Augustinian Determinism VS. The Early Church

Ken Wilson Rebuts James White

Description from the above video on SOTERIOLOGY 101’s YouTube:

Dr. Leighton Flowers welcomes back Dr. Ken Wilson to defend his Oxford Thesis from over 15 hours of mostly fallacious and unfounded attacks by Dr. James White of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

The Common Misconceptions in this Debate So Far:

  1. Wilson’s argument rests on Manicheanism and Augustinianism being the same worldview: This is untrue. It is not at all unreasonable to suggest that just one aspect of Manicheanism (i.e. its adherence to theistic determinism) might have influenced Augustine’s interpretation of the scripture.
  2. Wilson is saying Augustinianism is untrue because of its similarities with Manicheanism: This is inaccurate. It is possible for false worldviews to adhere to some aspects of truth, therefore proving that Calvinism has some link to Manicheanism doesn’t prove Calvinism is false. Wilson is saying Augustinianism is not rooted or founded in the early church writings therefore it most likely originated from other gnostic, neoplatonic and Manichean roots, which brings into question its validity as the correct interpretive grid.
  3. Wilson is arguing Augustinianism imports Manicheanism into Christianity because it uses similar words: This is also untrue. Just because Mani spoke of “the elect” and Calvinists also emphasize “the elect” does not mean they are necessarily linked, or even have the same definitions. Wilson is not attempting to argue that all aspects or jargon of the Manichean worldview are linked to the all aspects or jargon within the Calvinistic worldview. Wilson is only looking at the one common point of connection, namely deterministic philosophy, which was first introduced by Augustine, a former Manichean.
  4. James White’s criticism has accurately portrayed Wilson’s arguments and showed Wilson’s bias: This is demonstrably untrue as will be shown in this video and in many of the articles posted at www.soteriology101.com.
  5. If it can be proven that Wilson held to preconception of the ECFs and Augustine’s beliefs before doing his research, then his subsequent research is invalid: Again this is false. Even if it could be proven beyond all reasonable doubt that Wilson firmly believed the ECFs denied TULIP theology and that Augustine was the first to introduce it, this does not make his findings invalid. One would still need to demonstrate that Wilson’s bias lead to poor research.

Here are quotes from Reformed historians who validate the foundational claims of Wilson’s work:

Herman Bavinck:

  • In the early church, at a time when it had to contend with pagan fatalism and gnostic naturalism, its representatives focused exclusively on the moral nature, freedom, and responsibility of humans and could not do justice, therefore, to the teaching of Scripture concerning the counsel of God. Though humans had been more or less corrupted by sin, they remained free and were able to accept the proffered grace of God. The church’s teaching did not include a doctrine of absolute predestination and irresistible grace.

Loraine Boettner:

  • “It may occasion some surprise to discover that the doctrine of Predestination was not made a matter of special study until near the end of the fourth century….They of course taught that salvation was through Christ; yet they assumed that man had full power to accept or reject the gospel. Some of their writings contain passages in which the sovereignty of God is recognized; yet along side of those are others which teach the absolute freedom of the human will. Since they could not reconcile the two they would have denied the doctrine of PredestinationThey taught a kind of synergism in which there was a co-operation between grace and free  this cardinal truth of Christianity was first clearly seen by Augustine

Robert Peterson and Michael Williams of Covenant Theological Seminary:

  • “The Semi-Pelagians were convinced that Augustine’s monergistic emphasis upon salvation by grace alone represented a significant departure from the traditional teaching of the church. And a survey of the thought of the apostolic father’s shows that the argument is validIn comparison to Augustine’s monergistic doctrine of grace, the teachings of the apostolic fathers tended toward a synergistic view of redemption” (36).

Louis Berkhof [in The History of Christian Doctrines]:

  • “Their representations are naturally rather indefinite, imperfect, and incomplete, and sometimes even erroneous and self-contradictory. Says Kahnis: “It stands as an assured fact, a fact knowing no exceptions, and acknowledged by all well versed in the matter, that all of the pre-Augustinian Fathers taught that in the appropriation of salvation there is a co-working of freedom and grace.”

Berkhof goes on to admit that “they do not hold to an entire corruption of the human will, and consequently adhere to the synergistic theory of regeneration” (130).

In other words, despite White’s assertions to the contrary, there were no “monergists” before Augustine.

An additional quote

  • “It may occasion some surprise to discover that the doctrine of Predestination was not made a matter of special study until near the end of the fourth century. The earlier church fathers placed chief emphasis on good works such as faith, repentance, almsgiving, prayers, submission to baptism, etc., as the basis of salvation. They of course taught that salvation was through Christ; yet they assumed that man had full power to accept or reject the Gospel. Some of their writings contain passages in which the sovereignty of God is recognized; yet along side of those are others which teach the absolute freedom of the human will. Since they could not reconcile the two they would have denied the doctrine of Predestination and perhaps also that of God’s absolute Foreknowledge. They taught a kind of synergism in which there was a co-operation between grace and free will. It was hard for man to give up the idea that he could work out his own salvation. But at last, as a result of a long, slow process, he came to the great truth that salvation is a sovereign gift which has been bestowed irrespective of merit; that it was fixed in eternity; and that God is the author in all of its stages. This cardinal truth of Christianity was first clearly seen by Augustine, the great Spirit-filled theologian of the West. In his doctrines of sin and grace, he went far beyond the earlier theologians, taught an unconditional election of grace, and restricted the purposes of redemption to the definite circle of the elect.” — from Loraine Boettner’s “Calvinism in History”

Here is chapter two from Ken Wilson’s book, “The Foundation of Augustinian-Calvinism” (PDF as well)

Here is a good review of the book via the South African Theological Seminary.

See also my first post commenting on this issue.


Chapter 2

Early Christian Authors 95–400 CE


Early Christian authors unanimously taught relational divine eternal predetermination. God elected persons to salvation based upon foreknowledge of their faith (predestination). These Christians vigorously opposed the unilateral determinism of Stoic Providence, Gnosticism, and Manichaeism.[48] So early Christians taught predestination,[49] but refuted Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals’ Eternal Destinies (unilateral determinism). This unilateral determinism can be identified in ancient Iranian religion, then chronologically in the Qumranites, Gnosticism, Neoplatonism, and Manichaeism. “Christian” heretics such as Basilides who taught God unilaterally bestowed the gift of faith to only some persons (and withheld that salvific gift to others) were condemned. Of the eighty-four pre-Augustinian authors studied from 95–430 CE, over fifty addressed this topic. All of these early Christian authors championed traditional free choice and relational predestination against pagan and heretical Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals’ Eternal Destinies.[50]

This can only be understood and appreciated by reading comprehensively through the sizeable number of works by these authors. Some persons triumphantly cite ancient Christian authors claiming they believe Augustine’s deterministic interpretations of scripture, but without reading the entire context or without understanding the way in which words were being used.[51] I am not aware of any Patristics (early church fathers) scholar who would or could make a claim that even one Christian author prior to Augustine taught Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals’ Eternal Destinies (DUPIED, i.e., non-relational determinism unrelated to foreknowledge of human choices).

I. Apostolic Fathers and Apologists 95–180 CE

Most of these works do not directly address God’s sovereignty or free will.[52] The Epistle of Barnabas (100–120 CE) admits the corruption of human nature (Barn.16.7) but only physical death (not spiritual) results from Adam’s fall. Personal sins cause a wicked heart (Barn.12.5). Divine foreknowledge of human choices allowed the Jews to make choices and remain within God’s plan, resulting in their own self-determination (Barn.3.6). God’s justice is connected with human responsibility (Barn.5.4). Therefore, God’s foreknowledge of human choices should affect God’s actions regarding salvation.

In The Epistle of Diognetus (120–170 CE) God does not compel anyone. Instead, God foreknows choices by which he correspondingly chooses his responses to humans. Meecham writes of Diogn.10.1–11.8, “Free-will is implied in his capacity to become ‘a new man’ (ii,I), and in God’s attitude of appeal rather than compulsion (vii, 4).”[53] Aristides (ca.125–170 CE) taught newborns enter the world without sin or guilt: only personal sin incurs punishment.[54]

II. Justin Martyr and Tatian

The first author to write more specifically on divine sovereignty and human free will is Justin Martyr (ca.155 CE). Erwin Goodenough explained:

Justin everywhere is positive in his assertion that the results of the struggle are fairly to be imputed to the blame of each individual. The Stoic determinism he indignantly rejects. Unless man is himself responsible for his ethical conduct, the entire ethical scheme of the universe collapses, and with it the very existence of God himself.[55]

Commenting on Dial.140.4 and 141.2, Barnard concurred, saying God “foreknows everything—not because events are necessary, nor because he has decreed that men shall act as they do or be what they are; but foreseeing all events he ordains reward or punishment accordingly.”[56] After considering 1 Apol.28 and 43, Chadwick also agreed. “Justin’s insistence on freedom and responsibility as God’s gift to man and his criticism of Stoic fatalism and of all moral relativism are so frequently repeated that it is safe to assume that here he saw a distinctively Christian emphasis requiring special stress.”[57] Similarly, Barnard wrote: “Justin, in spite of his failure to grasp the corporate nature of sin, was no Pelagian blindly believing in man’s innate power to elevate himself. All was due, he says, to the Incarnation of the Son of God.”[58]

Tatian (ca.165) taught that free choice for good was available to every person. “Since all men have free will, all men therefore have the potential to turn to God to achieve salvation.”[59] This remains true even though Adam’s fall enslaved humans to sin (Or.11.2). The fall is reversed through a personal choice to receive God’s gift in Christ (Or.15.4). Free choice was the basis of God’s rewards and punishments for both angels and humans (Or.7.1–2).

II. Theophilus, Athenagoras, and Melito

Theophilus (ca.180), all creation sinned in Adam and received the punishment of physical decay, not eternal death or total inability (Autol.2.17). Theophilus’ insistence upon a free choice response to God (Autol.2.27) occurs following his longer discussion of the primeval state in the Garden and subsequent fall of Adam. Christianity’s gracious God provides even fallen Adam with opportunity for repentance and confession (Autol.2.26). Theophilus exhorts Christians to overcome sin through their residual free choice (Autol.1.2, 1.7).

Athenagoras (ca.170 CE) believed infants were innocent and therefore could not be judged and used them as a proof for a bodily resurrection prior to judgment (De resurr.14). For God’s punishment to be just, free choice stands paramount. Why?—because God created both angels and persons with free choice for the purpose of assuming responsibility for their own actions (De resurr.24.4–5)[60] Humans and angels can live virtuously or viciously: “This, says Athenagoras, is a matter of free choice, a free will given the creature by the creator.”[61] Without free choice, the punishment or rewarding of both humans and angels would be unjust.

In Peri Pascha 326–388, Melito (ca.175 CE) possibly surpassed any extant Christian author in an extended description depicting the devastation of Adam’s fall.[62] The scholar Lynn Cohick explained: “The homilist leaves no doubt in the reader’s mind that humans have degenerated from a pristine state in the garden of Eden, where they were morally innocent, to a level of complete and utter perversion.”[63] Despite this profound depravity, all persons remain capable of believing in Christ through their own God-given free choice. No special grace is needed. A cause and effect relationship exists between human free choice and God’s response (P.P.739–744). “There is no suggestion that sinfulness is itself communicated to Adam’s progeny as in later Augustinian teaching.”[64]  

B. Christian Authors 180–250 CE

I. Irenaeus of Lyons

Irenaeus of Lyons (ca.185) wrote primarily against Gnostic deterministic salvation in his famous work Adversus Haereses. “One position fundamental to Irenaeus is that man should come to moral good by the action of his own moral will, and not spontaneously and by nature.”[65] Physical death for the human race from Adam’s sin was not so much a punishment as God’s gracious gift to prevent humans from living eternally in a perpetual state of struggling with sin (Adv. haer.3.35.2).

Irenaeus championed humanity’s free will for four reasons: (1) to refute Gnostic Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals’ Eternal Destinies, (2) because humanity’s persisting imago Dei (image of God within humans) demands a persisting free will, (3) scriptural commands demand free will for legitimacy, and (4) God’s justice becomes impugned without free will (genuine, not Stoic “non-free free will”). These were non-negotiable “apostolic doctrines.” Scholars Wingren and Donovan both identify Irenaeus’ conception of the imago Dei as freedom of choice itself. As Donovan relates: “This strong affirmation of human liberty is at the same time a clear rejection of the Gnostic notion of predetermined natures.”[66]

Andia clarified that God’s justice requires free choice since Irenaeus believed God’s providence created all persons equally.[67] In refuting Gnostic determinism (Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals’ Eternal Destinies), Irenaeus argues that God determines persons’ eternal destinies through foreknowledge of the free choices of persons (Adv. haer.2.29.1; 4.37.2–5; 4.29.1–2; 3.12.2,5,11; 3.32.1; 4.14, 4.34.1, 4.61.2). Irenaeus attacked both Stoicism and Gnostic heresies because DUPIED made salvation by faith superfluous, and made Christ’s incarnation unnecessary.[68] Irenaeus taught God’s predestination. This was based on God’s foreknowledge of human choices without God constraining the human will as in Gnostic determinism.[69]

Irenaeus denied that any event could ever occur outside of God’s sovereignty (Adv. haer.2.5.4), but simultaneously emphasized residual human free choice to receive God’s gift, which only then results in regeneration. “The essential principle in the concept of freedom appears first in Christ’s status as the sovereign Lord, because for Irenaeus man’s freedom is, strangely enough, a direct expression of God’s omnipotence, so direct in fact, that a diminution of man’s freedom automatically involves a corresponding diminution of God’s omnipotence.”[70] Although he exalted God’s sovereignty, it was not (erroneously) defined as God receiving everything he desires.[71] The scholar Denis Minns correctly states, “Irenaeus would insist as vigorously as Augustine that nothing could be achieved without grace. But he would have been appalled at the thought that God would offer grace to some and withhold it from others.”[72]

II. Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian

Clement of Alexandria (ca.190) strongly defends a residual human free choice after Adam (Strom.1.1; cf. 4.24, 5.14). Divine foreknowledge determines divine election (Strom.1.18; 6.14). Clement understood that God calls all (lläv1ωv iοίvuv àvOρdrnωv)—every human, not a few of every kind of human —whereas, “the called” are those who respond. He believed that if God exercised Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals’ Eternal Destinies (as the Marcionites and Gnostics believed), then he would not be the just and good Christian God but the heretical God of Marcion (Strom.5.1).

Clement refuted the followers of the Gnostic Marcion who believed initial faith was God’s gift. Why?—it robbed humans of free choice (Strom.2.3–4; cf. Strom.4.11, Quis dives Salvetur 10). Yet Clement does not believe free choice saves persons as a human work (cf. John 1:13). He teaches God must first draw and call every human to himself, since all have the greatest need for the power of divine grace (Strom.5.1). God does not initiate a mystical (i.e., Neoplatonic) inward draw to each of his elect. Instead, the Father previously revealed himself and drew every human through Old Testament scripture, but now reveals himself and draws all humanity equally to himself through Christ and the New Testament (cf. John 12:32; Strom.7.1–2).[73]

Tertullian (ca.205) wrote that despite a corrupted nature, humans possess a residual capacity to accept God’s gift based upon the good divine image (the “proper nature”) still resident within every human (De anima 22). Every person retains the capacity to believe. He refuted Gnosticism’s discriminatory deterministic salvation (Val.29). God remains sovereign while he permits good and evil, because he foreknows what will occur by human free choice (Cult. fem.2.10). Humans can and should respond to God by using their God-given innate imago Dei free choice. Therefore, Tertullian did not approve of an “innocent” infant being baptized before responding personally to God’s gift of grace through hearing and believing the gospel (De baptismo 18). He believed that children should await baptism until they are old enough to personally believe in Christ.

III. Origen of Alexandria

Origen (ca.185–254) advances scriptural arguments for free choice that fill the third book of De principiis (P. Arch.3.1.6). “This also is definite in the teaching of the Church, every rational soul is possessed of free-will and volition” that can choose the good (Princ., Pref.5). God does not coerce humans or directly influence individuals but instead only invites. Why?—because God desires willing lovers. Just as Paul asked Philemon to voluntarily (κατὰ Eκοuσιοv) act in goodness (Phlm. 1.14), so God desires uncoerced lovers (Hom. Jer.20.2). Origen explains how God hardens Pharaoh’s heart. God sends divine signs/events that Pharaoh rejects and hardens his own heart. God’s hardening is indirect. “Now these passages are sufficient of themselves to trouble the multitude, as if man were not possessed of free will, but as if it were God who saves and destroys whom he will” (Princ. 3.1.7). Origen distinguishes between God’s temporal blessings and eternal destinies in Romans 9–11, rejecting the Gnostic eternal salvation view from these chapters.

Initial faith is human faith, not a divine gift. “The apostles, once understanding that faith which is only human cannot be perfected unless that which comes from God should be added to it, they say to the Savior, ‘Increase our faith.'” (Com.Rom.4.5.3). God desires to give the inheritance of the promises not as something due from debt but through grace. Origen says that the inheritance from God is granted to those who believe, not as the debt of a wage but as a gift of [human] faith (Com.Rom.4.5.1).[74]

Election is based upon divine foreknowledge. “For the Creator makes vessels of honor and vessels of dishonor, not from the beginning according to His foreknowledge, since He does not pre-condemn or pre-justify according to it; but (He makes) those into vessels of honor who purged themselves, and those into vessels of dishonor who allowed themselves to remain unpurged” (P.Arch.3.1.21). Origen does not refute divine foreknowledge resulting in election but refutes the philosophical view of foreknowledge as necessarily causative, which Celsus taught:

Celsus imagines that an event, predicted through foreknowledge, comes to pass because it was predicted; but we do not grant this, maintaining that he who foretold it was not the cause of its happening, because he foretold it would happen; but the future event itself, which would have taken place though not predicted, afforded the occasion to him, who was endowed with foreknowledge, of foretelling its occurrence (C.Cels.2.20).

Origen explains the Christian interpretation of Rom 9:16.[75] The Gnostic and heretical deterministic interpretations render God’s words superfluous, and invalidate Paul’s chastisements and approbations to Christians. Nevertheless, the human desire/will is insufficient to accomplish salvation, so Christians must rely upon God’s grace (P. Arch.3.1.18). Origen does not minimize the innate human sin principle that incites persons to sin. Rather, he chastises immature Christians who blame their sins on the devil instead of their own passions (Princ.3.2.1–2; P. Arch.3.1.15).

IV. Cyprian and Novatian

Cyprian (d.254 CE) taught God stands sovereign (Treat.3.19; 5.56.8; 12.80). Yet, God rewards or punishes based upon his foreknowledge of human choices and responses (Treat.7.17, 19; Ep.59.2). Humans retain free choice despite Adam’s sin (Treat.7.17, 19).[76] “That the liberty of believing or of not believing is placed in freedom of choice” (Treat.12.52). Jesus utilized persuasion, not force (Treat.9.6). Obedience resulting in martyrdom should arise from free choice, not necessity (Treat. 7.18), especially since imitating Christ restores God’s likeness.

Novatian (ca.250 CE) teaches a personal responsibility for sin instead of guilt from Adam, because a person who is pre-determined due to (even fallen) nature cannot be held liable. Only a willful decision can incur guilt (De cib. Jud.3). Lactantius (ca.315 CE) taught Adam’s fall produced only physical death (not eternal death) through the loss of God’s perpetually gifted immortality (Inst.2.13), as Williams correctly identified.[77] Yet, mortality in a corrupted human body predisposed the human race to sin (Inst.6.13). God loves every person equally, offers immortality equally to each person, and every human is capable of responding to God’s offer—without divine intervention (Div.inst.5.15) “God, who is the guide of that way, denies immortality to no human being” but offers salvation equally to every person (Div.inst.6.3). Humanity must contend with its propensity to sin, but the corrupted nature provides no excuse since free choice persists (Inst.2.15; 4.24; 4.25; 5.1). He consistently teaches Christian free choice (Inst.5.10, 13, 14).

C. Christian Authors 250–400 CE

I. Hilary of Poitiers

Hilary (d.368 CE) referred to John 1:12–13 as God’s offer of salvation that is equally offered to everyone. “They who do receive Him by virtue of their faith advance to be sons of God, being born not of the embrace of the flesh nor of the conception of the blood nor of bodily desire, but of God […] the Divine gift is offered to all, it is no heredity inevitably imprinted but a prize awarded to willing choice” (Trin.1.10–11). Human nature has a propensity to evil (Trin.3.21; Hom. Psa.1.4) that is located in the physical body (Hom. Psa.1.13). Human free choice elicits the divine gift, yet the divine birth (through faith) belongs solely to God. A human ‘will’ cannot create the birth (Trin.12.56) yet that birth occurs through human faith.

II. The Cappadocians

Gregory of Nazianzus (ca.329–389 CE) writes frequently of the “fall of sin” from Adam (Or.1; 33.9; 40.7), including the evil consequence of that original sin (Or.45.12). “We were detained in bondage by the Evil One, sold under sin, and receiving pleasure in exchange for wickedness” (Or.45.22). Salvation (not faith) is God’s gift. “We call it the Gift, because it is given to us in return for nothing on our part” (Or.40.4). “This, indeed, was the will of Supreme Goodness, to make the good even our own, not only because it was sown in our nature, but because cultivated by our own choice, and by the motions of our free will to act in either direction.” (Or.2.17). “Our soul is self-determining and independent, choosing as it will with sovereignty over itself that which is pleasing to it” (Ref.Conf. Eun.139). Children are born blameless (Ep.206). God is sovereign, and Christ died for all humankind, including the ‘non-elect.’ (Or.45.26; cf. Or.38.14). Nevertheless, in matters of personal salvation, God limits himself, allowing humans free choice (Or.32.25, 45.8).

Basil of Caesarea (ca.330–379 CE) believed humans do not inherit sin or evil, but choose to sin resulting in death. We control our own actions, proved by God’s payment and punishment (Hom. Hex.2.4). He promotes God’s sovereignty over human temporal (not eternal) destinies, including our time of death by “God who ordains our lots” (Ep.269) yet he refutes micromanaging Stoic Providence (Ep.151). God empowers human faith for great works because mere human effort cannot accomplish divine good (Ep.260.9). Basil allowed no place for either Chaldean astrological fatalism (Hom. Hex.6.5; Ep.236), or Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals’ Eternal Destinies. Righteous judgment resulting in reward and punishment demands Christian traditional free choice. In contrast, any concept of inevitable evil in humans necessarily destroys Christian hope (Hom. Hex.6.7) because all humans have an innate natural reason with the ability to do good and avoid evil (Hom. Hex.8.5; cf. Ep.260.7). Basil refuted a dozen heresies, but reserved his strongest denunciation for the one teaching determinism—”the detestable Manichaean heresy” (Hom. Hex.2.4).

Gregory of Nyssa (ca.335–395 CE) pervasively teaches a post-Adamic congenital weakness, inclined to evil and in slavery to sin but without guilt (C. Eun.1.1; 3.2–3; 3.8; De opificio hom.193; Cat. mag.6, 35; Ep.18; Ref. conf. Eun.; Dial. anim. et res., etc.). Each person’s alienation from God occurs through personal sin and vice, not Adam’s sin (C. Eun.3.10). Despite an inherited tendency to evil, the divine image within humans retains goodness, just as Tertullian and others had taught (Opif. hom.164; cf. Ep.3.17).[78]  Humanity’s ruin and inability to achieve eternal life by self-effort demanded God initiate the rescue through Christ (Ref. conf. Eun.418–20). But Gregory refutes the idea of a human nature so corrupted that it would render an individual incapable of a genuine choice to receive God’s readily available gift of grace offered to everyone equally.

By appealing to the justice of God’s recompenses, Gregory refutes those [e.g., Manichaeans] who believe humans are born sinful and thus culpable (De anim.120). The choice for salvation belongs to humans, apart from God’s manipulation, coercion, or unilateral intervention (C. Eun.3.1.116–18; cf. Adv. Mac. spir. sancto 105–6; De virginitate 12.2–3). Gregory upholds Christian [not Stoic] divine sovereignty (Ref. conf. Eun. 169; cf. 126–27; Opif. hom.185).

III. Methodius, Theodore, and Ambrose

Methodius (d.312 CE) believed all humans retain genuine free will even after Adam’s fall since Christian free choice was necessary for God to be just in rewarding the good and punishing the wicked (Symp.8.16; P G 18:168d). He championed traditional Christian free choice in a major work against Gnostic determinism (Peri tou autexousiou, 73–77).[79] Cyril of Jerusalem (ca.348–386 CE) taught humans enter this world sinless (Cat.4.19) and God’s foreknowledge of human responses determines the divine choosing of them for service (Cat.1.3).

Theodore of Mopsuestia (ca.350–428 CE) defended traditional original sin against Manichaean damnable inherited guilt (Adv. def. orig. pecc.), so that, “Man’s freedom takes the first step, which is afterwards made effective by God … [with] the will of each man as being absolutely free and unbiased and able to choose either good or evil.”[80] Humans retain the ability to choose good and evil (Comm. Ioh.5.19).

Ambrose of Milan (d.397 CE) baptized Augustine in Milan on Easter in 387 CE. He taught traditional (not Augustinian) original sin (De fide 5.5, 8, 60; Exc. Satyri 2.6; cf. 1.4). Ambrose believed slavery to sin [the sin propensity] was inherited, but this was not literal sin that produced personal culpability and damnation (De Abrah.2.79). The scholar Paul Blowers noted, “Ambrosiaster (Rom.5:12ff) and Ambrose (Enar.in Ps.38.29) … both authors concluded that individuals were ultimately accountable only for their own sins.”[81]

Ambrose emphasized God predestined individuals based upon his foreknowledge of the future, concerning which God was omniscient (Ep.57; De fide 2.11, 97). God compels no one, but patiently waits for a human response in order that He may provide grace, preferring pity over punishment (Paen.1.5). He insisted upon residual free choice and views an increase in a person’s faith (not initial faith) as a divine gift given in response to faithfulness. (Paen.1.48; Ep.41.6).

D. Conclusion

Not even one early church father writing from 95–430 CE—despite abundant acknowledgement of inherited human depravity—considered Adam’s fall to have erased human free choice to independently respond to God’s gracious invitation.[82] God did not give initial faith as a gift. Humans could do nothing to save themselves—only God’s grace could save. Total inability to do God’s good works without God’s grace did not mean inability to believe in Christ and prepare for baptism. No Christian author embraced deterministic Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals’ Eternal Destinies (DUPIED): all who considered it rejected DUPIED as an erroneous pagan Stoic or Neoplatonic philosophy, or a Gnostic or Manichaean heresy, unbefitting Christianity’s gracious relational God. God’s gift was salvation by divine grace through human faith (cf. Eph. 2:8), not a unilateral initial faith gift, as the Gnostics and Manichaean heretics were claiming. Early Christian literature could be distinguished from Gnostic and Manichaean literature by this essential element.

In a seemingly rare theological unanimity over hundreds of years and throughout the entire Mediterranean world, a Christian regula fidei (rule of faith) of free choice (advocated by Origen as the rule of faith) combated the Divine Unilateral Predetermination of Individuals’ Eternal Destinies espoused in Stoicism’s “non-free free will” and Gnosticism’s divine gift of infused initial faith into a “dead will.” The loving Christian God allowed humans to exercise their God-given free will.

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Footnotes
Abbreviations from Ken Wilsons Augustine Book (PDF)

[48] Sarah Stroumsa and Guy. G. Stroumsa, “Anti-Manichaean Polemics in Late Antiquity and under Early Islam,” HTR 81 (1988): 48.

[49] Wallace wrongly claims, “In spite of the numerous New Testament references to predestination, patristic writers, especially the Greek fathers, tended to ignore the theme before Augustine of Hippo. This was probably partly the result of the early church’s struggle with the fatalistic determinism of the Gnostics”; Dewey Wallace, Jr. “Free Will and Predestination: An Overview,” in Lindsay Jones, ed. The Encyclopedia of Religion. 2nd edn., vol.5. (Farmington Hills, MI: Macmillan Reference USA, 2005), 3203. He obviously had not read Irenaeus and other early authors. For a cogent refutation of this absurd claim, see in the same volume C.T. McIntire (2005), “Free Will and Predestination: Christian Concepts,” vol.5, 3207.

[50] Wilson, Augustine’s Conversion, Appendix III, 307–309.

[51] Wilson, Augustine’s Conversion, 41–94, and see other comments in the work revealing how this occurs.

[52] For The Shepherd of Hermas and other works not covered here see Wilson, Augustine’s Conversion, 41–50.

[53] Henry Meecham, The Epistle to Diognetus: The Greek Text (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1949), 29–30.

[54] Harold Forshey, “The doctrine of the fall and original sin in the second century,” Restoration Quarterly 3 (1959): 1122, “But in this instance the doctrinal presupposition shows through clearly—a child comes into the world with a tabula rasa.

[55] Erwin Goodenough, The Theology of Justin Martyr (Jena: Verlag Frommannsche Buchhandlung, 1923), 219.

[56] Leslie Barnard, Justin Martyr: His Life and Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967), 78.

[57] Henry Chadwick, “Justin Martyr’s Defence of Christianity,” Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 47.2 (1965): 284; cf., 291–292.

[58] Barnard (1967), 156.

[59] Emily Hunt, Christianity in the Second Century: The Case of Tatian (New York, NY: Routledge, 2003), 49.

[60] Bernard Pouderon, Athénagore d’Athênes, philosophie chrétien (Paris: Beauchesne, 1989), 177– 178. Pouderon highlighted this requisite for God’s law and justice: “La liberté humaine se tire de la notion de responsabilité: ‘L’homme est responsable (lllóöικοc) en tant qu’ensemble, de toutes ses actions’ (D.R.XVIII, 4).” “Human freedom results from the concept of responsibility: ‘Man is generally responsible (lllóöικοc) for all his actions.'” (my translation)

[61] David Rankin, Athenagoras: Philosopher and Theologian. Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 180.

[62] Stuart Hall, Melito of Sardis: On Pascha and Fragments in Henry Chadwick, ed. Oxford Early Christian Texts (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), xvi, where The Petition To Antonius “is now universally regarded as inauthentic.”

[63] Lynn Cohick, The Peri Pascha Attributed to Melito of Sardis: Setting, Purpose, and Sources (Providence, RI: Brown Judaic Studies, 2000), 115.

[64] Hall (1978), xlii.

[65] John Lawson, The Biblical Theology of Saint Irenaeus (London: The Epworth Press, 1948), 203.

[66] Gustaf Wingren, Man and the Incarnation, trans. by Ross Mackenzie (Lund: C.W.K. Gleerup, 1947; repr., London: Oliver and Boyd, 1959), 36; Mary Ann Donovan, “Alive to the Glory of God: A Key Insight in St. Irenaeus,” TS 49 (1988): 291 citing Adv. haer.4.37.

[67] Ysabel de Andia, Homo vivens: incorruptibilité et divinisation de l’homme selon Irénée de Lyons (Paris: Études Augustiniennes, 1986), 131.

[68] E.P. Meijering, “Irenaeus’ relation to philosophy in the light of his concept of free will,” in E.P. Meijering, ed. God Being History: Studies in Patristic Philosophy (Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing, 1975), 23.

[69] James Beaven, An Account of the Life and Times of S. Irenaeus (London: Gilbert and Rivington, 1841), 165–166; F. Montgomery Hitchcock, Irenaeus of Lugdunum: A Study of His Teaching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1914), 260; Wingren (1947; repr., 1959), 35–36.

[70] Wingren (1947; repr., 1959), 35–36.

[71] Explained later when discussing Augustine’s later specific sovereignty view.

[72] Denis Minns, Irenaeus (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1994), 136.

[73] Modern commentaries on this gospel rarely connect God’s drawing as being through scripture and Christ (John 6:44–45; 5.38–47; 8.19, 31, 47; 12.32). Cf. 1 Pet. 2.2.

[74] This serves as an excellent example of a passage removed from its context by which some persons erroneously attempt to prove an early church father taught faith was God’s gift.

[75] Rom. 9:16, “So it depends not upon man’s will or exertion, but upon God’s mercy.”

[76] For a refutation of Cyprian as teaching Augustine’s inherited guilt unto damnation see Wilson, Augustine’s Conversion, 77–82.

[77] Norman Williams, The Ideas of the Fall and Original Sin from the Bampton Lectures, Oxford University, 1924 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1927), 297.

[78] C. Eunomium 24 (on the soul’s ability to see Christ) is probably post-baptismal.

[79] Patrologia orientalis 22:797–801. Cf. Roberta Franchi, Metodio di Olimpo: Il libero arbitrio (Milano: Paoline, 2015).

[80] Henry Wace, A Dictionary of Christian Biography and Literature to the End of the Sixth Century A.D., with an Account of the Principal Sects and Heresies (London: Murray, 1911), “Theodore, III.B.f.” This suggests Macarius was incorrect when he assumed that this work by Theodore was anti-Augustinian. It is defending traditional freedom of choice versus eternal damnation by inherited sin from being born physically, a Manichaean doctrine. The quotation is from Reginald Moxon, The Doctrine of Sin (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1922), 40.

[81] Paul Blowers, “Original Sin,” in Everett Ferguson, ed. Encyclopedia of Early Christianity. 2nd edn. (New York, NY: Routledge, 1999), 839–840.

Balthasar Hubmaier: Baptist History in the Reformation (Updated)

Balthasar Hubmaier (1480–1528) was an influential German Anabaptist leader and one of the most well-known and respected Anabaptist theologians of the Reformation.

In the closing of his work entitled “Freedom of the Will” he laid out a very strong argument against theistic determinism and fatalism which are the undercurrent of Augustinian philosophy and Calvinist “Sovereignty”.

Let me say something to ppl who do not take the time to know what something is and dismiss with labels. Stalin called Lenin a fascist

In similar fashion, we find this “labeling” among the Reformers: See Leighton’e Full Interview of Professor Harwood

Which brings me to an excerpt from a book I have a PDF form of… so the pages and the footnotes will not be properly marked.

As I am going thru this book (pictured), I am rejecting more of my compatibilism and drilling down on a more solid foundation.

Note also how Paul wheels the argument of Romans 1—11 to a climactic conclusion: “For God has bound all men over to disobedience so that he may have mercy on them all” (Rom 11:32, emphasis added). Here the scope of God’s intention to have mercy matches the scope of human sinfulness, as indicated by the repeated all. If Paul has already established in Romans 1—3 that all human beings without exception have been consigned to disobedience, then the symmetry of Paul’s expression in Romans 11:32 strongly implies that God intends to have mercy in a similar scope: on all human beings without exception. Even if we allow that Paul may here be referring to Jews and Gentiles as people groups, we must not imagine that God’s desire to show mercy fails to apply to every individual within each group. After all, Paul establishes that all humans are under sin by arguing that both Gentiles (Rom 1:18-32) and Jews (Rom 2:1—3:20) as people groups are under sin. If we accept Paul’s strategy of indicting every individual through indictment of the group, then consistency requires that we allow the same extension to hold with regard to God’s mercy, as Romans 11:32 seems to say.

The Pastoral Epistles abound with passages pointing toward God’s universal saving intentions: “God our Savior, who wants all men to be saved and to come to a knowledge of the truth” (1 Tim 2:3-4); “Christ Jesus, who gave himself as a ransom for all” (1 Tim 2:5-6); “We have put our hope in the living God, who is the Savior of all men, and especially of those who believe” (1 Tim 4:10); “For the grace of God that brings salvation has appeared to all” (Tit 2:11). Given the unqualified use of all in these passages to identify those whom God desires to save, the burden of proving otherwise is on those who hold that biblical writers assumed a limitation on those who would be saved.1

Of course Calvinists have offered their own accountings of these passages. Some argue, for example, that the “world” loved by God in John 3:16 must refer only to “the elect within the world.”2 Similarly, they read the unqualified all in restricted senses (e.g., “all types of people” or “all the elect”). Accordingly, the scriptural claim that Jesus died not only for our sins but also for the sins of the whole world means that Jesus died not only for the sins of (some) Jews but also for the sins of (some) Gentiles. But D. A. Carson, certainly no Arminian sympathizer, considers such moves to be clever but unconvincing exegetical ploys that feebly attempt to overcome “simply too many texts on the other side of the issue.”3 These restrictive interpretations of all require such textual gymnastics that they condemn themselves as invalid.

[….]

 compatibilism is a popular position among Calvinists, particularly among the philosophically informed, we want to stress that not all Calvinists embrace it. Some Reformed theologians have argued for another option. These writers do not agree with Feinberg that a Calvinist must either give up freedom altogether or accept compatibilism. To the contrary, they hold that we are required by Scripture to accept both God’s control of all things and human freedom, but they insist that it is not up to us to find a way to reconcile these truths. Popular evangelical author J. I. Packer is a proponent of this view. He endorses this position in his widely read book Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God.

As he notes, divine sovereignty and human responsibility are both clearly taught in Scripture. And he understands sovereignty in the Calvinistic sense that God unconditionally determines everything that happens. “Man is a responsible moral agent, though he is also divinely controlled; man is divinely controlled, though he is also a responsible moral agent.”4 Packer identifies this pair of claims as an “antinomy” because he believes we cannot dispense with either one of them, nor can we understand how they are compatible. From the standpoint of finite human reason, it may seem contradictory to affirm both of these claims and therefore impossible to do so. Here is Packer’s advice for dealing with such antinomies.

Accept it for what it is, and learn to live with it. Refuse to regard the apparent inconsistency as real; put down the semblance of contradiction to the deficiency of your own understanding; think of the two principles as, not rival alternatives, but, in some way that at present you do not grasp, complementary to each other.5

Apparently Packer means to affirm that both determinism and freedom in the libertarian sense are true. It is the affirmation of both of these that produces antinomy. By contrast, the affirmation of determinism and the compatibilist account of freedom produces no such intellectual tension. The resolution of antinomy will need the perspective of eternity, but it is easy to see here and now how freedom and determinism can be held together if one accepts a compatibilist account of freedom.

[….]

Second, we believe that there are large stretches of Scripture that are hard to make sense of if humans aren’t free in the libertarian sense of the word. In chapter two we examined some of these, but now let us consider another one, namely, Jeremiah 7:1-29. In this passage God calls his people to repentance. God enumerates the sins of his people and reminds them that while they were doing such things, he spoke to them again and again (Jer 7:13). But instead of repenting, they persist in idolatry and other self-destructive behavior. God promises to punish them for their sin, but he again reiterates that he repeatedly sent his prophets to them to urge them to obedience (Jer 7:20-26).

This passage is hardly unusual. The book of Jeremiah contains several other similar passages, as do most of the Prophets as well as some other biblical texts. Now the question we want to raise is, what view of freedom is implied in such texts? Of course, as we have already noted, Scripture does not expressly define the nature of our freedom or draw philosophical distinctions for us. But it is still worth asking what sort of freedom is implied by various texts of Scripture.

  1. For a helpful treatment of such terms as all and every in the Pastoral Epistles, see I. Howard Marshall, “Universal Grace and Atonement in the Pastoral Epistles,” in The Grace of God and the Will of Man: A Case for Arminianism, ed. Clark H. Pinnock (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondervan, 1989), pp. 57-63.
  2. See D. A. Carson’s characterization of this point of view in The Difficult Doctrine of the Love of God (Wheaton, Ill.: Crossway, 2000), p. 17.
  3. Ibid., p. 75.
  4. John S. Feinberg, “God, Freedom and Evil in Calvinist Thinking,” in The Grace of God, the Bondage of the Will, ed. Thomas R. Schreiner and Bruce A. Ware (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker, 1995), 2:465.
  5. J. I. Packer, Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1961), p. 23. […] 21.

So there is wiggle room in orthodoxy – is my main point. Spurgeon is wrong:

And I have my own private opinion, that there is no such thing as preaching Christ and him crucified, unless you preach what now-a-days is called Calvinism.  I have my own ideas, and those I always state boldly.  It is a nickname to call it Calvinism.  Calvinism is the gospel, and nothing else.

— Charles Spurgeon, Spurgeon’s Sermons, vol. I (Baker Books, reprinted 2007), 88-89.

And, I can disagree with Pink:

  • When we say that God is Sovereign in the exercise of His love, we mean that He loves whom He chooses. God does not love everybody. — A.W. Pink

Challenges To Strict 5-Point Calvinism | Tozer/Winger/Geisler

This post will include lengthy excerpts combined with media… so buckle up buttercup!

  • Let him, therefore, who would beware of such unbelief, always bear in mind, that there is no random power, or agency, or motion in the creatures, who are so governed by the secret counsel of God, that nothing happens but what he has knowingly and willingly decreed. – John Calvin

I reject this strict interpretation by Calvin… Tozer reopens this “knowingly and willingly decreed” to a slightly different understanding that I see is a better fit to this mystery God has unveiled.

This first audio is from A.W. Tozer regarding God’s sovereignty. I also include a partial excerpt from his book, The Knowledge of the Holy: The Attributes of God. Their Meaning in the Christian Life, chapter 22 ~ “The Sovereignty of God” ~ of which the entire chapter is here.

Here is that partial chapter excerpt.

I changed a couple words as can not reads better as cannot:

While a complete explanation of the origin of sin eludes us, there are a few things we do know. In His sovereign wisdom God has permitted evil to exist in carefully restricted areas of His creation, a kind of fugitive outlaw whose activities are temporary and limited in scope. In doing this God has acted according to His infinite wisdom and goodness. More than that no one knows at present; and more than that no one needs to know. The name of God is sufficient guarantee of the perfection of His works.

Another real problem created by the doctrine of the divine sovereignty has to do with the will of man. If God rules His universe by His sovereign decrees, how is it possible for man to exercise free choice? And if he cannot exercise freedom of choice, how can he be held responsible for his conduct? Is he not a mere puppet whose actions are determined by a behind-the-scenes God who pulls the strings as it pleases Him?

The attempt to answer these questions has divided the Christian church neatly into two camps which have borne the names of two distinguished theologians, Jacobus Arminius and John Calvin. Most Christians are content to get into one camp or the other and deny either sovereignty to God or free will to man. It appears possible, however, to reconcile these two positions without doing violence to either, although the effort that follows may prove deficient to partisans of one camp or the other.

Here is my view: God sovereignly decreed that man should be free to exercise moral choice, and man from the beginning has fulfilled that decree by making his choice between good and evil. When he chooses to do evil, he does not thereby countervail the sovereign will of God but fulfills it, inasmuch as the eternal decree decided not which choice the man should make but that he should be free to make it. If in His absolute freedom God has willed to give man limited freedom, who is there to stay His hand or say, What doest thou? Mans will is free because God is sovereign. A God less than sovereign could not bestow moral freedom upon His creatures. He would be afraid to do so.

Perhaps a homely illustration might help us to understand. An ocean liner leaves New York bound for Liverpool. Its destination has been determined by proper authorities. Nothing can change it. This is at least a faint picture of sovereignty.

On board the liner are several scores of passengers. These are not in chains, neither are their activities determined for them by decree. They are completely free to move about as they will. They eat, sleep, play, lounge about on the deck, read, talk, altogether as they please; but all the while the great liner is carrying them steadily onward toward a predetermined port.

Both freedom and sovereignty are present here and they do not contradict each other. So it is, I believe, with mans freedom and the sovereignty of God. The mighty liner of Gods sovereign design keeps its steady course over the sea of history. God moves undisturbed and unhindered toward the fulfilment of those eternal purposes which He purposed in Christ Jesus before the world began. We do not know all that is included in those purposes, but enough has been disclosed to furnish us with a broad outline of things to come and to give us good hope and firm assurance of future well-being.

We know that God will fulfil every promise made to the prophets; we know that sinners will some day be cleansed out of the earth; we know that a ransomed company will enter into the joy of God and that the righteous will shine forth in the kingdom of their Father; we know that Gods perfections will yet receive universal acclamation, that all created intelligences will own Jesus Christ Lord to the glory of God the Father, that the present imperfect order will be done away, and a new heaven and a new earth be established forever.

Toward all this God is moving with infinite wisdom and perfect precision of action. No one can dissuade Him from His purposes; nothing turn Him aside from His plans. Since He is omniscient, there can be no unforeseen circumstances, no accidents. As He is sovereign, there can be no countermanded orders, no breakdown in authority; and as He is omninpotent, there can be no want of power to achieve His chosen ends. God is sufficient unto Himself for all these things.

In the meanwhile things are not as smooth as this quick outline might suggest. The mystery of iniquity doth already work. Within the broad field of Gods sovereign, permissive will the deadly conflict of good with evil continues with increasing fury. God will yet have His way in the whirlwind and the storm, but the storm and the whirlwind are here, and as responsible beings we must make our choice in the present moral situation.

Certain things have been decreed by the free determination of God, and one of these is the law of choice and consequences. God has decreed that all who willingly commit themselves to His Son Jesus Christ in the obedience of faith shall receive eternal life and become sons of God. He has also decreed that all who love darkness and continue in rebellion against the high authority of heaven shall remain in a state of spiritual alienation and suffer eternal death at last.

Reducing the whole matter to individual terms, we arrive at some vital and highly personal conclusions. In the moral conflict now raging around us whoever is on Gods side is on the winning side and cannot lose; whoever is on the other side is on the losing side and cannot win. Here there is no chance, no gamble. There is freedom to choose which side we shall be on but no freedom to negotiate the results of the choice once it is made. By the mercy of God we may repent a wrong choice and alter the consequences by making a new and right choice. Beyond that we cannot go.

The whole matter of moral choice centers around Jesus Christ. Christ stated it plainly: He that is not with me is against me, and No man cometh unto the Father, but by me. The gospel message embodies three distinct elements: an announcement, a command, and a call. It announces the good news of redemption accomplished in mercy; it commands all men everywhere to repent and it calls all men to surrender to the terms of grace by believing on Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour.

We must all choose whether we will obey the gospel or turn away in unbelief and reject its authority. Our choice is our own, but the consequences of the choice have already been determined by the sovereign will of God, and from this there is no appeal.

Here is the excellent first question [of twenty] Mike was attempting to get to get through, which then prompted me to go thru a bunch of his videos. I will include links to those below the video I grabbed the response to that first question from:

Why God Hardens Hearts: Romans 9:17-24 (YouTube) – This topic is what, many years ago led me to come up with the idea that as God [in His perfect justice] and Man [in his freedom to rebel] working in a mystery together led to the eventual hardening of Pharoah’s heart. God’s perfect sovereignty and man’s limited freedom will culminate in God’s will/plan/glory being executed perfectly.

AND THIS IS A MYSTERY

Our freedoms — as such, and God’s sovereignty. Working in tandem. One of many mysteries involving an infinite Being: the Judeo/Christian God, YHWH.

  • “But I will harden Pharaoh’s heart and multiply my signs and wonders in the land of Egypt.”  – Exodus 7:3
  • “But the LORD hardened Pharaoh’s heart and he did not listen to them, as the LORD had told Moses.” – Exodus 9:12
  • “Then the Lord said to Moses, ‘Go to Pharaoh, for I have hardened his heart and the heart of his servants, that I may show these signs of mine among them.’” – Exodus 10:1
  • “I will harden Pharaoh’s heart so that he will pursue them. Then I will receive glory by means of Pharaoh and all his army, and the Egyptians will know that I am the LORD.” So the Israelites did this.” – Exodus 14:4
  • “The LORD hardened the heart of Pharaoh king of Egypt, and he pursued the Israelites, who were going out defiantly.” – Exodus 14:8

— combined with Romans 1:18-25:

For God’s wrath is revealed from heaven against all godlessness and unrighteousness of people who by their unrighteousness suppress the truth, since what can be known about God is evident among them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, that is, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what he has made. As a result, people are without excuse. For though they knew God, they did not glorify him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became worthless, and their senseless hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man, birds, four-footed animals, and reptiles.

Therefore God delivered them over in the desires of their hearts to sexual impurity, so that their bodies were degraded among themselves. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served what has been created instead of the Creator, who is praised forever. Amen.

A good dealing with the order of the verbs in these and other passages of the hardening of Pharoah’s heart is HERE (it is a must read in my opinion, even though it is long). The author is more on the hard-Armenian side of the aisle, but nonetheless his treatment of the issue is one I made years ago. I believe both the strict 5-pointer and the Arminian over-step their bound like we try to relegate the Trinity to water/ice/steam. We all misuse language in trying to describe the God who saved us, and we will continue in this failure/endeavor in our discussions. Thankfully the Holy Spirit is the giver of real Truth by pointing us to Jesus for the Glory of the Father:

fundamentally, the way we know Christianity to be true is by the self-authenticating witness of God’s Holy Spirit. Now what do I mean by that? I mean that the experience of the Holy Spirit is veridical and unmistakable (though not necessarily irresistible or indubitable) for him who has it; that such a person does not need supplementary arguments or evidence in order to know and to know with confidence that he is in fact experiencing the Spirit of God; that such experience does not function in this case as a premise in any argument from religious experience to God, but rather is the immediate experiencing of God himself; that in certain contexts the experience of the Holy Spirit will imply the apprehension of certain truths of the Christian religion, such as “God exists,” “I am condemned by God,” “I am reconciled to God,” “Christ lives in me,” and so forth; that such an experience Provides one not only with a subjective assurance of Christianity’s truth, but with objective knowledge of that truth; and that arguments and evidence incompatible with that truth are overwhelmed by the experience of the Holy Spirit for him who attends fully to it.

William Lane Craig, Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics, 3rd ed. (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 2008), 43

Other Mike Winger YouTube discussions are…

BTW, there are many debates I have watched on this topic by James White. I highly recommend Dr. White and his ministry, they have had a huge apologetic influence on me over the years.

I also use thinking over the years to note this idea of God’s sovereignty and foreknowledge in my life in a two page testimony I use this graphic in:

Another influential apologetics “coach” in my life was Dr. Norman Geisler. Here is a presentation I uploaded for this post:

CS LEWIS was another huge influence on my apologetic life. I noted in his book, The Problem of Pain, this part from chapter 3 and 4,

“Divine Goodness”

Any consideration of the goodness of God at once threat­ens us with the following dilemma.

On the one hand, if God is wiser than we His judge­ment must differ from ours on many things, and not least on good and evil. What seems to us good may therefore not be good in His eyes, and what seems to us evil may not be evil.

On the other hand, if God’s moral judgement differs from ours so that our ‘black’ may be His ‘white’, we can mean nothing by calling Him good; for to say ‘God is good’, while asserting that His goodness is wholly other than ours, is really only to say ‘God is we know not what’. And an utterly unknown quality in God cannot give us moral grounds for loving or obeying Him. If He is not (in our sense) ‘good’ we shall obey, if at all, only through fear—and should be equally ready to obey an omnipotent Fiend. The doctrine of Total Depravity— when the consequence is drawn that, since we are totally depraved, our idea of good is worth simply nothing— may thus turn Christianity into a form of devil-worship.

The escape from this dilemma depends on observing what happens, in human relations, when the man of infe­rior moral standards enters the society of those who are better and wiser than he and gradually learns to accept their standards—a process which, as it happens, I can describe fairly accurately, since I have undergone it. When I came first to the University I was as nearly with­out a moral conscience as a boy could be. Some faint dis­taste for cruelty and for meanness about money was my utmost reach—of chastity, truthfulness, and self-sacrifice I thought as a baboon thinks of classical music. By the mercy of God I fell among a set of young men (none of them, by the way, Christians) who were sufficiently close to me in intellect and imagination to secure immediate intimacy, but who knew, and tried to obey, the moral law. Thus their judgement of good and evil was very different from mine. Now what happens in such a case is not in the least like being asked to treat as ‘white’ what was hitherto called black. The new moral judgements never enter the mind as mere reversals (though they do reverse them) of previous judgements but ‘as lords that are certainly expected’. You can have no doubt in which direction you are moving: they are more like good than the little shreds of good you already had, but are, in a sense, continuous with them. But the great test is that the recognition of the new standards is accompanied with the sense of shame and guilt: one is conscious of having blundered into soci­ety that one is unfit for. It is in the light of such experi­ences that we must consider the goodness of God. Beyond all doubt, His idea of ‘goodness’ differs from ours; but you need have no fear that, as you approach it, you will be asked simply to reverse your moral standards. When the relevant difference between the Divine ethics and your own appears to you, you will not, in fact, be in any doubt that the change demanded of you is in the direction you already call ‘better’. The Divine ‘goodness’ differs from ours, but it is not sheerly different: it differs from ours not as white from black but as a perfect circle from a child’s first attempt to draw a wheel. But when the child has learned to draw, it will know that the circle it then makes is what it was trying to make from the very beginning.

This doctrine is presupposed in Scripture. Christ calls men to repent—a call which would be meaningless if God’s standards were sheerly different from that which they already knew and failed to practise. He appeals to our existing moral judgement—‘Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right?’ (Luke 12:57) God in the Old Testament expostulates with men on the basis of their own concep­tions of gratitude, fidelity, and fair play: and puts Himself, as it were, at the bar before His own creatures—‘What iniquity have your fathers found in me, that they are gone far from me?’ (Jeremiah 2:5.)


CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 3)

“Human Wickedness”

A recovery of the old sense of sin is essential to Christianity. Christ takes it for granted that men are bad. Until we really feel this assumption of His to be true, though we are part of the world He came to save, we are not part of the audience to whom His words are addressed. We lack the first condition for understanding what He is talking about. And when men attempt to be Christians without this preliminary consciousness of sin, the result is almost bound to be a certain resentment against God as to one always inexplicably angry. Most of us have at times felt a secret sympathy with the dying farmer who replied to the Vicar’s dissertation on repentance by asking ‘What harm have I ever done Him?’ There is the real rub. The worst we have done to God is to leave Him alone—why can’t He return the compliment? Why not live and let live? What call has He, of all beings, to be ‘angry’? It’s easy for Him to be good!

Now at the moment when a man feels real guilt— moments too rare in our lives—all these blasphemies vanish away. Much, we may feel, can be excused to human infirmities: but not this—this incredibly mean and ugly action which none of our friends would have done, which even such a thorough-going little rotter as X would have been ashamed of, which we would not for the world allow to be published. At such a moment we really do know that our character, as revealed in this action, is, and ought to be, hateful to all good men, and, if there are powers above man, to them. A God who did not regard this with unappeasable distaste would not be a good being. We cannot even wish for such a God—it is like wishing that every nose in the universe were abol­ished, that smell of hay or roses or the sea should never again delight any creature, because our own breath hap­pens to stink.

When we merely say that we are bad, the ‘wrath’ of God seems a barbarous doctrine; as soon as we perceive our badness, it appears inevitable, a mere corollary from God’s goodness. To keep ever before us the insight derived from such a moment as I have been describing, to learn to detect the same real inexcusable corruption under more and more of its complex disguises, is therefore indis­pensable to a real understanding of the Christian faith. This is not, of course, a new doctrine. I am attempting nothing very splendid in this chapter. I am merely trying to get my reader (and, still more, myself) over a pons asi-norum—to take the first step out of fools’ paradise and utter illusion. But the illusion has grown, in modern times, so strong, that I must add a few considerations tending to make the reality less incredible.

  1. We are deceived by looking on the outside of things. We suppose ourselves to be roughly not much worse than Y, whom all acknowledge for a decent sort of person, and certainly (though we should not claim it out loud) better than the abominable X. Even on the superficial level we are probably deceived about this. Don’t be too sure that your friends think you as good as Y. The very fact that you selected him for the comparison is suspicious: he is prob­ably head and shoulders above you and your circle. But let us suppose that Y and yourself both appear ‘not bad’. How far Y’s appearance is deceptive, is between Y and God. His may not be deceptive: you know that yours is.

Does this seem to you a mere trick, because I could say the same to Y and so to every man in turn? But that is just the point. Every man, not very holy or very arrogant, has to ‘live up to’ the outward appearance of other men: he knows there is that within him which falls far below even his most careless public behaviour, even his loosest talk. In an instant of time—while your friend hesitates for a word—what things pass through your mind? We have never told the whole truth. We may confess ugly facts— the meanest cowardice or the shabbiest and most prosaic impurity—but the tone is false. The very act of confess-ing—an infinitesimally hypocritical glance—a dash of humour—all this contrives to dissociate the facts from your very self. No one could guess how familiar and, in a sense, congenial to your soul these things were, how much of a piece with all the rest: down there, in the dreaming inner warmth, they struck no such discordant note, were not nearly so odd and detachable from the rest of you, as they seem when they are turned into words. We imply, and often believe, that habitual vices are excep­tional single acts, and make the opposite mistake about our virtues—like the bad tennis player who calls his nor­mal form his ‘bad days’ and mistakes his rare successes for his normal. I do not think it is our fault that we cannot tell the real truth about ourselves; the persistent, life-long, inner murmur of spite, jealousy, prurience, greed and self-complacence, simply will not go into words. But the  important thing is that we should not mistake our inevitably limited utterances for a full account of the worst that is inside.

  1. A reaction—in itself wholesome—is now going on against purely private or domestic conceptions of moral­ity, a reawakening of the social We feel our­selves to be involved in an iniquitous social system and to share a corporate guilt. This is very true: but the enemy can exploit even truths to our deception. Beware lest you are making use of the idea of corporate guilt to distract your attention from those humdrum, old-fashioned guilts of your own which have nothing to do with ‘the system’ and which can be dealt with without waiting for the mil­lennium. For corporate guilt perhaps cannot be, and cer­tainly is not, felt with the same force as personal guilt. For most of us, as we now are, this conception is a mere excuse for evading the real issue. When we have really learned to know our individual corruption, then indeed we can go on to think of the corporate guilt and can hardly think of it too much. But we must learn to walk before we run.
  2. We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker’s, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble. As for the fact of a sin, is it probable that anything cancels it? All times are eternally present to God. Is it not at least possible that along some one line of His multi-dimensional eternity He sees you forever in the nursery pulling the wings off a fly, forever toadying, lying, and lusting as a schoolboy, forever in that moment of cowardice or insolence as a subaltern? It may be that salvation consists not in the cancelling of these eternal moments but in the perfected humanity that bears the shame forever, rejoicing in the occasion which it fur­nished to God’s compassion and glad that it should be common knowledge to the universe. Perhaps in that eter­nal moment St Peter—he will forgive me if I am wrong— forever denies his Master. If so, it would indeed be true that the joys of Heaven are for most of us, in our present condition, ‘an acquired taste’—and certain ways of life may render the taste impossible of acquisition. Perhaps the lost are those who dare not go to such a public Of course I do not know that this is true; but I think the possibility is worth keeping in mind.
  3. We must guard against the feeling that there is ‘safety in numbers’. It is natural to feel that if all men are as bad as the Christians say, then badness must be very excus­able. If all the boys plough in the examination, surely the papers must have been too hard? And so the masters at that school feel till they learn that there are other schools where ninety per cent of the boys passed on the same papers. Then they begin to suspect that the fault did not lie with the examiners. Again, many of us have had the experience of living in some local pocket of human soci-ety—some particular school, college, regiment or profes­sion where the tone was bad. And inside that pocket certain actions were regarded as merely normal (‘Every­one does it’) and certain others as impracticably virtuous and Quixotic. But when we emerged from that bad soci­ety we made the horrible discovery that in the outer world our ‘normal’ was the kind of thing that no decent person ever dreamed of doing, and our ‘Quixotic’ was taken for granted as the minimum standard of decency. What had seemed to us morbid and fantastic scruples so long as we were in the ‘pocket’ now turned out to be the only moments of sanity we there enjoyed. It is wise to face the possibility that the whole human race (being a small thing in the universe) is, in fact, just such a local pocket of evil—an isolated bad school or regiment inside which minimum decency passes for heroic virtue and utter corruption for pardonable imperfection. But is there any evidence—except Christian doctrine itself—that this is so? I am afraid there is. In the first place, there are those odd people among us who do not accept the local stan­dard, who demonstrate the alarming truth that a quite dif­ferent behaviour is, in fact, possible. Worse still, there is the fact that these people, even when separated widely in space and time, have a suspicious knack of agreeing with one another in the main—almost as if they were in touch with some larger public opinion outside the pocket. What is common to Zarathustra, Jeremiah, Socrates, Gautama, Christ1 and Marcus Aurelius, is something pretty sub­stantial. Thirdly, we find in ourselves even now a theoret­ical approval of this behaviour which no one practises. Even inside the pocket we do not say that justice, mercy, fortitude, and temperance are of no value, but only that the local custom is as just, brave, temperate and merciful as can reasonably be expected. It begins to look as if the neglected school rules even inside this bad school were connected with some larger world—and that when the term ends we might find ourselves facing the public opin­ion of that larger world. But the worst of all is this: we cannot help seeing that only the degree of virtue which we now regard as impracticable can possibly save our race from disaster even on this planet. The standard which seems to have come into the ‘pocket’ from outside, turns out to be terribly relevant to conditions inside the pocket—so relevant that a consistent practice of virtue by the human race even for ten years would fill the earth from pole to pole with peace, plenty, health, merriment, and heartsease, and that nothing else will. It may be the custom, down here, to treat the regimental rules as a dead letter or a counsel of perfection: but even now, everyone who stops to think can see that when we meet the enemy this neglect is going to cost every man of us his life. It is then that we shall envy the ‘morbid’ person, the ‘pedant’ or ‘enthusiast’ who really has taught his company to shoot and dig in and spare their water bottles.

[….]

This chapter will have been misunderstood if anyone describes it as a reinstatement of the doctrine of Total Depravity. I disbelieve that doctrine, partly on the logical ground that if our depravity were total we should not know ourselves to be depraved, and partly because experience shows us much goodness in human nature. Nor am I recommending universal gloom. The emotion of shame has been valued not as an emotion but because of the insight to which it leads. I think that insight should be permanent in each man’s mind: but whether the painful emotions that attend it should also be encouraged, is a technical problem of spiritual direction on which, as a layman, I have little call to speak. My own idea, for what it is worth, is that all sadness which is not either arising from the repentance of a concrete sin and hastening towards concrete amendment or restitution, or else arising from pity and hastening to active assistance, is simply bad; and I think we all sin by needlessly disobeying the apostolic injunction to ‘rejoice’ as much as by anything else. Humility, after the first shock, is a cheerful virtue: it is the high-minded unbeliever, desperately trying in the teeth of repeated disillusions to retain his ‘faith in human nature’, who is really sad. I have been aiming at an intellectual, not an emotional, effect: I have been trying to make the reader believe that we actually are, at present, creatures whose character must be, in some respects, a horror to God, as it is, when we really see it, a horror to ourselves. This I believe to be a fact: and I notice that the holier a man is, the more fully he is aware of that fact. Perhaps you have imagined that this humility in the saints is a pious illusion at which God smiles. That is a most dangerous error. It is theoretically dangerous, because it makes you identify a virtue (i.e., a perfection) with an illusion (i.e., an imperfection), which must be nonsense. It is practically dangerous because it encourages a man to mistake his first insights into his own corruption for the first beginnings of a halo round his own silly head. No, depend upon it; when the saints say that they—even they—are vile, they are recording truth with scientific accuracy.


CS Lewis | The Problem of Pain (Chapter 4)

Needless to say I have been privy to this debate since the 80’s.

I like to say I am a Baptist except for dress and drink… but a Baptist nonetheless. I am not a 1689 Confession type Baptist. I have always joked that I am a 3.5 Calvinist when I read Norman Geisler, and a 4.5 Calvinist when I read James White. No more.

This next part comes from a post about preaching the Gospel to ourselves. And in the middle of this post I have the following. And THE REASON I put that there was to note that a majority of Calvinists give lip play to a distinction between “total” and “utter” depravity, but many use language and ideas to the “utter” end of the spectrum.

A TEACHING BREAK

A spiritually dead person, then, is in need of spiritual life from God. But he does exist, and he can know and choose. His faculties that make up the image of God are not absent; they are simply incapable of initiating or attaining their own salvation. Like a drowning person, a fallen person can reach out and accept the lifeline even though he cannot make it to safety on his own.

The below is from Geisler’s book, Chosen but Free:

Sproul has a wonderful ministry, and he [Sproul] has asked ~ rhetorically ~ how: anyone could be involved in believing in the value of human worth and at the same time believing in TOTAL depravity? He responds:

The very fact that Calvinists take sin so seriously is because they take the value of human beings so seriously. It is because man was made in the image of God, called to mirror and reflect God’s holiness, that we have the distinction of being the image-bearers of God.

But what does ‘total depravity’ mean? Total depravity means simply this: that sin affects every aspect of our human existence: our minds, our wills and our bodies are affected by sin. Every dimension of our personality suffers at some point from the weight of sin that has infected the human race.

So the argument is nuanced and deep.

Thus I split the horns and end up tweaking some of the 5-points, and getting rid of others.

Again:

  • Let him, therefore, who would beware of such unbelief, always bear in mind, that there is no random power, or agency, or motion in the creatures, who are so governed by the secret counsel of God, that nothing happens but what he has knowingly and willingly decreed. – John Calvin

I do not take that as Gospel Truth, in other words. The following graph serves as a good comparison between the two: Calvin and Wesley (a slightly different image):

 

Defending “Lutheranism” from Martin Luther’s Fall from Grace

Brought this back to the forefront due to this past “Reformation Sunday

Luther Rose 2

This is a discussion that took place on my Facebook. And I could see where it was headed, but I wanted to see which avenue it went down… there is so many of them. I pick up the conversation where the person is trying to make a counter point to my assertion that Obama went to a very racist church for twenty years.

A religion started by a rabid anti-Semite, seems like it would be an inherently bad religion that people should denounce, right?

I prod, “Go on.”

What’s your opinion? If you believe obama going to a controversial church proves he has the same opinions as the church leader, I am curious what you think of an entire religion founded by someone who believed in killing and jailing all Jews.

[….]

Martin Luther, who wrote The Jews and Their Lies in the 1540’s which wad basically a blueprint for the holocaust. It’s sad that you need context to know whether killing Jews is bad or not…

I reference an earlier challenge to see if this person has read varying views of events in history, here I remind here of that challenge.

Have you read the book “The Fabricated Luther“? Or books about the Aryan cults such as noted in here (like my SCRIBD) or in books like “The Occult Roots of Nazism: Secret Aryan Cults and Their Influence on Nazi Ideology.” Very anti-Luther — were the Aryans and Nazis. I will post an exceprt or two from the Luther book. BTW, this is what I mean about going to sources “at odds with each-other, you then contrasted and found the better narrative based on available historical evidence.”

Huh? Can you succinctly tell me what you think about Lutheranism? Is it poisoned because of Luther?

Here is the quote I was referring to, and allow me to elucidate afterwards:

The cliché labeling Luther an anti-Semite ignores his 1523 treatise That Jesus Christ Was Born a Jew, in which he admonishes his fellow Christians: “If the apostles, who were also Jews, had dealt with us Gen­tiles as we Gentiles deal with the Jews, there would never have been a Christian among the Gentiles. Since they dealt with us Gentiles in such brotherly fashion, we in turn ought to treat the Jews in a brotherly man­ner in order that we might convert some of themWe should remem­ber that we are but Gentiles, while the Jews are in the lineage of Christ?” Elsewhere in this treatise, Luther writes: “If I had been a Jew and had seen such dolts and blockheads govern and teach the Christian faith, I would sooner have become a hog than a Christian.”

It is noteworthy that in the early twentieth century, the Jewish Encyclopedia made a clear distinction between the “two Luthers”—the pro-Jewish younger Luther and the anti-Jewish older Luther. In this remarkable publication, Gotthard Deutsch melancholically observed about Luther in 1906 that the “totally different attitudes which he took at different times with regard to the Jews made him, during the anti-Semitic controversies of the end of the nineteenth century, an authority quoted alike by friends and enemies of the Jews?”

Alas, it is true that in 1543, shortly before his death, Luther pub­lished his venomous book On the Jews and Their Lies, a work that was to cause great embarrassment to future centuries of Lutheran church lead­ers. In this book, he gave the “sincere advice” to burn down the syna­gogues, destroy the Jews’ homes, take away their prayer books, forbid rabbinic teaching, abolish safe-conduct for Jewish travel, prohibit usury, and force Jews into manual labor.

Johannes Wallmann has shown, however, that Luther’s treatises against the Jews, though reprinted in the late-sixteenth and early-sev­enteenth centuries, had limited impact in the general population. As the article in the Jewish Encyclopedia made clear, this and other appalling texts did not resurface until the late nineteenth century. In fact, in a devastating critique of German Protestant attitudes in the Hitler years, Richard Steigmann-Gall writes: “Not only did racialist anti-Semitism find a warmer reception among liberal Protestants than among confessional Lutherans, in many ways, racialist anti-Semitism was born of the theological crisis that liberal Protestantism represented ” Liberal Protestantism is a child of the nineteenth century. According to Steigmann-Gall, it provided the platform for Nazi ideologues to develop such theories as the one that Jesus was an Aryan. In other words, Protestants who were theologically closest to Luther’s teachings were more immune than liberals to one of the ugliest aspects of Nazism—racism. This observation could arguably also be made about deviant and sometimes lethal theologoumena that are currently rife in mainline churches in the United States and elsewhere in the West.

Uwe Siemon-Netto, The Fabricated Luther: Refuting Nazi Connections and Other Modern Myths, 2nd Edition (Saint Loiuse, MS: Concordia Publishing, 2007), 51-52.

Here is the point, Lutheranism was founded well BEFORE his 1543 anti-Semitic writing… when he was VERY Jewish friendly.

SO — Lutheranism was founded on the pro-Jewish Luther. It was leftism in it’s various shades that chose the later Luther.

In Germany (and the U.S.), the eugenic movement was founded by left leaning secular and religious persons. Lutheran churches (read here — especially conservative Lutheran churches — but all) have denounced this racism from “later Luther.”

Has Obama denounced his ties to Farrakhan, his churches teaching that blacks are the true Jews? Have you heard his church of 20-years denounce Farrakhan or the New Black Panther members that sit in its pews? Have you heard Michelle Obama denounce her affiliations to Farrakhan’s wife?

You see, you are setting up a non-sequitur and emboldening my case that racism exists on the Left… much more-so than in conservative politics or conservative religion.

From eugenicists and the real NAZIs (an acronym with socialism in it), to before that and the founding of the KKK and, to our country entering into a Civil War, to the founder of Planned Parenthood. On-and-on:

▼ “virtually every significant racist in American political history was a Democrat.” Bruce Bartlett, Wrong on Race: The Democratic Party’s Buried Past (New York, NY: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008), ix;

▼ “not every Democrat was a KKK’er, but every KKK’er was a Democrat.” Ann Coulter, Mugged: Racial Demagoguery from the Seventies to Obama (New York, NY: Sentinel [Penguin], 2012), 19.

The history of Protestantism and Catholicism saving Jews in WWII is another proud moment to understand (for instance the book by the Jewish Rabbi entitled: “The Myth of Hitler’s Pope: Pope Pius XII And His Secret War Against Nazi Germany”), Einstein did:

“Being a lover of freedom, when the [Nazi] revolution came, I looked to the universities to defend it, knowing that they had always boasted of their devotion to the cause of truth; but no, the universities were immediately silenced. Then I looked to the great editors of the newspapers, whose flaming editorials in days gone had proclaimed their love of freedom; but they, like the universities, were silenced in a few short weeks… Only the Church stood squarely across the path of Hitler’s campaign for suppressing the truth. I never had any special interest in the Church before, but now I feel a great affection and admiration for it because the Church alone has had the courage and persistence to stand for intellectual and moral freedom. I am forced to confess that what I once despised I now praise unreservedly.”

Albert Einstein Time Magazine, December 23, 1940 (page 38); Mackay, J. A. 1939. “The Titanic Twofold Challenge,” New York Times Magazine, May 7, p. 3.

Here are two additional resources to consider, the first is via Ray Comfort:

As we wonder how Hitler could have claimed to be a Christian, and how the church in Germany could have been duped by his policies, it makes no sense until we understand something extremely important.

In pre-Second World War Germany, there were 40 million Lutherans. It is significant to realize that to be part of the Lutheran church in those days one need not be converted to Christ. As with the Roman Catholic church, children were simply baptized into the church as infants because they had to be a member to be married or buried. That was just the way it was. If for some reason an individual wanted to separate himself from the church, his name would be read from the pulpit for three Sundays and intercession was then made for him in public prayer. Consequently few took the radical step of leaving the church.

For years the denomination had been influenced by a theological liberalism that was really only secular philosophy disguised by religious language. So rather than being a vibrant Christ-centered lighthouse of biblical truth, the Lutheran church of that time (as with many contemporary denominations) was simply a huge traditional institution. The problem with the German people was that they couldn’t recognize true Christianity from hollow religious jargon.

And this from Richard Weikart:

German Protestantism had largely adopted theological liberalism, especially in the university theology faculties. Theological liberalism tended to dismiss many parts of the Bible as historically unreliable and rejected the miraculous. It opposed the idea of the inherent sinfulness of humanity and stressed the immanence rather than the transcendence of God. It also embraced Friedrich Schleiermacher’s stress on individual religious experience or feeling, thus making religion impervious to scientific or historical criticism even while admitting such criticism’s validity in the empirical realm.

Though theological liberalism dominated the German theological scene by the early twentieth century, some Protestants remained theologically conservative. Further, immediately after World War I, the Protestant theologian Karl Barth helped initiate a new movement—sometimes called neo-orthodoxy—which challenged liberal theology by emphasizing the authority of all of God’s Word and stressing the sinfulness of humanity and the transcendence of God. Barth and neo-orthodox theologians did not reject biblical criticism, but they interpreted scripture in an existential sense, rather than as empirical historical claims.

Though the majority of Germans still identified as Christians, competing religious and secular philosophies had undermined the loyalty of a minority. During the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, some German intellectuals dispensed with the notion of a miracle-working God or a divine Jesus. Instead, they embraced deism, a rationalistic concept of a God who created the world to operate according to fixed scientific laws and then left it to run on its own accord. Many deists remained in the churches, especially in the Protestant Church, pushing it in a more liberal direction.

In the Romantic backlash against Enlightenment rationalism in the last decade of the eighteenth and opening decades of the nineteenth century, religion became more intellectually respectable. However, many Romantics were not entranced with traditional Christianity; they found pantheism more congenial to their mystical love of nature. Pantheism, the worship of nature or the cosmos as God, exerted a powerful influence on German intellectual life throughout the nineteenth century. In 1835, the poet Heinrich Heine asserted, “Nobody says it, but everyone knows it: pantheism is an open secret in Germany. We have in fact outgrown deism. We are free and want no thundering tyrant.” Sometimes known as monism, pantheism diverged into two main branches in the nineteenth century: a mystical or idealistic form and a scientific or naturalistic version. German idealism prevailed in German philosophy in the early nineteenth century, so idealistic pantheism was more pronounced then. Later in the nineteenth century, science and materialism became more significant forces in German intellectual life, giving impetus to naturalistic varieties of pantheism. After World War I, pantheism experienced resurgence among German intellectuals, so it was still intellectually viable during Hitler’s political career.

In addition to pantheism, a position known as panentheism also emerged during the Romantic era. Panentheism is close to pantheism, but not quite the same, since it teaches that nature is a part of God, but God also transcends nature to some extent. In this view, nature is divine, but it is not all of God. In pantheism, God and nature are completely identical. ….

More Weikart

I am very aware of his “evolving” thoughts on Jews but the effects of his venomous thoughts, no matter how late in life they came, on the real life of Jews around the world cannot be ignored. You should consider be so kind to everyone.

Okay, no one is denying this? But Lutheranism was not founded on Anti-Semitism. Obama’s church was. It would be analogous to me going to a liberal, NAZI, Lutheran church in Germany for 20-years.

While a couple other things were said, the above is a good way to defend Church history, while still admitting Luther’s later fall from grace. (Mind you with a little RPT religio-political “swerve” thrown in.) Here is a good short video by egwpisteuw, here is his video description:

An analysis of the error in Bible interpretation made by Martin Luther which caused him to become antisemitic and to write the treatise entitled “Von den Juden und ihren Lügen” “Of the Jews and Their Lies.”

Here is a longer video lecture by a pastor:

  • Luther and the Jews. In the 1520’s, Martin Luther strongly opposed the Church’s stand toward the Jewish people. He wanted to help them come to Christ, and believed this would be accomplished by extending Christian brotherly love and charity to them. However, by the 1540s, (Towards the end of his life), Martin Luther wrote some very anti-Semitic material. This document was not widely publicized (only going through a few printings) and was practically forgotten for hundreds of years, until it was discovered and turned into propaganda by the Nazis.

Some of the Economists Pictured On My Van

MEDIA and W.W. ADDED

Often I am asked who the pictured persons are on the back of my van. So I figured I would explain a few of them in bio form and what books by them are classics.

All books and pictures will be linked.

Milton Friedman

(More at Econ Library) Milton Friedman was the twentieth century’s most prominent advocate of free markets. Born in 1912 to Jewish immigrants in New York City, he attended Rutgers University, where he earned his B.A. at the age of twenty. He went on to earn his M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1933 and his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1946. In 1951 Friedman received the John Bates Clark Medal honoring economists under age forty for outstanding achievement. In 1976 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in economics for “his achievements in the field of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory, and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy.” Before that time he had served as an adviser to President Richard Nixon and was president of the American Economic Association in 1967. After retiring from the University of Chicago in 1977, Friedman became a senior research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.

Friedman established himself in 1945 with Income from Independent Professional Practice, coauthored with Simon Kuznets. In it he argued that state licensing procedures limited entry into the medical profession, thereby allowing doctors to charge higher fees than they would be able to do if competition were more open.

His landmark 1957 work, A Theory of the Consumption Function, took on the Keynesian view that individuals and households adjust their expenditures on consumption to reflect their current income. Friedman showed that, instead, people’s annual consumption is a function of their “permanent income,” a term he introduced as a measure of the average income people expect over a few years.

In Capitalism and Freedom, Friedman wrote arguably the most important economics book of the 1960s, making a case for relatively free markets to a general audience. He argued for, among other things, a volunteer army, freely floating exchange rates, abolition of licensing of doctors, a negative income tax, and education vouchers. (Friedman was a passionate foe of the military draft: he once stated that the abolition of the draft was almost the only issue on which he had personally lobbied Congress.) Many of the young people who read it were encouraged to study economics themselves. His ideas spread worldwide with Free to Choose (coauthored with his wife, Rose Friedman), the best-selling nonfiction book of 1980, written to accompany a TV series on the Public Broadcasting System. This book made Milton Friedman a household name.

F.A. Hayek

(More at Econ Library) If any twentieth-century economist was a Renaissance man, it was Friedrich Hayek. He made fundamental contributions in political theory, psychology, and economics. In a field in which the relevance of ideas often is eclipsed by expansions on an initial theory, many of his contributions are so remarkable that people still read them more than fifty years after they were written. Many graduate economics students today, for example, study his articles from the 1930s and 1940s on economics and knowledge, deriving insights that some of their elders in the economics profession still do not totally understand. It would not be surprising if a substantial minority of economists still read and learn from his articles in the year 2050. In his book Commanding Heights, Daniel Yergin called Hayek the “preeminent” economist of the last half of the twentieth century.

Hayek was the best-known advocate of what is now called Austrian economics. He was, in fact, the only major recent member of the Austrian school who was actually born and raised in Austria. After World War I, Hayek earned his doctorates in law and political science at the University of Vienna. Afterward he, together with other young economists Gottfried Haberler, Fritz Machlup, and Oskar Morgenstern, joined Ludwig von Mises’s private seminar—the Austrian equivalent of John Maynard Keynes’s “Cambridge Circus.” In 1927 Hayek became the director of the newly formed Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. In the early 1930s, at the invitation of Lionel Robbins, he moved to the faculty of the London School of Economics, where he stayed for eighteen years. He became a British citizen in 1938.

Most of Hayek’s work from the 1920s through the 1930s was in the Austrian theory of business cycles, capital theory, and monetary theory. Hayek saw a connection among all three. The major problem for any economy, he argued, is how people’s actions are coordinated. He noticed, as Adam Smith had, that the price system—free markets—did a remarkable job of coordinating people’s actions, even though that coordination was not part of anyone’s intent. The market, said Hayek, was a spontaneous order. By spontaneous Hayek meant unplanned—the market was not designed by anyone but evolved slowly as the result of human actions. But the market does not work perfectly. What causes the market, asked Hayek, to fail to coordinate people’s plans, so that at times large numbers of people are unemployed?

One cause, he said, was increases in the money supply by the central bank. Such increases, he argued in Prices and Production, would drive down interest rates, making credit artificially cheap. Businessmen would then make capital investments that they would not have made had they understood that they were getting a distorted price signal from the credit market. But capital investments are not homogeneous. Long-term investments are more sensitive to interest rates than short-term ones, just as long-term bonds are more interest-sensitive than treasury bills. Therefore, he concluded, artificially low interest rates not only cause investment to be artificially high, but also cause “malinvestment”—too much investment in long-term projects relative to short-term ones, and the boom turns into a bust. Hayek saw the bust as a healthy and necessary readjustment. The way to avoid the busts, he argued, is to avoid the booms that cause them.

Hayek and Keynes were building their models of the world at the same time. They were familiar with each other’s views and battled over their differences. Most economists believe that Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936) won the war. Hayek, until his dying day, never believed that, and neither do other members of the Austrian school. Hayek believed that Keynesian policies to combat unemployment would inevitably cause inflation, and that to keep unemployment low, the central bank would have to increase the money supply faster and faster, causing inflation to get higher and higher. Hayek’s thought, which he expressed as early as 1958, is now accepted by mainstream economists (see phillips curve).

In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Hayek turned to the debate about whether socialist planning could work. He argued that it could not. The reason socialist economists thought central planning could work, argued Hayek, was that they thought planners could take the given economic data and allocate resources accordingly. But Hayek pointed out that the data are not “given.” The data do not exist, and cannot exist, in any one mind or small number of minds. Rather, each individual has knowledge about particular resources and potential opportunities for using these resources that a central planner can never have. The virtue of the free market, argued Hayek, is that it gives the maximum latitude for people to use information that only they have. In short, the market process generates the data. Without markets, data are almost nonexistent.

Mainstream economists and even many socialist economists (see socialism) now accept Hayek’s argument. Columbia University economist Jeffrey Sachs noted: “If you ask an economist where’s a good place to invest, which industries are going to grow, where the specialization is going to occur, the track record is pretty miserable. Economists don’t collect the on-the-ground information businessmen do. Every time Poland asks, Well, what are we going to be able to produce? I say I don’t know.”

In 1944 Hayek also attacked socialism from a very different angle. From his vantage point in Austria, Hayek had observed Germany very closely in the 1920s and early 1930s. After he moved to Britain, he noticed that many British socialists were advocating some of the same policies for government control of people’s lives that he had seen advocated in Germany in the 1920s. He had also seen that the Nazis really were National Socialists; that is, they were nationalists and socialists. So Hayek wrote The Road to Serfdom to warn his fellow British citizens of the dangers of socialism. His basic argument was that government control of our economic lives amounts to totalitarianism. “Economic control is not merely control of a sector of human life which can be separated from the rest,” he wrote, “it is the control of the means for all our ends.”

To the surprise of some, John Maynard Keynes praised the book highly. On the book’s cover, Keynes is quoted as saying: “In my opinion it is a grand book…. Morally and philosophically I find myself in agreement with virtually the whole of it; and not only in agreement with it, but in deeply moved agreement.”

Although Hayek had intended The Road to Serfdom only for a British audience, it also sold well in the United States. Indeed, Reader’s Digest condensed it. With that book Hayek established himself as the world’s leading classical liberal; today he would be called a libertarian or market liberal. A few years later, along with Milton FriedmanGeorge Stigler, and others, he formed the Mont Pelerin Society so that classical liberals could meet every two years and give each other moral support in what appeared to be a losing cause. …

Thomas Sowell

(More at Famous Economists) Thomas Sowell is a renowned economist, theorist and writer hailing from the United States of America. He is known for his old-fashioned assessments of economic theory, often drawing criticism from his liberal counterparts, but still attracting appreciation from fellow conservatives for encouraging hard work and self-sufficiency.

Sowell is an African American born in North Carolina on 30 June, 1930. He spent a lot of his early childhood migrating between cities due to family issues which required him to drop out of his high school. His family’s financial predicament forced him to work different jobs at a very young age; his endeavors saw him work at a machine shop and as a delivery boy for Western Union. He was soon inducted in to the Marine Corps as an aspiring photographer, where he also learned how to operate pistols. He managed this job whilst simultaneously continuing his education, attending night classes at his high school.

After enrolling in Howard University, Sowell soon obtained a transfer to Harvard University on the back of impressive results in College Board examinations and positive recommendations from professors. Sowell graduated with a degree in economics in 1958, and then moved to Columbia University for his Masters program, after which he completed is Ph.D. studies from the University of Chicago in 1968.

TRANSCRIPT 

Dave Rubin: You were a Marxist at one time in your life. Most people will find this hard to believe, but, It is true.

Thomas Sowell: But it’s not that unusual. Ahhh, most of the leading conservative thinkers around time did not start off as conservatives. You had a couple like Bill Buckley and George Will [that did start off conservative]. But, Milton Friedman was a liberal and a Keynesian. Hayek was a socialist. Ronald Reagan was so far left at one point the FBI was following him.

Dave Rubin: So then, what was your wake up to what was wrong with that line of thinking?

Thomas Sowell: Facts

PICTURED: Thomas Sowell’s book on Marxist Economics, David Horowitz, Whittaker Chambers, Frank Meyer, William F. Buckley Jr., George Will, Milton Friedman, F.A. Hayek, Ronald Reagan

Thomas Sowell occupied a number of teaching positions at various universities after completing his education. After teaching at Rutgers and Howard universities in the early 60’s, he held the title of assistant professor of economics at Cornell and the University of California, Los Angeles where he was given full professor status in 1974. Sowell has also been part of the faculty at Brandeis University and Amherst College. In 1980, he moved to Stanford University which granted him the title of Senior Fellow at its Hoover Institution. He has held this position there ever since.

Sowell initially subscribed to the Marxist school of thought in economics theory, an approach he renounced after his experience working as an intern for the U.S. Department of Labor in 1960, instead opting for free market principles. His research in his time there also made him critical of minimum wage laws, which he felt not only perpetuated unemployment, but were introduced by bureaucrats only to secure their status in the government. He orchestrated the Black Alternatives Conference in San Francisco during the Reegan regime to oppose minimum wages and call for more black representation in the government. In 1969 however, Sowell defended Cornell University against allegations of racism after observing the rebellion by black students.

Sowell also boasts remarkable credentials in the field or journalism and writing, expressing opinion on a multitude of topics such as state policies on social and racial groups, Marxist economic theory and education. He has published a number of works since 1971, with some of his best-selling books being ‘Basic Economics: A Common Sense Guide to the Economy‘, ‘Black Rednecks and White Liberals‘, and ‘Intellectuals and Society‘. Besides publishing books Sowell has written for prominent magazines and academic journals. These include the New York Times, Forbes and the Spectator. He also managed a column for the Scripps-Howard news service in the years 1984-1990.

During is elaborate career, Thomas Sowell was no stranger to controversy. His claims that inequality which persists across ethnic groups bears no connection with discrimination, but is to do with the characteristics and attitudes intrinsic to these groups was not received well by some sects. His resistance towards government assistance of economically and socially challenged groups, which he believes discourages self-sufficiency and dependence, has also been criticized. But he still remains one of the great African American thinkers of his generation given his contributions not only towards the economics, but political philosophy and social theory as well. …

Ludwig von Mises

Ludwig von Mises was one of the last members of the original austrian school of economics. He earned his doctorate in law and economics from the University of Vienna in 1906. One of his best works, The Theory of Money and Credit, was published in 1912 and was used as a money and banking textbook for the next two decades. In it Mises extended Austrian marginal utility theory to money, which, noted Mises, is demanded for its usefulness in purchasing other goods rather than for its own sake.

In that same book Mises also argued that business cycles are caused by the uncontrolled expansion of bank credit. In 1926 Mises founded the Austrian Institute for Business Cycle Research. His most influential student, Friedrich Hayek, later developed Mises’s business cycle theories.

Another of Mises’s notable contributions is his claim that socialism must fail economically. In a 1920 article, Mises argued that a socialist government could not make the economic calculations required to organize a complex economy efficiently. Although socialist economists Oskar Lange and Abba Lerner disagreed with him, modern economists agree that Mises’s argument, combined with Hayek’s elaboration of it, is correct (see socialism).

Mises believed that economic truths are derived from self-evident axioms and cannot be empirically tested. He laid out his view in his magnum opus, Human Action, and in other publications, although he failed to persuade many economists outside the Austrian school. Mises was also a strong proponent of laissez-faire; he advocated that the government not intervene anywhere in the economy. Interestingly, though, even Mises made some striking exceptions to this view. For example, he believed that military conscription could be justified in wartime.

From 1913 to 1934 Mises was an unpaid professor at the University of Vienna while working as an economist for the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, in which capacity he served as the principal economic adviser to the Austrian government. To avoid the Nazi influence in his Austrian homeland, in 1934 Mises left for Geneva, where he was a professor at the Graduate Institute of International Studies until he emigrated to New York City in 1940. He was a visiting professor at New York University from 1945 until he retired in 1969.

Mises’s ideas—on economic reasoning and on economic policy—were out of fashion during the Keynesian revolution that took over American economic thinking from the mid-1930s to the 1960s. Mises’s upset at the Keynesian revolution and at Hitler’s earlier destruction of his homeland made Mises bitter from the late 1940s on. The contrast between his early view of himself as a mainstream member of his profession and his later view of himself as an outcast shows up starkly in The Theory of Money and Credit. The first section, written in 1912, is calmly argued; the last section, added in the 1940s, is strident. ….

Frederic Bastiat

Joseph Schumpeter described Bastiat nearly a century after his death as “the most brilliant economic journalist who ever lived.” Orphaned at the age of nine, Bastiat tried his hand at commerce, farming, and insurance sales. In 1825, after he inherited his grandfather’s estate, he quit working, established a discussion group, and read widely in economics.

Bastiat made no original contribution to economics, if we use “contribution” the way most economists use it. That is, we cannot associate one law, theorem, or pathbreaking empirical study with his name. But in a broader sense Bastiat made a big contribution: his fresh and witty expressions of economic truths made them so understandable and compelling that the truths became hard to ignore.

Bastiat was supremely effective at popularizing free-market economics. When he learned of Richard Cobden’s campaign against the British Corn Laws (restrictions on the import of wheat, barley, rye, and oats), Bastiat vowed to become the “French Cobden.” He subsequently published a series of articles attacking protectionism that brought him instant acclaim. In 1846 he established the Association of Free Trade in Paris and his own weekly newspaper, in which he waged a witty assault against socialists and protectionists.

Bastiat’s “A Petition,” usually referred to now as “The Petition of the Candlemakers,” displays his rhetorical skill and rakish tone, as this excerpt illustrates:

We are suffering from the ruinous competition of a foreign rival who apparently works under conditions so far superior to our own for the production of light, that he is flooding the domestic market with it at an incredibly low price…. This rival is none other than the sun….

We ask you to be so good as to pass a law requiring the closing of all windows, dormers, skylights, inside and outside shutters, curtains, casements, bull’s-eyes, deadlights and blinds; in short, all openings, holes, chinks, and fissures.

This reductio ad absurdum of protectionism was so effective that one of the most successful postwar economics textbooks, Economics by Paul A. Samuelson, quotes the candlemakers’ petition at the head of the chapter on protectionism.

Bastiat also emphasized the unintended consequences of government policy (he called them the “unseen” consequences). Friedrich Hayek credits Bastiat with this important insight: if we judge economic policy solely by its immediate effects, we will miss all of its unintended and longer-run effects and will undermine economic freedom, which delivers benefits that are not part of anyone’s conscious design. Much of Hayek’s work, and some of Milton Friedman’s, was an exploration and elaboration of this insight.

(Via Econ Lib)

Henry Hazlitt

Henry Hazlitt, a journalist, writer, and economist, was born in Philadelphia. His father died soon after his birth, and he attended a school for poor, fatherless boys. His mother remarried, and the family moved to Brooklyn, New York. When he graduated from high school, Hazlitt’s ambition was to go to Harvard and write books on philosophy. But his stepfather died, and he started attending the no-​tuition College of the City of New York. However, he soon left school to support himself and his mother. In those years, it was not hard for a young man to get a job. With no government- imposed obstacles to hiring or firing, no minimum wage laws, no workday or workweek restrictions, and no unemployment or social security taxes, employer and potential employee needed only to agree on the terms of employment. If things did not work out, the employee could quit or be fired. Hazlitt’s first jobs lasted only a few days each.

When Hazlitt realized that with shorthand and typing skills he could earn two or three times the $5 per week he was being paid as an unskilled office boy, he studied stenography. Determined to become a writer, he looked for a newspaper job and soon took a job with the Wall Street Journal, then a small limited-​circulation publication. Its executives dictated editorials to him, and reporters phoned in their stories. At first he knew nothing about Wall Street. On one assignment, Hazlitt was informed that a company had passed its dividend. Hazlitt thought this meant the company had approved it. But in stock market terminology, passing a dividend meant skipping it. Fortunately, in reporting the story, Hazlitt used the company’s original verb. He was learning about the market.

Having missed out on college, Hazlitt determined to study on his own. He started reading college economics texts, but was not misled by their anticapitalist flavor. Experience had taught him that businessmen did not always earn profits; they sometimes suffered losses. Hazlitt’s uncle had been forced to close his Coney Island enterprise when it rained heavily over a Fourth of July holiday and customers stayed away in droves. Hazlitt’s stepfather lost his business making children’s hats when this custom went out of fashion.

Hazlitt’s real economic education began with his study of Philip H. Wicksteed’s The Common Sense of Political Economy, which introduced him to the subjective theory of value, only recently developed by Austrian economists Carl Menger and Eugen von Böhm-​Bawerk. Hazlitt continued his self-​study program and persisted in his ambition to write. His first book, Thinking as a Science, appeared in 1916 before his 22nd birthday.

In 1916, Hazlitt left the Wall Street Journal for the New York Evening Post. He was forced to leave during World War I, serving in the Army Air Corps in Texas. However, when the war ended, the Post wired Hazlitt that he could have his job back if he was in the office in 5 days. He entrained immediately, went directly to the newspaper, and worked that day in uniform.

From the Post, Hazlitt went on to become either financial or literary editor of various New York papers. From 1934 to 1946, Hazlitt was an editorial writer for The New York Times. Hazlitt and the Times parted company over the Bretton Woods Agreement, against which Hazlitt had been editorializing. The Times supported the agreement, which had been endorsed by 43 nations, but Hazlitt claimed it would only lead to monetary expansion and refused to support it. Hazlitt secured a position with Newsweek and left the Times. From 1946 to 1966, he wrote Newsweek’s Business Tides column.

An analysis of Hazlitt’s libertarian sympathies must mention his association with Ludwig von Mises, the leading exponent of the Austrian School of Economics. Hazlitt first heard of Mises through Benjamin M. Anderson’s The Value of Money, published in 1917. Anderson criticized many writers on monetary theory, but said he found in Mises’s works “very noteworthy clarity and power. His Theorie des Geldes und der Umlaufsmittel [later translated into English as The Theory of Money and Credit] is an exceptionally excellent book.” Although Mises had been widely respected in Europe, he was little known in this country when he arrived as a wartime refugee in 1940. When Mises’s Socialism appeared in English in 1937, Hazlitt remembered Anderson’s remark about Mises and reviewed Socialism in the Times, describing it as “the most devastating analysis of socialism yet penned … an economic classic in our time.” He sent his review to Mises in Switzerland and, 2 years later, when Mises came to this country, he phoned Hazlitt. Hazlitt recalled Mises’s call as if coming from an economic ghost of centuries past. Hazlitt and Mises soon met and became close friends. Hazlitt’s contacts helped establish Mises on this side of the Atlantic, enabling him to continue his free-​market teaching, writing and lecturing. Hazlitt was instrumental in persuading Yale University to publish Mises’s Omnipotent Government and Bureaucracy in 1944 and then his major opus, Human Action, in 1949As a founding trustee of the FEE, Hazlitt also was responsible for Mises’s appointment as economic advisor to that Foundation.

In 1946, Hazlitt wrote and published his most popular book, Economics in One Lesson. It became a best-​seller, was translated into 10 languages, and still sells thousands of copies each year. Its theme—that economists should consider not only the seen but also the unseen consequences of any government action or policy—was adopted from 19th-​century free-​market economist Frédéric Bastiat. Thanks to Economics in One Lesson’s short chapters and clear, lucid style, countless readers were able to grasp its thesis that government intervention fails to attain its hoped-​for objectives.

While still at Newsweek, Hazlitt edited the libertarian biweekly, The Freeman—as coeditor from 1950 to 1952 and as editor-​in-​chief from 1952 to 1953. When the left-​liberal Washington Post bought Newsweek, Hazlitt became a columnist from 1966 to 1969 for the international Los Angeles Times syndicate. ….

Walter Williams

Walter E. Williams, prominent economist, commentator, and professor at George Mason University, died on Tuesday, December 1. He was 84.

Williams was a national fellow at the Hoover Institution in the academic year 1975-1976. He also served on the Board of Overseers from 1983 to 2004 and was a member of its executive committee from 1994 to 2004.

The highly esteemed Williams was born in 1936 to humble origins in Philadelphia. A onetime taxi driver, he went on to earn a BA in economics from California State University (Cal State)– Los Angeles, and an MA and PhD in economics from University of California, Los Angeles.

He has served on the economic faculties of Los Angeles City College, Cal State Los Angeles, Temple University, and Grove City (Pennsylvania) College. Since 1980, he has been the John M. Olin Distinguished Professor at George Mason University (GMU), Fairfax, Virginia, where he was also the chair of the economics department from 1995 to 2001.

“The economics profession boasts many excellent, but it has precious few with the ability and interest to do rigorous research and to engage the public with its results,” said Donald J. Boudreaux, Williams’s GMU colleague, in Wall Street Journal tribute.

A prolific writer of widely read syndicated columns, academic papers, and best-selling books, Williams authored the seminal 1982 book The State against Blacks, about how the regulatory state negatively impacts African Americans. He was also known for his concise arguments about how minimum-wage laws can result in employment discrimination.

“What minimum-wage laws do is lower the cost of, and hence subsidize, racial preference indulgence. After all, if an employer must pay the same wage no matter whom he hires, the cost of discriminating in favor of the people he prefers is cheaper,” Williams held.

Williams has also made countless appearances on radio and television shows including Firing LineFree to ChooseFace the Nation, and Crossfire. In 2014, he produced Suffer No Fools a PBS documentary criticizing antipoverty programs and based on his autobiography, Up from the Projectspublished in 2010 by Hoover Institution PressAmong his other thirteen books are More Liberty Means Less Governmentalso published by Hoover Institution Press in 1999. The collection of thoughtful, hard-hitting essays explores issues including minimum wage, the Americans with Disabilities Act, affirmative action, and racial and gender quotas.

Williams was also a perennial substitute host of The Rush Limbaugh Show, on which he would frequently invite Milton and Rose Friedman Senior Fellow Thomas Sowell for conversations on economics, politics, and a wide range of contemporary social issues.

“He was my best friend for half a century. There was no one I trusted more or whose integrity I respected more,” Sowell said.

(via Hoover Institute)

I Hope This Helps!

The conservative base of the Republican Party are filled with people like me and all the peeps I know. We are well read, present answers to questions with facts. Correct peoples opinions with a more reality based view. Etc. The books above [and more] helped form my opinions on economics and government, and assisted in a total worldview. A coherent worldview must be able to satisfactorily answer four questions: that of origin, meaning, morality, and destiny. All those are based in the Christian worldview and have a more coherent view within the Biblical, Judeo-Christian worldview. Meaning and direction in life are salted with the laws of economics and self governance. And church history plays a role in all this. Just one example:

A WILDERNESS OF CASUISTRY

In 1957, the great Reformation historian Johannes Heckel called Luther’s two-kingdoms theory a veritable Irrgarten, literally “garden of errors,” where the wheats and tares of interpretation had grown indiscriminately together. Some half a century of scholarship later, Heckel’s little garden of errors has become a whole wilderness of confusion, with many thorny thickets of casuistry to ensnare the unsuspecting. It is tempting to find another way into Lutheran contributions to legal theory. But Luther’s two-kingdoms theory was the framework on which both he and many of his followers built their enduring views of law and authority, justice and equity, society and politics. We must wander in this wilderness at least long enough to get our legal bearings.

Luther was a master of the dialectic — of holding two doctrinal op­posites in tension and of exploring ingeniously the intellectual power of this tension. Many of his favorite dialectics were set out in the Bible and well rehearsed in the Christian tradition: spirit and flesh, soul and body, faith and works, heaven and hell, grace and nature, the kingdom of God versus the kingdom of Satan, the things that are God’s and the things that are Caesar’s, and more. Some of the dialectics were more uniquely Lutheran in accent: Law and Gospel, sinner and saint, servant and lord, inner man and outer man, passive justice and active justice, alien righteousness and proper righteousness, civil uses and theological uses of the law, among others.

Luther developed a good number of these dialectical doctrines sepa­rately in his writings from 1515 to 1545 — at different paces, in varying levels of detail, and with uneven attention to how one doctrine fit with others. He and his followers eventually jostled together several doctrines under the broad umbrella of the two-kingdoms theory. This theory came to describe at once: (I) the distinctions between the fallen realm and the redeemed realm, the City of Man and the City of God, the Reign of the Devil and the Reign of Christ; (2) the distinctions between the sinner and the saint, the flesh and the spirit, the inner man and the outer man; (3) the distinctions between the visible Church and the invisible Church, the Church as governed by civil law and the Church as governed by the Holy Spirit; (4) the distinctions between reason and faith, natural knowledge and spiritual knowledge; and (5) the distinctions between two kinds of righteousness, two kinds of justice, two uses of law.

When Luther, and especially his followers, used the two-kingdoms terminology, they often had one or two of these distinctions primarily in mind, sometimes without clearly specifying which. Rarely did all of these distinctions come in for a fully differentiated and systematic discussion and application, especially when the jurists later invoked the two-kingdoms theory as part of their jurisprudential reflections. The matter was complicated even further because both Anabaptists and Calvinists of the day eventually adopted and adapted the language of the two kingdoms as well — each with their own confessional accents and legal applications that were sometimes in sharp tension with Luther’s and other Evangelical views. It is thus worth spelling out Luther’s understanding of the two kingdoms in some detail, and then drawing out its implications for law, society, and politics.

John Witte, Jr., Law and Protestantism: The Legal Teachings of the Lutheran Reformation (Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 94-95.


iPencil


Starring comedian Andrew Heaton, EconPop takes a surprisingly deep look at the economic themes running through classic films, new releases, TV shows and more from the best of pop culture and entertainment. Heaton brings a unique mix of dry wit and whimsy to bear on the dismal science of economics and the result is always entertaining, educational and irreverent. It’s Econ 101 meets At The Movies, with a dash of Monty Python.

I, Pencil

I, Pencil – FINAL CUT from Nicholas Tucker on Vimeo.

The “Original ‘I-Pencil'”

The Bible’s Influence on Music

Martin Luther believed that music was second only to Scripture in its ability to elevate the soul. In this brief clip, R.C. Sproul, W. Robert Godfrey, Steven Lawson, and Stephen Nichols discuss some of Luther’s most famous and heartfelt hymns.

The below is from Vishal Mangalwadi’s book, The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, chapter one:


Chapter One

The West Without Its Soul
From Bach To Cobain

For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the
branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than
anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came.
But unfortunately there had been a little mistake: The thing at the
bottom was not a bed of roses after all; it was a cesspool full of barbed
wire . . . It appears that amputation of the soul isn’t just a simple
surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency
to go septic.

—George Orwell, Notes on the Way, 1940


On April 8, 1994, an electrician accidentally discovered a dead body in Seattle, Washington. A shotgun had blown the victim’s head into unrecognizable bits. The police investigation concluded that the victim of this ghastly tragedy was the rock legend Kurt Cobain (b. 1967) and that he had committed suicide a few days earlier. Cobain’s previous attempts at suicide by drug overdose had been unsuccessful. His beautiful wife, singer Courtney Love, is said to have called the police multiple times to have them confiscate his guns before he killed himself or harmed others.

Cobain, the lead singer and gifted guitarist for the rock band Nirvana, captured his generation’s loss of anchor, center, or soul so effectively that their album Nevermind sold ten million copies, displacing Michael Jackson at the top of the charts.

The phrase “never mind” means “don’t bother,” “don’t concern yourself.” Why should you mind, if nothing is true, good, or beautiful in any absolute sense? Should a man be bothered about his adorable daughter’s ongoing need for a father? “Never mind” is a logical virtue for a nihilist who thinks that there is nothing out there to give meaning and significance to anything here —be it your daughter, wife, or life. In contrast, the modern West was built by people who dedicated their lives to what they believed was divine, true, and noble.

Nirvana is the Buddhist term for salvation. It means permanent extinction of one’s individual existence, the dissolution of our illusory individuality into Shoonyta (void, nothingness, or emptiness). It is freedom from our misery-causing illusion that we have a permanent core to our being: a self, soul, spirit, or Atman.

Here is a sample lyric expressing Cobain’s view of salvation as silence, death, and extinction:

Silence, Here I am, Here I am, Silent.

Death Is what I am, Go to hell, Go to jail . . .

Die[1]

As the news of Cobain’s suicide spread, a number of his fans emulated his example. Rolling Stone magazine reported that his tragic death was followed by at least sixty-eight copycat suicides.[2]

“Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has got to go!” The Stanford students of the 1960s who chanted for the demise of the Western civilization were disgusted with hypocrisy and injustices in the West. Yet, their rejection of the soul of their civilization yielded something very different from the utopia they sought. Diana Grains, in Rolling Stone, noted that prior to the 1960s, teenage suicide was virtually nonexistent among American youth. By 1980 almost four hundred thousand adolescents were attempting suicide every year. By 1987 suicide had become the second largest killer of teens, after automotive accidents. By the 1990s, suicide had slipped down to number three because young people were killing each other as often as they killed themselves. Grains explained these rising figures among the offspring of the ’60s generation:

The 1980s offered young people an experience of unsurpassed social violence and humiliation. Traumatized by absent or abusive parents, educators, police and shrinks, stuck in meaningless jobs without a livable wage, disoriented by disintegrating institutions, many kids felt trapped in a cycle of futility and despair. Adults . . . [messed]-up across the board, abandoning an entire generation by failing to provide for or protect them or prepare them for independent living. Yet when young people began to exhibit symptoms of neglect, reflected in their rates of suicide, homicide, substance abuse, school failure, recklessness and general misery, adults condemned them as apathetic, illiterate, amoral losers.[3]

According to his biographers, Cobain’s early years had been happy, full of affection and hope. But by the time he was nine years old Cobain was caught in the crossfire between his divorcing parents. Like far too many marriages in America, his parents’ marriage had devolved into an emotional and verbal battlefield. One of Cobain’s biographers, commenting on a family portrait when Kurt was six, said, “It’s a picture of a family, but not a picture of a marriage.”[4] After the divorce, Kurt’s mother started dating younger men. His father became overbearing, more afraid of losing his new wife than of losing Kurt. That parental rejection left him displaced, unable to find a stable social center, incapable of maintaining constructive emotional ties either with his peers or with his parents’ generation. That instability inflicted a deep wound in Cobain’s soul that could not be healed by music, fame, money, sex, drugs, alcohol, therapy, rehabilitation or detox programs. His inner anguish made it easy for him to accept the Buddha’s first noble truth that life is suffering.

Psychotherapy failed Cobain. Having questioned the very existence of the psyche (roughly, the self or soul), secular psychology is now a discipline in decline. Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung believed in the existence of self,[5] but their followers now recognize that their faith in “self” was a residual effect of the West’s Christian past—Jung’s father, for example, was a clergyman.

Jung’s truly secular followers, such as James Hillman, are recasting the essence of his theory. An increasing number of thinking people are recognizing that theoretically it is impossible to practice psychology without theology. Six centuries before Christ, the Buddha already knew that if God does not exist, then the human self cannot exist either. Therefore, he deconstructed the Hindu idea of the soul. When one starts peeling the onion skin of one’s psyche, he discovers that there is no solid core at the center of one’s being. Your sense of self is an illusion. Reality is nonself (anatman).

You don’t exist. Liberation, the Buddha taught, is realizing the unreality of your existence.

This nihilism is logical if you begin with the assumption that God does not exist. However, it is not easy to live with the consequences of this belief, or rather, this nonbelief in one’s own self. To say “I believe that ‘I’ don’t exist” can be devastating for sensitive souls like Cobain. His music—alternately sensitive and brash, exhilarating and depressed, loud and haunted, anarchic and vengeful—reflected the confusion he saw in the postmodern world around him and in his own being. While he was committed to a small set of moral principles (such as environmentalism and fatherhood), he was unable to find a stable worldview in which to center those principles.

He was naturally drawn to the Buddha’s doctrine of impermanence: there is nothing stable and permanent in the universe. You can’t swim in the same river twice because the river changes every moment, as does a human being. You are not the same “thing” that you were a moment ago. Cobain’s experience of the impermanence of an emotional, social, spiritual center to his life had tragic consequences. He adopted the philosophical and moral emptiness that other bands lauded as the “Highway to Hell.”[6]

MUSIC AFTER GOD’S DEATH

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (AD 1844–1900) realized that having killed God, Europe could not possibly save the civilizational fruits of its faith in God. But not even Nietzsche realized that one philosophical implication of God’s demise would be the death of his own self. For fifteen hundred years prior to Nietzsche, the West had followed St. Augustine (AD 354–430) in affirming every human being as a trinity of existence (being), intellect, and will. After denying the existence of the Divine Self, it became impossible to affirm the existence of the human self. Therefore, many intellectuals are reverting to the Buddhist idea that the self is an illusion. As contemporary Jungian psychologist Paul Kuglar explained, in the postmodern philosophy, Nietzsche (the speaking subject) is dead—he never existed, for individuality is only an illusion created by language.[7]

Deconstructionists blame language for creating the illusion of the self, but the Buddha blamed the mind. It cannot be God’s image. Therefore, the mind had to be a product of primeval cosmic ignorance, Avidya. The Buddha’s rejection of the self made sense to the classical skeptics such as Pyrrho of Elea (360–270 BC), who traveled to India with Alexander the Great and interacted with Buddhist philosophers. After returning to Greece, he established a new school of skeptical philosophy to teach that nothing is truly knowable. If so, why should anyone pay philosophers to teach anything? No wonder education, philosophy, and science declined in Greece.

Denying the reality of a spiritual core as the essence of every human being makes it hard to make sense of music, because music, like morality, is a matter of the soul. Those who think that the universe is only material substance and the soul is an illusion find it hard to explain music. They have to assume that music evolved from animals, but none of our alleged evolutionary cousins make music. (Some birds do “sing,” but no one has proposed that we, or our music, evolved from them.) Charles Darwin thought that music evolved as an aid to mating. That might be believed if rapists took bands to lure their victims. By evolutionary psychology, rape could be seen as a natural form of mating and morality an arbitrary social control.

Music serves no biological purpose. As Bono, the lead singer for U2 put it, “music is a matter of the spirit.” Some contemporary music moves toward God—for example, Gospel Music. Other genres—for example, the Blues— may be running away from God and seeking redemption elsewhere. Nevertheless “both recognize the pivot that God is at the center of the jaunt.”[8] Even in the Bible, all prophetic poetry is not singing praises to God. Beginning with Job, biblical poetry includes penetrating questioning of God in the face of suffering and injustice. Music that blames God for evil, affirms God as the only available source of meaning and our right to pass moral judgment.

The Buddhist skepticism that Pyrrho brought to Europe is logical and powerful. The West escaped its paralyzing influence only because thinkers such as St. Augustine succeeded in refuting it. Augustine affirmed the certainty of the human self because the Bible taught that God existed and had created man in his own image. Augustine also affirmed the validity of words. He believed language can communicate truth because communication is intrinsic to the triune God and man is made in the image of a God who communicates. Now, having rejected those biblical foundations, the West has no basis for escaping the Buddha’s radical pessimism.

In spite of—or perhaps because of—his inner chaos, Cobain remained so popular that in 2008 the music industry ranked him as the number one “Dead Artist.” His albums outsold Elvis Presley’s. Years after his death, in 2002 his widow was able to sell the scraps and scribbles in his journals to Riverhead Books for (reportedly) four million dollars. Two decades ago, a publisher anywhere in the world would have rejected his notes as meaningless, misspelled graffiti. At the dawn of the twenty-first century in America, cultural gatekeepers rightly recognize that Cobain represents America’s soullessness better than most celebrities. In a sample of relatively meaningful meaninglessness, he wrote:

I like punk rock. I like girls with weird eyes. I like drugs. (But my Body And mind won’t allow me to take them.) I like passion. I like playing my cards wrong. I like vinyl. I like feeling guilty for being a white, American male. I love to sleep. I like to taunt small, barking dogs in parked cars. I like to make people feel happy and superior in their reaction towards my appearance. I like to have strong opinions with nothing to back them up with besides my primal sincerity. I like sincerity. I lack sincerity . . . I like to complain and do nothing to make things better.[9]

I have seen entries similar to Cobain’s journals and lyrics in students’ private diaries in art exhibitions in American colleges. Prior to Cobain, in the 1960s and ’70s, countercultural students at these colleges believed they were on the cusp of inaugurating utopia. By Cobain’s time they knew that nihilism leads only to escapism. Steven Blush studied the music of the early 1980s that directly preceded Cobain both chronologically and stylistically. Popularly it is called “hardcore,” a genre marked by its brashness and intentional existence outside the mainstream. He concluded:

Hardcore was more than music—it became a political and social movement as well. The participants constituted a tribe unto themselves. Some of them were alienated or abused, and found escape in the hard-edged music. Some sought a better world or a tearing down of the status quo, and were angry. Most of them simply wanted to raise hell. Stark and uncompromising . . . Lots of [messed]up kids “found themselves” through hardcore . . . the aesthetic was intangible. Most bands couldn’t really play that well, and their songs usually lacked craft. They expended little effort achieving prevailing production standards. However, they had IT—an infectious blend of ultra-fast music, thought provoking lyrics, and f[orget]-you attitude.[10]

The postmodern “rebels without a cause” were Living in a world of my own.[11]

Cobain’s music appealed to contemporary America because it was a full-throated disharmony of rage, anguish, hatred, despair, meaninglessness, and obscenity. His song titles included “I Hate Myself, I Want to Die” and “Rape Me” (later changed to “Waife Me”). Most of what Cobain sang cannot be deciphered, and many of his lyrics that can be deciphered have no apparent meaning. Whether he knew it or not, his lyrics were Zen koans, counter-rational sayings such as “what is the sound of one hand clapping?” Such words do not make sense because (in the absence of revelation) reality itself makes no sense. Words are merely mantras—sounds without sense—to be chanted or shouted.

Cobain committed suicide because Nothingness as the ultimate reality does nothing positive. It cannot provide joy to the world, let alone meaning or hope for the mess in one’s life. Its only consequence is to inspire people to seek an exit from the world—Nirvana. A culture of music does not flourish in the soil of nihilism. Cobain’s gift as a musician blossomed because he had inherited a unique tradition of music.

Music seems a natural, perhaps even essential, part of life to the Western mind because it has been an integral part of traditional worship and education. For example, Oxford and Cambridge universities have played pivotal roles in shaping the second millennium. However, a person who has never visited these cities may not know that they are cities of churches and chapels. The chapel is the most important building in traditional colleges and a pipe organ is often the centerpiece of a chapel. That is not the case in every culture.

Turkmenistan is the latest country to put restrictions on music: on state holidays, in broadcasts by television channels, at cultural events organized by the state, in places of mass assembly, and at weddings and celebrations organized by the public.[12] Nations such as Saudi Arabia have had restrictions on music for a long time. In Iran and Afghanistan, women cannot sing on the radio, let alone on television or in person before mixed audiences. In post-Saddam Iraq, radical Muslims have assassinated sellers of music CDs. Mosques do not have keyboards, organs, pianos, orchestras, or worship bands because according to traditional Islam, music is haraam or illegitimate. [The idea that music is “haraam” or is illegitimate is based on Qur’an 17.64, 31.6, and 53.59–62. Historically, Islamic theologians working in the tradition of Qur’anic interpretation developed by Ibn Masood, Ibn Abbas, and Jaabir after the death of Prophet Muhammad have interpreted these passages as condemning all music. Other modern interpreters contend that the Qur’an does not ban music.]

These cultures see Western music as inextricably mixed with immoral debauchery. For them, musicians such as Kurt Cobain are undesirable role models. Indeed, on the cover of his album Nevermind, Cobain brazenly depicted the values he lived by: an infant with a long penis underwater reaching out to a dollar bill on a fishhook. On the back cover, Cobain’s mascot, a chipmunk, sits on a vagina. Open debauchery was a part of “pagan” music until the Bible extricated music from it by recentering the locus of the music to God.

Do not get drunk on wine, which leads to debauchery. Instead, be filled with the Spirit . . . Sing and make music in your heart to the Lord, always giving thanks to God the Father for everything, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ.[13]

Buddhist monks in Asia developed sophisticated philosophies, psychology, rituals, and psycho-technologies to try to escape life and its sufferings. They perfected techniques such as Vipasana [Yoga attempts to control breathing in its quest to realize self. Vipasana observes breathing as a means of silencing one’s mind to experience that there is no self or soul inside us but only Nothingness, Emptiness, Void, Shoonyta or Selflessness] to silence not just their tongues but also their thoughts. Buddhism originated in India and prior to its disappearance enjoyed powerful political patronage for centuries. It built such massive monasteries that Buddhist art is a cherished aspect of our national heritage. Yet, Buddhism left no discernible musical tradition or instrument in India. No Buddhist monk started a band such as Nirvana, because in Buddhism salvation is not a heaven filled with music.[14] As a pessimistic philosophy of silence it could not produce music of hope and joy. Buddhism could not celebrate existence because it saw suffering as the essence of life. Some forms of modern Buddhism have embraced music, partially because of the efforts of Western converts, such as Kurt Cobain, who grafted the Western tradition of religious music into the Buddhist faith.

To say that music is a new phenomenon in Buddhist temples is not to suggest that pre-Buddhist Tibet or China had no music.[15] Music is intrinsic to the universe and to human nature even if some worldviews, including Darwinism, do not understand, recognize, or promote it. China’s fertility cults and sexual rites involved choirs of boys and girls singing alternately and together to symbolize Yin and Yang dualism as early as 2000 BC. A thousand years prior to that, the worshippers in Sumero-Mesapotamia used music in their temple rituals.

The musical ragas of Hindu magical rituals have survived for thirty-five hundred years. Most of the Vedas are hymns and chants. The Vedic priests understood sound as well as anyone else in the world and developed a highly complex system of chanting, even if Hindu monks and priests did not develop music into the complex medium that Western music became. Thankfully this is changing now. Bollywood has played a great role in inspiring some Hindu ashrams to develop great music. It has also raised the standard of Qawwali, which began as a part of Sufi tradition [Sunnis and Shiites consider Sufism a Muslim heresy], but is now loved by Hindus as well as by Muslims—including in Pakistan.

WRITING MUSIC INTO THE WEST’S DNA

St. Augustine, the author of the six-volume On Music, was a key figure in inserting music into Western education and worldview. His first five volumes are technical and could have been written by a Greek philosopher. But Augustine was most excited about his sixth book, which gives a biblical philosophy of music. Music is, of course, integral to the Bible, in which the longest book is Psalms. The last psalm, for example, asks creation to praise the Lord with the trumpet, lute, harp, tambourine, strings, pipe, and cymbals.

Why are these physical instruments able to make music? Augustine saw that the scientific basis or essence of music lies in mathematical “numbers” or scores at the core of creation. Since music is mathematical, Augustine argued, it must be rational, eternal, unchangeable, meaningful, and objective—it consists of mathematical harmony. We cannot make a musical sound from just any string. To get a precise note, a string has to have a specific length, thickness, and tension. This implies that the Creator has encoded music into the structure of the universe. This insight was not new. It had been noted by Pythagoras (570–490 BC), whose school Plato attended before starting his Academy. Augustine promoted this “pagan” insight because the Bible presented a view of creation that explained why matter could make music.

Augustine taught that while this musical code is “bodily” (physical), it is made and enjoyed by the soul. For example, the book of Job deals with the problem of inexplicable suffering. In it God himself tells Job of the connection between music and creation: “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? . . . when the morning stars sang together and all the sons of God shouted for joy?”[16]

The Bible taught that a sovereign Creator (rather than a pantheon of deities with conflicting agendas) governs the universe for his glory. He is powerful enough to save men like Job from their troubles. This teaching helped develop the Western belief of a cosmos: an orderly universe where every tension and conflict will ultimately be resolved, just as after a period of inexplicable suffering Job was greatly blessed.

This belief in the Creator as a compassionate Savior became an underlying factor of the West’s classical music and its tradition of tension and resolution. Up until the end of the nineteenth century, Western musicians shared their civilization’s assumption that the universe was cosmos rather than chaos. They composed consonance and concord even when they experienced dissonance and discord. That is not to suggest that classical music did not express the full range of human emotions. It did. A bereaved composer would write a tragic piece; someone abandoned by his love would express his desolation. But such outpourings of a broken heart were understood as snapshots of real life. Given the cultural power of the biblical worldview, no one thought of them as Kurt Cobain did, as evidence of the breakdown of cosmic order or the nonexistence of order in the universe.

In the novel The Silmarillion, J. R. R. Tolkien gives us a beautiful, fictional exposition of the Augustinian perspective on the relationship of music, creation, the fall (evil), and redemption. Tolkien’s Middle-earth experienced much more suffering than the Buddha’s India. Tolkien’s “earth” was to be captured, corrupted, and virtually controlled by evil. Suffering was real, brutal, and awful. Yet the Bible taught Tolkien that the Almighty Creator, who was also a compassionate Redeemer, was loving enough and powerful enough to redeem the earth from the greatest possible mess, sin, and suffering. This helped Tolkien to celebrate creation, both in its origin as well as in its ultimate destiny:

There was Eru, the One, who in Arda is called Iluvatar; and he made first the Ainur, the Holy Ones, that were the offspring of his thought, and they were with him before aught else was made. And he spoke to them, propounding to them themes of music; and they sang before him, and he was glad. But for long while they sang only each alone, or but few together, while the rest hearkened; for each comprehended only part of the mind of Iluvatar from which he came, and in the understanding of their brethren they grew but slowly. Yet ever as they listened they came to deeper understanding, and increased in unison and harmony. . . .

Then Iluvatar said to them: “Of the theme that I have declared to you, I will now that ye make in harmony together a Great Music.”

Then the voices of the Ainur, like unto harps and lutes, and pipes and trumpets, and viols and organs, and like unto countless choirs singing with words, began to fashion the theme of a great music; and a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.[17]

Prior to becoming a follower of Christ, Augustine had been a professor of Greek philosophy. He knew that although music was encoded into the structure of the physical universe, being finite, it could never provide ultimate meaning to life [Augustine’s intellectual mentor, Plato, believed that epistemologically no finite particular can make sense without an infinite reference point]. Therefore, he reasoned that to be meaningful, music had to be integrated into the ultimate aim of human life, which was to love God and one’s neighbors. To love one’s neighbor is to “always mind” his welfare.

Over the centuries, the influence of Augustine’s biblical philosophy of music kept growing. Originally, church music was dominated by monophonic plainsong, a single line of melody as in the Gregorian chant. Roman Catholic churches began to develop polyphonic music. This style, which combines several differing voice parts simultaneously, began to flourish at Notre Dame (Paris) by the eleventh century. That development in Christian worship laid the foundation for the entire spectrum of Western classical music, religious and secular [Augustine did not have much influence over the Eastern Church and that may be one reason why its music did not develop much beyond the chant].

In the tenth century AD, Augustine’s biblical philosophy of music inspired a group of Benedictine monks to build the world’s largest pipe organ in the cathedral of Winchester, England. The organ required seventy men and twenty-six bellows to supply wind to its four hundred pipes. Technologically, the pipe organ was the world’s most advanced machine until the invention of the mechanical clock. Europe’s organs stood as emblems of the West’s unique desire and ability to use the arts, science, and technology for the glory of God as well as for the relief of humanity’s suffering and toil.

Augustine’s biblical philosophy of music was an important tributary that contributed to the river of mechanical arts that began to flow out of Christian monasteries and churches. This tradition used technology to worship God and to love one’s neighbors.

TAKING MUSIC TO THE MASSES

Martin Luther (AD 1483–1546) took the biblical-Augustinian philosophy of music out of the cloister and choir loft to Europe’s masses. An Augustinian monk and pioneer of the Protestant Reformation, Luther was and remains a polarizing figure. Some love him; others hate him. Yet many critics agree that Luther may have been the most influential figure of the second millennium.

Luther was a “Protestant” because he saw plenty in his world to protest against. But he did not become a reformer simply because he protested. He changed Europe because he found something worth singing about, something worth living for, and something worth dying for. He found a covenant relationship with the Almighty God [Later some Enlightenment thinkers secularized the biblical idea of divine covenant as “social contract.” The idea lies at the root of modern constitutionalism. It enabled the West to become a society built uniquely on trust. See Robert N. Bellah The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial (New York: Crossroad Books, 1975)]. A relationship he could count upon. It was a faith, a worldview upon which his decadent world could be rebuilt. Yet, it was far more than an idea or creed. It was a vibrant relationship with someone who was worth dying for; a love affair worthy of songs.

Luther got excited about the Bible partly because it taught that he could not and did not need to do anything to qualify for God’s love. Salvation— forgiveness from sin and the restoration of a person’s relationship with God —was a free gift of grace to be received by the empty hands of faith. The Bible gave Luther a deep, Abraham-like, inner assurance of God’s acceptance. God’s friendship gave such a value and meaning to his life that he had something to sing about. Yes, in a world that had rebelled against the Creator, there was suffering. Yet, because God is love, there is hope for pardon, peace, progress, and prosperity. This gospel made the West uniquely optimistic, enabling it to sing, “Joy to the world”—a message opposite to that of Cobain.

Luther helped this biblical worldview to become the soul of Western civilization. His spiritual followers summed up his discovery of the Bible’s essence in songs of hope, assurance, and certainty, such as “Amazing Grace,” written by reformed slave trader John Newton (1725–1807):

Amazing grace! How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!

I once was lost, but now am found;
Was blind, but now I see.

Luther became a reformer because he realized that in order to conform to God’s Word, all God’s children would need to have that Word in their native languages. He translated the Bible into his own German dialect. His translation went into hundreds of editions and turned his dialect into the “Standard German” for the whole of the German-speaking world. Together with Luther’s German hymnal, his Bible forged the soul of the German-speaking nations. Luther’s work inspired other reformers, such as William Tyndale, who began translating the Bible into English. That crucial beginning made the Bible the soul also of the English-speaking world. Following Jesus and the apostles, the early church sang worship together until Jerome the Great encouraged priests to take over chanted worship in the fifth century. Since then until Luther’s time, congregations rarely sang during Christian worship—and then only in Latin, which they did not understand. By and large it was the priest’s job to worship and pray. Luther rediscovered the New Testament doctrine of the priesthood of all believers [As we shall see in chapter 15, this profound discovery based on 1 Peter 2:9, Revelation 1:6, etc., became an important source of the West’s economic development and political liberty.], which made it necessary for the entire congregation to worship God by singing as well as by prayer and other means. “God,” he believed, “has created man for the express purpose of praising and extolling Him.”[18] Because of his belief in the priesthood of all believers, Luther wrote hymns in the language of his people —German—and brought music to the lungs and lips of even the poorest peasants in the congregation.

For Luther the reformation of the university was second in importance only to the reformation of the Church, and music had to have a prominent role in education as well:

I have always loved music; whoso has skill in this art, is of a good temperament, fitted for all things. We must teach music in schools; a schoolmaster ought to have skill in music, or I would not regard him; neither should we ordain young men as preachers, unless they have been well exercised in music.[19]

In putting music at the heart of worship and at the core of his curriculum of education, Luther simply followed the Jewish (biblical) tradition of temple musicians and singers who were “prophets” or “sons of prophets.” The biblical phrase “sons of prophets” often meant the students of prophets. An early meaning of the phrase “to prophesy” was ecstatic singing accompanied with music.[20] King David—the driving force behind the temple worship in Jerusalem—was Israel’s musician, singer, and poet par excellence. The Bible calls him a “prophet.”[21] The New Testament asked the followers of Christ to seek the gift of prophecy.[22] In the light of the Old Testament, that exhortation had to include learning music, as did the “sons of prophets.”

The modern West confirmed Luther’s educational philosophy that musical literacy produces people with an intuitive awareness of a logical and orderly universe. It is not a coincidence that universities such as Oxford and Cambridge that have a distinctly Christian heritage still hold music in greater respect than most of the universities founded upon secularism during the twentieth century.

THE FLOWERING OF WESTERN MUSIC

It takes barely five minutes to walk from the Bach house at Eisenach, Germany, to the house where Luther had lived as a student, and it takes less than ten minutes to drive up the hill to the castle of Wartburg where Luther translated the New Testament into German. By the time Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) was born, that area had become a Lutheran province. Philosophically, Johannes Kepler reinforced the biblical-Augustinian-Lutheran view of creation and music by teaching that music mirrors the divinely ordained mathematical harmony of the universe. Bach was a musical genius because he was a mathematical genius who received as a part of his education this (non-polytheistic) biblical outlook of an orderly creation. In that mind-set, aesthetics was inseparable from ultimate harmony. One of his biographers, Wilfrid Mellers said,

At the school which Bach attended in Ohrdruf the system of education was little changed from the old [Augustinian-Lutheran] prescription. Music was second in importance only to theology, and was taught by the same master, who believed that music makes the heart ready and receptive to the divine Word and truth, just as Elisius [Elisha] confessed that by harping he found the Holy Spirit.[23]

For Bach, as for Luther, “true music” pursues as its “ultimate end or final goal . . . the honor of God and the recreation of the soul.” Bach believed that music was a “harmonious euphony for the glory of God.”[24] Obviously, this is not meant to suggest that Bach’s musical talent was nurtured only by theological beliefs. His family was a key factor in developing Bach’s talent. In chapter 15 we will see that it was Luther’s exposition of the Bible that made his family different from Cobain’s family. In his formative years, Bach drew heavily on his family’s musical heritage, which extended back to his great-great-grandfather. The Bach clan had developed into an expansive network of musical apprenticeship and encouragement. This network proved to be pivotal in Bach’s development.

What does a German monk, a Roman Pope, and a Spanish Emperor have to do with music history? Today we look at the events that surrounded 15th and 16th Century German music – particularly that of Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation.

Bach and Cobain shared more in common than their talent for music. They both lost their parents when they were nine years old, Cobain’s parents to divorce and Bach’s to death. A tragic event such as his parents’ death could have irreparably upset Bach’s emotional balance. But back then the “family” was more than parents and children. Johann moved in with his older brother, who taught him to play the organ and develop his talents as a composer. Following his brother’s example, Johann later tutored his own children to become some of the best musicians of their generation. His youngest son became, in his own right, one of the most important influences on Mozart’s work.

It is tempting to interpret the order and harmony of Bach’s music as a metaphorical reflection of the order of his family. The stability and support of his wider family gave Bach the emotional strength to overcome his heartaches. This strength is reflected not only in his life but also in his work. Yet, the family alone cannot explain his ability to celebrate “The Passion” (suffering) of St. John or St. Matthew. This ability to celebrate suffering came from his faith in the resurrection— God’s triumph over suffering and death.

Philosophically speaking, Bach’s inner power to cope with his parents’ death came from his belief in a sovereign and loving God. His life and his compositions were saturated with the book that had given him profound personal and social hope.[25] Life taught him that evil was real and powerful, but the Bible taught him that God was at work redeeming the world, working all things together for good.[26] This biblical faith had been the key to the optimism and music of Western civilization: for Augustine as the Roman Empire was collapsing around him, for Luther as his own life was threatened by a powerful empire and a corrupt religious leadership, and for Tolkien as he lived through the horror of two World Wars.

These people knew evil and suffering, as did the Buddha and Cobain, but the difference was that the Bible gave them a basis for hope in this life as well as in the next. This biblical faith in a Creator who made human beings in his image and loved them enough to come to save them, made it possible for the West to sing, “O come, all ye faithful/ Joyful and triumphant.” In contrast, Cobain’s career demonstrates that without this faith the West’s hope and celebration are turning into a sense of abject despair. If we may borrow the language of musicologists, the West is losing its “tonality”—its “home/ key note,” its soul, its center, the reference point that allowed the relaxation/resolve of tension.

THE LOSS OF “TONALITY” IN WESTERN MUSIC

For centuries, Western music was tonal. That is, its hallmark was loyalty to a tonic key/home note. Every single piece gave preference to this one note (the tonic), making it the tonal center to which all other tones were related. The breakup of tonality in Western music is said to have begun with Adolf Hitler’s hero, Richard Wagner (1813–1883), who experimented with “atonality” in his opera Tristan and Isolde. Claude Debussy (1862–1918), Grand Master of the occult Rosicrucian lodges in France, took that experiment further. The West’s descent into the chaos of atonality accelerated in the twentieth century in Vienna, the capital of Europe’s cultural decadence [for example, the second Viennese school of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg].

Eventually the atonal composers had to create a new organization in their art to replace tonality—an artificial tonality called serialism. By dismissing tonality—the center—they lost something they hadn’t considered—form. Technically, Cobain retained tonality, but in a philosophical sense the loss of tonality in Western culture culminated in Cobain’s music, the icon of America’s nihilism and an unfortunate victim of a civilization that is losing its center, its soul. It must be added in his defense that by killing himself, Cobain demonstrated that he lived by what he believed. His sincerity makes him a legitimate icon. Most nihilists do not live in the grip of what they believe to be the central truth about reality. For example, French existentialists Sartre and Camus advocated choice in spite of the nihilism they embraced. In so doing they made a way out of Cobain’s problem. For them suicide was not necessary if one could create his own reality by choices.

Cobain remains popular because while many people claim to be nihilists, they don’t fully live it out. He did. He lived without creating his own reality through choice (or tonality through serial technique). He lived in the nihilism, in the “atonality,” and in that nihilism he died. In that sense Cobain stands as the direct opposite of the life, thoughts, and work of J. S. Bach. Whereas Bach’s music celebrated life’s meaning as the soul’s eternal rest in the Creator’s love, Cobain became a symbol of the loss of a center and meaning in the contemporary West.

While Western music has gone through dozens of phases with thousands of permutations since the time of Luther and Bach, in some ways it was only during the 1980s that a phenomenon like Kurt Cobain became possible. The rejection of a good, caring, and almighty God and a rejection of the biblical philosophy of sin ensured that there was no way to make sense of suffering— personal, societal, or environmental. Reality became senseless, hopeless, and painful.

THE AMPUTATION OF THE SOUL

Today, many people reject the Bible because they consider it to be irrational and irrelevant. Others believe it to be responsible for racial prejudices, sectarian bigotries, slavery, the oppression of women, the persecution of witches, opposition to science, the destruction of the environment, discrimination against homosexuals, and religious wars. However, this criticism itself reveals the powerful influence the Bible had during the last millennium. During that time, hardly any intellectual position or social practice could become mainstream in Christendom unless it could be defended on biblical grounds, real or mistaken; nor could beliefs and practices be challenged unless their opponents demonstrated that their call for reform was biblical.

Criticisms of the Bible are recognition of its unique cultural power. It has been the West’s intellectual and moral compass, the “sacred canopy” (Peter Berger) that gave legitimacy to its values and institutions. The West’s rejection of the Bible ushered in what historian Jacques Barzun called its “decadence.”[27] It brought an abrupt end to the Modern age [by that I mean the period from the sixteenth through the midtwentieth century when the Bible remained the dominant culture-shaping force, even though skeptics, agnostics, and atheists kept condemning the Bible], just when Western civilization seemed set to win the world. Now, having amputated the Bible, the Western educational machinery is producing “strays,” lost like Cobain. It can make good robots but it cannot even define a good man. The postmodern university can teach one how to travel to Mars but not how to live in one’s home or nation.[28]

India-born British author George Orwell (1903–50) was a socialist, inclined toward atheism. The horrors of Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and the two World Wars forced him to face the consequences of the “amputation of the soul.” In his “Notes on the Way,” Orwell wrote that the writers who sawed off the West’s soul included “Gibbon, Voltaire, Rousseau, Shelley, Byron, Dickens, Stendahl, Samuel Butler, Ibsen, Zola, Flaubert, Shaw, Joyce —in one way or another they are all of them destroyers, wreckers, saboteurs.”

These “Enlightenment” writers led the West into its present darkness.

In his essay Orwell was reflecting on Malcolm Muggeridge’s book The Thirties, which describes the damage these writers had done to Europe. Muggeridge, then still an atheist, was astute enough to perceive that,

we are living in a nightmare precisely because we have tried to set up an earthly paradise. We have believed in “progress.” Trusted to human leadership, rendered unto Caesar the things that are God’s. . . . There is no wisdom except in the fear of God; but no one fears God; therefore there is no wisdom. Man’s history reduces itself to the rise and fall of material civilizations, one Tower of Babel after another . . . downwards into abysses which are horrible to contemplate.[29]

I first discovered the Bible as a student in India. It transformed me as an individual and I soon learned that, contrary to what my university taught, the Bible was the force that had created modern India. Let me, therefore, begin our study of the book that built our world by telling you my own story.

Epigraph: George Orwell’s “Notes on the Way” was first published in Time and Tide, March 30—April 6, 1940. It is reprinted in Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell (Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968).

NOTES

[1] “Endless, Nameless” on Nevermind (Los Angeles: Geffen Records, 1991). This song is a hidden track at the end of some copies of the CD.

[2] The Rolling Stone editors, Cobain (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1994), 128. See “Suicidal Tendencies” by Diana Grains, 128–32.

[3] Ibid.

[4] Charles R. Cross, Heavier Than Heaven (NY: Hyperion, 2001), 15.

[5] Freud’s second topography undermines the modern, Cartesian understanding of selfhood that most in the West understand by “self.” Freud’s self is decentered.

[6] Band AC/DC.

[7] For a simple summary see Connie Zweig’s essay, “The Death of the Self in a Postmodern World” in The Truth About The Truth: Deconfusing and Re-Constructing the Postmodern World, ed. Walter Truett Anderson (NY: Penguin Putnam, 1995), 145–150.

[8] Rolling Stone, November 3, 2005, 54.

[9] Kurt Cobain, Journals (NY: Riverhead Books, 2003), 108–09.

[10] Steven Blush, American Hardcore: A Tribal History (Los Angeles; NY: Feral House, 2001), 9.

[11] A lyric by Agent Orange, “Living in Darkness,” Agent Orange (Warner/Elektra/ Atlantic, 1981).

[12] On February 25, 2009, the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour submitted the 2008 Human Rights Report for Turkmenistan: “The government demonstrated little or no support for non-Turkmen music, but classical music was taught and performed throughout the country. The previously banned government-supported symphony orchestra was reestablished at the National Cultural Center and began monthly concerts of Turkmen and world classical music. The president decreed that the circus reopen, and the first opera performance took place in June. Traditional local music, which had not been performed for years, was played in concerts and social events.” US STATE DEPT (accessed January 16, 2011).

[13] Ephesians 5:18–20 NIV.

[14 ] For a biblical description of music in heaven, please see Revelation 5:7–9, 14:1– 3, 15:1–4.

[15] “Tibetan Buddhist Monk Nominated for Grammy award,” 3 February 2006, International Campaign for Tibet (accessed December 4, 2010).

[16] Job 38:4–7.

[17] J. R. R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion (Boston and NY: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2001), 15–16. Tolkien’s fictional passage is an expression of the Bible’s teaching in Job 38, John 1, and the book of Revelation.

[18] Martin Luther’s Foreword to Georg Rhau’s Symphoniae Lucundae, a collection of chorale motets published in 1538, reprinted in From Liturgy and Hymns, ed. Ulrich S. Leupold; trans. Paul Zeller Strodach; vol. 53 of Luther’s Works, American Edition, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1965).

[19] Martin Luther, The Table Talk of Martin Luther, trans. and ed. William Hazlitt (London: H. G. Bohn, 1857), 340.

[20] For example, see 1 Samuel 19:18–24 or 1 Chronicles 25:1–6. “David and the chiefs of the service also set apart for the service the sons of Asaph, and of Heman, and of Jeduthun, who prophesied with lyres, with harps, and with cymbals. The list of those who did the work and of their duties was: Of the sons of Asaph . . . who prophesied under the direction of the king. Of Jeduthun, the sons of Jeduthun . . . who prophesied with the lyre in thanksgiving and praise to the LORD. Of Heman, the sons of Heman . . . the king’s seer, according to the promise of God to exalt him . . . They were all under the direction of their father in the music in the house of the LORD with cymbals, harps, and lyres for the service of the house of God.”

[21] Acts 2:30.

[22] 1 Corinthians 14:1.

[23] Wilfrid Mellers, Bach and the Dance of God (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1981), 82.

[24] Christoph Wolff, Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician (NY: Norton, 2000), 8.

[25] Ulrich Meyer, Biblical Quotations and Allusions in Cantata Libretti of Johann Sebastian Bach (London: Scarecrow Press, 1997), 177–216. Bible references that Bach quoted or alluded to in his compositions and writings.

[26] Romans 8:28.

[27] Jacques Barzun, From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present, 500 years of Western Cultural Life (NY: HarperCollins, 2000). His concept of “decadence” is explained in his introduction.

[28] Stanley Fish, who retired as the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the Univ. of Illinois at Chicago argued in an article, “Why We Built the Ivory Tower,” NY Times, May 21, 2004, that the Univ. should not even try to teach morality or good citizenship. He wrote, “Performing academic work responsibly and at the highest level is a job big enough for any scholar and for any institution. And, as I look around, it does not seem to me that we academics do that job so well that we can now take it upon ourselves to do everyone else’s job too. We should look to the practices in our own shop, narrowly conceived, before we set out to alter the entire world by forming moral character, or fashioning democratic citizens, or combating globalization, or embracing globalization, or anything else.”

[29] Ibid. Quoted by Orwell.

Canon and Sola [not Solo] Scriptura (Α – Ω Ministries)

Today I was joined by Dr. Michael Kruger, President of Reformed Theological Seminary in Charlotte, North Carolina. Dr. Kruger has written numerous books that are high on our “you must read this book” list, such as Canon Revisited and The Question of Canon; he likewise contributed to and edited The Heresy of Orthodoxy and The Early Text of the New Testament. Our visit was prompted by a phone call made by a Lutheran to Catholic Answers Live back on 10/31/13. We played the entire call before the program started, and we played the heart of the call, where the Roman Catholic priest made the key assertions about canon and scriptural authority, during the interview with Dr. Kruger. We covered a wide variety of topics relevant to the canon issue. Truly one of the most useful programs we’ve ever done! Enjoy and learn!

Talked a bit about a few current events at the start (played video from Mars, for example), but the focus today was on sola scriptura, what it means, why it is central, and why I am simply stunned to see men I used to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with using the phrase as a throw-away joke line on Twitter. Please listen and consider well!

After we spent a little time on some positive reports of God’s grace, and then a few minutes on some negative developments of more rebellion and insanity coming out of Disney, we dove into a fully discussion of tradition, the canon, and finally looking at a series of Tweets by Steve Meister on the table of contents of your Bible as a form of “inescapable tradition.”

Response to Hank Hanegraaff

(PART 1) I was pointed this morning to a video of Hank Hanegraaff (joined by Dr. Nathan Jacobs) attacking the doctrine of sola scriptura.  Given I debated Jimmy Akin and Tim Staples (Roman Catholics) on The Bible Answer Man Broadcast decades ago, I felt it necessary (and useful) to begin a response to the claims made.  Nothing new as we have surely addressed all of this in the recent past and literally since the 1990s.  But important as the topic remains central.  I still have nine minutes left to review, and I think another video on the eucharist is due out soon as well.  We will continue the review on Tuesday.

(PART 2) As promised I continued in my response to Hank Hanegraaff’s attack on sola scriptura, finishing up the entire video, dealing with a wide variety of issues.  Important stuff for those looking at or dealing with Eastern Orthodoxy.  May be doing a program again tomorrow.

If you are active in reaching out to our Roman Catholic friends and family members, this is an important program for you. We spent most of our time going deeply into a clip from CA Live on “tradition” in the Bible. Then we played a brief clip from the British Parliament on critical race theory that was real encouraging, and finished off with looking at France’s vain attempt to create a “secular” form of Islam.

2 Thessalonians 2:15… Oral Tradition (Roman Catholicism)

Can the things which Rome wish to bind upon us in the name of Oral Tradition had been taught to the Thessalonians?

Then we looked at 2 Thess. 2:15 as quoted by Jay Dyer in his “10 Reasons” video we started responding to last week. All Dividing Line Highlights’ video productions and credit belong to Alpha and Omega Ministries®. If this video interested you, please visit aomin.org/ or http://www.sermonaudio.com/go/336785


2018 Flashback


Is Roman Catholic Views of Tradition, Biblical?

This is from a larger debate between Ken Samples and Fr. Mitch Pacwa . I think this intro does it’s due diligence in explaining many of the false views I have heard from people as of late. In other words, one should not define Protestants as believing Sola Scriptura wrongly, and then responding to this false view.

The below is from an excellent book by William Webster:

  • William Webster, Salvation, The Bible, and Roman Catholicism (Edinburgh, UK: Banner of Truth Trust, 1990), 13-20

AUTHORITATIVE STATEMENTS OF ROMAN CATHOLIC TEACHING ON TRADITION AND THE WORD OF GOD

The Documents of Vatican II

Hence there exist a close connection and communication between sacred tradition and sacred Scripture. For both of them, flowing from the same divine wellspring, in a certain way merge into a unity and tend toward the same end. For sacred Scripture is the word of God inasmuch as it is consigned to writing under the inspiration of the divine Spirit. To the successors of the apostles, sacred tradition hands on in its full purity God’s word, which was entrusted to the apostles by Christ the Lord and the Holy Spirit . . . Consequently, it is not from sacred Scripture alone that the Church draws her certainty about everything which has been revealed. Therefore both sacred tradition and sacred Scripture are to be accepted and venerated with the same sense of devotion and reverence. Sacred tradition and sacred Scripture form one sacred deposit of the word of God, which is committed to the Church.[1]

The Question and Answer Catholic Catechism

59. Where do we find the truths revealed by God?

We find the truths revealed by God in Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition.

60. How does Sacred Scripture compare with Sacred Tradition?

Both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition are the inspired word of God, and both are forms of divine revelation. Sacred Scripture is divinely inspired writing, whereas Sacred Tradition is the unwritten word of inspired persons.[2]

89. Why is Sacred Tradition of equal authority with the Bible?

The Bible and Sacred Tradition are of equal authority because they are equally the word of God; both derive from the inspired vision of the ancient prophets, and especially from the infinite wisdom of God incarnate who gave to the apostles what he came down on earth to teach, through them, to all of mankind.[3]

TRADITION AND THE WORD OF GOD – SUMMARY OF NEW TESTAMENT TEACHING

The first issue to be addressed in any discussion of spiritual truth is that of authority. To say something is true or false implies an authoritative standard by which we can make such a judgment. But is there such an authoritative stand­ard by which we can judge whether a particular teaching or system is true or false? The answer is an unequivocal ‘yes’. That authoritative standard is the Word of God, the Bible. Jesus Christ himself said of the Bible, ‘Thy word is truth’ (Jn. 17:17). In settling issues of spiritual controversy the Lord Jesus always appealed to the Word of God as an authoritative standard by which to judge truth and false­hood.

Mark’s Gospel records an incident in which certain Sad-ducees came to Jesus to question him. The Sadducees were the religious liberals of Jesus’ day and they rejected many of the teachings espoused by the more orthodox sect of the Pharisees. They did not believe in angels or in the resurrec­tion of the dead. A number of these men came to Jesus to ask him a trick question about life after death. Jesus demolished their trick question but went on to say this:

Is this not the reason you are mistaken, that you do not understand the Scriptures, or the power of God?… But regarding the fact that the dead rise again, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the burning bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not the God of the dead, but of the living; you are greatly mistaken (Mk. 12:24,25-27 NASB 1963).

Twice in this passage Christ tells these men they are greatly mistaken in their views. The reason is that they do not understand the Scriptures. He appeals to those Scriptures to correct the false concepts these men held. He points to the Word of God as an authoritative standard by which to judge truth and error. These men are greatly mistaken because the views they hold and the doctrines they teach contradict the Word of God.

Here you have two opposing views of truth. One says there is no resurrection from the dead, the other says there is. How do you determine which is true? You go to the Word of God. The Lord Jesus Christ is the Son of God. He is God in human flesh and therefore whatever he teaches is absolute truth. And according to him the Word of God is the final and authoritative standard by which all claims to truth are to be judged.

This principle obviously has a direct bearing upon the whole issue of tradition. The Roman Catholic Church teaches that tradition as well as the Bible constitutes the revealed Word of God. It teaches that the teaching of the Church Fathers, the Church Councils, and the Traditions of the Church are all ‘one sacred deposit of the Word of God’.

John Hardon S. J. makes the following statements in his Question and Answer Catholic Catechism:

Sacred Tradition is the unwritten word of God that the prophets and apostles received through the inspiration of the Holy Spirit and, under His guidance, the Church has handed on to the Christian world.[4]

Both Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition are the inspired word of God, and both are forms of divine revelation. Sacred Scripture is divinely inspired writing, whereas Sacred Tradition is the unwritten word of in­spired persons.[5]

Jesus Christ had some interesting things to say about tradition:

Then some Pharisees and scribes came to Jesus from Jerusalem, saying, ‘Why do Your disciples transgress the tradition of the elders? For they do not wash their hands when they eat bread.’ And He answered and said to them, `And why do you yourselves transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition? For God said, “Honor your father and mother”… But you say, “Whoever shall say to his father or mother, ‘Anything of mine you might have been helped by has been given to God,’ he is not to honor his father or his mother.” And thus you invalidated the word of God for the sake of your tradition. You hypocrites, rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you, saying, “This people honors Me with their lips, but their heart is far away from Me. But in vain do they worship Me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men”‘ (Matt. 15:1-9).

In a parallel passage in Mark 7:5-13 much of the same teaching by Jesus is recorded. The Pharisees ask why the disciples do not walk according to the tradition of the elders. In response Jesus denounces the scribes and Pharisees and their observance of tradition which is in violation of the Word of God. In effect they have elevated the teachings of men above the Scriptures. The following sums up Jesus’ evaluation:

  1. You teach as doctrines the precepts of men.
  2. Neglecting the commandment of God you hold to the tradition of men.
  3. You set aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition.
  4. You invalidate the Word of God by your tradition which you have handed down.

We should note that Jesus is not condemning tradition simply because it is tradition. All tradition is not wrong. What he is condemning is the elevating of tradition or the teaching of men to equality with the Word of God. He condemned the scribes and Pharisees for following tradition which violated and invalidated the Word of God. And then he rebuked them for so teaching others.

Tradition is not necessarily wrong, but tradition is not the Word of God, and for tradition to be acceptable to God, it must never contradict or violate the clear teaching of the Bible. All tradition must be judged by the truth of Scripture, including traditions which have their original roots in Scripture. The traditions that the scribes and Pharisees adhered to, but which Jesus denounced, were traditions which had their roots in mistaken interpretations of the Bible.

There is one obvious and definitive test which we can apply to all teaching and tradition to determine if it is true. That test is this: if the tradition or the teaching, even though it arises from the interpretation of a passage of Scripture, contradicts the clear teaching of another portion of Script­ure, then that particular tradition or teaching is incorrect, for Scripture never contradicts Scripture.

The Word of God alone is our final authority, never tradition. We are told in 2 Timothy 3:16,17 that ‘All Scripture is inspired by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, for training in righteousness; that the man of God may be adequate, equipped for every good work.’ All Scripture is inspired and is therefore authoritat­ive. And because it is inspired, that is, because it is the Word of a self-consistent God, it will never contradict itself.

Consequently, we can judge whether or not a particular teaching or tradition is true by comparing it to the Word of God. If it is consistent with the Word of God, then we can accept it as truth. However, if it clearly contradicts the teaching of the Bible or makes the Word of God contradict itself, then we know that it is error, and is to be rejected. Otherwise we shall fall into the same condemnation which Jesus uttered against the Pharisees.

One question this whole issue brings up is this: can the true church of God fall into error? The answer to that question, based upon the history of God’s people in the Bible is ‘yes’. It is possible for the church leadership to fall into error and be led astray from the truth. For example, the apostle Peter was publicly rebuked by Paul for the hypocrisy of which he was guilty (Gal. 2:11-14).

On an earlier occasion the apostle Peter was rebuked by Christ because he tried to hinder the Lord from going to the cross. ‘But He turned and said to Peter, “Get behind Me, Satan! You are a stumbling-block to Me; for you are not setting your mind on God’s interests, but man’s”‘ (Matt. 16:23). The Lord Jesus actually addressed Peter as Satan, for Satan was using Peter to try to divert him from the will of God. This all transpired after Peter had been told that he was to be given the keys of the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 16:18-19).

Of course, the example of God’s chosen people, the Jews, during the time of the Lord Jesus himself, shows us clearly that it is possible for the church’s leadership to be deceived. Jesus’ words about tradition were spoken against the scribes and Pharisees, the religious leadership of God’s chosen people and the true church of that day. They had fallen into error and had become so blind that they failed to recognise

Jesus as the Messiah. They fell into the error of misinterpret­ing the Word of God and of elevating tradition and the teachings of the elders to a level equal in authority to the Scriptures, even though those teachings contradicted the Word of God. In addition to this Jesus claimed that the religious leadership of his day, because of their adherence to tradition and misinterpretation of Scripture, were actually responsible for hindering people from entering the kingdom of God: Woe to you lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you did not enter in yourselves, and those who were entering in you hindered’ (Lk. 11:52). ‘But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from men; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in’ (Matt. 23:13). If this was true of the religious leadership of God’s chosen people in the day of Jesus Christ, there is absolutely no guarantee that a church leadership will not fall into error and mislead people.

Were the Pharisees and scribes of Jesus’ day intentionally trying to deceive people? Not necessarily! Many of them were doing what they sincerely felt was right. But they were wrong and consequently they were deceiving people and leading them astray. Sincerity is no guarantee against error. A man can be sincerely wrong. In the final analysis, as Christ taught, the Word of God is the final authority for determin­ing what is truth and what is error. Any teaching which contradicts the Word of God must be rejected: ‘To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them’ (Is. 8:20, A.V.).

Luke records that when Paul came to Berea, and preached the gospel in the local Jewish synagogue, the Bereans ‘were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, for they received the word with great eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily, to see whether these things were so’ (Acts 17:11). The Bereans compared Paul’s doctrines with the Word of God to see if his teachings were consistent with the teachings of the Word of God. Only then would they accept the gospel he was preaching. They knew that any teaching that truly originates from God would not contradict what he had already revealed in his Word.

It is in this spirit that we shall examine the teachings of the Roman Catholic Church….

[1] Walter M. Abbot S.J., The Documents of Vatican II (Westchester, IL: Follett Publishing Co., 1966), 177.

[2] John A. Hardon, S.J., The Question and Answer Catholic Catechism (New York, NY: Image Books, Doubleday, 1981), 37.

[3] Ibid., 41.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid., 41.

The Cost of Materialism (Nihilism)

Hat-tip to EVOLUTION NEWS & SCIENCE TODAY for this.

The role played by the Judeo-Christian tradition in the rise of Western science is a contentious topic — but not an obviously emotional one. Or so you might think. Stephen Meyer spoke on the subject at our most recent Dallas Conference on Science and Faith. The video is up now. In a new presentation using the story of Isaac Newton and his investigation of the nature of gravitation as a case study, Meyer recalls an earlier talk he gave at the Dallas Conference on related themes where a young woman, a member of the video crew, broke down in tears as Steve spoke. She later confessed in a communication to us:

Throughout my college career, professors would constantly lecture that based on the evidence they had provided…there should be no way that anyone in the class could believe in God. They’d argue that the science was proven… and God was hence a myth. I was not equipped to present a valid opposition in a debate. I was desperate to find a commonality between my beliefs and my [scientific] education. [Emphasis added.]

“Desperate” is a remarkable word. How many young people are being educated to believe that thinking scientifically means discarding a relationship with God?

[….]

As these comments suggest, the nihilism that is being sown by materialism is not just an intellectual problem. The desperation that goes with it cuts to the heart of many people. If you have children in college, as I do, it’s a very scary thing. Many thanks to Steve Meyer for tackling the science-versus-faith “warfare” myth directly. One viewer notes that he sent the lecture to his “agnostic brother” who is “really into the sciences.” Good idea. 

Bestselling author Stephen Meyer explores how three key Judeo-Christian presuppositions encouraged the rise of modern science, and he explores the influence of faith on the life and work of Sir Isaac Newton. Meyer is Director of the Center for Science and Culture at Discovery Institute and author of Return of the God Hypothesis. This talk was presented at the 2022 Dallas Conference on Science and Faith in January 2022.

Is Martin Luther’s “Plague Advice” Good for Covid?

Personal Statement: J-and-J in May 2020, boosted with Covid, end of December. Raging headache for days. Like a bad cold, slight fever for 2-days, have lost all sense of smell and taste….just in time [/sarcasm] to try out my wife’s Christmas present – an air fryer.

A few thoughts on a Martin Luther quote I have seen used since 2020… first, the quote fashioned by RPT

I am only writing this post because I have just seen a similar Luther quote [albeit mine is more complete] on the Facebook of someone that should know better. One commentor noted:

  • False equivalency, among other logical fallacies. — C.P.

I responded thus (with a slight addition):

Really? A quote about the Black Plague?

The Bubonic plague was a deadly pandemic that wiped out a massive chunk of population in the World during the mid-1300s. In Europe alone the plague wiped out nearly 50% of Europe’s population. Some estimates even claim that Black Death wiped out around two-third of Europe’s population. According to National Geographic the plague killed around 25 million people, almost one-third of Europe’s population (National Geographic). The plague also killed half of London’s population in almost 4 years (Sciencemag). The Bubonic plague is reported to have killed an estimated 75–200 million people (Shipman). Historians report that people died rapidly. The streets were filled with corpses mounted over each other. And the priests were too scared to perform the death rites. Florence, a city of Italy, alone is reported to have 50,000 deaths out of a population of 80,000. The mortality rate was as high as 50% during the Bubonic plague era. (Joshua Mark)

….How serious is Covid-19 exactly? And how will the outcome of the pandemic differ if vaccines were mandatory rather than optional? What additional loss of life can be expected if we do not make vaccination compulsory?

That Covid-19 is serious is beyond question. But let’s look at a few markers to help us evaluate the severity of the risk to humanity.

The deadly Spanish Flu from 1918-1920 is estimated to have killed somewhere between 20-50 million people, or close to 3% of the world’s population. By contrast, Covid-19 has so far killed about 5.3 million people in two years. That represents about 0.07% of the global population. 

How deadly is Covid-19? The overall infection fatality rate (IFR) of Covid has been estimated to be between 0.1% and 0.2%. Quoting from an analysis by Professor John P.A. Ioannidis of multiple studies which calculated inferred IFR by seroprevalence data: 

“Interestingly, despite their differences in design, execution, and analysis, most studies provide IFR point estimates that are within a relatively narrow range.  Seven of the 12 inferred IFRs are in the range 0.07 to 0.20 (corrected IFR of 0.06 to 0.16) which are similar to IFR values of seasonal influenza. Three values are modestly higher (corrected IFR of 0.25-0.40 in Gangelt, Geneva, and Wuhan) and two are modestly lower than this range (corrected IFR of 0.02-0.03 in Kobe and Oise).” (emphasis mine).

For people under 60, the IFR is much lower still. And for vaccinated people, the risk of death from Covid-19 is reduced about ten fold. 

For a vaccinated person, the risk of Covid-19 is no worse than seasonal influenza. 

And this was before Omicron, the new variant which looks set to become the dominant strain around the world in the coming weeks, and so far appears to cause much milder symptoms and a much lower fatality rate. Why are we still in panic mode?

Over the last two years, there were roughly 120 million all cause deaths. Only 5.3 million of those (less than 5% of all deaths) were Covid-19 deaths. Thanks to the media’s scaremongering, there are many people who seem to think that Covid-19 was the leading cause of death in 2020 and 2021. Based on historical mortality data we can estimate that deaths due to cardiovascular disease probably exceeded 40 million over the last two years, while cancer deaths are likely to have exceeded 20 million. That reality does not nullify or make light of the tragic 5.3 million Covid-19 deaths so far. But it helps to put Covid-19 in perspective. …..

Arguing From The Other Side – Onne Vegter Sets Out The Case Against Mandatory Vaccines (December 2021)

AGAIN, this is in no way parallel to even the 1793 Philadelphia yellow fever epidemic. The city had reached about 50,000 residence, and over the course of the fever 5,000 died. That is 5% of that cities population. Comparing…

  • These unparalleled public health actions were enacted for a virus with an infection mortality rate (IFR) roughly similar to seasonal influenza. Stanford’s John P.A. Ioannidis identified 36 studies (43 estimates) along with an additional 7 preliminary national estimates (50 pieces of data) and concluded that among people <70 years old across the world, infection fatality rates ranged from 0.00% to 0.57% with a median of 0.05% across the different global locations (with a corrected median of 0.04%). AIER

Back in June of 2020 I noted the following:

  • The CDC just came out with a report that should be earth-shattering to the narrative of the political class, yet it will go into the thick pile of vital data and information about the virus that is not getting out to the public. For the first time, the CDC has attempted to offer a real estimate of the overall death rate for COVID-19, and under its most likely scenario, the number is 0.26%. Officials estimate a 0.4% fatality rate among those who are symptomatic and project a 35% rate of asymptomatic cases among those infected*jump, which drops the overall infection fatality rate (IFR) to just 0.26% — almost exactly where Stanford researchers pegged it a month ago.RPT

Keep in mind in March of 2020 I noted that the rates would be from 0.03% to 0.25% — not to brag or anything, but I am in the 23-studies lane-lines of the Stanford study mentioned in June. I just couldn’t differentiate between age groups, but that was assumed as the average age of deaths.

All this is to say is that to compare such an even is at best a non-sequitur. Much like the same person’s comparing

Dr. Sarfati, with whom I agree on most things, shows unfortunately his twisted logic on vaccines — all the while calling those who disagree with his position in the slightest: anti-vaxers.”

Here is his posting:

Anti-vaxers: Is there any other vaccine in history that required three doses in a year and yet still didn’t prevent transmission of the virus it was meant to protect against?

Reality: remember your childhood vaccines which kept you safe and which you are depriving your children from.

Here are the two responses I wish to note:

S.L. – I shouldn’t respond because I am not an ‘anti-vaxxer’ (I am vaccinated with every vaccine my GP recommended), but I’d just like to comment on this vaccine schedule. I (and most people my age) received FAR less vaccinations that suggested on the above or the current schedule in Australia. I received 6 vaccinations in my first five years of life in Germany in 1970: tuberculosis, smallpox, measles, diphtheria, polio and whooping cough. Some of these were boosted ONCE. So apart from the occasional influenza vaccine (which I take when the ‘season’ looks particularly ominous) I have had perhaps 15 shots in my life. My children (born in the early millennium in Australia) had many additional vaccinations but still not as many as required above. We followed the increased schedule but spaced out and separated the MMR vaccines at the suggestion of our pediatrician at the time. We also refused the HPV vaccine for both children at 14. They were not about to be sexually active. We decided (with them) that they can choose to take the HPV vaccine as adults. Both kids (19 and 22) are healthy and have always been. Same with me – though I’ve worked in education all my life i.e.. in contact with many different people every day and exposed to every ‘childhood disease’ outbreak you can think of. I have no compelling reason to accept uncritically that vaccinations requirements should have needed to go up the way they have because someone wants to improve our health. lol.

Here is my response as well… a bit shorter:

ME – I honestly do not know. Are those doses minimized due to age? And a single or two dose be given to adults? To Wit….

To support my observational question…. well, somewhat answer it — the ATLANTIC notes the following:

  • ….10 micrograms of RNA in each Pfizer shot, a third of the 30-microgram recipe that’s given to people 12 and older. Further down the road, pending another set of votes, authorizations, and recommendations, kids 4 and younger will get a wee 3 micrograms, a tenth of what their parents get…..

Historically, variola major [smallpox] has a case-fatality rate of about 30% (FDA | TIME). In the United States, the 1952 polio epidemic became the worst outbreak in the nation’s history. Of the nearly 58,000 cases reported that year, 3,145 died and 21,269 were left with mild to disabling paralysis.

(FLASHBACK) Dr. Kelly Victory says delta variant is far, far less lethal

So, even if say 3 adult vaccination shots are needed for such a horrible disease… to require boosters and laws regulating Covid “vaccines,” is not where the evidence leads. The fatality rates and survivability of Covid compared and an argument for vaccinations is moot. Both in the IFR, CFR, and the efficacy of these “vaccines” for Covid are the basis to reject such logic in the OP (original post).

I have also in the past questioned the death rate and other factors are wildly overcounted.

Hospitalization Numbers:

Death Numbers:

Two examples from this post to make a point:

Example One:

A pair of gunshot deaths that counted among COVID fatalities have earned the ire of a county coroner in Colorado. Grand County, in the sparsely-populated (but breathtaking) northwestern quarter of the state, is home to fewer than 15,000 people and has been lucky enough to endure only a handful of deaths related to the Wuhan Virus.

But of those five deaths, County Coroner Brenda Bock says two actually died of gunshot wounds.

Bock sounded furious in her interview with CBS4 News in Denver, and with good reason. Grand County’s economy is heavily reliant on tourism, and as Bock told CBS4, “It’s absurd that they would even put that on there.”

“Would you want to go to a county that has really high death numbers?” she asked, presumably rhetorically. “Would you want to go visit that county because they are contagious? You know I might get it, and I could die if all of a sudden one county has a high death count. We don’t have it, and we don’t need those numbers inflated.”

Bock told CBS4 that because the victims had tested positive for COVID-19 within 30 days of having been shot, the county classified them as “deaths among cases.”

That’s a curious definition, but one required by the national reporting rules created by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention….

(PJ-MEDIA)

That is literally 40%!

Example two:

  • Just one more of the many examples I could share is the New York Times getting 40% wrong of their “died from Covid-19 under 30-years old” front page news story. Mmmm, no, they didn’t die of Covid.

Another four-zero. Just sayin.

First Omicron Death (With or Of)

Promises, Promises

I.E., if masks work, why don’t they work? If lockdowns work, why don’t lockdowns work?

I think these stories are related to the non-sequitur nature of the OP… in that it is a false equivalency:

Martin Luther would surely be on the “keep society open” side considering the evidence.

Jehovah? Or Yahweh? J-Dubs Miss The Mark As Usual

(Updated from 4-2010)

The name, “Jehovah,” comes from the mixing of two words. Hebrew has no vowels, so how did we end up with God’s name having them? God’s name in the Hebrew was YHWH, but the Jews took the passage of taking God’s name in vain as applying to even just mentioning His name. So, in public readings, the Jews would use such words as ADONAI (or adhonay), meaning LORD. As translations of the scriptures became common, the merging of the two words (YHWH and adonai) became warranted to allow vowels into the word via the changing dialect.

Therefore, the letters a – o – a were taken from adonai and added to YHWH. The result for the English version of God’s name? Yahovah. or Jehovah. Now, the Jehovah Witness would say that Jehovah is the most correct form of God’s name. Unfortunately for them, it is a crude mixture of two.

  • By the way, what does YHWH mean? It is part of the root verb which means, “to be.” Remember Exodus 3:14 where God said I AM is My name? This “I AM” is from the root verb “to be.” God is basically saying that: He is eternal, beyond even the time-space dimension, worthy to be worshipped, followed, and adored as well as being set apart from every other “being” known to Moses or the world.

Back on track. Lets see what some resources say the correct pronunciation of YHWH is:

Jehovah – “False reading of Hebrew YAHWEH.” Webster’s College Dictionary

Jehovah – “Intended as a transition of Hebrew YAHWEH, the vowel points of Hebrew ADHONAY (my lord) being erroneously substituted for those of YAHWEH; from the fact that in some Hebrew manuscripts the vowel points of ADHONAY (used as a euphemism for YAHWEH) were written under the consonants YHWH of YAHWEH to indicate that ADHONAY was to be substituted in oral reading of YAHWEH. Jehovah is a Christian transliteration of the tetragrammaton long assumed by many Christians [not this one] to be the authentic reproduction of the Hebrew sacred name for God but now recognized to be a late hybrid form never used by6 the Jews.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary

Jehovah – “is an erroneous form of the name of the God of Israel.” Encyclopedia Americana

Jehovah – “the pronunciation ‘Jehovah’ is an error resulting among Christians from combining the consonants YHWH with the vowels of ADHONAY.” Encyclopedia Britannica

Jehovah – “false form of the divine name YAHWEH” New Catholic Encyclopedia

Jehovah – “is a mispronunciation of the Hebrew YHWH the name of God. This pronunciation is grammatically impossible. The form ‘Jehovah’ is a philological impossibility” The Jewish Encyclopedia

Jehovah – “an erroneous pronunciation of the Tetragrammaton, or four-lettered name of God made up of the Hebrew letters Yod He Vav He. The word ‘Jehovah’ therefore is a misreading for which there is no warrant and which makes no sense in hebrew” The Universal Jewish Encyclopedia

Jehovah – “is an erroneous form of the divine name of the covenant God of Israel” The New Schaff-Herzog Encyclopedia

Jehovah – “is an artificial form” The Interpreters Dictionary of the Bible

Jehovah – “the vowels of one word with the consonants of the other were misread as ‘Jehovah’” Encyclopedia International

Jehovah – “is an inaccurate reconstruction of the name of God in the old testament” Merits Student Encyclopedia

Jehovah – “When Christian scholars of Europe first began to study Hebrew, they did not understand what this really meant, and they introduced the hybrid name ‘Jehovah’… The true pronunciation of the name YHWH was never lost. Several early Greek writers of the Christian church testify that the name was pronounced ‘YAHWEH.’ This is confirmed, at least for the vowel of the first syllable of the name, by the shorter form Yah, which is sometimes used in poetry (e.g. Exodus 15:2)… The personal name of God of Israel is written in the Hebrew Bible with the four consonants YHWH and is referred to as the ‘Tetragrammaton.’ At least until the destruction of the First Temple in 586 B.C.E. this name was regularly pronounced with its proper vowels, as is clear from the Lachish Letters, written shortly before that date.” Encyclopedia Judaica

Jehovah – “a supreme deity recognized and the only deity worshipped by Jehovah’s Witnesses.” Webster’s Third New International Dictionary

On page 195 of the Jehovah Witness book, Reasoning from the Scriptures, it reads that the original form was lost, and that no one actually knows the correct pronunciation of the name Yahweh:

As usual, misinformation and misrepresentation.  But if page 195 in this book by the Watchtower disagrees with all the available evidence, the Jehovah Witness will clasp to the Watchtower’s understanding of truth.

 

The Crusades | Dr. Clay Jones (Apologetics315)

(Originally posted May, 2011)

APOLOGETICS315 INTERVIEWS Professor Clay Jones in regards to church history and the Crusades. He deals with some myths and corrects many historical errors in understanding. Apologetics315 interviews can be uploaded via i-Tunes for free:

Assistant Professor of Apologetics, Biola University

Dr. Clay Jones (D. Min and M.Div) is Assistant Professor of Apologetics in the graduate program in Christian Apologetics at Biola University. For several years, Jones was the host of “Content for Truth,” a weekly, call-in-talk radio program (nationally syndicated through the USA Radio Network), which sought to provide a forum for how to think Christianly about issues of the Bible, theology and culture. He has also authored Prepared Defense, an interactive apologetics software program, along with diverse encyclopedia articles on theodicy, evil, and suffering; journal articles on why God ordered the destruction of the Canaanites, and has a forthcoming book, Why God Allows Evil. Dr. Jones has been on the pastoral staff of two large churches and continues to speak widely on why God allows evil; how to think about the Crusades, Inquisitions, Witch-hunts, etc.; the glory that awaits the Christian in heaven; and related topics. (His blog can be found here: CLAYJONES.NET)

The above are these three combined:

The article and books Dr. Jones recommends are here:

One should also visit my large post on the CRUSADES:

I deal — somewhat — with the beginning of the crusades and their cause in an older post, reproduced below:

THE CRUSADES

This is from a philosophy 101 class my son and I took at a local community college. Francis Collins, one of America’s leading scientists and head of the Genome Project for America – one of the most important scientific programs of our day, stepped outside his expertise and tried to don on a cap of a historian at times. Here is my critique of a portion of Collins book[5] for class:

b. Faith in God is harmful, since “throughout history terrible things have been done in the name of religion” (p. 39).

Another favorite of the skeptic.  Here Collins drops the ball in my opinion.  I will critique two aspects of his work: i. his understanding of Islam, and ii. His understanding of comparative crimes.

i. Collins is getting out of his genre a bit.  If I met him I would probably hand him two books by Robert Spencer.  Quickly, before I quote Spencer.  Muhammad personally ordered (and partook in) the slitting of 900 throats of men, women, and children.  Jesus, when Peter cut off the Roman soldiers ear, told Peter to put the sword away and healed the soldiers ear.

The nine founders among the eleven living religions in the world had characters which attracted many devoted followers during their own lifetime, and still larger numbers during the centuries of subsequent history. They were humble in certain respects, yet they were also confident of a great re­ligious mission. Two of the nine, Mahavira and Buddha, were men so strongminded and self-reliant that, according to the records, they displayed no need of any divine help, though they both taught the inexorable cosmic law of Karma. They are not reported as having possessed any consciousness of a supreme personal deity. Yet they have been strangely deified by their followers. Indeed, they themselves have been wor­shipped, even with multitudinous idols.

All of the nine founders of religion, with the exception of Jesus Christ, are reported in their respective sacred scriptures as having passed through a preliminary period of uncertainty, or of searching for religious light. Confucius, late in life, confessed his own sense of shortcomings and his desire for further improvement in knowledge and character. All the founders of the non-Christian religions evinced inconsistencies in their personal character; some of them altered their prac­tical policies under change of circumstances.

Jesus Christ alone is reported as having had a consistent God-consciousness, a consistent character himself, and a con­sistent program for his religion. The most remarkable and valuable aspect of the personality of Jesus Christ is the com­prehensiveness and universal availability of his character, as well as its own loftiness, consistency, and sinlessness.[6]

Not to mention that just saying the Crusades were wrong is almost jeuvinile.  Robert Spencer talks a bit about the lead up to Christendom finally responding — rightly at first, woefully latter.

The Third Crusade (1188-1192). This crusade was proclaimed by Pope Gregory VIII in the wake of Saladin’s capture of Jerusalem and destruction of the Crusader forces of Hattin in 1187. This venture failed to retake Jerusalem, but it did strengthen Outremer, the crusader state that stretched along the coast of the Levant.[7]

The almost Political Correct myth is that the crusades were an unprovoked attack by Europe against the Islamic world.[8] I can see with quoting Tillich and Bonhoeffer, although worthy men to quote, they are typically favorites of the religious left. Robert Schuller and Desmond Tutu on the back of the cover of Collins first edition are also dead give a ways.  So PC thought is entrenched in Collins general outlook on religion and life.  Continuing:

The conquest of Jerusalem in 638 stood as the beginning of centuries of Muslim aggression, and Christians in the Holy Land faced an escalating spiral of persecution. A few examples: Early in the eighth century, sixty Christian pilgrims from Amorium were crucified; around the same time, the Muslim governor of Caesarea seized a group of pilgrims from Iconium and had them all executed as spies – except for a small number who converted to Islam; and Muslims demanded money from pilgrims, threatening to ransack the Church of the Resurrection if they didn’t pay. Later in the eighth century, a Muslim ruler banned displays of the cross in Jerusalem. He also increased the anti-religious tax (jizya) that Christians had to pay and forbade Christians to engage in religious instruction to others, even their own children.

Brutal subordinations and violence became the rules of the day for Christians in the Holy Land. In 772, the caliph al-Mansur ordered the hands of Christians and Jews in Jerusalem to be stamped with a distinctive symbol. Conversions to Christianity were dealt with particularly harshly. In 789, Muslims beheaded a monk who had converted from Islam and plundered the Bethlehem monastery of Saint Theodosius, killing many more monks. Other monasteries in the region suffered the same fate. Early in the ninth century, the persecutions grew so severe that large numbers of Christians fled to Constantinople and other Christians cities. More persecutions in 923 saw additional churches destroyed, and in 937, Muslims went on a Palm Sunday rampage in Jerusalem, plundering and destroying the Church of Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection.[9]

A pastor once made mention to me that to paint a picture of the crusaders in a single year in history is like showing photos and video of Hitler hugging children and receiving flowers from them and then showing photos and video of the Allies attacking the German army. It completely forgets what Hitler and Germany had done prior.

While the church withheld the Bible from most, so the misuse of it wasn’t the case as much as a drive for political supremacy – and in fact was the catalyst for the Reformers and pre-Reformers getting copies of it into the laities hand so they could actually read what the Bible said on such matters – the response by the West’s only large organization to the Islamo-Fascism of the day was in fact a net-good. (Actually showing that God can bring good out of the bad.) This response may have been carried out wrongly at times engendering people’s fears and prejudices, however, the Bible played no role in these fears or prejudices. Mainly because the people involved in these atrocities had no access to a Bible. That aside, the totality of the Crusades [good and bad] was a net moral good for our planet and shows God’s providence over the course of history.

Read more: RPT Homosexuality-A Christian Ethic? (FYI, I need to update this post… a lot)