Realizing Fears in Egypt

An acquaintance recently shared with me this news article by the Assyrian International New Agency. I cannot find it being carried by any other news agencies and so I am hesitant to accept it as fact too quickly. I do not, however, have any real reason to doubt it, and so I will pass it along for others to consider.

The article focuses on the abduction of a Christian teenager from her home but outlines a number of violent acts against Christians since the outset of the protests in Egypt. The includes a church being torched, Christians having stones hurled at them, three murders, a conspiracy to sabatoge a church construction, and just general violence against Coptic Christians. This was the most disturbing portion to me:

St. Mary and St. Michael church was the scene on November 24, 2010 of severe clashes between State Security forces and Copts protesting over the closure of their church, during which the forces used tear gas and live ammunition against the protesters, resulting in the killing of three Copts, hundreds of injuries and the arrest of 176 Copts...

During the protests in Tahrir Square which, culminated in the ousting of President Mubarak, a period which witnessed the complete absence of the security forces from the streets, the congregation of St. Mary and St. Michael church was guarding the church, which was closed on November 24. On February 6, as soon as a few security officers came back on duty, they stormed the church and evicted the priest and the congregation who were keeping vigil there and holding services praying for peace in Egypt.

I suspect that this will not be the last time my fears about the unrest in Egypt and its effect on Christians there will be realized.

A Day with Ben Witherington: Ethics and Act

At the end of this series on A Day with Ben Witherington (which has ironically lasted for a full week now), I would actually like to turn to ethics proper. In particular, I will argue that the ethicality of an act is not limited to the outward appearance of that act. I wish on this point I could engage Witherington more directly, either critiquing him as an opponent or drawing on him as a source. Unfortunately, he seemed to be occupying different opinions at different times. At least I can say that, regardless of where he stands, he acted as the catalyst for my formulating these thoughts more concretely.

At one point Witherington made the claim that he knew many good people who were not Christians. By this he meant that there were people who did not murder, who did not steal, who did not X (where X is some feature of the Christian ethos). It strikes me that the very fact that someone does not steal does not make their stance on personal property ethical necessarily. Ethics extends beyond the mere act. For example, a man who refuses to steal because it is wrong is generally considered to be more ethical than a man who refuses to steal because he fears he will be caught. The motive for the ethical act bears on the ethicality of the behavior.

This is the essence of virtue ethics, and later on Witherington would say that he believes that virtue ethics align most closely with the biblical view of ethics. The focus on the character and motive of the moral actor are legitimate, but they do not necessarily preclude the sentiment that there are many good non-Christians. Witherington, as a self-described good Weslyan, believes that grace pervades creation allowing for humanity to do good that would otherwise be impossible. It is possible for an atheist and a Christian alike to operate out of a genuine motive of self-sacrifical love.

Yet, I would go further still and argue that a common motive or a common virtue still does not ensure a common rightness in an act. Just as the motive for the act must be examined, so too must the ground for the motive be examined. Motives of self-sacrifice can be derived from a belief in the virtue of self-abasement because the self does not truly exist. It is an illusion. Therefore, self-sacrifice is no more or less self-interested than selfishness, since there is no self. It is only more enlightened and therefore nearer to escape. Such a self-sacrifice is not truly ethical. The motive is grounded in a lie, which precludes the possibility of virtue.

In short, it seems to me that to achieve the belief that there can be truly ethical acts performed by non-Christians, we must be willing to admit one of two things. ON the one hand, God does not need to be the grounds for ethicality (which Witherington rejects), in which case our own ground for ethics has been undermined and we are undone. On the other, God must be the ground of ethicality but that humanity need not be conscious of it (which Witherington accepts), in which case we have allowed that we may be accidentally virtuous and eliminated any full volitional activity from ethics. The latter suggestion seems to run startlingly contrary to the Arminian views of Witherington.

Regardless, I have serious doubts as to whether anything can be said to be good without God and whether any activity born out of a ground which rejects God can be said to be ethical.

A Day with Ben Witherington: A Brief Note on Women

It should not have really surprised anyone that Witherington, when asked, came out in favor of having women in all the same ecclesiastical roles as men. He is a Methodist, and their movement has historically been associated with championing the "rights" of women. I am not even sure why someone asked him his opinion, or why someone else asked him to defend it, or why someone else asked him to defend his defense of it. I suppose the presumptuousness of youth tricks us into believe that ideas which seem novel and irrefutable to us are in fact neither novel nor irrefutable. They are instead merely tired and flawed.

I would like, nevertheless, to engage a fairly common argument which Witherington employed with reference to appeals to creation as a defense for complimentarian gender economics. Witherington argued that all economic disparity between the genders is a result of the Fall and the curse which God placed on woman as a result. I do not agree with that, but let us accept it for the sake of argument. Witherington then argued that in undoing the Fall, Jesus inaugurated a society (the church) which erased the consequences of the Fall for gender relations.

The most productive way I can imagine to evaluate this is to look at the effects of the Fall as a group. They are these:

There will be enmity between the serpent (the devil) and humanity.
There will be pain in childbirth.
There will be a disparity in gender economics.
There will be toil as a prerequisite for food.

Looking at that list, if Jesus has undone the curse of the Fall, he seems to have overlooked every aspect except gender economics. Humanity still wars against the devil, and Paul exhorts us in Ephesians not to stop this warfare but to intensify it with spiritual weapons. There is still pain in childbirth. Humanity still toils for food. If we are going to reject complimentarian gender economics, I suspect we will need firmer grounds than simply because it was part of a curse which is no longer in effect.

A Day with Ben Witherington: Bad Arguments

After spending three consecutive days critiquing Witherington's concept of theosis and attempting to demonstrate ways in which a proper understanding of theosis would correct the deficiencies in his thought, I think it is appropriate to turn away for a moment from critiquing Witherington. Instead, I would like to use him as a vehicle to critique the way people interact with bad arguments.

I was surprised and excited (read "giddy like a little school girl") when Witherington "confessed" that he is a pacifist. I am always delighted to find scholars outside the historic peace churches who have come to an honest conviction about the necessity of non-violence as part of Jesus' ethos. In the deep South and at the new Harding--the one totally inimical to the ethical stances of both its namesake and its founder and totally ignorant of its history--pacifism is the kind of sin you can still be lynched for, if only intellectually in a coffee house by an irate undergraduate.

After the shocking revelation took the time to sink in, a student interjected with what he expected, I am sure, to be a damning argument: "That's all good in theory, but let's talk about practice. I mean, Tolstoy died penniless at a train station!"

I'll let the force of that impressive argument sink in for a moment.

Just think on it.

Has it sunk in?

No?

I imagine not. In fact, the argument is bad on so many levels that I'm sure I could spend the better part of a day dissecting all the ways in which it is obviously wrong. Witherington, for his part, responded with a certain grace that Tolstoy was by no means the typical pacifist and that even utopian style pacifism was not typical pacifism. Witherington is, of course, right to point out that Tolstoy cannot be said in any sense to be a representative of all Christian pacifists. Judging the majority by the radical minority is the same way we came up with the rhetoric about homosexuals molesting little boys. It doesn't fly.

Of course, there are other angles that can be taken. For example, what is so bad about the fact that Tolstoy died penniless at a train station? Tolstoy elected to give up his wealth and to live an itinerant life. He expected to die penniless, and had you told him in advance that he would die this way, it would likely not have bothered him. The mention of the train station is particularly odd. Is there virtue to dying on a hospital bed? Death is inglorious regardless of its locale.

You might just have readily argued that thousands upon thousands of pacifists have died quite "respectable" deaths (whatever that is), at home in their beds surrounded by family and with their modest financial means in tact. Examples like Lipscomb, Harding, and Armstrong spring immediately to mind. None of them were rich men, by any means, but they lived full lives and died peacefully by all accounts. The thousands of nameless, faceless members of the historic peace churches who die all the time without consequence probably deserve to be counted as well. If we are really measuring the value of a person by the circumstance of his death, then we should say that pacifism is a delightful system. After all, a pacifist is less likely to die in the field of battle. And wars happen more often than Tolstoys.

I was tempted to blurt out, "Your savior had died penniless on a cross."

All of this, however, is actually my problem. Arguments such as these are so simple to refute that we do it automatically. There was no reason for Witherington to hesitate in distancing himself from Tolstoy. The comparison was made, and his immediate thought was, "I am not Tolstoy or even a disciple of Tolstoy." Yet, when you take time to refute the content of an argument whose very nature is corrupt, you legitimize the argument. If Witherington was a follower of Tolstoy, would the critique have then been applicable? If most pacifists died poor and ingloriously, would pacifism be undone? If Jesus had died rich, if utopian pacifism was typical, if some of the facts were changed, would the reasoning of the argument be valid?

The real problem with the appeal to Tolstoy is that it doesn't speak to the value of pacifism at all. It doesn't deal with the question of whether or not violence is ethical. How Tolstoy died is not directly related to ethics, or if it is, then that connection is not self-evident. Yet, every time we chase down an opponent's red herring, no matter how simple it is to prove wrong, we reinforce the practice of flawed argumentation. When that argument (so well crafted that it just had to come from the website of a right wing militia) finds its rhetorical niche among people who already agree with its unrelated conclusion, they will have no reason not to embrace and repeat it. We ought to be developing a culture of intellectual honesty, and the first step is to start calling bad arguments what they are. Stop refuting them as if they warranted our attention. The correct response to "Tolstoy died penniless at a train station" is "So what?

A Day with Ben Witherington: Theosis, Against an Anemic Christology

Theosis is so critical a doctrine in Orthodox theology that it is essentially impossible to escape it in any aspect of Orthodox thought. It relates to soteriology (obviously), epistemology, theology proper, anthropology, and, among countless others, Christology. In this final aspect, I think that once again Witherington would have profited from a fuller, better understanding of theosis. During a very informal Q&A, Witherington made the assertion that the human nature in Christ was identical for all intents and purposes to the unfallen nature of Adam. (I mention the venue in the hopes that it may merely have been that Witherington, without having prepared, misspoke or spoke imprecisely.) This creates a theological quandary: would human nature inexorably but unconfusedly united to divine nature really have not been any different than human nature not so united? In the Orthodox tradition, the divine nature divinized the human nature, not in a way which was supernatural (that is to say, not in a way that exceeded the potentiality of any other human nature) but in a way that made that humanity something functionally other than all other human nature. It is only by being somehow different, not merely by virtue of the volitional activity of the human nature in Christ, that Christ can truly represent the new man, the true humanity.

I think the appropriate language to speak about the difference between Adam's nature and the human nature of Christ, other than merely that one was united to divinity (which is theosis) and the other was not, is the language of potentiality and actuality. Adam always had the potential for increase, for union, for participation in the divine life, but that participation and its inevitable consequences had not occurred. He elected sin instead. Certainly, that participation in and union with divinity would have resulted in a radical change in him. Panagiotes Nellas has said that this potential was never truly possible before the Incarnation and argues that, even if there were no Fall, the Incarnation would have been necessary as a means of opening the path for union between God and man. Regardless of the merit of that argument, it was never beyond Adam's nature to be in union with God. In that sense, the human nature of Christ and Adam were identical in their potential. After all, the human nature of Christ was truly human and no more. The suggestion, however, that they were no different in any respect seems to suggest (as I have accused Witherington of suggesting before) that the encounter with the divine can somehow leave all or part of human nature unaffected. I cannot accept this.

I dare say that a Christology which views the humanity in Christ as unremarkable misses something of the promise which we have in salvation. We are being transformed into something remarkable by our participation in the divine life. Christ, as the living embodiment of that participation, was already something remarkable even in his human nature.

A Day with Ben Witherington: Theosis, Multiform Salvation

The series of lectures that Witherington presented were on ethics, and so it is unsurprising that his focus was on moral aspects of the New Testament. In fact, I would have been annoyed had it been otherwise. After all, I did not come to hear a lecture on the role of the intellect in salvation or on the eschatological hope for life. Unfortunately, Witherington did not merely ignore other aspects of soteriology but actively subordinated them to his moral agenda. After his rejection of theosis as a proper interpretation of 2 Peter 1, Witherington insisted that our participation in the divine nature was a moral participation: a grace-empowered imitation of the divine moral attributes. He spoke of knowledge as a means of understanding those characteristics but not as an area in which we partook of divinity. He explicitly rejected the idea that we should partake of any characteristic of divine being. It is precisely in these areas that I think theosis improves on the deficient Western means of understanding salvation.

Witherington provided me with the pedagogical tool to lay out my opposition to his "moral only" view of participation in God, his ethics-driven view of salvation. He noted that in Scripture there are three predicates for God: God is love, God is life, and God is light. Witherington insisted that the first of these was most critical as it represented the moral character of God. I would suggest that there is a corollary between the way in which salvation grants increase and participation in the characteristics of God and these three predicates.

God is love, and I certainly do not mind Witherington pointing out the critical importance of this affirmation. Salvation does include moral perfection, as it should. Ours is a holy God, a God for Whom love is the highest expressed good. Our experience of the divine is one of love: love in the very act of creation, love in the governance of that creation, and love in the plan of redeeming creation. To encounter the divine is necessarily to be changed into the image of love, to love God and to love neighbor. The entire ethos of the New Testament is constructed on this axis and, if we trust the testimony of Christ, so is the Old Testament. To participate in God requires a holiness which manifests as love and a love which drives holiness. In the process of salvation, God cures us of the disease of sin, cooperates with us in keeping us morally healthy, and finally eliminates the potential for the disease altogether. That is an appropriate, even crucial, understanding of salvation. It is not, however, exhaustive.

God is also life, and life is not a moral characteristic of God. Yet, the most common images for salvation are those of the "new life" and of "eternal life." Unless we view this life as the mere absence of physical death and as a consequence of moral health--which I find to be a shockingly shallow understanding of the "life abundant" that we are promised--we must understand our being given life as being given a divine characteristic which is not moral. Life is a characteristic of being, and in that sense we may speak about it as an "ontological" quality of God (thought I realize how much qualification that would require). Salvation includes not merely a moral perfection and the elimination of evil, but also the elimination of sin's handmaiden, death, and a kind of perfection of our being. Salvation is not merely a process of God helping us to do good and forgiving us when we do evil, it is a an initiation into being good, not in the ethical sense of having good virtues which motivate good actions but in the metaphysical sense of having being which is being perfected by its contact with Being. Unless we view being as a static category which includes both Creator and creature, than we admit that a communion with a transcendent "being" can affect our very being.

Finally, God is light. In this we see that God is Truth and the revealer of truth. The fourteenth century hesychasts spoke of divine light as an object which was seen and the means by which that object was seen and the seeing subject by virtue of the transformative power of the light. This, I believe, is a fuller view of knowledge than Witherington suggests when he speaks of knowledge a means of revealing the moral character of God. Again, Witherington seems to limit knowledge merely to a possible bank of knowable facts. In Scripture, however, what the light exposes is not facts but Truth (a distinction which is both rhetorical and substantial, however trite it may seem). Knowledge is a means of encountering God, of unlocking or decoding the facts which are rationally perceived, and of combating ignorance which is a sinister force in the order of sin and death. Certainly as a part of this, we better understand both the moral and ontological character of God and of our own salvation, but knowledge has merit which transcends the auxiliary function Witherington wants to assign to it. To know is something in itself, provided that we understand knowing in a way that ignores the limitations that science is attempting to artificially impose on knowledge.

However artificial that schema may be, I think it appropriately conveys the point: salvation is comprehensive. When we encounter God, which is itself the means of salvation, the result is not merely moral perfection. It is not "merely" anything. The come into contact with the divine is transformative experience whose ramifications are total. It is perhaps even inappropriate to speak in even so broad of categories of moral, ontological, and epistemological aspects of salvation. In truly apophatic style, it may be best to keep silent as to the true scope of salvation. Certainly, however, a view of salvation which involves only the erasure of sin and the perfection of moral virtue leaves much of the human person unaffected by the intervention of the divine, something that contact with divinity would seem to preclude by its very nature.

A Day with Ben Witherington: Theosis, Vanquishing a Strawman

On the list of doctrines that Witherington took ever so subtle jabs at (so subtle, in fact, that the person sitting next to me in the lecture did not even remember it) was "theosis." I put that in quotes because the doctrine that Witherington opposed was nothing like the doctrine of theosis espoused by the Orthodox Church. Reading 2 Peter 1, Witherington scoffed at those who held to a view of "theosis," people who thought that we would become omniscient, omnipresent, and so on.

Frankly, I can understand why that concept of theosis would be unnerving for Witherington. After all, the Orthodox Church for centuries has worked deliberately to resist any understanding of theosis which would equate divinization with becoming God in any absolute sense. Witherington inexcusably confused taking on divine characteristics as becoming divine absolutes. The Orthodox doctrine of theosis does not allow for people to appropriate the absolute characteristics of God. In fact, it positively precludes it.

The doctrine of theosis is one of perpetual ascent, the expansion of finite beings into an infinite plenitude of God. It doesn't matter to what degree a finite reality grows, it can never fill infinity. The point at which a being reaches omniscience, for example, is the moment at which knowledge ceases to be finite and becomes infinite. Unless you view God's omniscience as merely His comprehensive knowledge (in some way analogous if not identical to our own mode of knowing) of things extant rather than as His infinite capacity to contain everything as cause, there is no reason to assume that without a dramatic ontological shift that the finite human should ever expand to a point where he has reached complete knowledge. Complete knowledge is not something absent in humanity merely from some lack of information. Absolute knowledge requires an absolute being who transcends knowledge and knowing as cause.

Theosis never allows for humanity to make that transcendent leap from finitude to infinitude. In fact, the idea of perpetual ascent absolutely excludes the possibility that we should ever arrive at an absolute. To be saved as creatures, we must remain creatures even as we are united with divinity. Notice the language is of "union" and not of "absorption." Perhaps Witherington had in view the doctrines of the Latter Day Saints, in which people themselves become deities, or of certain forms of Buddhism, in which people are absorbed into a universal Nothingness. That is not, however, "theosis" properly speaking. Theosis has its type in the Incarnate Word: a union of two natures without confusion, in which both retain their essential characteristics. (This Christological aspect of theosis is a problem to be dealt with later.)

Witherington in his brief and subtle critiques of theosis only managed to display and undo his own misconception of the doctrine. Theosis has always rejected the confusion of deity with humanity. It has nothing to fear from accusations that it will lead to omniscience, omnipresence, or really omni-anything in the way that God possesses those qualities.