Oh the Games We Play with God and Church: A Study of Game Theory and Favorable Outcomes

 

The games we play
http://gospelfutures.org/2013/04/04/the-games-we-play/

by Neil Williams
April 4, 2013

When the mathematical genius John von Neumann (1903 – 1957) sat down to figure out how he could use mathematics to improve his poker playing, little did he realize the repercussions of his inquiry, not only in mathematics but also in almost every other field of inquiry. Considered the father of game theory, Neumann, with the economist Oskar Morgenstern, produced the founding textbook Theory of games and economic behavior that revolutionized economics.

 

When playing a game such as poker, you have limited information (you cannot see all the cards), other players will deceive you, and they intend to win. Game theory is about what decisions and strategies you should take to achieve a favorable outcome.

 

Games consist of three main areas: players, strategies, and outcomes. A basic form of a game is a two-person game where a win for one player means a loss for the other. Known as a zero-sum game, the outcome of this type of game adds up to zero—a win (+1) is offset by the other player’s loss (-1). These games are one hundred percent competitive with no co-operation between players.

 

In a positive-sum game, your win does not mean a total loss for your opponent and involves some co-operation as well as competition. In such games, all players benefit, the outcome being positive. The cliché “win-win situation” refers to a positive sum game where all players benefit from the outcome. Trade between two nations is a classic example of a positive-sum game.

 

Game theory started in mathematics, but expanded to other disciplines including psychology, economics, politics, evolutionary biology, warfare, and theology. We can conceive of most, if not all, interactions in terms of a game: people bidding on an ebay auction, the Cuban missile crisis, a couple arguing with each other, a job applicant negotiating a salary, airlines overbooking flights on the assumption that some passengers will not turn up, a criminal taking a plea agreement instead of a jury trial, a person sacrificing their life for the sake of another.

 

The ways games are structured have implications for relationships and transformation. A married couple may frame an argument as a zero-sum game where each maneuvers, like game pieces on a board, to achieve a winning position—a position that means a defeat for their partner. Seminaries, religions, churches, and para-churches may frame their institutional identity as zero-sum games. Rules and beliefs establish and dictate how and why the game is played and who may play it. If you play, you play to win. If you play, you may only play as long as you stick to the parochial system; otherwise you are out. Blogs—from religious to atheist—will make little progress in relational transformation if a zero-sum mentality demands winners and losers.

 

In these zero-sum games, a community builds a petty game with rules and beliefs that exclude a multitude of other realities, creating a system of thought that is placed above people and transforming relationships.

 

The most famous example in game theory is the Prisoner’s Dilemma devised by Merrill Flood and Melvin Dresher. The basic idea of the Prisoner’s Dilemma is this: The police have arrested you and your partner-in-crime on suspicion of robbing a bank. Lucky for you, the prosecutor lacks sufficient evidence to convict. You and your friend, however, are locked in separate, isolated cells and the prosecutor comes to you with a few options:

 

• Confess and we will let you go free and put your friend behind bars for 15 years.
• Don’t confess and if your partner confesses we will put you in jail for 15 years.
• If you both confess, we will drop the penalty to 3 years.
• If neither of you talk, well, we have enough to convict you on a lesser charge and put you both away for 6 months.

What do you do? The dilemma is this: the rational choice is to confess, no matter what your friend does. If they do not confess, you go free. If they confess, you only get three years instead of fifteen. But here is the catch: if you both keep silent the jail time is even less—only six months instead of three years. Do you confess or stay silent, or in the language of game theory, do you defect or cooperate? In the Prisoner’s Dilemma, the rational choice is to defect, but the best possible outcome for both of you is to cooperate and keep silent.

Cooperation needs a relational connection. To achieve the best possible outcome we need trust, but trust is vulnerable to exploitation. Do you trust your friend enough, because if you co-operate and they deflect, then you are behind bars for fifteen years? In this case, game theory underscores that trust and cooperation achieves the best outcome for everyone. The rational choice is not always the best. The relational choice is the best.

Game theorists have studied many variations of the Prisoner’s Dilemma including iterative cases. Most interactions in life are not once off. Instead of a one-off game, what happens when we have the opportunity to repeat the game a hundred times? What strategy should we now adopt? The answer was discovered in two experiments organized by the political scientist Robert Axelrod, author of the highly influential The Evolution of Cooperation, a book that opened with the question: “Under what conditions will cooperation emerge in a world of egoists without central authority?” Axelrod invited game theorists in economics, psychology, sociology, evolutionary biology, political science, mathematics, physics, and computer science to submit computer programs that would compete against each other in an iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario. What program would receive the highest score? One that was more willing to cooperate? One that defected all the time?

Axelrod describes some of the programs:

Massive retaliatory strike: cooperate at first, but after a defection, retaliate for the rest of the game.

Tester: this program tries to find out what you are like, so it attacks in the first move. If met with retaliation, it will cooperate for a while. Then it will defect again, just to see how much it can get away with.

Jesus: always cooperate

Lucifer: always defect

If Tester plays Massive retaliatory strike, they both do poorly. Tester defects on the first move and Massive retaliatory strike defects from them on.

If Lucifer plays Jesus, Lucifer wins.

Axelrod thought that the winning program would contain thousands or tens of thousands of lines of code. The mathematical psychologist Anatol Rapoport submitted the highest scoring program, and it was also one of the simplest, five lines of code, a tit-for-tat program, where co-operation was met with co-operation, and defection met with defection. Overall, the top ranking programs were all nice, and on average, the defector programs scored significantly lower.

Axelrod described the tit-for-tat program as nice, retaliatory, forgiving, and clear. It is nice so it starts with co-operation. It retaliates to discourage the other player from continued defection. It forgives and quickly restores cooperation. It is clear in that it is not duplicitous; its actions are straight forward and easily interpreted, thus providing a basis for long-term cooperation. The one distinguishing feature of programs that did well versus those that did poorly, was being nice. In other words, start with trust and co-operation, and avoid unnecessary conflict. A nice player is never the first to defect and co-operates whenever the other player co-operates. Surprising, nice people finish first.

Tit-for-tat is the most successful strategy when the Prisoner’s Dilemma is played numerous times. You start with co-operation and basic trust. If the other player cooperates, you continue to cooperate. If they defect, then you respond with defection. The strategy punishes those who take advantage of other players’ trust and generosity. The strategy, however, also allows for a change of mind. After deflecting, your opponent may once again decide to co-operate with you. In tit-for-tat, you respond with cooperation.

To express these ideas in theological language, for an iterative game that achieves the best outcomes for all players, we need trust, forgiveness, and repentance. Trust is necessary for cooperation and as we cooperate we repeatedly send the message that we are trustworthy. In a repeated game, however, there will be failures by all players. Forgiveness is necessary, for it allows us to continue to play the game when a defector decides to cooperate. Repentance is necessary, for it allows us to change from defecting to cooperating. It turns out that forgiveness and repentance are even more important than first realized by game theorists. In the complicated world of relationships, signals can be misinterpreted. Perhaps a player intended to cooperate but her actions are misconstrued as a defection. A player can make a mistake or perhaps they just need a second chance. Does the game now have to continue with repeated retaliation? Here is where a small tweak optimizes the tit-for-tat program; named “generous tit-for-tat,” it will randomly throw in a forgiveness about ten percent of the time. Call it grace—an undeserved mercy that breaks a cycle of repeated defection.

Playing games that benefit all players depends on healthy relationships. If we are in relationship with other players, we are more likely to cooperate than defect. Relationships encourage a willingness to forgive and repent. Relationships temper our fear that we will be tricked. And relationships temper our greed that seeks outcomes advantageous to us while at the expense of other players.

The tit-for-tat strategy illustrates that a relational approach is far from being a sugary pushover. Unconditional pacifism is a losing strategy because psychopaths and con-artists are always scouting to exploit some unwary soul, softie, or sucker. A relational approach that includes trust, forgiveness, and repentance, also includes a credible threat of repercussion for defection. “If another person sins, rebuke that person; if there is repentance, forgive” (Luke 17:3). A relational approach will retaliate, for example, against the zero-sum games of patriarchy, racism, and other forms of bigotry. It starts with trust and co-operation, is quick to forgive, but will also punish defectors.

There is, however, a problem with a game repeated a finite amount of times. If you know the game is finite and is going to end after a hundred moves, then even after repeated cooperation, the rational strategy is to defect in the final move. Take the money and run—there is no retaliation because the game has ended. This suggests the importance of infinite games, games that continue indefinitely, where there is no end and therefore no temptation to defect at the end.

The religious scholar James Carse has developed this idea in Finite and infinite games: a vision of life as play and possibility. Carse distinguishes between two types of games: finite and infinite. There are substantial differences between the characteristics and goals of finite and infinite games. Carse writes, “A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” A finite game ends when somebody wins, thus finite games need fixed boundaries and unchanging rules to decide who wins. Because of the boundaries of finite games, it is impossible to play an infinite game within a finite game. In contrast, infinite games are ongoing and have no fixed boundaries or rules. Thus for Carse, “Every move of an infinite player makes is toward the horizon. Every move made by a finite player is within a boundary. Every moment of an infinite game therefore presents a new vision, a new range of possibilities.”

For Carse, the goal of players of finite games are to become powerful, entitled, Master Players, supremely competent in every detail of the game that they essentially play as if the game is already completed. And because a finite game always ends, finite players have to repeatedly play to prove they are winners. In a finite game, the last thing you want is surprise, whereas in an infinite game, surprise is a reason for continuing to play. An infinite game is fluid and open ended, and the reasons for playing an infinite game are not to become powerful or to win. The concern of infinite players is “not with power but with vision.”

Finite games are defined by their boundaries, whereas infinite games are defined by their horizon. Boundaries are fixed and clear, and one cannot move beyond a boundary. But in an infinite game the horizon is open-ended—it is a direction toward we move, a place we never reach, a journey always open to newness and surprise.

Is Christianity a finite or an infinite game? What should it be? We would be naïve to assume that there is one message of Christianity. In the church’s two thousand year history, people have expressed a multitude of different ideas about Jesus and different versions of Christianity.

It is possible to conceive of Christianity as a finite or an infinite game.

1. Christianity formulated as a finite zero-sum game: we win; everyone else loses. We are master players, essential to this grand game, a game that has a definitive conclusion resulting in a win for us, and a loss for everyone else. The game is one of good versus evil, us versus them. Our particular beliefs and rules establish fixed boundaries of the game, and distinguish us from other Christians and their games. You may join our game and play, but only if you accept the rules that structure and direct our game. The benefits include power, titles, solid explanations, fixed boundaries, solidarity with us, and a winning hand.

As a finite game, Christianity has had little difficulty aligning itself with patriarchy, slavery, racism, hate crimes, torture and death of infidels, and colluding with empires—Roman, Spanish, English, American. In each case, there are clear winners and losers.

If Christianity is setup as a megalomaniacal finite game, it is impossible to play an infinite game. By its nature, it excludes the possibility of the gospel story as an infinite game.

2. A vision of Christianity as infinite play: Jesus creates a new playground that plays fast and loose with the rules, dissolves boundaries and fixed beliefs, and opens new horizons of possibility. In an infinite game, the central themes of the gospel story—incarnation, life, death, resurrection—are articulated in ways that place people and relationships above the system. In Christ, there are no winners or losers—there is neither Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male nor female (Gal 3:28). Jesus is not a master player but an infinite player who invites all to an infinite game by including the excluded and rebuking the excluders. Anyone can play, no titles are awarded, no winners are announced, and boundaries are replaced by a gospel horizon.

This infinite game is characterized by vision and openness, where beliefs and rules are continually rewritten in order to keep the game going. To put boundaries on an infinite game, destroys it and stops the game. There is no end of play, and if need be, infinite players will choose death over life in order for the game to continue.

The gospel story as an infinite game contrasts with the beliefs and rules of finite games. Beliefs are certain and bounded. Stories have development, surprises, twists, paradoxes, uncertainties, even contradictions. Beliefs often end the conversation. An infinite story invites further discovery, directs us to the horizon, continues the game, and reformulates the conversation.

If the story is a great pyramid of inspiration and awe, beliefs are limestone rocks dug out from the structure. Beliefs are not necessarily bad, we just need to recognize them for what they are—abstractions from the story, attempts to collate our understanding, pieces of rock dismantled from the magnificent structure. Sometimes these rocks are useful for constructing smaller buildings, but often people just throw them at others. Beliefs are ready tools to create finite or zero-sum games that leverage power over others, but if all we have is rocks, we have reduced the grand story to rubble and can no longer resonate with its openness, poetry, surprises, and vision.

There is an infinite game, an infinite story, which starts: in the beginning was the game maker, and the one who plays, and the one who invites others to join the game and continue the play....


 

Cometh the End-of-Days ... Too Soon Lived, Too Shortly Over ...



Tonquin Valley, Jasper National Park, Alberta





Sometimes a picture, or a song, seems to fit us. Today's picture and song seems to fit me by their emotional moodiness and abject honesty before God as to our fit-and-frame, our wonder-and-encouragement, against each day's sometimes too heavy challenges. It is not often we find ourselves so alone with God as at the times in our lives when momentous change comes.... The kind of change you have been prepared for all your life and must now cross over to its withdrawn boundaries. Boundaries of mortality and death; of health and good keep; of bright pasts fading into the dimming lights of lengthening futures marking finality's end; of beginning and start.

 

These past many weeks I have been making peace with my dad's steady decline held within Parkinson's unfeeling grip. It began late one Thursday afternoon when called home by an aged mother unable to stand him up and move him to the bathroom. Arriving I saw immediately the heavy grip of pneumonia raging through his body, his fever, shakiness, and delirium having lain too long unrecognized. Unable to do no other, I picked dad's painful body up and carried him through the house's too-narrow hallways and doorways. First undressing, than cleaning, and finally re-dressing him in preparation to leave the home he loved and wished to stay. Then giving him some few minutes to say goodbye as we packed to all that he once knew - to his past and to his even more distant memories - before driving both dad and mom to the hospital many long miles away. This same trip had been made many years ago when dad had had two separate heart attacks on the same night. But this illness was different. It held a finality to it that I couldn't shake nor wished its interminable end.

Even so, that night proved to be the watershed in a life that clung bravely to health even as his body wore away through loss of muscle control, weakness, and failing health. Dad's self-imposed dignity was lost years ago as he fell down hard repeatedly when become unbalanced in motion, standing, or stooping. Through hot tears he stubbornly clung to life as he remembered it - even through the dark dismay of knowing that with each fall the disease within his body increased its unholy presence. First came my brother's purchase of a Kawasaki Mule for dad to run around the property as he lost the ability to operate safely his tractor, car, and truck. The lawn mower was the next to go because of the pain that jarred his pain-whacked body over the bumps of the uneven ground. Then came the lift chairs, canes, and walkers; the wheelchairs, medicines, diets, and strengthening therapies. And with each event came more loss and a greater personal conviction to endure bravely under God's presence and love what 'ere may come. As it surely would.

 

So that even now, as my dad continues his steady decline within Parkinson's unfeeling grip, he bravely lives each passing day in the hope of God's sustaining mercy for a finality no one ever seeks until, at the last, it can no longer be refused. To this has come my family's deep sense of loss and inability to do anything but face with dad his own resolve knowing life has passed and that eternal life will shortly begin. It is a common ending all know and are faced with - some with a greater degree of loss and fate than others less blessed by challenge, suffering, and struggle. For myself, it is working with an institutionalized medical system to help make dad comfortable until the end. Nor to give up too soon despite his languishing spirit. And yet, even this does little to comfort me as I watch dad's unending pain-and-loss mount against a pneumonia that comes-and-goes, filling his lungs with unwanted fluids unable to swallow properly, while watching other parts of his body cease in their functioning, and knowing that at some point even I must let go my stubborn hope of dad's comfortable survival.

 

At some point we each must rethink our life, its accomplishments and failures, its disappointments and steady challenges, knowing that all we are, and have done, is in our Lord's faithful hands to do with as He will. Mine is to let go of a father who always had my best interests at heart. And to visit an area hospice agency this week seeking answers to medical ethics questions I felt too guilty to admit... realizing that dad's time is drawing to a close. Asking the question, at what point does one reframe the present so that a love one's life can be accepted as worn out, and coming to its end. That it is no longer able to be lived out to the satisfaction of its owner. To tenderly speak to a father's heart and not his head. To speak words of assurance, of comfort and love, of truth and loss. of life and death. Words which might not be heard in the weeks or months that lie ahead. To prepare a soul even as he had prepared mine own many years earlier for life's hardships and joys.

 

Worse for me, is to watch my family work through their various emotions of grief and loss, meaning and well-being, as I contemplate how to negotiate and coordinate dad's care from sub-acute nursing services to in-home care and palliative services. Or when to bring in hospice once all curative hope has ended so that we might prepare for the tough times ahead without feeling as though we were giving up. Part of the solution has been in allowing dad's growing medical instability to be shared and known to the family from the doctors and nursing staff. By sharing the finality of his medical tests. And by admitting the sheer volume of tell-tale signs lying everywhere present except within the hearts of those who would deny their harsh realities. By sharing medical findings, temporary solutions, paperwork, and financial considerations. And in allowing quiet, timely conversations, to unfold with a sister or brother, a mother and relatives, one's own son and daughter, nieces and nephews, as they can be bourne within weary hearts and minds coming to similar conclusions in their own separate ways.

For it is to the Lord's mercies we are driven at such times. To whom we pray mercy for a father once too busy for family because of work and bills when raising a young family. For a dad whom my brother and I would wade out through the morning clovered dews to watch plow up fallow ground bowed over a chilly, steel tractor's frame. Whom we'd listen to on harsh blizzard mornings held within the rusted, unyielding whines of a decaying tractor pushing its plow through high snowy drifts into heaps while we played and tumbled underneath it all. Who raced across the fields to a fire siren's call or answered the pleas for help as a duty-bound police officer. Who taught us to handle a gun safely even as he was instructed by his father and uncles. And to hunt sure-footedly in the tangle of undergrowth and viney fencelines that we trampled across even as he learned it soldering along the Korean DMZ. All the while telling us to follow alertly the trace of our German Shorthair with his nose to the ground before setting into point. To enjoy the art of travel and adventure as we explored all parts of North America from its southern Texan borders to furthers Canadian reaches each summer for the four to five weeks that we would spend on the road camping along the nation's infant highways and lonesome, wild byways. To listen to his patient coaching and instruction on the ball fields. And to love the time we spent in playing catch with dad in the backyard. Or out in the nearby mown fields of the family's farm as we hit his lofting pitches. To be at his side at large family reunions meeting distant relatives he knew well. Or at marital celebrations. Or in church. Or the too many family burials we seemed to endlessly attend. And sadly, to bury a torn brother ripped apart by the angry delusions of bi-polarism - whose untimely death tolled upon the heart of his beloved father consumed in grief.

Life has its cycles of despairs and happiness. And it is to each of these that we must pass as best we can, relying on God's wisdom and judgment against our own frailties, emotional upheavals, failures, and wandering hearts. It is at such times that I wish to feel intensely the losses and gains, the miseries and successes, even the very heart of God during life's untimely storms and griefs. To not abandon these very difficult times but to listen, watch, and live through them as they were meant to be under sin's penalty and life's enduring hardships. To find within death the beating heart of life's redemption knowing that nothing is lost to a God who sovereignly reigns and wishes to recreate. Who loves with a burning heart of passion even as we would. Who by His Spirit tells us of His risen Son's victory against death's greedy hand. Who raises the dead to life even within the very sallow lives we live thinking ourselves beyond God's mercies and kindnesses, His grace and compassion. Ignoring all but the vanity around us thinking these only compose a life made for the grave when they were really made for eternity's unfurling eons of renewal and reclamation. Nay to life's cycles of despairs and happiness we each must look into the heart of God to see its truer end and everlasting promise.

For it is in this Almighty God that we rest and find our peace to the hard questions we cannot discover. Nor to the deep answers that would elude us as we helplessly watch the hot, living agonies experienced by a loved one suffering so tragically within the strengthening grip of consuming disease. At the last - even as in its beginning - our hope ever rests in Jesus' resurrection and all that His atonement means to living life fully and completely. Jesus is our Rock. He is the sure ground upon which we tread. Whom we must abandon ourselves unto, and to nothing less. Both now as always. For it is to God's wisdom and faithfulness that we rely - and not upon our own feeble devices. We live in God's creation as His own rebirthed creation. It is how He has made us. Even as we would hold onto a temporality meant only to slip into eternality's permanence by His guiding, all-suffering heart of compassion and mercy. For such a one who knows these things, and believes with his heart, will come the blessing of God's steady assurance and all-consuming Spirit. A Spirit far larger than any disease we may bear - even that of sin's curse. So then we are to be at peace, and know that our end-of-days are held within Him who is, and has become to us, even our own End-of-Days. Forever and always. Life without end.

 

R.E. Slater

May 23, 2013

 

 

Paul's Prayer for the Ephesians

ESV

 

¹⁴ For this reason I kneel before the Father, ¹⁵ from whom every family^[a] in heaven and on earth derives its name. ¹⁶ I pray that out of his glorious riches he may strengthen you with power through his Spirit in your inner being, ¹⁷ so that Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith. And I pray that you, being rooted and established in love, ¹⁸ may have power, together with all the Lord’s holy people, to grasp how wide and long and high and deep is the love of Christ, ¹⁹ and to know this love that surpasses knowledge—that you may be filled to the measure of all the fullness of God.

 

²⁰ Now to him who is able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to his power that is at work within us, ²¹ to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever! Amen.
 

 

 

 

Lana Del Rey - Young and Beautiful

 

 

 Published on May 10, 2013

Music video by Lana Del Rey performing "Young and Beautiful"
from the Great Gatsby soundtrack: http://smarturl.it/GatsbyMusic

Produced by Daniel Heath
Video Director: Chris Sweeney
Shot By Sophie Muller
Video Producer: Adam Smith, Jacob Swan-Hyam

(C) 2013 Lana Del Rey, under exclusive license to Polydor Ltd.
(UK). Under exclusive license to Interscope Records in the USA





My Father's Final Passage and Continuing Voyage

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rachel Held Evans: "10 Things I’ve Learned About Church History"

 

 

10 Things I’ve Learned About Church History from ‘The Story of Christianity, Vol. 1” by Justo L. Gonzalez

http://rachelheldevans.com/blog/church-history-volume-1

 

by Rachel Held Evans

May 22, 2013

 

A couple weeks ago it occurred to me that I know next to nothing about church history. So, in an effort to remedy that situation, I ordered The Story of Christianity, Volumes 1 and 2, by Justo Gonzalez from Amazon, and brought them with me to the beach—you know, for a little light reading.

 

Here are a few random observations from my first week of reading:

 

1. Christians have never been in full agreement when it comes to theology. (And our little theological blog spats have NOTHING on the Arian controversy or the Inquisition, let me tell you!) But often, these disagreements and controversies lead to important developments in Christian thought, theology, and practice. The Nicene Creed, for example, was formulated largely as a response to Arianism. (The Apostle’s Creed is older.) I find this oddly comforting. There’s less pressure to figure everything out. We’re always in process, always debating and discussing, always getting a little bit right and a lot wrong.

 

2. Constantine was not baptized until just before his death. And his conversion to Christianity is as big a deal as we make it out to be. It changed Christianity forever and marked the beginning of an ongoing, uncomfortable, and at times destructive relationship between Christianity and power.

 

3. Calls for social justice aren’t new or trendy, but have been a part of church teachings for many centuries.  See the writings of John Chrysostom, Basil, Ambrose, St. Francis, and many others. “If one who takes the clothing off another is called a thief, why give any other name to one who can clothe the naked and refuses to do so?” wrote Basil. “The bread that you withhold belongs to the poor; the cape that you hide in your chest belongs to the naked; the shoes rotting in your house belong to those who must go unshod.”

 

4. Also not as new as I once thought: bishops, and church hierarchy in general.

 

5. I always thought that the Council of Nicea marked the final acceptance of orthodoxy when it came to the divinity of Christ. But Arianism—the belief that Jesus was created by God as a subordinate and separate entity, not the incarnation of God—made a pretty serious comeback, and with the support of the empire, it nearly won the day! Jerome wrote that “the world woke up as from a slumber, and discovered itself to be Arian.” Athanasius and other supporters of Nicene theology were exiled and persecuted for defending orthodoxy, but in the end, their tenacity, patience, and thoughtfulness prevailed. Also, Athanasius was nicknamed “the black dwarf.”

 

6. Pretty much every time I conclude that a Church Father seems like a pretty cool guy, I learn that he hated Jews and/or women.

 

7. I think it’s safe to say Saint Anthony was an introvert.

 

8. In the fourth and fifth centuries there was a Christian sect called Donatism. Some Donatists peasants were convinced that there was no death more glorious than that of the martyrs, but since the persecution of Christians had ended, they committed to violently resisting those they perceived to be heretics. Gonzalez writes that “in some cases, this quest for martyrdom rose to such a pitch that people committed mass suicide by jumping off cliffs"! Point: There's always this tendency to take a good thing to its extreme, whether it's respect for martyrdom, veneration of the saints, solitude, aestheticism, or even engagement with the culture.

 

9. Monastics have always struggled to hold in tension the desire for solitude with the importance of community and service.

 

10. Gonzalez thanks his word processor in the Preface.  That seems worth noting.

 

I’ll post 10 more things when I’ve finished reading!

 

I’ve found that most Christians know very little about the history of the church. And we Protestants have the unfortunate habit of skipping from the epistles of Paul to Martin Luther and the 95-theses, leaving centuries of church history in the dust.

 

How can we do better?

 

And what have you learned about church history lately? Any fun facts?

 

 

 

Date a boy (or girl!) who travels...

 

 

http://jamesrusselllingerfelt.wordpress.com/2013/04/25/date-a-boy-who-travels/

 

by lainnnes
April 25, 2013

 

 

The young woman who wrote this is right on.

This article could be written about girls as well.

 

 

Date a boy who treasures experience over toys, a hand-woven bracelet over a Rolex. Date the boy who scoffs when he hears the words, “vacation”, “all-inclusive”, or “resort”. Date a boy who travels because he’s not blinded by a single goal but enlivened by many.

 

You might find him in an airport or at a book store browsing the travel guides – although he “only uses them for reference.”

 

You’ll know it’s him because when you peek at his computer screen, his background will be a scenic splendor of rolling hills, mountains, or prayer flags. His Facebook friend count will be over-the-roof, and his wall will be plastered with the broken English ‘miss-you’ of friends he met along the way. When he travels, he makes lifelong friends in an hour. And although contact with these friends is sporadic and may be far-between, his bonds are unmessable and if he wanted, he could couch surf the world… again.

 

Buy him a beer. Once a traveller gets home, people rarely listen to their stories. So listen to him. Allow him to paint a picture that brings you into his world. He might talk fast and miss small details because he’s so excited to be heard. Bask in his enthusiasm. Want it for yourself.

 

He’ll squeak like an excited toddler when his latest issue of National Geographic arrives in the mail. Then he’ll grow quiet, engrossed, until he finishes his analysis of every photo, every adventure. In his mind, he’ll insert himself in these pictures. He’ll pass the issue on to you and grill you about your dreams and competitively ask about the craziest thing you’ve ever done. Tell him. And know that he’ll probably win. And if by chance you win, know that his next lot in life will be to out do you. But then he’ll say, “Maybe we can do it together.”

 

Date the boy who talks of distant places and whose hands have explored the stone relics of ancient civilizations and whose mind has imagined those hands carving, chiseling, painting the wonders of the world. And when he talks, it’s as if he’s reliving it with you. You can almost hear his heart racing. You can almost feel the adrenaline ramped up by the moment. You feel it passing through his synapsis, a feast to his eyes entering through those tiny oracles of experience that we call pupils, digesting rapidly through his veins, manifesting into his nervous system, transforming and altering his worldview like a reverse trauma and finally passing, but forever changing the colors of his sight. (Unless he’s Karl Pilkington.) You will want this too.

 

Date a boy who’s lived out of a backpack because he lives happily with less. A boy who’s travelled has seen poverty and dined with those who live in small shanty’s with no running water, and yet welcome strangers with greater hospitality than the rich. And because he’s seen this, he’s seen how a life without luxury can mean a life fueled by relationships and family, rather than a life that fuels fancy cars and ego. He’s experienced different ways of being, respects alternative religions and he looks at the world with the eyes of a five-year-old, curious and hungry. Your dad will be happy too because he’s good with money and knows how to budget.

 

This boy relishes home; the comfort of a duvet, the safety stirred in a mom-cooked meal, the easy conversation of childhood friends, and the immaculate glory of the flush-toilet. Although fiercely independent, he has had time to reflect on himself and his relationships. Despite his wanderlust, he knows and appreciates his ties to home. He has had a chance to miss and be missed. Because of this, he also knows a thing or two about goodbyes. He knows the overwhelming uncertainty of leaving the comforts of home, the indefinite see-you-laters at the departure gates, and yet he fearlessly goes into the unknown because he knows the feeling of return. And that the I’ve-missed-you-hug is the best type of hug in the whole world. He also knows that goodbyes are just prolonged see-you-laters and that ‘hello’ is only as far away as the nearest internet cafe.

Don’t hold onto this boy. Let this boy go and go with him!

If you haven’t travelled, he will open your eyes to a world beyond the news and popular perception. He will open your dreams to possibility and reality. He will calm your nerves when you’re about to miss a flight or when your rental blows a flat, because he knows the journey is the adventure. He will make light of the unsavory noises you make when you – and you will – get food poisoning. He will make you laugh through the discomfort all while dabbing your forehead with a cold cloth and nursing you with bottled water. He will make you feel like you’re home.

 

When you see something beautiful, he will hold your hand in silence, in awe of the history of where his feet stand, and the fact that you’re with him.

 

He will live in every moment with you, because this is how he lives his life. He understands that happiness is no more than a string of moments that displace neutrality, and he is determined to tie as many of these strings together as he can. He also understands your need to live for yourself and that you have a bucketlist of your own. Understand his. Understand that your goals may at some points differ, but that independence is the cornerstone of a healthy relationship when it’s mutually respected. You may lose him for a bit, but he will always come home bearing a new story and a souvenir he picked up because it reminded him of you, like it was made for you, and because he missed you. You might be compelled to do the same. Make sure that independence is on your bucketlist, and make sure it’s checked. Independence will keep your relationship fresh and exciting, and when you’re together again it will forge a bond of unbreakable trust.

 

He’ll propose when you’ve breached your comfort-zone, whether it be a fear like skydiving or swimming with sharks, or sitting next to the smelly person on an overcrowded bus. It won’t be with a diamond ring, but with a token from a native culture or inspired by nature, like the penguin and the pebble.

 

You will get married somewhere unassumed, surrounded by a select few, in a moment constructed to celebrate venturing into the unknown together again. Marry the boy who’s travelled and together you will make the whole world your home. Your honeymoon will not be forgotten to a buffet dinner and all-you-can-drink beach bars, but will be remembered in the triumphant photographs at the top of Kilimanjaro and memorialized in the rewarding ache of muscles at the end of a long days hike.

 

When you’re ready, you will have children that have the names of the characters you met on your journeys, the foreign names of people who dug a special place in your heart if only for a few days. Perhaps you will live in another country, and your children will learn of language and customs that open their minds from the very start, leaving no room for prejudice. He will introduce them to the life of Hemingway, the journey of Santiago, and empower them to live even bigger than both of you.

 

Marry a boy who travels and he’ll teach your children the beauty of a single stone, the history of the Incas and he will instill in them the bravery of possibility. He will explain to them that masking opportunity, there is fear. He will teach them to concur it.

 

And when you’re old, you’ll sit with your grandchildren pouring over your photo albums and chest of worldly treasures, while they too insert themselves into your photographs, sparked by the beauty of the world and inspired by your life in it.

 

Find a boy who travels because you deserve a life of adventure and possibility. You deserve to live light and embrace simplicity. You deserve to look at life through the eyes of youth and with your arms wide open. Because this is where you will find joy. And better, you will find joy together. And if you can’t find him, travel. Go. Embrace it. Explore the world for yourself because dreams are the stuff reality is made from.

 

 

 

Was Kierkegaard an evangelical? Parts 1-3

 

 

 

Was Kierkegaard an evangelical? Part 1

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2011/08/was-kierkegaard-an-evangelical-part-1/

 

by Roger Olson

August 29, 2011

Comments

 

Perhaps a better way of asking the question is–should contemporary evangelicals regard Kierkegaard (henceforth “K”) as a forerunner and historical ally?  Of course, I’m addressing this question not to the average evangelical in the pews (or in front of their television sets, reading the latest popular “Christian fiction” from the Christian bookstore) but to educated pastors, lay people and scholars.  In my experience, most books about evangelicalism neglect or ignore K. Those that trace evangelicalism's roots tend to focus on the Reformers (of course), the Puritans, the Pietists, Wesley and Edwards, the Princeton Reformed theologians, Finney, Moody, the Holiness and Pentecostal movements, Fundamentalism, etc.  I don’t recall ever having read about K. in such a book–especially not as part of that “great cloud of witnesses” evangelicals like to look back to–our heroes and spiritual ancestors.  But why not?

 

Recently I’ve been revisiting K.–reading recent biographies and books about his thought old and new.  (It’s for a writing project but also to refresh my own knowledge of K. and expand it.)  I spent many hours reading the massive Soren Kierkegaard: A Biography by Joakim Garff, translated from the Danish by Bruce H. Kirmmse (Princeton University Press, 2005).  It’s 813 pages not including the various appendices.  One of the most detailed biographies I’ve ever read and in places very boring.  And, I think, Garff had some axes to grind against K. when he wrote this.  It doesn’t put K. in a very flattering light.  However, even if half of what Garff says is true (and I’m sure much more than that is true, but perhaps a lot of it is somewhat distorted) K. was not a very likeable fellow.  He was extremely intense, isolated, somewhat bitter, resentful, elusive, prone to angry outbursts, obsessive-compulsive, etc.  Not a pretty picture.  Still, many great geniuses have terrible personality flaws and emotional problems.  Garff really plays up K.’s treatment of his fiance Regine Olsen with whom he broke up without any real explanation.  The reasons for it are still a matter of speculation even though K. himself gave many in his journals and to friends.  He also focuses much on K.’s battle with the journal The Corsair and says K. started it and didn’t handle it well.  He had a tendency to take even the slightest slights very personally and over react.

 

Nevertheless, in spite of these personal flaws and failures, what always shines through is K.’s insightfulness into the human condition and his commitment to finding true Christianity and living it out to the greatest extent possible–which accounts for many things his contemporaries and biographers regard as great failings on his part.  K. came to regard the salon society of his day (of which he had been a part) as effete and artificial.  He came to disdain it and most of “high society” of Denmark and Europe in general as false, pretentious and far from true Christianity.  The dominant religion he saw as completely accommodated to middle class and upper class values and to the rationalism of Hegel and the reduction of Christianity to ethics by Kant.  He abhorred Schleiermacher’s emphasis on feelings.  Everywhere he looked (especially post-1848) he saw nothing but inauthenticity–especially in religious life.

 

My own “history” with K. goes back to high school.  I had a friend who considered himself an”existentialist,” so I set out to find out what that meant.  The only book on the subject in our high school library was What Is Existentialism? by William Barrett.  My friend had read it, so what he meant by existentialism was whatever Barrett meant.  As I recall, I didn’t really understand the book, but I plowed through it anyway.  Somewhere in it, as I recall, was a discussion of K. as the real father of existentialism, so I went to the only Christian bookstore in town and bought the only book it had on K.–Hermann Diem’s Kierkegaard’s Dialectic of Existence.  Not the best choice.  I tried to read it and maybe I got something out of it, but I doubt that I understood much.  I was only 17!  I recall asking my father, who was also my pastor, whether K. was a Christian (in our sense of “Christian” which meant “evangelical”–others not being really Christian, of course!).  He said no.  I don’t think he knew much about K., but I believed him and so shelved K. for a long time.

 

Much later, during my seminary days, I revisited K. because I came to know of his influence on my favorite theologian–Emil Brunner.  (Back in those wonderful days North American Baptist Seminary, like many evangelical seminaries, used Brunner’s Dogmatics as the basic textbook(s) for systematic theology.  They knew and taught us that Brunner was not exactly an evangelical in our North American sense, but that his pietism made him worthy of study even if we had to be wary of some of his views.  They weren’t afraid to expose us to non-evangelical theologies.)  Then I read Either/Or–again, not a particularly good choice if you’re looking for K.’s evangelicalism!  And I read Fear and Trembling and Sickness Unto Death and some other of K.’s books.  I remember being fascinated by him but finding him too opaque for my taste.  But I could tell he was passionate about discovering authentic Christian faith and he swam against the stream–something I was experiencing then.  He was also a contrarian and I’ve always been something of one.

 

Later, of course, during my doctoral studies and then teaching theology to undergraduates, I encountered K. a lot and read IN him (as opposed to reading whole books by him or studying him in any depth or detail).  I included him in my courses on Christian history and theology but never quite figured out where to place him in the story.  Clearly he was a Protestant.  Yes.  Definitely (in spite of some of his criticisms of Luther).  He was THE existentialist.  Certainly.  Whatever that means.  But he was always tainted in my thinking, like most evangelicals’, by the uses made of him by the likes of Bultmann and secular existentialists.   All that is to say, I felt a certain ambivalence toward him–as far as whether I could actually embrace him as a spiritual ancestor and hero.  He was always a little out of focus for me.

 

That came out clearly in Stan Grenz’s and my neglect of K. in 20th Century Theology: God and the World in a Transitional Age (IVP, 1992).  There we relegated him to the introduction to the section on neo-orthodoxy and only talked about him as an inspiration to the early Barth and to Brunner, Niebuhr and Bultmann.  I now think he deserved a chapter of his own–alongside Kant and Hegel if not Schleiermacher.

 

One issue always complicating discussion of K. is whether he was a philosopher or a theologian.  He claimed to be neither and heaped scorn and disdain on both professions (even though he held a doctoral degree in theology).  He was independently wealthy and didn’t work other than writing.  He considered himself a “writer” and clearly (although he never said so directly) a social prophet.  Today he might fall best into the category of social commentator, but his writings were filled with philosophical and theological concepts and issues.  I have come recently to think of him more as a theologian than a philosopher even though his own hero was Socrates.  K.’s main concerns were theological in nature and he had no use for dispassionate, uninvolved reasoning about religion.  For him true religion IS authentic Christianity and its source is revelation.

 

One thing I’ve learned from my recent studies is that K.’s father (with whom he had a tumultuous relationship–like mine with my father) was a member of a Pietist conventicle.  Actually, it was more than just a conventicle; it was a temple.  It couldn’t be called a “church” by law.  Only the Danish Lutheran Church could be called “church” in Denmark then.  But there was in Copenhagen a thriving Brethren Community (Gemeinde) in the early 1700s and K.’s father attended there weekly.  He also attended the state church, but it seems his real commitment was to the Pietists.  K.’s relationship with Pietism was always tense.  On the one hand he respected their passion and inwardness; on the other hand he disdained their sentimentality and emphasis on feelings.  There’s no evidence that K. continued his father’s habit of attending the Pietist gatherings, but their influence lived on in his own religious life and theology.  I think that influence has been downplayed by K. scholars; it needs to be explored more.

 

So, what am I coming to think about K. and evangelicalism?  Well, OF COURSE he was no “evangelical” in the contemporary North American sense AS THAT IS DEFINED by the popular media.  I’m certain he would have no use for television evangelists, the Religious Right, “Christian” bookstores full of holy hardware, etc.  But, when I talk about evangelicalism I rarely mean that!  By evangelical, as I have explained before, I mean a certain Christian and primarily Protestant form of life that stems from the Reformers (including the Anabaptists) and was shaped by the Pietists, Puritans and Revivalists of the 18th and 19th centuries.  It is a Christian form of life that emphasizes personal conversion and relationship with God through Jesus Christ, the Bible as God’s Word written, the cross as the center of Christian devotion, preaching and life and transformative action through missions and social change (but focusing primarily on individual transformation and social change only secondarily).

 

To be sure, K. would probably not even fit that profile comfortably.  In fact, he steadfastly resisted fitting ANY category comfortably.  One gets the sense that K. was extremely uncomfortable in his own skin and certainly in his own society.

 

So what evidence is there that could justify calling K. an evangelical in any sense (other than the strictly formal one of being a member of the Protestant state church)?  I think there’s a lot of it, even though I also recognize and acknowledge that it would be both anachr0nistic and unfitting to call him an evangelical without qualification.  Still, I am going to argue (in Part 2) that evangelicals ought to rediscover K. (in a similar way to how they have adopted C. S. Lewis who also should not be considered an “evangelical” in the usual sense as I have outlined it above) and add him to their list of heroes and forerunners.  There were certain aspects of his thought that “fit” the evangelical profile even if he would want to challenge any actual existing structures of evangelicalism as falling short of being TRULY evangelical as he understood that.

 

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 

Was Kierkegaard an evangelical–Part 2

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2011/08/was-kierkegaard-an-evangelical-part-2/

 

by Roger Olson

August 31, 2011

Comments

 

In Part 1 I raised the question whether Soren Kierkegaard should be regarded as a forerunner and ally of modern/contemporary evangelicalism.

 

This isn’t a new discussion, but I haven’t heard it lately among evangelicals.  With exceptions, of course, it seems like conservative evangelicals have developed a consensus that K. was not an evangelical or an ally of evangelicals but, as Francis Schaeffer claimed, a pernicious influence on modern/contemporary theology.  For Schaeffer and his crew, K.’s main theological influence was on neo-orthodoxy which is, of course, bad.

 

Let me offer an example of what I’m talking about that provides evidence that evangelicals need to rediscover the real K. and stop misrepresenting him.

 

Of course, John MacArthur doesn’t represent all evangelicals.  (Who does?)  But he is influential within especially Reformed evangelical circles.  His article (or is it as sermon?) “The War against Reason” may be found at Forgotten Word Ministries at www.forgottenword.org/johnmacarthur2.html.  I don’t see a publication date there.  According to a note at the end of the article, it is an excerpt from MacArthur’s book Reckless Faith: When the Church Loses Its Will to Discern (1994).  Someone named Robert Wise, apparently the director of Forgotten Word Ministries, posts a note at the end of the on line version of the article/chapter (whatever it is) saying “We do pray this article has blessed you in some way.  Our prayer is that you will use this message to better understand what is happening in our churches today.”

 

Hardly.

 

MacArthur’s article contains many paragraphs on K. under the heading “Adrift on a sea of subjectivity.”  Here’s a typical statement–almost a thesis statement of the article: “…in his reaction against the lifeless state church, Kierkegaard set up a false antithesis.  He decided that objectivity and truth were incompatible. … Kierkegaard devised an approach to religion that was pure passion, altogether subjective.  Faith, he suggested, means the rejection of reason and the exaltation of feeling and personal experience.”  MacArthur goes on to describe K. as a relativist who reveled in subjectivism and denied truth except “my truth” and “your truth.”  Although he quotes K. a few times, I have to wonder if he really read any whole book by K. or just picked a few quotes out of context.  Anyone who has really read K. KNOWS he did not believe in subjectivism (“ISM”) but in passionate inwardness which he called subjectivity.

 

Of course, there’s lots of room for debate over exactly what K. meant by truth as subjectivity, but no serious K. scholar thinks he was endorsing the old “my truth is my truth and your truth is your truth” (and both are equally valid because there’s really no such thing as truth anyway).  K. was reacting against the overly objectified “faith” of Hegel and his followers which set aside passion and inwardness in favor of a sterile, rationalistic religious philosophy.

 

MacArthur makes the common mistake of confusing “subjectivity” (especially K. style) with “subjectivism” (popular culture style).  He agrees with Schaeffer’s critique that K. “fell below the line of despair” and opened the door to modern denials of truth.  (Of course, Schaeffer also traced this modern denial of what he called “True truth” to Thomas Aquinas and I won’t even get into all that here.  But I have to mention the Christianity Today quote published soon after Schaeffer’s death in which Schaeffer, wearing Lederhosen and with his characteristic goatee, is standing at the gates of heaven talking with St. Peter.  St. Peter looks at his book and says ‘Francis Schaeffer, Francis Schaeffer.  Oh, yes.  Saint Thomas would like a word with you.”  In my opinion, the cartoon would have carried more “punch” for evangelicals if it has St. Peter saying “Oh, yes.  Soren Kierkegaard would like a word with you.”)

 

I can say with confidence that MacArthur and Schaeffer were both wrong about K.  There is no hint in K’s writings that he denied the “True truth” of God’s revelation of himself in Jesus Christ and the gospel.  He simply didn’t think this truth is amenable to rational or empirical proof and that trying to prove it undermines it because this particular truth, by its very nature, requires personal commitment.  It cannot be known apart from involvement.  And, by its very nature, this “involvement” means suffering.  Not necessarily physical suffering, but the suffering of self-sacrifice and total self-giving to God.  Apart from repentance, faith, risk, involvement, commitment and suffering one cannot truly know God.  Even then, in this life, at least, “knowing God” is never a matter of mastering God; the God-human relationship is ALWAYS a crisis and never a matter of harmony.

 

How can anyone read K. and come away thinking he denied truth?  Why would he be so passionate if he didn’t think what he was writing was true?  But, of course, what MacArthur is assuming (contrary even to Calvin) is that rational apologetics MUST be valid and get one at least partway to Christian faith OR ELSE faith is a totally subjective, blind leap in the dark.  EVEN CALVIN underscored the absolute necessity of the “inner testimony of the Holy Spirit” for knowing the truth of scripture.  Apart from that, according to Calvin, the human mind is nothing but a factory of idols.  Why doesn’t MacArthur attack Calvin or Luther (who called reason the great seducer)?

 

In fact, contrary to the typical evangelical polemic against K., I think his whole work constitutes a kind of apologetic.  Certainly not the kind evangelicals like (whether evidentialism or presuppositionalism), but an indirect argument for the truth of Christianity from the human condition.   It’s ironic that Schaeffer and others would say K. fell below the “line of despair” because he would agree with them!  But not in the way they meant it.  For him, despair is the inevitable human condition apart from faith in God (meaning the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and not the God of the philosophers).  But also, despair can be a step toward faith insofar as one recognizes it and looks beyond it to Jesus Christ.  K. was very Christocentric.  His version of Christianity was Jesus-centered and cross-centered.  Yes, sometimes he overstated his case as when he suggested that all we REALLY need to know about Jesus is that he was crucified.  But one MUST NOT take such statements out of context and one must recognize hyperbole when he or she encounters it.

 

In brief, then, I think K.’s bad reputation among evangelicals is a bad rap; it’s wholly undeserved.  That doesn’t mean we should embrace K.  He didn’t want to be embraced.  He wanted to make people of his day, including Christians, uncomfortable.  And it doesn’t mean agreeing with everything K. wrote.  But it’s simply dishonest to represent K. as a total subjectivist IN THE CONTEMPORARY sense of “subjective.”  Today most people understand “subjective” to mean truth is relative to the individual; there is no true Truth beyond what individuals (or perhaps cultures) believe.  Anyone who accuses K. of that is simply ignorant.

 

Have any evangelicals discovered the “real K.?”  Yes.  Unfortunately, they haven’t been listened to–at least not enough to alter the common evangelical disdain for K.

 

My colleague C. Stephen Evans is well-known as a K. scholar and has published several books about K. and numerous articles about him and his thought.  Way back in 1984 Steve wrote an article defending K. and his philosophy/theology.  The article was entitled “A Misunderstood Reformer” and was published in Christianity Today (September 21, 1984, pp. 26-29).  I wish everyone even slightly interested in K. could read it.  Unfortunately, I have not found it on line.  But any good Christian college, university or seminary library will have it and you can probably order it through your local library’s interlibrary loans service.

 

Steve writes “Strangely, almost the only group that does not admire and revere Kierkegaard is the one group with whom I believe he had the strongest degree of spiritual kinship: evangelical Christians.”  My point exactly.  And Steve goes on for two pages (triple columns!) explaining why evangelicals are wrong about K.  He says that the main reason evangelicals have such a low opinion of K. is simple: “We have not read his books.”  Steve also rightly says “Poor Kierkegaard has suffered more than any author I know of from a generation of evangelical ignorance.”  He notes exceptions–E. J. Carnell, Kenneth Hamilton, Vernard Eller and Vernon Grounds.  But overall and in general especially American evangelicals have been trained to think of K. as the fountainhead of existentialism which is, of course, very bad because it leads to atheism.

 

In his article Steve writes “I believe that the common interpretation of Kierkegaard as an irrationalist or subjectivist is wrong.”  Steve should know; he’s a world renowned expert on K. and a man of strong evangelical faith who has taught at Wheaton, Calvin and Bethel (among other evangelical schools) and was the curator of the Kierkegaard library at St. Olaf College.

 

I especially agree with Steve’s conclusion that “Kierkegaard, more than anyone I know, can help remind evangelicals that Christianity is a manner of being, a way of existing, not merely an affirmation of doctrine.  But he can remind us of this in a way that will not precipitate a slide back into the contempt for reason and the life of the mind that has sometimes infected evangelicalism and fundamentalism.”

 

So was K. an evangelical?  I wouldn’t want to saddle him with that label according to what it means to most people (especially journalists) today!  However, in his own way he was an evangelical in the best sense–a lover of Jesus Christ and the gospel and a person determined to suffer for the cause of Christ in the world.  He was a prophet to Christendom then and now.  I suspect much of the disdain for K. in evangelical circles comes from the fact that he regarded Christianity as a way of life more than a creed.  He never denied any cardinal tenet of orthodoxy, but, like the Pietists, he thought dead orthodoxy is a greater danger than heresy.

 

In my next installment (Part 3) I want to discuss K.’s evangelical beliefs–especially his belief in conversion.  I also want to discuss his synergism of salvation and his Pietism.  I won’t call him an Arminian, but his soteriology was quite compatible with Arminianism.

 

 

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

 

 

Kierkegaard as evangelical–Part 3 (final)

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2011/09/kierkegaard-as-evangelical-part-3-final/

 

by Roger Olson

September 2, 2011

Comments

 

As we have seen here (in my posts and the comments), one can make K. into almost anything.  He wrote much and sometimes seemed to contradict himself.  His goal was not so much to produce a system (in fact that was no goal at all!) but to make people think–to shake them out of complacency both about their own lives and about Christianity.

 

My own reading of K. has led me to believe he was what I consider an evangelical–a person of passionate faith in Jesus Christ–even if not a typical one by contemporary North American standards.  (This reminds me of the old story, possibly apocryphal, that a leading American fundamentalist traveled to England to have a conversation with C. S. Lewis.  Upon returning he said that he concluded Lewis was a Christian even though he smoked a pipe and drank sherry.)

 

What made K. an evangelical?  His absolute determination to find and live authentically according to the gospel of Jesus Christ.  Now, for those who define “evangelical” in terms of doctrinal orthodoxy, K. never (to the best of my knowledge) denied any tenet of orthodox Christianity.  He did try to show that they are beyond comprehension and are paradoxes–as a sign of God’s transcendence and humans’ sinfulness.  He perhaps over reacted to the dead orthodoxy and rationalistic religious philosophies (especially Hegel’s) of his day.  But that doesn’t make him non-evangelical in my opinion.

 

One of the books that has helped me understand K. as an evangelical is Kierkegaard as Theologian: The Dialectic of Christian Existence by Louis Dupre (1963).  Admittedly it’s an older book, but that doesn’t disqualify it from having something valuable to say about someone who lived a century earlier.  It is also written by a Catholic scholar and published by a Catholic publisher (Sheed & Ward).  So what?  I’m not into judging a book by its author (necessarily or categorically) or its publisher.

 

Dupre’s treatment of K. is very sympathetic while at the same time critical.  He treats K. as a theologian more than as a philosopher while admitting that K. didn’t fit the typical profile of a theologian (viz., producer of tomes of systematic theology or even monographs on doctrines).  Most of his criticisms come at the end of the book and are what you would expect from a Catholic–K. was too Protestant.  (Dupre does an excellent job of debunking the occasional claims that K. was a closet Catholic and would have joined the RCC if he had lived longer.)

 

One thing Dupre tackles is the old canard that K. was a complete irrationalist.  He demonstrates from K.’s own statements that he did not disdain every use of reason in theology.  Dupre admits (of course) that for K. coming to faith in Jesus Christ cannot be a smooth process of reasoning as if authentic faith would arrive at the end of a syllogism.  And the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob cannot be proven to exist by philosophy.  Yes, true faith requires a “leap” by which he meant a choice.  So what? Luther said the same in various ways.  What K. added to Luther was the corrective that the choice of faith cannot be made FOR another (e.g., a child).  (K. ended up arguing that infant baptism is a mistake.)

 

But K. was not an irrationalist about Christianity.  True, like Tertullian, he sometimes referred to what Christians believe (e.g., the incarnation) as absurd, but he MEANT by secular standards of rationality.  He obvious did not think that believing Christianly requires a sacrifice of the intellect UNLESS “intellect” MEANS Hegelian-type dialectical reasoning (arriving at a smooth synthesis through sublation of the tension between opposites).

 

Dupre does an excellent job of showing, from K. himself, that K. actually valued reflection in faith.  Reflection won’t get you TO faith, but once faith is found, reflection has value.  On faith and reason Dupre says rightly “His [K.'s] entire work should be regarded as an effort, by means of a more profound meditation on the experience of modern man, to rediscover the commensurability of faith with reflective thought.” (142)

 

What about the charge that K. was against the church?  That he reveled in individualism and rejected the communal dimension of Christianity?  Again, Dupre debunks this.  For example, K. wrote that “The individual is first related to God and only secondarily to the community: the first relation is the highest, although he must not despise the second.” (192)  His objection was to the common notion that faith can somehow be handed down within the church (e.g., Bushnell’s “Christian nurture”).  What is this other than another way of saying that “God has no grandchildren”–an old evangelical axiom?

 

K. wrote much about the church and most of it was negative.  That was not because he disdained church but because the only church he knew (in his context) was the Danish Lutheran (state) Church.  When he outlined his vision for church he said it should be a “small group of outlaws” (Dupre’s paraphrase of K. on this point) banded together for resistance to the world.  (H. Richard Niebuhr uses K. as an example of his “Christ and culture in tension” model of Christ and culture.  If Dupre is right, as I think he is, K. was rather a Christ against culture Christian.)  But the point is that K. did NOT reject church in favor of a totally atomistic understanding of Christianity.  What he rejected was Christendom–the church as synthesized with society such that belonging to the society made one a Christian and vice versa.

 

K.’s pietism appears not in a mystical approach to faith as union with God but in his strong emphasis on the personal relationship with God.  But for him, this personal relationship with God is NOT one of smooth acceptance because of one’s goodness or worthiness.  Rather, it begins AND REMAINS a consciousness of sin before God.  K. wrote: “If you are not conscious of your sinfulness to the extent that, in the most terrible anxiety of conscience, you dare not act otherwise than to cleave to Christ, you will never be a Christian.  Only the torture of the consciousness of sin could account for a man’s subjecting himself to this radical cure.  To become a Christian is, among all, all, the most terrible operation.  No more than a man who feels slightly indisposed would ever get the idea of subjecting himself to the most painful operation, would it ever enter one’s head to concern himself with Christianity, if sin did not infinitely torture him.” (90)  Yet, that was not the final word; K. always went on (eventually) to pronounce grace and forgiveness for those who are tortured by their sinfulness and cleave to Christ with faith: “‘Thy sins are forgiven thee’ (Luke 7, 49), that is the cry of encouragement of the Christians to one another; with this cry Christianity spreads all over the world, by these words it is recognized as a race apart, a separate nation.” (95)

 

I suspect that one reason especially Reformed evangelicals are uncomfortable with K. and wish to turn people away from him is that he was no Calvinist.  He didn’t even agree with Luther about the bondage of the will.  I wouldn’t call him an Arminian, but that’s only because he was Lutheran.  (There’s something odd and unfitting about calling a Lutheran an Arminian as Arminianism is part of the Reformed tradition–historically and sociologically speaking.)  Dupre spends pages proving that K. believed grace can never be compelled and that true, saving faith is always a free choice enabled by grace.  But here is a quote from K. on the subject: “From every point of view the concept of predestination may be considered as an abortion, for having unquestionably arisen in order to relate freedom and God’s omnipotence, it solves teh riddle by denying one of the concepts and consequently explains nothing.” (107-108)  K. called Luther’s and Calvin’s ideas of grace “fatalistic” but WITHOUT embracing Pelagianism or semi-Pelagianism.  As Dupre notes, for K. “All the initiative [in salvation] rests with God.” (109)  Without naming it as such, K. clearly believed in prevenient grace as the ground a power of conversion, but he also believed the human person plays a role in his or her conversion.  But that role is only to assent to grace; it has nothing to do with merit.

 

What about the Bible?  One reason some evangelicals have rejected K. is that he supposedly elevated individual experience over Scripture.  That’s simply false.  It’s a misinterpretation of K.’s attitude toward the Bible.  For him the Bible IS authoritative FOR THE CHRISTIAN, but faith is not founded on the Bible but the Bible’s authority is founded on faith.  K’s view is nothing other than Calvin’s view of the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit.  A person without faith will never recognize the Bible as God’s Word and a person with faith always will.  But “proof” is not possible in spiritual matters.

 

I think K. was thinking along the same lines I have mentioned as Scot McKnight’s and mine (and, of course, many others’).  I do not believe in God and Jesus Christ because I FIRST (in order of priority) believe in the Bible as if the Bible had some intrinsic authority over and above God and Jesus Christ.  I accept the Bible as God’s Word because (as Luther said) it is the “cradle that carries Christ.”  In and through the Bible’s words I am encountered by Jesus and brought into relationship with him, but the Bible’s inspiration and authority are not self-evidence or based on historical proofs.  They are based on my and the church’s relationship with God revealed in Jesus Christ and the gospel.  K.’s view (and mine and McKnights and Luther’s!) relativizes the Bible IN COMPARISON with Jesus Christ; Christianity is Christ and faith in him (what K. called “cleaving to Christ”) and is a matter of passionate inwardness (subjectivity) and not of objective reasoning including some kind of presuppositionalist apologetics.  But K. never denied the inspiration of Scripture or its authority for Christian doctrine.  What he did, however, was make the typical Pietist move of subordinating doctrine to Jesus Christ and having a personal relationship with him.  The essence of faith is not belief in the Bible or doctrine but (in Dupre’s words paraphrasing K.) “a Person to Whom I entrust myself without reserve.” (137)

 

In conclusion, when I read K., I hear loud echoes of the evangelical faith of my childhood and youth and early education among the German Pietist Baptists.  All the evangelical critiques of K. sound to me like rationalism and dogmatism (what Brunner called “theologismus”–faith in doctrines and theology).  Yes, K. was a kind of fideist; so what?  One can certainly argue against that, but one cannot argue that fideism is foreign to evangelical faith.  Luther was a fideist as was Calvin!  (Anyone who doubts that about Calvin needs to go back and read (or re-read) the first chapters of the Institutes where Calvin absolutely dismisses every form of natural theology and calls the mind of the unconverted person a “factory of idols” and bases everything on the inner testimony of the Holy Spirit.  Somehow or other, “mainstream” evangelicals have become enamored with rational apologetics  often to the detriment of true faith.  The “Four Spiritual Laws” booklet contained the illustration of a train with the engine being “facts” and “faith” the coal car and “feelings” the caboose!

 

Why am I passionate about this matter of K.’s reputation?  Because I think it illustrates a deep problem in modern evangelicalism’s DNA.  Too many evangelicals simply accept the word of their favorite Christian speaker or writer, be it Francis Schaeffer or John MacArthur, and don’t exercise the least bit of skepticism when they bash someone like K.  And they do.  As I have pointed out here before, a pathos of modern evangelicalism is that it rewards those in its ranks who are the first to point out heresy where nobody has yet recognized it which then results in continuous heresy hunting even among themselves!  Finger pointing and half-baked (or completely raw) accusations of heresy are the norm among conservative evangelicals.  Their treatment of K. is a good example.  We need to speak out against this habit of the evangelical mind and my little contribution is to assert that K. was NOT what Schaeffer and MacArthur said (along with many other evangelicals) and even where they were right about K., those characteristics have always been part of the evangelical movement and do not make one non-evangelical.