Parableman

For Zion's Sake

2010-03-20T13:16:01Z

For Zion's sake I will not be still, and for Jerusalem's sake I will not rest, until her righteousness goes forth like brightness, and her salvation is like a burning torch [Isaiah 62:1, John Oswalt's translation (p.576)]

John Oswalt, in his commentary on Isaiah, says of this verse:

However it might appear, God insists that he will be at work unceasingly for Zion's sake. The emphatic position of this phrase Underlines a significant point. As important as God's name is, he is not delivering Jerusalem for himself, for the sake of his reputation, but for the love of his people. (Oswalt, The Book of Isaiah, Chapters 400-66, p.578)

Then he adds this footnote:

The other side of the position is given in Ezek. 36:19-27, where God makes plain that he is not delivering Israel because of anything it has done to deserve such deliverance. The deliverance is strictly an expression of his own holiness.

Here is that passage:

I dispersed them among the nations, and they were scattered through the countries; I judged them according to their conduct and their actions. And wherever they went among the nations they profaned my holy name, for it was said of them, 'These are the LORD's people, and yet they had to leave his land.' I had concern for my holy name, which the house of Israel profaned among the nations where they had gone.
"Therefore say to the house of Israel, 'This is what the Sovereign LORD says: It is not for your sake, house of Israel, that I am going to do these things, but for the sake of my holy name, which you have profaned among the nations where you have gone. I will show the holiness of my great name, which has been profaned among the nations, the name you have profaned among them. Then the nations will know that I am the LORD, declares the Sovereign LORD, when I am proved holy through you before their eyes.

" 'For I will take you out of the nations; I will gather you from all the countries and bring you back into your own land. I will sprinkle clean water on you, and you will be clean; I will cleanse you from all your impurities and from all your idols. I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you; I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I will put my Spirit in you and move you to follow my decrees and be careful to keep my laws. [Ezekiel 36:19-27, TNIV]

Here are three views that someone might hold to try to fit these texts together:

A. God does things for the sake of his glory, and God does things for the sake of his people (or those he will bring into his people). But these motivations are distinct (but at times simultaneous), and neither is wholly reducible to the other.

B. God does things for the sake of his glory, but all this means is that he acts based on his character and promotes what's good. The reason God promotes what's good is for the sake of others. So God's doing things for the sake of his glory is explainable in terms of God's doing things for the sake of others, which is the more primary and ultimate motivation for God.

C. God does things for the sake of others, but the reason God's love is important is because it demonstrates the perfection of God, the most perfect being. It's always good to promote good, and promoting the most perfect is better than anything else you might do. So God does things for the good of others because God does everything for the sake of his glory, and doing things for others does that.

]]> John Piper defends view C in print (e.g. in Desiring God, The Pleasures of God, and Let the Nations Be Glad!), as have Thomas Schreiner (for example, in his commentary on Romans in the BECNT series and his NT Theology) and Iain Duguid (in his Ezekiel NIV Application Commentary).

I believe view B captures my sometime co-blogger Wink's position, one that Joyce Baldwin and Miroslav Volf also seem to endorse, although I think perhaps each might want to tweak bits of it in different ways.

Position A is my own position. I think what Oswalt says supports my position, although he himself doesn't quite get there explicitly. Piper might read the Isaiah quotation as saying God does things for the sake of Zion and then explain that as the secondary level, where God does things for others so that it will bring him glory in doing so. But Oswalt points out that "for the sake of Zion" is emphatic. It's as if God is saying that it's really simply for Zion that he's doing this. It's hard for me to see that as reducible to God acting for his own glory as the primary motivation behind the other-centeredness. It just doesn't seem natural for this verse to mean that.

But the Ezekiel quote qualifies this in the other direction, as Oswalt points out in his footnote. In some instances God acts not for Israel's sake but for his own name. This is consistent with an others-centered motivation, if Oswalt is right that this is about deliverance but not because of Israel deserving that deliverance. But it doesn't read that way to me. It doesn't seem to be saying just that God does it without their deserving it. It says that God did it not for them. It's as if there's no sense in which God did it for them.

Peter Craigie's Ezekiel commentary (Daily Study Bible series) offers a different way to get view A. He says it means only that God didn't do it only for them but also did it for his name. But that seems to do injustice to the text even more strongly than Oswalt's suggested interpretation. The whole point here is that it's not for them. If they were the only factor God would be considering, they would be judged.

It seems to me that Ezekiel's language is strong enough that it can't be taken in any way other than the stronger claim that seems like what Piper and Duguid would support. In no sense is this act for Israel. It's solely for God's name. The problem, though, is that the Isaiah passage is talking about the exact same restoration as the Ezekiel passage, and that says quite clearly that God is doing it for Zion.

So are we stuck with a contradiction? It's certainly a formal contradiction, and it's one that Piper/Duguid also can't handle very well. Ezekiel doesn't give a reductionist account, as in Piper's view, which would say that God does it for them but then saying that "for them" is in turn really just for his glory, because he gets glory by doing things for them. Ezekiel says something stronger, and it amounts to an eliminativist account of all motivation having to do with them.

I want to offer another solution. The Ezekiel passage is talking about them as they are at the time. The Isaiah passage is talking about them as they will be. God isn't doing it for them as they are now. Oswalt is right to say that they don't deserve it, but that's only part of it. At the time Isaiah was writing this, and at the later time when Ezekiel wrote, Israel wasn't in a position to deserve what God was doing. God wasn't doing it for them in the state they were in. But God intended to do something for them that would secrure the reputation of God in a way that doing nothing to restore Israel would harm it. In Ezekiel it's not for them at all in the sense of being for them now, but it's for them in a different sense in Isaiah. It's for them as God intends them to be. God has a plan for a restored Israel, an Israel who will be the sort of nation that God delights in doing things for. Israel in its current state wasn't like that, and thus God wouldn't do what he announced he'll do for their sake as they are at the time. He does it for his own glory and for the sake of what Israel will be. Both motivations are present, and neither is reducible to the other, but you also can truly say that God doesn't do it for them in one very important sense while also saying that God does do it for them in a different but also very important sense.

The Isaiah passage contains evidence for this within it. (1) Isaiah goes on to describe Zion (as God will restore her) as a crown in his hand, something marvelous for God to delight in. (2) A little further, God will rejoice over Zion (again, restored Zion). So it seems as if it's not just for zion's sake that God does it but God takes delight in Zion rather than just appreciating that what he's done furthers his glory, with Zion as the means. Zion is treated as an end, but it's only the restored Zion that God is delighting in and treasuring. This is consistent with God loving while we're still sinners, but it's love for us as God envisions us restored.

The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles

2010-03-18T00:42:42Z

Wiley/Blackwell finally has a page for The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles, to which I'm one of the contributors. (Why do I want to say "of which" there instead of "to which"? That doesn't seem grammatical, but it sounds better.) Amazon also has a page for it now.

There's still no picture, and I have no idea what this is going to look like. I wasn't all that impressed with the X-Men one's cover, but I guess they couldn't get copyright permission to depict anyone from the X-Men on the cover, and without that what can you do but have a cool way of writing the title and trying to do something interesting with the cover scheme? The Open Court volume on Harry Potter had a picture of a castle with a snow owl, and I'm guessing Wiley/Blackwell will come up with something else generic that doesn't violate copyright.

It says it won't be out until September, but the editor tells me they're actually shooting for July. Either way, it will be out in advance of the seventh movie, which I'm much happier about than I was about their original plan, which was to put it out concurrent with the eighth movie in 2011. This thing has been done for quite a while already and has just been sitting around waiting for the publisher to find it appropriate to release it. It could have been done in time for the sixth movie if they'd wanted to do that.

I'm looking forward to reading the other pieces in this one even more than I was with the X-Men one that also included a piece by me. I read the whole Open Court volume, and there were only a few duds there. I've gotten most of the way through the Narnia one, and the same is true of that one. I was disappointed in a lot more of the X-Men ones, for different reasons in different cases. I haven't read anything in this one but mine (and one that got pulled for legal reasons that I can't say anything else about here), but I've seen the email addresses of the other contributors, and I've been able to deduce who quite a few of them are, several of them very good philosophers who undoubtedly have interesting things to say.

My piece has been retitled "Destiny in the Wizarding World", which I think is superior to my own title, which was "Destiny in Harry Potter". I'm much more satisfied with the final state of this chapter than I was with the X-Men one, which I thought had been worsened by the removal of the most interesting discussions of race and even in one place the weakening of my argument due to crucial bits taken out (it even reads as fallacious to me now). There was a whole section I'd added at the editors' insistence that the series editor removed without discussion. This one, on the other hand, was, I think, noticeably improved at every stage of editing. So I'm looking forward to holding it in my hands and reading all the pieces.

Commentaries on Galatians

2010-03-14T03:33:09Z

[Note: This is part of a larger project reviewing commentaries on each book of the Bible. Follow the links from that post for more information on the series, including explanations of what I mean by some of the terms and abbreviations in this post. This is not an exhaustive list, just the commentaries that I think are most worth paying attention to.]

Galatians is both well-served and not well-served in terms of commentaries. On the one hand, the commentaries that are on the market right now complement each other well, with some commentary or other existing for any particular focus or strength you might want in a Galatians commentary. The problem is that no one commentary seems to my mind to do enough of those things well for me to have an easy first choice, and most of my favorite commentaries on this book have serious shortcomings. I suspect that will be remedied once several of the forthcoming works on Galatians are complete (especially Carson and Moo, but several others in the list will add expertise and skills not well enough represented among the existing commentaries to satisfy me; see my list of forthcoming commentaries on Galatians below the published ones).

I do think F.F. Bruce's NIGTC is one of the better commentaries out there. It's getting dated, especially given the New Perspective on Paul that Bruce doesn't spend a lot of time interacting with, since it was pretty much brand new during the final years he was working on this volume. Bruce tends to be stronger on historical and language, especially on smaller details, and weaker on theology and broader structure. (Carson gives two examples of weaker areas: law/grace and old/new covenants.) Bruce defends the traditional Protestant approach that the New Perspective responds to, even if he doesn't spend a lot of time tackling the claims of particular proponents of the NPP. He argues for an early date and a South Galatian location, and he gives one of the most convincing accounts I've seen of how Galatians and Acts fit together, defending the historicity of both. Complementarians will be annoyed at his insistence on egalitarianism in Gal 3:28, which even a good number of egalitarians recognize as being about gospel equality rather than about what the implications of gospel equality are in marriage and in church governance. Most of the commentary isn't so ideologically-driven, however, and this is currently the first place I look on this book. I'm just not as inclined to look in only one place as I might be on other books.

Gordon Fee's recent commentary in the Pentecostal Commentaries series is very good. Fee has an outstanding reputation as a commentator, for good reason. He's one of the most respected Pauline scholars of our day, and he's especially pastorally-minded. One element Fee contributes that doesn't occur quite as much in the other commentaries I've spent a lot of time in is in the overall flow of thought of the epistle. He's constantly considering smaller passages in the light of the general train of thought Paul has over the course of the letter, and he's particularly good at the kind of structural issues that Bruce tends to be weaker on.

He's also theologically stronger than Bruce, especially on the matters he's spent the most time thinking about, which includes christology and pneumatology. Galatians is particularly important on the Holy Spirit, so it's nice to have Fee on this book for that alone. On historical issues, I'm less convinced by Fee's reconstruction of events than I am of Bruce's, but he himself doesn't seem as confident of his approach as some do. He does insist on the historicity of both Galatians and Acts, unlike some who depart from the more traditional approach represented in Bruce. On New Perspective issues, he strikes me as trying to maintain a moderating approach between the traditional Protestant view and the New Perspective. I tend to think he's moderated too much away from the traditional approach. Given my criticism of Bruce on Gal 3:28, I should say that Fee does not make the same mistake, even though he's strongly committed to egalitarianism. He rightly insists that egalitarians who try to extend its use to issues beyond the gospel itself are going beyond what the text says.

Given that this is from a series many people might not be familiar with, it's worth pointing out that this isn't intended to be an exhaustive commentary series, with lots of technical exegetical details, but it's also not just an applicational commentary or something like that. Fee himself might bemoan the fact that Pentecostals aren't as well-represented in biblical studies as he'd like, and Pentecostals sometimes have a bad reputation of focusing mostly on application at the expense of careful exegesis. But potential readers shouldn't let those facts discourage them from purchasing or reading this commentary. Fee does include most of the major issues that should come up in exegetical discussion, just not with exhaustive coverage of every option or with the level of detail you'll find in a more academic commentary.

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Richard Longenecker's WBC is a lot like Bruce's NIGTC in some ways, but I'm less satisfied with it. I detest the format of the WBC, which doesn't help, but I also have more problems with how Longenecker carries out his task as a commentator. Like Fee, he tries to find middle ground between the New Perspective and the traditional view, and I thought he gave up more ground to the New Perspective than I thought the evidence warrants. I've seen reviewers criticize him of trying to reconcile the two approaches in a way that leads to outright contradictions, but I didn't notice anything like that myself in the parts I read. In any case, Longenecker has an excellent command of the Jewish background to this letter. He's been criticized (by D.A. Carson, for example) for being weak in his treatment of passages dealing with the Holy Spirit (something you certainly wouldn't find with Fee).

Longenecker supports a relatively early date for the epistle and the South Galatian provenance (which I think is almost certainly correct), but he works out the chronology in comparison with Acts in an idiosyncratic way, one that I'm unconvinced of (and not even sure if it works). He does defend the historicity and complementarity of both Galatians and Acts. Yet Longenecker thinks Paul unfairly caricatures his opponents, a view that I find at odds with the high view of scripture that he otherwise seems to hold.

Longenecker tries to read Galatians as a formal Greco-Roman oration (i.e. what's called rhetorical analysis), an approach that seems to me to be entirely arbitrary. It may well be that some of the forms of Greco-Roman argumentation affected Paul's training, which was largely Semitic teaching form the Jewish rabbi Gamaliel. But trying to fit the whole structure of Paul's letter into this kind of oration format seems a bit of a stretch to my mind. Until Fee, I considered this the second most important commentary to have, after Bruce. But I think Fee captures his strengths well enough that I'm considering selling this volume once I have Moo's BECNT.

J.L. Martyn's AB is too academically-important to ignore if you're doing academic work. I looked at it enough to gain a respect for his command of the letter and the literature on it. His approach is a bit idiosyncratic, but he's not as lone ranger. He's managed to influence Galatians scholarship significantly with this work. This commentary is incredibly detailed, even for an Anchor Yale Bible volume, and will be of a lot less use to someone just preaching or leading a Bible study on Galatians. He tends to side more with the New Perspective than with the traditional Protestant approach (but I believe he is Catholic himself), and he favors the later date and North Galatian location that are usually seen to conflict with Acts (and thus tends to dismiss the historicity of Luke's account in Acts). Carson says he's weak on salvation-historical elements and thinks he hasn't "got to the bottom of Paul's understanding of the relationships between law and grace". His approach emphasizes the corporate, even cosmic, aspects of the gospel so much that there's not much attention given to how the gospel affects individuals. He doesn't have much time for legal/forensic elements to the gospel.

James Dunn's BNTC is a standard New Perspective mid-level commentary. I haven't spent a lot of time in it myself, but Dunn's work is one of the more significant places to look for a New Perspective approach to Galatians. Dunn's key thesis is that Paul wasn't criticizing what we since the Reformation call works-based salvation. He was rather simply resisting the Jewish believers' claim that only Jews can be saved.

Timothy George's NAC is strongest on the theological message of the text, and he does a great job placing his discussion in the light of the history of commentary on Galatians. He's known as something of a Reformation historian, but his historical knowledge of church history as a whole comes out in this commentary. Unlike some critics of the New Perspective, he does treat their arguments explicitly at times, but he interacts a lot less with contemporary scholarship than most commentaries of this size would. In many ways this isn't a typical commentary, but I've found his comments helpful and a nice complement to a more traditional commentary. He is more concerned with the issues an expositor would care about than, say, Bruce or Longenecker.

Ronald Fung's NICNT defends the traditional approach (as opposed to the New Perspective), but I don't think he engages much with New Perspective supporters. I haven't looked much at it. This is a solid commentary, by all accounts, but no one seems to think it stands out in any way, and everything Fung is good at can probably be found in other commentaries. My one reason for still considering it would be that it may be more balanced than some of the commentaries that are strong in some ways but not in others, and it probably does offer more toward expositing the text than some of the more detailed works above. One reviewer criticizes Fung for relying too much on Kittel's word-studies.

Ben Witherington's socio-rhetorical commentary is strong on both Jewish and Greco-Roman background, and he's much better than most commentators at literary matters, but he tends to do a lot with the rhetorical analysis I've criticized above (see Longenecker). I haven't spent a lot of time in this commentary. I don't have a good read on how Witherington handles the New Perspective issues, but I know that he supports South Galatia and an early date for the epistle. If his approach to the historical issues and the difficult questions with how Acts fits with Galatians is anything like his treatment of those issues in his Acts commentary, I would expect it to be superb. Witherington is known for zooming through commentaries quickly, and I think that hurts the quality of his work. A commentary someone has been working on for over a decade is bound to have more long-term thought involved in it than one that takes a couple years. My biggest pet peeve with Witherington is that he's extremely fair to opponents whose assumptions about scripture are far from his own (e.g. theological liberals) but grossly unfair to those who share his high view of scripture but have reach theological conclusions (complementarians and Calvinists especially).

Walter Hansen's IVPNTC takes the unusual approach of holding to a later date and North Galatian location while trying to reconcile it with Acts. I'm not sure he succeeds. I have a hard time with this series, because it tries to play to two audiences, having a flowing exposition at the top and some footnotes not clearly tied to any location in the main text (as footnotes usually are), and the level of detail in the footnotes is significant but without sufficient space to do so properly, so it requires pick-and-choose approach to which exegetical issues will get coverage. This is D.A. Carson's favorite introductory-level commentary on Galatians, and that's even despite his disagreements with Hansen over the historical issues.

Philip Ryken's REC defends the traditional approach very well. This is more of a series of expositions, actually based on sermons, than a commentary, but it's expository preaching of the sort that centers enough on good exegesis that it's helpful.

Hans Dieter Betz's Hermeneia is the first to engage in the kind of rhetorical analysis I discussed above (see Longenecker). Betz also sees far more Greco-Roman background in general, at the expense of the Jewish background that seems much more obviously involved. This commentary is important for academic study of Galatians, since it's been so influential, but I don't think it's of much value to the expositor, because of its level of detail and its less helpful overall approach.

Scot McKnight's NIVAC displays some of the strengths of the series, which include (a) presenting the basic message of the book (which in McKnight's case is heavily leaning toward a New Perspective interpretation, where the conflict is seen as being about social boundary markers rather than whether obedience to the law justifies), (b) identifying areas where Paul's language or assumptions involve cultural baggage or historical background that contemporary readers need help understanding and working through ways to help contemporary Christians understand those issues in our own terms, and (c) finding applications for our own day based on how the principles behind the text get transferred into the new context. The series tends to be light on exegesis. I disagree enough with the New Perspective approach that I wouldn't recommend this commentary as much as I would other volumes in the series, but McKnight is a good writer who has thought a lot about how the gospel works itself out in our lives. One reviewer thinks his New Perspective interpretation makes it much harder for him to find contemporary application than it would be if he accepted the traditional approach.

Richard Hays gives a popular-level exposition of a New Perspective approach in the NIB. This commentary is bound with a number of others in a thick volume that makes it cumbersome to use, although it's not as expensive as some volumes of this size (900 pages for II Corinthians through Philemon). Many academic libraries have this series available for reference, but often they will treat it as a reference work and won't let you check it out. Hays is a good writer and often has insightful things to say, but I disagree enough with his general approach that I can't give it a strong recommendation. Hays sides firmly with the New Perspective, and he's been strongly influenced by Martyn's commentary. It might be a quicker read for someone who wants to get Martyn's sort of view without wading through the whole Anchor Yale Bible volume. This would be more helpful for someone teaching Galatians than Martyn or Dunn.

I'm aware of the following forthcoming commentaries on Galatians, some of which may be a long way off if they will ever appear:

D.A. Carson (PNTC)

Martinus de Boer (NTL)
David DeSilva (NICNT)
Katherine Greene-McCreight (BTCB)
Douglas Moo (BECNT)
Peter Oakes (PCNT)
John Riches (BBC)
Thomas Schreiner (BHGNT)
Thomas Schreiner (ZEC)
Graham N. Stanton (ICC)
Brian Vickers (NCC)
Robert Van Voorst (ECC)
Andrew H. Wakefield (SH)
Ronald D. Witherup (CCSS)
N.T. Wright (THNTC)

I'm especially looking forward to Moo and Carson. Carson and Moo have been among the most stalwart defenders of the traditional approach against the New Perspective. Moo has written stellar commentaries on Romans and James, so it will be interesting to see his work on Galatians as well. He said he was going to work on this commentary once he was done with Colossians and Philemon for PNTC, which has been out since August 2008 (and thus probably complete by mid-2007). I don't know how quickly he works, though. It might be a few more years.

This will be Carson's first commentary on a Pauline epistle, despite having written on Paul lots of times in other kinds of works. Carson has said that he will work on Galatians once his NIGTC on John's epistles is complete. A former student of mine told me in 1996 that it was almost done, and the series editor told me a couple years ago that he was hoping for the manuscript any time now, but he hadn't gotten any explicit word of when it would be done (and then it would take a full year to be published after he had the manuscript). So the Galatians commentary might be a while yet.

Schreiner is strongest in systematic theology, and he'll be develop a good defense of the traditional approach against the New Perspective. He also has a significant Romans commentary under his belt.

DeSilva's strengths are similar to those of Witherington above. That volume is supposed to be out this year, according to DeSilva's c.v.

Wright will defend a version of the New Perspective, probably the most tenable version out there, but I think his view still goes too far. Wright always has an eye for the practical, and this series has lots of theological reflection, which will give him plenty of space to explore his version of the NPP.

Stanton's ICC will be extremely detailed, useful for the academic but probably for no one else. Van Voorst will be more accessible but likely still far too detailed for most preachers and Bible study leaders.

Expect Wakefield to be popular-level but academically-priced, a stupid decision on the part of the publisher of that series that I've consistently criticized as immoral. I know nothing of the author, but I don't recommend this series.

Wood for the Trees

2010-03-13T14:47:26Z

In the U.K., people often speak of losing the big picture because of the details by saying that someone can't see the wood for the trees. Usually in the U.S., we say "forest for the trees". It's long occurred to me that the U.K. way of saying it conveys exactly the opposite here as it does across the pond.

In the U.K., a natural way to refer to a wooded area is to call it "the wood". That means the wood is a level up from the trees in terms of big picture vs. details. But in the U.S. you would never say "the wood" unless you meant the material that makes up the bulk of the tree's matter. To refer to a wooded area, you'd call it "the woods". So when you compare the wood with the trees in the U.S., you're actually talking about the tree and what it's made out of rather than a bunch of trees and the forest they comprise. That means the wood as heard in the U.S. is smaller and more detailed than the trees. The trees are a level up in terms of details vs. big picture.

So if you say someone can't see the wood for the trees, I always do a double-take, because it always sounds to me, at least at the initial hearing, as if you're describing someone who can't see the details because of some rigid big-picture view that they can't get away from. I'm familiar enough with the expression now that I quickly adjust, but it's a very weird phenomenon. This expression first conveys to me the exact opposite of what it means.

Sarah Palin, Hypocrite by Proxy

2010-03-11T03:08:17Z

I've seen several references to this story that imply or assert that Sarah Palin is a hypocrite for being a very vocal critic of the Canadian health care system, when it turns out she used to go with her family across the border to receive services from Canadian medical professionals instead of those in Alaska. (See here for an example.)

But then I read the article. It turns out there are two huge facts obscured by such an analysis, and they're both whoppers.

1. This wasn't something she did with her family as an adult. This is something her parents did with her until she was six. Yes, people are calling Sarah Palin a hypocrite because of what her parents chose to do, while bringing her along, when she was in kindergarten. I guess if you've run out of ways to attack her involving her own kids, you turn to attacking her for what happened to her when she was a kid herself. I suppose this is hypocrisy by proxy. Find something someone else did that seems to conflict with what Palin is saying, and then call her a hypocrite for someone else doing what she thinks is problematic.

2. They lived during that period in a very rural town near the Canadian border. The closest city was across that border. Most people in very rural towns drive to the nearest city for some of their health care concerns. It just happened that they had to go to another country in this case. If Sarah Palin had lived in that town and taken her own children to Canada, that's perfectly consistent with saying the Canadian health care system is inferior to the American health care system, because no one thinks the American health care system is equally available in every small rural town. The closest thing that's of good enough quality might be in the Canadian system that does things in a way that's less ideal. Being less ideal than the American system is compatible with being the best thing in the area. So there's no inconsistency here anyway.

I noticed an argument here that Juneau, AK is just as close to Skagway, AK where they lived as Whitehorse, YT, where they occasionally sent someone for medical aid in emergencies. So I checked Mapquest. It took 6 hours to get to Juneau and 3 hours to get to Whitehorse.

Then the comments there indicate that you would usually go to Juneau by ferry in those days, and that takes several hours also, where the train ride to Whitehorse is only two. So it does seem that Skagway's closest city is Whitehorse, YT. Juneau has a slightly larger population but not enough to make a huge distinction. They're both big enough cities to have the emergency care facilities that her small town didn't.

Also, the Associated Press interviewed Chuck Heath, Palin's father, about this:

Palin's father said Monday they had little choice, given their location in Skagway. "There was no road out of there at that time," said retired teacher Chuck Heath, reached by phone in Wasilla. "The ferry schedule was very erratic. We had no doctor in Skagway. The plane schedule was very erratic. The winds dictated whether the planes could come in or not."

So it's hard to make the argument that even her parents' choice had anything to do with preferring Canadian health care to American health care, never mind that she herself is somehow a hypocrite because of what her parents did when she was in kindergarten or younger.

Update: There's also the following argument. Palin benefited from Canadian health care, so she shouldn't criticize it, much less fight to prevent the same thing from happening in the U.S. or advocate that Canadians should implement something else.

I sure hope those who support President Obama's proposed changes in U.S. health care don't offer such an argument, because it then makes them hypocrites for benefiting from the American system but then criticizing it. It's simply crazy to say that you can't criticize something you benefited from. Think about all the workers in developing countries who actually benefit from the jobs American corporations outsource but who still work in conditions that it's immoral to expect anyone to work in. It's perfectly fair to think those conditions are bad enough to want to change them, even if you're personally benefiting from them. You might even be grateful for the benefit you've received while pointing out that those who have helped you are still doing something wrong.

Heterosexism

2010-03-09T20:23:52Z

I previously posted my worries about the glossary entry for the word 'gay' in Elizabeth Meyer's Gender, Bullying, and Harassment. I'm worried about the following entry also, for several reasons:

Heterosexism: A bias toward heterosexuality that denigrates and devalues GLB people. Also, the presumption that heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality or prejudice, bias, or discrimination based on these things.

The first thing to notice is that this is a disjunctive definition. It lists three different things, any of which it will count as heterosexism. This isn't problematic in itself. There are plenty of words that can apply to a number of different things. Some of them are due to plain old ambiguity, e.g. the word 'bank' can mean a financial institution or the sandy shoreline alongside a river. More often a term can refer to several phenomena that all fit under the same category.

What might generate more of a problem is when a term is defined to refer to a number of different phenomena that are sufficiently different and should not be confused with each other. This isn't necessarily a problem, though. For instance, there are plenty of things the word 'homicide' can refer to, and they've of a pretty diverse sort. A homicide could be a cold-blooded, premeditated murder, or it could be an unplanned violent killing in the heat of an argument. It could be criminal but accidental manslaughter, or it could be excusable self-defense. In all cases, someone has been killed, and thus it counts as a homicide, which etymologically and in actual contemporary usage simply means the killing of a person by someone else.

Where it becomes more problematic is if the word you choose to use for this is loaded in such a way that its very usage carries the sense that anything it applies to is equally wrong. This is a new enough term that I think it's fair to say that people who are using it as Meyer does are in fact in the process of coining the term and determining its meaning by how it's used. The fact that it's deliberately a parallel with words like 'sexism' and 'racism' is important here. I suspect Meyer, and those whose consensus she wants to represent in her glossary of how such terms are used, wants all three things she lists to be seen as serious as racism and sexism are. The problem is that a case can be made that they're not. Let's separate the different meanings.

A: A bias toward heterosexuality that denigrates and devalues GLB people

B: the presumption that heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality

C: prejudice, bias, or discrimination based on these things.

It seems to me that anyone satisfying meaning A is engaging in pure evil, but meanings B and C can range over a wide enough range of things that they don't belong in the same category at all. Some of that wide range is clearly morally problematic (perhaps stemming from something like what meaning A is getting at). Some of it is simply a matter of empirical discovery, but some of it involves moral judgment.

]]> Consider the official Roman Catholic view, for instance. Priests in the Roman Catholic Church take a vow of celibacy. They're not allowed to have sexual relationships with anyone, whether male or female. If they were not priests, they would still think it wrong to engage in heterosexual sex outside of marriage or homosexual sex at all. Nevertheless, they welcome gay people into the priesthood, and they don't make the mistake of thinking someone is likely to be a child molester simply because the person is gay. It's pretty clear to me that they don't denigrate and devalue GLB people, even though they have a bias against homosexuality when it comes to recognizing gay couples as morally legitimate. Whatever you might think of the practice of not recognizing a gay union as a legitimate marriage, it's hard to escape the conclusion that it's far, far worse morally speaking to treat gay people as inhuman and without rights of any sort than it is simply to presume that heterosexuality is better than homosexuality. The Roman Catholic Church, at least officially, recognizes this, even if there might be some members who do not.

That separates A and B already. An act that clearly demonstrates the kind of bias in sub-definition A is much worse than merely satisfying sub-definition B. I can think of lots of other ways of satisfying sub-definition B that range across a huge spectrum. Someone might think heterosexuality is better than homosexuality for a number of reasons. It could come from a natural law theory, as it does for Roman Catholics. They see heterosexuality as natural and more fitting with humanity than homosexuality. Depending on how the natural law theory goes, that might be taken to imply that something about homosexuality is morally wrong (as it does for Catholics). But it might not. Michael Levin, for instance, thinks homosexuality is unnatural because he doesn't think it fits well with evolution's purposes, which presumes a certain set of controversial views about evolution and the purposes of organisms in the evolutionary scheme, but it is a view that's out there, and it does strike me as a sort of natural law view that takes heterosexuality to be superior to homosexuality for some natural purpose, and what I've read of Levin didn't give me the impression that he thinks there's anything morally bad about being gay or engaging in gay sex (although he does think it's natural for heterosexuals to dislike or being uncomfortable around gay people).

But you might even take a more moderate view. Even if you find nothing morally unproblematic about homosexuality, and even if you think there's nothing unnatural about it, you might think it's less conducive to one key purpose human beings should want for ourselves, which is to perpetuate ourselves. It's true that gay people can help raise their relatives' children, in which case they're helping some of their DNA be perpetuated, and a gay couple or single gay person can adopt a child, which helps the next generation continue. I'm not trying to diminish that. Nevertheless, if this purpose is the only purpose you're considering heterosexuality does happen to fulfill it a little bit better. Recognizing that is already heterosexism, according to Meyer's definition, since it means you're taking heterosexuality to be superior to homosexuality in this respect. You don't have to think there's anything unnatural about it or morally wrong with it to think such a thing. Yet it's being put under a term that's designed to capture the moral wrongness of all that it applies to.

There's another unproblematic recognition of heterosexuality as superior. Most straight men aren't going to get as much sexual satisfaction out of a sexual relationship with a man than they are out of a sexual relationship with a woman. Many are disgusted at the very idea of anal sex with another man, for example, and they're certainly not sexually attracted to men. So for the majority of the male population heterosexual sex is superior to homosexual sex. This is probably true of women as well, but I'm not in as strong a position to comment on that. Now it's true that the reverse is true for gay people. That doesn't touch my point. All I'm saying is that for a significant percentage of the population (by far the majority) heterosexuality is superior purely in the sense that it is their preferred means of sexual satisfaction. I can't see any reason why a gay person might find that problematic (unless they accept the pretty radical claim that all heterosexual sex is rape, in which case I'd have to take a few steps back to deal with that claim).

So here are at least four ways of satisfying sub-definition B.

B1: There are those who think heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality in a way that leads them to make fun of gay people, along with people they might wrongly believe to be gay or to be acting gay, or even to cause such people physical harm. The kind of superiority they mean is the kind the KKK has in mind when they say whites are superior to blacks or the kind meant when you hear that men are superior to women from a serial rapist who takes delight in forced sexual submission of women merely because they're women.

B2: There are others who think heterosexuality is superior to homosexuality because they think homosexuality isn't part of God's design.

B3: There are those who think it's against nature in some other sense.

B4: Then there are those who just plain think there are certain purposes for which it's not as good, some of which are nearly uncontroversial even among those who are pretty far to the left on these issues.

Yet all of these satisfy sub-definition B, but there's a world of difference between some of these, and there's a world of difference between all of them (except the first, of course) and the kind of bias that satisfies sub-definition A.

We haven't even gotten to sub-definition C yet. It says any kind of discrimination based on any of these things (things in sub-definition A and B) is heterosexist.

C1. So you've got the real gay-bashers who dislike gay people so much that they like to bash their heads in. They choose the targets of their assaults based on their bias as in sub-definition A.

C2. Then there are those who for religious reasons want to worship in a way that's faithful to their own religion, which teaches the superiority of heterosexuality in sense B2. So they believe it is immoral to engage in homosexual sex, and they restrict marriage to heterosexual couples, for example, or they prevent gay people who are sexually active (as opposed to gay people committed to celibacy) from taking certain jobs involving official ministry responsibilities.

C3. There are those that take B2 much further, though. There are those who insist that they not be prevented from refusing to rent their property to a gay couple. There are those who insist that the federal government should be able to refuse to hire a gay person merely for being gay or that a private individual who accepts B2 should be able to refuse to hire gay people. There are those who want to keep openly-gay people from serving in the military. There are those who want to allow hospitals to continue denying visitation rights in the hospital to gay partners. This is based on B2, as C2 is, but it seems to me to be a very different kind of discrimination with very different purposes, and whatever you think of the moral issues with C2 it's hard to deny that a stronger burden of proof should be met to extend B2's justification of C2 into the kinds of secular things involved in C3.

C4. Then there are the kinds of discrimination that should seem uncontroversial or at least not controversial in terms of the bias itself. For instance, a straight man considers only women when he seeks a romantic or sexual partner. Someone wants to get married purely for the purpose of reproducing and considers only people of the opposite sex to help achieve that purpose (and if you think that's not the usual purpose of marriage, you're considering a very small sample; this has traditionally been the main purpose for marriage in many societies, and many men have married for reproduction while having other relations for enjoyment or love, sometimes other women but sometimes young boys, as happened frequently in ancient Greece).

Or perhaps the Allies in World War II want to infiltrate the Vichy government's top echelons, so they send an agent in to engage in romantic liaisons in order to find information. Since the people they need information from are men and mostly straight men, they discriminate against lesbians and gay men and choose agents who are female and straight for this purpose. There may be moral problems with the entire mission, but if so they don't have anything to do with any discrimination against gay people. For the purpose of this mission, heterosexuality is superior. They thus hold to B4, and they discriminate on that basis.

Then there are scientific studies. Someone might be trying to see if certain brain conditions are more common among straight men. They might want to see how straight people react to a concocted scenario where they're treated the way gay people are treated, or they want to see how easily self-identified straight men will respond sexually to male bodies. This involves discrimination, and it's discrimination that's based on a version of B4, since being straight qualifies them for the purpose of the study, where being straight is superior for their purposes than being gay. Yet that discrimination seems morally unproblematic.

I've long been arguing for more precise distinctions when it comes to this sort of thing. Some people strongly detest views like B2 and discrimination like C2. Others defend it. Lumping it under a term like 'heterosexism' decides the issue linguistically and through a kind of language-bullying, which is ironic given that Meyer's book attempts to address sexuality-related bullying. I prefer to engage in moral argument to resolve such issues, and I think there's room in society for teaching that views like B2 and acts that privately discriminate in a like-minded organization in ways like C2 don't justify discrimination of the C3 sort, while reserving extremely harsh criticism for A and B1. Then B4 and C4, which almost everyone would recognize as completely unproblematic, are being tarred by the term merely because they involve discrimination based on something already wrongly tarred as heterosexist.

Unfortunately, I'm not the kind of person who is good at coming up with positive proposals, never mind creative and catchy terms like those who first started using terms like 'heterosexist' and 'heteronormative'. But I'm pretty good at recognizing problems when I see them, and I think there's something problematic about how Meyer is defining this term. She's certainly not alone. Most people who actually use that term would use it similarly to how she does. I think it leads to a failure to make proper moral distinctions (and perhaps results from such a failure to begin with). It allows controversies to become disguised as being about something that they're not about, where the two sides are talking about completely different issues. Worst of all, it assigns already-loaded terms of moral condemnation that define something in the minds of all hearers as bad without engaging in the argumentation needed to establish such a thing and without recognizing that it alienates allies on issues like A and B1 and turns them against efforts to stop such things.

Meyer's book is about bullying. Most evangelical Christians I know who hold to B2 and C2 would be all for her attempts to decrease bullying of any sort, including bullying based on sexual orientation. I wonder if she's doing her cause a disservice by these expansive definitions that, while expressing her view accurately, are going to turn potential allies against her. I suspect she would feel like she's abandoning the larger cause by being silent on issues like B2 and C2. But she largely is silent on those issues, which is something I consider a virtue of her book. She ignores something that she really doesn't need to address to deal with the bullying issue. Whether someone believes same-sex marriage should be allowed isn't really tied up with whether they think the kids in their child's class should be allowed to call their kid a fag for being less good at sports. If she felt the need to express her larger view somewhere in the book, she could do so while acknowledging that those who disagree with her on that should still recognize the value of fighting against anti-gay bullying, and she should support them in that endeavor even if she disagrees with their other commitments. I found very little in the book that might cause the kind of alienation I'm talking about here. But I found this glossary definition so striking given the overall avoidance of the issue throughout most of the book that it was hard to resist commenting.

Race Thought Experiment #8

2010-03-07T03:50:45Z

Consider a man named Jim in the 1960s who does what people sometimes call "passing for white". His family is black, but there's enough white ancestry for him to appear white. Someone looking at him without knowing his family would think he's white. He talks in a way that no one would know his family is black. His employers would never discriminate against him because of his being black, even if they normally did such a thing, because they wouldn't know that he is black.

Jim decides to apply for college late in life, after the civil rights era is long over. There's a checkbox to indicate if he is black, which will be used for affirmative action purposes. Some people think affirmative action is immoral, and some people think it's immoral to ask or report one's race. Ignore those issues for this example, since what I want to get at is a different issue, and I don't want those as distractions. Assuming people should normally report their race accurately on such forms, should he check the box indicating that he is black? If you think he is black-passing-as-white, but you think he shouldn't check the box, exactly why is that (because it seems as if such an action constitutes a lie)?

Now consider a man in our day named Tom who has three white grandparents. His fourth grandparent is Jim. So he has two great-grandparents who are indisputably black and a grandparent who many people would consider black-passing-as-white. But Tom grew up in a white suburb in a family considered by everyone around them to be white, and almost no one he comes into contact with ever learns of or suspects that he has pretty recent black ancestors.

Tom applies for college. Again, ignoring issues about the moral status of affirmative action and assuming people should normally report the race on such forms, should Tom check the box indicating that he is black, knowing that it will qualify him for affirmative action? If not, but Jim should, what is the difference between the two that justifies a different moral result? If you think they both should not check it, is it for the same reason in both cases?

The Dualist View of Personal Identity

2010-02-27T03:50:52Z

This is the 54th post in my Theories of Knowledge and Reality series. The last post introduced the subject of personal identity. This post moves into the first personal identity view to be discussed: the dualist view of personal identity.

I've already discussed dualism at length earlier in this series, starting here. The dualist view of personal identity, however, is not the same view as dualism in philosophy of mind. The dualist view in philosophy of mind takes us to have an immaterial mind or soul. The dualist view of personal identity not only believes there is such a thing but takes that mind or soul to be definitive of who we are.

In the terms of my last post in this series, then, the mind/soul is the key essential aspect of who we are. It's what makes me what I am, and I couldn't lose it while still existing. According to the dualist view of personal identity, my mind/soul is the only thing essential to me. You could do all manner of things to my body, and provided that there's nothing done to my mind or soul I'd still exist. (What condition I might be in is another matter.)

I mentioned in my last post that I would be following somewhat the arguments of John Perry's A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Perry has one of the characters in his conversation give some criticisms of the dualist view.

Objection 1: We notice if it's the same person by seeing if they have the same body. The dualist view identifies our most central features completely independently of the body.

Response: Maybe the soul is always in the same body, so we use bodies to tell if it's the same person. Sameness of person happens to go along with sameness of body, but that doesn't mean it has to be that way.

Also, this isn't the only way we identify people. If we're on the phone, over email, or in chat rooms, how do we tell? We pay attention to mannerisms, personality, character, beliefs, memories no one else should know, etc.

Objection 2: Can I tell if I have the same soul I had yesterday? I usually think of the Simpsons episode where Bart sells his soul to Milhouse, and they show people's souls tagging along behind them, but Bart's (which looks like Bart) is tagging along behind Milhouse, along with Milhouse's own. Maybe our souls move from body to body, or maybe our souls die off and get replaced by new ones very quickly. It would be crazy to rule that out as a possibility without strong argumentation, and yet the dualist view seems to deny that.

Response: This assumes a certain dualist view according to which there's nothing distinctive about the soul. You can have a view according to which the same soul might go from one person to another, without all the mental characteristics continuing on with the soul in the new body. That's just not Descartes' dualist view, so it's unfair to say dualism doesn't allow life after death on these grounds. You can't object to one view by saying a different view has problems. In other words, Descartes accepts that the mind/soul and the mental properties of a particular mind go hand-in-hand. Thus he considers the soul to be an essential property, but he also thinks other properties will always go along with the soul.

If you lose all your memories and beliefs, what we take to be distinctive of you, are you a different person, even if you have the same soul? A radical version of this appears in Babylon 5 (see especially the third-season episode "Passing Through Gethsemane"), called death of personality. By the 23rd century, they'd replaced the death penalty with procedure that became colloquially referred to as a mind-wipe. The memory and personality characteristics of the convicted criminal get removed from the brain, and a new set of memories and personality replace them, with a desire to serve.

In the episode, a monk discovers that he was once a serial killer. At least that's how he describes it. Some will say he's a new person now. Are they right if they mean that literally? We say a man just out of prison totally changed is a new person - but not literally. It could be the same guy much changed. So this isn't much of an objection to dualist accounts.

We have no sure way to tell if it's the same soul, but does it need to be absolutely sure or just reliable? If dualism is true, the methods we do use to tell if it's the same person will be reliable until death, so what's the problem? Having the same soul would involve the same beliefs, character, memories, and those don't allow body-switching or soul replacement without the person knowing.

So I conclude that the original challenge Perry sets up at the beginning of the discussion is met. He has his Weirob character ask for an account of the possibility of her survival beyond her impending death from terminal illness. She says she'd be satisfied not with a full expectation of eternal life but with the mere possibility. Doesn't the dualist view provide that? Sure, there are dualist views that have problems as discussed above, but those aren't the standard dualist view, and objections to those don't show problems with the dualist view itself. Perry thinks he's removed the dualist view from his set of options for this reason, but that seems premature.

Now it's another matter entirely whether the dualist view is true. I haven't given any arguments for it yet. You might happen to think it's true because you're committed to dualism already and find it plausible that such a mind/soul just is you or is central to your being you. But the arguments for dualism, discussed earlier in this series, are not all that convincing to most philosophers today. I hope that by the end of this personal identity discussion we'll be much more inclined to consider dualism, because it seems to me to be the best way to handle all the problems that occur in personal identity discussions. But for now let's move on to other views to see their difficulties before returning to a view that has much less of an argument for it in the views of most philosophers today. The next post will look at psychological accounts of personal identity.

Race Thought Experiment #7

2010-02-24T03:49:09Z

If a couple in Africa with no European ancestry somehow naturally conceived and gave birth to someone who grew up to look just like Sarah Michelle (Gellar) Prinze, would she be white? If a couple in Norway with no recent African ancestry naturally conceived and gave birth to a child who grew up to look just like James Earl Jones, would the child be black? If you think the cases aren't parallel, and one is yes but the other no, why is that?

Ontological Equality and Functional Subordination

2010-02-20T03:02:53Z

Craig Blomberg has a pretty detailed review of Philip Payne's Man and Woman, One in Christ: An Exegetical and Theological Study of Paul's Letters, and because of Denver Journal's new comment feature there's a lengthy comment in reply by Payne right below the review. There's a brief statement in Blomberg's review that Payne spends a good deal of time responding to that caught my interest.

The primary debate is over a particular issue in biblical interpretation between complementarians who insist that functional subordination is compatible with ontological equality when it comes to human relationships and egalitarians who resist such a compatibility. Most complementarians consider a similar kind of functional subordination to occur between the Father and Son in the Trinity, and so any egalitarian argument against it has to take into account both levels of the analogy, which makes things tricky to say the least. My own concern with Payne's argument lies primarily in its significance for the Trinitarian debate, but it also has an application in the gender-role issue that gave rise to the overall book that Blomberg is reviewing. I'll quote the relevant part of the exchange before offering my sense of where I think Payne's argument is mistaken.

Blomberg:

Payne finds the concept of functional subordination within ontological equality virtually non-sensical

Payne:

This misrepresents my position. I believe that ontological equality is perfectly compatible with functional subordination as long as that subordination is voluntary and temporary, as was Christ's voluntary and temporary subordination to the Father in the incarnation (e.g. Phil 2:6-11). It seems to me that if subordination in necessary and eternal, it is then an aspect of one's essence. As Millard J. Erickson says in Who's Tampering with the Trinity? An Assessment of the Subordination Debate (Grand Rapids: Kregel, 2009), 250, "If the Father is eternally and necessarily supreme among the persons of the Trinity, and if the Son eternally is subordinated to him, an interesting consequence follows. The Son in not merely accidentally, but essentially, subordinate to the Father. That means that there is a difference of essence between the two--that the Father's essence includes supreme authority, while the Son's essence includes submission and subordination, everywhere and always." It is the simultaneous affirmation of equality of essence of the persons of the Trinity with this sort of difference in their essence that I find self-contradictory.

I'm not sure I agree. It depends on a couple issues. In the case of the Trinity, it partly depends on what you mean by "ontological equality". Suppose functional subordination is correct, and the Son is functionally subordinate to the Father eternally and necessarily. Does that imply ontological inequality? Well, it implies a difference that is ontological, if it counts as an ontological difference for the Son to have an essential property not shared by the Father and the Father to have one not shared by the Son. If the roles are eternal and necessary (meaning there is no possible world in which the Father and Son don't have these roles), then there is an ontological difference, yes.

But is it inequality? Only in the sense that two things that are different are not equal on the mere ground that they are different. An apple and an orange are different and thus not equal. But they're an apple and an orange and are thus not comparable. It's not as if the apple is superior to the orange or vice versa just because they're different fruits. They're just different. Ah, but isn't the hierarchical relationship of the Father and Son going to be comparable, since one is in authority over the other? Thus it won't be like apples and oranges. That's true. But what the apple-orange relationship illustrates is that you can have differences without having the kind of ontological difference that amounts to inequality. Does a hierarchical relationship involve the kind of inequality we should care about when talking about equals?

Not necessarily. In the congregation I grew up in, the pastor and chair of the elder board was an unpaid volunteer, who had a full-time job in the human resources office of a local manufacturing plant. A member of the congregation was the human resources director and thus was his boss. So they simultaneously were in authority over each other in different respects, one on a spiritual level and the other in a workplace-supervisory role. Each was functionally subordinate to the other. It's true that in this case both are temporary roles, but my point with the example isn't that it's permanent but ontologically equal. It's that a functionally-subordinate role relationship can be hierarchical without being unequal. These two men were fully equal in their rights as U.S. citizens, as members of our congregation, and as employees of their company, but in certain respects one was in authority over the other, while in other respects the other was in authority over the first. So a hierarchical relationship can involve functional subordination with ontological equality.

So it seems to me that functional subordination is compatible with equality in the important sense, and whatever sense ontological differences of the sort Payne points out will be true in a case of eternal and necessary ontological differences, it's not the sense that undermines the relevant kind of equality.

But I think there's another problem with Payne's argument. Should we assume that eternal functional subordination implies necessary subordination? Should we think eternal functional subordination of the Father to the Son involves some essential property of the Father involving authority and a different essential property held by the Son involving subordination? I'm not sure myself that such a view would be heretical, as Kevin Giles claims. As long as the property is relational, it need not be part of the essence of the Father or the essence of the Son (which on traditional orthodox assumptions should be the same essence and thus have the same properties). After all, there has to be something that distinguishes the Father from the Son for them to be two persons, even if they are also the same God and thus can't have essential properties that are different. Perhaps an essential relation between them, a functional one rather than an ontological one, that would do that trick. (By a relation here, I mean a property corresponding to a two-place predicate that's held between two things rather than a property corresponding to a one-place predicate held by one thing.)

But you might instead be able to make sense of the Father-Son relation as contingent but eternal. In other words, isn't it possible that the functional relationship between the Father and Son is a voluntary, agreed-upon relationship that the Father and Son eternally and timelessly settle on but that in another possible world they might have eternally and timelessly settled on a different relation, namely one that puts the person who actually is the Father in the Son role and the person who actually is the Son in the Father role? I'm not aware of anything in the creeds or the scriptures that precludes such a view. Something's being true at every time certainly does not imply that it had to be true. If that truth is grounded in a timeless decision that God might have made differently, then in a different possible world God would have had some other contingent fact true of him timelessly and eternally. So it simply isn't true that functional subordination across all time implies necessary functional subordination.

I think there's yet a third problem too. Complementarians think functional subordination relations among human beings in this life should not involve a woman in authority over a man in marriage or in spiritual authority over men in the church. Regardless of whether that view is correct, I don't think it's true that they hold this to be true eternally. Marriage relationships end in death, and there's no reason to think elder-congregation relationships continue with any authoritative relationship post-death. So, for the only two functionally-hierarchical relationships most complementarians today even believe in, there's no reason to think complementarians must extend those relations beyond death, and thus that functional subordination isn't even an eternal relation, never mind a necessary one. I'm sure most complementarians would insist that women will not be in authority over men in the resurrection in any way like the husband-wife or elder-member relations in this life. But that doesn't mean such relations will continue. It's consistent with complementarianism that no human being (besides Jesus) will have any authority over any other human being in the resurrection. So even if Payne were right that eternality implies essentiality (which he certainly is not), he'd have the further problem of extending his critique toward complementarians who won't even insist on eternal functional subordination, and I don't see why complementarians should insist on that.

Gay/Homosexual/?

2010-02-18T16:43:31Z

I'm reading through the glossary in Elizabeth Meyer's Gender, Bullying, and Harassment, which I've been reading for an invited book review, and I noticed something that seemed odd to me in the definition for 'gay':

The preferred term for a person who engages in same-sex relationships and identifies as a member of this community. It is preferred to the term homosexual, which has scientific meanings that apply specifically to same-sex behaviors and does not consider a person's identities and relationships. Gay can refer to both men and women, although many women prefer the term lesbian.

Now I can think of three different things that could be distinguished here:

1. The sexual orientation: to use Meyer's own glossary definition, "the genders and sexes to which a person is emotionally, physically, romantically, and erotically attracted" -- such as homosexual, bisexual, omnisexual, heterosexual, and asexual -- and is informed by innate sexual attraction." This is a factual issue about which kinds of people the person is attracted to.

2. The identity: how someone identifies themselves in relation to sexual orientation. This isn't the same as sexual orientation, which is a question about who someone is attracted to. It's a question of how the person defines themself.

3. The behavior: how someone acts with respect to people of different genders or sexes. e.g. actually engaging in romantic and/or sexual relationships, making efforts to pursue such relationships, and so on.

I know people who would consider themselves homosexual according to sexual orientation as it's defined in 1 but who do not see their identity defined that way and in fact want to resist it. It's not clear that they are gay in the sense of Meyer's definition. This observation is completely independent of the moral question of whether they should resist it. They in fact try to, which means they don't identify as gay according to how Meyer defines that term.

What I find odd is that they also don't count as homosexual, the way Meyer defines that in the definition of 'gay' above, but they do count as homosexual by the definition of 'sexual orientation' in 1. If they are celibate or engage in heterosexual relationships (two men I know in this category are heterosexually married and, as far as I know, faithful to their wives), despite that not being their innate preference, then they do not participate in homosexual behavior as in 3. They merely have the attraction as their primary attraction, simply 1. The definition of 'sexual orientation' in 1 specifically allows for this possibility. But the definition of 'gay', which excludes it, also excludes it from what it says about the term 'homosexual', which it says "has scientific meanings that apply specifically to same-sex behaviors and does not consider a person's identities and relationships".

So is being homosexual a matter of sexual orientation, as in 1, or is it a matter of behaviors as Meyer distinguishes it from being gay in her definition of 'gay'? Or is the term ambiguous between the two and can sometimes mean one and sometimes the other? I thought I knew what it meant, but now I'm not so sure if she's capturing an important use of it that I haven't noticed before. If that's so, then perhaps we need to make distinctions clearer and figure out a term for the sexual orientation that doesn't imply anything about behavior.

Views on Baptism

2010-02-17T00:52:25Z

Marcus Maher reviews a new book called Three Views on Baptism. It basically covers the two main views of baptism found among Protestants along with a third view by Anthony Lane that is very close to what my own congregation does, and I've hardly ever seen anyone argue for such a view in print (which I think is the best practice, for the record).

The idea is that scripture isn't clear enough on the issue of baptism to justify a congregation requiring either believer's baptism or infant baptism. Instead, a congregation should leave it to the parents to decide whether they will (a) baptize their infant in anticipation of a later confirmation or (b) dedicate in anticipation of a later baptism (with pretty much the same content expressed at whichever one ends up occurring).

I happen to be of the view that each practice is functionally equivalent to the other practice. One of them conceptualizes it in a more biblical way, but the other does the same thing under a less-biblical way of describing it and conceiving of it.

As I commented on Marcus' post, I think there are two issues going on here, one of which isn't remotely settled by Lane's approach. Here are two separate questions:

1. What should a church allow in terms of its practice (only infant, only believer's, leave it to the conscience of the parents)?
2. What should a parent do (which might involve how parents choose a congregation to be members of or mighty involve choosing what to do in a dual-practice congregation)?

Even if you answer the first question with dual-practice (as I would), you still need an answer to the second question. I belong to a dual-practice congregation, and I think they made the right choice to allow both. But I think the scriptures do favor believer's baptism. Someone else might disagree with me (as several members of my congregation do, including one of the three elders). But I don't think that disagreement is grounds for division, which is why I favor the dual-practice approach.

What I don't think Lane really answers, though, is the second question. Favoring dual-practice in a congregation doesn't mean not taking a view on which to do when it comes time to decide between them, and it seemed to me from the review that Lane doesn't take a stance on that question. He thus hasn't answered the main question the other two authors are debating in the book, which is a little strange if the book is supposed to cover three views on the same question.

Holy Vestments

2010-02-12T17:32:30Z

In Sartorial Eye for the Clerical Guy, Christopher Benson points to the Mosaic law's requirements for dazzlingly beautiful uniforms for priests as a reason for Christian ministers to wear nice clothing today, with an emphasis on the majestic robes of the more liturgical denominations as compared with the three-piece suits of the congregations I grew up in.

In the comments, someone made the argument that Paul doesn't exactly say anything to Timothy, repeating such provisions for New Testament times. I suppose that's true, but it doesn't go far enough, because Paul did discuss vestments at one point:

likewise also that women should adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire,but with what is proper for women who profess godliness--with good works.[I Tim 2:9-10]

as did Peter:

Do not let your adorning be external--the braiding of hair and the putting on of gold jewelry, or the clothing you wear-- but let your adorning be the hidden person of the heart with the imperishable beauty of a gentle and quiet spirit, which in God's sight is very precious. [I Pet 3:2-4]

This is of a piece with the holy expanding to all things [edit: see my Scripture and Worship for the biblical theology of worship I'm working with here], as opposed to the holy/common divide of the Mosaic law. If all vestment can be holy, as all food, all containers, all buildings, and all days are now holy, then the principle of wearing clothing to glorify God becomes more about the inner than what it looks like. So a biblical theology that recognizes this isn't going to apply the levitical dress in a way that requires uniforms for the so-called professional ministers (on the ground that they are the replacements for priests at least in the sense of being the ones paid for ministry) or for the ordinary believer (on the principle of equality). It requires recognizing what Rick Warren wears as being just as capable of holiness and glory to God as what N.T. Wright wears.

When I raised this issue in the comments (I actually just lifted my comment verbatim above), Christopher responded:

Thank you for invoking relevant New Testament passages on clothing. Those passages deepen our conversation. I am wrestling with your contention that "the holy/common divide of the Mosaic law" is gone under the New Covenant, so that the holy is expanded to "all things." All things? Holiness can be conceived in different ways. One way is "a condition of being set apart." What is set apart about a minister who wears the same clothing at the pulpit that he wore for the Super Bowl party or neighborhood BBQ? What is set apart about going to a building on Sunday morning that resembles the bar I visited on Friday night or the mall I strolled through on Monday afternoon? Holiness quickly begins to loses its set-apartness and becomes quotidian and pedestrian.

If we think of holiness as being set apart, then it is a little strange to say that all things are holy, since then there would be nothing to be set apart from. But I think what I said is still true (and what follows is repeated from a comment I left in response). I meant that the holy/common divide of seeing the priestly/tabernacle things and the ordinary life things breaks down in the NT. Every day is equally holy, not just special festival days or sabbaths, as Paul says in several places. Every location is holy and suitable for worship rather than just a centralized temple or tabernacle, as Jesus says to the Samaritan woman in John 4. All food is clean, as Jesus declares and Peter and Paul reiterate. There are no special holy silverware items for use in a special holy building (e.g. what some people wrongly call a church) used for special fellowship meals. There are no special seats that have to be used (e.g. pews). Why should we retain the idea that some clothes are special?

That doesn't mean there's no purpose for clothing. We should still be clothed, for example, and it shouldn't be too revealing. But I don't see why a T-shirt, even one with a rip in the sleeve, or a bright Hawaiian shirt pattern should be any less appropriate for worship than a three-piece suit or dress. There's something special about worship that takes place corporately, yes. But it's not as if that's the only time we worship, and the principle that we should care about our appearance should apply as much during the week when we worship with our lives as it does when we happen to be worshiping corporately with other believers.

Race Thought Experiment #6

2010-02-12T03:46:33Z

In C.S. Lewis' The Magician's Nephew, Aslan modifies a normal horse to make him a talking horse and then later gives him wings and makes him a flying, talking horse. What if he transformed him further so that he looked and acted just like a human? Would he be a horse still? Would he be human?

Consciousness in Persistent Vegetative States

2010-02-09T21:35:04Z

A study published last week in the New England Journal of Medicine concludes that 40% of diagnoses of brain disorders are misdiagnoses. These are people diagnosed with conditions such as being in a persistent vegetative state, which is often taken as sufficient for removal of life support because of the assumption that no person remains.

This study finds that a significant percentage of people who are diagnosed as being in such a state are not only conscious but can even be made to communicate simple "yes" or "no" by being told to think about some concrete thing if they mean "yes" and a different concrete thing if they mean "no". Different parts of their brain would be active if they were conscious and given these instructions, and that could be detected, A number of these patients were thus able to communicate after being declared to have brains of jello with no possibility of consciousness.

This calls for a massive rethinking of how we should interpret what's going on in persistent vegetative state diagnoses. Either there are different conditions that look the same for all that can be detected (prior to this new method of detecting consciousness, anyway), or the one state that's been called a persistent vegetative state is fully compatible with consciousness, despite what doctors have assumed. Our courts have relied on that judgment to excuse what turns out to be the killing of a conscious human being. This new research raises the standards pretty steeply for when we should make life-or-death decisions based on such diagnoses.

The LifeNews article about this study includes a suggestion in the opposite direction. If these patients can indicate, consent, can't they be asked if they want to die? The doctor the article quotes as being interested in this does acknowledge that there are still problems with consent. I don't think the article shows much awareness of how significant such problems are. It's notoriously difficult to know when someone has rationally consented even if they can communicate in complete sentences, and this doctor thinks he can get patients who can only use this roundabout method to give legal consent to being killed? How will they determine whether the person is being rational in consenting? Congress prohibited the selling of organs, because it's too easy for people at the lower end in terms of income to be manipulated into giving up their organs. Shouldn't we extend at least as much courtesy to those who might be manipulated into giving up their lives?

[cross-posted at Evangel]