Apologia Spring 2015

Spring 2015, Volume 9, Issue 2

featuring

Examining Moral Failure in the Bible also inside

A Second Look at the Blanchard v. Rice Debate Breaking Christians’ Silence on Racism Being Mortal and Our Memories

A Letter from the Editor

J

ohn Sloan Dickey defined a bold future for Dartmouth when he addressed the undergraduate population and proclaimed, “The world’s problems are your problems.” He sought to combat the myriad temptations facilitated by Dartmouth’s size and locale: to become overly focused on the present, to forget the great, tragic, and complex expanse extending far beyond the wilderness of Hanover, and to treat the academy as an end in itself, rather than a means of preparation for greater work in the future.

Such temptations are not unique to Dickey’s era, but continue to tug at the heart of this institution. Preparation for a lifetime of responsible leadership, as the college’s mission statement promises, is far from easy; the stakes are high, and the demand—on both educators and students—is higher. A sense of purpose is crucial for providing a framework in which such an effort can be reasonably and justifiably spent, lest the whole endeavor dissolve into a mist of heedless negligence. This is why numerous sons and daughters of Dartmouth have asked, and continue to ask, a perennial question: how does education make one fit to effectively engage the world?

Naturally, numerous answers have been proposed, and we at the Apologia recognize and affirm the veracity contained within them. The development of critical reasoning, technical skill sets, and effective expression are good and valid aims of the college. But the college also claims dedication to the stewardship, transmission, and discovery of knowledge—a body of wisdom that accurately reflects what is glimpsed in reality. It is at this juncture that we seek to add a voice that has long been relegated to the sidelines of academic discourse. We ardently believe that Christianity is not only the most internally consistent and intellectually satisfying belief system that mankind has ever encountered, but that it offers a context unmatched in explanatory power for every issue that humanity faces and effective guidance in addressing the root causes of these issues. Christianity has something to say about the full range of ills plaguing society, from the damage wrought by centuries of racist behavior to the labyrinthine questions of moral governance and human reconciliation with mortality in an age of unprecedented medical advances. In this issue, we tackle these issues and more in the spirit of C.S. Lewis’ famous assertion, “I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.”

Yet we also acknowledge that we do not always see clearly. Though we believe that God’s truth is revealed through the Bible, our human brokenness fractures our ability to fully comprehend this truth, a reality that we also ponder in these pages. Indeed, all the world’s problems can be traced back to human brokenness. These problems are truly our problems, and we at the Apologia place our hope for restorative action beyond humanity, in the Gospel and the person and work of Jesus Christ, in full assurance that his engagement with the world is sufficient to right all wrongs, heal all illnesses, and redeem all hearts. We invite you now, reader, to approach our words with open eyes, that you may understand why we do so.

Jake J. Casale Editor-in-Chief

Submissions

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

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

by Natalie Shell ’15

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 2015, Volume 9, Issue 2

Editor-in-Chief Jake Casale ’17 Managing Editor Macy Ferguson ’16 Editorial Board Nathaniel Schmucker ’15 Abby Thornburg ’15 Chris D’Angelo ’16 Mene Ukueberuwa ’16 Danielle D’Souza ’17 Jessica Tong ’17 Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17 Matthew West ’17 Business Manager Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17 Production Manager Janice Yip ’15 Production Staff Macy Ferguson ’16 Chenchen Li ’18 Christopher Kymn ’18 Tiffany Park ’18 Photography Natalie Shell ’15 Janice Yip ’15 Contributors Emmanuel Hui ’17 Luke Dickens ’18 Chenchen Li ’18 Stephanie Liu ’18 Advisory Board Richard Denton, Physics Gregg Fairbrothers Eric Hansen, Thayer James Murphy, Government Lindsay Whaley, Classics Leo Zacharski, DMS 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 © 2015 The Dartmouth Apologia.

INTERVIEW: 2

God in Mathematics and Philosophy John Lennox

SCRIPTURAL INTERPRETATION: 6 A Second Look at the Blanchard v. Rice Debate Sara Holston ’17

YOU BE THE JUDGE: 12

Shakespeare’s Moral Universe Danielle D’Souza ’17

EXAMINING MORAL 16 FAILURE IN THE BIBLE:

A Theological Understanding of God’s Chosen Leaders Joshua Tseng-Tham ’17

MONARCHY REVISITED: 23

A Review of Christian Statecraft Mene Ukueberuwa ’16

THE RHETORIC OF 28 WORLDVIEWS:

Narratives of Violence and Peace Jake Casale ’17

BREAKING CHRISTIANS’ 35 SILENCE ON RACISM Jessica Tong ’17

“BEING MORTAL” AND 39 OUR MEMORIES Chenchen Li ’18

PHARISEE IN THE FIELD 42 Emmanuel Hui ’17

T

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

INTERVIEW

GOD IN

MATHEMATICS AND PHILOSOPHY John Lennox, Professor of

Mathematics at the University of Oxford, Fellow in Mathematics and the Philosophy of Science at Green Templeton College, Oxford and renowned Christian Apologist discusses Christianity, mathematics, and C.S. Lewis.

Conducted by Luke Dickens and Stephanie Liu

John Lennox, 2008

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Why did you choose to study mathematics?

I chose mathematics because 1) I was good at it and 2) my headmaster told me that it would get me into Cambridge. I actually wanted to be a Latinist first.

Then, I wanted to do electrical engineering, and I was all set up to do it, but the headmaster said, “I think you would get into Cambridge, but only if you do math.”

How has mathematics influenced you?

It has taught me to think, because it is the most rigorous form of logic. All of the things that we deal with depend on logical analysis. In my field, you either have it 100% right or you do not publish it. That is why mathematicians do not publish as many papers as natural scientists and so on. In natural science you can say, “I took this chemical and I took that chemical, and I discovered this and that.” But you cannot do that in math. You either have to think of something entirely new and prove it rigorously, or forget it! It’s a humbling process.

How has mathematics influenced your understanding of God?

Mathematics is very powerful as an analogical tool.

C.S. Lewis nearly failed to get into Oxford because he could not pass the math exam. They nearly lost him because of that! It was only because of the war that he was exempted from being required to pass the exam.

Now Lewis had a very acute sense of geometry. If you read his books, you will find that many of his helpful analogies come from geometry, such as, for example, his analogy explaining a triune God.

How do you see mathematics being used to prove the existence of God?

Mathematics can be used at several levels. The first level is this: the fact that we can do mathematics is very powerful evidence of God. It means that this is a universe that has a logical structure and is mathematically describable. That is what has inspired modern science—the belief that, because there is a rational creator, you can study the universe mathematically. That is the big evidence. It is so big that most people miss it. They want some sort of mathematical equation. But it is the fact that you can do math that is the first big evidence of God. There are certain specific branches of mathematics you can use as well, such as the field of probability.

Take the Bayes’ Theorem for example. Reverend Bayes came up with this idea of probability that you can use antecedent probability to increase the probability of something being true. Roughly speaking, if you can

Portrait of Bayes, date unknown

ask yourself “What is the probability of there being a God?” then you can say, “What is the probability of there being a God granted you perceive the universe to be carefully designed?” Intuitively, the probability has become much greater! These arguments have been developed to great sophistication. The Bayes Theorem is correct, there is no question about it. The discussion generated by it is whether you can apply it to theories distinct from probabilistic, naturalistic scientific situations. One of my colleagues from Oxford, Richard Swinburne, a very famous philosopher, uses it a great deal.

Could you explain the dangers in using probability?

People often ask me, “What is the probability that God exists?” I say to them, “What is the probability that you exist?” You do not decide whether you exist based on the probability of whether you exist. You depend it on the basis of actuality. The question is not whether God is probable, but whether God is actual and if there is evidence for his actuality. People often do not distinguish between probability and actuality.

The probability of you winning the lottery is very small, but if I come by your house and find that it has doubled in size and I see that you have ten cars outside, I would be prepared to believe that you have won the lottery!

What would another use of mathematics be?

This one involves math, in a way, but is more theoretical physics. Though, it is massively important!

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If you ask most of my atheist friends, “What is the best argument on the side of God?” most of them will say the fine-tuning of the universe. It is not strictly mathematical, but it is mathematical in that it is the math of theoretical physics. And the huge number of parameters that we now know about that have to be incredibly fine-tuned in order for life to exist is, I think, an important indicator of the existence of a God. Can you explain how Turing machines relate to the existence of a God?

The Church-Turing thesis, which most people accept, is that the Turing machine simulates any computer, past, present, or future. Now, there is a whole series of results from theoretical computer science that have to do with the generation or nongeneration of information. The general result that is held these days is that a Turing machine cannot create any information in its input or in its informational make up.

Now, then, I will wear my biological hat (which is a fairly thin hat). The cell is at least an information processor. So, at that level, a Turing machine can simulate it. Therefore, the cell cannot create any new information. It seems to me that the demolition of the materialist thesis comes about by the results of theoretical computer science.

The point is, that it takes an intelligence to create information. If you make a Turing machine that is there now, it is an information processor. It cannot create any information that is not in its own internal system and its own input. The human mind is not a Turing machine. The conservation of information applies to machines but not to humans. This, however, does not bode well with evolutionary scientists since it seems that information cannot be created except by intelligences or an intelligence.

Now, let us say that I am not a Christian but have just accepted the argument that God exists. What next?

Romans 1 gives us the value and the limitations of natural theology—that is, the concept of reading God from the universe. Paul, the author of Romans, says that the invisible things of God are clearly perceived in the things that are made. He says that there is a God who is powerful and clearly seen, but that we cannot deduce things such as the doctrine of atonement from simply gazing at the stars. We need evidence of a different kind. Christianity claims to be part of history and experience, so we must draw on its history and experience. That is perfectly legitimate. We must get past the idea that science is the only way to truth.

That idea, which I call scientific fundamentalism

US Navy version of Turingbombe was used against the German cipher machine Enigma-M4, 2012

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You do not decide whether you exist based on the probability of whether you exist. You depend it on the basis of actuality. The question is not whether God is probable, but whether God is actual and if there is evidence for his actuality. People often do not distinguish between probability and actuality. and everybody else calls scientism, is false. The very statement “science is the only way to truth” is not a statement of science, and therefore is false by its own definition. It is incoherent as a statement.

People often try to demonstrate inconsistencies in God’s properties. For example, they ask whether God can create a rock so heavy that he cannot lift it in the attempt to prove that he cannot be omnipotent. How would you respond to that?

Well, I will quote Lewis when he said, “nonsense remains nonsense even when we are talking about God.” It is nonsensical. It is wonderful to see Hawking and other theoretical physicists talking nonsense. The universe can create itself—that is nonsense. The same applies to God. On that note with C.S. Lewis, could you tell us what you remember most about him from your personal interactions?

One thing that I remember most is his lecturing style. It was winter and very cold. The lecture room was completely full; people were on the floor and hanging in the windows. He would burst in through the double doors of the lecture room with a hat, coat, and scarf and start lecturing instantly. As he came into the lecture room and as he took off his hat and coat, he was building up to a tremendous flow of words. By the time he got to the podium, you had already had about five minutes of a brilliant lecture. He flowed on for 50 minutes, and then he would reverse the process.

He kept lecturing as he put on his coat and his hat and so the last words were uttered as he burst out the door.

There was no Q&A. That is my memory of Lewis.

Could you tell us about a story regarding C.S. Lewis’ memory?

Oh yes, Lewis had a photographic memory. One time he happened to be at a seminar at which a friend of mine, who later became a very famous professor of Italian, was speaking. And Lewis was so impressed that he came to him afterwards and said, “A group of friends meet with me every Tuesday, would you like to join us?” This was a great honor, so he went.

He eventually got to know Lewis very well. One day he was in Lewis’ room and Lewis was in a convivial mood. Lewis said to him, “Take down any book from the shelves.” So he did so. “Open it anywhere and start reading,” Lewis said. So he started to read for a couple of minutes, and then Lewis just continued on and on and on. That was pretty awesome. He had that phenomenal of a memory.

Are there any other stories you remember about C.S. Lewis?

Yes. The chaplain at Magdalen College is a great C.S. Lewis fan. He and I were having dinner at Magdalen and he asked, “Have you ever seen the bet book?”

The fellows have a betting book, and it’s very old, and they don’t use it anymore. And he said, “just look at this.” And there it is, in fine writing, that C.S. Lewis bets professor so and so that the word ‘eros’ cannot be found in any of the works of some very obscure Greek writer. The bet is dated as well. And underneath, C.S. Lewis again signs, “Received from professor so and so a crate of port.” So he won the bet!

What are you currently working on in your philosophical endeavors?

The thing that interests me most now is Thomas Nagel’s argument. He is an atheist who believes that evolutionary naturalism is false. C.S. Lewis and Alvin Plantinga both picked up on this problem, but now we have one of the world’s leading atheist philosophers who has acknowledged this issue. Briefly stated, the idea is that as long as you are thinking about the natural world, you do not exist, but the moment that you start thinking about thinking you do exist. If you argue that the mind is the result of a random evolutionary process, then you have no grounds for believing your mind. I suspect that Darwin’s theory will fall. I am not arguing that natural selection is false, but that macroevolution is wrong. You know the God of the gaps argument?

Well evolution is just like that. A scientist would say, “I can’t explain why we came about, through natural means, so evolution must have done it.”

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SCRIPTURAL INTERPRETATION:

A SECOND LOOK AT THE BLANCHARD V. RICE DEBATE

by Sara Holston

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F

ew books have been as influential, hotly debated, or variously interpreted as the Bible.

Scriptural interpretation has been on the minds of American Christians and non-Christians alike since before the Civil War, when it came to the forefront of public discourse as a central question in the debate over slavery. Today, Americans still struggle with how to interpret biblical passages that challenge our cultural views or personal feelings. Are we meant to read the Bible literally? How do we maintain accuracy in translation? How do we take into account historical context? Should we? Should we read individual passages in isolation, or are we meant to look at the broader message of the Bible as a whole to inform our reading of smaller pieces? Many of these questions arose during the time leading up to the Civil War and were advanced in the Blanchard v. Rice Debate over slavery. For four days in October 1845 two contrasting methods of reading the Bible were contested; methods that ultimately developed into various extremes still hotly debated today. Both Jonathan Blanchard and Nathan Rice, well respected pastors and biblical scholars, made relevant points about how to properly read and accurately interpret Scripture. Balancing their perspectives and following their lead in seeking to do the same today can help us strengthen our biblical literacy and understand true Christianity.

Historical Background The years leading up to the Civil War saw abolitionists and supporters of the antislavery movement clashing with proslavery Americans over specific scriptural passages related to slavery. Until this point, the position generally accepted by Americans on these passages held that the Bible does not condemn slavery: it was practiced frequently in the Old Testament, Jesus himself never spoke on the issue, and St. Paul went so far as to give moral directives to slaves.i But, as some Americans began to feel that the practice was morally wrong, they sought a way to support their position using the Bible. Antislavery sympathizers moved through various methods of interpreting the relevant Scriptures, seeking one that could uphold the immorality of slavery. As proslavery advocates countered each approach, abolitionists developed

new ones, and the hermeneutics of the antislavery movement evolved beyond the traditional “plainsense” understanding of the passages to a progressively less literal reading of the Bible.ii Abolitionists first argued that while no biblical passages recount Jesus directly condemning slavery, there are also none in which he condemns polygamy, infanticide, idolatry, and blasphemy, all of which nineteenth-century Christians considered morally indefensible.iii Since these practices were understood to be absolutely and clearly wrong, and since they were described as such in biblical passages not attributed to Jesus, abolitionists took the view that it was therefore unnecessary for Jesus to state the obvious by addressing them specifically. When this view failed to persuade slavery supporters, abolitionists back-tracked and argued that slavery was nonexistent in Palestine at the time of Jesus, and so he did not have any context or need to address it as morally reprehensible. Slavery advocates quickly pointed to the Bible’s depiction of Jesus’ meeting with slaves, compelling abolitionists to shift their stance yet again. This time they adopted the popular anti-intellectual plain-sense approach to reading Scripture. Attempting to address both Jesus’s meeting with slaves and Paul’s statements concerning slavery, anti-slavery minister Albert Barnes proposed the “Barnes Hypothesis,” arguing on semantics that the word typically translated as “slave” should actually be understood as “servant.”iv As historical evidence supporting slavery in Jesus’ time grew, however, Christ’s silence on the issue once again proved an issue for the movement.

In the 1840s and 50s the antislavery movement began to seek alternative methods of biblical interpretation that deviated from the traditional literalism. The first of these new approaches was the hermeneutic of “the seed growing secretly,” which borrowed from contemporary popular ideas of human progress. The theory flipped the previous impression of Christ’s era as a Golden Age on its head, arguing that instead of laying out definitive moral laws, which were misinterpreted over time and evolved away from the truth, Christ subtly planted the seed of the true gospel in the minds of his followers, leaving it to develop into fully-fledged moral beliefs as humanity progressed through history. This method

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was considered to account for Christ’s silence on the issue and to reconcile any perceived contradictions between the Old and New Testaments as reflecting the progress of human morality over time.v The new hermeneutic still faced the problem of contradictions within the New Testament itself, namely, contradictions between Christ’s perceived objection to slavery and Paul’s statements that appear to accept and uphold it, such as “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart, just as you would obey Christ.”vi Standing on the foundation that the Holy Apostle Paul could not have made mistakes, supporters of the antislavery movement argued that the contradiction between Christ’s work against slavery and Paul’s statements seemingly in favor of it proved that the plain-sense interpretation was flawed. They then applied another new hermeneutic, that of an “immutable principle,” in which a small kernel of truth or meaning in the Gospels was chosen and used as the lens through which all other relevant passages were read. Combined with the “seed growing secretly,” this approach formed the abolitionist’s newest scriptural interpretation.vii The antislavery supporters chose as their kernel Jesus’s Golden Rule, “do to others as you would have them do to you,” employing the idea to reconcile Paul’s statements with the notion of Christ’s secret seed.viii Abolitionists considered evangelism to be a second immutable principle, and focused on Paul’s emphasis on the practice. They believed that baptized slaves could not obey the slave code, neither could Christian pastors enforce it while still being in line with Christian teachings. Therefore, this code contravened evangelism. Thus, abolitionists held that Paul, by promoting evangelism, was secretly signaling that he was against slavery. Resorting to planting

“secret seeds” was deemed pragmatic: had Jesus or Paul openly condemned slavery and other practices central to the social and economic structure of their time, repercussions from the Roman government would have been swift, potentially curtailing the spread of the Gospel. So, Christ and his followers had to operate somewhat within the rules of the time in order to enact change later.ix The idea of the secret seed was later discarded in favor of the argument that Paul openly condemned slavery in two passages that had been generally overlooked. The first was I Corinthians 7:21, which reads, in a common eighteenth-century translation, “Art thou called being a servant? Care not for it: but if thou mayest be made free, use it rather.”x This passage was considered to be grammatically ambiguous, as the antecedent of “it” here is unclear.xi The other passage, I Timothy 1:10, reads “…for menstealers, for liars, for perjured persons, and if there be any other thing that is contrary to sound teaching.”xii By reading “menstealers” here as applicable to the concept of slavery, abolitionists argued that Paul here condemns slavery and therefore this passage should be relevant to the debate.xiii As the theories of the secret seeds and open condemnation contradict each other, however, the abolitionists actually weakened their stance by arguing both.

Indeed, abolitionists so often changed their mind or completely reversed themselves trying to incorporate various evidence and arguments that might support their viewpoint that they undermined their own credibility. As a solution to this growing instability, the antislavery movement turned still further from literalism, settling this time for arguments of conscience with an approach that became known as the “hermeneutic of moral

Slavery in South Carolina and the ex-slaves by Austa Malinda French, 1862

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intuition.” Pursuant to this hermeneutic, the Bible should be read with regard to the themes and messages woven throughout the entire text, rather than analyzing only individual passages. With this method, even if individual passages did not seem to support the antislavery position, abolitionists argued that the broader Word of God did, thereby enabling the anti-slavery sentiment to prevail.xiv The Blanchard v. Rice Debate It was upon the argument for reading the Bible with regard to its overarching themes that Blanchard took his stand against Rice in their 1845 debate.xv Rice, who took the proslavery side of the debate, allowed that the

one as minor as breaking a tooth, was grounds for immediate manumission. Most significantly, slaves were not property and, while non-Jewish slaves could be bought, they could not be resold. Wayland held that as such, “if slavery be justified by the law of Moses, it is, of course, only justified in the manner and with the restrictions under which it was placed by that law,” therefore rendering American slavery unacceptable outside the ancient context.xix This argument frequently made little headway in the debate, as its nuances were too quickly overlooked and it was easily lumped in with other radical and unpopular antislavery arguments that drew on a nonliteral interpretation of the Bible. Many Christians

If a deeper understanding of the time period, the words in the original language, and a complex exegesis stemming from exploration of multiple connecting passages and themes was required, only a small number of experts would be capable of understanding the Bible.

Bible points to the eventual, voluntary elimination of slavery, but maintains that slavery itself is not evil. He used specific texts and passages as evidence for this position, which Blanchard struggled to refute. In turn, Blanchard fell back on the “general principles of the Bible” and “the whole scope,” insisting that among paramount “principles of the Bible are justice and righteousness,” and therefore the Scriptures condemn slavery as an evil contradicting this greater purpose, even if they do not denounce it explicitly in individual passages.xvi His reliance on the larger themes of the Scriptures came at a time when rationalism, the focus on reason and logic as superior evidence for a theory, was gaining ground in theological circles. With the growing prominence in universities of the new German higher criticism, a way of researching and reading the Bible using the historical context pertaining to the author and the content in that culture, Blanchard’s perspectives on the Bible matched the ideas advanced in academic communities.xvii For example, theologians such as Francis Wayland and Tayler Lewis developed and championed a nuanced interpretation of the Biblical passages pertaining to slavery, utilizing a great deal of the historical evidence previously employed against claims that slavery did not exist in Jesus’ Palestine. They allowed that the Bible does not expressly condemn slavery, but pointed out that it does not imply slavery is acceptable outside of that time and place, and that even if so, slavery “in ancient times was very different from slavery in the American South.”xviii In the time of Christ, these scholars argued, slaves could bear weapons, they could be named heir, and an injury to a slave, even

felt that in reading certain passages as not literal, abolitionists circumvented what appeared to be moral teachings about slavery and paved the way for any challenging or unpopular teachings and passages to be similarly ignored. This was such a concern to Christians that, in fact: the more the anti-slavery and abolitionist preachers enlisted German historical criticism in the service of their theology, the more unpersuasive their exegesis appeared even to their fellow antislavery and abolitionist clergymen.xx

The biggest challenge to reading the Bible through the lens of the broader themes arose from the fact that the American church had historically thrived reading the Bible literally and looking at specific passages in isolation, rather than attempting to understand the historical context of the entire work. Americans, proslavery advocates urged, had always approached the Bible with a plain-sense hermeneutic in which anyone, with no broader education or experience, could pick up the Bible, read the relevant passages, and understand the teachings.xxi If a deeper understanding of the time period, the words in the original language, and a complex exegesis stemming from exploration of multiple connecting passages and themes was required, only a small number of experts would be capable of understanding the Bible. The rest of the population would have to trust these few as authorities or undergo significant training and education to draw those connections themselves. To a society built on individualism and the agency of the common man, this idea was unpopular.

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the text detailing those moral teachings, and seek to understand the nuances beyond what may appear obvious at first sight.

Ultimately both sides of the debate made valid points and, perhaps most significantly, both were driven by what appeared to them to be the primary moral issue at stake. To the abolitionists, it was clear that the Bible, actually a library of different writings all inextricably tied to the history of their times and authors, could not be read without deeper understanding of all of these factors, and that the failure to do so up to that point had led to the propagation of an unacceptable immoral practice for hundreds of years. But, to Rice and his proslavery sympathizers, it was equally clear that reinterpreting long agreed upon passages of the Bible based solely on moral intuition was a dangerous and slippery slope. In the eyes of these Americans, for abolitionists to decide to find a reading of Scripture that fit what they believed to be morally right was to again reject the perfect judgment of the omniscient and omnibenevolent God, to metaphorically eat of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.

An American family Bible dating to 1859 by David Ball

Another significant point of contention between Blanchard and Rice dealt with the supposed evidence for the morality of slavery found in the churches and in taking the pulse of Christianity in the nation. When the Blanchard v. Rice Debate was held, religion was more integrated in daily life. As one historian states: “the people…brought economics and religion together.”xxii Proslavery supporters frequently argued, as Rice did in the debate, that to be biblically against slavery was to believe that all American slaveholders—a good percentage of the population—were damned to hell.

And yet “there [were] true Christians and Christian churches in the slave-holding States…blessed with the same tokens of divine favor, and [having enjoyed] the same glorious revivals of religion…[T]he prayers of [those] slave-holders [had] been heard and abundantly answered in blessings on themselves and others.”xxiii This abundance and success contradicted the idea that slaveholders and traders would be alienated from God. Blanchard countered that perhaps these individuals’ experiences were not what they thought; these slaveholders could have false hopes, or they could be “blessed in consequence of the prayers of the holy dead,” that accounted for God’s love and support in their lives.xxiv Blanchard here raises an important point; we cannot accurately read the signs of God’s favor regarding particular issues and use them as affirmation of our lifestyles. Rather, the best way to determine what practices God approves of is to closely examine

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Conclusion Ultimately, much of the debate over American slavery in the nineteenth century boiled down to conflict between intellectualism and anti-intellectualism in Christianity. The proslavery side supported antiintellectualism, opting for the simplest approach to interpretation, a stance that was seen to line up with values of individualism and traditional reliance on the absolute authority of the Bible. Abolitionists, on the other hand, championed the beginning of the intellectual movement in biblical interpretation, insisting on the significance of the historical context of the Scriptures and the relation of individual passages to the whole for truly understanding Scriptures and restoring their full spiritual authority. Similarly, we see these conflicting perspectives present in today’s world, from interpretive methods that rely on the authority of moral conscience and reading Scriptures in a way that affirms our moral beliefs, to in-depth, holistic, contextual study, to still a plain-sense literalism.

Christian denominations often approach the Bible differently, and there remains great debate today over the best method. The Blanchard v. Rice Debate provides a foundation for the components of this discussion; knowing where the issue began can help us think about it and understand it better going forward. The fact that this issue has stood for so long and continues to be debated shows that Christians recognize its complexity and are willing to think through various readings of the text in seeking the truth. Differing interpretations of Scripture may seem divisive at times, but ultimately

create opportunities for all of us to better understand Christ’s teachings.

This study and deeper understanding may be more significant than ever in restoring biblical authority.

David Nienhuis, Associate Professor of New Testament Studies at Seattle Pacific University, describes his experiences and work with what has come to be known as “biblical illiteracy.” He states that Study after study demonstrates how nearly everyone in our land owns a Bible (more than one, in fact) but few ever take the time to read it, much less study it closely…recent Gallup polls tell us that only half can name even one of the four Gospels, only a third are able to identify the individual who delivered the Sermon on the Mount, and most aren’t even able to identify Genesis as the Bible’s opening text…it has become increasingly clear that the situation is really no better among confessing Christians…I often begin my survey of the Christian Scriptures course by asking students to take a short biblical literacy quiz...The vast majority of my students— around 95 percent of them—are Christians…

Yet the class as a whole consistently averages a score of just over 50 percent, a failing grade.xxv

Not many Christians today have the biblical knowledge of their pre-Civil War counterparts, and even fewer turn to the Bible for guidance in how to live and make moral decisions.

Beyond the downsides for Christians ourselves, this biblical illiteracy and loss of biblically founded living causes Christians to fall short of the calling to demonstrate Christian teachings in how we live.

Nienhuis points out that: a merely cognitive level of biblical literacy does not automatically result in the formation of a Christian character. To make a real difference in people’s lives, biblical literacy programs… will have to teach people to speak the language of faith; and while this language is of course grounded in the grammar, vocabulary, and stories of the Bible…[w]e don’t memorize languages; we use them and live through them.xxvi

When we do not understand what the Scriptures are teaching, we may misunderstand statements or misapply passages to our daily lives. We can end up deciding for ourselves what is morally right, using the Bible for mere affirmation of what we want to be true.

Thus, the Christianity presented to, and understood by, the general public may not accurately represent the faith. If this is true, and Christians have failed to understand and practice the religion as it was intended to be, then those who have disagreed with it may be

rejecting non-existent teachings. Today, the Blanchard v. Rice Debate reminds us that true Christianity can only be understood and effectively practiced through strong biblical literacy.

J. Albert Harill, “The Use of the New Testament in the American Slave Controversy: A Case History in the Hermeneutical Tension Between Biblical Criticism and Christian Moral Debate,” Religion and American Culture 10 (2000): 149-186. See also Colossians 3:22, 4:1; Ephesians 6:9. ii.

Harrill, 150-159. iii.

Harrill, 150-51. iv.

Harrill, 151. v.

Harrill, 154. vi.

Ephesians 6:5 (NIV). vii.

Harrill, 154. viii.

Matthew 7:12 (NIV), also appears in Luke 6:31; Harrill, 153. ix.

Harrill, 156. x.

I Corinthians 7:21 (KJV). xi.

Harrill, 157. xii.

I Timothy 1:10 (KJV). xiii.

Harrill, 157. xiv.

Harrill, 158. xv.

Mark Noll, “The Battle for the Bible: The Impasse Over Slavery,” The Christian Century 123, 9 (2006): 20. xvi.

Noll, 20. xvii.

Harrill, 157. xviii.

Noll, 24. xix.

Noll, 23. xx.

Harrill, 152. xxi.

Noll, 25. xxii.

John Patrick Daly, When Slavery was Called Freedom (Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2002), 101. xxiii.

Jonathan Blanchard and Nathan Rice, “Debate on Slavery,” October 1845. (Cincinnatti: WM. H. Moore & Co Publishers, 1846), 159. xxiv.

Blanchard and Rice, 162; Daly, 58-9. xxv.

David R. Nienhuis, “The Problem of Evangelical Biblical Illiteracy: A View from the Classroom,” Modern Reformation 19, 1 (2010) 10-13, 17. xxvi.

Nienhuis, 13. i.

Sara Holston ’17 is from Wayne, PA. She is an English major and prospective Computer Science minor.

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TITUS ANDRONICUS

MACBETH

OTHELLO YOU BE THE JUDGE: SHAKESPEARE’S MORAL UNIVERSE

by Danielle D’Souza

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O

ne of the reasons we read great books is not merely to become more informed about history and philosophy, but to become better decision makers in our own lives. Great books can lead us to ponder life’s deepest questions and help us determine how to live our own lives in the fullest, best way possible. The greatest of writers confront moral questions at the heart of the human condition and enable us as readers to see those more clearly. I will discuss the moral universe of Shakespeare focusing on three of his plays—namely, Titus Andronicus, Macbeth, and Othello. In these plays we see Shakespeare’s commitment to showing the viewer moral consequences. Milton and Dante, two of the other great writers in the Western tradition, also use their works to show the consequences of immoral actions. All three writers deal with the fundamental questions of the human condition. There is, however, a fundamental difference between the approach of Milton and Dante on the one hand and Shakespeare on the other. In Milton and Dante’s works the audience is told what to believe morally and then has the option to either agree or disagree, while in Shakespeare’s works the audience must come up with its own moral interpretation. Milton and Dante’s works include omniscient narrators whose points of view emerge clearly and unambiguously in the text. The audience, of course, is free to agree or disagree about that message, but there is no ambiguity about what that message is.

Traditionally, in the Medieval and Early Modern period, art was seen as an instrument of moral education.

Milton and Dante fit that mode. Shakespeare, by

completely different. He allows both evil and good to emerge from a single situation.

In a way Dante and Milton use the same technique as the Bible. Many of the stories in the Bible include clear good and evil characters where it is obvious what sin is being committed, who is at fault, and what the right thing to do is. Yet in Shakespeare’s plays, particularly in Titus Andronicus, there is no clear moral message but morality is simply discussed, debated, and portrayed from different viewpoints. In a way, one could see the Bible’s stories as cases left open to a judge, namely God, who tells us what is right and wrong in a situation or story. This is, for example, the case of parables in the Bible, which focus on giving moral lessons. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s plays are more like cases before a jury, where the audience is the jury. There is no “judge,” not even Shakespeare.

Whether God or fate is the judge of the characters varies between his plays. Even when the hand of God is present in his plays, his will has to be interpreted both by the characters and ultimately by the audience.

It is precisely up to the audience to determine who the heroes and villains are in Titus Andronicus.

Titus Andronicus is about two morally ambiguous characters—Titus and Aaron the Moor. At first glance, it seems as though Aaron the Moor is the villain. He orchestrates the torture and death of characters and commits horrible crimes. By contrast, Titus seems like the tragic hero. He is a good king who loses his daughter, his hands, and is brought to ruin. Yet, upon further reflection, one could see how Aaron is the real tragic hero. Titus could be viewed as the rogue elephant

In a way, one could see the Bible’s stories as cases left open to a judge, namely God…[whereas] Shakespeare’s plays are more like cases before a jury, where the audience is the jury. contrast, fits into this category more loosely because he does not have a singular moral message to convey.

He rather conveys a general moral universe within which actions have consequences. In other words, Shakespeare’s messages are more implicit, while Milton and Dante’s are more explicit. Shakespeare’s plays have no omniscient narrator, and the audience is left as the final judge of what is right and wrong. Dante and Milton use a simple technique: they create a context in which neither the narrator nor the viewer has any doubt about the perspective from which the poet writes. Dante puts the bad people in Hell, for example, and the good people in Heaven.i Milton has his own list of enemies—in Paradise Lost, not merely devils and demons, but also Catholics.ii Shakespeare’s approach is

who oppresses the Roman people, while also being particularly merciless to foreigners. Rome is portrayed as a sexist, racist place where Aaron finds himself prisoner and only in death is he liberated. The roles of hero and villain are made even more ambiguous by the fact that Shakespeare deals out equally bad consequences to both characters. Often one can determine who the villain is in a play by looking at which character receives his just deserts in the end.

Since both Titus and Aaron receive punishment, the audience is able to view Titus and Aaron in either role.

It is clear that Shakespeare intended to present moral ambiguity in this play.iii While in Titus Andronicus it is unclear who plays the hero and villain, Macbeth includes not so much

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A scene from Macbeth, Folger Shakespeare Library, 1932

two separate roles of hero and villain at all, but a hero who becomes a villain. Macbeth starts out good but becomes evil. Within the play itself Shakespeare shows us that characters’ actions have consequences.

Macbeth receives his just deserts and so does his wife, Lady Macbeth. While at the start of the play Macbeth seems like a good man, he gives in to his evil wife, Lady Macbeth, who pushes and convinces him to murder King Duncan so that the Macbeths can rule Scotland. After killing Duncan, Macbeth loses his

Shakespeare’s First Folio, 2013

She wanted her husband to kill Duncan and he did it. She chastises him for being too kind and she gets her wish in his transformation to a coldblooded killer with no remorse. She gets all that she wants, but then she finds that it is her own conscience that ruins her.

She sees Macbeth’s newfound cruelty and knows that she is responsible for it. She is responsible for the extermination of his conscience, for the subsequent murders he commits, and for the desolation he causes.

Her conscience and guilt drive her to madness and

Life does not come with signs that say ‘this person is good’ or ‘this person is bad.’ It presents itself to us plain and we have to figure out the morality of a situation for ourselves. In a way, watching a Shakespeare play is a good exercise in moral reasoning and watching his plays can help us to make better decisions about our own lives. restraint and goes on a killing spree in a hopeless effort to remain king, despite a prophecy that he will lose the throne. He murders numerous innocent people and the play ends with him not only losing the throne but also his life. Considering his terrible actions, this is just punishment. Meanwhile, Lady Macbeth also undergoes a reversal and in the end she too receives just treatment for her actions. Lady Macbeth’s deepest desire was to become queen, and she gets her wish.

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lead to her death. Macbeth and Lady Macbeth both receive their comeuppance. It seems clear that there is some moral authority administering justice onto them for breaking moral laws, and thus inviting moral consequences.iv Even so, Shakespeare leaves it to the audience to determine who was really morally responsible for the mass murders—Macbeth, Lady Macbeth, or both. With regard to morality, Shakespeare still leaves much to the audience to determine.

Unlike in Macbeth, in the play Othello, Shakespeare presents a clearly defined villain and hero at the outset. Othello is the hero, while Iago is the villain.

However if one looks at Othello, it seems as though the consequences are unfair. Since Iago is the villain, one would expect his consequences to be worse than Othello’s. Iago purposefully plotted to enrage Othello so that he would kill Desdemona. Othello, on the other hand, receives a much harsher punishment than Iago— the death of his wife in addition to his own. While one may not necessarily pity Othello because he did in fact murder Desdemona, one can see that Othello did this on false pretenses. Iago is duly punished, but Othello ends up dead in the horrific realization that he has killed his innocent wife. Even though Othello received a harsher punishment than Iago did, as a viewer we still see Othello as more heroic than Iago. This is because Othello was justly jealous, while Iago was unjustly so.

In this, we see that the consequences, as in portrayal of the characters, are evident to the viewer even though they may not be evident in the play itself. For example, even though in the actual plot of the play the innocent Desdemona was murdered unjustly and she does not receive her just deserts, in the audience’s perception of her she does. The audience esteems her more than any of the other characters and in that reception of her she gets her fair due. Even if Shakespeare does not always deal out fair consequences in the plays themselves, in this case, Shakespeare ensures that the consequences are still fair by eliciting the appropriate response to each character from the audience.v In conclusion, Shakespeare makes sure that the viewer always observes moral consequences. In Macbeth, Shakespeare incorporates moral consequences directly into the play itself, affirming the audience’s perceptions of each character’s morality. In Othello, Shakespeare leaves little doubt in the mind of the viewer that in one case villainy is well punished and in the other heroism ends in tragedy. In Titus Andronicus, Shakespeare offers consequences all around, presenting a case of genuine moral ambiguity allowing the viewer to take sides.

As students, we can appreciate Shakespeare because he presents his plays to us in the same way that life presents itself to us. Life does not come with signs that say “this person is good” or “this person is bad.”

It presents itself to us plain and we have to figure out the morality of a situation for ourselves. In a way, watching a Shakespeare play is a good exercise in moral reasoning and watching his plays can help us to make better decisions about our own lives. There is such a richness and variety in his plays—as we have seen in the huge differences between Titus Andronicus, Othello, and Macbeth—variety that can make us wiser than experience alone can possibly make us.

Even the most devout Christian philosophers who have followed the Bible as their primary source of instruction have also found wisdom in supplementary material, such as philosophy and literary texts. For example, the philosopher Thomas Aquinas, a very devout Catholic, drew much of his philosophy from Aristotle, even though Aristotle was by no means Christian.vi Anglican writer C.S. Lewis also drew from ancient and medieval philosophy in his writing.

He even shifted to writing fictional novels—many of which have themes of good and evil in them for the reader to reflect upon.vii At the same time, these secondary texts cannot replace clear commandments in morality. Biblical parables along with the Ten Commandments, for example, will always have great value because they deliver clear moral lessons that provide direct moral instruction. Without direct moral instruction, we could all easily slip into the realm of moral relativism, justifying any and all of our actions, no matter how morally reprehensible. Some constant framework of what is moral and what is not is needed to live a purpose-driven life—a framework that cannot be supplied by changing views of morality, such as in Shakespeare’s works. In sum, in life we need exercises in ethical examination as well as direct moral instruction in order to live the fullest life possible.

Dante Alighieri, Divine Comedy, Vol. 1, Inferno (New York: Penguin Classics, 2002). ii.

John Milton, Paradise Lost (England: Dover Publications, 2005). iii.

William Shakespeare, Titus Andronicus (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005). iv.

William Shakespeare, Macbeth (New York: Penguin Classics, 2007). v.

William Shakespeare, Othello (New York: Penguin Classics, 2005). vi.

Thomas Aquinas, “Summa Theologica” in Classics of Moral and Political Theory, 5th Ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2011). vii.

Thomas Howard, Narnia and Beyond: A Guide to the Fiction of C.S. Lewis (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2006). i.

Danielle D’Souza ’17 is from San Diego, CA. She is a prospective major in History with a minor in Government.

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Examining Moral Failure in the Bible:

A Theological Understanding of God’s Chosen Leaders

by Joshua Tseng-Tham

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David and Bathsheba by Jan Matsys, 1562

T

Main altar of the Sagrada Família Cathedral.

Barcelona, Spain, 2015

hree-thousand years ago in the palace grounds of Jerusalem, a beautiful woman named Bathsheba caught the eye of King David while she bathed outside her home. She was the wife of one of his soldiers, Uriah, who was off to battle. Overcome by lust, David commanded her to visit him, and seduced her for a one-night affair. After impregnating her, David intoxicated her husband and tried to manipulate him into returning to his wife for the night. But Uriah, out of loyalty to his troops, slept at the entrance of the palace. Unable to convince him to go home, David ordered the commander of his army to arrange for Uriah to be sent into the thick of the battle to ensure that he was killed in action. After he was murdered, the king took Uriah’s widow as his wife.i This story is one of many that skeptics use to criticize biblical ethics. It is a potent example of ethical incoherency in the actions of a biblical figure, which complicates the role-model interpretation of the Old Testament to which many Christians subscribe today.

They see the purpose of prominent biblical leaders in the Old Testament as moral authorities, leaders to guide future generations of Christians and to serve

as examples for them to emulate. Thus, the popular treatment of these prominent biblical figures is one of awe and reverence. They are praised in church sermons and are taught to children in Sunday school.

Skeptics claim, however, that the praise these figures receive is inappropriate. To them, the immoral actions of biblical leaders relinquish any claim to their moral authority. Robert Ingersoll, famously known as “The Great Agnostic,” examined these characters and was horrified by what he saw: I compared Zeno, Epicures and Socrates, three heathen wretches who had never heard of the Old Testament or the Ten Commandments, with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, three favorites of Jehovah, and I was depraved enough to think that the Pagans were superior to the Patriarchs—and to Jehovah himself.ii

To the ancient Israelites, David’s actions would never speak to a man with moral quality. To modern society, he would be a criminal and a pariah. Yet Jews, Christians, and Muslims praise him as a righteous follower of God.

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To Ingersoll and many others like him, it is absurd that Christians honor these flawed biblical figures and that God divinely chooses them. This not only reflects the hypocrisy of Christians, but it also reflects poorly on God. To condone such barbarous behavior, let alone choose these individuals as vessels of his will, is to encourage evil itself, a contradiction of the virtuous Jesus portrayed in the New Testament. In this debate, both sides presuppose a role-model interpretation of the Bible. Yet, this common presupposition is false.

The claim that Old Testament figures do not warrant

character. The praise that Abraham receives in Hebrews is often seen as a justification for viewing Abraham as a role model. To many, Abraham is a model of faithful self-sacrifice, driven not by fear or uncertainty but by a conviction to obey his Lord.

Lastly, Moses is viewed as the biblical figure that encapsulates justice. Writer of the Ten Commandments and leader of the newly-formed nation of Israel, Moses is seen as a man of the law. Bruce Feiler of the Washington Post describes how Moses’ influence does more than merely permeate popular culture, for “he

The claim that Old Testament figures do not warrant their status as role models has merit, but the popular Christian claim that these figures should be seen as role models does not. their status as role models has merit, but the popular Christian claim that these figures should be seen as role models does not. In fact, the role model interpretation is not only flawed in its own right, but creates a debate where there should not be one. Rather, seeing the Old Testament as a message of God instead of a message of people avoids many of the insinuations raised by skeptics and offers a greater positive and thematic view of Scripture as a whole.

Before this interpretation can be properly addressed, it is important to be aware of the current context surrounding the debate resulting from this role model mindset. While the role model interpretation can theoretically be used for any Old Testament character, the three figures perhaps most subject to this interpretation are David, Abraham, and Moses. Rick Warren, mega-church pastor and author of the book, The Purpose Driven Life, wrote how David was “a man after God’s own heart because he applied the Word to his life and practiced what he knew.”iii Adherents of this theory see the Old Testament as establishing David’s personal qualities as a righteous man; Jeremiah’s prophecies connecting the House of David to Christ seemingly confirms David’s righteous place within the biblical narrative.iv For the vast majority of Christians, particularly those within American Christianity, King David is portrayed as a man in love with God, devoting his life to God’s will and glory, and as a legitimate vessel for Christ’s later coming.

Whereas Christians often depict David as a man of love, Abraham is seen as a man of faith. When called into the land of his inheritance, Abraham “obeyed and went, even though he did not know where he was going. By faith he made his home in the promised land like a stranger in a foreign country.”v This portrait of Abraham pervades popular Christian thought and influences many peoples’ impressions of Abraham’s

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is the champion of oppressed people; he transforms disparate tribes in a forbidding wilderness into a nation of laws; he is the original proponent of freedom and justice for all.”vi Both secular and Christian readers familiar with Moses associate him as the author of biblical law and therefore see him as the embodiment of biblical morality. While not the only figures receiving admiration, David, Abraham, and Moses are three biblical leaders commonly evoked as ideal models of righteous followers whom people ought to imitate.

To counter this reputation, skeptics often submit examples that show why David, Abraham, and Moses do not deserve their moral praise. In addition to the story of David and Bathsheba, skeptics have accused David of committing war crimes. In his book Atrocities, Massacres, and War Crimes: An Encyclopedia, Alexander Mikaberidze wrote an entire entry devoted to King David’s massacres of 22,000 Syrians and 18,000 Edomites, as well as his purchase of his first wife with 200 Philistine foreskins.vii To critics, these actions are an affront to human decency. At most, this is proof to them that David committed war crimes.

At the very least, David’s armies committed actions that, while acceptable to the ancient world, would be unacceptable to the modern world. Critics also point to David’s many personal flaws. He was vain, neglected his family, and even ran a protection racket before he was king.viii King David is far from the ideal king—while he pleased God in many ways, his many weaknesses preclude him from being the moral example that many Christians respect.

Abraham, another prominent Old Testament figure, is not so much a man of undying faith, but rather a man with continual lapses of doubt and internal conflict. The Abraham that God first encountered at Ur is far from the Abraham often portrayed in Sunday school. Author Preston Sprinkle, using the historical

Sarah, Abraham, and Hagar

by Matthias Stomer, 1638

context of Ur during Abraham’s time, concludes that when God first calls Abraham, he is engaged in idolatry, offering sacrifices to the gods of the sun and moon, and having sex with temple prostitutes.ix Despite Abraham’s laudable acceptance of God’s call, he repeatedly displays doubt and fear during his journey. Abraham continuously questions God’s plan and protection, to the point of lying about his wife and risking her life twice, once in Egypt and again in Gerar.x His lies nearly cost him his inheritance—God’s promise of a mighty nation through the line of Sarah. Yet despite

one of the most barbaric individuals that I ever read about in my life.”xii Richard Dawkins, after examining Moses’ slaughter of the Midianites, concluded that “Moses was not a great role model for modern moralists.”xiii Robert Ingersoll devoted an entire book to condemning Moses’ moral shortcomings. In one of his chapters, he claimed that Moses, after witnessing the golden calf, was unjustified when he ordered the Levities to slaughter the sinners. He reasoned that the commandment that forbade idolatry had not yet been delivered by Moses to the Israelites, therefore “to inflict

Abraham is a patriarch defined by a remarkable interplay between conviction and contradiction—a man of faith on one hand, and a man of doubt on the other; a man in pursuit of the Lord, and a man that runs away.

God’s promise, Abraham, believing his wife too old to bear children, has a child through his concubine. xi He is a patriarch defined by a remarkable interplay between conviction and contradiction—a man of faith on one hand, and a man of doubt on the other; a man in pursuit of the Lord, and a man that runs away.

Moses often receives the harshest criticisms. Christian Bale, who portrayed Moses in the 2014 film Exodus: Gods and Kings, called him a “likely schizophrenic…

punishment for breaking unknown and unpublished laws is, in the last degree, cruel and unjust.”xiv It is clear that a close examination of Moses’ actions reveal a deeply flawed leader who is no more immune to sin than the common man. There is no doubt that some of the appearances of moral indiscretion can be explained through proper historical and theological context. At the very least, the objections leveled against Moses cast significant doubt onto his ability to act as the moral authority that many people want him to be.

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The arguments against the moral integrity of these characters seem to compromise their status as moral authorities. But even if these leaders were righteous, the Christian is still left with an interpretation that suffers from two dangerous weaknesses. First, seeing these leaders as moral role models makes the false assumption that we can relate to their stories.

Graeme Goldsworthy writes how approaching the Old Testament like a character study neglects the context behind their narratives: It should be recognized that the ‘character study’ approach is frequently used in a way that implies quite wrongly that the reader today may identify with the character in question. But we must reckon with both the historical and theological uniqueness of the characters and events if we are not to misapply them. Is it in fact true that if God took care of baby Moses, God will take care of me? …The theological significance of Moses and of his preservation is all but ignored in this case.xv

The character study approach is both overly simplistic and a dangerous red herring. The reader, in the attempt to summarize the Old Testament material, places the role model at the center of every story. For

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instance, the reader may see Exodus, Samuel, and Genesis as a study of Moses, David, and Abraham, respectively. But by devoting all attention to the character’s traits, motivations, and actions, the reader ignores the historical and theological context of these figures as well as the reasons for their placement within the biblical narrative. Goldsworthy argues that the unique relationship these characters had with God precludes any meaningful comparison with the average reader. Modern believers cannot simply superimpose the lives of these leaders onto their own. That is not only impossible, but it is contrary to how the Bible should be read and understood.

The second weakness of this approach is that it places an unnecessarily large burden of proof on the Christian to justify seeing these people as moral archetypes. There is warrant to many of the skeptical arguments against the righteousness of these characters, and there is no guarantee that any believer who tries to defend this paradigm will be successful. Instead what is more likely to happen is incoherence, and that any discoveries that run counter to an established narrative of these figures can tempt one to ignore or minimize the sin. For instance, seeing David as a moral example can lead one to either dismiss his personal flaws, or at the

Sunrise in Ko Samui, Thailand, 2008

very least, downplay their impact. This response is less a form of cognitive dissonance than an intellectually dishonest attempt to preserve an exegesis. This exegesis deifies these characters to the point where any valid criticism of their character is viewed as heresy. An even greater concern, however, is that Christians will build their faith and witness on whitewashed Bible heroes, and then have their faith and witness shattered when those “role models” are discovered to be less exemplary than advertised.

A Christian understanding of the Old Testament does not depend at all on the morality of the figures themselves. It instead replaces a moral reading of the Old Testament with a theological reading.xvi Popular culture, with a moral approach to the Old Testament, often makes people the primary focus of the story.

On the contrary, the primary character of the Old Testament is God himself. The entirety of the Bible is fundamentally a story about God, a doorway into his essence, showing us what he is and who he is.

Thus, “reading the Bible theologically means that we look first and foremost at what the passage teaches us about God.”xvii His nature is littered throughout his interactions with humanity, from the leaders that he appointed to the commoner whom God wanted to transform. The actual moral qualities of these individuals are irrelevant.

The purpose of reading about David, Moses, and Abraham, therefore, is not to extract moral lessons from their actions. Rather it is to learn about God and his qualities through his interactions with these figures.

In particular, discovering God’s divine grace in these passages allows us to reconcile God’s desire to ordain these people as men of great importance and influence with their deep moral flaws and inconsistencies.

Sprinkle describes divine grace as “God’s relentless and loving pursuit of His enemies, who are unthankful, unworthy, and unlovable.”xviii Viewing God’s divine grace and unconditional love in the microcosm of the Old Testament shows a God who gives purpose and love to those who do not deserve it. God led Abraham out of Ur in spite of his idolatry, not because he could, but because that is who he is. God is grace, and by anointing sinners he is merely acting in accordance with his nature. He loved Moses even after his moral failures, and forgave David after his sexual crimes.

God is both generous and relentless in his pursuit of sinners. The Old Testament could not be properly understood without God’s grace. To examine these figures without this theological context risks viewing

the Old Testament as an inconsistent moral guide, instead of a window into one of God’s most defining characteristics.

Viewing God’s divine grace in the macrocosm of the overall biblical narrative demonstrates the central Gospel message of Jesus’ death and sacrifice.

Christianity affirms not only man’s broken nature but also our inability to overcome it through our own efforts. Jesus Christ, being infinitely holy and righteous, came to Earth and entered our world to die, thereby providing the perfect gift and paying the ultimate penalty. By his infinite love and grace he removes the guilt of our sins, allowing us to experience perfect communion with him.xix By understanding how God’s interactions with Old Testament figures reveal his grace, one can establish a bridge between the God of the Old Testament and the God of the New Testament.

The different ways in which God relates to different people in different time periods and contexts can often mislead an honest reader into thinking that the God of the New radically changes from the God of the Old. In fact, both God’s ordinations and his sacrifice are expressions of the same nature. They derive not from a vengeful God and a compassionate God, but the same God, infinite and changeless. Reading the Old Testament theologically and recognizing the extent by which God reaches out to the sinner provides additional context to his ultimate sacrifice thousands of years later. From this perspective, Jesus’ death on the cross should not be a surprise, even though it is no less unjustified. His death, a centerpiece of Christian faith, is nonetheless a part of a coherent whole between Old and New. This singular focus on the theological aspects of the Old Testament should not detract one from seeing the value of these Old Testament leaders and patriarchs. Instead, our role as a reader is to observe from these prominent figures the different ways these people struggle with and respond to God’s character. Goldsworthy applies this perspective in his commentary on the battle of David and Goliath: The application of this truth to the believer is somewhat different from a simple identification of the believer with David. Rather we should identify with the ordinary people of God, the soldiers, who stand and watch the battle fought on their behalf. The same point may be made about the lives of all the biblical characters who have some distinct office bestowed on them by God.xx

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As observers of David, Abraham, and Moses, we learn not from their morality but from their humanity, an example of ordinary people endowed with extraordinary responsibilities, and yet falling desperately short of God’s ideal. We can express solidarity with them because, as human beings, we are endowed with gifts that we do not deserve and struggle to accept.

As observers of David, Abraham, and Moses, we learn not from their morality but from their humanity, an example of ordinary people endowed with extraordinary responsibilities, and yet falling desperately short of God’s ideal. We can express solidarity with them because, as human beings, we are endowed with gifts that we do not deserve and struggle to accept. And yet we cannot be hasty as to fully identify with them, because we differ in time, culture, and calling. Still, it forces us to focus on the central biblical message—the Gospel, which is Christ, the Word of God made flesh. Biblical characters do not have their own message. David’s message is not about love, just as Abraham and Moses’ messages are not about perseverance and justice. Instead, they give us a story: their responses to God’s message.

When many skeptics critique biblical figures such as David, Abraham, or Moses, they do so with the assumption that any evidence that compromises these figures’ moral authority compromises the Bible’s authority. This is a dangerous misunderstanding, not because it misunderstands the Bible’s role within Christianity, but because it has misled many Christians into basing their confidence in Scripture on these flawed individuals. Even if the critics’ claims were true, they have no theological impact on the Christian understanding of the Old Testament. It does not matter if David was a womanizer, Abraham was a murderer, or if Moses was a schizophrenic dictator.

What does matter is the fact that these characters, regardless of their personal attributes, are conduits for God’s message. The only person in the Bible whose morality had any theological significance was Jesus Christ. Jesus, the centerpiece of the New Testament, is goodness. Being the embodiment of moral perfection, Christ is the role model that both believers and skeptics can trust. It is because of this goodness that Christ is passionate about pursuing those who ultimately do not deserve it.

See II Samuel 11.

Robert G. Ingersoll, “VI. Volney, Gibbon, and Thomas Paine – Voltaire’s Services to Liberty – Pagans Compared with Patriarchs,” in Why I Am An Agnostic, vol. 4 of The Works of Robert G. Ingersoll, in

i.

ii.

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Twelve Volumes (New York: The Dresden Publishing Co., 1901), 45. iii.

Rick Warren, Rick Warren’s Bible Study Methods: Twelve Ways You Can Unlock God’s Word (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2006), 36. iv.

See Jeremiah 23:5. v.

Hebrews 11: 8-9 (NIV). vi.

Bruce Feiler, “Moses: Biblical Prophet, American Icon,” The Washington Post, 5 December 2014, <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/ article/2009/10/15/AR2009101503474.html>. vii.

Alexander Mikaberidze, “Old Testament, Atrocities in the Hebrew Bible,” in Atrocities, Massacres, and War Crimes: An Encyclopedia (Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, LLC, 2013), 506-507. viii.

See I Chronicles 21, II Samuel 13-22, and I Samuel 25. ix.

Preston Sprinkle, Charis (Colorado Springs: David C. Cook, 2014), 52. x.

See Genesis 12:10-20 and Genesis 20. xi.

See Genesis 16. xii.

Catherine Shoard, “Christian Bale: Moses was ‘barbaric’ and ‘schizophrenic,’” The Guardian, 5 December 2014, <http://www.theguardian.com/ film/2014/oct/27/christian-bale-moses-was-barbaricand-schizophrenic>. xiii.

Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 278. xiv.

Robert G. Ingersoll, Some Mistakes of Moses (Washington, D.C.: C. P. Farrell, 1879), 233. xv.

Graeme Goldsworthy, “The Gospel and Kingdom,” in The Goldsworthy Trilogy (Milton Keynes, UK: Paternoster, 2000), 25. xvi.

Sprinkle, 28. xvii.

Sprinkle, 28. xviii.

Sprinkle, 23. xix.

See Romans 5:11. xx.

Goldsworthy, 25.

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

Monarchy Revisited:

A Review of Christian Statecraft

by Mene Ukueberuwa

T

hroughout history, since the time of Christ, the conduct of politics has seemed to create a barrier to proper, public devotion to God. As chronicled in the Book of Acts, Jesus’ followers in the early aftermath of his death largely abandoned social hierarchy in favor of perpetual communitas: a state of urgency and common purpose that draws attention away from practical concerns. But, as the years passed and the body of Christians expanded, the church became increasingly intertwined with its surrounding states and developed an internal hierarchy of its own. The disorderly politics that resulted rightly made faithful Christians wary of statecraft in practice.

But, Jesus’ own words and attitude indicate that political order, like all human matters, can fulfil its proper divine essence if it is constructed and carried out faithfully.

Christ makes it clear throughout the gospels that man owes his highest allegiance only to God, but his admonition that we “render unto Caesar things that are Caesar’s” suggests that there is such a thing as a legitimate political order among men.i When the Pharisees attempted to exploit the apparent tension between obeying both God and man-made laws, Jesus

The Tribute Money by Titian, 1516

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St. Thomas Aquinas, Carlo Crivelli, 15th century

expressed confidence that it is possible and necessary to do both. “Show me the tribute money,” Jesus asked of the two Pharisees who had challenged Caesar’s claim to their earnings. “Whose image and superscription are on it?” he followed, before telling them to turn it over, indicating that Caesar’s mark on the coin reflected a legitimate claim of ownership. Because Christ had already established God’s ownership over all creation, he can only have meant for us to understand Caesar’s authority as inferior to God’s rather than in

evasion of the Pharisees’ question, as if “render unto Caesar” applied only to the coin and other literal possessions of the state. Individualist philosopher Henry David Thoreau explored this interpretation in Civil Disobedience. By Thoreau’s reasoning, individuals were only bound by common law “if [they used] money which has the image of Caesar on it, and which he made current and valuable, that is, if [they were] men of the State.”ii His suggestion was that society’s claims only applied to those who had deliberately entered it and were limited to the specific areas in which they had chosen to participate.

St. Paul, however, made the case for a more expansive reading of “render unto Caesar” in his letter to the Romans. “Whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves,” he wrote to an audience of Christians in the Roman provinces of Galatia, Macedonia, and Achaia— subjects of the same Caesarean rule as the Pharisees in Judea.iii “Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience,” Paul concluded, stating definitively that human law could have a moral value parallel to God’s law.

Thoreau and other critics were right to recognize the potential risks that came from imbuing civil society with moral authority. St. Thomas Aquinas and the broader Catholic theological tradition, however, express an understanding of civil authority as subordinate, such that it can complement divine authority rather than contradict it. To be properly subordinate in this way, civil law must satisfy certain criteria. Firstly, it must not claim ownership of entire persons in a way that violates God’s ownership. “We have obligations of charity and justice to the people with whom we share [the earth]. Patriotism is a virtue.

Love of country is an honorable thing,” explained

St. Thomas Aquinas and the broader Catholic theological tradition, however, express an understanding of civil authority as subordinate, such that it can complement divine authority rather than contradict it. competition with it. But, his recognition of both types of authority demonstrates that there is a true power in society, which deserves our recognition insofar as it remains within God’s limits.

Especially because the Pharisees who confronted Jesus were not arguing in good faith, it is tempting to take Jesus’ answer as a simple rebuke rather than as a broad rule. Jesus’s command that we reckon with earthly authority has often been interpreted as a mere

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Charles Chaput, Archbishop of Philadelphia, in a homily on the subject.iv He meant to illustrate the areas of life that rightly qualify as civil goods, such as our material wealth and public conduct. Chaput, however, continued by drawing a distinction between these aspects of each person’s life and the person himself. “Just as the coin bears the stamp of Caesar’s image, we bear the stamp of God’s image in baptism.

We belong to God, and only to God,” he proclaimed,

summarizing the primacy of our relationship to God.v Secondly, civil authority that complements divine law must itself be good and within the limits created by God’s laws. Thomas Aquinas elaborated on the legitimizing power of divine authority in De Regno, his treatise on politics. “In the law of Christ, kings must be subject to priests,” Aquinas explained, in order to demonstrate that social order is legitimate only insofar as it respects the higher authority of

religious ideals. But, the fact that the common law, which structures our interaction with the public world, is not necessarily grounded in those ideals creates a degree of friction between civic and religious life. This separation, wherein individuals pursue material aims through formal society and religious aims through private community, may not ultimately lead Christians away from a full appreciation of God and has a merit of its own. Our inabilities to perceive

Liberalism’s treatment of liberty and material well-being as paramount is essentially a concession to human flaws rather than the tenet of an optimal society. religious law.vi These requirements for civil authority’s legitimacy theoretically allow Christians to live in society without “serving two masters.”

Because the codes of a fully just society must comport with divine law, the framer of such a society must appreciate the truth and goodness of God’s codes.

Whether a group or an individual holds responsibility for molding society, their laws will be embedded with justice and worthy of total obedience only when they direct citizens toward God’s predetermined end.

Thomas Hobbes envisioned this guiding influence of divine knowledge when he conceived of a theoretically ideal state in Leviathan. Beginning with a quote from Solomon, he said, “‘Give to thy servant understanding, to judge thy people, and to discern between good and evil.’ It belongeth therefore to the sovereign to be judge, and to prescribe the rules of discerning good and evil.”vii The only justification for making individuals cede their autonomy, Hobbes reasoned, would be a state that would guide them into fuller harmony with God. With the optimality of a God-oriented society being clear, a question persists: which form of social order best fulfills this goal? Liberalism and monarchism, for example, provide two philosophical concepts of political order that affect their subjects’ relationship to God in different ways. In the fallen world, the potential for error and sin creates the need for the safeguards against human authority that liberalism provides. But, liberalism’s emphasis on freedom from compulsion limits the state’s aims to material rather than spiritual ends, which gives individuals a sense of discord between their civic and spiritual worlds. Because liberal law, as envisioned by theorists such as John Stuart Mill, is designed only for mutual protection and does not advance a particular vision of the good, it leaves each individual to pursue his higher moral aims privately. Citizens may freely form groups to discuss and practice their

and to perfectly obey God make liberalism necessary.

But, liberalism’s treatment of liberty and material well-being as paramount is essentially a concession to human flaws rather than the tenet of an optimal society. Being preoccupied with humans’ great capacity for error, liberalism devotes every resource to the prevention of harm and preservation of autonomy, but fails to guide its autonomous subjects toward the opposite of harm in doing so.

Frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, engraving by Abraham Bosse, 1651

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In addition to reinforcing Christians’ existing convictions, the monarchic state allows the law to fulfill its highest function as a direct moral teacher to individuals. Although each perfected citizen in a liberal state can conduct himself flawlessly in accordance with his personal understanding of God, even a sinless liberal state can still lack the monarchical state’s ability to form a moral community, with a public voice dedicated to affirming the divine law and a civil structure that guides men in the public exercise of that law.

The pronouncements of a monarch, backed by the state’s enforcing power, can impart a stark moral understanding more fully than private exploration of faith alone. According to Aristotle, men form their full moral understanding in the public sphere, building upon their private foundation through dialogue and the affirmation of their peers.

“Man, when perfected, is the best of all animals, but when separated from law and justice, he is the worst of all,” he wrote in his treatise on politics, expounding on his belief that individuals were only be perfected Charlemagne by Albrecht Dürer, 1512 through public life.ix

Freed of the constraints of human sin, monarchism’s ambitious social aims make it uniquely conducive to the formation of the Christian sensibility in its subjects. Aquinas vividly described the monarch’s ability to frame society around God in this way. “He is to be in the kingdom what the soul is in the body, and what God is in the world,” he wrote in recognition of a king’s position as head of his subjects’ collective spiritual body.

He continued with confidence that such a leader could bring divine justice to bear on society: If he reflect seriously upon this, a zeal for justice will be enkindled in him when he contemplates that he has been appointed to this position in place of God, to exercise judgment in his kingdom.viii

Without the obscuring effect of fallenness, which binds every man, Christian and otherwise, from following the beckon call of eternity described in Ecclesiastes, each citizen is free to embrace and uphold such a monarch’s pronouncements.

Because the monarchical state blends consent of the governed with transcendent authority, the monarch can make

Although each perfected citizen in a liberal state can conduct himself flawlessly in accordance with his personal understanding of God, even a sinless liberal state can still lack the monarchical state’s ability to form a moral community. ambitious moral claims that fully accord with his understanding of divine truth. Theoretically, laws and public values grounded explicitly in the Gospel can eliminate the tension between Christians’ civil and religious aspirations.

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Even after virtues were cultivated in the oikos, or household, Aristotle claimed, they were only fully inculcated when they were reflected in the polis, or public sphere. The extent to which someone understands a particular value as right or wrong is

formed partially in the home and in the church, but more fully when those values are affirmed or rejected in an unambiguous public code.

Beyond monarchic law’s ability to imbue society and individual citizens with Christian morals, the

terms of bringing Christian philosophy to bear in human society. The litany of atrocities committed by autocrats in the name of Christ, along with the eras’ worth of men and women who lived in permanent subjugation, demonstrate the danger of absolute

The birth of a new heir to the throne, who will likely outlive the adults who witness the occasion, draws subjects’ focus forward toward eternity. organization of the state around a single individual also promotes a Christian perspective. Firstly, it fulfills God’s intention that his people represent him to one another. Though Christians remember the life of Christ as the example of perfect personhood, material life in his physical absence requires Christians to seek reflections of him in the people around them. The moral example of a living individual who is formally upheld as the primate of one’s society can supplement his understanding of the proper way to live beyond what he learns from the memory of Christ alone.

Secondly, there is a particularly strong impact to the moral pronouncements of an individual who is not bound by law or social taboos but only by his understanding of what is truly good. People seeking transcendent moral truths are naturally skeptical of answers offered by others whom they believe are simply conforming to social conventions. Though a monarch is certainly expected to adhere to tradition in practice, he is theoretically free of tradition’s strict burdens because society is ultimately formed around his own will. From this perspective, the monarch’s willingness to advocate and adhere to Christianity can be understood as an act of pure appreciation, which lends credibility to the beauty and truth of the faith.

Finally, the hereditary nature of monarchy creates a link to past and future generations that counters individualism and promotes the continuous passage of public virtues. The public enshrinement of a long line of descendants in a single family draws subjects’ focus away from the mundane details of daily life and toward the grand, ongoing project of society.

The birth of a new heir to the throne, who will likely outlive the adults who witness the occasion, draws subjects’ focus forward toward eternity. And subjects’ acceptance of the monarch’s divine right encourages them to understand things in terms of their nature, rather than their utility or merit, in a way that effaces their egos and fosters openness to submission to Christ in turn.

In practice, monarchic societies have records ranging from starkly mediocre to abominable in

power in a world of error and sin. But because of the beauty of the monarchic ideal, contemporary Christians should not rush to condemn past generations for their embrace of absolutist states.

These states were guilty of crimes of excess, but this excess was motivated in part by righteous ambition for a society more fully ordered by objective moral vision.

The limited states of today rightly prevent similar excess, but the prevention of moral overreach comes at the cost of clear moral ambition. Recognizing what has been lost in the global turn toward liberalism, Christians should understand that life in society, as Christ desired, will henceforth require a passionate evangelization to reach the hearts of citizens where the state no longer can.

Matthew 22:21 (NIV).

Henry David Thoreau, Civil Disobedience (Carlisle, MA: Applewood Books, 2000), 11. iii.

Romans 13:2 (NIV). iv.

Charles Chaput, Homily: Closing Mass, Fortnight for Freedom (Washington, DC, 2012), 2. v.

Chaput, 2. vi.

Thomas Aquinas, De Regno (Milwaukee: Divine Providence Press, 2014), 111. vii.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (New York: Penguin Classics, 1982), 98. viii.

Aquinas, 95. ix.

Aristotle, Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 5. i.

ii.

Mene Ukueberuwa ’16 is from Princeton Junction, NJ. He is a major in Government, with a minor in Religion.

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the rhetoric of worldviews:

NARRATIVES OF

by Jake Casale

Salisbury Cathedral in Salisbury, Wiltshire, England, 2014

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PEACE

O

n September 16, 2014, an incident occurred at James Madison University (JMU) that soon attracted the attention of national media news outlets. A self-described preacher arrived on campus and began vilifying students in the immediate vicinity, calling them sinners and claiming that they were headed straight to hell. Some students challenged the man, and eventually a crowd gathered. What happened next was unexpected— soon a portion of the crowd began to sing the lyrics to “How He Loves,” a popular worship song, with one student leading on guitar. Eventually, the singing grew so loud that the preacher’s denigration was drowned out.i A YouTube recording of the scene has garnered over a million views, and the actions of the students have earned praise for representing a true Christian response to conflict.

The communication dynamics in this scenario are fascinating, in no small part because two different representations of Christianity are jostling for validity in the eyes of the functional “audience”—locally speaking, the student body at JMU, though the viral broadcast invites the entire Internet to listen.

One emphasizes a God who is defined by actions of condemnation; the other, by actions of love. In a sense, the audience is witnessing two different forms of rhetoric on the same subject. Furthermore, these forms of rhetoric are not only in communication with the audience, but also with each other; their shared temporal space and juxtaposition exerts an effect on how the respective messages are conveyed and how the audience receives them. The whole display is one massive feedback loop of rhetorical construction and perception, centered around one important question: what is the core of the God of Christianity? It is clear that the two discourses do not, at first glance, present a unified answer, and that they serve as an example of what many perceive to be fundamental contradictions in Christian doctrine. A casual observer, however, would be mistaken to cite this incident as an example of theological disunity. A better characterization would be rhetorical disunity. The concept of a God who has the capacity to love and to condemn is internally reconcilable; the rhetorical discourses each focus on a discrete attribute and amplify it (potentially stepping away from biblical foundations in the process), creating a conflict that seems irreconcilable.

This is not surprising, however, because human history is shot through with examples of seemingly irreconcilable rhetorical discourse. Discerning truth in such a mix of disparate, conflicting perspectives has been one of the perennial tasks of the human race. Yet, postmodernism appears to resign itself to the notion that determining truth is an impossible endeavor, a

stance that is fundamentally opposed to that of the Christian worldview. Christianity claims that absolute truth is contained within God himself, and that he designed rhetorical communication as a tool through which humans could uncover this truth. Moreover, while the human ability to communicate was broken when sin entered the world, that brokenness does not capture rhetoric’s essential, original character; rather, it twists this character into a mangled shadow of its true essence. The postmodern worldview, however, sees this broken character as a primacy of rhetoric.

This divergence in how these two worldviews construct their respective concepts of rhetoric is crucial because how each worldview views rhetoric is indicative of its overall view on the nature of reality. It is on the primacy of brokenness that the metaphysical structures of postmodernism are built—ultimately yielding a system of ontological violence in which virtually nothing can be known, rendering all human inquiry pointless. The Christian worldview offers a reconceptualization of this desolate state by elucidating a redemptive understanding of rhetoric founded upon an ontology of peace in which violence and strife are impositions onto the created order, rather than the original metaphysical concerns that postmodernism would claim them to be. The striking conclusion here is that postmodernism is not necessarily a wholly inaccurate picture of how the world operates, but it instead captures the broken reality that Christ came to redeem. But, in order to understand how the Christian understanding of rhetoric is the lynchpin in this conclusion, one must first consider how Christianity influenced the development of rhetorical thought, then the specific way in which Western society’s notion of rhetoric changed over the course of history, and finally the metaphysical tenets particular to the two systems that directly impact how each constructs its notion of rhetoric.

First, it is important to define exactly what we mean by “rhetoric,” since the scope of the term’s definition has widened dramatically over the centuries.

The ancient Greeks considered rhetoric to consist of political discourse, primarily public speaking and argumentation for the purpose of shaping policy and legal decisions. Contemporary scholars have since expanded the concept to include an innumerable variety of discourses beyond the political, such as science, art, and religion. Philosopher of rhetoric, John Boyd White, holds a more reductionist perspective— he claims that any use of language itself is a form of rhetoric because of language’s “reciprocal character… for while a person acts both within and upon the language he uses…his language at the same time acts upon him…language is in part a system of invention,

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an organized way of making new meaning in new circumstances.”ii All of these definitions can be broadly encompassed under the macro-definition of rhetoric as communication along an interval of difference, or an envoy between two entities that are unalike in some way. The interval is the distance between the entities that is necessarily created by their difference; without difference, the boundaries between the entities would dissolve and there would be no space (or need) for communication to occur. Naturally, since there are no two entities in the observed world that are exactly the same, all existence is marked by intervals of difference, and therefore marked by rhetorical communication.

Christianity is no stranger to the discipline of rhetoric—indeed, the development of rhetoric predates the birth of Christ. Many ancient Greek theories of public speaking and communication were recorded in the fourth and fifth centuries BC; meanwhile, the ancient (Old Testament) biblical tradition made great use of rhetorical forms. Over the course of a millennium, Christianity became one of the dominant world religions, and theologians began to show interest in how it could be communicated.

Many were specifically interested in how it ought to be communicated, or the morality involved in selecting and arranging language for the purpose of explaining the faith. St. Augustine, one of the most influential medieval Christian theologian-philosophers, wrote extensively on the intersection of rhetorical principles and faith. He argued that “the eloquence of words may be used for both good and evil;” Christians could employ rhetoric as a tool to locate and express God’s absolute truth, although it could just as easily be used,

by Christians and non-Christians alike, to obscure truth.iii It is important to understand the distinction between rhetoric and truth itself; the eloquence of words was meant to facilitate the discovery of the “immeasurably greater eloquence of realities.”iv In this view, a harmony exists between words and truth. Truth

seeking as the primary aim of rhetoric. Instead, another function was stressed: persuasion. According to Aristotle, who published the most influential secular treatise on rhetoric, the discipline is concerned with developing “the faculty of observing in any case the available means of persuasion.”v The focus here is on how the persuasion occurs, rather than the inherent validity of the content being presented. While Aristotle himself did not claim that persuasion is inherently antithetical to truth, his emphasis on the former is the most enduring legacy that he bequeathed to the discipline. Persuasion became embedded in Western cultural consciousness as the practice’s paramount

Copy of a bronze sculpture by Lysippos, c. 1st or 2nd century, photo by Eric Gaba, 2005

Truth is not contingent on words—it can be known by its own inherent force of veracity. Rhetoric merely helps humans grasp and comprehend it. is not contingent on words—it can be known by its own inherent force of veracity. Rhetoric merely helps humans grasp and comprehend it.

The belief that rhetoric could be used to access truth is not limited to Christianity. In fact, Plato, who also believed that rhetoric had a dual capacity for good and evil and should be used to pursue epistemic truth, influenced St. Augustine. A majority of Plato’s contemporaries, however, did not emphasize truth-

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aim. Yet, as the philosophical currents of history have progressed, culminating in postmodernism, society’s basic concept of persuasion has shifted. The ancients may not have viewed persuasion as antithetical to truth, but the two are sharply divided in the postmodern worldview. Because postmodernism rejects the notion of absolute truth, it necessarily casts all persuasive rhetoric as ontologically violent, meaning that violence is rhetoric’s fundamental state of being. This necessarily

and advertising rhetoric is any indication, it appears that our society nurtures the belief that rhetoric’s chief aim is the manipulation of ambiguous information in order to induce a perception of reality that may or may not be true. This belief has three key implications for the nature of reality, and these implications intimately influence each other and are sustained by the metaphysical assumptions of postmodernism.

The first implication is the difficulty inherent in differentiating persuasion from manipulation.

According to Forbes, manipulation is coercion through force to get someone to do something that is not in their own interest. Persuasion is the art of getting people to do things that are in their own best interest that also benefit you.viii

Plato and Aristotle in the School of Athens by Rafael, 1509

It might be natural to assume that people are inherently aware of their own best interests, but various emotional and psychological factors can foster a mental blindness to these interests, which consequently muddles the discernment of rhetoric that encourages people to act on their interests. Ironically, one of these factors is a negative reaction to being told what to do; this is called psychological reactance,

Our society nurtures the belief that rhetoric’s chief aim is the manipulation of ambiguous information in order to induce a perception of reality that may or may not be true. leads to the desolate conclusion that violence is a primacy of existence itself. This sequence of logic may appear extreme, but if we carefully examine how our society conceives of rhetorical discourse, it becomes clear that postmodernism ultimately assumes that the basic fabric of existence is violence itself— an assumption that is fundamentally opposed to a Christian conception of reality. For example, consider: Rhetoric (n.)—“Language designed to have a persuasive or impressive effect on its audience, but often regarded as lacking in sincerity or meaningful content.”

The definition of rhetoric cited above is the second that appears in the Google Dictionary entry for the term.vi Similarly, the first of seven definitions of rhetoric in the 2014 Random House Dictionary is “(in writing or speech) the undue use of exaggeration or display; bombast.”vii Both definitions seem to imply that rhetoric is fundamentally a collection of techniques meant to influence an audience’s thoughts.

Such influence is facilitated by the ambiguous nature of reality and the fluidity of human perceptual capacities.

Indeed, if the average American’s distrust of political

which occurs “in response to regulations or impositions that impinge on freedom and autonomy.” Moreover, “research indicates that some linguistic features evoke the perception that free behavior might be curtailed… language that is dogmatic…controlling…or explicit, provokes reactance.”ix This includes words such as “must” or “need”—which are often found in rhetorical communication. The principle of reactance reveals that the human mind instinctively interprets language that is directive in nature as an act of restrictive force against itself. In a sense, it reacts as if such language is ontologically violent; restriction is perceived as threatening, and therefore harmful. If the mind goes one step further and perceives the formation of language itself as an act of power as Foucault suggests, then all language becomes a threat.x The second implication, which emerges from the first, involves trust. If an individual is uncertain of whether or not she is being manipulated, or if she is experiencing psychological reactance, she will likely feel distrust towards the rhetorician. Moreover, the combined action of several localized incidents of distrust directed at a specific source can result in a generalized attitude of distrust toward any form of

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Engraving of Saint Augustine of Hippo, date unknown

communication along an interval of difference—and within a postmodern framework, the space between any two people is cast as an interval of difference.

Therefore, since any communication between two individuals is inherently rhetoric and potentially divorced from truth, all human interactions become

narrative, is the idea that truth is utterly unknowable. It proceeds logically from the previously posed problems.

If all rhetoric, or all communication along an interval of difference, is inherently violent and so cannot be trusted, then there can be no objective way to determine if any rhetoric presents actual reality. Reality is molded according to the beholder, and any attempt to create a universal moral code for society is meaningless because “force or tenderness, retreat, conquest, or charity are all equally ‘true.’”xii Contradictions cannot be definitively resolved. All rhetoric becomes a tool constructed to advance the fulfillment of its creator’s impulses, but there is no transcendent standard that can truly claim that one impulse “is sufficiently concrete to counter other impulses.”xiii The absence of truth means there is no real escape from the violence of existence; the only solution we see enacted is the restraint of violence with violence, or political and ethical mandates that are enforced by societal will and physical force. In the postmodern landscape, intervals of difference must be filled with strife, and nothing can truly be known.

The realization of such an existence can only lead to despair. If Christianity is a worldview that claims to offer boundless joy and hope, the polar opposite of despair, then it must support a notion of existence in which violence is not an ontological primacy, but a corruption of the original state, which is completely devoid of conflict. Such an existence is defined as an ontology of peace.

This peace is categorically different from any notion of the term that fits within the postmodern system because it is founded on a conception of difference that is not inherently violent. Any talk of

If Christianity is a worldview that claims to offer boundless joy and hope, the polar opposite of despair, then it must support a notion of existence in which violence is not an ontological primacy, but a corruption of the original state, which is completely devoid of conflict.

Such an existence is defined as an ontology of peace. suspect. The spread of generalized distrust among the American public in the last four decades is evidence of this epidemic; only one-third of Americans today believe that people can be trusted, down from half in 1972.xi People resist one another’s words because they are unwilling to trust that the other party does not wish to do them violence through manipulation.

Thus, difference always carries the threat of violence in a postmodern world. If difference is a primacy of existence, then violence must be a primacy as well.

The third implication, which is the most significant anathema to the central unity of the Christian

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peace in a postmodern system is “at most a necessary fiction, and occasionally a critical impossibility” because any reduction in violence is only achieved through the increase of another violence; the true absence of opposing forces is nowhere to be found.xiv Any concept of true peace must propose that the reality of difference does not naturally lead to violent conflict, but instead allows for co-existence. This cannot be a co-existence maintained simply by the avoidance of conflict (noninteraction), because it is impossible to fulfill basic biological necessities without communicating along an interval of difference. Differences will interact;

what they cannot do is clash. Therefore, rhetoric that reflects an ontology of peace must view difference as “harmonizable (not synthesizable),” and such an idea is “a prospect of peace otherwise unimaginable [outside of ] theology.”xv In music, harmony is the combination of different musical notes to produce unique chords that have a pleasing effect; similarly, a harmony of differences would produce something that neither element could embody on its own. Such a phenomenon, however, appears to reject the idea of boundaries that is inherent in the finite nature of everything seen in the world. If an interaction between differences resulted in a novel element, postmodernism must claim that the boundaries between the two dissolved, and thus the new creation was born out of violent force. To maintain the boundaries of the finite, the new element must be present in the interaction itself, somewhere within the communication traveling along the interval of difference. And, if the new element was not produced within the finite boundaries of the different elements, then the rhetorical interaction must have touched upon something infinite and boundless— an element that transcends all the differences seen in existence, but that has a distinct connection to those same differences. Postmodernism cannot account for any such element, but Christianity offers a compelling exemplar in the form of the Triune God. Christian metaphysics is grounded in the assumption that God is the creator and sustainer of all that can be seen in creation. All goodness and truth are contained within and spring forth from God’s character. Moreover, his effusive creativity is the basis of all difference seen in creation. Since God is infinite, he cannot be fully expressed in the finite limits that define all created things. God reveals different aspects of himself in the multiplicity of objects and creatures that he has created, and the interaction between those objects creates a fuller, though never exhaustive, image of the munificent beauty that is contained within God. Rhetoric, thus, is not a tool of destruction, but an arbiter of revelation, unveiling aspects of God that cannot be glimpsed outside of the interval of difference. It functions as Augustine claims—as a way to grasp and comprehend truth. The full truth of God cannot begin to be glimpsed without difference, and the rhetorical communication that flows between finite points of difference.

This is not to claim that violence has not permeated the use of rhetoric. Violence and disorder are an intrusion on the original peace of creation; they are “unnecessary, arbitrary, and sinful invention[s] of the will” that pale in comparison to the infinite peace embodied within God.xvi But, since sin has the power to separate creation from God, thereby severing the ties

Former monastery in Griffen, 2011

that bind transcendence to finite difference, violence is able to hijack rhetorical discourse and obscure the inherently peaceful design of difference. In this way, postmodern thought has correctly captured a reflection of how rhetoric operates in its broken state. While God, through the provision of common grace to all creation, does not fully give rhetorical communication over to utter chaos, it is clear that violent discourse pervades human existence. Unfortunately, this applies even to discourse that claims to truthfully represent Christianity, and conflicts between seemingly categorically opposed definitions of Christianity, like the JMU incident, serve as evidence of the reality that intervals of difference are still fractured even in the midst of a redemptive process.

Yet this redemptive process, the reassertion of God’s original, peaceful design for difference, was begun when communication was enacted along the largest interval of difference of all—the gulf between a perfect God and a broken world—in the form of Christ, sent as “a proclamation of the story of peace posed over against the narrative of violence.”xvii Christ is a living, breathing rhetoric that serves to restore

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Christ is a living, breathing rhetoric that serves to restore the shattered interval between the Creator and his creation through the act of the resurrection.

Painting of Christ at Berezhany town museum in western Ukraine, 2008

the shattered interval between the Creator and his creation through the act of the resurrection, which returns violence (even the ultimate eradicative violence of death) to its proper orientation in relation to the infinite: weak, tiny, and powerless. Though violence still fights against infinite peace, Christ’s victory has assured that the process of redemption will be fulfilled in all who accept it—all who allow God to restore their capacity to touch truth through communication along an interval of difference. The state of rhetoric in a world that is sinful, yet in the process of being redeemed, is much how Augustine described it: therein exists the capacity for good and evil. The good is the peace of the infinite God, and the evil is the violence of manipulation and force.

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i.

Diego Jauregui, “Homophobic Preacher Ranting at JMU,” YouTube, 16 September 2014, <https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2jSVHc5NkM>. ii.

James Boyd White, When Words Lose Their Meaning: Constitutions and Reconstitutions of Language, Character, and Community (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984). iii.

Joseph Anthony Mazzeo, “St. Augustine’s Rhetoric of Silence,” Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (1962): 177. iv.

Mazzeo, 177. v.

Aristotle, Rhetoric (New York: Cosimo, 2010), vii. vi.

“Rhetoric,” Google, 1 January 2015, <https:// www.google.com/search?q=rhetoric>. Google, in turn, draws its definitions from Oxford Dictionaries.

See “Rhetoric,” Oxford Dictionaries, 1 January 2015, <http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/us/definition/ american_english/rhetoric>. vii.

“Rhetoric,” Dictionary, 1 January 2015, < http:// dictionary.reference.com/browse/rhetoric>. viii.

Jason Nazar, “The 21 Principles of Persuasion,” Forbes, 1 January 2015, <http://www.forbes.com/ sites/jasonnazar/2013/03/26/the-21-principles-ofpersuasion/>. ix.

“Psychological Reactance Theory,” Psychlopedia, 1 January 2015, <http://www.psych-it.com.au/ Psychlopedia/article.asp?id=65>. x.

Mark G.E. Kelly, The Political Philosophy of Michel Foucault (Florence: Routledge Books, 2010), 24. xi.

Connie Cass, “In God We Trust, Maybe, But Not Each Other,” AP-GfK Poll, <http://ap-gfkpoll.com/ featured/our-latest-poll-findings-24>. xii.

David Bentley Hart, The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth (Grand Rapids: W.B. Eerdmans, 2003), 3. xiii.

Hart, 3. xiv.

Hart, 57. xv.

Hart, 107. xvi.

Hart, 3. xvii.

Hart, 59.

Jake Casale ’17 is from Redmond, WA. He is a prospective double major in Psychology and Geography modified with Computer Science.

BREAKING CHRISTIANS’ SILENCE ON RACISM

by Jessica Tong

I

n the wake of Michael Brown’s shooting in August 2014, there was a noticeable dearth of active, grassroots Christian involvement in the racial conversation in Ferguson, Missouri and the rest of the United States. This suggests to many that Christianity, or at least Christians, are strangely silent about racism. The assumption that might follow is that either Christianity itself perpetuates racism or that a Christian is simply no different from the next passive person in the room. On the contrary, Jesus Christ was far from silent on the topic of racism. He responded to the racist dynamics between the Jews and the Gentiles of his day by calling on Christians to be active in matters of racial equality. By challenging the Christian to “take up your cross and follow me,” Jesus invited Christians to follow in his footsteps—to risk their lives and their dignities to love the Lord and their neighbors as themselves.i Hence, the Christian faith condones neither racism nor silence. Instead, it offers each person a worth and identity that deems race entirely irrelevant.

The root of overt racism often lies in the genuine confidence of Christians and non-Christians in their own racial supremacy. As evolutionary theory developed throughout the nineteenth century, many evolutionists used this new framework to affirm

the existent belief that the white race had reason to claim superiority—it had “advanced further up the evolutionary ladder” and “lower races will have been eliminated by the higher civilised races throughout the world.”ii During the Atlantic slave trade, beliefs of evolutionary superiority were rampant, providing justification for the enslavement of millions of Africans. This race-based mistreatment persisted into the twentieth century. Hitler’s Mein Kampf actively sought to “make the practice of Germany conform to the theory of evolution.”iii The Holocaust, what is now universally acknowledged to be a moral abomination, merely reflected an assurance in the superiority of pure German blood. Similarly, the “White Australia Policy,” an immigration policy that restricted Chinese immigration, coincided with legalised segregation in the United States. Even Christians actively perpetuated racial segregation and degradation. Christians supported the slave trade during the 1800s, often citing Cain’s curse to be black slavery.iv These problems persisted into the twentieth century, as Martin Luther King, Jr. noted in 1963 that “the most segregated hour of Christian America is 11 o-clock on Sunday morning.”v Nevertheless, other Christians and non-believers have found that Christianity itself does not grant any

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person superiority over another. Sir Arthur Keith, a secular evolutionary anthropologist, noted that Christianity “seeks to break down all racial barriers.”vi As Paul writes to the Romans, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”vii According to Christianity, grace is humanity’s great equalizer. With grace itself being a gift to the undeserving, neither race nor good works could make someone any more or less deserving of God’s love. Christ offered this radically new perspective on human equality, which brought the second-century Christians to strive for a “third race.” This “third race” no longer defined identities by race, age, wealth, or moral standing, but rather by each person’s birth as a unique child of God. Hence, while individual Christians have been proud of their race, enough to condemn others into inferiority, the central supposition that the Christian faith makes about the nature of humanity contradicts such actions.

When silence in the face of racism is not bred out of pride, it is often bred out of a fear of mockery and backlash—in other words, a desire to “survive.”

In societies dominated by racist sentiments, beliefs to the contrary can result in discrimination, social ostracization, and even imprisonment. This desire for comfort and stability can and has historically overshadowed even the greatest barbarianism and injustice. The outright silence of many Christian and non-Christian bystanders attests to the overpowering animalistic instincts to self-protect and the power of the herd mentality.

Nonetheless, both the natural discomfort in seeing another human suffer and the Christian faith reveal an acknowledgement of the worth and sacredness of

human life. The theory of the survival of the fittest might view fearful silence as a healthy defence tactic, and oppression of another race as a form of victory.

Christianity, however, does not encourage such fear.

As C.S. Lewis argues in Why I’m Not a Pacifist, the command to “turn the other [cheek] to him also” applies in the case that the only victim is the person who might desire to retaliate.viii In other words, when direct revenge and ego are no longer at play, our duty to defend the defeneless still is. Accordingly, Martin Niemöller, a Protestant pastor and social activist during the rise of Hitler in Nazi Germany, preached on many occasions on the desperate necessity to not “keep silent at man’s behest when God commands us to speak. For it is, and must remain, the case that we must obey God rather than man.”ix He openly declared that the Christians in Germany were guilty of the Nazi murders, for “in our world and in our name have these things been done.”x And yet, Niemöller spoke of a revelation from God that still shook him to the core: speaking up was not enough. When he visited a crematorium of 238,756 human beings in Dachau in 1945, he stated, God asked me—as once He asked the First Man after the Fall, Adam—Man, where wast thou in those years 1933 to 1945? I knew I had no answer to that question…Should I have said perhaps: ‘As a pastor in those years I bore courageous witness to the Faith; I dared to speak, and risked life and freedom in doing so?’ But God did not ask about that. God

Left: Martin Luther King leaning on a lectern by Marion S. Trikosko, 1964 Right: Martin Luther King, Jr. World Telegram & Sun photo by Dick DeMarsico, 1964

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asked: ‘Where were you from 1933 to 1945 when human beings were incinerated here?’xi Here, Niemöller presents the idea that Christians are called to more than just discouraging silence; they must not only speak up, but also take action.

While Christians must turn the other cheek to their assailant, they must also actively defend the victims around them. At the Temple, when Jesus encountered a crowd who wished to stone an adulteress to death, he proclaimed, “let the one who has never sinned throw the first stone!” and later said to the woman, “Neither

implementation of meritocracy. Even America’s ethnic churches that strive to become multi-ethnic, to mirror a united, Christ-like community, confront the failures of affirmative action due to their racial context. Pastor Suh of Joyful Sound Church writes, “Even if 21% of our members are non-Asian, most people would not consider us a multiracial church. For white churches, this same logic does not apply.”xv Ultimately, the numerical approach, like the word “tolerance,” lacks the depth a social attitudinal change requires.

With these mere words and numbers, humans have been settling for an equality that is too shallow.

Our struggle to equalize all races, to empower a cultural identity without overpowering another, calls for the kind of humility and pride that we can find embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. do I [condemn you]. Go and sin no more.”xii Just as Jesus was not silent but intervened for the woman, without condoning her actions, he calls Christians to similarly intervene for victims of injustice.

Some like King and Niemöller obeyed, showing that Christians in fact ought to fight silence with both words and actions. But even politically correct words and affirmative action, modern strategies to combat racism, have failed to stop teenagers such as Michael Brown and Xinran Ji from being murdered. Instead, what society desperately needs is a change of heart to give meaning and honesty to these words and actions.

The approach of emphasising national “tolerance” aims to stop overtly racist language and actions, but fails to appease people, precisely because it does not require a change of heart. Tolerance, or “[refrainment] from objecting to something with which one does not agree,” surrenders to the prevailing attitudes and judgments toward other groups.xiii It simply seeks to hinder actions or words that might reveal annoyance or indignation. The official Australian Immigrant Book, recommended to most immigrants entering Australia, portrays tolerance as “vital, because Australia is becoming more and more a multicultural society.”xiv Such a definition carries within it the damaging assertion that societies can and must be based on pretences to avoid criticism or unrest.

Numerical diversity is just as erroneous a metric for successful change in society. In educational institutions, nations, and churches, a level of racism is reduced to statistics; affirmative action assumes that diversity and equality can be quantified and solved by quotas. Unfortunately, this has given rise to the notion of a “token” minority student and a warped

Instead, Christ redefines the premise of equality entirely. Just as each is equally humbled in the light of the superior glory of Christ, each is equally lifted up as his beloved child, for whom he died on the cross. As St. Paul writes to the Galatians, “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.”xvi St. Paul goes on to write that “if you belong to Christ, then you are Abraham’s descendants, heirs according to promise.”xvii Indeed, the evolutionary principle that we are all of a common ancestor aligns with Paul’s affirmation of our equal standing and shared history as humans. Equality can be seen a gift, rather than the prize of a never-ending competition for power and influence.

Our struggle to equalize all races, to empower a cultural identity without overpowering another, calls for the kind of humility and pride that we can find embodied in the person of Jesus Christ. Just as Jesus was the Son of God, but crucified for mankind, “becoming Christian requires humbling yourself before God and becoming vulnerable before man.”xviii The commonly cited phrase that each person is in this world “but not of this world,” suggests that each person lives on Earth for a divine purpose.xix Hence, God makes “serving God and serving humankind inseparable.”xx Finally, Jesus warns that “anyone who hates his brother is a murderer,” reminding us that like all things, the act of serving humankind starts from the heart.xxi Therefore, in the fight against racism, affirmative action, numerical quotas, and empty words of comfort have only plastered Band-Aids over a wound created by competing egos. Christ, however, offers a different solution. Rather than seeking equality in equal rights

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Regular Ticket Workingmen’s Party California by anonymous, c. 1890

or power, Christ encourages us to focus on our shared humanity. Christians, especially, are called to love each person, whether Christian or not, as a child of God, and thus to find in each other a shared identity, regardless of race, religion or gender. As a testament to this love, each Christian is given the same Great Commission, leaving no need for competition. Christians have indeed been silent and “neutral in times of great moral crisis” regarding race, yet this attitude is incompatible with what Christ requires of his followers.xxii While Jesus promises to give rest to those who are “weary and burdened” by the injustice of racism, he also urges others to risk their lives to defend the oppressed and disadvantaged, with the radical love he himself first displayed.xxiii Matthew 16:24; Luke 10:27. All scripture quotations from the NKJV. ii.

Gertrude Himmelfarb, Darwin and the Darwinian Revolution (London: Chatto and Windus, 1959), 343. iii.

Himmelfarb, 343. iv.

David Goldenberg, The Curse of Ham Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003). v.

James C. Klagge, “The Most Segregated Hour in America?” Virginia Tech, 12 January 2015, <http:// www.phil.vt.edu/JKlagge/ConductorChurch.htm>. vi.

Arthur Keith, Evolution and Ethics (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1949), 230. vii.

Romans 3:23. viii.

Matthew 5:39; C.S. Lewis, “Why I’m Not a Pacifist,” The Weight of Glory and Other Addresses (New York: Macmillan, 1949), 85. ix.

Michael Power, Religion in the Reich (London: Longmans, Green and co. 1939), 142. i.

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James Bentley, Martin Niemöller, 1892-1984 (New York: Free Press, 1984), 177. xi.

Dietmar Schmidt, Pastor Niemöller (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1959), 19. xii.

John 8:1-11. xiii.

Anna Triandafyllia, Addressing Cultural, Ethnic & Religious Diversity Challenges in Europe. xiv.

“Tolerance Is the Australian Way,” The Australian Immigrant Book, 13 January 2015, <http://www. aust-immig-book.com.au/business/toleranceaustralian-way>. xv.

Sharon Kim, A Faith of Our Own Secondgeneration Spirituality in Korean American Churches (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2010), 157. xvi.

Galatians 3:28. xvii.

Galatians 3:29. xviii.

Paul M. Andersen, Professors Who Believe: The Spiritual Journeys of Christian Faculty (Downers Grove, Il: InterVarsity Press, 1998), 45. xix.

John 17:16. xx.

Andersen, 45. xxi.

I John 3:15. xxii.

Mark Musa, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy. Trans. and commentary by Mark Musa (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 19962004). xxiii.

Matthew 11:28. x.

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

BOOK REVIEW:

being mortal atul gawande’s

by Chenchen Li

Town hall in Kłodzko, Poland, 2014

A

tul Gawande, for those who have not yet read his books, is at once a writer, surgeon, and professor at the Harvard School of Public Health and at Harvard Medical School. Each of his prior books has been on the New York Times bestseller list: Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science (2002), Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance (2007), and The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right (2009). Not surprisingly, his latest work, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (2014), has followed the trend. It is about death, a difficult topic to treat well. But, according to reviews from literary giants like Malcolm Gladwell and Oliver Sacks, Atul Gawande has done so.i Gawande writes about how medicine changed the way we see mortality. Before the advent of tested medication, diseases had to be waited out; now, however, doctors can draw from an enormous amount of research-based knowledge to treat patients. If a

patient dies, it is often because the physician did not know enough—we say the doctor has failed. But, Being Mortal says this is the wrong way to see it.

Mortality is unchangeable and should not be a doctor’s fault. Instead, he says, we need to learn to accept death as inevitable and understand that sometimes what makes life worth living should be valued over simple preservation.

“The one time I remember discussing mortality was during an hour we spent on The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy’s classic novella,” writes Gawande.ii Ilyich is a character on his deathbed who suffers under the care of an endless series of doctors, none of whom can help. “What tormented Ivan Ilyich most,” Tolstoy writes, “was the deception, the lie, which for some reason they all accepted, that he was not dying but was simply ill, and he only need keep quiet and undergo a treatment and then something very good would result.”iii Gawande said his class interpreted this lack

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of acceptance (which, if had, could have given Ilyich peace) as a “failure of character and culture.”iv But, he also thinks we have not gotten much better— Gawande sees Ilyich’s story reincarnated in hospitals all the time. Medicine tries to prevent dying, but it does not bother with the process itself. In the rest of Being Mortal, Gawande addresses these questions: what is important in the end? And what can we do to preserve that?

Alice Hobson was Gawande’s grandmother-inlaw. Her role in his book is to show that safety and comfort alone are not what people need to be happy, although we often think they are. Hobson was forced to leave her condominium because of her deteriorating health, chose a nursing home, and found she hated it. She passed away soon after arranging a ‘Do Not

To put all this in a phrase, we see things in stories.

We remember the periods in which things happen.

“Time is this rubbery thing,” says David Eagleman in a New Yorker article by Burkhard Bilger. Eagleman is an assistant professor of neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine. “It stretches out when you really turn your brain resources on, and when you say, ‘Oh, I got this, everything is as expected,’ it shrinks up.”viii When a man named Michel Siffre spent two months in a cave as part of an experiment, he left it thinking only one month had passed because everything had been so routine.ix Gawande shows that safety and comfort are not the most important things in a meaningful life, and what does matter depends on how we perceive time. He draws on other sources to say what makes

We see things in stories. We remember the periods in which things happen.

Resuscitate’ order for herself. Gawande writes, “The trouble was that she expected more from life than safety. ‘I know I can’t do what I used to,’ she said, ‘but this feels like a hospital, not a home.’”v What is it, then, that makes a rich and happy life?

Being Mortal theorizes that the answer depends on how we perceive our lives. Gawande describes a study done by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman and University of Toronto physician Donald Redelmeier, in which patients ranked their pain levels during and after colonoscopy and kidney stone procedures. One would think, he says, “that the final ratings would represent something like the sum of the momentby-moment ones…but this wasn’t what the patients reported at all.”vi Kahneman and Redelmeier discovered a ‘Peak-End Rule’ phenomenon that went against this assumption. It turned out that patients’ final ratings were actually an average of only two moments: the worst part and final part of the procedure.

C.S. Lewis wrote about something similar in The Great Divorce. The following is a fictional conversation between two characters, the first of which is on a trip out of hell into heaven.

“But I don’t understand. Is judgment not final?

Is there really a way out of Hell into Heaven?”

“It depends on the way you’re using the words.

If they leave that grey town behind it will not have been Hell…both good and evil, when they are full grown, become retrospective…

Heaven, once attained, will work backwards and turn [temporal agony into glory]…damnation will spread back and back into their past and contaminate the pleasure [of sin].”vii

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living worthwhile, including writing from 1908 by a Harvard philosopher named Josiah Royce. “We all seek a cause beyond ourselves. This was, to [Royce], an intrinsic human need…In ascribing value to the cause and seeing it as worth making sacrifices for, we give our lives meaning.” Royce says this loyalty does not necessarily make a person happier, but it makes life endurable. “Without it, we have only our desires to guide us, and they are fleeting, capricious, and insatiable…The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater. If you don’t, mortality is only a horror.”x Gawande is not a religious writer, but these conclusions make sense in a Christian context. David Foster Wallace noted in his famous commencement speech, “This is Water,” that “an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship…is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive…[Y]ou will never have enough.”xi Money, power, or intellect will consume you. What is worth your loyalties are other living things and God—sources of input to your life, things that can give back. And God, as this perfect entity, is the one thing for which this is true, that also will not die.

If we see things in stories (as evidenced by Kahneman’s ‘Peak-End Rule’ and Lewis’s ideas on retrospection), then the shape of our narratives determines whether our lives have meaning. Andrew Stanton gave a TED Talk in 2012 about what makes a good character, part of which is copied here. Stanton works for Pixar, and has written or been a part of writing A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo, WALL-E, the Toy Story films, and Monsters, Inc.

“The only way death is not meaningless is to see yourself as part of something greater. If you don’t, mortality is only a horror.”

Atul Gawande “I took a seminar…with an acting teacher named Judith Weston,” he said.

“She believed that all well-drawn characters have a spine…an inner motor, a dominant, unconscious goal that they’re striving for, an itch that they can’t scratch…It’s something that always drove all [the characters’ choices].”

Stanton readily applied Weston’s idea to his own work. “Wall-E’s [spine] was to find the beauty. Marlin’s, the father in Finding Nemo, was to prevent harm. And Woody’s was to do what was best for his child.”xii We are drawn to stories and see our lives in stories.

“In the end, people don’t view their life as merely the average of all of its moments,” writes Gawande. “Life is meaningful because it is a story…its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. A seemingly happy life may be empty.

A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause.”xiii As Lewis said, a great cause might redeem any suffering for it, and endings can redeem pain. If we are Christians, we know our endings—so how should that shape our lives? By knowing which moments are going to matter, versus the ones that are totally ephemeral, how does this change the way we live? And if we are not Christians, how would our priorities shift as a result?

Our personalities and lives are made up of our memories, which are further split into two parts: the experiencing self and the remembering self, as Kahneman and Gawande define them. The experiencing self is gone as each moment passes, whereas the remembering self is the one that follows these stories so closely. Yet, Gawande says, both the experiencing self and the remembering self factor in when we make decisions. Since the remembering self is so biased, it cannot always make the best choices—at the same time, as noted before, the experiencing self is gone the moment it has existed. It is hard to decide whether to treat a patient or not; a doctor does not know whether the treatment will be worth the risk.

Many times, it is not. And short pleasures, living a meaningful life up until the end, can sometimes make up for prolonged suffering. So, dying in hospice, at peace with a good ending and with family and friends, is not implicitly a medical failure. Gawande, however, does add this:

I am leery of suggesting the idea that endings are controllable…But we are not helpless either…Our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life.xiv i.

“Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End,” Atul Gawande, 12 January 2015, <atulgawande.com/book/being-mortal/>. ii.

Atul Gawande, Being Mortal:Medicine and What Matters in the End (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2014), 1-2. iii.

Lev N. Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, trans.

Louise and Aylmer Maude (An Electronic Classics Series Publication, 1998-2013), 41. iv.

Gawande, 1-2. v.

Gawande, 74-5. vi.

Gawande, 237. vii.

C.S. Lewis, The Complete C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2002), 502-503. viii.

Burkhard Bilger, “The Possibilian,” The New Yorker, 12 January 2015, <www.newyorker.com/ magazine/2011/04/25/the-possibilian>. ix.

Joshua Foer and Michel Siffre, “Caveman: An Interview with Michel Siffre,” Cabinet Magazine, 12 January 2015, <www.cabinetmagazine.org/ issues/30/foer.php>. x.

Gawande, 126-7. xi.

David F. Wallace, “Transcription of the 2005 Kenyon Commencement Address – May 21, 2005,” Purdue University, 12 January 2015, < http://web. ics.purdue.edu/~drkelly/DFWKenyonAddress2005. pdf>. xii.

Andrew Stanton, “The Clues to a Great Story,” TED Conferences, 12 January 2015, <www.ted.com/ talks/andrew_stanton_the_clues_to_a_great_story>. xiii.

Gawande, 238. xiv.

Gawande, 243.

Chenchen Li ’18 is from Richland, WA. She is a prospective major in Physics modified with Biology.

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pharisee in the field

by Emmanuel Hui

Photo courtesy of Emmanuel Hui

I

often stop to ask myself why I’m doing what I am. Not for motivational purposes, but for recalibration, because I find my impetuses too often fluctuate between sources of greed, pride, and love.

When it comes to actions of moral good, these three motivators are caught in a never-ending, three-way tug-of-war, like a flickering pie chart with each slice fighting for the market dominance of my heart. I was especially mindful of this internal conflict one night as I poured a bucket of ice-cold river water over my body.

No, I wasn’t doing the ALS ice bucket challenge; I was uphill in a Fijian jungle village on my summer medi-

then I’d get angry at myself for feeling guilty for feeling good. It occurred to me that these reactionary feelings all tie back to the three-way distribution for why I choose to do good.

The most straightforward way to solve this inner anguish is to be rid of the initial pride. This could work only if love takes the majority of my heart, just as a loving mother isn’t proud of wiping her child’s bum.

Only a love-majority heart is capable of true altruism that seeks no benefit for itself. However, a Darwinian person would be quick to point out that nothing we do is ever absent of indirect greed and personal interest.

Some days, I felt like a saint for having treated upwards of 70 patients, and I brimmed with pride, which would invariably be followed by guilt for the self-aggrandizement. And then I’d get angry at myself for feeling guilty for feeling good.

cal internship. July is winter in Fiji, and it gets down to around 40oF at night. I was working for the Wesley United Methodist Church and lived for a month devoid of luxuries such as hot showers, regular electricity, and the Internet (oh what horror!). Some days, I felt like a saint for having treated upwards of 70 patients, and I brimmed with pride, which would invariably be followed by guilt for the self-aggrandizement. And

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A child’s wellbeing allows the mother’s genes a greater chance for continuation, and any good we do for “others” ultimately benefits the human gene’s survival.

Me? The internship definitely offered tangible benefit.

I was able to grow in knowledge and experience, and the job also helped with résumé building for medical school. Greed held an undeniable position in my heart and honestly lowered my capacity to love.

This secular evolutionary perspective, however, is insufficient for explaining that which benefits others at great personal cost. I could easily have done an internship in NYC and lived the high life, instead of suffering the cold and being cautious of something as basic as drinking water. Similarly, it’s understandable that a mother would sacrifice her own life for her child, but if she does the same for an impotent, handicapped, and terminally ill grandpa, the ethical utility of her behavior comes into

Photo courtesy of Emmanuel Hui

Nothing we do is absent of indirect greed and personal interest. question. The evolutionary model for moral reasoning depends on a cost-benefit analysis, and some decisions are bound to cost more than they return. Everyone has a different threshold for the moral cost-benefit ratio that motivates them to do good, and evolution falls short in explaining the extremely high ratios that some people have. Generally speaking, I attribute the extra push that motivates people to commit to high-ratio moral behavior as derived from pride and/or religion.

Pride fuels the insistence that one must do what is right in lieu of the consequences, which belittles or makes irrelevant the ethical utility of isolated cases. This strict observance of rules can either be sentimentally driven, such as the human commitment to not eat corpses, or in the interest of social order, such as bushido (samurai honor code), which legitimizes seppuku (exonerative suicide). Both contribute to scenarios where a person may be “too proud to back down.” Religion extends the cost-benefit notion beyond life, such that one’s behavior may be evaluated in some form of a karma scale to avoid punishment or reap rewards. Moreover, Christianity teaches that a morally good, omnipotent, higher power exists, which is why morality is efficacious for achieving the maximal good and happiness. As said and attested by Martin Luther King, Jr., “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”i While being a Christian may not be necessary in defining what is morally good (I can use reason to figure most of that part out), it definitely gives me a more complete answer for why.

And so every night before I poured the freezing water over my pitiful shivering self, I told myself “for the Lord!” and then faced the cold head on. I’m honestly not a very good person. I’m just too proud to ignore the opportunity of assisting the underprivileged, which derives a greater magnitude of good and happiness than does a common internship at a research hospital.

I’m also mindful of possible “treasures” that may be stored up for me in heaven, though that is (thankfully) not my intention. Of course it would be optimal if I would do good merely because it’s the right thing to do and because I’m a loving person, but I’m not yet there and I’m working on it. Till then, I’ll keep relying on God’s providence for an expanded heart.

Martin Luther King, Jr. “Our God is Marching On!” Speech given at Montgomery, Alabama, 25 March 1965. i.

Emmanuel Hui ’17 is from Hong Kong. He is a prospective double major in Religion and Biology.

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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.

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

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

We [I] believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, of one Being with the Father. Through him all things were made.

For us and for our salvation he came down from heaven: by the power of the Holy Spirit he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary, and was made man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered death and was buried.

On the third day he rose again in accordance with the Scriptures; he ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and his kingdom will have no end.

We [I] believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father [and the Son]. With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified. He has spoken through the Prophets. We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins. We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.

44 • The Dartmouth Apologia • Spring 2015 ]

Image by Natalie Shell â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;15