Feynman 5: Telling the Past from the Future

This is the fifth of seven chapters in Richard Feynman's, The Character of Physical Law, a series of lectures he gave at Cornell in 1964. The four previous were:

• Gravitation as an example of physical law
• The relation of physics to math
• Great conservation laws
• Symmetry in physical law

Another fascinating lecture. It was a little disappointing at the end because for most of the chapter I might have been listening to an apologist presenting the cosmological argument for the existence of God. He did mention God at the end but did not venture to address ultimate questions. He ended by only saying that those who look at the small workings and those who ask the big metaphysical questions should not look down on each other or on any of those who figure out the stuff in between.

1. Most of the chapter was about the irreversibility of things on a large scale despite the theoretical reversibility of everything on a small scale. So on a small scale, "there does not seem to be any distinction between the past and future" (109). He does mention friction and beta decay as irreversible.

Perhaps the clearest example he gives in the chapter is of mixing together blue and white water. Gradually, they will combine into a whitish blue throughout the whole tank. Nothing in theory would keep it from becoming unmixed again into blue and white corners. We just know it isn't going to happen in a lifetime.

"One of the rules of the world is that the thing goes from an ordered condition to a disordered" (113).

He then hypothesizes an obscure device that might turn because of random air molecules against a vane only allowed to go one way. The illustration didn't work for me but I got the point. Eventually, heat evens out in a system and reaches equilibrium.

2. This sounded exactly like versions of the cosmological argument that I grew up with. He even mentions entropy (121), the famed second law of thermodynamics that Christians often use to argue that the universe had a beginning. Things go from ordered to disordered and the process seems irreversible. That suggests there must have been an orderly beginning.

Feynman doesn't go there. Indeed, like a novel reader, I kept waiting for the denouement. In a universe this vast, it is possible to find a small pocket of random order, but then we would expect complete bluish-white everywhere else. But we don't. So what was the order with which it all began?

3. At another point, Feynman gives us an amazing instance of the anthropic principle of which I had never heard. Apparently, it is easy to suggest how hydrogen atoms might come together to form helium atoms in a primordial soup of hot atoms. But cosmologists hit a snag when it come to the formation of larger atoms like carbon.

Fred Hoyle found a possible way. If one of the electron levels of carbon was at precisely 7.82 million volts, then three helium atoms could stick together just long enough for carbon to form. And so it was. Carbon does have an energy level in its electron orbitals that is 7.82 million volts. If it didn't, there would be no universe other than a random collection of cooling hydrogen and helium atoms (for the most part).

"The most important things in the real world appear to be a kind of complicated accidental result of a lot of laws" (122).

4. He ends the chapter with a concept he calls a "hierarchy of ideas." At the bottom of this hierarchy are the fundamental laws of nature. Then above them are basic principles like heat. Then there are bigger items like surface tension or refractive indices, properties of substances.

Still further up are waves, sun spots, stars. Then things like frogs. Then further up is history, "man," political expediency. Then evil, beauty, hope. It is here that he finally mentions God, although he does not believe that either end is truly closer to God. By implication, both ends point to God.

"The great mass of workers in between, connecting one step to another, are improving all the time our understanding of the world, both from working at the ends and working in the middle, and in that way we are gradually understanding this tremendous world of interconnecting hierarchies" (126).

Feynman 4: Symmetry in Physical Law

This is the fourth of seven chapters in Richard Feynman's, The Character of Physical Law, a series of lectures he gave at Cornell in 1965. The previous three were:

• Gravitation as an example of physical law
• The relation of physics to math
• Great conservation laws

I didn't find this lecture as interesting or as clear. It's curious to me why the idea of symmetry seems at first glance to be rather boring. I suspect it is partly because I don't know much about it. But it is probably also because of some matter of my personality. I remember studying "translation" in high school, mapping one coordinate frame onto another. I remember it seeming very boring.

But the end of the lecture hinted at something interesting about symmetry. Apparently, the laws of conservation in the previous lecture relate in some way to the symmetries in this one.

1. The first part of the chapter explores several different kinds of symmetry in nature. He defines symmetry as being able to change something in some way and it looking exactly as before.

The ones he presents are:

• symmetry of translation (if you move everything over, it operates the same)
• translation of time (if you move stuff forward in time, the laws of nature operate the same)
• rotating things (if you turn everything a certain way, they operate the same)
• motion in a straight line (relative to your frame of reference, everything operates the same)
• atom replacement (you can replace one atom with another same atom and everything works the same)

There are some interesting twists and turns in his presentation of these, although sometimes he gets a little tedious with his "what ifs." Here were the "what ifs" I found most interesting:

• If the universe had a beginning, then the translation of time symmetry wouldn't work for the beginning of time, but usually scientists don't include that part of time in their discussion of such symmetry.
• Einstein's theory of relativity sets the speed of light as an absolute speed limit for the universe, so motion in a straight line only is symmetrical within a frame of reference, not from one frame of reference to another moving relative to it.

2. Then he presents some items of the universe that are not symmetrical.

• Change of scale. If you make something bigger, it does not operate the same way. If you took a matchbox cathedral and increased the scale to the size of an actual cathedral, it would collapse under its own weight. This relates to one of the random discussions on Big Bang Theory on whether a giant rat was possible. 
• Spinning is not symmetrical in the sense that you can tell if you are spinning (e.g., with a gyroscope). By contrast, you cannot tell if you are moving at constant velocity without looking outside your car.
• One of the most interesting apparent non-symmetries is reflection. I did a quick search to see if this non-symmetry still holds. From my brief look, it seems like it does. 

Feynman shows that reflection symmetry holds to a very large extent. There are some interesting twists. For example, apparently living organisms prefer "right-handed" molecules. Bacteria will eat all the sugar that comes from nature. But they will only eat half of the sugar that is artificially produced, even though it has the same chemical formula. (This is an argument, by the way, that all life is derivative on the same basic original life-structure--all life is "right-handed" on the molecular level, so to speak).

But when he gets down to the atomic level, apparently all electrons spin left. You can create a positron (positively charged electron) that spins right, but it isn't (if I understand correctly) an exact mirror. So on the subatomic level, symmetry doesn't hold. You can't create a right-handed electron.

3. So we arrive at the pay off of the chapter, which is a deep connection between symmetry and laws of conservation. He lines them up this way:

• symmetry of translation relates to conservation of momentum
• symmetry in time relations to the conservation of energy
• symmetry in rotation relates to the conservation of angular momentum

Interesting!

Oh Feyn, Man!

When I entered my forties, I went through a kind of nerd mid-life crisis. I began to re-open some of the math and science books I had bought in my teens and early twenties. I hadn't understood them then and I still didn't understand them.

Five years ago I bought some of the latest math and science textbooks, including a university physics book. My goal was only to read a page a day, with the hope I would get through them by the time I turned fifty. That's not going to happen. I'll be lucky to make it by 55.

I'm only a little more than 300 pages into the physics book I bought, but my experience with the Seminary curriculum has already had me thinking a number of things about how one might teach this content in a better way: 

• There's some overlap between physics and chemistry--why separate them so sharply?
• There are a lot of things at the end of the book that could really come earlier. As it is, you hardly get to them, especially if you're only taking two semesters of physics. The stuff I'm most interested in is like 1000 pages in!
• It doesn't really have to be taught in this order, even though it seems like everyone does.

So, lo and behold, I discover that Richard Feynman did much of what I have in mind... in 1963. He touches on relativity and quantum physics really early in the series. He crosses into chemistry type topics. I've been doing video tutorials as I go through the book I have. But a big part of me wishes I had known about these!

What is more, they are all available for free online on the Cal Tech website! What a rush it must have been to be a physics student at Cal Tech when he taught these!

Feynman 3: Great Principles of Conservation

This is the third of seven chapters in Richard Feynman's, The Character of Physical Law, a series of lectures he gave at Cornell in 1965. The previous two were:

• Gravitation as an example of physical law
• The relation of physics to math

In this third lecture, he muses about principles of conservation that seem to apply throughout the universe. I say "muses" because he makes no claims to know why these patterns seem to hold or whether they will continue to hold in the future.

As a sign of his genius, he did not have a prepared manuscript for these lectures, only some notes. They were delivered extempore and then written up from the recordings. For example, in the course of this lecture he constructed a chart on a chalkboard. He is truly unusual among such geniuses to be able to communicate so clearly. Truly amazing.

1. Feynman spent the bulk of the lecture presenting examples of conservation in nature, especially the conservation of energy. But near the end he does begin to reflect on the possible significance of it all.

The main conclusion he reaches is that science is uncertain. It is in its very nature to reach beyond the known to the unknown, and this requires guesswork and the expectation that the laws that already seem to work in one area will also work in another. But he makes it clear that scientists can't assume they will continue to work.

For example, when it was found that a neutron could deteriorate into a proton and an electron, Niels Bohr famously suggested that they had finally found a situation where energy was not conserved. By that time he was so used to time-held notions going out the window that he had a penchant for wanting to overturn time honored scientific notions.

But it turned out he was wrong. There was another tiny particle, an anti-neutrino, that was involved, and energy was conserved.

For Feynman, though, it was important for scientists to be willing to throw out the conservation of energy principle if the evidence seemed to warrant it. And so it is for all true truth-seekers in every area except for the axiomatic.

2. The conservation of energy takes up the most space in the lecture. As usual, Feynman puts it in incredibly clear terms. He uses the analogy of a mother who leaves her child alone in a room with 28 blocks. One way or another, she will always be able to account for 28 blocks when she comes back to the room.

Perhaps the child will throw one block out the window. Perhaps the child has put one in a box--she can weigh the box to find out if she knows how much it weighed before and how much each block weighs. If there is a sink full of water, she can measure how high the water level has risen to account for submerged blocks.

And so he gives the analogy to the conservation of energy. Sometimes the energy hides, but science so far has always been able to account for all the "blocks" before and after some process.

3. Electric charge is always conserved. Feynman gets into a little relativity in his discussion here. Charge is always conserved locally, meaning in a particular frame of motion. Someone in a different frame of motion may not seem to observe conservation of charge.

He notes also that many things that are conserved come in units. Charges come in units. Another thing that comes in units and is conserved are "baryons," a heavier type of atomic particle like a proton or a neutron. The standard model of physics wasn't quite assembled completely when Feynman gave these lectures, but it was well on its way.

Two other conservations he mentions are the conservation of momentum (mass times velocity) and the conservation of angular momentum (the area created by motion over time from a certain reference point, such as the area between the moving planets per given time and the sun).

In all these things, Feynman sees deep yet seemingly inexplicable connections.

The Relationship of Physics to Math (Feynman 2)

Yesterday morning I read the first chapter of Richard Feynman's The Character of Physical Law, a series of lectures he gave at Cornell in 1965, fifty years ago. This morning I read the second chapter, "The Relation of Mathematics to Physics." In this chapter you really catch a glimpse of this man's genius, as well as his uncanny ability to explain things.

This chapter is full of insights that, interestingly enough, I have caught these last twenty years or so at IWU, especially being friends with the likes of Keith Drury and Russ Gunsalus. These are insights that were part of the founding of Wesley Seminary, insights that are hard to catch, hard to communicate, hard to convince. When they train you to be a scholar, they do not teach you to think like Feynman, a physicist. They teach you to think like a mathematician.

1. Feynman of course is not disparaging of mathematicians in the least. Indeed, he ends the chapter by apologizing to the layman for the difficulty of mathematics. "If you want to learn about nature, to appreciate nature, it is necessary to understand the language that she speaks in" (58), by which he means math. In the chapter, he references people like me, who read book after book, hoping that the next person will finally be able to explain to me what is going on with quantum physics.

But in the end it is just tough. Either you can hack the stuff or you can't. In the words of Euclid to a king, wanting an easier explanation, "There is no royal road to geometry" (58). In the words of the nineteenth century physicist Jeans, "The Great Architect seems to be a mathematician."

This is a powerful statement: "To those who do not know mathematics it is difficult to get across a real feeling as to the beauty, the deepest beauty, of nature... [there are] people who have and people who have not had this experience of understanding mathematics well enough to appreciate nature once."

2. Still, Feynman spends most of the chapter indicating that physics is quite distinct from math. He wonders if the mathematicians will prove to be right in the end, that all of nature can be boiled down to certain axioms, certain "building blocks" of knowledge, as it were. He calls this the Greek approach to math, to start with foundational claims and build all other claims from there.

But we are not there yet at all, he indicates. Even in math, he suggests, you can start at different places and get to the same destination. But in physics, things are much more like the Babylonian way of doing math. By his description, the Babylonian way of doing math is that you know a collection of things that are true.

You do not break them down into truth atoms. You see some connections between these various mathematical truths and you intuit when to use one tool and when to use another. There are many analogies in physics, he says, where there are no clear connections between differing rules at all, but they have an uncanny similarity to each other.

3. This is the state of physics right now. It is impossible in physics right now to know what the first principles are--or whether there even are first principles. When Newton was asked what his theory of universal gravitation meant, he indicated that it didn't mean anything. It simply describes how things move.

I have said this many times here and it is in my philosophy book. Science is a collection of very precise myths that express the mystery of the world's operations.

Feynman gave as an illustration three completely independent and apparently unrelated ways to express the phenomenon of movement. The first was Newton's "action at a distance model," where a force is acting on an object at a distance. But there is a second model that looks only on the mass and potential of the object itself. And there is a third model, Euler's principle of least action. This last one was the inspiration for Feynman's claim to fame in quantum physics. Somehow, particles know to take the path of least action.

These three expressions (myths, if you would) are completely unrelated, apparently, but they all explain the motion of a body from one point to another correctly, at least on a macro-scale. "The correct laws of physics seem to be expressible in such a tremendous variety of ways" (55).

4. Practical theology is much more like physics than it is mathematics, in that regard. There are these macro-truths. It isn't always helpful to try to break them down into fundamental truth atoms. As a Biblehead, the game we often play of trying to break down life into Bible atoms (i.e., proof texts) is really embarrassing. It's really just a silly game.

But I digress. There are times when the "physics" of life and morality isn't working right and you need to bring in the "mathematicians." And sometimes the "mathematicians," while exploring the beauty of thought for its own sake, will generate useful tools for life without thinking of its relevance.

Feynman would say that the physicists need the mathematicians at key points, although most of what physicists do, in his own words, is fly by the seat of their pants, to see if something works in the real world. And, of course, Feynman was also very good at math.

New Seminary MA Specialization - Ordination Track

In what I think will be my last Seminary Academic Affairs meeting with me chairing (I have one more with Dave Smith chairing in August, I suspect), we passed a new MA in Ministry specialization in "Pastoral Ministry" this afternoon. It is a delightful finale to my generally "creative" Deaning, created with the brainstorming help of none other than Russ Gunsalus and Joel Liechty.

This MA specialization will take 6 hours more than the base degree (which is 36 hours), but you will be able to meet all the educational requirements for ordination in the Wesleyan Church in 42 credit hours. There's not an ounce of fat in this degree, and (aside from one course--Lenny Luchetti's Pastor, Church, and World), this will be the only completely online way to meet ordination requirements for the Wesleyan Church and get a degree in the process.

It will only take two years and a semester to complete, and you will be able to transfer in up to 15 graduate hours toward it from somewhere else. You can possibly get up to 6 hours of advanced standing toward it from appropriate undergraduate work as well. All the requirements for licensure are completed in the first year.

I think this will be a tremendous addition to the tool set of the Wesleyan Church. Mind you, the Master of Divinity degree remains the ideal seminary degree for a minister. It is obviously a much more robust degree than this MA, and it is the degree that hospitals, the military, and doctoral programs recognize.

So this degree is not meant to be a substitute for the MDIV. It's meant to be a more robust option for those who wouldn't have done a degree at all.

Feynman's The Character of Physical Law 1

The second half of June is often the season when administrators take what they can of their remaining vacation days, so I am relaxing a bit these next two weeks (though I am happily and gratefully continuing to work for the Seminary until the end of August).

1. So this morning I picked up an old book of interest to me by Richard Feynman, The Character of Physical Law. I make no promises to finish it, but I read the first chapter this morning.

Feynman was a curious soul. I blogged through the first eight chapters of a biography of him last summer, then stopped when the school year came on heavy. Perhaps I will try to finish working through it. I am cursed with too many interests, too little intellect, and too little time. I wish there was a chamber you could enter where time outside freezes but you can go in and study for a while.

Einstein-Dirac-Feynman-Hawking--that's my current list of the greatest geniuses of twentieth century physics. Feynman gave these lectures in 1965 at Cornell.

2. Chapter 1 is about the law of gravitation, first set down by Newton. I'm not sure what to expect from this book. I'm looking for some insight behind physical law. My hunch is that Feynman will not be able to tell me. My hunch is that he is going to muse about patterns, scientific development, and curious correspondences. But there are no real answers to why the laws of nature work the way they do.

He mentions some of these mysteries in this chapter. So the inverse square of distance seems to have some deep significance, but we don't know what it is (30). It shows up both in the law of universal gravitation and in the formula for electric charge. But the relationship between these two forces is unknown and different on the level of 10 to the 42nd power (a one with 42 zeros after it).

Newton's law of gravitation also had to be modified a little by Einstein, who with the help of David Hilbert set out a general theory of relativity that included gravity. Yet even here, Feynman noted that this theory could not yet account for gravity on the quantum level. This is one of the cutting edges of physics.

Feynman ends this first lecture with three observations.

a. The first is the correspondence between physical reality and mathematics. I've mentioned the inverse square feature.

A fun story in the chapter is when two individuals using only math and the observed movements of Uranus independently asked two different observatories to turn their satellites toward a part of the sky where they expected to find a planet, Neptune. The rationale was the hypothesis that Uranus' orbit was being affected by another large planet.

Feynman's account is different from others. He basically suggests that the British observatory thought it ridiculous that you could find a planet by math, while the German observatory dutifully looked and found. This is probably a better story but perhaps less true.

b. The second observation is that these discoveries are not exact, as in the need for modification by Einstein and still by someone in relation to quantum gravity.

c. The third, though, is the simplicity of Newton's basic equation and fourthly its universal character.

3. In the meantime, the chapter gives a lovely tale of how the law developed from Copernicus to Kepler and Galileo to Newton to Cavendish and several other scientists up till the twentieth century. A reassuring reminder is that it took some four centuries to unfold the content of this chapter and that these scientists worked a lifetime on them. They seem amazingly brilliant after the fact, and no doubt they were.

But they weren't brilliant every day. We tend to miss the trial and error of their probings and the long story of development.

P.S. I forgot to mention the old idea around the time of Galileo that angels pushed the planets around. (Feynman had a flair for the dramatic, so I probably should confirm this) He suggests that this is not entirely wrong, but that they were wrong on the direction in which the angels were pushing. The angels--gravity--were pushing inward toward the sun rather than pushing behind the planet. After all, a body in motion stays in motion all by itself... another mystery whose reasons we know not why.

E3. The invisible Church meets in visible churches.

This is the third post on the Church in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first unit in this series had to do with God and Creation (book here), and the second unit was on Christology and Atonement.

We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit on the Spirit and the Church was on the Holy Spirit.
_______________________________
The true Church is both visible and invisible.

1. The true, invisible Church is visible in that those who are in Christ inevitably will come together to worship, disciple, fellowship, and participate in God's mission to the world. Even though the true Church is invisible, it is not individual. The Church is a corporate entity.

When Paul tells the Corinthians that "you are God's temple" and that "God's Spirit dwells in you (1 Cor. 3:16), he does not use the singular word for "you" in Greek, but the plural. It is the collective body of Christ that is the Church rather than me in my individual body. [1] We are God's temple far more than I am God's temple.

So it is questionable whether a person who claims to be in Christ but never meets together with other believers is truly in Christ unless their circumstances truly prevent them from doing so. God has created us in a way that we need each other for spiritual strength. God often chooses to heal us through others, even though he could do it directly.

Are you discouraged? God could encourage you directly, but he more often uses others. Indeed, there are situations where we cannot even sense God's presence as individuals and, rather than push through the clouds directly, God uses our fellow believers to heal our antennae. [2] In the mystery of his will, God uses people to do so much of his work on this earth.

2. It does not matter whether you are an introvert or an extrovert. Christians assemble together (e.g., Heb. 10:25). Indeed, the word church in Greek, ekklesia, means an "assembly," a gathering of individuals. [3] The apostle Paul's primary use of the word is in reference to a local gathering of believers rather than the body of Christ everywhere.

So the first meaning of the word church is in reference to a local gathering of believers, probably gathering in a house. A city like Rome and Ephesus would have many such churches. The church at Corinth seems to have been able to gather together in the house of Erastus, suggesting that Corinth may have only had 40 or 50 believers in the city (cf. Rom. 16:23). [4]

To refer to all the churches everywhere as the "Church" is thus a figurative expression, a metaphor built off the primarily meaning of a church as a local gathering of believers. The invisible, global, timeless Church is the collection of all the "assemblies of God" (cf. 1 Thess. 2:14) that have met in all times and places for the last two thousand years.

3. Before the Protestant Reformation in the 1500s, there was only one church for any one region. If you lived in the West, you were Roman Catholic. If you lived in the East, you were Orthodox. If you lived in Egypt, you were Coptic. So while these groups might question whether the others were truly in the Church, there was no doubt for those who lived in a particular place as to who was in the church there.

So the church in a specific location was quite visible, even if we might now say that its true membership was invisible even then. But there was no question as to what was a church and what wasn't.

However, the Protestant Reformation raised this question with force: How do you know when you are truly in a church? If the Church is invisible and there is more than one visible, human organization that claims to be the Church or at least part of the Church, how do you know which ones are legitimate and which ones are not?

From this question would develop the "three marks of the Church." A true church is anywhere there is 1) the pure preaching of the gospel, 2) the pure administration of the sacraments, and 3) the practice of church discipline. [5] This model suggests that a true, visible church--rather than a mere Bible study or meeting for fellowship--is one where someone proclaims the word of God, where individuals are baptized and the Lord's Supper eaten, and where there is enough organization and leadership for church discipline to take place.

Yet the Reformers here no doubt were still reading their own assumptions into these definitions. They were elevating the importance of preaching in keeping with the fact that the Reformation centered on Scripture. In much of their thinking they retained a sense of the sacraments that had developed as much in Christian history as in the Bible, only pruning the number down to two. And they assumed an importance to church structure that fit with the need to counterbalance the power of the Roman Catholic Church. None of these drives were bad, but were they essential?

4. What was a "gathering" in the early church? Perhaps more fundamental for its existence than what they did when they gathered is the mere fact that they did gather, regularly. So first, a visible church is a collection of believers that gathers regularly. As Matthew 18:20 suggests, there is a special, authoritative sense of God's presence when even two or three of God's people are together.

What do they do when they gather regularly? There is a collection of activities that they do, and we need not limit them to say that a church is only a church when they are doing a certain core of them. [6] They worship together (which often includes the sacraments). They often hear a word from the Lord and instruct each other (often if not usually involving Scripture). They fellowship together. They admonish one another (which can include church discipline and leadership). They participate in the mission of God to redeem the world.

Over time, we might say that a true, visible church will end up doing all these things and that, if it does not, it is perhaps imbalanced in some way. But the core ingredient, the core identifier, is that a group of individuals in the invisible Church are meeting together regularly to do these sorts of things. A true, visible church is a collection of individuals who have the Holy Spirit and are in Christ who meet together regularly to worship, disciple, fellowship, admonish, and spread the gospel in the world.

The Church is invisible, but it meets together in visible churches.

Next week: E4. The church is one body even though it has many members.

[1] There is arguably nuance even to 1 Corinthians 6:19, which is often taken in relation to my individual, physical body as a temple (a verse often used against smoking). The "yous" in this verse are all plural, leading us to think that, primarily, Paul is again thinking of the collective body of Christ at Corinth. What each man does with his individual body with a prostitute corrupts the whole body of Christ at Corinth. See Kenneth Schenck, 1 and 2 Corinthians: A Commentary for Bible Students (Indianapolis: Wesleyan Publishing House, 2006).

[2] A book that was once meaningful to me in this regard was David Seamand's Healing of Memories (Colorado Springs: Chariot Victor, 1985).

[3] Although the image of the church as the "called-out ones" is a helpful illustration, it is not technically accurate. This is an example of the etymological fallacy, where you assume that the history of a word--in this case the words that once came together in Greek history to form the word--determine what the word means. So since ek means "out of" and kalein means "to call," the conclusion is reached that ekklesia means "called out of."

But no Greek thought this any more than we think of "understanding" as "standing under" something. These words had been joined together centuries before the New Testament and people just used the word without thinking of its history. The clearest example of this fact is Acts 19:41, when the city clerk sends a mob away. This verse says that he dismissed this ekklesia.

[4] See especially Wayne A. Meeks, The First Urban Christians: The Social World of the Apostle Paul (New Haven: Yale University, 2003 [1983]).

[5] The number varied a little at first. John Calvin, for example, only mentions the first two in his 1536 Institutes of the Christian Religion, but he mentions church discipline elsewhere as a practice of the Church.

[6] This is a key insight from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. There is not always a core set of universal characteristics to something we name. Sometimes an "entity" is defined by a looser collection of characteristics and "family resemblances." In other words, there are trends of characteristics for the group that may be prevalent but not universal (e.g., a family may be known for having big noses without everyone in the family having a big nose).

Saturday Novel: London

The train from Cambridge slowly made its way through the north of London toward Kings Cross Station. Alan had thoughts of downtown Chicago as he observed row after row of terraced housing. But all of London had them. They were everywhere.

Most of the train lines coming from the north ended at Kings Cross. Here it was, the well-known station from the Harry Potter movies.

He wasn't quite sure what to do with himself. He had found the hotel on his phone. Apparently, Heathrow airport was on the west side of town and his hotel wasn't far from it. But he had the rest of the day to look around London.

"Excuse me," he finally asked a man reading a newspaper. "If you only had a day in London, what would you see?"

"A day?" the man said in a quite different accent from Mr. Fox. "You Americans think you can see anything in a day. It's Tuesday. It must be London. Just go to your hotel room and watch the telly." Then the man went back to his newspaper.

"That was helpful," Alan muttered to himself. He finally spotted the entrance to the Tube, a large map of the lines and stations. What did he know of London? There was the Queen's palace, right? Buckingham Palace. There was Big Ben and the Parliament. What else?

London Bridge caught his eye. He remembered a tune from childhood: "London Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. London Bridge is falling down, my fair lady." A few tunnels and he was soon boarding the black line headed south.

London Bridge turned out to be nothing of any interest whatsoever. A sign told him that at one time this was the only place to cross the Thames River and that some rich American had bought the bridge in 1972 and reconstructed it in Arizona. What was more interesting was the Tower Bridge that he could see down the river, along with the Tower of London next to it.

He spent the next few hours just walking. He started at the Tower, where the kings had lived in the Middle Ages. Then he followed a path through Old London to St. Paul's Cathedral, an area that had been destroyed by a massive fire in the 1600s. Eventually he found his way to Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace and Parliament.

It was a different world from his. Chicago had its places to visit too--even a historic fire. But it didn't have buildings that went back over 500 years or monuments to battles of the past. The history enticed him. For the first time in his life, it called him to something bigger than the moment. It was the smallest sense of the vastness of time and space--whose immensity he had hardly begun to know...

Theology is not in words.

At some point I underwent a paradigm shift to be able to read the Bible historically and literarily. I haven't found a great way to describe this shift other than a shift from a premodern reading. I have come up with some small statements that help point the way.

1. One of them is that theology is not in a word, but a word is in a text, which can be in a theology. There is a tendency from the pulpit for individuals to see rich and deep theology in words. So take the word love and what some people see in agapao, phileo, and eros. What they are really doing is constructing a kind of theology of love and mistakenly thinking that this theology is in these words or comes from these words.

But these words are in their theology. The theology is not in these words. I talk about doing a word study on the word impossible from Hebrews 6:18 which says it is impossible for God to lie. The result? The word means "not possible."

What the student who asked me to do this study wanted was a theology of what it might mean to say something was impossible for God. He was thinking that theology was in the word. But the theology is in the sentence and in Hebrews. The theology is not in the word. The word is in a text, which is in theology.

Similarly, the meaning of the word Satan is not "tempter," "accuser," etc. Those are theological descriptions of Satan. The word Satan can mean an "adversary" or it can mean the Satan. Again, the students confuse what the word means with a theology about the word. One is "in" the word, so to speak. The other is a much bigger perspective that is inevitably from outside the text looking on.

2. Another example of this shift is to recognize that Romans and Galatians are not in the same book, even though we by them that way. The warning in Revelation 22:18-19 was not about the whole Bible and 2 Timothy 3:16 wasn't either. Galatians is part of the historical context of Romans. Revelation 22 was about the scroll of Revelation, and 2 Timothy 3:16 was about the Old Testament, just as Psalm 119:105 was about the Pentateuch.

The books of Paul and the NT were not written in the order in which they appear. If you teach a NT Survey in historical order you could do Mark first to get at Jesus who came first, but 1 Thessalonians would probably be the first historically. All of Paul's letters would come before any of the Gospels. Mark would come first then Matthew and Luke, with John last.

3. Similarly, you would not only look at Matthew and Mark in terms of Jesus. You would look at them as moments in the history of the early church. Matthew is a moment in the story of the early Church every bit as much as it is the story of Jesus.

Anyone who knows me knows that I am a both-and person when it comes to such things. But there is no debate that this is what historical consciousness looks like.

4. The premodern default goes to the Bible to get theology. But the Bible is a collection of sources for theology, "within" theology. The premodern thinks he or she is getting theology "out of" the biblical words, but the unity of understanding is imposed on the words.

This is why requiring OT and NT Survey in Christian curriculum is a reflection of premodernism. Those who put these requirements in the curriculum did so thinking that the students would thereby know what to think and how to live. The great switch-a-roo has always then been that those who teach these courses often teach history and literature. The course often has worked best when the professor is someone who is a master of the content of the biblical text but doesn't really understand it fully in context.

What Christian colleges should be requiring is a themes of the Bible course that is basically a theology course. Or they might require a theology course instead, especially if it is taught with a practical focus. That's what they actually thought they were getting when they put OT and NT Survey in the curriculum. The Bible is the most important source of theology, but the organizing principles of theology necessarily stand outside the biblical text, organizing the biblical source materials. It is impossible that it be any other way.

5. The premodern paradigm shift also relates to what Hans Frei has said about the stories of the Bible. The premodern does not see the stories of the Bible as stories in a book in history. He or she sees the stories as videotapes of a sort, transcripts. Yet these stories are not separate stories for the premodern. They are part of one big movie of which I am a part as well.

So two defining characteristics: it is one story whose individual scenes are thought to be something like exact videos. But both of these are unreflective readings. Genesis does not know that the serpent is Satan. Genesis knows nothing of Satan. Leviticus knows nothing of Hebrews. These are not only distinct stories with distinct historical and cultural assumptions. They are "perspectivized" portrayals within the literary and cultural forms of their time.

As Scripture, I think we best read them with a view to their theology, not their history. We read them to learn what they say about God and life from the perspective of God's people at a particular point in time, not for what they say about what happened in history, understood as the content of their stories.

6. These are both difficult paradigm shifts to grasp and yet they are inevitable and completely obvious once you understand. There is some loss of the Bible as a magical text with these understandings. But there is also the benefit of gaining a three-dimensional view of the text as a result rather than a flat view.

And there is a second naivete to be had after these first shifts. You can return to read the Bible as one book even after you are bitten by history.

My Book on Revelation, Hebrews, and General Epistles is out!

My New Testament "life application" series is now completely out with the final volume now available!

This volume covers Hebrews, James, 1 and 2 Peter, 1-2-3 John, Jude, and Revelation. It completes the whole series on the New Testament. Here is the Kindle version.

The goal of this series was not only to give the lay person and pastor a window into what experts were saying about the New Testament but also to try to apply the text on a deeper level.

 Below you'll find links to the whole series in both paperback and Kindle. There are also devotionals that go along with these, so that a church could do the devotionals in small groups while the pastor preaches from the larger book. WPH has some sermon notes on many of the books (see bottom of page).




Jesus: The Mission (the basic message and mission of Jesus) Kindle
Jesus: Portraits in the Gospels (the special emphases of each Gospel) Kindle

Paul: Messenger of Grace (1 and 2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians) Kindle
Paul: Soldier of Peace (Romans) Kindle
Paul: Prisoner of Hope (Prison Epistles, Pastoral Epistles, 2 Thessalonians) Kindle

The Early Church: Reaching the World (Acts) Kindle
The Early Church: Letters to the Body of Christ (Hebrews, General Epistles, Revelation) Kindle

Nijay Gupta on Goldingay

Nijay Gupta has written two reviews of John Goldingay's new book, Do We Need the New Testament?

1. His first post is positive: Goldingay is right!
2. His second post pushes back: Goldingay is wrong!

I think Nijay does a great job of this. Let me say that I simply didn't grow up hearing that the OT wasn't my testament. In fact, I knew far more about the OT going into college than I did about the New Testament. I tested out of NT Survey in college at SWU and I remember thinking, wow, I know a whole lot less about the NT than the OT. I take this as a reflection of how much OT preaching I must have heard growing up and going to camp meeting.

In fact, I identify more with what I take to be the background of Fee and Stuart. I grew up with concern about "shaving the edges of your beard" (Lev. 19:27) and women "wearing that which pertaineth to a man" (in my case, slacks; Deut. 22:5). I grew up needing to hear about passages in the NT that told me not to let anyone judge me for whether I observed a sabbath (Col. 2:16). We did, however, eat pork chops.

I respect Goldingay greatly, but some of the things he says about the NT are nothing short of astounding to me (read Nijay's review).

I have been rather soft-spoken on my two-fold hermeneutic till now, believe it or not. But I think I will get more assertive in this now second phase to my career as a scholar. There are two distinct ways to read the Bible--historically and sacramentally. They need not contradict. They are both legitimate.

I am both tired of the theological interpreters who pretend history does not exist. And of course I reject the old school historians who dismiss the sacramental entirely. Goldingay, in typical evangelical fashion, tries to overlay the historical with the sacramental. Very popular right now. He skews the history to make it fit with the theological, and he pretends the sacramental is the historical.

But it basically amounts to fundamental historical incompetence. It will not stand.

Isaiah 14:12 and Lucifer

Isaiah 14:12-15 is a really neat passage to me. I think it's because in my hermeneutical journey, I had not one but two exciting moments reading it.

I remember how exciting it was in youth to learn everything for the first time. The rush of mental endorphins in high school, college, and seminary. Every once and a while I'll still have a moment like that (it's mostly been designing new stuff for the Seminary). But in my teens there were new breakthroughs in understanding all the time. It's part of why I love teaching undergraduate students so much--I can relive those moments again vicariously through them.

1. The first exciting moment with Isaiah 14 was when I learned it in the King James as the passage that told us about the Fall of Satan from heaven before Adam himself fell:

"How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, 'I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God: I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High.'

"Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit."

How neat! I thought. There it is.

2. Until of course I went to Seminary. I don't know when I reread this chapter from the beginning. That's when I learned to read in context.

14:4: "You will take up this taunt against the king of Babylon." OK, so this chapter wasn't actually about Satan, was it? It was about the king of Babylon.

The chapter uses highly metaphorical language. The dead are looking forward to your arrival, O king of Babylon. Ah, I see, Lucifer is a misleading translation. It's referring to Venus, the morning star. The NIV translates it that way so you don't get confused.

There's no doubt here. Isaiah shows no knowledge whatsoever of Satan. God hasn't flipped that switch yet in the theology of Israel. The picture of the dead is also metaphorical. It pictures the dead like Homer would, but Isaiah doesn't mean it literally. It's a powerful picture.

You're going down, king of Babylon. You were like the morning star, but you're about to go to the underworld.

3. Still, we don't have to choose between these two readings, IMO. The king of Babylon is a great warning to those who think they are great, who might dare think themselves almost gods. "If you think you are standing strong, be careful that you do not fall" (1 Cor. 10:12). None of us are gods. None of us are great next to God, not next to a whole mess of things. That'll preach.

Can we read it in reference to Satan? Perhaps. The Holy Spirit simply has never been limited by the original meaning, no matter what Walter Kaiser may say. The NT may hint at a "spiritual" interpretation of this passage that has Satan in mind. Luke 10:18 and Revelation 12:9 may imply this reading of Isaiah 14, although they probably do not have a Fall before Adam in mind. Their meanings seem to be eschatological, about the trajectory of salvation, not the past.

So it seems that the common Christian belief that Satan fell (gulp) comes more from Jewish and post-biblical Christianity than it does the Bible itself. Can we accept that as possible revelation also?

I can. :-)

World Changing Discussions and Decisions

I forget what I was watching the other day that brought home to me how generally small a part of the world I am in. (Yes, yes, we are all equally valuable in God's sight. We all matter. We're all important. ;-)

I am actually just finishing one of the most significant roles I'll probably play in my life, maybe the most significant one in terms of impact. I helped start a seminary.

But I'm not going to be deciding the fate of the free world any time soon. And even the theological discussions of my world are, in the end, generally insignificant in the broad scheme of things. I don't know where the center of future thought is right now, but it is nowhere near my world.

So where do you think the world-changing discussions and decisions are taking place right now, the ones for the history books? A US President may make some of those kinds of decisions (going to war with Iraq, passing near universal health care). Are there any world-changing discussions even taking place in the universities and think tanks of the world right now? What will be the greatest new or re-presented old thought of this decade?

Where is the center of world thought right now, in terms of impact? If we were to be at the heart of the world's history of understanding right now, where would we be?

(P.S. I'm teaching all day so won't be able to participate in the discussion mucho.)

E2. The true Church is an invisible church.

This is the second post on the Church in my ongoing series, theology in bullet points. The first unit in this series had to do with God and Creation (book here), and the second unit was on Christology and Atonement.

We are now in the third and final unit: The Holy Spirit and the Church. The first set of posts in this final unit on the Spirit and the Church was on the Holy Spirit.
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The true Church is both visible and invisible.

1. The Church is invisible in the sense that it cannot be identified with any earthly organization or membership. Similarly, it cannot be identified with those who visibly or publicly profess faith in Jesus Christ and are baptized. The visible churches of the world include both those who are in Christ and filled with the Holy Spirit as well as individuals who are followers of Christ only in name.

Paul's description of a true child of Israel is in fact his description of who is in the Church. It is not the Christian "who is one outwardly, nor is true circumcision something external and physical. Rather... [the true Christian is someone] who is one inwardly, and real circumcision is a matter of the heart—it is spiritual and not literal" (Rom. 2:28-29).

The visible church thus includes within its walls both wheat and weeds (Matt. 13:24-30), but we as humans will never be able to distinguish between them fully. It is true, "You will know them by their fruits" (Matt. 7:16). And yet there are individuals who look to have the right fruit, who "honor me with their lips, while their hearts are far from me" (Isa. 29:13).

Similarly, there are no doubt individuals whose actions do not match our expectations but whose hearts and motives are true. This is why we are not to judge, because we cannot see the heart with confidence. "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged" (Matt. 7:1). "The Lord does not see as mortals see; they look on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart" (1 Sam. 16:7).

2. With the Nicene Creed of 381, we affirm that the Church is "one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church."

The Church is one in that, no matter how many individual Christian organizations and denominations may exist, the true Church is only one church. We may disagree with our heads and on ideas, but we all have the same heart. We may disagree on various matters of Christian practice, but we all have the same heart. We all have faith in God, and we are all saved through the blood of Christ.

"There is one body and one Spirit, just as you were called to the one hope of your calling, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, who is above all and through all and in all. " (Eph. 4:4-6).

3. This true Church exists in all places and it has existed in all of history since the resurrection of Christ and the Day of Pentecost. It is thus a catholic church. We can say with the Apostle's Creed that we believe "in the holy, catholic Church," by which we do not mean the Roman Catholic Church or those churches that consider themselves catholic in a way that excludes certain Protestants. The Church is catholic in that it exists wherever in the universe there are those who are in Christ, filled with the Holy Spirit. It is the communion of saints, past, present, and future.

4. It is a holy Church because it belongs to God. The Holy Spirit has sanctified the Church and made it God's possession. Woe to those who would harm the true Church or persecute those in Christ. They are touching God's anointed. They are fighting against God himself.

The true Church is thus not typified by sin, but by righteousness. To the extent that visible collections of individuals calling themselves Christians wrong each other or wrong others, those churches are not the Church. The true Church loves God and is an instrument of God's love in the world. "Whoever does not love abides in death. All who hate a brother or sister are murderers, and you know that murderers do not have eternal life abiding in them" (1 John 3:14-15).

5. The Church is apostolic in that it is sent into the world to proclaim that Jesus is Lord, that Jesus has risen from the dead and has been enthroned by God as king of the cosmos. The Church is not an instrument of force in the world. It does not conquer militarily in the name of Christ. Rather, it is an instrument of God's love in the world.

The Church demonstrates God's love as an instrument of redemption in the world. It is most concerned with the eternal destiny of the people in this world. It thus is key in God's mission to reconcile the world to himself (2 Cor. 5:18-20).

But God is also interested in people being fed and having clothing and in all those dimensions of human wholeness that pertain to our lives in this world. Indeed, God loves his creation beyond humanity. He loves the animals and plants he has created. He takes joy in the sun and the moon. The Church, as God's people, will be mindful of God's love of his creation and participate in his redemption of the world written large.

The true Church is an invisible church. But it is one, catholic Church, potentially existing in all times and places. It is a holy and apostolic Church, called both to be righteous and to be an instrument of righteousness in the world.

Next Sunday: E3. The true Church always results in visible churches.

Philippians 3 as Example of Train of Thought

I did a brief study at the beginning of class most mornings this past week. The purpose was half-devotional, half to illustrate the tool of the previous day's session.

On Tuesday, I put Philippians 3 on the screen and we looked at what seemed to me to be its train of thought.
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The bulk of Philippians 3 is a bit of a puzzle in the flow of Philippians as a whole. The chapter begins with encouragement to "Rejoice in the Lord" (3:1). Then Paul surprisingly begins to warn the Philippians of those who might pressure them to get circumcised: "Beware of the dogs." The shift is so unexpected that some have even suggested that Philippians 3 might actually be from a separate letter Paul sent to the Philippians. [1]

The chapter continues with somewhat of a resume. Paul gives his credentials, as it were, as a Jew. Paul was circumcised like other Jewish males (3:5). He can give his tribe--Benjamin.

Then his self-description gets very interesting (3:4-6). He was a "Hebrew born of Hebrews." He was a Pharisee. These are descriptions that no doubt at one point had been matters of great pride to Paul. He had not been your run-of-the-mill member of Israel. Even though he was born in Tarsus, away from the homeland, his family were apparently Aramaic-speakers of Jerusalem stock. [2] He was not a mere "person of the land." He was a Pharisee.

In the past, there has been a tendency to see these self-descriptions as negative. In our world in front of the text, Pharisees are usually flat, stock characters. They are bad guys rubbing curly mustaches with their fingers, pure legalistic evil. Real people are more complex than such caricatures. The New Testament, even though we do get some strongly negative portrayals (e.g., Matt. 23), is not negative toward every Pharisee. [3]

Indeed, Paul gives us qualities about which he might actually boast, at least in human terms (Phil. 3:4). In what must be one of the most ignored statements in Paul's writings, he notes in 3:6 that, "as to righteousness under the law," he was "blameless." [4] Apparently, Paul did not feel like a miserable failure at keeping the Jewish Law before he came to believe that Jesus was the Messiah. Apparently, he thought he kept the Law very well.

So when we get to Philippians 3:7, it is a very good resume that he is laying aside. It is not his past sins that he is forgetting and leaving behind in 3:13. It is things that were to his gain from a human perspective. It is not that his past was bad in comparison to Christ. It is that it was completely insignificant. The things he has lost for the sake of Christ are like rubbish or dung in comparison.

Paul has come to realize that his own righteousness does not, in the end, count for much. It is not a righteousness of his own that will count before God but a righteousness that comes through the faithfulness of Jesus on the cross. [5] It is a righteousness credited from God rather than one that Paul himself can boast about. [6]

Now we arrive at some verses in Philippians that I have found fascinating to break down and observe carefully. Later in this chapter, we are going to talk about developing good skills of observation and learning how to observe what we might call the "train of thought" of a passage, how the thought of one sentence in the Bible flows into the next. The next few verses in Philippians (3:12-16) are fairly familiar, but how much of that familiarity comes from our contemporary traditions of interpretation, the world in front of the text, and how much of it is actually what Paul was thinking?

Philippians 3:10-11 express Paul's desire to experience the power of Christ's resurrection. Apparently, after expecting in the earlier part of his ministry to be alive when Jesus returned (e.g., 1 Thess. 4:15; 1 Cor. 7:29), Paul now more expected to die before it happened. He wants to be part of the resurrection (Phil. 3:11). He apparently sees suffering for Christ as part of what he must do to follow Christ. He continues to be faithful, "if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead" (3:11). [7]

It is at this point, 3:12, that many contemporary readers of Philippians make a clean break between what precedes and what follows. Philippians 3:12-16 is a classic passage on the idea of "progressive sanctification," that we are on a never-ending journey of spiritual improvement as Christians. We are not perfect, just forgiven. We mess up, we repent, then we forget what is behind and keep pressing on. We cannot help but fail, but what is important is that we keep improving.

This interpretation fits well with contemporary culture, the world in front of the text. "Every day in every way, I'm getting better and better." [8] When an interpretation fits so well with our world in front of the text, it is extremely difficult to hear anything else in a passage. [9] Indeed, you might argue that the Holy Spirit is involved in such cases and that what Christians are hearing in those instances is inspired in its own way for the Church today.

Nevertheless, it is surely valuable to have some sense of what Paul might have actually meant too, and developing skills in following a train of thought are one way to hone in on the most likely option...

[1] Cf. for example. David Garland, "The Composition and Unity of Philippians: Some Neglected Features," NovT 27 (1985). The early Christian Polycarp, writing in the mid-second century, indicates that Paul wrote letters, plural, to the Philippians (Polycarp, Phil. 3.2). The theory is that, as these letters were shared with the broader church, they were joined and copied together. In the end, it would be difficult to prove such a theory. It is speculative, even if possible.

[2] A great biographical study which tries to read Paul on ancient Mediterranean and Jewish terms is Bruce J. Malina and Jerome H. Neyrey's Portraits of Paul: An Archaeology of Ancient Personality (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 1996).

[3] For a recent exploration of who the Pharisees were, see N. T. Wright, Paul and the Faithfulness of God (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2013), 80-196.

[4] One of the most transformative articles for my entire understanding of Paul was Krister Stendahl's, "Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West," in Paul Among Jews and Gentiles (Minneapolis: Fortress, 1976 [1963]). He explores the full significance of this verse for reconstructing the pre-Christian Paul.

[5] There is much debate about whether Paul meant the phrase, "through the faith of Jesus Christ" to refer to Jesus' faith or human faith in Jesus. I have come down with those who see this lead-off expression as a reference to Jesus' faithfulness to death, while believing that Paul then regularly builds off the ambiguity of the phrase to proceed to talk about human faith in God. See my "2 Corinthians 4:13 and the πίστις Χριστοῦ Debate," CBQ (2008): 524-37.

One of the best inroads into this debate are twin chapters in Pauline Theology, Volume IV: Looking Back, Pressing On, David M. Hay and E. Elizabeth Johnson, eds. (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 1997). The chapters are by Richard B. Hays, "ΠΙΣΤΙΣ and Pauline Christology: What Is at Stake?" and by James D. G. Dunn, "Once More, ΠΙΣΤΙΣ ΧΡΙΣΤΟΥ."

[6] Although most scholars now see the phrase, "the righteousness of God" in Romans 1:17 as a reference to God's righteousness, Paul actually uses the preposition from in Philippians 3:9. So what he is saying here is more akin to what he says in Romans 4:5-6. You will find a good inroad to this discussion in N. T. Wright, What Saint Paul Really Said: Was Paul of Tarsus the Real Founder of Christianity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1997), 95-111.

[7] Many translations of Philippians 3:11 obscure the conditional nature of the underlying Greek. Chapter 3 will dip a little into how you can get insights and clarifications from the original languages without knowing much about them. The number of open, free resources in this regard seem to multiply with each new year. In the meantime, comparing several versions often will give you some sense of the main options for how a verse might be translated from the original languages.

[8] A motto that comes from the French psychotherapist Émile Coué (1857-1926).

[9] Another passage that fits in this category is Romans 7:14-25. Although most current Romans scholars would agree that Paul is not describing his current state in these verses, or the normal state of a believer, it is immensely difficult to convince the typical person in the pew--or pastor--differently. We will mention this section of Romans in chapter 5 on surveying blocks of biblical text.

Hermeneutical Paradigm Shifts

I've had a good week teaching a course called "Bible as Christian Scripture." You'd have to ask the students if they thought it was a good week but, for me, it was probably the best I've ever felt about the class. My goals for this class are mainly two-fold.

First, I want the students to continue to have a freedom in the Spirit not only to hear God speak to them in Scripture but to change and transform them to become more loving and Christ-like. But I also want them to have a heightened sense of what it might mean to read the words of the Bible in context. Since this latter area is the one that involves the most direction, it was inevitably where we spent the most time, learning the tools of inductive Bible study (IBS).

So each day this week involved a possible paradigm shift. Here's an attempt to summarize them:

Monday
The Bible is clearly history, but God uses it as a sacrament of transformation, where he sets the agenda for what it does in us. As Scripture, the goal is for God to master us through it, rather than for us to dissect and master it.

Tuesday
There is a certain, finite number of ways that two thoughts or two units of thought can relate to each other. These do not vary from culture to culture. They are intrinsic to the way God has created the world.

Wednesday
"Theology is not 'in' a word. Rather, a word is in a text, which is 'in' theology. The Bible as a text is 'in' Truth."

Thursday
If you understand this comment, you will have made major progress toward reading the Bible in context: "Galatians is not part of the literary context of Romans but part of its historical context."

Friday
The Bible does not tell us how to apply its words to today. We are forced to do it ourselves. It's thus best for us to apply it in community, to keep us from starting a cult.

The benefits and curse of Asbury style IBS

I'm teaching "Bible as Scripture" this week for Wesley Seminary. My Asbury training always shows up in this class when we get to what Dr. Bauer calls, "structural laws." I try not to call them that but try to use more informal language. I really enjoyed IBS at Asbury but I think many students left those classes feeling like they had learned some secret technical language that no one else would ever understand.

Even new Bible professors there, I got the sense, if they had not studied at Asbury as a grad student, could be mystified at a completely unique language used scarcely anywhere else in the academy. What do you make of a label like, "recurrence of particularization with filial language"? I don't think I really got a sense of what all that stuff was about until I adjuncted for Asbury a few times 10-15 years ago.

But I continue to find these categories incredibly helpful. I'm also teaching Romans online right now. I try to spare the lingo and of course these observations are spread out over weeks. But when I look at Romans, I am now cursed to see:

• Romans 1:16-17 as the key verses of this book ("generalization of 1:16-17 in 1:18-11:36"). 
• I can't help but see 1:18-5:11 as a movement from the problem--"all have sinned" (1:18-3:20) to the solution--"the faithfulness of Jesus Christ" (3:21-4:25)
• ... with Romans 3:20-31 as the greatest encapsulation of how salvation works in the whole Bible ("generalization of the solution in 3:21-4:25") 
• ... and Romans 5:1-11 as the conclusion to this whole section ("generalization with logical causation"). 

And what am I to say of all the sub-patterns I am cursed now to see? Romans 4 is a substantiation of 3:21-31. Within Romans 4, 4:1-3 is a general statement that is "particularized with a recurrence of substantiation in 4:4-25."

Who will free me from this body of IBS-eze??? I'm convinced that these are all valid patterns. But who will have a clue what I am talking about?

Is America in Decline?

I think, you'll be glad to know, this series is at an end. Previous posts include:

• Did Constantine and Theodosius make Rome Christian?
• When did Europe become Christian?
• Theories of Western decline
• A more dialectical view
• Wesley, Arminius, and the Enlightenment
• Judeo-Christian Values of America
• The Christian Foundations of America
• Exceptional America

1. In the previous post I suggested that what was initially exceptional about the US is that it was the first fully implemented representational democracy, whose structure had the potential to embody best for the first time in history:

• the love of God toward all the people of a nation equally...
• God's manner of giving individuals the freedom to accept or reject him while...
• protecting all individuals against harm while...
• considering all the individuals of a society equal in value...
• and protecting the minority against the potential oppression of the majority.

A representational democracy is not biblical by structure--such things just didn't exist in the ancient world, and the brief democratic experiment in Greece had no protection for individual rights. It is rather that the results of this structure had the potential to result in a place that embodied Christian values better than any other structure in history.

And of course the US was only the first. There are now representational democracies all over the world.

2. Again, another claim of this series is that the percentage of true Christians at any one time or place is much smaller than those who are Christians in name. I wouldn't be surprised if, in the initial migrations of Europeans to America, there was a higher percentage of fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ. After all, so many of the first immigrants were fleeing religious persecution.

But by the time of the Revolutionary War and the founding of the US, I wonder if the percentage had leveled out to about what it is now--about 20%.

Similarly, although the structure of America's representational democracy seems ideal, its ideals are still being worked out:

• Slavery persisted till 1865 (interestingly, Thomas Jefferson's originally proposed Declaration condemned the slave trade, but the Continental Congress rejected those parts of his version). 
• Reconstruction after the Civil War was so botched that we had to have the Civil Rights movement of the 60s. Race conflict even this past year illustrates that the structures of society are still out of whack in some way.
• Women were not included in America's social contract until 1920 when women had the right to vote. Even in the 1950s their presence in the work place was resisted.

3. There is a sense in which America's laws are more loving than ever. I imagine the wild west to have been a place of vast injustice, where there was scarcely any true rule of law. Imagine how murderers, pedophiles, and wife beaters must have thrived on the old frontier in Kentucky and Indiana in the year 1800.

Spousal and child abuse is less tolerated than ever. Without altering my position on homosexual sex, I still can't imagine that a country where homosexuals are not forced to undergo chemical castration, imprisonment, or death is a more Christian place than one where they are.

4. So in what respects, then, might America be in decline, if the percentage of true Christians remains about the same and the value of all individuals is higher than ever? Even abortion is at its lowest in over forty years.

I suppose there are two parts to this question in my mind: 1) Is the average individual less "moral" than before? A person can behave morally because it is cultural without any real investment in morality or Christ. 2) Is the structure of the US less loving than before?

5. With regard to the first question, the crime rate has fluctuated a little in the last couple of years, but in general is still lower than the 1970s. It thoroughly declined in the 1990s. It was down in 2013.

Divorce rates shot up forty years ago when it became a serious option but are not clearly on the rise now. Despite often quoted statistics about Christian divorce, those statistics relate to all declared Christians and thus include the nominals who are now becoming nones. The divorce rates among the more serious 20% are not as high.

From what I believe is a more thoroughly Christian viewpoint, we must reckon that while divorce is never the ideal, it is not always better for the children for couples to stay together. In cases of abuse, staying together imprints a son or daughter to become an abuser. I also wonder if divorce rates will actually go down in the emerging context where most gay individuals will no longer marry to hide their sexuality ("bearding").

Clearly options like living together and premarital sex are more prevalent than ever. This is deeply saddening. Nevertheless, teenage pregnancy is actually on the decline overall. I don't have any statistics, but I actually doubt that homosexuality is on the rise, although experimentation may be. My hunch is, though, that the percentage of gay individuals is more or less the same as it always has been. We just didn't notice.

So the facts seem to suggest that, at least in these areas, individual morality is not really on the decline among nominals and non-believers.

6. That leads me to the structures, are the structures of America in decline? Here are the things that are worrying me the most:

a. economic disparity
The difference between the wealthy and the everyday person is starker than ever. This strikes at the foundations of a democracy. Capitalism, again, is not an end in itself. The genius of the American system is not that it rewards a few. The most Christian aspect of the American system is the fact that it values all and potentially empowers all.

When the lower end of the socio-economic spectrum has healthy sources of livelihood and healthy living conditions, society as a whole benefits, is healthier, and more embodies the core values of a nation that is truly Christian in values. When the lower end lacks resources, crime increases, violence increases, and history is also replete with tales of revolution. If you don't account for your poor, they will eventually account for you.

b. the welfare class
Although well intentioned--even intentioned with Christian values--too much of America depends for its livelihood on others who do the work. It's not just about unfairness to those who actually do the work. That's the legalistic way to think of it. It's ultimately bad for those on the receiving end and it undermines the capacity of the society as a whole.

Again, I don't have statistics, but one wonders if a sense of entitlement and a laziness with regard to work has become part of all layers of society. The child of a rich or middle class person can be unproductive and non-contributing to society as well. The welfare just comes from within the family rather than from the government. Has America as a whole become less work brittle? I don't know.

This does get at a moral question? Are Americans more oriented to self-gratification and pleasure than ever? I don't know. It might be that, as with the issues I mentioned in the last section, it only feels that way and that the percentages are more or less the same as always.

But when you think of what signifies the decline of a great people, a decline in the impulse to do, to create, to work has to be a major element. If a people are not competing, if they are not ready to defend themselves, if they only receive or take in for themselves as individuals rather than contributing to a greater good, that is an eventual death warrant for a society, it seems to me.

c. lack of education
Education is a crucial element in a successful democracy. An uneducated majority will vote for the wrong people and the wrong outcomes. Here again, while it feels to me like America is less educated than ever, it may very well be that social media and cable news has only given a greater microphone to a certain set of people. This is an insight that I am slowly coming to, the most vocal and alarming voices are often not the voice of the majority. The majority usually, over time, moves in the right direction, it seems to me.

But certainly there are voices with power that are anti-science in America right now. It doesn't seem to matter to many Americans that the majority of experts in a particular field are solidly convinced of something. My uneducated opinion seems to count as much as someone who can actually do the math.

But maybe it has always been this way. It just seems that now the anti-evidence voices control the textbooks.

d. postmodernism
Anyone who knows me well knows that I believe there are important insights to be gained from postmodernism. But even to say that puts it in a framework of truth.

Postmodernism has--it at least feels to me--eroded the scholarly pursuit of objective truth and encouraged a certain kind of ideological tribalism in America. From my earlier posts, you can tell that I believe the Enlightenment quest for truth and objectivity was a core basis for the prosperity and egalitarianism of Western culture. Everyone stands equally before the court of truth and the court of law.

Sure, postmodernism has made it abundantly clear that this goal is ultimately a dream. But it is a dream we must continue to pursue!

Unfortunately, Christians have sometimes, without realizing it, jumped on this bandwagon. If all positions are really animals in a circus, then we can be in the circus too. But ideological tribalism is inherently deconstructive to the framework of Western society.

The values of equality can sometimes blur into this deconstructive arena. So we value women equally to men so we give them equal voice. Absolutely. But in any instance where feminism begins to say, "You cannot communicate with us because you are a man. Your truth is a different truth than our truth," at that point feminism has become the enemy of democracy. A democracy can only thrive if there is a core, common truth shared by all.

And so when "presuppositionalism" makes it such that the different parts of society cannot communicate with each other on some common playing field, it has become deconstructive of democracy.

Those are some thoughts. Hopefully there are some insights in there. If not, I welcome your critique, for I believe in a truth that is common to all and, most importantly, common to God.

Exceptional America

I continue my musings over the trail of Christianity in Western culture, now contemplating in what ways America is a Christian nation and whether we are in a decline of some sort at present. Previous posts include:

• Did Constantine and Theodosius make Rome Christian?
• When did Europe become Christian?
• Theories of Western decline
• A more dialectical view
• Wesley, Arminius, and the Enlightenment
• Judeo-Christian Values of America
• The Christian Foundations of America

1. I am quite proud of the United States. I want to remention a couple things I have said in my musings thus far. I believe that Wesleyan-Arminian theology is the best translation of biblical theology into the modern world. I believe that the Enlightenment was, in several key respects, a good thing in the history of humanity. I believe the two fit well together, the best of Christianity wed to the best of human thinking at a particular time in a particular respect.

I can imagine that those comments might make some uncomfortable. On the one hand, I'm affirming the "right things." I'm affirming Wesleyanism. I'm affirming America. But I'm not affirming them in the way people normally affirm them, namely, as some straightforward implementation of a biblical worldview. Still more dangerous, am I suggesting that Western civilization in the Enlightenment actually was superior in some way to other civilizations at that particular point in time?!

2. First, let me affirm strongly that all people are of equal value (a tenet of the New Testament and Western civilization). Let me also quote a line from Men in Black: "A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky, dangerous animals." The point of the quote is that there are plenty of smart individuals out there. But at any given time, the bulk of humanity is basically herd animal.

So there are equally smart people of any race, gender, or status. Always have been. The intellectual capacity of the smartest ancient Egyptian was no wit less than Einstein. To say that there might have been something exceptional about Western civilization in the Enlightenment is not to say that individuals in the Western world were/are smarter or better than individuals elsewhere in space and time. It is not to say that Enlightenment Europe was exceptional in all respects. It is not even to say that Western civilization has continued to be exceptional in these areas...

As an aside, I saw a silly slogan the other day poking fun at the metric system. It basically pointed out that the one country that doesn't use the metric system is the only one that has been to the moon. What is ironic about this quote is that it is some American taking credit for the achievements of scientists, all of whom used the metric system in their calculations to get us to the moon!

In other words, the person who created this meme is not exceptional as an individual (at least not in science) and has no business taking any credit for going to the moon. Being American doesn't make you exceptional even if there would turn out to be something exceptional about America. Indeed, I consider prevalent attitudes like this one more a possible sign of America's decline.

... What I am, gulp, wondering is whether the Enlightenment that took place in Europe in many respects represented a high mark in history up to that point in terms of human rationality. As a consequence, I am suggesting that the Western democracies that issued from that thinking might represent the best form of human government yet in human history. The world has followed suit, of course, to where representational democracies exist all around the world today.

And, yes, I am pondering whether this approach to government, as as a structure for society, is most "Christian" and "biblical," not in that the model comes from Scripture, but that it results most in the kind of society that most loves its neighbor as itself and best models the character of God as love.

3. First, the character of God. The best explanation for the existence of evil that I have heard, while affirming that God is love, is that God enables us to be free to choose between good and evil (see here, here, and here). It is the affirmation that a world in which we are able to choose between good and evil is a better world than one in which we are forced to choose the good. But if God gives us the freedom to choose, some will make the wrong choice, and there will be evil.

This is not only a quintessentially Wesleyan explanation for evil in the light of God's character. It also fits extremely well with the Enlightenment values of freedom and moral responsibility. I believe it fits with the Bible, but it is not precisely an explicit biblical teaching (the other side errs, IMO, by confusing the "that time" of the Bible with the "all time"). It grows out of the biblical affirmation that God is love and that God is sovereign and yet that evil continues to exist.

It does not fit, however, with the Puritan way of viewing the world. The Puritans believed it was beholden on them to make everyone in New England live the right way. Freedom of religious viewpoint was not part of their worldview. The founding fathers rejected this aspect of early America and strongly opposed a state church.

But it was part of the essential DNA of the founding of the United States, and it has become part of the essence of the democracies of the world today. In that sense, those forces in America today that would insist on forcing the culture to be Christian in ways that do not involve the concrete harm of others are actually "unamerican" and, I would argue, based on a mistaken understanding of God.

4. Next, the ethical command to love our neighbor. While we are still working out the kinks, the Constitution was structured to 1) favor the benefit of the majority while 2) considering all individuals to have equal rights under the law. What is this but the optimal working out of the love of neighbor in society?

To be sure, these claims were, in reality, a farce as long as slavery existed. They were a farce for as long as women were not given a voice. Unfortunately, they remain to some extent still aspirational today to the extent that there is so much unfairness. As long as the rich can break the law in ways that the poor cannot, this vision is still unattained. As long as the color of one's skin results in unequal treatment under the law, then the ideal of the Constitution is not yet fully achieved.

The Bill of Rights, in this respect, is incredibly important. It keeps a majority from oppressing a minority. In Egypt, the majority Muslim brotherhood tried to vote out the rights of the minority. The same has been happening in Turkey. The Bill of Rights say that a Christian majority in America would not be allowed to vote America to have Christian laws that are based on specific Christian understandings that are not translatable to universal rights and laws (i.e., that cannot be formulated in terms of concrete harm to others).

This wisdom resulted from the struggles of Europe in the days after the Reformation. The fathers would have no state church in the US. There would be neither Henry VIII or Bloody Mary. There would be no Oliver Cromwell either. There would be no Cotton Mather even. It would be a place where the Quakers and Pilgrims could be different from the Puritans without fear of persecution.

The South got upset in the 1960s when the federal government forced it to allow African-Americans to have the same rights as "whites." But this is the genius of America. The majority cannot abuse the minority. It is not just about majority rule. It is also about minority rights. This is, when it works right, the best structural embodiment of the love of neighbor in history, now adopted by nations all over the world. And the US was the first to implement it structurally. That was exceptional.

5. What is exceptional about this structure, now the structure of governments all over the world, is the goal of the neutrality of government in arbitrating the rights of individuals and groups. What is exceptional in this structure is the goal of the greatest happiness to the greatest number of people--a value set forth by Jeremy Bentham in the 1700s. This goal--the greatest happiness for the greatest number--stood at the base of Adam Smith's capitalism (also set forth in the 1700s). To the extent that capitalism departs from this goal--the greatest happiness for the greatest number--it becomes unamerican and has deviated from its founding purpose.

These are ideas from the Enlightenment. They embody the core absolutes of Scripture, IMO, but these specific structures for society were not developed with such force until the 1700s in England in the flow of the Enlightenment.

All these structures assumed the rule of reason. Of course the Enlightenment overestimated the rationality of people. But the goal was there. Voters and representatives would follow the rules of logic and the inference of evidence in all their conduct.

It was this insistence on objectivity, rationality, and empiricism that drove the scientific revolution. The Industrial Revolution had much about it that was not ideal or Christian, but the blessings of scientific discovery have followed from these twin stars of logic and empiricism.

Because even rational people disagree, the founding fathers implemented Montesquieu's balance of powers. An executive branch would capture the benefits of a monarchy without the unlimited power. A legislative branch would capture the voice of the people--one house would be more populist, the other would represent regions. A judiciary, elected for life, would arbitrate, so that the pressures of culture at moments in history could not overrun the structural rights.

What an ingenious system! It has taken over 200 years to see this structure work out many of the prejudices of the founding fathers themselves. A slave is not 3/5 of a person. A woman can think as well as a man. But what an exceptional experiment America has been, and the best of the world has followed suit.

Perhaps my next post will finally get to the point. In what respects might America then potentially be in decline?