(continued) Unbeknownst to Brian and Rich, powerful aliens from Alpha Centuri were listening in on their conversation. The aliens thought it a shame that Rush was not a musician. After some discussion, they decided to make a band which was otherwise just like Rush, but which was itself, or rather, himself, a musician – a power trio who was a virtuoso. For starters, they copied the patterns of Peart, Lee, and Lifeson, ensuring they could duplicate their musical abilities. Then, they set about making a power-trio-man.

It seemed to them that Lee was the font of Rush. So first they created the new Lee. But they made him with an unstoppable urge to rock, and a power, like theirs, to create things from nothing. He automatically gave rise to the new Lifeson, who immediately knew that while a guitarist and a bassist may jam together, the band would take on a whole new qualitative dimension were it to get an excellent drummer. And so Lee and Lifeson cooperated to bring into existence the new Peart. The three immediately knew that they had all it took to rock mightily, and so had no overriding motive to bring about a fourth band member. All of this happened in an instant, the moment Lee was made – he gave rise to Lifeson, and the two of them gave rise to Peart. Given the existence and nature of Lee (that is, the new one), it was inevitable that the new Lifeson and the new Peart should also exist. Thus was Rush 2.0 born.

If that were all the aliens had done, you’d probably think that this was the genesis of a band, but not of a power-trio-musician. But the aliens did more. First, they assured that Lee was a perfect musician, and that the other two were as well. Second, they built the three so that they could not but cooperate. None could grandstand, go his own direction, or lose concentration; when Rush 2.0 played, the three played perfectly together. Finally, they did this by tying the wills together in an odd way. Each was unable to make a choice unless each of the others consented; and all of this happened as quickly as one agent normally makes a decision. Truly, they played as one.

But the aliens decided that Rush 2.0 was not one musician. It was much like a musician – it was a unified source of actions, and one could imagine that it, like its parts, had a will of its own. But it had neither consciousness, nor knowledge, nor will, though it could be, confusingly, described as such, because each of its parts had those features.

But a few among these creative alien rock fans were not willing to give up. They modified Rush 2.0 into Rush 3.0, by giving the band’s members perfect access to one another’s thoughts, breaking down a sort of mental privacy that normally separates persons one from another. They thought that functional unity was not enough; what was needed to make the three one musician was “mutual interpenetration.” This involved the sort of telepathic transparency noted, but also required that the being of each should somehow overlap. First, they partially merged the bodies of the three so that they all shared a foot. This seriously complicated Peart’s drumming, but their virtuosity remained intact. But this seemed to make them just three cooperating, intimate musicians sharing a foot – not a musician. So they made the body overlap total.

In the end, Rush 3.0 looked like a one-man band. On stage, one observed just one figure with oddly incoherent features furiously playing some very odd instruments. But this one body was shared by three souls; three agents, their wills unbreakably tied together as described, and with total access to one another’s thoughts, continued to play together. As Rush 3.0 took the stage, the aliens observed that each man would introduce himself, taking turns with the one mouth, but no fourth musician would introduce himself.

The aliens decided that Rush 3.0, though it looked from the outside like a musician, was not itself a musician. A musician was a man, not a body, and Rush 3.0 consisted, for all their efforts, of three men, three very intimate and unified men sharing a body. The aliens couldn’t imagine any way to make them further overlap short of annihilating two of the there souls, and so, two of the three musicians. So, they gave up. At best, they could produce a mutant which could be mistaken for a power-trio-musician. Being scrupulously honest, they wouldn’t consider presenting this mutant to the masses and telling them that it was a musician. They decided that a guitar-bass-drums power trio would always be a trio of musicians, and never itself a musician. 

“Is this your first Rush concert?”

“Yes, I’m so excited.”

Rich and Brian had been talking about this for months. Like geeky hard rock fans worldwide, they had long been in awe of Neal Peart’s furious and precise drumming, Geddy Lee’s dancing bass and soaring vocals, and the rich textures and screams of Alex Lifeson’s electric guitar. This was their first Rush concert, and they crowded towards the entrance with thousands of other fans, many decked out in concert t-shirts.

But Rich and Brian had an edge over nearly all of them: backstage passes. “I can’t wait to meet him,” said Rich.

“Who?”

“Rush.”

Brian gave him a strange look but said nothing.

Rich continued, “I want to ask him how he came up with the lyrics for 2112, how many classical guitar lessons he took, and how he keeps his voice in shape.”

“You mean, you want to ask Neal the first question, Alex the second, and Geddy the third?”

“Sure – they’re all Rush. But I do think that Rush is the greatest rock musician ever.”

“Rich… Rush isn’t a musician. Rush is a band.”

“Yes, I know, but they play so well together, it is as if they were one musician – one musician playing three instruments at once – sometimes four, when Geddy uses the bass pedals and plays keyboard too. Man, Rush is the best. He’s so talented.”

“You mean, they’re so talented, right?”

“Strictly, yes. I think Rush is a real thing, with three musicians for parts, but it is not literally a person, much less a musician. But we can say, without confusion, that Rush plays a mean guitar, is an awesome drummer, and sings in a high, spacey way.”

“No, we can’t! If you said that, say, to your little brother, you would only confuse him. Remember, he thinks Pink Floyd is a guy whose first name is ‘Pink!’”

The concert was a memorable one, and Rich and Brian much enjoyed their brief backstage meeting with their heroes. To Brian’s relief, faced with the band itself, Rich seemed to drop his strange speculations, and only addressed questions to one musician at a time. Perhaps he realized that Rush itself would have no voice to reply, nor any thoughts to express. “A band,” thought Brian to himself, “is made of musicians, but is not itself a musician.”

Surely Brian’s last point is correct. We may disagree about whether the band Rush a thing in its own right or merely a collection of things, but all should agree that it is not a musician. And even if it is a thing, just because it is composed of musicians, just because it has musicians as parts, it doesn’t follow that it is a musician itself. It isn’t. When Rush is on stage, only three musicians are playing, not four – even when four instruments are being played.

(to be continued…)

I was just within earshot, pretending to read. The girl leaned into her mother, received a kiss on her forehead, and then went back the children’s section of the library. The mother returned to her book.

She was a beautiful woman, with a kind face. How sad, I thought, that all she has is her daughter. She must be a widow, or have been abandoned. Has she no living siblings, or parents? Or has the family been torn asunder by some falling out? How sad. I went back to my book, but was too blue to enjoy it.

A quarter of an hour later, a young boy approached the woman. He looked to be about five years old. She reached out knowingly to him, and he fell into her embrace.

“Jimmy, you’re my only true love,” she said.

I had misunderstood. Just because the daughter is her only true love, it didn’t follow that the son wasn’t also her only true love. They both were.

Was this a mystery, a contradiction of the heart? Did she really only love Mellissa, and also, really only love Jimmy? I decided not. It was just a phrase. I imagined that at home, she probably has a husband who is also her “only true love”. But when she says it to him, I wondered, does it mean something more exclusive? What about when she says it to the dog, or to the cat?

She assembled her children and they approached the counter to check out their books. I think I heard the girl say, of two different books, that each was her “favorite.”

This time, the second and final part of our tale. (Part 1.) It features staggering scientific breakthroughs and moderate fool-pitying, so it should be suitable for all audiences. 

Bill went on to serve for several decades at the Central Police Station, and often enjoyed regaling guests or fellow employees with tales of the two most confused polygamists he’d run across. “Probably too much of the firewater,” he’d opine, “or else, too much metaphysics!” He even gussied up the stories a bit, making the first feature identical triplets, and the second, two sets of conjoined twins. (In the improved version, the man insisted that he’d only two wives, but plainly, he had four – just, in pairs).

But the young Bill never expected the amazing advances in science that took place throughout his career, and for the most staggering alleged polygamy case he could imagine. In brief, it’d been discovered that Aristotelian-Thomist dualists were correct. A human self, it turned out, was the combination of a body and a substantial form, or soul. Both physicalists and Cartesian dualists now receded to the shadows for good, along with phylogiston chemists, ether physicists, and phrenologists. People now laughed at the bad old days when people dismissed souls out of hand as undetectable. Now, souls could easily be detected, and it could now be observed, via instruments, for example, that the soul leaves the body about five minutes and forty seconds after brain waves have ceased. And the rough date of “quickening” was known as well. Early fetuses, it turned out, lacked souls, and so were not human persons, until about mid-way through the third month.

It had been awhile since Bill had seen a polygamy prosecution, but on this particular day, officer Young brought him a distraught young man named Mr. Gill Tea.

“Mr. Tea,” queried Bill, “I see that you’re charged with polygamy.”

“I’m guilty as sin,” bawled the young Mr. Tea.

This is a new one, thought Bill. I guess they don’t all deny it. “Guilty, eh. How many wives do you have?”

“Two, sir. But I didn’t know.”

“What, you couldn’t tell them apart?”

“Yes, well, no. Well, sort of.”

It turned out that Gill had married what he thought was a young woman named Sue. Sometimes, Sue was mellow, slack, almost depressed. And at other times, her life was a manic whirl of activity, and she was the life of the party. At these times, she called herself “Suzie.”

“I thought it was just her style, to use that zippier, more upbeat sounding name when she was ‘up’. And she responded so well to the meds.”

“Medicine?”

“Yes, for manic-depression. When she took that, she was always Sue. Little did I know!”

It turned out that what looked like one woman was in fact two women sharing a body. A human being, everyone now knew, was a soul combined with a body. But thanks to the new soul-detection technology, it was known that this body contained two souls, only one of which could “drive” the body at a time. The medicine in question, it turned out, simply prevented the Suzie-soul from taking the driver’s seat. But it still composed Suzie all along, just as the same body plus a different soul composed Sue.

And the pitiable Mr. Tea had unknowingly married both. After inadvertently courting the both of them, he married Sue is a lovely traditional ceremony. Then, on a trip to Vegas, he was surprised when Suzie insisted on hitting a drive through wedding chapel, and redoing the paperwork and everything with the name “Suzie.” He called this event re-affirming their vows, but he eventually noticed that Suzie simply called it their wedding.

As Bill knew, this was actually a well-known phenomenon. It had turned out that what used to be called “multiple personality disorder” victims (a diagnosis now discarded) fell into two camps: malfunctioning selves, and multiple selves sharing a body. Gill’s wives Sue and Suzie were examples of the latter – their souls two, but with only a body between them.

“I wouldn’t be too worried, Mr. Tea,” said Bill. You’ll just have to divorce one. Society is very tolerant of adultery these days, especially if your spouse has no objection to it.”

“I’m a good Mormon!” blurted Gill.

“I’m sure you are, son. Say, have you ever thought of refuting the charge?”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re a polygamist only if Sue and Suzie are not the same wife.”

“Yes.”

“But, what if you argued that they are the same wife?” suggested Bill.

“That’s nonsense. A wife just is a certain woman. And we all know that they’re not the same woman, for a woman is a soul-body compound, and Sue is one such compound, and Suzie’s another.”

“Not so fast. What if you admit that a woman just is a certain soul-body compound, but argue that different women can be the same wife?”

“I don’t understand. A wife just is a certain woman. I pity the fool who relies on that argument.”

“Mr. Tea, stop your fool-pitying. I’ve seen a lot of cases like this. Bear with me.”

“I’m listening.”

“See, you admit that Sue is not Suzie, and Suzie isn’t Sue. But you urge that they should be counted as one.”

“What does that mean, though?”

“It means that they share a single body.”

“Yeah, well… that seems like, I don’t know, an abuse of language. I mean, Sue’s a good wife. Suzie is not such a good wife. So, they just can’t be the same wife. If they were, they’d be equally good or bad at wifing.”

“I see your point,” conceded Bill. He gave up his attempt to coach the pitiable Mr. Tea. In the end, Mr. Tea too was convicted, but only of involuntary polygamy, and the judge suspended his fine.

Bonus internet nonsense here.

 Here’s a bit of fresh fiction, possibly part of a future paper or book some day. Of course, there is purpose behind the madness. (See 2.2.2 here.) It is dedicated to philosopher Bill Hasker. Enjoy.

It was a quiet day at the Salt Lake City Central Police Station. Bill looked at the clock and fiddled with his pen. Two hours till quitting time, and he’d only booked two new arrests. Little did he know, it would still turn out to be an interesting day.

“Bill, wake up.” It was officer Smith, escorting a bearded man in handcuffs. “Book this fellow, would you?”

It was a polygamy case. Bill had seen these from time to time. Although the state of Utah had always outlawed polygamy, and the Mormon church had stopped the practice in 1890, ever since, there had been holdouts, people the media called “Mormon Fundamentalists” who insisted on practicing the old Brigham Young lifestyle, usually out in the boondocks.

“But I’m innocent,” insisted the accused, whose name was Mr. Dienay.

“That’s what they all say,” mumbled Bill, filling out a form.

“Seriously, I have but one wife. But they say I have two.”

“Well, Mr. Dienay, you’ll have you chance to prove that in court. Now, who lives with you?”

“There are my children Alma, Nephi, Ether, and Moroni.” Bill recorded their names, dates of the birth, sexes.

“And there’s my wife Polly. And there’s my wife Molly.”

“I thought you said you only had one wife.”

“Oh, they’re the same wife!”

Bill adopted an uncomprehending stare. “The same wife,” he flatly echoed.

“Absolutely.”

“Mr. Dienay,” continued Bill, “please describe them.”

“Well, Molly is a brunette, about as tall as me, and fair-skinned. Polly is a redhead, very short, and has freckles.”

“And they’re the same wife.”

“Yes.”

“If they were the same wife, wouldn’t they be exactly… the same?”

“Oh no, sir. But they’re one wife, all right. I’m a monogamist.”

“That means that you have only one wife, I mean, at a time.”

“I know what “monogamist” means! A monogamist is a man who is married to some woman, and any wife he has is the same wife as her.”

“So, a monogamist can have more than one wife?”

“You’re not listening. Polly and Molly are one wife.”

“Um… what do you mean, what you say that they are one wife.”

“They’re to be counted as one.”

“Yes, I get that… but why?”

“Because, they have exactly the same DNA. Polly and Molly are identical twins. And when the DNA is the same, the wife is the same. They differ, yes, and are two women, but when you understand how to count them, you’ll get the right count, my friend: one. One wife.”

“Good luck with that defense,” laughed Bill. With that, he sent Mr. Deinay to his cell.

As Bill pondered this interesting way of counting wives, officer Smith returned with another arrestee to book. His too was charged with being married simultaneously to two women, and like Mr. Deinay, he denied the charge. His name was Mr. Joyner.

“Mr. Joyner, I need your wives’ names, please.”

“I only have just one wife, sir.”

Bill paused and squinted. “Mr. Joyner, if your one wife puts on a hat, how many hats does she put on?”

“Two.”

“Mr. Joyner, how many full names does your one wife have?”

“Two – Mrs. Jill Joyner and Mrs. Jane Joyner.”

Bill was on to him. “Mr. Joyner, are your wives… I mean, are Jill and Jane identical twins?”

“No, sir. But they are twins.”

“When your one wife puts on a pair of pants, how many pairs does she put on?”

“One – but it’s a special one, with three legs! My wife Jill and Jane are conjoined twins. They share a leg.”

“That’s interesting. I’ve heard of conjoined ladies marrying, but usually it is two two different gentlemen. Anyway, Mr. Joyner, you have two wives. I assume you’re going to plead guilty.”

“No – I’m innocent! How can a monogamist like me confess to bigamy?”

“Mr. Joyner, what do you think a monogamist is?”

“A monogamist, sir, is a man who is married to a woman, and any woman that is his wife has a body not wholly distinct from that woman’s body.”

“So you think that Jill and Jane are one wife.”

“Yes, can you not count?”

“They’re different, so they’re two!”

“Well, two ladies, sure. But you count wives by discrete bodies. If some ladies share a body, or a part of a body, they are exactly one wife. Different wives have non-overlapping bodies.”

Bill had heard enough. “That’s ridiculous. Don’t you know what a wife is?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” shot back Mr. Joyner.

“A wife just is a certain woman, a person, a being with feelings, knowledge, free will.”

“Your point being…?”

“You’ve got two of those. It’s just that they can’t be separated, and they share a body part or two.”

“You’re begging the question,” protested Mr. Joyner.

Both Mr. Joyner and Mr. Deinay lost their cases, and both spent time in Utah low-security penitentiaries.

To be continued…

I remember going out for a walk one day around our neighborhood in Claremont; it was probably the dead of winter, but, you know, 55 degrees, since this was Southern California. I was praying, and I saw in someone’s front yard a sapling that had been tied of straight with a couple of stakes and cables, forcing it to grow straight. I knew that my own mind was enthusiastic but undisciplined, and I prayed that God would send me teachers to make me grow straight.

Of my twelve applications, I got into to three places, and I ended up  going to Brown University for my Ph.D. I had a great time there; no complaints at all. I’ll cover my time there in two posts.

The two who most influenced me were my dissertation adviser James Van Cleve and Victor Caston.

Victor is a ridiculously smart ancient and medieval specialist, interested particularly in philosophy of mind. I served as his Teaching Assistant for his ancient philosophy class, from which I learned a ton, and I attended Greek reading groups with him. Later, he would meet to read Aquinas with me in Latin. Urbane but not over-polite, with a smile he would simply call you out on your inconsistencies. He knew all the wiles of the species Homo Academicus, and he had an excellent way of ratting out bad philosophy, such as people parading a pet theory, skating by on the abuse of abstract nouns, or simply not reading a text carefully enough. This last one was a biggie. Having written his dissertation on Aristotle (and, on one of the most obscure issues in Aristotle), he was acutely aware of how medieval philosophers and 20th c. Thomists would misread Aristotle through the lenses of their own theories. He had an intense work ethic and attention to detail. I teased him about his caffeine intake, and about his paper with 400 references at the end. But I also tried to imitate his seriousness and precision. At one point, perhaps half way through, after reading a term paper of mine he informed me that I’d turned a corner in my development as a philosopher, and that meant a lot to me.

Van Cleve, who we students referred to as “JVC”, is another unique and dear man. Terrifically smart, he’s naturally humble and soft-spoken, but not easily swayed. He’ll sit there and listen through some big-shot philosopher’s paper, taking notes, then raise his hand, and without the slightest pretense puncture the whole thing with one soft spoken, sincerely asked question. He’s an early modern philosophy specialist, and honestly, I should have taken more with him than I did. One year he did a great graduate seminar on the philosophy of Thomas Reid. From a Caston course, I’d become interested in the problem of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, and had plunged into the literature on that problem, as well as the literature on what philosophers call logical fatalism. With Van Cleve, I read some fascinating work by logicians on temporal logics, work which was in large measure inspired by the traditional discussions. He has great patience in working through technical, dense material.

There were few Christian students at Brown (except my friend Michael Pace) and no openly Christian professors, and no philosophy of religion specialists. But I came to think this was good for me. Rather than immediately attaching myself to some great Christian philosopher and becoming his mini-me, I was forced to develop my own views. Happily, Caston and Van Cleve were both interested in many questions of philosophy of religion. And also, Brown was more theist-tolerant, I think, than some top programs, due to its most famous recent philosopher Roderick Chisholm (who retired just before I went to Brown – never met him) being somewhat of a closet theist. I think Brown’s philosophical culture at the time – tough-minded, but somewhat restrained, polite, was in large measure due to him. I’ve heard stories of other places literally making a sport of devouring visiting speakers. At Brown they’d refute you, but leave your dignity intact.

I also much appreciated Ernest Sosa. He too was an admirable intellect, a profound and original epistemologist. I took and greatly enjoyed a couple of his seminars, but ended up veering away from epistemology, and towards the history of philosophy and philosophy of religion. He too was kind and helpful to me. At the time, and I assume still, he was an ex-Christian agnostic, but being friendly with folks like Plantinga, he took the view that theists and non-theists can learn a lot from one another. I agree.

There were others who helped me too, but I’d better get to the Trinity part. Towards the end of my career at Brown, I started to think about the Trinity. At some point, two friends and I – my best Christian friend in the program and another friend who was a former Christian and agnostic, decided to read through Richard Swinburne’s The Christian God. Wow! Richard knows how to argue. These years later, this is still the most careful, most philosophically sophisticated presentation of social trinitarianism.  I was much impressed, though not entirely sure I believed it. I was soon aware that Ed Feser and Kelly James Clark had argued in print that Swinburne was a tritheist. But I thought, well, this doctrine is pretty important. So what if it is tritheism? Maybe trinitarianism just is the right sort of tritheism. I mean, his Persons necessarily cooperate, can’t disagree. They are all divine and they function as if they are one agent.

At some point, as was my habit, I was digging around in the bowels of Brown’s excellent library, and ran across a book by a theology Ph.D. named Thomas Pfizenmaier, on Samuel Clarke‘s views on the Trinity. I read it, and was fascinated. In brief, it was a lot like what Swinburne was saying; the persons of the Trinity were really persons/selves. All are called “God” in the Bible, but the Father was (in some mysterious sense) the source of the others, and Clarke argues, he’s called “God” in a higher sense of the term. Plainly, Clarke had done his homework. I obtained a copy of his massive Scripture Doctrine of the Trinity, in which he numbers and sorts every verse in the New Testament that has to do with the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit. He then quotes (in Greek or Latin) pre-Nicene church fathers on these, and translates those quotes, and in the end summarizes what he says is the biblical Trinity doctrine in 55 propositions. Amazing. Why is this book out of print? Why have these arguments been ignored by academic theology for the last 200+ years? The more I read, the more I wondered. Eventually I reprinted it myself.

In short, Swinburne made me a social trinitarian, though I didn’t call it that at the time. And Clarke too, I saw, had a three agent, three self view of the Trinity. I saw that this was in a sense a point of logic. If each “Person” really is a person, and some things are true of each that aren’t true of the other two, then we really do have three here. Modalism is out. I can’t remember if it was at Brown or shortly thereafter, but at some point I read articles by Cornelius Plantinga making a plausible case that “social” Trinity theories were what the 4th c. Greek fathers meant all along.

And I was becoming aware that one’s theological theories really shape how one interprets the Bible, to an alarming degree. This was an application of what I learned from Victor Caston. I realized that I needed to really revisit the whole issue, looking at the Bible on its own terms, and finding a consistent way to understand it. I’d had experiences in church of the preacher reading a text, and basically saying, with little shame, “Well, we can see here that it seems to say P. Of course, we all know that not-P is true.” And then he’d move on! There’s no integrity in that, I decided, and I just can’t be that smug, that complacent in what my tradition tells me it is supposed to say.

I also started to realize that despite the similarities, there were some pretty important differences between Swinburne and Clarke.

Next time: a book that changed my life.

The only place I got into was the Claremont Graduate University, then called the Claremont Graduate School. At the time the core faculty there was Al Louch, John Vickers, and Charles Young, and D.Z. Philips for half a year. I was accepted as an M.A. student, who could then be admitted to the Ph.D. if they thought I was up to it. (As it turned out, they did.) I was at CGU for two years (1993-1995), and what I mainly did was plow through yet more early modern philosophy – Locke, Hume, Kant, and now Reid. For me, Thomas Reid was a revelation after reading Hume and Kant. I actually became very interested in the history of the so-called “Common Sense” school, and sought out and read material by thinkers as obscure as Buffier, Oswald, Beattie, and McCosh. But I found that Reid was the best philosopher among them. Around that time Keith Lehrer came out with a book on Reid, but I can say that I was into Reid just a little before it was cool. I bought a reprint of his complete works which is now thoroughly marked up.

I took two rigorous seminars (Locke, Hume) with Edwin McCann of USC, who had also been doing courses at CGU. His knowledge of early modern philosophy was truly impressive, and his empiricist and Wittgensteinian leanings were an interesting counterpoint to my own zeal for traditional metaphysics.This zeal met another critic in Jill Buroker, in a seminar wholly devoted to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

D.Z. Phillips I avoided. I’d read real epistemology (Chisholm, Plantinga, etc.) and was always unimpressed with the later-Wittgenstein approach, especially to the epistemology of religion. Anyway, I heard it all repeatedly from some of my fellow students, who also said that every Phillips class was basically the same line over and over. I never could identify with the quasi-conversion stories some of them related about reading Wittgenstein’s On Certainty.

Another part-timer, who also did computer work for the college, was Dr. Joel Smith, who had been a student of the famous Wilfrid Sellars at Pittsburgh. I took an interesting History of the Philosophy of Science course with him, and he kindly  encouraged my forays into the dense work of Sellars and others.

Finally, one day I marched over to the adjoining Claremont McKenna campus ad introduced myself to Stephen T. Davis. He was as nice as could be, and I ended up taking his undergrad Philosophy of Religion class. This, I gobbled down like a cop eating doughnuts. I sat on the front row, took copious notes, and tape recorded it all to review later. He spent a lot of time on arguments for God’s existence – probably some material that later made it into this book – and I have fond memories of wandering around the Claremont campuses enjoying the metaphysical high after that class, as I pondered whether, say the ontological argument was sound. He was very helpful in his advice, and very kind to me later when I was on the job market. And he was tough- but broad-minded, non-polemical, and properly appreciate of historical philosophy – a good model for me.

What, at this time, did I think about the Trinity? Not much. By listening to some popular apologetics, I was at least a little familiar with the standard evangelical apologetics, I call it, Walter Martin way of arguing:

The Bible sez Jesus is God, the Father is God, and the Holy Spirit is God, and yet there is only one God. See: there is the Trinity!

(The cleanest version I’m aware of is this, by Francis Beckwith.) Briefly, I see this way of arguing as just confused and confusing. First, it isn’t clear at all that any creedal Trinity doctrine would follow. Second, it’s not clear that it is consistent (three different things, each being numerically identical to one thing??). It superficially follows a patristic mode of argument, but I don’t think it is the same as any of those ancient arguments. I suspect that Beckwith would not today maintain this way of arguing.

I also remember some basic defensive points, to the effect of: Why would we be surprised if the God of the Universe turned out to by greater that we can comprehend, or to have many persons in him? As I related once before, I tried some of this out on my fellow grad student Ed Feser, and he was unimpressed. (He wasn’t Catholic at that point.) Feser (rightly) not being impressed by my lazy points, I noted that I should think about this issue more some day.

Finally, I do remember privately speculating some about the subject, along the lines of modalism. See, the Holy Spirit would be God’s immanence – the Father his transcendence, and the Son his mercy. Thus, the Trinity would really be three attributes of God. See, I saved monotheism! Actually, I just added a theory to the modalist junk heap. But at least I didn’t air my thoughts in public.

D’oh!

Like many, I had read and been profoundly impressed with Alvin Plantinga’s first two Warrant books. Then I found that my fellow student Dan Speak was applying to Notre Dame for his Ph.D.. Though I had been admitted to CGU’s Ph.D. program, I too caught the Plantinga fever, and also decided that I might as well apply to a bunch of other places too. My CGU profs totally supported me in this. As it turned out, neither Dan nor I got into Notre Dame, but thanks to my recs from CGU, my applications were a little more fruitful this time around.

Next time: other coast.

As with the last post, I continue in a personal vein.

In 1989 I went away to Biola University. This was an exciting time in my life for many reasons.

I met my lovely wife (in freshman orientation!), traded my trombone (uncool) for an acoustic guitar (cool), moved to Southern California, got involved in John Wimber’s Vineyard church, and in the winter term of my freshman year, in January, I discovered Philosophy. There’s a lot I could say about all of this, but I’ll try to stick to things which are somehow relevant to my thinking about God and Jesus.We’ll get more theological as we go along.

• Philosophy. I took an intro class with a prof named Delbert Hanson, whom I remember fondly. (He passed away in 2002.) He was the first in his family to go to college. He got his PhD late in life, from USC, and spent his whole career teaching a heavy course load (eight classes a year, I believe) at Biola. When I first met him, his nordic looks, white sideburns, and glasses reminded me of Isaac Asimov. In his life he published one book, which was savaged by at least one reviewer. He was very kind to me, and spent a good amount of time talking philosophy with me, transmitting to me that insatiable curiosity and dissatisfaction with pat answers that is typical of philosophers. He was open-minded, positive, and curious, always learning new things, unlike a good many people at that stage of life. I doubt that I would be in the profession if he hadn’t been there. He also expected me to plow through heavy tomes of historical philosophy like Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Not having any T.V. or Internet in my room, I gladly did this, and for the first time started to really work at school. (I coasted rather bored through high school, and like many Americans to some extent wasted my youth on T.V.) From his longtime friend and colleague David Ciocci I got my first tastes of Plato, philosophy of mind, and other topics. I didn’t connect as much with him personally, but he was and is a good thinker and lecturer. At the time, these two were the entire Philosophy department at Biola.
• Theology. The two systematic theologians I remember taking classes with at Biola left me cold. One guy especially was just going through the motions. In his class you would literally fill in the blanks on these books of outline notes (with blanks) that you’d buy. I remember reading the Charles Ryrie systematic theology that was assigned, and sometimes I’d want to agree with one of things Ryrie was arguing against. But the prof was uninterested in discussing anything, in or out of class. In contrast, the textual specialists seemed intellectually alive, and struck me as admirable people.
  I especially enjoyed the OT guy married to an attractive lady maybe 30 years his junior, who loved to lecture on the Song of Songs.
• Ceasing cessationism. With much excitement, my friends and I visited the then famous Anaheim Vineyard Christian Fellowship in the Fall of 1989, and we ended up attending there for a couple of years, also becoming involved in their small groups, termed “Kinship Groups”. In my first year of college I realized I had to decide this whole cessationism issue, so I read everything I could get my hands on, and scoured the New Testament to see if indeed it taught that certain spiritual gifts were meant to cease upon the close of the biblical canon. I found that there was really no New Testament basis for that claim. The cessationist view, I thought, was based on the cessationists’s experience, horror of disorder and discomfort with anything supernatural, and in many cases their contempt for non-cessationists. I read an anti-Charismatic book once in which the author mocked a lady who “taught her dog to bark in an unknown bark.” (i.e. barking in tongues) Now, I believe that someone claimed this for their o-so-spiritual-doggie, but what really does this have to do with the issue? Against cessationism, I found testimonial evidence from many Christians, ancient and recent. I eventually saw enough of these things first and second hand to become convinced of their reality. Buy me a beer some time and I’ll tell you some stories. This was the first case where I examined the Bible for myself (of course, listening to arguments from both sides) and found that it simply didn’t say what some people strongly insisted that it did – people who loudly declared that the Bible was the infallible guide for everything they did, and the sole basis for their theology. Thus I learned of the giant mis-match that can exist between people’s religious rhetoric and their actual beliefs and practice.
• Vineyard. Aside from the whiz-bang stuff, what was really distinctive about the Vineyard was their Kingdom of God theology, directly influenced by New Testament scholar George Eldon Ladd. At the time they didn’t talk a lot directly about this, but I absorbed it somewhat, as they presupposed it in their theology and ministry there. At the time my wife and I were more focused on their enchanting worship music, which was peaking at the time, and their unselfconscious way of connecting with God through singing, and through various kinds of prayer. Wimber was a winsome person, a hilarious story teller, and he could be an excellent preacher, and a good exegete of the gospels. In the early 1990s, the Vineyard entered the throes of some real weirdness, first with prophecy and prophets, then with “revival”, and eventually the “Toronto Blessing” phenomena. We didn’t get too much involved in any of those things; I adopted a sort of interested agnostic stance about a lot of it. Meanwhile, we joined a church plant, a Kinship group that had decided to become a church.
• Anti-anti-intellectualism.There was a tension between my growing interest in Philosophy and my Vineyard-type spirituality. They were more non-intellectual, really, than anti-intellectual. But my father was very anti-intellectual, referring, half-seriously, to seminaries as cemeteries. To him, pursuing arguments, seeking evidence, precise analysis – these were sure signs of the sin of pride, and were avoided by the spiritual. Some people in the Vineyard were like this too – like the guy we once met who had a graduate degree in theology, but God (he said) had told him to burn all his theology books – not because they contained important falsehoods (or at least, not mainly because of this) but because, you know, they were keeping him from God somehow. We didn’t believe that he’d heard correctly. But I was much concerned about pride – my own, that is. In I think my junior year, J.P. Moreland arrived at Talbot, which cross-listed its classes with Biola – full of hyperactive energy, zealous passion, and an abundance of opinions. At first I was put off by him – surely he of all people was corrupted by pride. But I found that this was a shallow mis-judgment. One day in class, he did what I recognized to be prophesying, in the Pauline sense. This blew me away. I realized that belief in supernatural Christianity needn’t be accompanied by ignorance or a slap-dash, careless intellectual style, as with some people who had been held up as models at the Vineyard. This ultimately freed me to consider graduate study in Philosophy. Before, like many an evangelical church kid, I sort of assumed that really spiritual people went into ministry in one way or the other. I went on to profit greatly from J.P.’s rigorous classes in contemporary epistemology, philosophy of science, and metaphysics. He even converted me, for a good while, to full blown Platonic realism about universals. Incidentally, J.P. has since joined the Vineyard – the church Wimber pastored until his death in 199

Still, to this point, I had not engaged in serious thought about the Trinity or Incarnation. As best I could tell, pretty much no one around had. But J.P. was an exception. One day in class – I forget which – he shocked us all. “Jesus is not God – that is, Jesus is not identical to God.” What? How can he say this? Isn’t this heresy? He knew he was shocking us. Simple – he explained the self-evidence of Leibniz’s Law, better called the Indiscernibility of Identicals. Some things are true of one, which are not true of the other – whether by “God” you mean the Father or the Trinity. Ergo, they aren’t one and the same thing. That a thing can’t at one time differ from itself – this is as certain as 1+1=2.

At the time, I don’t know that J.P. had his views on the Trinity worked out. In any case, I don’t recall being presented with a social Trinity theory, on which the Trinity are a group of divine persons. I’m pretty sure I’d never heard this anywhere up to this point, although it had been in theological circles for some time. Of course God was himself a person/self – you talk to him, right, and hope he talks back somehow? There are three persons in God? That’s nice – and shame on those naughty cultists for denying it – but the whole point of Christianity is to have a person-to-person relationship with God, right? Like countless evangelicals, I insisted “It’s a relationship, not a religion!”

As an undergraduate student I had brief flings with double-predestination Calvinism (based on reading, or rather, mis-reading Paul’s letter to the Romans), and totally confused truth- and knowledge- relativism, ala postmodernism, after reading a bewitching book by an English professor at some Christian college somewhere – kind of a pre-Brian-McLaren. I was just unable to separate junk pseudo-philosophy from good philosophy. At the time I thought the book was some kind of revolutionary discovery.

My fellow philosophy majors kindly pummeled me over this, and my mentor Dr. Hanson gently rolled his eyes at it, and when I had really absorbed more logic and epistemology, I was forever cured of the “postmodern condition”.

I have lived happily since then in the often considered extinct “modern” era, where people believe that a statement is true just in case the world really is that way, and where people don’t think that all standards of evidence are arbitrary creations of culture. I came to find out that these convictions really had nothing to do with smug over-confidence in one’s own beliefs, or in the oppression of people with dissenting views.

I’m not proud of these flings, but they help me to keep things in perspective when my students now glom on to goofball ideas. I will sometimes offer objections, but I always to to respect them, and communicate with them where they’re at. It’s more important to aid their intellectual development than it is to disabuse them of ungrounded beliefs they’ll probably grow out of anyway. That’s how I’d want people to treat me, and I’m happy to say that that was how most treated me when I was spouting pomo nonsense.

Next: more Modern times.

The Charismatic church we’d heretofore attended had split, and my family too decided to leave. Thus, we embarked on the unpleasant task of “church shopping”, for awhile going to a different place each Sunday.

We ended up at a place in Plano (near Dallas) called Fellowship Bible Church North (since renamed), founded and pastored by Gene Goetz, who had taught at Dallas Theological Seminary.

This church was a very different place, completely reflecting the ultraconservative DTS ethos. For one thing, it was strongly cessationist. This is roughly the view that now that the church has the Bible, it no longer needs, and God no longer really gives miraculous spiritual gifts such as healings, prophecies, or speaking in tongues. I remember meeting one guy there who asserted that at his former Charismatic church, there was a guy who whenever he (thought he) spoke in tongues, just endlessly repeated: comeinahondaleaveinamazda. I met another young lady with some congenital illness, who’d been in a “faith movement” church before, and had been told that it was her fault that she was still ill – her sinful lack of faith was to blame. Very sad. But I didn’t draw any conclusions about cessationism.

Their cessationism ended up being a bit of a problem for my parents, who still believed in those gifts, but they liked the people, and the very organized sermons, which were more like seminary lectures than you’d think. Each was accompanied by a little colored sheet, about 4×8 which has sort of outline notes that you could fill in as you listened.

Note the “Fellowship” in the title of the church. This was accomplished by members being encouraged to participate in periodic “mini-church” meetings in people’s homes. And, by the fact that after every service, they put out dispensers of cheap lemonade, which folks were encouraged to stand around and imbibe as they fellowshipped post-service.

Note the word “Bible” in the title of the church. Even more than many Protestants, we viewed the Bible as the source and foundation of all our beliefs. One didn’t hear about the creeds – just the Bible, with a particular emphasis on the letters of Paul.

At the time, I was a scrawny, awkward kid for whom youth group meetings were both scary and exciting. In my high school years, I started paying attention, to see if I really believed all this stuff. I faithfully attended youth groups, got myself a big ole’ NIV Study Bible, and even sometimes studied the Bible with a friend or two.

Like DTS, the doctrine of inerrancy was assumed. The church’s current statement of faith, probably not changed since I was there, begins thusly:

The Bible

We believe the Bible, composed of the Old and New Testaments, is God’s revelation to us, written by human authors who were supernaturally guided by the Holy Spirit. As the very word of God, it is without error in the original manuscripts and serves as our supreme and final authority in all matters about which it speaks. (2 Tim. 3:16-17; 2 Pet. 1:20-21)

Second up:

The Trinity

We believe God is One, the only God, eternally existing in three equal persons: Father, Son and Holy Spirit, each completely and fully God. (Deut. 6:4; Matt. 28:19; Eph. 4:4-6)

Theologically, this is some thin soup (not to mention some thin proof-texts). On the face of it, it is compatible with a modalistic understanding of the Trinity, on which God is a single divine self who lives eternally in three ways - so each of the Three just is that one divine self, God. And it seems incompatible with the sort of social trinitarianism that’s so popular nowadays.

Perhaps this was meant to be an abbreviated version of DTS’s article, which is a little more full:

Article II—The Godhead

We believe that the Godhead eternally exists in three persons—the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit—and that these three are one God, having precisely the same nature, attributes, and perfections, and worthy of precisely the same homage, confidence, and obedience (Matt. 28:18–19; Mark 12:29; John 1:14; Acts 5:3–4; 2 Cor. 13:14; Heb. 1:1–3; Rev. 1:4–6).

Here it is not “God” but rather “the Godhead” which exists in the three. “Godhead” here must mean not the Trinity, but rather the divine nature; that they share this, makes thee Three amount to just one god, and have all the same essential features. This might be compatible with some sort of “social” theory, the kind where the Trinity aren’t a group, but rather a god.

In any case, at the time, under the tutelage of folk who composed creeds like these, what did I think about the Trinity? Again, I would say that I didn’t think about it.

I would have said that Jesus is God, meaning, that he’s God himself, God in human form. The gospel is that Jesus died to pay for our sins, and only God himself could do that, right? Plus look at those miracles – only God could walk on water, or raise the dead, right? Basically, “Jesus” is God’s proper name, and I used “Jesus” and “God” interchangeably.

In high school I had a Mormon friend or two, and at least became aware of the existence of Jehovah’s Witnesses. I was curious about these groups and read a bit about them, but what I picked up from certain evangelical apologists is that the important thing about these naughty folk is that they have the wrong Jesus. That is, they don’t think Jesus is God. Whatever else may be different about them, this is what matters. Obviously, they don’t read the Bible or are blinded somehow by human philosophy, because they can’t see that it plainly says that Jesus is God himself. I mean, look at John 1.

I was aware that these others, this Father and Holy Spirit are also God. About how this could be I’m sure I had no views. Probably, often I thought of God  as having three parts – God is the Trinity, and this triune god is composed of the Three together. How can God be Jesus, and also the whole Trinity, of which Jesus is one third? Again, I didn’t think about it. None too clear about what this doctrine was, I would’ve just pointed at texts which seem to imply that each is individually God, and then to ones asserting there to be just one god.

I’m not sure, but I probably would’ve thought the question “How could it be?” was a perverse one. After all, God’s ways are higher than our ways. How could we expect to completely understand God Almighty?

Thus far, my views on the Trinity were entirely informed by how American evangelicals read the Bible, and slightly by how evangelical apologists argue against the theologies of some marginal groups.

I went off to college in 1989, to start the first of what eventually became three degrees. As the nineties went on, there were some new influences.

Part 3 of this series.

In this series I’m going to get a bit more personal. This will take me a while, but I’m determined to go up to the present day. Maybe when I’m done my co-bloggers will fess up too.

My parents got into the Charismatic movement in the 1960s. Don’t imagine quasi-hippies – far from it. Not the Jesus-people kind of Charismatics – no, the suit and tie and almost-beehive hairdo kind. The people would look more like the denizens of, say, the Lawrence Welk Show. But with hymns. I owned a lot of clip-on ties and bow ties in those days.

Christ as Life church was founded by an interesting fellow who claimed to have an apostolic ministry. We knew him as “Brother Bill”.

It was a small, close-knit church, on the outskirts of Dallas, Texas. Out where the land was cheap, the weeds were high, and the Junebugs were plentiful, they built a new building. We went there twice on Sunday, and often on Tuesday and Thursday nights as well. Everyone knew everyone, and my dad was the chief hymster on the piano. People raised their hands, and sang in tongues when the songs were done. But they tolerantly let little scamps like me play among the pews with baseball cards and go to the bathroom at least once every service out of boredom. Despite some similarities, we weren’t Pentecostals; services lacked that particular brand of excitement. We didn’t believe in falling down, rolling in the aisles, or any of that Benny Hinn type of stuff. There was some goofy legalism in the church; forbidden were rock music, not dressing up for church, long hair on men (or women!), pants on women, drinking, smoking, and apparently for awhile, wearing the color red! Oh yeah, and once we participated in busting up and burning some KISS records.  Heck, I’d still do that, but now on grounds of musical quality! Dancing was no good too… except for polkas! I dimly remember attending a few of those – not at church, of course. Yes, we were cool.

On the positive side, I remember that around the start of each school year, they would line up all the school kids, and one by one each kid would go through several groups of 4-6 people, with each group laying their hands on the kid and praying for God’s blessings for that year. I remember some people saying some very encouraging things to me there, and coming out the end of the prayer gauntlet feeling invigorated.

I got saved when I was seven, going on eight. I was baptized in August 1977 in an outdoor pool at the neighbor’s house, which I think was really a big round metal watering trough from a ranch. Some family friends who had been Sunday school teachers of mine gave me a plaque that day, which I still have somewhere. “Thou wilt keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee.” (Is. 26:3) At some later point they prayed for me to be baptized in the Holy Spirit, but I did not speak in tongues. Didn’t know what to make of that, but didn’t sweat it much.

What, growing up here, did I think about the Trinity? I can safely say that I didn’t think of it at all. It was an entirely non-creedal church, and we never recited things in the services. Sermons were all Bible teaching, or what passed for it. There was a lot of talk of “the Lord” (as in the New Testament), but I never wondered whether this referred to Jesus, to God, or to both (there being one and the same). I do remember mildly puzzling at some point over the song we called the Doxology, which ends “God in Three Persons, Blessed Trinity!” As best as I can recall (we left the church when I was 12), the church was profoundly anti-intellectual. It wasn’t that they talked theology but left the Trinity out; rather, I don’t think they ever really got theological (or in any way theoretical) at all. They were about spiritually, supernaturally discerning stuff. Whatever I learned, I wasn’t able to discern that Chick tracts and comic books were off the wall – had a good collection of those. I think my parents confiscated the comic book about how the Jesuits infiltrated and corrupted the NIV translation and killed Abe Lincoln. And the one about Satanists sacrificing people too. But I digress.

Eventually the church mostly broke up, as I understand it, over claims that the pastor’s wife was manipulating things behind the scenes. Being a kid, the personal relationships in the core of the church were really over my head.

The church we landed in was very different.

Part 2 in this series.

The man (right) and his expressed sense of humor (left).

Once upon a time, I met a friendly lawn gnome named Willy. I happened upon him when trimming the bushes along the side of my house – nearly slashed the poor little guy with my electric trimmer. I quickly apologized, and asked him to come inside and have a beer with me. Willy graciously accepted, and inside my kitchen, I poured him a shot glass of Sam Adams Lager, and made some small talk.

“So, have you always live here in western New York state?”

“No.”

“Where are you from?”

“California originally. But more recently, New York City. Ah, but that was before I was a gnome.”

“What? Haven’t you always been a gnome?”

“Oh no – until 2002, I was Will Farrell’s sense of humor.”

“Eh… what do you mean?”

“Just what I said, me boy. I was Will Farrell’s sense of humor. I particularly enjoyed living in New York from 1997 to 2002, when he was on Saturday Night Live. Then, having been expressed, I now existed on my own. I found New York City to be expensive and crowded, so I eventually headed up this way.”

“You mean that you were his muse, his inspiration, right? I can make no sense of you being someone’s sense of humor.”

“No – not his inspiration, but his sense of humor, like I said. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, me boy!”

“So… if you’re Will’s sense of humor, and you’re no longer in him, then it would follow that Will Farrell is no longer funny. But – he is! Haven’t you seen Elf? It came out in 2003.”

“I hope you know, there are no such things as elves! In any case, me boy, he expressed me, yes, so that as of 2002 I was a gnome. But I didn’t ever say that Will had lost his sense of humor – pay attention, boy!”

“Did you first come to exist in 2002?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Right – Farrell was born in 1967, so presumably by the early 70′s, he had a sense of humor.”

“Obviously.”

“I don’t understand how anything could be a sense of humor – or any faculty, power, or ability – at one time, and that same thing be a self at a later time.”

“Me boy, you think too literally!”

Clearly, I’d offended him. Dropping his little grome pants, he mooned me. Finishing his beer, he stomped back out to the yard, leaving me to ponder the mystery of Willy’s existence.

Next time: what’s the point of the Willy story?

“When the LORD finished speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai, he gave him the two tablets of the Testimony, the tablets of stone inscribed by the finger of God.” Ex. 31:18

Once upon a time, there was a smallish branch of Christians, now nearly forgotten to history, called the Fingerites, inhabitants of Obscurantia (formerly part of the Roman Empire). Although they put their point in the loveliest Latin terminology, their reading of the above verse amounted to this: God, though entirely bodiless through this time, inscribed Moses’s tablet with his (God’s) finger. They were opposed by a neighbouring sect in Obscurantia, which historians now dub the Schmingerites. They considered their brethren the Fingerites to be naive literalists. Both sides were intensely proud of their distinctive readings of the above finger-text, and based their exegesis of other finger of God texts on the above solutions. Lest violence ensue, they agree to hold a local council, in the hopes of reconciling their doctrinal differences.

“God has a no body at all, but has his own finger? That’s positively mysterious“, objected a leading Schmingerite theologian. “God has no body, and thus no fingers. It must be remembered that human concepts don’t literally apply to God – don’t blaspheme the Almighty with your merely human thoughts about him.”

The Fingerites were unimpressed by this bombast. “We follow the true Tradition. Our bishops trace their lineage to the apostles, and we’ve always been guided by the Holy Spirit. Our reading of the text is thus illuminated, and the text, so illuminated, plainly says that God wrote with his finger. We accept what it says. Of course, other texts say or imply that (at least pre-incarnation) God lacks a body. But we submit our Reason to the Word, and assert both these things. We are certain our doctrine is true, though we know not how it is true.”

The Schmingerites replied, “If you followed the true Tradition, like we do, you’d not ignore the precious mystery of God’s schminger. This transcendent reality, need we remind you, is much like a finger, and also much unlike one. Specifically, it is like a finger as concerns tablet-writing, but unlike it inasmuch as having a schminger doesn’t require having a body. God, in speaking to mere humans, must lisp, as nurse speaks to a baby. He inspired this text with the word “finger” because the time was not yet right for his people to behold the glorious truth of the schminger.”

“Glorious truth?” gasped the Fingerites. “Your theory is complete nonsense – you’re just imagining, like we do, that God wrote with his finger, but you’re trying to avoid objections by saying it wasn’t a finger, but this something-you-know-not-what. You call it a mystery, but it’s a negative one – one devoid of meaning.”

“Devoid of meaning? Hah! We gave you our analogies – a schminger is like a finger, as concerns tablet-writing, but unlike a finger as concerns body possession.”

At this point in the august proceedings, a hand went up in the gallery. The dueling bishops were shocked that a mere commoner would intrude on such a holy summit, but before they knew it, one of them acknowledged the hand-raiser, a frail old man, of sober countenance. He arose and spoke.

“Forgive me, holy Fathers,” he said, “but may it be that both of your are mistaken? Might it not be that the phrase “the finger of God” was to be understood metaphorically, meaning just that God directly, and not through any creaturely intermediary, put the carved words into Moses’s tablets?”

The bishops fell upon him with an hailstorm of words. They spat that he was a trespassing pryer into mysteries, an arrogant rationalist, an innovator, an individualistic denier of the teaching ministry of the Church, an impious rebel, a destroyer of faith, a denier of divine providence, a low-down dirty dog, a heretic, a schismatic, a temerarious puker of the vilest blasphemous bile. Both sides anathematized the old man most thoroughly, and as he slunk out of the council hall, both sides made sure he didn’t forget that “We have the true Tradition.” Thus was the schism averted.

Technorati Tags: mystery, mysteries, positive mysterianism, 4 R’s, negative mysterianism, schminger, hermeneutics, mysterian, mysterianism

A story about implicit faith…

Once upon a time, there was a virtuous and patriotic Russian peasant named Georgy. Georgy lived a simple life among simple people, in a village so far out in the boondocks of the USSR that World War II – what Russians call the Great Patriotic War – passed by practically unnoticed. The farming life had treated Georgy and his family well, and he had only good thoughts towards the great leader of his country, Comrade Stalin.

After a particularly vicious and thorough purge, Stalin’s government found itself in need of new secret police agents. Being vigorous, patriotic, single, and malleable, one of Stalin’s recruiters focused on Georgy. (He overlooked Georgy’s moral goodness.) Hearing about this exciting and rewarding career, Georgy was strongly inclined to make the deal.

Georgy’s friend Artem, however, was more cautious. “Georgy – are you sure this is a good idea? I mean, you’ll be expected to do,say and believe a lot of things you haven’t yet imagined.”

“Sure – well, that’s the excitement of it. What’s there to worry about? I love the Motherland. So does Uncle Joe.”

“Well, Georgy, are you a communist?”

“What’s that?”

After a stunned silence, Artem continued. “Georgy, do you believe in the collective ownership of the means of production?”

“If Uncle Joe is in favor of that, then so am I. I’m quite into collecting myself. Stamps, for instance.”

“Georgy, that’s a very, um, loyal and patriotic attitude, but how can you be sure that when you find out all of Comrade Stalin’s policies, you’ll agree with them, or at least be willing to carry them out? I mean, saying that you’ll do this when you find out about them is one thing, wanting that to happen is another, but really being inclined that way is another. How do you know you actually are inclined that way, my friend?”

“My dear Artem, I have implicit faith in Uncle Joe, and in all he stands for. I believe whatever he does.”

“But how do you know that you won’t disagree, or just not agree, when you find out in detail what our Comrade Leader believes?”

“I just do. I just love Uncle that much.”

“What if he tells you that the sky is green?”

“He wouldn’t do that.”

“But if he did, Georgy, would you believe him?”

“No.”

“But for all you know, he believes it, Georgy. If so, you don’t believe everything Uncle Joe does, though you say you do, and you wish you did.”

“That’s exactly what I do wish. I’m going to sign up now.” And he did.

Being as morally upright as he was uninformed, Georgy’s career in Stalin’s secret police was brief, although he went out “with a bang”.

Technorati Tags: implicit faith, faith, explicit faith, 4 R’s

Saith Grok: “Love thy neighbor, and buyest thou all thine goods at WalMart.”

Is Allah God? Are Christians and Muslims talking about (numerically) the same God? We’ve previously linked and joined in with discussions with Jeremy Pierce and with Kevin Corcoran.

To further the discussion, I present a tale to explain why I think it doesn’t matter whether or not “God” (used by Christians) and “Allah” (used by Muslims) refer to the same being.

A kind and generous woman named Sophie decides to sponsor two children through World Vision. She offers to give to children from “wherever the need is greatest”, and weeks later, a letter reveals that she is the new sponsor of two brothers from some third-world country she’s never heard of. Their names are Goofus and Gallant, and they are identical twins.

Each month, Sophie sends off a generous check, along with a note. She’s not sure about the boys’ religious affiliation, so she sticks with good general advice, which she hopes will apply no matter what. “Treat others as you want them to treat you.” “Forgive others, just as you are forgiven.” “Love and serve the Creator.” “Love one another.”

She also sends kind little notes every so often. “I love you.” “You’re growing to be so big!” “Hope to meet you some day.”

Sophie doesn’t know this, but Goofus and Gallant are rather confused about their benefactor. They (correctly) believe that their benefactor is a rich, English-speaking being who lives far away, but some silly playground talk, the occasional television show, and some translation problems leads them to believe the following things about their benefactor – about the source of their support and the occasional notes and letters:

1. He is a space alien with green tentacles, who must wear a bulbous glass helmet when visiting the earth.
2. Once, probably, he killed a kitten. Or something like that.
3. He and his planet mates once invaded the Earth, but were repelled by a bartender wielding a board with a nail in it.
4. He’s a shape-shifter. In addition to his usual form, he could appear, say, as a middle-aged caucasian American woman.

Goofus and Gallant often discussed their benefactor, whom they referred to (no one knows why) as “Grok”. They had very different attitudes about Grok. Gallant loves Grok and is grateful to him. He hopes that some day he can somehow return Grok’s love, and eagerly desires to meet him. Every week he writes Grok a letter, telling Grok about his day, and writing out his hopes, dreams, and fears. He has a large stash of these, saved for a hoped-for future delivery to Grok.

Goofus hates Grok. His dark imagination conjures up some evil motives which he attributes to Grok (something about WalMart, global hegemony, and soylent green), and each of “Grok’s” (in fact, Sophie’s) letters to Goofus are greeted with (1) spit, (2) toilet paper usage, and (3) burning (of course, always in that order). Goofus ignores the copious benefits flowing from “Grok”, ignores or maliciously reinterprets the monthly notes, and in fact hates Grok so much that he will try to kill anyone who so much as says a good word about Grok.

Ten years pass this way, and Goofus and Gallant are now graduating from high school. Sophie decides that she’ll surprise “her boys” by attending their graduation. She buys a ticket to their country, and boards the plane with presents, a loving heart, and ten year’s worth of longing.

When she arrives, will she care whether or not “Grok” (spoken by Goofus and Gallant) refers to her? No.

• If not, she’ll accept Gallant’s letters as if they were written to her. This country is very backwards, so she doesn’t blame Gallant for his mistaken beliefs about the imaginary “Grok”. She’ll treat Gallant as if he’d loved her, and not the imaginary “Grok”.
• If “Grok” has all along referred to her, she’ll accept Gallant just the same.
• Either way, she’ll find Goofus unacceptable. Has he hated merely an imaginary character? If so, still, he’s made himself the sort of person who would hate Sophie if informed that she were in fact his World Vision sponsor. Or was Gallant’s hate directed at Sophie all along? (i.e. when Goofus thought and spoke about “Grok”, he thereby referred to Sophie) She will not force her love on him, and so will pass him by.

Sophie has generously dished out benefits for ten years; she’s fishing for someone who will return her love. Because she’s looking for the right sort of person, it is inconsequential to her whether or not someone has actually successfully referred to her, or recognized her as the source of blessings.