Charity

Next semester I will join the faculty of Bluefield College, up in the Appalachian Mountains. It’s a small, Baptist-affiliated, liberal arts college with a biology major, and I’m sure it will present me with interesting new challenges.

Today I announced to the students that I will not return to PHC next year.

To any of my current and former students who may be reading this: thank you for your kindness to this stranger in a strange land and for your enthusiasm about a subject about which you might have been tempted to be less than enthusiastic. Teaching you has been my privilege.

Although my time here has sometimes been difficult, there were more good times than bad, I do not regret these past five years. God has taught me much about himself and about myself. I am a different person for walking these halls, teaching these students, reading these books, and for a thousand little conversations. Within the bounds of this tiny campus, I have met some amazing people and built relationships that will last a lifetime, and that alone is worth the price of admission.

[W]hat legitimate honour can garments derive from adulteration with illegitimate colours? That which He Himself has not produced is not pleasing to God, unless He was unable to order sheep to be born with purple and sky-blue fleeces! If He was able, then plainly He was unwilling: what God willed not, of course ought not to be fashioned. Those things, then, are not the best by nature which are not from God, the Author of nature. Thus they are understood to be from the devil, from the corrupter of nature: for there is no other whose they can be, if they are not God’s; because what are not God’s must necessarily be His rival’s.

-Tertullian

Growth. It seems an inevitable part of being alive. We start off life small – microscopic, in fact – and take nourishment into ourselves, making it part of ourselves. As long as we’re alive, we’re excreting matter and taking more in, so that the stuff of our bodies is not the same stuff found there ten years ago. This is the principle on which carbon dating works. For a given amount of ordinary carbon in the atmosphere, there is a certain amount of unstable carbon-14. Plants take it into themselves and we take it from the plants. That unstable isotope is always breaking down, but as long as we live, we turn over our carbon and remain at equilibrium with the atmosphere and with all living things. Die, and the recycling ceases. The carbon-14 gradually breaks down and fades to nothing. It takes almost six thousand years for half of it to decay, this residue of life, but eventually there will be just one atom, then none left.

Life means growth, continual change. We laud the abstract idea of growth – physical growth, spiritual growth, intellectual growth – but fear change and struggle against it. Who wants to imagine the material of our bodies drifting away literally with every breath, even if it is being replaced? We sometimes struggle against the unknown future, preferring stability, familiarity, and a repetition of the good times of the past. C.S. Lewis seems to have felt this. In Perelandra, the main character finds himself on a pre-fall planet. Upon the experience of eating a fruit that was “like the discovery of a totally new genus of pleasures,” he found himself no longer hungry, but considering whether or not to repeat the experience. Finally, “it appeared to him better not to taste again. Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a vulgarity – like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day.” Later in the book, the same character remembers the experience and says:

This itch to have things over again, as if life were a film that could be unrolled twice or even made to work backwards… was it possibly the root of all evil? No: of course the love of money was called that. But money itself – perhaps one valued it chiefly as a defence against chance, a security for being able to have things over again, a means of arresting the unrolling of the film.

Lewis says something similar in Letters to Malcolm, written in the last year of his life: “It would be rash to say that there is any prayer which God never grants. But the strongest candidate is the prayer we might express in a single word: ‘encore.’”

Both repetition and change are both part of God’s creation. Every day begins with a sunrise and ends with a sunset. Summer turns to Fall, then Winter, then Spring, then Summer all over again. The growth of a child today is much the same as a thousand years ago. But every cycle is different. If you expect this Christmas to be just like one you lived last year, you will be disappointed. What’s more, the cycles progress. God’s children are being sanctified throughout their lives. History is moving toward the end God has assigned it.

“There is nothing new under the sun,” says Solomon, the anguished writer of Ecclesiastes, and calls the repetition “vanity of vanities.” At creation, God declared His days and seasons good, so what can Solomon, once called the wisest man, mean? He explains that mankind had myopically missed the forward movement in the repetition.

There is no remembrance of earlier things;

And also of the later things which will occur,

There will be for them no remembrance

Among those who will come later still.

Growth, and therefore change, are part of our nature. We grow without noticing the change, until we stand against the door jamb with the lines drawn on it and see that we are bigger at 8 than at 7, or read a diary from years ago and realize how flawed was our spelling, grammar, and understanding of the world.

We are being sanctified, changed, to be conformed to the image of Christ, but will not be perfect in this lifetime. Lewis tells us that “God whispers to us in our pleasure, speaks to us in our conscience, but shouts to us in our pain; it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”

I bet you think I’m going to agree with Lewis and say that pain brings us closer to God and makes us grow, much more than joy. I’m not. Yes, many people who experience pain grow in patience, empathy, and faith through the experience but it is more complicated than that. I’m sure the parents of a new baby are growing through the happy change in their life, and painful change makes some people bitter. The angry, despondent old man is as much a stereotype as the kind, wise one. Sometimes the silver lining turns out to be tin and there isn’t any sugar for the lemonade.

The optimistic quote about God shouting in our pain is from The Problem of Pain, published in 1940, twenty years before Lewis’s wife died. The year after her death, he published A Grief Observed, in which he says:

Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be – or so it feels – welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence.

It’s the classic “dark night of the soul” experience. He’s not hearing God shouting; he’s not feeling His presence at all. Towards the end of the book, Lewis modifies his earlier sentiment:

When I lay these questions before God, I get no answer. But a rather special sort of “no answer.” It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, not uncompassionate gaze. As though He shook his head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like “Peace, child; you don’t understand.”

About the time A Grief Observed was published, Lewis began to suffer from kidney failure. He improved enough to write one more book, Letters to Malcolm, from which I pulled the “Encore” quote above. It, like The Screwtape Letters, is an epistolary work, and Malcolm is as fictional as Screwtape. The letters are designed so that Lewis can write without sounding too preachy. In the eighth letter, Lewis responds to the news that Malcolm’s son is gravely ill, and makes reference to his own recent pain. It is worth quoting at length.

Some people feel guilty about their anxieties and regard them as a defect of faith. I don’t agree at all. They are afflictions, not sins. Like all afflictions, they are, if we can so take them, our share in the Passion of Christ.

…

And to God, God’s last words are “Why hast thou forsaken me?”

You see how characteristic, how representative, it all is. The human situation writ large. These are among the things it means to be a man. Every rope breaks when you seize it. Every door is slammed shut as you reach it. To be like the fox at the end of the run; the earths all staked.

As for the last dereliction of all, how can we either understand or endure it? Is it that God Himself cannot be Man unless God seems to vanish at His greatest need? And if so, why? I sometimes wonder if we have even begun to understand what is involved in the very concept of creation. If God will create, He will make something to be, and yet to be not Himself. To be created is, in some sense, to be ejected or separated. Can it be that the more perfect the creature is, the further this separation must at some point be pushed? It is saints, not common people, who experience the “dark night.” It is men and angels, not beasts, who rebel. Inanimate matter sleeps in the bosom of the Father. The “hiddenness” of God perhaps presses most painfully on those who are in another way nearest to Him, and therefore God Himself, made man, will of all men be by God most forsaken?

…

I am you see, a Job’s comforter. Far from lightening the dark valley where you now find yourself, I blacken it. And you know why. Your darkness has brought back my own. But on second thoughts I don’t regret what I have written. I think it is only in a shared darkness that you and I can really meet at present; shared with one another and, what matter most, with our Master. We are not on an untrodden path. Rather on the main-road.

Certainly we were talking too lightly and easily about these things a fortnight ago. We were playing with counters. One used to be told as a child: “Think what you’re saying.” Apparently we need also to be told: “Think what you’re thinking.” The stakes have to be raised before we take the game quite seriously. I know this is the opposite of what is often said about the necessity of keeping all emotion out of our intellectual processes –“you can’t think straight unless you are cool.” But then neither can you think deep if you are. I suppose one must try every problem in both states. You remember that the ancient Persians debated everything twice: once when they were drunk and once when they were sober.

Two years after the death of his wife, and within a year of writing the above, Lewis died of his kidney ailment. He was not quite 65. Grief is as hard on the body as it is on the soul.

The life of David, who is repeatedly described in Scripture as “a man after God’s own heart,” and who wrote the words that Christ quoted from the cross ten centuries later – “my God, my God, why hast Thou forsaken me?” substantiates Lewis’s idea that those who are nearest to God are most likely to experience the anguish of separation from Him.

Lewis also concludes that the state of being in pain is an opportunity to think in a different way and therefore to more deeply understand Christ and what it means to be made in His image. Implied in this is the possibility that one might miss the opportunity. This hypothesis explains both the character growth of some who experience difficulties and the lack of it in others.

After I had begun this essay, I picked up a copy of The Giver, the Newbery-winning book that the Loudoun County Public Library is trying to get the whole county to read. It is a simple children’s morality tale. The fictional world it presents is a dystopia characterized by a lack of change. The children grow, of course, but are encouraged to do it in the same way as each other and the generations before and after. They all wear particular clothes and haircuts that designate their age, get their first bicycle (there are no cars) at the age of nine, and are assigned a career at twelve. This last is called an “Assignment,” and like the “Matching of Spouses” and “Placement of newchildren,” (50 are bred each year, and each family may apply for one of each gender) they are carefully thought out by a committee of elders. The upside of this life is that noone goes hungry, and all the physical needs of the children and old people are met. Every family shares their dreams at breakfast and their feelings at dinner. The weather is always mild. The children learn to be polite, empathetic, and well-spoken, and rarely rebel against the ever-present rules of the regimented society. There is little pain, and the society never grows.

The people are generally happy, as the committee of elders is good at matching people with spouses who are temperamentally compatible and careers that are in line with their interests and abilities. The mechanism whereby this stasis is accomplished is that all of the history, all the memories of life before the “Sameness” – the wars, famines, Christmases, and true loves – are entrusted to one person: the Receiver of Memory. Noone else remembers the past beyond his or her own lifetime.

Of course, the protagonist gradually figures this out and then makes a choice about what to do. I won’t tell you the ending, in case you want to read it for yourself.

The moral of the story is that the memory of both pleasant and painful experiences of the past is required for real growth in the future. The price we would have to pay for a world without change would be too great, and so we’re stuck with the pain.

Some students come here, learn, and thrive. Others go a little crazy. I suppose the morality tale above might predict the latter. We are trying to convey what that fictional society scrupulously avoided – knowledge of the past, of the history of ideas, with all the darkness therein. It changes us and through us changes society. Solomon predicts it as well, saying that “in much wisdom there is much grief, and increasing knowledge results in increasing pain.”

Solomon asked for wisdom when God offered him anything. He could have done much worse, and he clearly prefers it to the alternative, but his wisdom did not bring happiness. He had material wealth and many children, and neither satisfied. His advice in the end seems to be simply to keep the larger picture in mind. We are all moving toward death. His final counsel is “Fear God and keep His commandments.” Life is not about us. That doesn’t mean we have to be maudlin all the time. “Indeed, if a man should live many years, let him rejoice in them all, and let him remember the days of darkness, for they shall be many.”

Rejoice, but remember the days of darkness.

…who successfully defended her thesis this weekend.

Can machines think?

In 1950, Alan Turing wrote a paper entitled “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in which he asked this and suggested that it is the wrong question. Computers can perform calculations faster and more accurately than humans, but how do you determine whether or not they can think? Turing proposed that a better question was whether or not a machine could be developed that could give responses indistinguishable from those of a real human. The Turing test is based on a game in which the participants ask questions of two people, a man and a woman, both of whom are out of sight and type answers to the questions. Both are trying to convince the group that they are the woman, and the group has to guess. Imagine the same thing, but with a human and computer answering the questions and trying to convince the group that they are the human. That’s the Turing test.

Turing seemed to have optimistic ideas about the development of thinking computers. He states:

I believe that at the end of the century the use of words and general educated opinion will have altered so much that one will be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.

At first blush, this seems silly, but when our computers are slow to do what we ask of them, we’ll say that they’re thinking. Of course, we mean that they’re calculating, but we do colloquially use the word “thinking” of computers without expecting objection.

Turing also speculates about the memory capacity that would be needed for a computer to pass his test:

I believe that in about fifty years’ time it will be possible, to programme computers, with a storage capacity of about 10⁹[ binary digits], to make them play the imitation game so well that an average interrogator will not have more than 70 per cent chance of making the right identification after five minutes of questioning.

Converted into modern notation, 10⁹ binary digits is 125 MB. By the year 2000, of course, PCs were well beyond this. My Palm PDA has a chip less than an inch square that holds 256 MB. Despite this and the name “Personal Digital Assistant,” it has never attempted to convince me that it is human.

What in the world does this have to do with family values?

I got a phone call today from a pleasant, female, non-synthetic-sounding voice that knew my name but sounded like it was reading a script. The voice inquired whether or not I was concerned about the morality being propagated by Hollywood-controlled entertainment, especially with regards to my children or grandchildren. When I replied that I have neither children nor grandchildren, the voice replied that I could still be concerned, even if I don’t have children, but it still sounded like a script. I asked who the voice works for, and the reply was the “Dove foundation,” followed by the same canned concerns over immorality in movies and what it does to the children, and a repeat of the question of whether or not I was concerned. I ignored the question and said “hello?” in an attempt to reach the human behind the script. The voice laughed a little, said “hello? Are you there?” I replied that I was and the voice gave the same laugh and same reply, word for word and without variance in speed or intonation of delivery. At this point I started to wonder if I was talking to a machine. The disorienting thing was that the voice clearly understood me well enough to figure out what part of the script to read in response, but was reading the same thing with a uniformity that would be difficult for a human to do even if she wanted to. At that point I told the voice just how disconcerted I was by the conversation. The voice hung up on me.

The Dove Foundation website features reviews of movies for “family-friendly” content. They claim their ratings are based on “Judeo-Christian values.” None of the Harry Potter movies, with their “occult” themes, get their seal of approval, a white dove on a blue background, but The Exorcism of Emily Rose does. The Passion of the Christ gets a thumbs down due to violence, but X-Men III squeaks in under the line. Dove has partnered with 20^th Century Fox so that movies sold by the entertainment giant that are approved by the foundation will bear the dove logo.

The website also explains my experience with the voice. There was a real person listening to my responses and selecting pre-recorded responses to match. So it wasn’t a real Turing test. And there apparently isn’t a button for this poor person to press when the respondent figures out that there’s something very wrong with the conversation.

I’m certainly not opposed to sites that give synopses of movies and warn parents of content that may not be appropriate for children. The goal of the Dove Foundation, however, goes far beyond this. They want to be entertained, and “to entertain is to amuse.” Their concern is that “Real life offers enough stresses and heartaches and disappointments. Most people don’t go to a movie with the aspiration of feeling worse when they leave.” The words “wholesome” and “uplifting” are used repeatedly on the website.

They are unhappy with the content of movies and are conducting a survey that they think will influence Hollywood producers. They claim “No one will be able to argue with the results once we reach a critical mass of responses. We will present our findings to the studio heads, and to the national media.” This explains my experience with the persistent voice asking me repeatedly if I was concerned. According to the website, they have surveyed over two million people over the past two years. Someone is really motivated.

I have no problem with parents who want kid-friendly movies without sex, violence, or inappropriate language. But surely producers are already filling this niche. The Dove Foundation itself has given its seal of approval to hundreds of movies. This seems not to be enough.

Why is it that the people who want feel-good, entertaining movies are the ones using this strange polling method that gave me the impression of being an unwilling participant in a Turing test? They could come up with a completely automated system that says up front that it is a recording and asks you to press 1 if you’re concerned about the state of entertainment. Most people will hang up on a machine, but they could have the person who is currently pressing the buttons ask the questions and record the responses. The most likely explanation is that they want the listener to hear the perky pre-recorded voice rather than the voice of the real person.

Think about that. “Real life offers enough stresses and heartaches and disappointments,” and real people are not good enough to take a telephone poll. Entertain me, amuse me, uplift me. Yikes. The closest the website gets to being overtly Christian is its mention of “Judeo-Christian” values, but the dove is conspicuously a Christian symbol. Somehow I have a sinking feeling that the website is the work of well-intentioned Christians.

I’d like to be able to tie the Turing test and the Dove Foundation neatly together with the moral of the story, but I’m not sure where the connection lies. Perhaps it is that both Turing and the Dove people seem to have grand notions of a future that does not appeal to me – a future in which messy humanity is sanitized. Turing says that if man could create a complicated enough computer, God might bestow a soul on it. In this case we would be “providing mansions for the souls that He creates.” In that case, there’s nothing special about the physical part of us. The Dove Foundation seems to eschew art, which, done right, touches the soul. They derogatorily say that “a large number of filmmakers are more interested in a trophy from their peers than popularity at the box-office.”

Maybe the connection is an oversimplification of the human condition. I think Turing’s idea of an ensouled computer, a “ghost in the machine,” is impossible. Artless, fluffy entertainment is not, but I don’t think any number of responses to a telephone survey is going to convince anyone that what humanity really, deeply needs is more of it.

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Shameless self-promotion alert…

I’m teaching Neuroscience this semester, and therefore reading about the mind-body problem , which partially explains the above post. It is mostly a science course, but I don’t think a Christian ought to approach the study of the brain without addressing the topic of the soul. So if there are any PHC students out there looking for an interesting elective, there’s still room. It’s MWF at 2:00.

The grounds crew has once again been at the Sisyphean task of removing the algae from Lake Bob. Two students drag a long net through the stuff and haul it up on shore to dry in the sun. They look for all the world like fishermen, one on each side of the net, straining to bring the mass of the stuff out of the water. They’re fishers of algae, though.

*

The maples at the south end of the circular drive and those in the dorm parking lot have moved, ent-like, to a field at the southeast end of campus.

Sadly, they did not wade there by themselves. They were scooped out of the ground by a giant tree plucker. It reminds me of a giant skil-crane attached to the back of a dump truck. Think of the Calvinist alien toys in Toy Story: “The Claw — it moves.” “I’ve been chosen! Farewell, my friends. I go to a better place.”

Mr. Hall says the trees will be moved back upon completion of the Student Center construction.

*

Both our librarian and registrar have been smiling a lot and are shopping for wedding dresses. One prefers simple, the other elaborate. I’ll leave it to you to guess which is which.

A Yeats poem came to mind yesterday.  I read it online, discussed it with an English-major friend, and then later reading Dr. Veith’s book Loving God With All Your Mind, it popped up again.  Yeats did not profess Christ; he had an interest in the occult.  And yet he felt the coming of some major turning point in history that he compared to both the first coming of Christ and His second coming.  He felt things falling apart, the loss of innocence.  Unlike Christians, however, he seems to see history as cyclical.  He thinks we are in the death of one cycle and moving into another.  One of the points Dr. Veith makes in his book, although not with reference to the poem, is that Christianity, unlike many other religions, views history as linear.  There is therefore hope for progress rather than the fatalism of endless reruns.  The point he made with respect to the poem is that as the rest of the world falls apart, lacking true meaning in its academic and moral relativism, Christian truth can take its place.  We believe truth can be known.  In my opinion, something even more important that Yeats missed is the City of God.  The earthly city really is spinning apart.  Maybe it really does move in cycles.  The City of God, however, will not succumb to centrifugal forces.  It moves inexorably toward the real second coming, not of a sphinx, but of a Savior.

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Today is Graham Walker’s first official day as president of PHC. I recently read and very much enjoyed Dr. Walker’s book. It is out of print and not really light reading, so for the edification of interested parties and in honor of the first day of this new chapter at PHC, I’m going to attempt to explain Dr. Walker’s argument, mostly in his own words. Please understand that this is way outside of my field of expertise. Way outside — my field of expertise is the cell biology of viral entry, and the book is about how Augustinian ideas about morality relate to the US Constitution. So take my take on it with a grain of salt.

I was struck with how many of the ideas in the book relate to the ideas that were part of the past year at PHC: natural law and rights, special and general revelation, faith and reason, the relationship between rules and morality, and how we ought to think about disagreements concerning moral issues. Some of the conclusions are not exactly what I expected. I think he makes some good arguments, and I have been motivated to read Augustine. It will be interesting to see how these ideas play into life at PHC.

The book is an argument for an Augustinian solution to the question of whether or not there is a moral foundation for law that humans can access. Surprisingly (to me, anyway) many conservatives say that there is not. Dr. Walker calls this position moral nihilism, and explains that:

Chief Justice William Rehnquist and former federal judge Robert Bork share a common constitutional philosophy. As expressed in their most theoretically self-conscious essays, this philosophy rests on two basic pillars: a moral nihilism that reduces morality to convention, and a political theory that reduces legitimacy to the will of democratic majorities.

Their motivation for denying that we can intuitively know the good is a concern for judicial activism. Their argument is that if we all have access to the good, then judges are justified in using their own moral sense to interpret law, which could lead to all sorts of scary situations. As Dr. Walker puts it,

an explicit recourse to an authoritatively real morality seems risky in the constitutional context. It may foster a preference for the rule of moral philosophers over the rule of law. It may tempt constitutional scholars and justices of the court to hold forth openly like ‘Platonic guardians.’

I think we all have had the experience of realizing that someone else’s idea of what is moral is very different than our own – this is the perception of “moral indeterminacy.” Not all moral nihilists believe that there is no true moral good. Many are “epistemological nihilists,” who believe that there really is an absolute moral good, but we can’t know it. Competing with moral nihilism is moral realism, the idea that human reason can access a real morality. We have the perception of a conscience. In biblical terms, we have God’s law written on our hearts.

Dr. Walker sums up the problem thus: “Our experience of this world encounters both moral order and disorder, both moral goodness and moral indeterminacy. Our experience also encounters, in ourselves and others, a capacity for willful wrongdoing whose exercise effectively clouds the sense of order and sharpens the sense of indeterminacy.”

So how does Augustine solve the problem? Augustine points out that man is both made in the image of God and is fallen. Therefore humanity “chronically exists in a contracted condition less than its true nature. This situation has complicated but not eliminated the human ability to know the good directly.” We truly can know right from wrong, using what Augustine calls ‘our most truthful interior vision,’ but we can’t expect any one person’s ideas about morality to always be correct or everyone to agree about it, because we are all fallen. That is, “fallen man’s will tends to turn away from the good that intellectual vision equips him to know.”

This does not mean that we will know morality by cold, dispassionate analysis. Walker quotes another Augustine scholar as characterizing Augustine’s view thus: “as truth it may be described as reason irradiated by love; as morality, love irradiated by reason.” This idea is seen, incidentally, in Lewis’ “men without chests” in his Abolition of Man. Without the heart, man’s innate sense of morality weakens.

This is more than simple natural law. Augustine’s solution is

neither a theory of the nature of law, nor even a theory of the nature of morality. We must look at it as an ontology. We must look at it, that is, as a theologically informed theory of the nature of nature itself — of being, which for Augustine necessarily and consciously bore on political existence as well.

This does not mean that Augustine views the Bible as unimportant. On the contrary,

Augustine introduces certain categories of thought drawn, not only from the findings of reason but also from the Bible taken as a source of divine revelation. He takes reason seriously, though; his own logic requires him to. Thus Augustine deals with biblical categories philosophically rather than simply religiously and so crafts a way of thinking that speaks to the philosophical traditions he challenges.

Walker explains that Augustine sees Holy Scripture as “undistorted access to the one strictly unimpeachable source.” It is therefore authoritative, not “speculative constructs of his own mind,” but a “standard by which to check and supplement all such reasoning.”

This squashes any idea that natural access to real morality should be allowed to lead us away from the Scriptures. All revelation comes from God and cannot ultimately be contradictory. Dr Walker describes Augustine’s view:

If the Scriptures are what they claim, then they issue from the same source as all knowledge; they are an expression of the very same intelligibility that bathes all being. This is why Augustine is not in the least squeamish about his dictum crede ut intellegas. ‘Believe in order that you may understand.’

Special revelation is portrayed as part of a larger “intelligibility that bathes all being,” but at the same time unique among forms of revelation because it is “undistorted,” and “not subject to the obfuscations of the fallen condition – except perhaps marginally in transmission.” God’s revelation is there for all to see and reason about, but the Bible gives us a clarity that we would not have without faith.

Dr. Walker contrasts Augustine’s view of faith and reason with that of Tertullian, “whose hope for a clean break with classicism had led him to celebrate faith as the acceptance of absurdity. Credo quia absurdum, Tertullian had announced, thereby inciting generations of Christians – and others – to construe faith as a substitute for understanding.” Augustine “did not come to his own theological position through a leap of faith. He came to it as the result of a long journey of philosophic assessment, in the course of which the sterility or incompleteness of other philosophic alternatives underscored the potency of the answer he eventually embraced.” These sentiments seem to be an argument for the value of the classics and careful reasoning for Christians.

The Augustinian view incorporates our perception of real moral goodness and also our perception of moral indeterminacy. It encourages us to look not only at our own internal moral compasses, but also those of other people. This includes people who have come before us: “If we can make sense of our experience of the good, we can also make sense of the notion that the ‘received wisdom’ of history can contain a record of real moral insight.” We should think in terms of love – The apostle Paul speaks of the “law of love.” At the same time, the Scriptures keep our fallen nature from allowing us to stray. We should be prudent and cautious, realizing our own internal vision is not perfect.

This is not something we can neatly quantify. We can’t come up with an exhaustive list of ironclad natural moral laws and enshrine them in the law. The law is not the same as the good. It allows order, but does not make us good – “law can only affect what Augustine calls the ‘exterior man,’ and it can only hope to inculcate virtue in the most minimal and unsatisfying degree.” As explained in this striking quote, we will never create a perfect society:

Augustine’s thought also effectively scuttles any Christian impulse to political theocracy. Almost alone in his day, we remember, Augustine withstood the enthusiasm for Constantine’s legal establishment of Christianity and for the imminent arrival of ‘Christian times’ that Augustine’s less cautious coreligionists thought it heralded. By an Augustinian way of thinking, any avowedly Christian temporal triumphalism has probably mortgaged its Christianity for its triumph. Despite underlying theological affinities, an Augustinian kind of political realism thus opposes the old Christian Left as much as the new Christian Right – the former for its naïve and manipulable optimism, the latter for its self-proclaimed reconstructionist zeal.

We can, however, love the good. May God grant us that for the future of PHC.

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link to discussion board here

Streptococcus pyogenes, the germ that causes strep throat, used to cause the much nastier scarlet fever. A possible side effect was permanent heart damage because the bacteria grew on the heart valves causing inflammation.