7.4 Paradigms Shifts (part 4)

The philosophy chapter on "How Do We Know?" continues. Previous posts at bottom.
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13. Most of us have heard of "paradigm shifts." These are when our way of looking at some issue or question fundamentally changes. The classic example is when the western world slowly shifted from thinking that the sun goes around the earth to thinking that the earth goes around the sun. In this particular case, it took more than a century for the shift to take place on a widespread level.

When we look back, most of us don't think much of this shift, but it was serious enough at the time that Galileo almost got burned at the stake for it (1633). When a person grows up with a particular paradigm, past controversies over it may seem insignificant. We might even look down on those "stupid people" who couldn't see it at the time. But this current moment in history is one with a clash of many paradigms, and different herds are fighting vigorously to maintain a certain way of looking at the world.

We normally think of paradigm shifts happening because of some data that doesn't fit into the prevailing way of looking at things. If we go back to our "dots" illustration, there may be dots that we did not include in the picture we drew out of the dots. It is often hard to fit all the data -- the dots -- into our "drawings" of the world.

We do our best to fit those "naughty dots" -- or "naughty data," as I like to call it -- into our pictures of the world. But some of those dots resist. We have drawn a picture of a bunny out of the dots, but there's this one dot next to the bunny's cheek that just doesn't seem to fit the picture. "Maybe it's a wart," someone exclaims. They write a scientific paper, "On the anomalous wart near the bunny's cheek."

But maybe there's a younger scientist. That "wart" has been bothering her for months, maybe even years. She lies there at night thinking, "What if it's not a wart?" At some point she might think, "What if it isn't a bunny?" "What else could it be?" she asks herself over and over again.

She has a breakthrough (or what she thinks is a breakthrough). Maybe it's not a wart but a nose. Maybe the face isn't turned the direction that everyone thinks it is. Maybe it's a tree.

She will face resistance. She might not be granted tenure for her foolish "nose hypothesis." Her papers might not be accepted for publication. She might not get that job.

But eventually, maybe her idea will catch on. Maybe some of the young whipper-snappers coming through the system will do their doctoral research on her nose hypothesis. Maybe her idea will catch on. Eventually, the resistance will get old and retire. Who knows, in three decades, perhaps most scientists will think that it is a nose.

Our paradigms "select" certain data as important and "deselect" other data as less or unimportant. Our paradigms tend to see certain data and not see other data. Think of some argument you have had with someone over something you said. "I didn't mean anything by it," you say. "It was a joke. You're not fat." 

"No, you really think that I'm fat," comes the response. Paradigms are meaning-assigning mechanisms. They take the same data of the world and do different things with it.

On November 11, 1572, a Danish astronomer named Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) observed a new star. But new stars weren't supposed to happen under the existing paradigm of the universe at that time. The stars were meant to be fixed, created by God on the fourth day of creation and stuck in place ever since. If stars can still come into being, then our paradigm of the cosmos needs to be altered.

14. This framework for understanding how different groups assign different meanings to the same data is incredibly helpful. In my holiness background, an earring or ring was very significant. They indicated ungodly pride on the part of those who wore them. It was thus a significant paradigm shift when I realized that such things might not actually have much significance at all to someone wearing them. In the case of a wedding ring, the significance might actually be quite virtuous.

We have paradigms with regard to Scripture as well, as we will discuss at the end of the chapter. In my paradigm relating to the value of human beings, Galatians 3:28 features large -- God does not value differently men and women, those of one race or another, or those of one social status or another. But for other Christians the household codes of Colossians 3-4 or the words of 1 Timothy 2:12 are the core data points of their theology of women or -- in the past -- of slaves. Same Bible. Same text. Different paradigms.

The writings of Michel Foucault (1926-1984) explored some key paradigm shifts that have happened on various aspects of society in the last few centuries. We can view his work through the lens of Kuhn's paradigm shifts and see some good illustrations of how the prevailing thinking of culture shifts over time.

For example, in his work, Madness and Civilization (1961), he explored how views of insanity have shifted over the years. [27] In ancient times, insanity could be seen as a blessing from the gods, as in the case of oracles who seemed to "lose their mind" when they were being inspired by the god. By contrast, no doubt mental illness might have been interpreted as demon-possession in certain Jewish circles.

In medieval times, there was the concept of the "ship of fools" (more legendary than historical). This ship was thought to sail to and fro with its riders seeking to find their rightful home. The problem was misplacement. If they were to find their rightful home, they would find the minds that they had lost.

A century ago, those with mental illness were seen as having a medical problem that might be fixed by medical procedures. There were frontal lobotomies and chemical therapies. In general, however, such individuals were hidden away so that no one need think about them. Under the Nazis, such individuals were seen as a problem for the genetic purity of the German race, and were eliminated.

In more recent times, those with mental illness have been viewed more with compassion. Society is supposed to help them. Medications are developed to help restore them. We take care of them as families rather than sequestering them away. They are often integrated and mainstreamed into our classrooms.

15. In his other works, Foucault explored similar shifts in relation to what we do with those who break the law or how we conceptualize sexuality. His attempts to do "archaeology" on the way society views these things are potentially helpful for us to see ourselves where we may have blind spots. [28] His work titled, Discipline and Punish (1975) explored changing views of the criminal. Then he wrote a three volume series on The History of Sexuality (1976).

For example, not long ago, a key feature of criminal punishment was public shaming. Individuals who were put to death were put to death publicly as an example. In the England of the 1500s, people were beheaded or burned at the stake publicly so that everyone could see what happens to those who oppose the king or queen. The notorious lynchings of the post-Civil War era were a way of keeping blacks in line. "Know your place or we -- the ones with the power -- will show you who is in control."

The Romans did the same thing with crucifixion. [29] Jesus was crucified at one of the entrances to Jerusalem, just outside the gate. Victims were stripped naked and humiliated. The point was, "Don't mess with the Romans. We have the power, and you are insignificant."

But in more recent times, capital punishment has become a private ceremony with hints of revenge. Select individuals are invited to come watch and see justice done. Still other voices in our contemporary culture are opposed to capital punishment at all.

We feel the pressures of these shifts in the church too. Although I do not think that the Bible is opposed to capital punishment, I feel the pressure of my circles to say it does. The "virtuous" in my circles are opposed to capital punishment. (To be fair, the percentage of individuals wrongly convicted is so high that I suspect it should be used very rarely.)

We experience these forces, this "herd pressure" as the voices in power shift. Just a year ago (2024), it was overwhelmingly common for companies to have offices devoted to "diversity, equity, and inclusion" (DEI). But with the power shift under the current administration, those letters will not likely be heard anywhere by a company in the public sector. 

As Foucault wrote, "Knowledge is power." Those who have power can shape what is true -- or at least what is considered to be true. "History is told by the winners."

Christians today operate with different paradigms in relation to criminality. Take the question of undocumented immigrants. How serious of a violation is it to overstay your official welcome? Those currently in power want to villainize such individuals. "They have broken the law; they must be returned... with forcefulness." 

But this perspective is not at all obvious. It is a paradigm. For example, who determines whether overstaying your official welcome is a matter of a fine or for that matter having to stand on your head for twenty minutes. Culture assigns the significance.

How significant is that line that we call a "border." It's not a real line. It's an imaginary line that a bunch of people got together and drew (sometimes at the point of a gun). It is a paradigmatic line -- a "social construct," if you would. [30] The significance of stepping over it is something we collectively create. It is not "real" in that sense.

Notice I said "undocumented" rather than "illegal." The word illegal has certain power connotations that assign a certain negative emotive force. Technically, most immigrants in this regard have broken civil law rather than criminal law. In that sense, most undocumented immigrants are not illegal. They have simply overstayed their official welcome. Most of the American public are undoubtedly unaware both of their own assumptions on this topic and of the forces that unknowingly are working on them.

16. Foucault's exploration of how views of sexuality have changed over time are also relevant to our conversations on the topic today. [31] Chiefly, he argued that the very notion of sexuality is fairly recent. Before the 1800s, people didn't categorize themselves as "heterosexual" or "homosexual." In effect, there were people who behaved normally and then there were "deviant acts." The acts were policed, not identities.

The assumption of culture prior to the 1800s, then, would be that a male would marry and have children. This was not a question of "orientation" -- a modern concept. It was simply the norm, the default. Any reader of the Sodom and Gomorrah story prior to the twentieth century would have assumed that all the men of Sodom were married and had children.

What then of same-sex prior to recent times? It was seen as something done "on the side," a deviant act as opposed to normal behavior. Take King James of King James Version fame. He was married. He had children. And he is rumored to have had sex with some younger men of his court. It was something he did "on the side," so to speak.

Today, we want to categorize an individual like him as a homosexual in orientation, someone whose "sexuality" is oriented around the same sex rather than the opposite sex. But this is a modern way of thinking about the subject. It reflects a paradigm shift that has taken place over the last hundred years.

With regard to Scripture, this perspective might change the way we read passages dealing with same-sex actions. If we read the key passages carefully, we can see that they are all about activities. They are not about orientations, which is a modern construct. Being aware of our own paradigms -- as well as those of the biblical worlds -- is a potential game changer when it comes both to understanding the Bible and applying it to today.

Our default is to read our paradigms into the biblical text. We assume our family structures. We assume our economic structures. We assume our way of thinking about any number of things. And the more core the issue, the more likely we are to be blind to our own paradigms.

Yet reading the Bible in context is an intercultural experience. It is like visiting a foreign country. If we listen to it closely, we will find it a strange new world. And we will begin to see our own assumptions more and more clearly too in contrast.

[27] Michel Foucault, Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in an Age of Reason (Random House, 1965).

[28] Foucault's core concept was how power stood in the background of such shifts. This is an important consideration, but I want to focus more on the epistemological dimension of such shifts at the moment.

[29] James Cone drew this parallel in his book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (Orbis, 2013).

[30] A classic work here is Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckman, The Social Construction of Knowledge: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (Anchor, 1967).

[31] We might note that he himself was gay and died of AIDS in 1984. In his work, he never claimed objectivity since as a postmodern he rejected the concept outright. Rather, for him, knowledge was a function of power. Despite his extreme views in this regard, however, there is much insight to be gained from his explorations, as I hope I am demonstrating.

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Previously,
1.1 Unexamined Assumptions
1.2 "Unitary" Thinking
2.1 Binary Thinking in Ethics
2.2 Contextualization in Missions
2.3 Beyond Relativism and Absolutes 
3.1 Setting the Stage for a Political Conversation
3.2 Binary Political Thinking
3.3 Assumptions about Christ and Culture
3.4 All our thinking and living is enculturated.
7.1 How Do We Know (part 1)
7.2 A Framework of Understanding (part 2)
7.3 The Ordering of Impressions (part 3)

1.3 Approaches to Scripture

Tuesday Science and Scripture continues. We are in the second half of the first draft of chapter 1: "Four Relationships" 

Previous posts:

1.1 Relationships between Science and Faith
1.2 Critical Realism and the Coherence of Truth

The Nature of Scripture 
Since we are asking about the relationship between science and Scripture, we should take at least a moment to clarify exactly what Scripture and science exactly are. It is perhaps ironic that, of the two, we might be less refective on the nature of Scripture than we are the nature of science. There are three main approaches to Scripture in this discussion, all of which likely intermingle in actual practice.

The first is exactly what we implied in the previous paragraph. Many readers approach Scripture in an unreflective, "what you see is what you get" manner, assuming the text means what it seems to say to them in modern English. One reads the words and defines them according to whatever meanings are in your head. If you are reading the Bible in English, then you assume that the normal meanings of English words in your world are the meanings the words have. 

For example, if you were reading the King James Version (KJV) of 1 Peter 1:15, you would encounter the words, "be ye holy in all manner of conversation." If you come to these words from the standpoint of modern English, you will likely think the verse is about how you talk to others. Yet the meaning of the English word conversation has changed over the last few hundred years. Accordingly, the English Standard Version (ESV) has "you also be holy in all your conduct."

Of course, the Bible was not written in English. The Old Testament was written in Hebrew (and some Aramaic), while the New Testament was written in Greek. Understanding the original meanings of the Bible's words two thousand years ago and more is not simply a matter of finding an English word that is equivalent to those Greek and Hebrew words. This is because the meanings of words are never exactly equivalent from one language to another. There is always some loss of meaning.

This is because the meaning of words is in how they are used. A dictionary does not tell us some unchanging meaning to words. A dictionary is a popularity contest. The meanings of words are numbered from most common use of a word to the least common. Meanings come and go. New meanings are always being added as they arise in culture, and older meanings (like that of conversation in the KJV as "conduct") first become archaic and then are dropped entirely.

For this reason, the meaning that first comes to our mind when we read the Bible may approximate the meaning the verse had when it was written, but it might not. Our first impression may actually turn out to be quite far from what the verse really meant. An English dictionary is only helpful if we do not know what the English words in our Bible mean, which we probably do.

Further, these meanings are embedded in a cultural world. When I read the word husband or wife in the Bible, I am not reading about a modern husband or wife. I am not reading about families as they likely exist in my world. I am reading about husbands, wives, and families as they existed in the biblical worlds.

Additionally, many Christians tend to read the Bible in an atomistic way. That is to say, we may tend to focus on individual verses rather than reading the Bible the way we would normally read a book, following paragraph to paragraph. If we remove verses from their paragraphs and chapters, we are even less likely to be reading the words "in context." To read in context is to read the words in the flow of an overall book of the Bible as well as in the light of its historical background.

All that is to say, we may assume that science is what needs to be adjusted in relation to Scripture when our understanding of Scripture itself may be incorrect. For example, Martin Luther once mocked the new idea that the earth might go around the sun, quoting Joshua 10 where the sun stands still. [21] Taking Joshua 10:13 literally, Luther assumed that the verse was saying it was the sun that was going around the earth and that it stopped in its course. In the 1500s and 1600s, there were many Christians who saw any language in the Bible about the sun rising or setting as evidence that it was in fact the sun that goes around the earth (e.g., Eccl. 1:5).

Today, we would take this language phenomenologically. That is to say, we take this as informal language that speaks of the world in terms of how it appears, not as scientific statements that should be taken literally. For example, Paul may be alluding to the dead when he says that every knee "under the earth" will bow to Christ (Phil. 2:10), but few Christians today think of the center of the earth as the true abode of the dead, even if we might bury their bodies under the earth. Similarly, when Paul talks about being taken up into "the third sky" (2 Cor. 12:2), few of us think that he is revealing that God's throne is in the upper atmosphere.

What is interesting is that we are usually willing to adjust our hermeneutic -- our way of interpreting Scripture -- in these instances even though Paul and the authors of Joshua and Ecclesiastes themselves may have taken this imagery literally. We are willing to say, "The point of the revelation was not the literal structure of the universe but the event being described or the actual point being made." Determinations of whether we should read such imagery literally or figuratively are often made unreflectively, depending on what our Christian traditions find important or generally ignore.

However, in other cases, we may actually be mistaken about what the text really meant. Our interpretation may be wrong. We may be reading the words as they strike us in our world rather than in the way the words were intended to be understood in their worlds.

In addition to an unreflective reading of Scripture, there are two other approaches that are significantly more reflective. We might call one a presuppositional approach and the other an inductive approach. The first says, "We cannot rightly understand Scripture unless we have a number of key faith assumptions in place." The other says that "We should let the text tell us what it meant by reading the words in their most likely original literary and historical contexts."

What is an inductive approach? An inductive approach simply tries to read the words for what they would have most likely meant when they were first written. This is a potentially complicated task. Indeed, we often lack sufficient evidence to draw conclusions on the original meaning beyond a reasonable doubt. In many cases, the meaning of the Bible is "under-determined." [22]

Nevertheless, an inductive approach draws on evidence from context to identify the most likely original meanings of a passage. This includes the literary context of a passage -- the words that come before and after the text in question. What does the train of thought lead us to think the words most likely meant. It also draws on the historical context of a passage -- its likely historical and situational background. This latter context is much more difficult to identify with certainty.

As relates to science, one of the most important questions is that of genre. The genre of a document is the type of literature it is. For example, we know not to laugh (generally) at an obituary or to cry after reading a comic strip meant to be funny. We absorb these expectations from our culture without even realizing it. 

Yet the expectations of biblical genres were part of the biblical worlds. I will not naturally come to the biblical texts with those assumptions because they were shaped in a world that is ancient and likely quite foreign to mine. What, for example, were the expectations of history writing when the biblical texts were written? What were the expectations of story telling or poetry or prophecy? 

For some, this may seem to be an attempt to dodge the "plain meaning" of the text. Yet, again, the plain meaning of the text to me is a meaning based on my world, not the text's world. Is my world really more important than theirs in determining the meaning? Do not the biblical texts themselves say that they were written to ancient Israelites, Romans, Corinthians, and so forth?

There is, however, another approach to the meaning of the biblical text that we might call presuppositional. To be clear, there are presuppositions -- pre-assumptions -- involved in the first two approaches mentioned above. The unreflective interpreter has largely unexamined assumptions. The inductive interpreter assumes that we have enough evidence to make reasonable decisions about the meaning of the text that at least approach or aim at objectivity.

What distinguishes a presuppositionalist approach is the nature and extent of the assumptions made. First, such assumptions are largely theological in nature -- they have to do with the nature of Scripture, the nature of human knowledge, and how God reveals himself. For example, we mentioned above that the meaning of Scripture is often under-determined. Many "post-liberal" theologians thus argue that it is not only permissible but inevitable that we bring our theological assumptions into our interpretations. [23]

Another group of interpreters that have long emphasized the role of presuppositions in interpretation are those who come from the standpoint of a "Reformed epistemology." The Reformed tradition stands in the stream of John Calvin's thought (1509-64), who famously emphasized that God chooses or "elects" certain individuals to be saved while not choosing others. The basis of God's choice is his decision alone and has nothing to do with any choices on the part of the elect.

It is thus natural that some in this tradition would see a proper understanding of Scripture as something that is given by God rather than investigated. You might say that the most important truths are more revealed than discovered. Karl Barth (1886-1968), perhaps the most influential Christian thinker of the twentieth century, wrote a masterpiece of theology known as the Church Dogmatics. [24] In them, he takes the posture that the most important truths about God are not to be argued for on the basis of evidence but to be believed as a matter of dogma.

Two more recent, leading Reformed figures in this regard are Alvin Plantinga and Vern Poythress. [25] Both would strongly emphasize that science is neither objective nor presuppositionless. We have already seen that this is the case from the work of Thomas Kuhn. 

A second key point that both Plantinga and Poythress make is that science often proceeds from a naturalist or anti-supernaturalist presupposition. What this means is that the possibility of God designing or being involved with the creation or processes of nature is either precluded or bracketed out. Naturalism presupposes that divine intervention cannot be used as an explanation for any scientific data. [26]

On the one hand, it is understandable that science would normally bracket the question of divine or "supernatural" intervention. When you are looking for an explanation for why mold grows on cheese, demons are not a particularly helpful explanation, as we will discuss in the next chapter. Nevertheless, what if God actually does exist and intervene in nature? What if the true explanation for the fossil evidence is that God actively participated in the development of simpler to more complex forms of life, as old earth creationists believe? In that case, the assumptions of normal science would actively preclude arriving at the correct explanation.

Christians are theists. That is to say, historic Christianity both believes that God is objectively real and that God is involved in the creation. A number of prominent scientists from the 1600s and 1700s were deists. They believed that God had created the world as a self-operating machine but that he was no longer involved in the operations of the world. Isaac Newton (1643-1727) would be a good example of someone whose views approached those of a deist. []

However, deism is not an option for a historic Christian, not least because the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus Christ are the central features of Christian faith. It would be hard to underestimate the degree to which the incarnation and resurrection of Jesus are an "intrusion" into the natural cause-effect flow of nature! For this reason, historic Christians by definition believe that God remains involved in the world.

The degree to which presuppositions about Scripture should be involved in scientific thinking can vary from one presuppositionalist to another. For example, Ken Ham is perhaps the best known spokesman at this time for what is called "young earth creationism." [27] He would interpret Genesis 1 to present creation in six literal 24 hour days.

For him, presuppositionalism not only assumes this interpretation of Genesis 1 but it demands that all scientific evidence must be analyzed with this assumption in view. If you attend a creation-evolution debate in which Ham represents the creationist side, you will hear much about presuppositions in his presentation. In his case, the evidence is not allowed to come to any conclusion but one that coheres with his interpretations of the relevant biblical passages.

On the other end of the spectrum, Francis Collins might represent a theist who looks for minimal involvement of God in the course of nature. Collins is well-known both for his leadership of the Human Genome Project and his strong Christian faith. In the late 1900s, the Human Genome Project mapped human DNA for the first time. Yet Collins is also known for his conversion to Christian faith, a pilgrimage captured well in his classic, The Language of God. [28]

Yet in his acceptance of evolution he largely rejects the option that God might have directed such a process. [29] Although he is a theist, he suggests that resort to the miraculous should be a course of last resort. Any "God of the gaps" approach -- which uses divine intervention to explain current gaps in our scientific knowledge -- should be strongly avoided. [] We will see in the next chapter why this approach is understandable. Nevertheless, it is possible that Collins' assumptions could lead him to miss God's divine hand when it was actually there in a pronounced way. 

[insert discussion of inerrancy]

We will keep these three basic approaches to Scripture in mind in the discussions of this book. Ideally, we would move from unreflectivity about our approach either to a primarily inductive or presuppositionalist approach. However, we likely will adopt some mixed approach, with at least some presuppositions and some evidentiary elements. We should keep these options in mind as we move forward.

[21] In Martin Luther's Table Talk as recorded by Mathesius (1539)

[22] See below for Stephen Fowl as an example of someone who would say that the meaning of the Bible is so underdetermined that it is fully acceptable to read it with theological presuppositions in place, Engaging Scripture: A Model for Theological Interpretation (Blackwell, 1998).

[23] I would describe the post-liberal tradition as thinkers who have come from mainstream (liberal) Christian traditions who have rejected what we might call a modernist, evidentiary oriented approach to the most important truths. Rather, these thinkers emphasize the legitimacy of giving primacy to certain faith assumptions apart from evidentiary reasoning. 

The work of Hans Georg Gadamer often stands in the background of such thinkers. See Truth and Method (Mohr Siebeck, 1960). Gadamer argued that our readings of texts are an inevitable fusion of our "horizon" with the horizon of the text. We thus cannot see the historical meaning of the text-in-itself but only the fusion of our world with the world of the text.

[24] The series was published in English by T & T Clark in 13 parts and 4 volumes from 1936-77.

[25] E.g., Alvin Plantinga, Where the Conflict Really Lies: Science, Religion, and Naturalism (Oxford University, 2011); Vern Poythress, Redeeming Science: A God-Centered Approach (Crossway, 2006). See also Ransom Poythress, Has Science Made God Unnecessary? (Christian Focus, 2022).  

[26] The roots of such bracketing go back to the Enlightenment, not least David Hume in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.

[27] See especially answersingenesis.com. 

[28] Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Free, 2006).

[29] Collins, Language, 45-52

5.1 An Easter Morning in Galatians

On Mondays, I'm writing on my journey with Scripture in college, seminary and beyond. I jumped the gun last week with the King James Version, missed a step. Backtracking this week to 1987. Previous posts at the bottom.
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1. There are three key pivot points in my spiritual pilgrimage. I've already mentioned one. It was an afternoon when I was ten years old at a February camp meeting when my conscience suddenly awakened. A period of about ten years of terror began when I struggled to find peace despite constantly praying for it. [1]

The second major pivot point in my spiritual journey happened on Easter Sunday, April 19, 1987. This was about a year after a relationship had fallen apart because of my self-doubt. Questions about the "standards" I have discussed was one of the symptoms. The woman I had dated returned to normal dress after the relationship ended.

While dress standards had been around me growing up, my parents had not emphasized them, so I'm not sure that they had really been very important to me before I went to college. As a man, I wasn't too restricted. It was more of something to which I assented. So now that it was personal, I couldn't see the meaning in them. Many of the rules of my context didn't make sense to me (like no dancing) even though I had no trouble keeping them. 

2. In retrospect, I wonder if my moral development was also working in the background. I totally agree with Søren Kierkegaard, Lawrence Kohlberg, and others that blind rule-keeping is a lower stage of moral thinking. In duty-oriented ethics, rules don't necessarily have to have meaning. Their meaning is in the fact that they are rules. 

This is where legalism can come in -- morality can simply become a checklist to do or not do. The rules become the goal rather than the meaning of the rules. In the hands of some personalities, we multiply rules because we like rules. We like structure. We like certainty. Although our understanding of the Pharisees is often a caricature, we know them especially for their penchant to reduce God's expectations to rules, subrules, sub-subrules, etc.

I had what I thought was a revealing conversation with my dad some time after I returned from my studies in England. I don't know what issue we were specifically discussing, but he finally exclaimed, "What don't you do?" (There were many answers I could have given him -- I don't murder, I don't steal). I'm sure we were talking about something that our branch of Wesleyanism didn't do that I now didn't have a moral problem with. Don't get me wrong -- my dad was a compassionate, reasonable man.

But it revealed that my father's church culture had programmed him to see morality primarily in terms of do's and don'ts. It was a hyper-duty based ethic. I wonder how many American Christians -- especially evangelicals -- think this way. It is a "law and order" mentality. It thrives on clarity, certainty, and concreteness. It requires less wrestling with the complexity of life or motives. Rather, it's thinking is, "This is the rule. Did you break it."

3. On Easter morning 1987, I felt compelled for some reason to read through the book of Galatians. I don't think I had ever done something like that. I read through a whole book of the Bible in one sitting -- in the atomized King James Version, no less.

As I read, I felt the Spirit telling me that I aligned far more with the Judaizers that Paul was fighting against than with Paul. (I should add, I had a very old perspective understanding of Paul at this time.) Paul was telling the Galatians that a right standing with God was a gift. It wasn't something you could earn by being good enough. God was looking for faith in Christ not works of law.

Galatians 5:2: "Behold, I Paul say unto you, that if ye be circumcised, Christ shall profit you nothing." 

Interesting that it was considered important in my circles to have male children circumcised. This was part of our hermeneutic that didn't really differentiate the Old Testament from the New Testament. You applied it all equally (inconsistently). So even though Paul tells the Galatians not to get circumcised, we did it because the Israelites did, and somehow we read the Old Testament as if we were Israelites too.

Galatians 4:9-11: "Now, after that ye have known God, or rather are known of God, how turn ye again to the weak and beggarly elements, whereunto ye desire again to be in bondage? Ye observe days, and months, and times, and years. I am afraid of you, lest I have bestowed upon you labour in vain."

Paul was not telling the Galatians that they needed to shape up and start keeping the Old Testament rules. He was, in effect, arguing for a heart-oriented approach. He was telling them they did not have to keep certain Old Testament rules. (I would now say the Israel-specific ones like circumcision, food laws, and sabbath observance.)

I would now categorize Paul's ethic (and Jesus') as a "virtue-based" ethic. It is an approach that says, "When your heart is right, your actions will be on the right track as well." It is a movement from who we are as Spirit-filled believers (being) to right action (doing). For sure, our ignorance can cause some malfunction in this process. But in theory, if we are led by the Spirit, we will walk by the Spirit (Gal. 5:16).

4. There was at that time a student on the campus of Central Wesleyan College (where I went to college), the daughter of a professor, who was perhaps the most Spirit-filled person I knew at the time. She had recently gotten back on track with her faith, and she exuded a contagious love for the Lord. As I reflected on Galatians, it occurred to me that here was someone who was far closer to the Lord than I was, and yet she didn't keep any of the rules I grew up with.

She had very short hair, for example. When one of my aunts cut her hair short, members of my family said she had "backed up on light," which meant that she had known better and chosen to rebel against God. This girl on campus wore jeans. She had earrings. And yet she clearly was filled with the Spirit.

In that sense, Galatians 5:22 was convicting. "The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control." That sure didn't seem like a good description of most of the "entirely sanctified" holiness people I grew up with. [2] Me? Peace? Ha!!

Joy? That's not how I perceived them. "Love"? No, I can't say that that's the first word that came to me. "Peace," "kindness," "gentleness"? No, not really. Curmudgeon would have more been my impression. "Self-control" -- yes!! In gobs.

It would increasingly seem to me that there was something fundamentally wrong with my previous paradigm when the key indicators of the Spirit seemed to be absent in those in my world who most emphasized the Spirit. Those who most believed in entire sanctification seemed to me the least to fit the checklist.

5. That Easter Sunday was a turning point. It wasn't that the change would have been immediately noticeable. I kept keeping the "holiness" rules. Like I said, the holiness rules didn't really affect men very much anyway.

But you might call it a Protestant moment. Back to the Bible. I was re-orienting myself around Scripture in a new way. Now the question was, "What does Scripture actually say?" rather than "How can I interpret this verse in a way that agrees with my tradition?" 

The scientific thinking that had developed in high school and that I had pursued initially as a chemistry major at CWC came into play. [3] Gather evidence from Scripture. Form hypotheses about what it might mean. Test the hypothesis against the text. Refine your conclusion. It is basically the inductive Bible study method that I would learn at Asbury Seminary the next year.

A note of caution. It is a dangerous thing to be loosed from your childhood paradigm. This is why it is so important for children to be discipled well -- and with a reasonable form of faith. The training of a child is deeply ingrained on the psyche. It is a deep structure. It is intuitive, not rational. It is not easily shaken.

As I was being loosed from my childhood paradigm, it would not be easy to replace with something so deeply ingrained. You can believe something with your mind, but that is a fairly weak power over your life, despite what many think. Ideas can come and go easily. It's the deep, gut "beliefs" that direct our actions. They are more affective than cognitive. [4]

Perhaps part of what I'm saying is that you will take easy answers when it is your tribe, when you're in the bubble. Now I would increasingly need good reasons. Now I would need substance.

6. This was also the beginning of peace. The restlessness of soul that began that February afternoon in 1977 had lasted ten years. Insecurity about whether I was saved. "Lord, please forgive me if I've sinned." "Lord, please forgive me if I've sinned." "What if I can't remember a sin so I can confess it? Does that mean I can never be forgiven for it?" "Has the Lord come back?" "Where's my mother? Is she still here?" "Am I sanctified?" "Have I wanted sanctification enough?"

Some of this neurosis no doubt came from my brain development and general personality. But the Devil also used it with great delight.

Now as I started seminary, I was headed for days of peace and joy, some of the happiest days of my life. Although I loved my family, a cloud of oppression would come over my soul when I would visit home. Then the freedom of the Lord -- the freedom of Galatians -- would return after a day or too back at seminary. It was not a freedom to sin. It was the joy of the Lord. 

The one version of God -- unintended no doubt -- was a sheriff sitting there with his revolver just waiting to blow me away if I stepped out of line. The other was a God who was rooting for me to win and helped me get back up if I fell. The one god almost smiled with fiendish delight as I neared a cliff. He nudged Gabriel and said, "Watch this -- he's about to fall off." The other was a God who redirected me away from the cliff without me even knowing it. 

The one God said, "Mercy triumphs over judgment" (Jas. 2:13). The other was a god who couldn't control his temper because he was insecure -- just a big guy. He would blow up uncontrollably whenever someone stepped over an arbitrary line he drew just to test me. One was a God of love, the other a god of legalism. One was a God who could sympathize with our weaknesses (Heb. 4:15). The other had no time for anyone who wasn't perfect.

It was the difference between a mature God and a childish one who was less mature than I am. 

[1] I've also been working on at least two other sets of "life notes" including a more general one, Notes Along the Way. 

[2] I tell about my journey with entire sanctification in Notes Along the Way and in the preface to A Brief Guide to Biblical Holiness.

[3] Again, I discuss this pilgrimage in more detail in Notes Along the Way.

[4] I talk about this in other writing projects like I'm Right; You're Wrong: A Philosophical Pilgrimage. See Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2013) and James K. A. Smith, You Are What You Love: The Spiritual Power of Habit (Brazos, 2016).

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1. The Memory Verse Approach

2.1 Adventures in Interpretation
2.2 Adventures in Jewelry

3.1 Beginnings of Context
3.2 Adventures in Hair
3.3 What was 1 Corinthians 11 really about?

4.1 Keeping the Sabbath
4.2 The Sabbath as Conviction
4.3 The New Testament and Old Testament Law 

Through the Bible -- Acts 1

Since next Sunday is Pentecost, I thought I'd shift from Mark to Acts.  

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1. Acts is volume 2 of Luke. It was written for the same person as the Gospel of Luke, someone named Theophilus (Acts 1:1). He is called "most excellent Theophilus" in Luke 1:3, making many wonder if he was a Roman governor (cf. Acts 24:2). 

The name "Theophilus" means "lover of God," making some think the name is a literary device and that Acts was written for anyone who loves God. As such, it would be addressed to all lovers of God. It is also possible that Theophilus was a Christian name given to a Roman governor at baptism. We know of at least one Roman governor who becomes a believer in Acts 13, Sergius Paulus. 

In the end, it seems likely Theophilus was a real person, maybe even a patron who sponsored the writing of Luke-Acts.

2. The Gospel of Luke was about "everything that Jesus began to do and teach" (Acts 1:1). In Acts, Jesus continues to teach through his Spirit in the apostles and his church. Luke 24 ended with Jesus' ascension, and Acts will pick up the story at that point. 

There is one key difference. A straightforward reading of Luke 24 would easily give us the impression that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended on the same day. [1] Yet in Acts 1 we hear that there was a forty day period between the resurrection and the ascension (Acts 1:3). From one standpoint, therefore, Luke 24 "telescopes" Acts 1.

The comparison shows that Luke used some artistic freedom in his presentation, which was perfectly acceptable at the time. It also means, however, that we are not likely getting a videotape or transcript of the events. Luke has arranged and told the events in a way that brings out truths about the Way. [2] That was his priority, the message. 

Jesus tells them to wait in Jerusalem. John the Baptist had foretold that Jesus would baptize them with the Holy Spirit (Luke 3:16; Acts 1:5). That will happen in Acts 2 on the Day of Pentecost. They are getting in the stalls at the Kentucky Derby. The race of the church will begin in Acts 2. [3]

3. The final question the disciples ask Jesus is whether he will now restore the kingdom to Israel. This is very revealing. It reflects that their expectations of Jesus as Messiah have always been military and political. They were not expecting Jesus to die, as the Gospel of Mark so clearly shows (e.g., Mark 8:31-32). Then they clearly were not expecting him to rise either (cf. Luke 24:21-24).

So now they are wondering, "Are we back on for kicking the Romans out of Jerusalem and taking the kingdom back for Israel?"

Jesus does not contradict their expectation in itself. After all, Luke 21 points to a "times of the Gentiles" when Jerusalem will be trampled on by the Romans (21:24), an allusion to the destruction of Jerusalem that would happen forty years later. Presumably, after the times of the Gentiles were over, the kingdom of God would come and an expanded Israel would inherit the earth.

But they do not understand the timing. Just as they did not anticipate Jesus death and resurrection, they did not anticipate Jesus' ascension. Jesus is taken out of their sight into heaven. Luke-Acts is the only place where Jesus' ascension is explicitly told, although Hebrews may allude to it. [4]

Heaven is not likely straight up, although that is the way they thought of it in their worldview. From what Paul says in 2 Corinthians 12:2, they likely pictured a universe where you went straight up through layers of sky to the highest sky where God's throne was. It is an illustration of the fact that God reveals himself in our categories so that we can picture and grasp his point in our language and peripheral frameworks.

If God created the universe out of nothing, then God's essence is not in this universe. His "throne room," a metaphor in itself, is "somewhere else." I have always thought of heaven and hell as being in another dimension, but that is simply a picture that works for me in our time.

So Jesus "stoops to their weakness," as the hymn says, meeting them in terms they understand. [5] He ascends until he is out of sight. Then presumably he transports to wherever heaven is. 

4. We might view Acts 1:8 as the key verse of Acts. It gives us a generalization of the whole book in a nutshell. 

For example, "You will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes on you." The book of Acts is a recurring series of events where believers receive the Holy Spirit, and power is an immediate consequence. I grew up in a tradition that emphasized purity as what comes with the Spirit, and we do find that idea at least once in Acts (15:9), the purification of sins.

However, power is the key manifestation of the Spirit in Acts. We find the power to perform miracles (e.g., Acts 3). There is the power of boldness (e.g. 4:31). They receive the power to speak in languages they have not learned (2:6).

With this power, they testify to the resurrection. "You will be my witnesses." They were disciples. In Acts 2 they become apostles -- individuals sent with a commission. The specific commission is to witness to Jesus' resurrection. According to Paul, this is a central part of what it means to be an apostle (1 Corinthians 9:1). There are no apostles of this sort today because Jesus has not appeared to anyone today the way he appeared to them. Paul was the last (1 Cor. 15:8).

So they will become apostles in Acts 2 and will be sent with the commission to testify to the resurrection. These initial apostles included more than just the Twelve. Paul was one of them. Barnabas likely witnessed the risen Jesus as well (1 Cor. 9:6). A husband-wife pair called Andronicus and Junia may also have been in this number (Rom. 16:7). 

They will witness to the resurrection in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, and the ends of the earth. This is a kind of map to the book of Acts. Acts 1-7 are in Jerusalem. Then Acts 8-12 are in Judea and Samaria. Finally, Acts 13-28 are to the ends of the earth, remembering that Rome was the end of the earth in the geographical paradigm of Jesus' day.

5. The remainder of Acts 1 deals with the replacement of Judas (1:12-26). The number twelve was important because it symbolized the tribes of Israel. The twelve apostles point to the restoration of Israel. 

First, Luke tells us who the eleven remaining disciples are. Peter seems to be the leader, and we remember that is the first man to whom Jesus appeared (Luke 24:34). In the Gospels we have, Peter is the lead apostle, although Jesus' brother James will seemingly become the leader of the Jerusalem church.

There are others there beyond the Twelve -- Acts 1:15 says 120. The women who had supported Jesus are mentioned, as now is Jesus' mother Mary and his brothers (1:14). Luke does not indicate that Jesus' mother or family were present at his crucifixion. John is unique in that regard. Mention of the presence of the women reminds us that Luke more than any of the Gospels features the presence and participation of women in the early church and its ministry.

Peter feels led to call for the replacement of Judas. He quotes Scripture -- Psalm 69:25 and Psalm 109:8. The early Christians likely meditated on these psalms as they thought about the sufferings of Jesus -- especially Psalm 69 since several of its verses are referenced in the New Testament in relation to Jesus. They are psalms of lament, where the psalmist asks God for rescue in suffering. They are even more specifically imprecatory psalms that call for God to vindicate the psalmist in the face of his enemies.

Reading these verses spiritually, Peter understands the Spirit to be telling them to replace Judas' "office" among the twelve. The criteria for the replacement include that it must be someone who has been with them since the time of John the Baptist. Interestingly, the apostle Paul would not qualify. It is often suggested that Paul was the real replacement for Judas, but he would not have qualified according to Acts. 

Paul and Barnabas were in a second tier of apostles. There were the Twelve, the first tier. Then there was a second tier to whom Jesus also appeared, but they were not among the Twelve. We see this two tier sense of the apostles in 1 Corinthians 15:5-8.

6. Acts 1:18-19 is where we find out the fate of Judas. Luke's account is a little different from the other Gospels. All the Gospels except John indicate that Judas received money for betraying Jesus. In Matthew he returns the money and then hangs himself. Then the priests buy a field with it (Matt. 27:7-8). In Acts 1, Judas buys the field and dies there "falling headlong" (Acts 1:19).

At least on a surface level, these two accounts are not precisely reconcilable. In Matthew the priests buy the field. In Acts, Judas does. The mode of death also seems to differ. Some have found it very important to find a historical reconciliation on the level of detail. For example, perhaps Judas tried to hang himself and the rope broke, causing him to fall headlong.

These attempts at harmonization are well-intentioned but probably unncessary. Ancient history writing could involve some creative license. Also, the agreement on the core event with difference in detail actually points to the historicity of the event. It is exactly what we would expect with oral tradition. Both accounts agree that the money was used to buy a field and that the field was called "Akeldama," "field of blood." They both agree that Jesus died soon after Jesus' death.

7. They cast lots and Matthias is chosen. We never hear of him -- or the majority of the disciples -- ever again. There are some traditions about what befell them, but they are not in Scripture.

On the surface, throwing dice does not seem the best method of choosing a leader, but in their worldview, God was understood to direct the way the lot fell. Presumably, God met them in their expectation within their framework of understanding. That it was a cultural practice is clear because the Roman soldiers cast lots to decide who would get Jesus' clothing (e.g., Matt. 27:35). This is the only time in the New Testament when believers cast lots to make a decision.

It is perhaps a reminder that "description is not prescription." That is to say, the Bible narrates a lot of events. We are not meant to emulate all of them (for example, Judas hanging himself). Sometimes the Bible describes what they did without prescribing that we do it the same way.

8. They bathe this decision in prayer (Acts 1:24). Prayer is another one of the key themes of Luke-Acts. The followers of the Way prayed regularly in community (2:42). They prayed for God's guidance. They prayed for the power of the Spirit. Although it is not explicitly mentioned before the Day of Pentecost, we should assume that, as mentioned here at the end of Acts 1, they were praying in the upper room when the Holy Spirit comes upon them.

[1] The angels appear to the women at the tomb on Easter morning. "The same day," two men meet Jesus on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13). When they realize it's Jesus, they head back to Jerusalem "that same hour" (24:33). When they arrive back, Jesus has already appeared to Peter and then suddenly appears to all of them (24:36). Then he leads them out to Bethany and is taken to heaven (24:50).

Clearly, this is a syncopated version. For example, Matthew and Mark have all the appearances to the main apostles in Galilee, and it is in Galilee that Jesus gives the Great Commission. Luke 24 has no room for any appearances in Galilee, even though he surely knows about them. 

[2] "The Way" is how Luke refers to the Jesus movement several times in Acts (e.g., Acts 9:2; 19:23).

[3] Some have suggested that the Day of Pentecost was a second Spirit event in the life of the apostles since Jesus breathes on them and tells them to receive the Holy Spirit in John 20:22. However, the story world of Luke-Acts is a self-contained one. In it, the Day of Pentecost is the fulfillment of the promise of John the Baptist. John has a different story world, and Acts does not include it. You might argue that John 20:22 is John's allusion to or version of Pentecost.

[4] E.g., Hebrews 4:14.

[5] From the hymn, "Spirit of God, descend upon my heart."

The Flow of Revelation 1

It is on my bucket list to write a book on biblical theology, starting with the notes from when I taught it as a graduate class. However, the church could probably use a popular version of my notes. I've thought about writing on it on Fridays. Here's a possible start.

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Introduction
It is natural for Christians to read the Bible as a single book from God to them. It is the word of God. It is good news for everyone in the world. The Holy Spirit speaks daily to believers as they read these words.

In the pages that follow I want to take you on a journey in your reading of the Bible. The goal is not to interfere with those direct words from God to you every day as you read the word. I call it God "zapping" us. I am reading the biblical text and, bam, God makes some passage come alive. In older language, he "quickens" it. 

Keep chewing on the text daily. If you know what lectio divina is, keep doing it -- reading small portions of text over and over again asking God to speak to you. Keep hearing that overarching story of salvation from creation to fall to redeption to final consummation in the text.

Yet, I want to sharpen your hearing of another story in the Bible. This is the story of God walking with humanity toward a more and more precise understanding of him. The pages of Scripture give witness to this journey. The New Testament has a fuller understanding of God than the Old Testament because of the fuller understanding of Christ, who is the key to unlock everything. Yes, we and the New Testament authors see Jesus in the Old Testament, but it is the Spirit and the New Testament that has opened our eyes. 

You don't have to take my word for it. We are about to see this developing understanding, this "flow of revelation," in the pages of the Bible itself. We will look at passages you may not have noticed. We will learn how to read the books of the Bible in context -- how those who first received it might have understood it. The goal is not to take away your direct zappings but to add what the biblical texts might have meant when God first revealed them.

The result will be a transformation of your reading of the Bible from a flat, two-dimensional story to a deep, three-dimensional chorus. We hope to hear how God spoke to a host of different individuals on different occasions in different times and places. I welcome you to treat me as a hostile witness if you want. Feel free to suspend your judgment on what is being said until you are fully convinced. If I am wrong, I don't want you to believe me.

I expect to learn on this journey as well. Who knows, maybe the text will talk me out of what I think this book is going to say. But it is the biblical text itself I want us to listen to. Some say that, but I wonder if they truly mean it. In practice, is it more the case that they listen to the Bible until it hits an electric fence their tradition has put up? In other words, I wonder if they listen to the text as long as it doesn't break their "rules."

We'll see what you think. We're going to start with what the Bible has to say about God. Then we'll follow a fairly conventional path. What does the Bible say about creation? About a Fall? What is the arc of Israel in the biblical texts? What about Christ and salvation? What about ethics? What about the return of Christ?

What I think you will find is that the earliest texts of the Old Testament have a very broad understanding of these things. I think you will find that the flow of revelation gets more and more precise as we go along. The details get filled in. The earlier revelation is more anthropomorphic in relation to God (portraying God using human illustrations we can relate to), the later texts more theologically detailed.

We will argue that Jesus is the "final Word" of Scripture. I want to be careful not to put a rule on the Bible that it doesn't want -- after all, that is what I am saying others do. But our working hypothesis will be that the flow of revelation after Christ is an unpacking of Christ's significance rather than "extra" revelation. One rule we will try to maintain is that the New Testament is the definitive unpacking of Christ's significance.

Yet, if we are honest, the unpacking of Christ did not end there. I write this introduction during the months of the 1700th anniversary of the Council of Nicaea in AD325. The Nicene Creed that would eventually develop out of that meeting is a much more precise presentation of the Trinity than anything found in the Bible. Indeed, the contours of the Bible itself -- called the "canon" or measuring rod -- are not found in the Bible. The Bible never says, "Here are the books of the Bible." That was a decision that bubbled up hundreds of years later in the church.

So, Jesus was the "last Word" and the New Testament is the authoritative presentation of God's Word. But the unpacking of that revelation continued in fundamental ways for several hundred years. And there are issues like predestination that we continue to wrestle with today. 

We want things to be crystal clear, and Christians often act as if the Bible serves that purpose. Yet, over 20,000 Protestant church groups later, it is simply not the case that the Bible has removed all ambiguity on questions of theology. It is quite curious to make such a claim in the light of history. Words by their very nature can typically be read in multiple ways. For good or ill, the community of faith almost always ends up playing a role in our understanding of Scripture. [1]

You can decide for yourself. Let's set sail on the river of revelation in Scripture. Orthodoxy will be our guiding star on the voyage -- the commonly held beliefs of Christians over the centuries. Yet we will also keep in mind that it is a "rule." Hopefully, the rivers of Scripture lead us there, but we also want to be honest if at some point we have to get out of the river of Scripture and finish the journey by land.

We'll see. Let's get in the boat and start sailing in Genesis. 

Key Concepts

lectio divina -- "divine reading." It's a practice of reading Scripture is small bites. Mulling it over. Meditating on it. Praying over it. Chewing on it.

anthropomorphism -- portraying something that isn't human in human terms

canon -- the collection of authoritative books found in the Bible, the "measuring rod" for our belief and practice

orthodoxy -- "right belief"

hermeneutics -- the study of how we interpret things, especially the Bible

[1] Several years ago, I tried to set out a "hermeneutic" -- an approach to reading the Bible -- that takes all these factors into account. The ebook of Who Decides What the Bible Means? is here, and the paperback on Amazon.

7.3 The Ordering of Impressions (part 3)

continued from here
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The Ordering of Impressions
8. So, our experiences of the world give us impressions. More accurately, our experiences of the world either conform to or do not conform to our mind's predictions of what we expect. And of course we have fake impressions as well, pseudo-impressions. How does our mind process these impressions?

Let's go back to Kant. As we mentioned, Kant believed that God had built our minds to have certain built-in or "innate" categories to accurately process our impressions. [18] The first of such categories he discussed were space and time. We perceive the items outside ourselves to have dimension. We perceive our experiences to string together in a sequence.

He would add to space and time other innate categories like cause and effect. Although not innate, he added logic and mathematics to the list of things that were not known by experience but could be known to be true through reason.

In short, there are a number of things that seem true about reality that go beyond our mere experiences. They seem to be intrinsic to reality itself. Can we go even further?

9. How about gravity? If I am on the roof of a tall building, I best not treat the question of jumping off as a matter of opinion. "You have your opinion; I have mine. You think I'll go splat but I don't." We can both debate whether we are going to go splat on the way down, but the ground doesn't care which position you take. There is a right and wrong answer. 

[As a quick aside, few people are truly relativists when it comes to matters of truth. [19] It's easy to be a relativist on matters of religion or the meaning of life, but you would be hard to find many people who think that the consequences of jumping out of an airplane without a parachute is a matter of opinion.]

Back to Hume. In his consummate skepticism, he suggested that we had no real reason to prefer going out of a building from the first floor rather than out a second floor window. [20] We have not experienced the future, so we cannot empirically say one is better than the other. Kant disagreed, and I hope you will too.

Roy Bhaskar, who coined the phrase critical realism, considered Hume and philosophers like him to be "unserious" when they ventured into suggestions like these. [21] Hume never actually climbed out a second floor window. Bhaskar suggests that there is an underlying structure to reality that, while our perceptions of it may vary, it is worthy of being called real. Our language about it, our pictures of it, our paradigms about it may vary, but we are getting at something that is actually true and there.

Bhaskar suggested that there were three dimensions to reality. [22] First, there is the actual -- the events that happen in the world. They are independent of us. They happen whether we are present or not. If a tree falls in the forest, it makes a sound.

But, yes, there is the empirical. This is my experience of the world. Yes, these perceptions are filtered by my mind. I do not experience the actual as it is but as it appears to me.

But he added a third category, the "real." There are structures and mechanisms that connect my perceptions with the actual. They are more than useful constructs of my mind. There's more to them than that. Gravity was one of them, as an example.

10. If I might tweak Bhaskar and Kant a bit, here is a similarly three-fold analysis of our knowledge of the world. First, the world outside of me is real. This is certainly a very pragmatic belief. If you find yourself in the middle of the road with a truck coming toward you, please step out of the way. It is best to treat the world outside yourself as real. We can hallucinate things about the world. We can be dreaming about the world rather than awake. But the existence of a world that is different from us is consummately reasonable.

It is reasonable to believe that the world would continue to exist even if I did not. If the earth did not exist, the universe would be just fine. No one has ever woken up to find that the world outside him or herself was not there.

Second, my perception of the world is thoroughly affected by my mind. In 1910, Ralph Barton Perry coined the phrase "the egocentric predicament." [23] I like to say that we are stuck inside our heads. We have no choice but to see the world from "in here." More on the paradigms and constructions with which we come to the world in a moment. As Kant put it, we do not see the world as it is. We see the world as it appears to us.

However, Bhaskar is also surely correct. There are underlying realities that are the basis for both the world and my understanding of it. We can surely go beyond pragmatic realism. Faith in certain structures of reality is more than merely useful. It is reasonable to believe that space and time, cause and effect, logic and math, and certain rules of nature are actually real beyond mere perceptions. The way any one person or group expresses that reality may differ, but the reality we are trying to express is real apart from our perception.

To summarize critical realism as I use the term, the world exists independently of me. It is real apart from my perception. However, my perception and understanding of the world will always be finite and shaped by my interpretive frameworks and fallen reason. Nevertheless, there are real truths about the world that we can grasp even if our knowledge of them is always mediated by human paradigms and frameworks of understanding.

Human Paradigms
11. What critical realism gives us is a hope that the constructs of our minds -- the way we organize our thinking about the world -- are more than merely arbitrary inventions of our minds. It gives us hope that some interpretations of the world are actually more accurate than others. We briefly mentioned Thomas Kuhn and the idea of paradigm shifts earlier in the chapter. In the first edition of his 1962 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, his work was interpreted by some to say that one scientific paradigm was no more valid than another. [24] A critical realist view justifies us in thinking that some paradigms are more correct than others and that we might actually approximate truths about the world.

Nevertheless, we should recognize the significant degree to which we construct our understanding of the world. If our perception of the world involves a host of different impressions, we are rarely aware of all of the data points, and some of them will be mirages of our imagination. Remember that our minds come to the world looking to confirm our pre-existing expectations. Our default mode is to see them.

You may have heard of a concept known as confirmation bias. This is our tendency to see what we expect to see. In chapter 3, I mentioned Jonathan Haidt's metaphor of a rider on an elephant. [25] The rider is like our reason and the elephant our deep intuitions and urges. Our elephant largely goes where it wants to go, and our "riders" find reasons to justify it.

As we have argued thus far on the journey, this is often true of the most idea-oriented among us. It is true especially of those who do not use their reason to find the most probable interpretation of the data but rather use their intellects to find possible ways to make the evidence fit what they already believe and what they want or need it to fit.

12. Paradigms are interpretive frameworks. They are meaning-harvesting mechanisms. They affect what we see of the data and what we don't see. They are like a word cloud -- they make some aspects of reality seem bigger and other aspects seem smaller. They direct what data we select as significant and what data we ignore.

When I was growing up, jewelry of almost any kind was considered wrong for a woman to wear (e.g., 1 Pet. 3:3). In the paradigm of my church background, it was very significant. It was something someone in my group would notice immediately on a woman. It was part of our holiness paradigm. It was large in our "word cloud."

My paradigm came into conflict with the paradigms of others at college. Modest jewelry wasn't a no-no for the women at my college. It was only after a break-up in college that it came home to me how insignificant an earring was for most Christian women. In my paradigm, it meant pride. It meant "look at me, look at me" in a bad way. But it crashed in on me that most women put on earrings like I would wear a tie to church back then.

When I got married, I wore a wedding ring. For the first few years of marriage I think I twisted and twisted that thing endlessly. It was uncomfortable and a foreign object on my finger. Yet its meaning was one of commitment to my wife. It says, "I am committed to someone and am not looking for a relationship with anyone else." I assure you, no self-centered pride is involved with it.

Yet, given the holiness paradigm of my youth, someone asked if they could see it not long after I was married. I foolishly took it off and gave it to them to see. They then commenced to parade around, "Ooo, look at me," flaunting the ring in an over-the-top way. To be frank, the person looked ridiculous.

In the "word cloud" of their paradigm, it seemed impossible that a ring would not be some huge statement, some huge psychological indicator. For this person, it meant PRIDE with capital letters. Most of you reading these words will no doubt think this story was very weird.

And yet this is the way paradigms work. Certain datapoints seem very significant. Yet someone with a different paradigm may not find them very significant at all.

13. The idea of paradigms arose in science as Kuhn used them to explain, for example, the Copernican revolution of the 1500s and 1600s when people went from seeing the sun as rotating around the earth to the earth rotating around the sun. In the twentieth century, relativity and quantum mechanics similarly transformed the way we look at the physics of the very big and the very small.

We often think of changes like these as a matter of progress or people getting smarter, but Kuhn points out that the math of the geocentric (earth at the center) thinkers was at one point better than that of the new heliocentric (sun at the center) ones. But the geocentric view had become very complicated to try to account for data that didn't fit simply into the existing paradigm. 

Copernicus' (1473-1543) model was much more straightforward. And when Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) later suggested that the planets moved around the sun in ellipses, then the new model was both simpler and more accurate in its math. Kuhn's point is simply that what the prevailing view of science is at the moment ("normal science") is not simply a matter of objectivity. There are social and paradigmatic elements as well.

Paradigms are the scaffolding that stand alongside whatever it is we are interpreting. They affect what we do with the data. They direct what kinds of pictures we draw with the dots, so to speak. 

As we mentioned earlier, you can draw an almost infinite number of pictures with a set of dots. In ancient times, they didn't have a lot of dots. This significantly affects what picture you draw. The fewer the dots you have, the less likely it is that your picture either represents underlying reality or that it is highly useful.

Myths were expressions of mysteries using the dots they had. We shouldn't think of myths as bad science -- that's to misapply our modern paradigm to a different world. Ancient myths were as much expressions of things as explanations.

Take the Norse myth that expresses why the seasons change. Jostein Gaarder uses this story as an illustration in his novelized history of Western philosophy. [26] The god Thor gets his hammer stolen and the season goes to winter. He gets it back, and we have spring. It's the Norse version of the Greek story of Demester and Persephone.

The thing is, in the story, Thor kills the guy who stole his hammer. If you are thinking that myths are about explanations, this is a really bad one. The story only works for one year because then the guy is dead. In fact, Thor dresses up like a woman and marries the guy before killing him. He's not going to be fooled next year.

I was always amazed that Gaarder didn't see that his paradigm of what a myth is was inadequate. This story is a really bad explanation for why the seasons change. However, it is a fun expression of the mystery that is the changing of the seasons...

[18] "Innate" comes from words meaning "in born." In other words, we are born with these categories.

[19] I might also point out that relativism on questions of truth is different from relativism on matters of ethics. On matters of truth, a relativist would claim that all truth is relative to the individual or group. As often pointed out, this is an absolute claim which deconstructs the very claim of relativism itself.

Relativism in ethics is a distinct question. It holds that there are no universal moral norms. It sees right and wrong as relative to the individual or group. We have already discussed relativism in chapter 2.

[20] In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779). 

[21] Roy Bhaskar, The Order of Natural Necessity: A Kind of Introduction to Critical Realism (Independently Published, 2017), 8.

[22] Bhaskar, A Realist Theory of Knowledge (Leeds, 1975).

[23] In his article of the same name, "The Ego-Centric Predicament," Journal of Philosophy (1910). 

[24] He denied that this was the case in the Postscript to his second 1970 edition.

[25] Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion (Vintage, 2013).

[26] Jostein Gaarder, Sophie's World: A Novel about the History of Philosophy (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux1991).

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Previously,
1.1 Unexamined Assumptions
1.2 "Unitary" Thinking
2.1 Binary Thinking in Ethics
2.2 Contextualization in Missions
2.3 Beyond Relativism and Absolutes 
7.1 How Do We Know (part 1)
7.2 A Framework of Understanding (part 2)

 

A Brief Thought on Wesleyans and Baptism Debates

Someone asked me, given the recent article in Wesleyan Life, how the son of a Wesleyan minister might never have been baptized. Many Wesleyans do not know that the Pilgrim Holiness Church was not strong on baptism.

For example, my grandfather was a Quaker minister before he switched when the Pilgrim church was officially formed in the early 20s. Asked to perform a baptism in his 50s, he decided he should be baptized too first. My mother was not baptized until she was in her 40s (and our family was good friends in Florida with the Coates, with a similar background). [1]

If you find this incomprehensible, there is a key factor in play. Few of us realize that we wear glasses when we read the Bible. This was true of the Quakers, but it's also true now of us as Wesleyans. America is Baptist country. It suits our culture like hand in glove. Quakers and Salvation Army folk are wearing a different set of glasses and don't generally baptize at all.

I believe in baptism as a norm. I love that you can still be baptized as an infant in the Wesleyan Church, following our Wesley roots. I love that we don't specify immersion, pouring, or sprinkling.

Wesleyan Church Wesleyans generally borrow their thinking from others. The more academic side says, "But we're Wesleyans; it needs to be more sacramental." The more populist side feels the forces of baptistification and says, "Acts, Acts, Acts."

And I feel like we Wesleyans have been doing just fine with our big tent position on baptism. Paul looks on at our current debates and says, "Were you baptized in the name of believer's immersion? I thank God I didn't baptize any of you (to your horror). Ok, maybe I did baptize a handful." We all think we're just reading the Bible and doing what it says. And so do the other 20,000 denominations.

Here was my attempt to capture what I perceive to be the Wesleyan Church position on baptism (now in this). Here is another piece I wrote before that, "The Skinny on Wesleyans and Baptism."

[1] As an artifact of her upbringing, I remember my mother noting in Mark 16:16 that while baptism is mentioned as part of being saved, the second part only says that those who do not believe will be condemned. In other words, it does not say that those who are not baptized stand under condemnation.

1.2 Science and Scripture: Critical Realism and the Coherence of Truth

It's Tuesday, so my Science and Scripture writing continues from last week...
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Experience vs. Reason 
Believe it or not, philosophers have debated extensively these last two hundred years about what science actually does and what its goals truly are. We will mention a few of the details near the end of the chapter. For the moment, here is a practical, common sense approach that will hopefully allow us to move forward. We will mention more specific controversies as they seem relevant.

When the scientific method was first detailed by Francis Bacon in the 1600s (more below and in the chapter that follows), it fed directly into a stream of thought called empiricism. In empiricism, the path to truth is through our senses -- "seeing is believing." Our eyes, our ears, our touch, taste, and smell all "write" on the whiteboard of our minds. As the ancient Greek Aristotle once said, "There is nothing the intellect that was not first in the senses." [10]

However, David Hume (1711-76) -- who took empiricism to its logical extreme -- realized that many aspects of common human understanding do not come from our senses. For example, you can hit a pool ball with a cue stick and experience every moment along the way. It's getting closer. It's getting closer. It is barely touching. The ball is moving. The ball is moving. What you can't experience is the rule of cause and effect that says, "The cue caused the ball to move." You can experience individual moments, but it is your mind that "glues" those moments together. 

The same is true of time. We experience moment after moment, but we do not experience time as the glue our minds assign to those moments. The same is true of the relationship between events and the "values" we assign those events. If someone hits me, I experience pain, but I do not experience the "value" that says it is wrong for you to hit me. Hume extended empiricism to what seemed a ridiculous conclusion -- that cause and effect, time, and values might be illusions.

Hume remained an empiricist despite what seemed a non-sensical implication. [11] However, he awoke another philosopher by the name of Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) from what he called his "dogmatic slumber." Kant suggested a simple way of looking at our knowing that created a cosmic shift in philosophy. He suggested that the content of our minds comes from our senses, yes, but that it is inevitably organized according to certain "built-in" or innate categories that God had given us. These categories included concepts like cause and effect, space and time, and right and wrong. [12]

I like to use the analogy of a Google Doc or some similar processing software. The user inputs text into the Google Doc. I am typing into a text "box" as I write this chapter. My typing is like our senses -- our senses "type" stuff into our minds.

But there are rules. Google Docs won't make you breakfast (yet). It won't take out your trash. I can't doodle outside the box (yet). What I am getting at is that there are rules to how the content is entered.

So it is with our minds, Kant argued. Our senses don't input the things of the world into our minds as they are. Our minds "glue" the inputs together in certain predictable ways that come pre-loaded onto our "hard drives," so to speak. In the end, we do not see the world as it actually is. We see the world as our minds process our experiences. We see the world as it appears to us.

With this simple framework, Kant set the stage for the debates of the last two hundred years over knowledge. These debates have spilled over into the philosophy of science, as we will explore in slightly more detail near the end of this chapter. Despite Kant's dethroning of any concept of pure empiricism, the first part of the 1900s was dominated by a group called the "positivists" who apparently did not get the memo. 

On the other hand, there are other philosophers who have almost suggested that science is nothing more than different social groups who believe different things. [13] Thomas Kuhn (1922-96) did see some paradigms as more effective than others but went a long way toward suggesting that scientific paradigms were less about progress in understanding as new groups simply organizing data in a different way. [14] A "constructivist" view of science sees it far less as the study of what is true about the world as scientists imposing their own frameworks on the world.

Both extremes seem a little less than satisfying, especially given all the developments in technology that improved understandings of science have made possible. Surely there are other perspectives on science that have managed to hold these two sources of truth in better tension. Such an approach would not abandon the central role of our senses nor ignore the dominating factor of our paradigms. Arguably, there is such an approach.

Critical Realism
The notion of "critical realism" has appeared in several contexts over the last fifty years. [15] In general, the goal is to find a middle way between a naive realism -- which doesn't recognize the role our minds play in our perception of the world -- and some pure constructivism that suggests we are simply making up our sense of the world as individuals or society. [16] Roy Bhaskar, the originator of the phrase, proposed three categories of reality: 1) the actual, the events that happen in the world (apart from our senses or existence), 2) the empirical, that which we observe, and 3) the "real," the deep structures and mechanisms that make things happen.

Without committing to his precise formulation, we can discern in his three elements a way of looking at science and the world that checks all the boxes, as it were. First, there is the world as it is. This relates to what Bhaskar called the "actual." It is reality happening. If the earth did not exist, the universe would go on just fine. Christians have historically believed that God is the only truly necessary Being, That is to say, if the universe were not here, God's existence would not be affected. [17] God and the world are real. They are not simply constructs of our minds. This is an incredibly reasonable claim.

However, second, we do not have unfiltered access to the world as it truly is. We only know the world as our minds organize and process it. (By the way, this is true of the Bible as well.) This is what Bhaskar calls the "empirical." Our understanding of the world is finite and it is flawed. From a theological perspective, part of human fallenness is our inability to be fully objective. We are stuck in our heads, and our sense of the world is inevitably skewed.

Yet, third, surely there is something more. Here is where various critical realists might differ a little in their formulations. There are ways of thinking that work incredibly well. Consider logic. The rules of logic were explored 2300 years ago by Aristotle and have been taught repeatedly to this day. There are no known exceptions to these rules. There is a structure to logic that always seems to work without exception. If one's premises are true, and one's logic is valid, the conclusion must follow. 

There is a close relationship between logic and math. Math parallels the world so well that some concepts first explored by mathematicians were later found to have actual correlates in the world. Take the square root of negative one, known as i. A smart middle school student might think, "Who came up with this idea? You can't find the square root of a negative number!" 

Yet quantum physics regularly uses imaginary numbers. Those numbers help physicists explain the way particles function on the subatomic level. Some of the predictions of cosmology -- the study of the universe -- were first proposed because of equations. The existence of antimatter is an example of one such discovery.

What we find is that there is a correspondence between math and the real world that seems to belie an underlying structure to the world that the human mind can grasp very adequately. Call it what you will. The world exists, and though our perception of that world is heavily constructed by our own minds and culture, the quest for truth about the world does not seem completely in vain.

One key to critical realism is the fact that some constructs of reality work better than others. For example, if a construct helps us correctly predict what will happen next, that is a more successful one than if we are always predicting the wrong thing to happen next. The idea of cause and effect, for example, is consistently reliable as a predictor of what comes next. Bhaskar would say that in such cases we have hit on something that goes beyond our mere perception to something that is real. We are knocking on the door of structures and underlying mechanisms of the universe. 

In this sense, we can go beyond what another school of realism -- pragmatic realism -- asserts. Pragmatic realism bascially asserts that we should only think in terms of what works, not in terms of actual truths about the world. [18] Leave the reality of the world as a black box we cannot look into and think only in terms of constructs that help us function in the world.

However, the existence of logic, math, and consistently dependable concepts like cause and effect may suggest we can say more than what the pragmatic realist does. Even if our way of talking about the world is subject to our language and paradigms, it would seem that our language is sufficient to express and predict some things with absolute accuracy (1 + 1 will equal 2 when the symbols refer to reality in their normal way).

The language and symbols we use to express the underlying reality of the world may vary. Nevertheless, in certain well known instances, it seems to be a fully accurate representation of what takes place as we experience it. The pragmatic realist brackets all consideration of the world as it actually is. The critical realist thinks more is possible.

Three Tests for Truth 
The previous section has paved the way for what may seem common sense to most of us. It is conventional to speak of three tests for truth. The third is our ultimate fall back: the pragmatic test. We often consider something true if it works, if it helps us predict what will come next, if it helps us make our way through the world. It is our ultimate fall back because, even if the pragmatic realist approach should turn out to work better than the critical realists', we would still be able to have the conversation that is in this book.

A second classic test for truth is the coherence test. Does a proposed explanation contradict itself, or is it logically consistent. You might argue that it is an extension, by faith, that the same logic that works consistently in deductive thinking also applies to the external world. It is an act of faith, for we cannot see the external world as it is. But it is a "reasonable" hypothesis.

One of our goals in this book is to explore whether a coherent integration between science and Scripture is possible. This goal assumes that truths about external reality are fundamentally coherent, and logic works both deductively and inductively. [19] We will assess how well this hypothesis holds up as we examine various topics.

Even in science, there are instances where coherency remains a goal rather than a worked-out conclusion. A well-known example is the ongoing challenge of reconciling general relativity with quantum mechanics. While each framework works extraordinarily well within its own domain, they resist integration into a single, coherent theory that explains all physical phenomena -- especially when it comes to extreme situations like black holes.

Do these incoherencies on the smallest level of reality indicate that, in the end, the universe is not coherent? Are matters of Scripture ultimately a matter of "blind faith," as Søren Kierkegaard generally believed? [20] Or is faith reasonable?

The third classic test for truth is the correspondence test. This test stands at the heart of why critical realism provides an important bridge from our perception to reality. If there is a real structure to truths about the world, then we should expect that our hypotheses and theories correspond to the data of the world. The more useful they are, the better they presumably will correspond.

Then there is the question of "elegance" in the correspondence. A complicated theory may account for the data, as the Ptolemaic model of the solar system did. In a complicated way, it mathematically expressed how the sun might actually go around the earth. But the Copernican approach -- whose math was initially less precise -- was more economical in its explanation. More on it in the chapter that follows.

These three -- the correspondence test, the coherence test, and the pragmatic test -- will be our friends in the pages that follow. We will not simply assume them uncritically. We will question them when it seems appropriate. However, they have stood the test of time as useful criteria for truthfulness. Hopefully, our confidence in them will only grow as we proceed.

[10] Aristotle, De anima III.

[11] He once remarked, for example, that empiricism left you with no reason to go out the first floor door rather than a second floor window. After all, you've never experienced what will happen in the future either way. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion I.

[12] The primary work in which he suggests this approach was Critique of Pure Reason.

[13] E.g., Paul Feyerabend (1924-94) basically reduced science to sociology. In Against Method (New Left, 1975).

[14] Thomas Kuhn, Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1962).

[15] The phrase was coined by Roy Bhaskar in 1975: A Realist Theory of Science (Leeds, 1975). In theology circles, the general concept was promoted by Ben Meyer, Critical Realism and the New Testament (Princeton Theological Monograph, 1989) and N. T. Wright, The New Testament and the People of God (Fortress, 1992). Before Bhaskar, similar lines of thinking were found in the work of Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge: Toward a Post-Critical Philosophy (University of Chicago, 1958).

[16] We might align this perspective with postmodernism.

[17] The relevant theological term is God's "aseity." He does not require anything outside Godself. By contrast, the existence of our universe is "contingent." There is no need for it to exist.

[18] Richard Rorty would be the key figure in pragmatic realism. See Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton University, 1979).

[19] Deductive reasoning begins with certain assumptions or "premises" and then uses the rules of logic to proceed to a valid conclusion. Inductive reasoning, as we will see, stands at the heart of the scientific method. In inductive reasoning, we begin with the observations of data in the external world and then infer various hypotheses to account for that data, patterns, inferences. Deductive thinking has been likened to an upside down V, starting with assumptions and broadening out to conclusions. Inductive thinking is like a right side up V, starting with data and inferring hypotheses from there.

[20] Kierkegaard did not use this exact phrase, but it captures his sense of the absurdity (and yet validity) of religious belief in Fear and Trembling (1843).