Slick’s Apostasy: Various Angles of the Issue

I heard about this first via Alpha & Omega Ministries: Yesterday on the Dividing Line.  I have not yet heard what Dr. White had to say about it, but other people have chimed in in written format, which I can access more easily.

Analysis from the redoubtable Steve Hays: Triablogue: Born to fail.

 

Another from Glenn Peoples (HT: Jason Engwer): How to exploit a family falling out for the sake of ideology.

 

Personally, in my reflections on the whole matter I was thinking more about the specifics of the stated reason for abandoning Christianity.  Without daring to put myself in the company of those commentators I will post those thoughts below, FWIW and as a possible indication of what others might be thinking

 

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From http://www.patheos.com/blogs/friendlyatheist/2013/07/15/the-atheist-daughter-of-a-notable-christian-apologist-shares-her-story/:

This changed one day during a conversation with my friend Alex. I had a habit of bouncing theological questions off him, and one particular day, I asked him this: If God was absolutely moral, because morality was absolute, and if the nature of “right” and “wrong” surpassed space, time, and existence, and if it was as much a fundamental property of reality as math, then why were some things a sin in the Old Testament but not a sin in the New Testament?

Four thoughts:

1) She was trained by Matt Slick.  Slick is cool, his ministry has stood the test of time, and he is probably one reason that I am a Calvinist today.  However, frankly his work has always been half-baked and over-reaching in some instances, and I fear that when it came to meta-ethics he may have trained his daughter poorly on account of possibly his own not having a solid grasp of certain issues.

2) Do the words “consequentialism” and “context” mean anything to either of the Slicks?  (Of course, I know that at least one of those matters to one of them.)  Or when did the Scriptures ever indicate that virtue ethics, or deontology, or divine command theory were the only possible correct paradigms by which to make sense of God’s law and God’s nature as revealed in the Scriptures?

Yes, Christians are sophisticated enough to reject divine command theory for reasons which are reflected in Euthyphro’s Dilemma.  Yet the Scriptures apparently never rule out consequentialism in toto and never rule out what we might call (gasp) situational ethics of a sort, and the whole of biblical ethics is best understood in considering both virtue ethics and these other ethical paradigms.

When and where is it appropriate in this country to walk around buck naked?  In a classroom at school?  No.  In worship services at church?  No.  At home?  Sure.

When and where is it appropriate to drive on the right side of the road?  In the U.S.?  Yes, but even then not if the driver is drunk and doing 100 mph on a crowded freeway.  In the U.K.?  No, unless suddenly it is good to cause needless head-on collisions with other vehicles.

Are circmstances or possible consequences relevant in the examples listed immediately above?  Yes, and that is exactly why there are exceptions to rules such as those to which we just alluded.

And is the range of permissible moral options dependent on the situation?  Yes, it is.  That is precisely how sex within the bond of marriage is permissible while your spouse’s cheating on you is not, or why harsh punishments are appropriate only for offenders who are culpable of the worst crimes, to cite two examples.

3) At some point the elder Slick may have got tripped up on issues of postmodern ethics or moral TAGs and passed a muddled, incomprehensible message down to his daughter--either that or the younger Slick just failed to grasp what she was being taught.  Similar language or similar terms appear in discussions of each, and this probably was a source of conflation or confusion at some point.

In any case, God is just (even essentially or transcendently so); in translation this means that God’s actions are just, for this is what the word “just” ultimately points to in terms of meaning and function.  Meanwhile, the words “just” and “moral” are more or less synonymous (though I  prefer “just” over the younger Slick’s “moral”), and those words ultimately mean either in accord with some ethical principle or in accord with what is good; and despite that the word “good” has many meanings--all of them dependent on what the metric or standard of measurement is--and despite anyone’s and everyone’s being capable of finding evil things to be favorable--i.e. “good”--or of prescribing evil conduct as though it were something just, God’s actions are just.

God has issued a body of ethical prescriptions and proscriptions of human behavior; each of these commandments are in accordance with both themselves and objective goodness: by definition, they are just.

Moreover, these commandments are “absolute” in the sense--and this is what people mean when they speak of moral rules which are “absolute”--that they are just regardless of whether Smith over here says, “Adultery?  Meh, that’s okay with me; there’s nothing wrong with it” or whether a society over there on the other side of the planet says, “Why not bow down before Baal?  Who else gives us rain for our crops or puts food on our table?”  That is the sense in which they are absolute.

However, this is not to be confused with the issues of divine command theory vs. rival meta-ethical theories.  There aren’t too many Christians who claim that if God suddenly decided one day to proscribe the consumption of turkey dinners then it would be evil to be turkey dinners in virtue of the proscription itself.  No, the claim would more or less be that if a divine proscription of turkey dinners came down the pike tomorrow then: a) it would be because the proscription did not have a favorable timing before then; and b) the proscription is done for a reason which is objectively good; c) rebellion against the Creator is not in accordance with what is objectively good; and d) guess what: God’s nature happens to be one of objective goodness, all such that it was never possible that an intuitively bad thing such as idolatry or sadistic torture or babies would have been prescribed at some point.

“...Why were some things a sin in the Old Testament but not a sin in the New Testament?” she asks.  Answer: if you can find an instance of such things, then stop to reconsider the matter and to ask yourself whether such things promoted the well-being of someone or something at one point in the past but later outlived their ability to do so.  Why is it a sin to issue orders to a someone of the rank of Sergeant First Class in one year whereas ten years later it is not a sin to do so?  Hmm, could it be that someone there in the Army got promoted such that legal and moral privileges which formerly were not theirs later rightly became theirs?  This is one example off the top of my head; you should be capable of doing the same.

4) How old is Rachael Slick again?  Oh yeah, that makes sense.

The Word "Christian" Means Whatever You Want It to Mean

We’ve already seen this, but here is more proof: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christian_atheism

Stats and Declining Attendance in Churches

Consider the following post, including its comments: Triablogue: Rod Dreher on Declining Attendance in American Churches

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In the meantime, the post links to the webpage of American Grace: How Religion Divides Us and Unites Us.  The book apparently presents a copious and interesting list of statistics, yet the information either within the book or in its review is to be taken with a grain of salt.  An example:

…What really distinguishes rank-and-file Tea Party supporters from other Americans and even other Republicans, is their desire to bring more God into government.

This is not true.  Members of the Tea Party movement are conservatives; Republicans are not absolutely conservatives, hence the acronym “RINO.”  Another example:

Republicans are far more hostile toward Muslims than are Democrats.

This is misleading.  It looks like a global assessment of the groups mentioned there: as if virtually all Republicans are hostile toward virtually all Muslims.  How many Republicans do you know are on the Internet calling for all American Muslims to be deported to Canada?  How many mosques or homes in Deaborn, MI have been firebombed by Republicans who just can’t stand to have Muslims in the United States anymore?  Meanwhile, another example of questionability:

Religious Americans are better neighbors than secular Americans. They volunteer at much higher rates for both religious and secular causes, give more money to religious and secular charities, and are roughly twice as engaged in their communities as comparable secular Americans. And they do more everyday good deeds: they're more likely to donate blood, help someone find a job, give money to a homeless person, or even let a stranger cut in front of them. The reason for this is not their theology, but the friendships they make through their congregations. Having religious friends is more important than simply having friends and being religious yourself. In other words, religious networks are "supercharged" in their effect on neighborliness.

Nope.  Religion, spirituality, theology, or even the divine works of regeneration and sanctification per Christian theology absolutely do not ever make a person more charitable or kind toward others: not in cases of holding doors for strangers, not in cases volunteering in places where people do not live, etc.  No, this is not the fruit of theology or works of God but is all due to desires to become someone’s BFF.  Continuing:

One downside of religion's effect on public life is that religious Americans are consistently less tolerant of dissent and less supportive of civil liberties than secular Americans. Secular Americans are more tolerant of fundamentalists than religious Americans are tolerant of atheists.

What the heck were the authors of this book or its reviewer thinking at this point?  Who in this country does not tolerate dissent but the people who want to bury Kirk Cameron and Chick-Fil-A’s president for those two’s candor and personal beliefs regarding homosexuality?  And at which ports or harbors can I find the ships that religious Americans are preparing to round up this country’s atheists and ship them off to Cuba or Russia?  Continuing:

Religious Americans, especially evangelicals, are more likely to have friends of a lower social class than are secular Americans. On the other hand, religious Americans are also less likely than their secular counterparts to favor public policies to address poverty and inequality.

Allow me to translate the second sentence for the reader: On the other hand, religious Americans are also less likely than their secular counterparts to favor public policies that attempt to eliminate poverty through welfare and through liberal economic theory and practices.  More:

African Americans are the second-most religious group in America (just behind Mormons)….

Wait a minute: aren’t Mormons religious by definition?  Finally:

In spite of these differences in how religions are perceived, Americans have a remarkably high level of religious tolerance. Eighty-nine percent of Americans – including 83 percent of evangelical Christians – believe that a person who is not of their religion can go to heaven.

The word “religion” in this case almost certainly is broadly used to connote, perhaps among other things, denominational differences within Christianity.  Otherwise this claim simply is not credible.  Try finding 8 evangelicals out the next 10 that you find who will tell you that it’s possible that a Muslim, Hindu, or wiccan as such will enter the kingdom of heaven: you won’t succeed if you try.  Then again, if you do find these eight people then one thing is clear: it will become necessary within the next thirty years to reintroduce or introduce Christianity to the western world.

The Trinity, Accuracy and Crypto-Modalists

What follows concerns the post The Discernment Gap: Showing a Lack of Passion for God's Honor and Glory at the AOMin Blog.

I am not totally sympathetic with Dr. White here for one reason: he and most other trinitarians themselves are not as accurate as they could and should be concerning the doctrine(s) of the Trinity. For example, Dr. White writes:

When asked if God manifests Himself in three ways, or exists in three divine Persons, he said that "neither one of them totally get it for me." Now there is a ringing profession of Trinitarianism if I ever heard it.

And later:

Ah yes, we need to outgrow this need for accuracy in what we teach about God…err, I mean, theological hair splitting. Let's outgrow it so that we can tell the world about…well, just what are we supposed to tell the world about? Oh yes, Jesus! But, what if they ask who Jesus was and is? As soon as we respond we will be engaging in…well, theology, right? Was Jesus two persons, a manifestation of the one God, the Father and the Son? Did Jesus pre-exist? And what did He come to accomplish? Make men savable, or actually save His people from their sins (Matt. 1:21)? Oh my, it seems that to have anything to say to the world we need to do this theological hair-splitting, which, of course, is another way of saying "honoring God by carefully handling His Word, testing our traditions, and holding fast to that which is good and just and honorable and true." It says volumes about what some people think evangelism is that they can so denature the message and still think they are speaking the truth.

Presumably Dr. White would rather TD Jakes say “God exists in three divine Persons” while also calling for people to be accurate in both ideas and verbal expressions of those ideas. Sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander, so how is it justifiable to say that God “exists in three divine Persons”? The adposition “in” is a locative preposition--in other words, it is a preposition that speaks of locations. So again, how accurate is it to suggest that basic trinitarian doctrine is this: that there are these three divine persons here and that God exists in and occupies the space which these three divine persons also occupy? Does that sound like trinitarian theology to you? It does not, yet that is precisely what the doctrine of the Trinity should be if common statements like “God exists in three divine Persons” and “Within the Godhead are three distinct persons” are accurate and precise.

Meanwhile, you might be remembering that it is merely the prototypical use of the word “in” that is locative in function and meaning; after all, the word is sometimes used to indicate instrumentality and other things (e.g. “The message was written in blood”). This observation about the use of the word “in” may be interesting, but in this case it is irrelevant. For it is clear that trinitarians subconsciously are thinking in terms of location when they say “God exists in three divine Persons,” because by analogy there is also the statement “Within the Godhead are three distinct persons” where the locative preposition “within” is used. So it hardly seems to be the case that “God exists in three divine Persons” means God exists at any and all given times as the three divine persons when most people say this, if someone were to assert this in White’s defense.

Again, it is clear that virtually no one is expressing the proposition that God exists at any and all given times as the three divine persons when they say “God exists in three divine Persons,” because if this is what trinitarians had in mind when they say this then they would have become fully aware of the seeming incoherence of the Trinity vis-à-vis Leibniz and the transitivity rule of identity long, long ago and would demonstrate an awareness of this as do only a very limited number of trinitarians. What that means is that the average trinitarian has a fuzzy concept of God’s trinitarian nature. And if the average trinitarian has a fuzzy concept of God’s nature, can the same be true of TD Jakes and other supposed crypto-modalists? Either way, Jakes and White are practically in the same boat.

And yes, fuzziness condemns and kills. Has everyone now heard of Michael Sudduth’s conversion to Hinduism?

Christian Atheism in Holland

Hat tip to a certain Midwesterner, and no hyperbole here:

BBC News - “Dutch rethink Christianity for a doubtful world”

Wandering, Apostasy, and Ananias

Concerning the account of Ananias in Acts, chapter five:

1) Fear of death is a natural and instinctive thing. Death is also not merely a release from the tribulations and evils of this world in which we live; death remains a tragic thing in God’s providence, and this is why we mourn even when Christians pass away.

Death also brings us face to face with our own shortcomings in life, as when someone’s life flashes before his eyes in a near-death experience. This is not a thing to be taken lightly, and any believer who should notice believers falling dead around him would do well to seriously contemplate his own moral conduct and his own heart vis-à-vis the events happening around him.

2) None of us actually knows that Ananias and his wife were not false brethren or false converts. Remember those Scriptures which tell us that these sorts of individuals were real?

Matthew 7.21-23
Matthew 25.1-13
John 6.61-66
John 17.12
2 Corinthians 11.26
Galatians 2.4
2 Peter 2.20-22 (cf. 2 Corinthians 5.17, Hebrews 10.14-17)
1 John 2.19
Jude 1.4,19

3a) However, let’s assume for a moment that Ananias and his wife were some of those who have come to Christ. Why should anyone expect them to be absolutely exempt from consequences of their actions? The prophet David committed adultery and killed Uriah the Hittite. The prophet Nathan later told David that God had taken away his sin (2 Samuel 12.13-14)--but he also told him that David’s son would surely die. So if people reap bitter fruit of their transgressions even in cases where we know that their sin is taken away, should the case of Ananias be very different?

3b) Likewise, the prophet Moses sinned against God; Moses’ sin, as with other sins of the Israelites, was later and in some sense taken away through the ministry of the Levites (Lev 16). But once the Israelites later reached the Promised Land, Moses still had to face a consequence of his action. For one will recall that Moses was not allowed to enter Canaan as a result of his failure to speak to the rock. So why should the case of Ananias be any different?

3c) Likewise, vis-à-vis 1 Peter 3.7, why should believers in general be expected to face absolutely no tough consequences of some moral error of theirs?

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As a general response to concerns of 1 Timothy 4.1, 1 Timothy 5.14-15 and 1 Timothy 6.10: what exactly should leave anyone with the impression that only those who believe in Christ are capable of departing from “the faith”?

21 Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. 22 Many will say to me in that day, Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in thy name? and in thy name have cast out devils? and in thy name done many wonderful works? 23 And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity. (Matthew 7.21-23)

You won’t have people following Christ unless they are first by definition affiliated with “the faith” in one way or another. Yet we can glean from the passage above that not all of such individuals can rightly be deemed as believers at first glance. For if these individuals were people who had “come to Christ” in the sense of John, chapter six at any point in the past, then Christ would have known them (Jn 10.26-29, 2 Tim 2.19); yet it is said that he never knew them.

Such is the case in John 6.61-66 also. Anyone who physically follows and associates with someone who continually offers various teachings is someone who is necessarily affiliated with the sum of these teachings, regardless of whether such a follower believes each and every one of these teachings. This affiliation exists in John 6.61-66:

61 When Jesus knew in himself that his disciples murmured at it, he said unto them, Doth this offend you? 62 [What] and if ye shall see the Son of man ascend up where he was before? 63 It is the spirit that quickeneth; the flesh profiteth nothing: the words that I speak unto you, [they] are spirit, and [they] are life. 64 But there are some of you that believe not. For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were that believed not, and who should betray him. 65 And he said, Therefore said I unto you, that no man can come unto me, except it were given unto him of my Father. 66 From that [time] many of his disciples went back, and walked no more with him.

The presense of associates or affiliates who were also unbelievers is likewise evidenced in the passage. So not everyone who will have turned away from Christ was a believer to begin with. Futhermore, if they turn away from Christ, then you can rest assured that they will also leave behind some aggregate of right teachings about or from Christ: they will have turned away from “the faith.”

Now let’s take things a step further with Galatians 2.3-4:

3 But neither Titus, who was with me, being a Greek, was compelled to be circumcised: 4 And that because of false brethren unawares brought in, who came in privily to spy out our liberty which we have in Christ Jesus, that they might bring us into bondage:

Make no mistake about it: as an unbeliever you don’t get to infiltrate the ranks of believers and to cause trouble among them unless you first create the false image and impression that you are a believer. Such a false brother necessarily pays lip service to “the faith” or appears to honor the gospel and theological truths which immediately pertain to the gospel, or else his mission of espionage is finished before it begins.

Finally, two more passages:

Therefore if any man [be] in Christ, [he is] a new creature: old things are passed away; behold, all things are become new. (2 Corinthians 5:17)

14 For by one offering he hath perfected for ever them that are sanctified. 15 [Whereof] the Holy Ghost also is a witness to us: for after that he had said before, 16 This [is] the covenant that I will make with them after those days, saith the Lord, I will put my laws into their hearts, and in their minds will I write them; 17 And their sins and iniquities will I remember no more. (Hebrews 10:14-17)

If anyone who is in Christ is a new creature and is someone whose sins will not be remembered, then how would the apostle Peter refer to any of such creatures as dogs or swine that stay true to their nature as dogs and swine? For it is written:

20 For if after they have escaped the pollutions of the world through the knowledge of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, they are again entangled therein, and overcome, the latter end is worse with them than the beginning. 21 For it had been better for them not to have known the way of righteousness, than, after they have known [it], to turn from the holy commandment delivered unto them. 22 But it is happened unto them according to the true proverb, The dog [is] turned to his own vomit again; and the sow that was washed to her wallowing in the mire. (2 Peter 2:20-22)

So we have just seen that there are or have been false brethren and people who have turned from Christ and teachings of Christ without having ever believed in Christ to begin with. This means that 1 Timothy 4.1, 5.14-15, and 6.10 don’t make for good proof texts against the teachings that Arminian and sub-Arminian apologists tend to vilify.

Powerless Powerful People

2 Timothy 2:13: “If we believe not, [yet] he abideth faithful: he cannot deny himself.”

If it is fair for the apostle Paul to blur identities here, as if the Head of the body of Christ were identical with the parts of the body, then up to a point perhaps it is fair for us to do the same. That is, if Christ cannot deny himself, then his self probably cannot deny him. Consequently, particular apostasy--in this case, a repudiation of Christianity--probably is not possible for those in whom the seed of God and the Spirit of God dwells.

Meanwhile, even if one can produce biblical exhortations or warnings that one not succumb to even this sort of apostasy, this doesn't necessarily prove that such apostasy is possible of believers. I go back to what Dr. John Martin Fischer was telling us once in class. Someone once explained to him (and I paraphrase): Look, even if determinism is true and your visiting a particular restaurant later tonight is determined, it’s still not going to happen unless you (intentionally) get up and go there.

God keeps his people safe, but God is also a God of means. And this means that you should not be surprised if God were to accomplish his ends through reminders of what would happen if two links in the causal chain were to be removed.