Effing the Ineffable

Recently attended a debate on the existence of Satan. Two of the panelists were Mark Driscoll (of Mars Hill Church in Seattle) and Deepak Chopra (famed new-age guru). I have many thoughts about the debate, but I wanted to write down this one small reflection fairly quickly since it’s both simple and essential to the heart of my disagreement with Chopra and much of what passes for “spirituality” in our age.

Several times in the course of the debate, Chopra described “god” as “transcendent and ineffable”. With the first adjective, I have no problems; assuming we are talking about the same God and using the same (western) meaning of “transcendent”, the statement stands in agreement with the heart of Evangelicalism, Puritanism, Lutheranism, Roman Catholicism, Augustine, and the church fathers. My complaint is with the second adjective.

“God is ineffable” is a popular saying in present-day “spiritual” circles. The compact OED gives us only two (only two, a paltry sum indeed!) meanings for ineffable: “too great or extreme to be expressed in words”, and “too sacred to be uttered”. Let’s consider each of these in turn.

If God is completely and truly ineffable in the first sense, then — catch this, it’s subtle — even calling Him “ineffable” is a contradiction, because it expresses something about Him in words. Similarly, if we call Him ineffable in the second sense, we have similarly contradicted ourselves, because — again, this is subtle — we have attached a word to the sacredly unutterable Identity and uttered it, thereby demonstrating that we think it is not ineffable after all.

Now, these critiques only apply if we treat “ineffable” as a first-class property of Divinity. It is quite a different matter to speak, as Christians often do, of the ineffable ages of God’s eternity, the ineffable depths of His love or compassion, or His ineffable power and mercy. With this we are saying something substantial, that God actually and truly possesses particular attributes and abilities and traits, but that He possesses them in measures which defy expression. There is no contradiction (with the first definition, anyway) in calling God ineffably Holy. It is only the “ineffable god” of vague spirituality which is, literally, nothing but nonsense.

Why is this important? For starters, the reason the “ineffable deity” meme is so popular today is that its own meaninglessness and nonsensicality invites its adherents to embrace equally irrational ideas about everything else. You are free to judge and condemn those who argue for an objective standard of justice. You are free to speak of rehabilitating that which you call irredeemably evil. You can champion education as the cure for wickedness even as you rail against any attempts to include efforts at moral formation in public education. You can adopt nonsensical spatial metaphors (”beyond” right and wrong, “beyond” liberal and conservative) to evade uncomfortable questions about the glaring inconsistencies in your own thinking or the dastardly ethical implications of your vacuous worldview.

If God is ineffable, then categories like “God’s justice” or “God’s will” or even “God’s existence” are likewise nonsensical. The mind consumed with the ineffable delusion reflexively dismisses such notions without regard for their merit. Consumed with vanity at having grasped the ungraspable, of having effed the ineffable, they exalt their own understanding and become futile in their own thinking, which (if we are willing to think Biblically) are the immediate forerunners to folly, idolatry, and judgement. “God is ineffable” is a cop-out, a word game played by those lacking the humility to allow that God might speak and that His words might mean something.

In the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit

And not, as some in the mainline are fond of saying, “Creator, Redeemer, and Sanctifier”. God is not an abstract amalgam of roles, no matter what the Sabellianists and Modalists say. God does act in those roles, but He has not invited us to know him only by narrow functional titles; we are made to meet face-to-face, not face-to-nametag.

But, of course, “Father” and “Son” hit us too close to home; we cannot hold someone called “Father” or “Son” at arms length without doing violence to our own humanity. We can love or we can hate, but the one thing we are incapable of doing is not caring. A “Creator”, however, can safely be observed from afar, or (more likely) simply ignored.

And, lest there be any confusion: That’s the God and Father or Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Lord Jesus Christ, and the Spirit of Jesus Christ.

But I will give them this: at least it’s linguistically artful, which is more than can be said for ecclesiastical abominations against our noble tongue like “God Godself”.

More Seattle Cognitive Dissonance

A few months ago Seattle had a series of severe winter storms. By “severe” I mean, of course, that enough snow fell to not melt instantly when it hit the ground. Anyway, those of you fortunate enough to have visited Seattle when such events occur will know that the city is absolutely crippled by them. We have a lot of arterial roads that run up and down very steep grades, and our four snowplows and two road graders just can’t keep up.

Well, those of us from cities that actually know how to handle winter weather invariably chirp up and complain that Seattle DoT needs to get its act together. To which a predictable cadre always reply “Why should Seattle make that huge capital outlay for an event that happens once a decade?”

Now, there are ways to have substantial snow-handling capabilities with minimal capital outlay by the city, but let’s set that point aside for the sake of argument.

The interesting part comes a few months later when a debate about Anthropogenic Climate Change comes up, and this same predictable cadre of people shout from the rooftops that we should expect more dramatic seasons (hotter/dryer summers, colder/snowier winters) because of it.

So, stick this in your pipe and smoke it: If these fine folks (with their very high estimations of their own intelligence) actually believe that the current theories of anthropogenic climate change are “good science”, that means that those theories give rise to highly reliable predictions of things which have not yet happened. One of those predictions, and it is the “consensus” of the current majority opinion-holders, is that (statistically, of course) we’ll be getting a lot more snow a lot more frequently in places like Seattle. So it would seem to follow logically that these same people would be clamoring for us to build a massive snowplow fleet before the coming anthropogenic uberwinters devastate our fair city.

The Answer I Need is Not to a Question

“My head is filled with questions and I can assure you no answer to any one of them has ever brought me one iota of happiness.” (Arthur Dent, Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, 2005)

I have read more Christian books than any reasonable human should hope, expect, or dread to have read.  I am well-studied in apologetics, Biblical theology, and theodicy.  I am blessed with numbers of friends far beyond my own social graces who bear wisdom beyond their years.  I possess an unusually keen gift for finding information on the web.  I have no doubt that, were my real problem ever an actual question, I could find an answer to it.

No, my real problem is not a question, and there is no truism, lemma, proposition, evidence, observation, argument or proof that can address it.  The answer I need is a new way – to think, to work, to labor, to suffer, to pray, to celebrate.  The answer I need is a new truth – grounded and unassailable, not subject to my own tepid indecision and wandering interests.  The answer I need is life afresh, because I can’t even hold death at bay as it eats away at everything in this world I thought I cherished.

I believe, emphatically, that Jesus Christ is “the way, the truth, and the life”.  He is not merely the exemplar of a new kind of humanity (although he is truly that), not merely the correct response to a theological inquiry (although he is truly that), not merely the agent of my eventual bodily resurrection (although he is truly that).  I believe, dogmatically, that Jesus Christ is the answer – not to my questions (foolish and ill-framed as they usually are), but to my actual need, the real problem and paradox of living a condemned man’s life amid this sin-decayed fraternity.

Another day, another idol

This election season is over, and thank goodness.  Just in time to begin the long and difficult process of preparing for the next one.  Because that, after all, is most of what American federal politics are about: re-election.

A nation’s politics tell you a great deal about that nation’s gods.  Before we even consider the issues of the day, look at how the USA treats the institutions of its democratic republic.  Voting is a kind of civic sacrament by which the will of the ultimate authority (the people) is revealed.  Our coinage, in a rather delicious twist of irony, is emblazoned with “In God We Trust”.  We see in political candidates godlike powers to feel and to heal our pain, bridge the gaping voids between our contradictory ideologies, and protect us from all of the uncertainties and unpleasantries which a real world brings (whether they be violent men wanting to harm us or violent cells turning our bodies against themselves).

Through the whole thing, I never cease to be amazed by the pervasive idolatry of both the participants and the process itself.  Both of the major parties degenerated into the most shameless form of idolatry – hero worship – with a war hero on one side and a symbolically significant idealist on the other.  And while the adoration art may have swung one direction more than the other, the adulative rhetoric of honor and patriotism running the other direction more than balanced it.  But most disturbing was that not even the prominent evangelicals who had platforms to inject their voices into the conversation bothered to ask whether we aren’t looking to these mere men to be something which only Jesus can be: a Savior who can deliver us from our sins and make the world new.

My own political inclination tends to run (little-”L”) libertarian, but unlike most of those with whom I tend to agree I will willingly stand first in line to decry its idols and folly.  “The market” — the savior of fiscal conservatism — is not a benevolent force which turns individual greed into virtuous affluence.  The market will indiscriminantly broker vice and virtue, setting the price for corn syrup and sex with underage prostitutes with eqaul vitality and precision.  As Douglas Wilson aptly noted, a market is not truly free when it consists of slaves exchanging chains with one another.  A market full of esteem for virtue may indeed suppress vice, but a market made up of greedy sinners will commodify their sin, driving it to greater and greater efficiency.  So it is not the market which I think will save us, but rather the providential hand of God working through redeemed men and their transformed wills to renew every institution from the inside out.

In a similar vein, I accept the social liberalism of libertarianism only because I prefer it as a necessary logical consequence of opposing the alternatives.  Specifically, I find it profoundly dangerous to endow the state with any power which you would not entrust to the hands of your enemies.  Let’s take an example: the state’s role in regulating marriage is an outgrowth of the eugenics movement, the idea that some people should not breed with each other; out of this we got marriage licensing. But the mechanism has since then so often changed hands, it has gone from a tool of population engineering to a tool of racism to a tool of public health (blood type checks) and is now being fought over as a tool of cultural normalization and validation, with the voice of the church chiming in from time to time on both wrong sides of every one of those issues.  And Christians today should ask themselves if they really want to use the law to impose one vision of social order when secular feminists, Oprahphiles, and post-free-love sexual libertines each hold a firmer grip on the voting psyche than we do (and are, therefore, better able to impose their visions of social order upon us by the same means).  Legal mechanisms always outlive the intentions of their creators.

Even so, social liberalism alone (by which I mean legal permissiveness toward behavior which does not actively harm others) does not give rise to cohesive civilizations.  As a legal framework, it works when people can (for the most part) trust one another to do the right thing, and to agree with one another that what a small minority is doing is indeed wrong.  Unfortunately, such an assumption in our own day would be patently false; when even a small fraction of my neighbors think there is nothing morally repugnant about dismembering and suctioning out the brains of an infant simply because it has not yet passed through its mother’s birth canal, I can no longer assume that the driver in the next car or the coworker in the next cubicle has any meaningful or coherent sense of right and wrong with which I can agree.  There is no more prevailing moral compass in the west, and there is no surprise in the result: the civilization tears itself apart because everyone is trying to pull it toward their own version of “north”.

So, with all of the caveats and more, I lean libertarian, not because I think they have picked the right savior — they have not — but because I see in it the clearest critique to the idol before whom every other political ideology bows low: Caesar.  A child is shot in a schoolyard?  Caesar will take away people’s guns.  A young man dies of a bacterial infection transmitted by spinach?  Caesar will establish stricter standards for the handling of spinach by farmers and distributors.  Someone is injured in a car wreck?  Caesar will make sure every restaurant gives easy access to their wheelchair.  A woman is raped?  Caesar will tell young children about how wonderful sex is and that they should try it as soon as possible so they don’t get sexually frustrated and start raping people.  And so it goes; tragedy happens (as, in a fallen world, it inevitably does), and the righteous cry that something must be done is immediately taken up by politicians and lawyers who compete with reckless abandon to seem the most heroic by spending money that is not theirs and crafting more and more rules which have less and less to do with the real problems of human brokenness.  There is room for a wise and judicious state to hold human sinfulness in check — Paul calls the governor a minister of vengeance upon the wicked (and that includes both the violence of the rapist and the greed of the corrupt insurance adjuster) — but the impulse in our day is to use the state to shape a new reality in which we can all live in a perpetual childhood, insulated from external danger, protected from our own folly, and oblivious to the mind-bending depth of human depravity and corruption (in others and in ourselves).  The state is a pretender to God’s titles as provider, defender, healer, and judge, and it is foolish of us as Christians (or anyone else for that matter!) to pretend to be able to craft a program to fill these roles without recognizing Caesar’s track record of virtually unbroken habitual poverty, oppression, sickness, and injustice, and without offering up a prayer of humility, supplication, and gratitude that in spite of this, by His grace, His righteousness has not been completely suppressed, His grace has not been completely hidden, our ministrations have from time to time served Him and others more than ourselves, and all of these are because He is indeed our good Savior, better than any we will ever elect.

Not Enough Options, You Insensitive Clod

Just got forwarded an email chain letter urging me to vote in an MSNBC live-poll…

	Should the motto “In God We Trust” be removed from U.S. currency?
		Yes. It’s a violation of the principle of separation of church and state.
		No. The motto has historical and patriotic significance and does nothing to establish a state religion.

Here’s my problem – I may have a “yes” or “no” opinion on the question, but I absolutely do not agree with either of the elaborations.

Regarding the first, the “principle of separation of church and state” is not a proper Constitutional legal doctrine… the only constitutional principles are “free exercise” and “no state establishment”.  So if “In God We Trust” should be removed, it would have to be on the basis of it either inhibiting the free exercise of religion (which it clearly does not) or because it somehow establishes a state church (which it also does not, although strident secularists would argue otherwise).

Regarding the second, the phrase does have historical and patriotic significance, but these cannot be decoupled from its theological significance.  While it clearly does not establish a state church (as I have claimed above), it does have religious significance, pointing to the fundamentally theistic philosophical foundations for our system of law and governance.

Of course, speaking as a Christian I find it deeply ironic that we print “in God we trust” on the instruments of Mammon, in whom we actually trust.  Were God actually an object of trust in any practical sense for America as a nation or its people, perhaps I would see more virtue than parody in the slogan.

Detectable Design

The hot debate between Darwinists and Intelligent Design advocates is whether “design” is a detectable property of a system.  The ID hypothesis votes yes, its opponents vote no.

So the other day I was random-link-cruising and happened upon some articles and discussions about Yucca Mountain, and particularly about the “warning label” problem: how do we mark the Yucca Mountain facility in such a way that all comers will recognize it as “dangerous” even if those comers are not English-speakers (10’s of years), familiar with Post-enlightenment Western culture (100’s of years), users of “language” as we understand it (1,000’s of years), or even recognizably “human” (10,000’s or 100,000’s of years).

It struck me that this is simply another face of the “design” question: the DOE wants to make it unambiguously clear to an observer with whom they have nothing (practically speaking) in common and to whom they will communicate nothing except a single physical artifice that (1) the artifice was deliberately designed by an intelligent agent, and (2) the intent of the designer was to warn the curious away from the site.  So success rests upon the existence of some empirical means of detecting not only design, but intent.  If the site can be misunderstood as a potentially natural phenomenon (e.g., genetically-modified blue cacti) or its purpose is misunderstood by a civilization with a different cultural lexicon (as, e.g., a “place of honor”), the project will have failed.

Then I had an almost comical daydream about Richard Dawkins’ great⁶⁰ grandson (60-some-odd generations from now) standing before an apparently sealed-up wall, Geraldo Rivera style, lambasting his critics’ quaint but preposterous notions that the triple-triangular megaliths surrounding him are anything except aethetically fortuitous freaks of geology which our psychological evolution happens to have predisposed us to be both fascinated and horrified by, and that he intends to prove first-hand that there is nothing interesting about the site.  Bring in the robot-piloted hyper-backhoes and start digging!

A Stroke of Genius

Here’s an idea that will revolutionize church finance:

Pre-paid tithe and offering cards.

Someone needs to jump on this and make it happen.

You’re welcome.

Never Let Go of the Gospel

This is a rant.  Consider yourself warned.

We live in what may be the most opulent, gluttonous, self-aggrandizing, selfish, arrogant civilization on the face of the earth.  We bear children not as the natural fruit of loving covenant and an expression of God’s providence, but because we decide we’re “ready” and we “want” them.  We have unfettered access to stores of knowledge beyond our remotest sense of comprehension.  We set aside a decade for “adolescence” in which we grant almost-unfettered economic freedom with near-total liberty from legal, moral, and cultural responsibility, and consider it destructive to impede the total moral free-agency of these formless and void wanderers. All but a sliver of the severely destitute live with conveniences and luxuries beyond the imaginations of millennia of the world’s wealthiest men, and many of the world’s people even today.

Living in that kind of world, I can’t see how anyone can open their Bible, stand up in front of hundreds (or thousands) of gathered believers on a Sunday morning, keep a straight face, and tell them how to have an even more comfortable, fulfilling future.  I don’t see how someone can look at himself in the mirror after telling an eager flock of God’s people that the Apostle Paul, writing to them from a prison cell, clothed in rags, and nearing the end of his life at the hands of a pagan government, wants them to be “winners” according to the exact same measure of “success” used by that pagan government (money, influence, popularity, power).  I am dumbfounded at the rush to remove from Christian believing every burden which might actually mark us as “Christian”, and their replacement with burdens of trend-chasing, status hoarding, and cultural conformity.

I say all of these things as a guy who loves churches that “understand the times”, that engage with culture in their forms and language and structure and outreach, that minister to practical needs, that produce well-balanced intelligible influential Christians to the glory of God.  I’m just getting quite fed up with the ease with which the unnegotiable first things are “swept under the rug” or treated as of “secondary importance” to those things which, frankly, are passing away.

Never, ever, ever let go of the gospel.  Never, ever, ever stop preaching the goodness of God, the awfulness of our sin, the awesomness of God’s judgement, the sacrifice of Christ’s crucifixion, the power of Christ’s resurrection, or the responsibility we bear as His representatives and body here on the earth.  Never, ever, ever think there’s anything more important than that to put in front of your people.

Okay, end of rant.  I feel better.  Don’t you?

Portraits in The Unending Cognitive Dissonance That Is Seattle, July 28, 2008

As I was walking out of CostCo this evening, I passed a couple coming in.  They were definitely a couple — holding hands, speaking fondly to each other, walking with that shared rhythm that people who have been together for a while sometimes get.

He was about 6′4″ with two-foot long dirty blond dreadlocks, dressed head to toe in linen and hemp.  She was about 5′8″, a smartly-dressed professional-looking brunette, like Jennifer Garner in the first season of Alias only prettier.

Such is Seattle.