he isn’t, for he is omnipresent; it is rather the state of the wicked soul who, in God’s presence, denies his love, curls up into itself, and wishes it had never existed. What determines whether people go to heaven or hell? It is simply their response to God’s grace. They can allow him to change them, or they can remain as they are. Either way, there is a choice, and no injustice on God’s part in giving them what they choose. With this understanding of heaven and hell, the choice set before Christians is clear. They can accept and cooperate with God’s grace so that it forms their characters and wills to love that which alone can fulfill them and bring them joy. On the other hand, they can flail around in the uncomfortable, ever-increasing awkward feeling of concupiscence until they inadvertently tear themselves away from the world, others, and their very selves. One is heaven, the other hell: the difference is a matter of choice. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, New Advent, <http://www.newadvent.org/summa/1003. htm#article1> (accessed 10 February 2017) 1.3.1. ii C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce (New York : The Macmillan Company, 1946), ch. 1. iii Genesis 3:7, New American Bible Revised Edition (NABRE). iv Deuteronomy 32:35, (NABRE). v C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: Macmillan Co., 1943), 97. vi Sirach 15:16-17, (NABRE). i
Keenan Wood ’18 is from Berlin, New Hampshire. He is an Engineering Physics major.
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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. The Dartmouth Apologia was founded on the belief 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. The Dartmouth Apologia affirms the Nicene Creed, recognizing 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 Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17
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