At Bible Study last night, we were looking at first John, as we have been in church, and it struck me that there are tensions throughout the book. For example, the tension in John 3 is that those born of God cannot sin (verse 9), but our experience is that we sin, and quite a bit.
It really begins in chapter 1, where we read that if we say we have no sin, we deceive ourselves, and in chapter 2, where we read that if we say we know God and don't keep his commandments, we are liars.
We're in a heap if we equate keeping God's commandments with "not sinning."1 Doesn't that mean that saying "I know him" is the same as "I have no sin"? Aren't these two statements mutually contradictory?
We get another sense of this in 1.7, where we read that if we walk in the light, his blood is cleansing us from all sin. If "walking in the light" means "not sinning," then where is the sin to be cleansed? Doesn't the verse imply that walking in the light includes sin?
How do we approach 3.9, which says that those who are born of God cannot sin?2
I'm not sure that I have the answers to any of these questions (in fact, I'm more sure that I don't), but what interested me some yesterday in the study is the historical context of the book.3 As I understand it, the book is considered a treatment of Gnosticism (Wikipedia article / Catholic Encyclopedia).
Gnosticism is a bit complicated, and I am no expert. As I understand it, the Gnostics generally treated the world as understable through two avenues: a "fleshy" one and a "spiritual" one. This is not entirely out of line with Christian though (see Ga 5, Ro 7, and others). As I've been taught, the Gnostics essentially denied the reality of the flesh and exalted (in their minds) the spiritual realm. This provoked rather licentious living (as mentioned in the "Antinomian School" of the CE article linked above) while simultaneously denying the reality of sin.
And I think perhaps that what we're seeing here is that sin is real, that the flesh is real, and that there is connection between the two more corporeal than we might think at first. (We read of glorified bodies in 1 Co 15, but not glorified spirits.) And so walking in the light (an important concept, I think, for the Gnostics) co-exists with sinning (which the Gnostics disallowed). Our fellowship with God is based on the admission of guilt (1.9), which implies the reality of sin.
And so I wonder if perhaps part of the tension in John is really that it's an explanation of how the spirit and flesh co-exist. In Galatians we read that the flesh fights against the spirit, and that it prevents us from doing what we want to do. In Romans seven, Paul laments that he doesn't even practise (PRASSW) the good he would like to do, but he completely does (POIEW) the evil that he wouldn't.4
Perhaps what we see in 1 John is a description of the spirit (the righteous, incorruptible part of our nature) and the flesh (the unrighteous, corrupted, and dying part). It has given me a lot ot think about, and hopefully will help crystallize some of my thoughts tomorrow when we finish the second chapter.
[1] I'm certainly not persuaded this is the connotation of "to keep" here—the word is more complicated than that—but there's a certain moralistic tone here that can't be denied. Doing the Right Thing is a part of this.
[2] I personally find the grammatical justification for "cannot continually sin" a little weak. I understand why the NIV translates 1 John 3 the way it does—and I'm pretty sure almost everyone else follows suit—but it's difficult to push POIEW into such a translation, and it really makes for some singular translation practices.
[3] I'm not a huge fan of the historical method of exegesis, primarily because it teaches people that we can make some cultural or historic adjustments to doctrine. E.g., there are people I've met who take the Corinthian prohibition against sexual contact as somehow limited to that single church, to that single culture, or that single time period. The same sort of thing happens with any number of sins (most of which I've committed, for whatever it's worth) that are culturally more acceptable today.
[4] One of the reasons it's very difficult follow the translation as mentioned in [2] is that the word POIEW is one that indicates completeness, not habit. We get our word "poem" from POIEW; one does not half-write a poem.
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Wednesday, March 7, 2007
More Free Will Musings
This collection of thoughts is mostly inspired by some recent stories regarding a link between faith and genetics. I found it originally on Slashdot and engaged in a short conversation with a couple posters regarding free will.
The original poster tried to demonstrate that God couldn't have free will because omniscience and omnipotence were logically incompatible. The premise and conclusion were both flawed, but it's really only the premise I'm interested in. He used a rather classic straw man argument: defining terms his way and applying them to the system of his choosing in order to show that system inconsistent. Christians never attributed free will to God in the sense that the poster would like to think of it.
The Bible is clear that (in at least one instance) God could not lie (He 6.8). All we really need in one instance to show that the poster's vision of God's omnipotence wasn't the same as the Christian's. And, for whatever it's worth, all Christians ever said was that we couldn't sin in heaven, not that we weren't free. The Scriptures really don't support the idea of free will as the power of contrary choice. They do a handy job of telling us that freedom is the ability to do what is right.
The original poster declined to respond, but another took issue with my statement that science provides no notion of free will either—it only ever ends in determinism (biological, chemical, and so on).
He used chaos theory, a new argument to me but not particularly to the debate. The mathematical basis isn't terribly difficult to grasp, and most people are familiar with the concepts regardless. The Butterfly Effect is the classic example: a butterfly flaps its wings in Venezuela and a tornado occurs in Texas. It's captured in the well-known rhyme:
Cutting out a fair amount of speculation and text, the thrust of it is that the present state of a chaotic system is very sensitive to initial conditions and that provided the same set of initial conditions, small variations along the way can produce drastically different outcomes after the same number of iterations.
This is important for a few reasons, one of which is that a lot of systems in nature are chaotic—the weather, for example, and the firings of neurons in the brain. What we find is that individual events are unpredictable, though classes of events are.1
The poster admitted, however, that this really wasn't avoiding determinism at all, though it provided the perception of it through unpredictability. In fact, chaotic systems are deterministic, just not "orderly."
There's another problem here, and that is that "Joe Freewill" (the moral agent in his example) is under the same constraints I am: he can't predict his own choices, either. In other words, the person making decisions is as ignorant about them as I am.
Yet another issue is that while chaos theory describes it cannot impute. In other words, chaos theory can describe natural phenomena, but it cannot explain how they arise. Science doesn't answer those sort of questions, and indeed cannot. Chaos theory says, "Event A is unpredictable," but it doesn't tell me where the source of unpredictability is.
Lots of interesting things to think about and study here, and it will be interesting to read about if I can escape the mound of books I'm buried under. At the end of the day, though, science and math really don't provide humans with much humanity—at least not in this case.
The original poster tried to demonstrate that God couldn't have free will because omniscience and omnipotence were logically incompatible. The premise and conclusion were both flawed, but it's really only the premise I'm interested in. He used a rather classic straw man argument: defining terms his way and applying them to the system of his choosing in order to show that system inconsistent. Christians never attributed free will to God in the sense that the poster would like to think of it.
The Bible is clear that (in at least one instance) God could not lie (He 6.8). All we really need in one instance to show that the poster's vision of God's omnipotence wasn't the same as the Christian's. And, for whatever it's worth, all Christians ever said was that we couldn't sin in heaven, not that we weren't free. The Scriptures really don't support the idea of free will as the power of contrary choice. They do a handy job of telling us that freedom is the ability to do what is right.
The original poster declined to respond, but another took issue with my statement that science provides no notion of free will either—it only ever ends in determinism (biological, chemical, and so on).
He used chaos theory, a new argument to me but not particularly to the debate. The mathematical basis isn't terribly difficult to grasp, and most people are familiar with the concepts regardless. The Butterfly Effect is the classic example: a butterfly flaps its wings in Venezuela and a tornado occurs in Texas. It's captured in the well-known rhyme:
For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe the horse was lost;
For want of a horse the rider was lost;
For want of a rider the battle was lost;
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
Cutting out a fair amount of speculation and text, the thrust of it is that the present state of a chaotic system is very sensitive to initial conditions and that provided the same set of initial conditions, small variations along the way can produce drastically different outcomes after the same number of iterations.
This is important for a few reasons, one of which is that a lot of systems in nature are chaotic—the weather, for example, and the firings of neurons in the brain. What we find is that individual events are unpredictable, though classes of events are.1
The poster admitted, however, that this really wasn't avoiding determinism at all, though it provided the perception of it through unpredictability. In fact, chaotic systems are deterministic, just not "orderly."
There's another problem here, and that is that "Joe Freewill" (the moral agent in his example) is under the same constraints I am: he can't predict his own choices, either. In other words, the person making decisions is as ignorant about them as I am.
Yet another issue is that while chaos theory describes it cannot impute. In other words, chaos theory can describe natural phenomena, but it cannot explain how they arise. Science doesn't answer those sort of questions, and indeed cannot. Chaos theory says, "Event A is unpredictable," but it doesn't tell me where the source of unpredictability is.
Lots of interesting things to think about and study here, and it will be interesting to read about if I can escape the mound of books I'm buried under. At the end of the day, though, science and math really don't provide humans with much humanity—at least not in this case.
Sunday, March 4, 2007
Abused Vocabulary
There are any number of abused vocabulary words in Christendom. Today's sermon inspired this posting by the pastor's interesting use of the word "world," as seen in first John. I want to make it clear as I write that I respect the man greatly, and I think he's a terrific teacher. We have our doctrinal differences, but I'm very pleased with his spirit and willingness to study the Word.1 So please don't take this as a harrangue against him; it's not.
The church is strongly against limited atonement (the doctrine that Jesus died especially for the elect), and they use 1 John 2.2 as evidence for their position.2 In this verse, they take the word "world" to mean "all men without exception."
The verse in question says, "And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." Their interpretation of the verse is common, and I won't even say it's wrong. I simply want to point out an inconsistency in how the word is used.
This morning, we moved on, arriving shortly at verse 15: "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." In this case, the pastor exegeted the verse explicitly as a system. It's certainly true that words have many uses, and the word "world" is one such.
I'm trying to avoid falling into a linguistic trap here; I really do think that we can use the word world to speak of its inhabitants. But there are other meanings in Scripture, also, and perhaps more prominent.
The Greek word is KOSMOS. We take from it our words "cosmos" and "cosmetic." KOSMOS speaks to an ordered system, and so it is used of a woman adorning herself (1Pe 3.3), of the world in which we live (Jn 1.10), things of the world (Mk 8.36), philosophies and religions of the world (1Co 3.19; Ga 4.3,4; Co 2.8), and people in the world (Jn 7.7; the "world" cannot hate—people do).
With all of these meanings of the world, we can imagine that the issue is a bit more complicated than it would appear at first blush. The frustrating thing for me in this situation is that the nuances of the word aren't examined. Naturally part of this frustration stems from a doctrinal difference I have with the church, but I think the point is an important one nonetheless. Such vocabulary abuse is especially common with the word "saved," and it dramatically influences the way that people read the Word. If we're intent on reading "all men without exception" instead of carefully considering that the world is a religious system, for instance, we may find ourselves in a heap of exegetical trouble.
[1] Calvary Chapel describe themselves as the link between pentecostal and baptist theology. They are, if it's even possible, three point Calvinists (they do not hold to Limited Atonement or Irresistable Grace; in this, I think they're essentially Lutheran), and hold that the spiritual gifts are still present. I'm a cessationist and agree with Calvin on most things. Double predestination gives me fits some still.
[2] The real difficulty with this understanding is that it fails to really capture what we read of redemption in the parables of Matthew 13. The hunter buys the field (the world) to get the treasure (the elect) inside of it. We may understand, too, that part of redemption is a redemption of creation, as in Romans 8. I guess I don't really care much for CS Lewis' theology in the main, but he was spot on when he wrote, "The reason we loved the old Narnia so much is because it was a little like this" (The Last Battle).
It's also often argued that his death was enough for all and applied only to the elect. I tend to apply Romans 5 and other passages in the sense that Christ's death removed Adam's transgression from the race; in this sense, his death was universal.
The church is strongly against limited atonement (the doctrine that Jesus died especially for the elect), and they use 1 John 2.2 as evidence for their position.2 In this verse, they take the word "world" to mean "all men without exception."
The verse in question says, "And he is the propitiation for our sins: and not for ours only, but also for the sins of the whole world." Their interpretation of the verse is common, and I won't even say it's wrong. I simply want to point out an inconsistency in how the word is used.
This morning, we moved on, arriving shortly at verse 15: "Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man love the world, the love of the Father is not in him." In this case, the pastor exegeted the verse explicitly as a system. It's certainly true that words have many uses, and the word "world" is one such.
I'm trying to avoid falling into a linguistic trap here; I really do think that we can use the word world to speak of its inhabitants. But there are other meanings in Scripture, also, and perhaps more prominent.
The Greek word is KOSMOS. We take from it our words "cosmos" and "cosmetic." KOSMOS speaks to an ordered system, and so it is used of a woman adorning herself (1Pe 3.3), of the world in which we live (Jn 1.10), things of the world (Mk 8.36), philosophies and religions of the world (1Co 3.19; Ga 4.3,4; Co 2.8), and people in the world (Jn 7.7; the "world" cannot hate—people do).
With all of these meanings of the world, we can imagine that the issue is a bit more complicated than it would appear at first blush. The frustrating thing for me in this situation is that the nuances of the word aren't examined. Naturally part of this frustration stems from a doctrinal difference I have with the church, but I think the point is an important one nonetheless. Such vocabulary abuse is especially common with the word "saved," and it dramatically influences the way that people read the Word. If we're intent on reading "all men without exception" instead of carefully considering that the world is a religious system, for instance, we may find ourselves in a heap of exegetical trouble.
[1] Calvary Chapel describe themselves as the link between pentecostal and baptist theology. They are, if it's even possible, three point Calvinists (they do not hold to Limited Atonement or Irresistable Grace; in this, I think they're essentially Lutheran), and hold that the spiritual gifts are still present. I'm a cessationist and agree with Calvin on most things. Double predestination gives me fits some still.
[2] The real difficulty with this understanding is that it fails to really capture what we read of redemption in the parables of Matthew 13. The hunter buys the field (the world) to get the treasure (the elect) inside of it. We may understand, too, that part of redemption is a redemption of creation, as in Romans 8. I guess I don't really care much for CS Lewis' theology in the main, but he was spot on when he wrote, "The reason we loved the old Narnia so much is because it was a little like this" (The Last Battle).
It's also often argued that his death was enough for all and applied only to the elect. I tend to apply Romans 5 and other passages in the sense that Christ's death removed Adam's transgression from the race; in this sense, his death was universal.
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