Response to Previous Post 'What Is the Gospel? by R.C. Sproul | Reformed Theology Articles at Ligonier.org'

Okay, I want to do something different here: instead of responding to DB’s last post in the comments section--which is limited in space--let me provide a full response here and make that a blog post.  Along the way I’ll go ahead and address you directly, DB, if needed. =)

In the article mentioned in the last post Dr. Sproul writes:

The Gospel is called the ‘good news’ because it addresses the most serious problem that you and I have as human beings, and that problem is simply this: God is holy and He is just, and I’m not. And at the end of my life, I’m going to stand before a just and holy God, and I’ll be judged. And I’ll be judged either on the basis of my own righteousness – or lack of it – or the righteousness of another. The good news of the Gospel is that Jesus lived a life of perfect righteousness, of perfect obedience to God, not for His own well being but for His people. He has done for me what I couldn’t possibly do for myself. But not only has He lived that life of perfect obedience, He offered Himself as a perfect sacrifice to satisfy the justice and the righteousness of God.

What was written there is good news--good for Jesus, since he is the one who lived a life free of wrongdoings and moral error.  But how is that good news to me?  I am not Jesus, after all.  And if Jesus died for his people, good; but how is that relevant to anything or what does that mean?  Did Jesus die to set an example of how his people should live selflessly?  Did he die to save his people from their past sins though not necessarily for sins that will be committed later down the road in the future?  And who are his people anyhow?  And if Jesus died as a sacrifice for his people, what does that mean?  Is Dr. Sproul using the word “sacrifice” in a loose and vernacular sense as soliders may “sacrifice” themselves by throwing themselves on top of grenades or by running unprotected in front of bullets to save fellow members of their unit or platoon?  Or is Dr. Sproul speaking of sacrifice proper?

The desire to avoid a long, cumbersome and tedious message is understandable, to be sure.  However, if I were to hear Dr. Sproul’s words with the ears of a pagan who has no prior understanding of Christian theology, how would anything from the second paragraph of the article produce the faith according to which God justifies sinners?  In anticipation of possible responses, let’s allow Dr. Sproul to finish his message by now quoting the third and final paragraph of the article:

The great misconception in our day is this: that God isn’t concerned to protect His own integrity. He’s a kind of wishy-washy deity, who just waves a wand of forgiveness over everybody. No. For God to forgive you is a very costly matter. It cost the sacrifice of His own Son. So valuable was that sacrifice that God pronounced it valuable by raising Him from the dead – so that Christ died for us, He was raised for our justification. So the Gospel is something objective. It is the message of who Jesus is and what He did. And it also has a subjective dimension. How are the benefits of Jesus subjectively appropriated to us? How do I get it? The Bible makes it clear that we are justified not by our works, not by our efforts, not by our deeds, but by faith – and by faith alone. The only way you can receive the benefit of Christ’s life and death is by putting your trust in Him – and in Him alone. You do that, you’re declared just by God, you’re adopted into His family, you’re forgiven of all of your sins, and you have begun your pilgrimage for eternity.

The meaning of the word “sacrifice” still is not clearly and unequivocally explained.  However, if explanations and analogies had been sought and mentioned in the scapegoat of Leviticus 16 and in specifics of the prophecy of Isaiah 53, these might have been quite helpful.  These passages in turn would have been made more understandable by Acts 2.22-23 and 4.27-28 where even the apostles take time to clarify how the Romans’ killing of Christ could amount to an act of punishment executed by God himself.

Until these and other things are explained in people’s approaches to evangelism, there is not much to prevent more new instances of false conversions and false faith.  Remember that while the verb “believe in” does mean believe in and the noun “faith” does mean faith, it is clear that biblical writers still had something specific in mind when they spoke of the faith according to which God justifies sinners.  For example, if Jesus of Nazareth was a carpenter by trade and was hired to have someone fashion a new table for them, the trust or faith of the person who trusts the Lord to now provide him with a new table does not have the sort of faith that Paul talks about in Ephesians 2.8-9, clearly.  In fact, coaches, soccer moms, or other people who would today say “I believe in you” as part of a speech to pep up their athletes before a game are expressing what are merely beliefs that those athletes have great ability or potential, as opposed to expressing any trust, dependence or reliance upon those individuals.  So if one takes an unclear message, mixes it with modern semantic ambiguity, and mixes it also with faith’s capacity to have different sorts and objects or targets, he is poised to produce more cases of the false brethren that have been mentioned quite often in past articles of this blog.

(Again, apparently it is by vagueness of teaching and preaching that one unbeliever goes on to believe merely that Jesus is great and powerful.  Meanwhile, another unbeliever goes on to trust his response to the Gospel or a gospel as means of salvation from fear of divine wrath.  In the meantime, still another unbeliever goes on trust Christ for the wrong things, and so on.)

If one goes back to read the New Testament to see how matters were handled in the earliest days of the church, I think that he or she will find that it’s okay to spend some time, effort, and repetition in doing the work of what is rightly called evangelism.  In Acts chapter two apostle Peter finds time to quote the prophet Joel, to speak of the wonders and signs performed through Christ, to mention the role of predetermined or predestined actions in the life of Christ, and so on.  In Acts 13.13-52 the apostle Paul likewise does not attempt to truncate or supersimplify the good news of Christ into a short sound byte or blurb; in fact, his audience even invites him to return to speak to them again despite his would-be verbosity.

So perhaps in the future it would be good to remind people--specifically Christians--of various things and to later teach the same thing to unbelievers.  For example, in Mark 2.10 we are told that while the Son of Man walked this earth he had authority to forgive sins.  We are also told in Matthew 28.18-20 that all authority in heaven and earth was given to him.  If God as the authority to forgive sins, and if all authority has been given to Christ, does Christ not have the authority to forgive people’s sins?  And if Christ has this authority, is this not a good reason for sinners to trust Jesus Christ if they call upon his name?

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Any comments on the matter, sir?

Challenge for Trinitarians

Christians tend to be behind the curve on different things. Yet as soon as Christian apologists figured out that the law of transitivity of identity and/or Leibniz’s Law of the Indiscernibility of Identicals proves what we all knew in our hearts to be true, many of these apologists came up with a quick answer.

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If A = C, and if B = C (where “=” signifies the relation of identity), then A = B. For example, if Samuel Clemens is the one man who invented Huck Finn, and if Mark Twain is the one man who invented Huck Finn, then Samuel Clemens is Mark Twain.

On a different yet related note, if A = B, then whatever is true of A is true of B. For example, if Y'shua is Jesus, and if Y'shua is the Messiah, then Jesus is the Messiah; and if Y'shua is Jesus and if Jesus is the Messiah, then Y'shua is the Messiah--no exceptions.

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Now, Christian apologists know this rule, and many of them have been confronted with the true (!) statement that if F = G and S = G, then F = S --or rather that if the Father is identical with the one god that exists and if the Son is identical with the one god that exists, then the Father is (identical with) the Son. One thing they have done in response is to take a sentence on the order of “The Word was God”--as in John, chapter one and as in common Christian parlance--and then have the boldness to treat the noun “God” as if it is a predicate noun both in Koine Greek John 1.1 and in common parlance. Translation: they take the noun “God” and they treat it like an adjective, all such that John’s sentence “The Word was God” may as well be rendered as the sentence “The Word was divine.”

And that’s supposed to be their solution to the problem: to boldly make a noun to be an adjective. Now, let’s assume for a moment that this analysis of “theos” is faithful to Greek grammar and that this analysis of Modern English “God” is faithful to English grammar and pragmatics. Okay, so John 1.1 may as well be rendered “...The Word was divine”--but so what? One could also aptly use the word “divine” in speaking of the attributes or properties that God has--God has divine properties of omniscience, omnipotence, etc. Those properties are divine, yet those properties’ being divine do not make them to be as great as the Father; so what follows is that Jesus’ being divine (in the sense of the word in question) do not necessarily make him to be equal with the Father or as great as the Father, despite the whole intention of Christian apologists in drawing attention to the idea of a predicate noun in the first place. What this means, in turn, is that the possibility that John expresses the proposition in John 1.4 that the Word is the one god that exists does remain; likewise, it follows that Christians perhaps unwittingly and unintentionally do contradict themselves with regard to the doctrine of the Trinity.

Yet there is another attempt at a solution to the problem raised by the nature of the identity relation. I have actually seen people equivocate and use four-term fallacies in order to save face for popular, contemporary emphases on the doctrine of the Trinity which revolve around sentences like “The Father is God, the Son is God...but the Father is not the Son.” I have actually seen people argue like this:

(1) I am human.
(2) Billy Graham is human.
(3) But I am not Billy Graham.
(4) So it is possible for two distinct objects to be human.
(5) So by analogy, it is possible for two distinct objects to be God.

The argument involves and depends on equivocation. It’s understood by rules of common parlance that “to be God” is a grammatical construction formed with the equative copula “be” and the noun “God.” Yet it is also understood that “to be human” involves the use of an adjective (not to mention the predicate “be”). (Compare: “To err is human.”) So the argument depends on a false analogy.

Yet there is a similar argument:

(1) I am a human.
(2) Billy Graham is a human.
(3) But I am not Billy Graham.
(4) So it is possible for two distinct objects to be a human.
(5) So by analogy, it is possible for two distinct objects to be God.

More or less of a four-term fallacy. One knows good and well for there to be an analogy, the contestant has to go all the way to say what he did not have the courage to say; if premise (4) is to stand, and if the argument is to be valid, then premise (5) must be changed as follows:

(5′) So by analogy, it is possible for two distinct objects to be a god.

So what the argument would end up suggesting, in a modified form, is that the Father is a god, the Son is a god, and that the Father is not the Son. Okay, so how many gods are there, anyway? Answer: one. But that means that the Father is the one god that exists, and that the Son is the one god that exists, and consequently that the Father is the Son, a proposition which Christian apologists try avoid.

Yeah, such are the pitfalls of trying to mix and dabble with all the different functions and meanings of the verb be (which are listed in any decent dictionary, though perhaps not the more recent usage which even makes “be” to mean cost in certain contexts). The attempts really do not seem to work.

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Finally, one last problem with the attempt to render “God” as a predicate noun when Christians say “The Father is God, the Son is God...but the Father is not the Son.” Presumably, they base their believe that F and S = G on the Scriptures themselves. Well, guess the Scriptures have to say about this matter of predicate nouns: they suggest that the premise of the predicate noun cannot save the day. Consider the following:

26 And after eight days again his disciples were within, and Thomas with them: [then] came Jesus, the doors being shut, and stood in the midst, and said, Peace [be] unto you. 27 Then saith he to Thomas, Reach hither thy finger, and behold my hands; and reach hither thy hand, and thrust [it] into my side: and be not faithless, but believing. 28 And Thomas answered and said unto him, My Lord and my God. 29 Jesus saith unto him, Thomas, because thou hast seen me, thou hast believed: blessed [are] they that have not seen, and [yet] have believed. (John 20.26-29, KJV)

Simon Peter, a bondservant and apostle of Jesus Christ, To those who have obtained like precious faith with us by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ: (2 Peter 1.1, NKJV)

Apparently, Jesus is denoted by the word “God” in each passage. And the word “God” in these passages clearly are neither adjectives nor predicate nouns. To the contrary, this word is clearly used as a token of the identity relation in these passages.

So, score one for the Oneness Pentecostals or other naysayers in this case, because up to a certain point they are correct on this issue: contemporary expressions of the doctrine of the Trinity do have a problem. Of course, that is not to say that the problem cannot be explained away, but equivocation, four-term fallacies, and false analogies are no legitimate means of making the problem go away.

For future reference

There is a reason that jargon and tediousness exists in various academic fields or fields of inquiry: necessity. I type this that I may never have to explain myself again.

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1. Words refer to things, without being those things.

If I type “Barry Obama,” the 44th President of the U.S. is not suddenly on your computer screen where the name “Barry Obama” appears. There is a difference between the sign and the signified.

2. Words do not necessarily mean any particular thing, or IOW, the meaning of words is not intrinsic.

That is, suppose you have a baby lying in a crib in America who uses the word “dada” to refer to his father. The fact that “dada” denotes and connotes his father here does not mean that the physical set of sounds [dada] now refers to someone’s dad and necessarily carries ideas of the same when someone in who lives in Ghana and speaks only Ewe uses that set of sounds. No, if that person in Ghana says “dada” to refer to his sister and everyone belonging to his speech-community thinks of qualities or properties of sisterhood when they hear that word, then that word does not absolutely refer to fathers or connote fatherhood. That physical set of sounds does not have an intrinsic meaning.

Notice that this has nothing to do with ideas of deconstructionism or postmodernism.

3. What a word means and refers to are not identical.

The classical demonstration goes more or less as follows; compare the following two sentences:

(A) Hesperus is Hesperus.
(B) Hesperus is Phosphorus.

Naively speaking, A is not informative since we all know that any given object is itself. However, B is informative as it tells those of us who may not have heard the name “Phosphorus” before that there are certain properties attendant to the name “Phosphorus.” So the two sentences do not “say” the same thing though there is only one object being named by them. Meaning and reference are not identical.

4. The word “connotation” is ambiguous, and there is a particular word that can be used in lieu of it.

What word refers to it denotes, and vice versa; in fact, reference and denotation are the same. Meanwhile, connotations in one sense are those things which mediate the denotation relation, or the relation that holds between the sign and the signified. So if I say “Obama’s mama” and you have never heard this phrase before you nevertheless know that I denote the mother of Obama; for the ideas which are commonly and conventionally attached to the word “mama” determine how we use the word to denote new objects.

However, a name like “Omar” sounds hopelessly Arabic; but that does not mean that any object denoted by that name is Arabic, for there are people called Omar who are not Arabs. In other words, in the vernacular sense of the word “connotations”the name “Omar” carries Arabic or maybe even negative connotations those these same ideas or concepts play no part in the denotation process.

For this reason, it is helpful to use jargon to avoid confusion. The denotation of a name can instead be its extension and the properties which one has in mind and which one uses to determine the appropriate/conventional use of a name in referring to something can be called its intensions, with an “s.”

5. Just as words denote objects without their being identical, sentences express propositions without their being identical.

The physical set of letters “La neige est blanche” and the physical set of letters “Snow is white” are not identical. They have different locations and different forms. However, both sets of letters commonly and conventionally express the very same idea: that snow is white.

So sentences express propositions without being identical with them. However, the relation of expression is not the only relation that obtains between sentences and propositions....

6. Some propositions are merely implicated by particular sentences.

Thanks to HP Grice we have the terms conventional implicature and nonconventional implicature. Both matter.

But first, the word “many” simply means a large number of. So if any one of us were to say “Many people didn’t show up for work” we would be asserting precisely that a large number of people did not show for work: nothing more, nothing less asserted. However, we also know in experience that such a sentence will virtually never be spoken unless some people nevertheless did show for work. In this case, implicature is at work. The sentence itself expresses one proposition as true while pragmatic rules accidentally suggest that another given proposition is true—the sentence “says” one thing and “implicates” another. In this case, the implicature is also conventional since words such as “many” and “some” are commonly employed where implicature is at work.

Finally, nonconventional implicature shows up in random exchanges such as the following:

Smith: You going fishing this weekend?
Jones: I’ve got something else I have to do.

Jones does not say “no,” but it is understood nonetheless that Jones expects that he won’t be fishing.

7. Grammar can be the study of the rules by which words and phrases are put together. Pragmatics can be the study of the rules by which some words and phrases are selected against other ones per context. Discourse analysis takes things to a third tier and looks at how sentences and surrounding sentences and paragraphs work together.

8. Lexemes are analogous to morphemes and phonemes in linguistics.

For example, allomorphs belong to morphemes and allophones belong to phonemes. Likewise, allolexes would belong to lexemes. An example of a lexeme would be “baptize” where the words “baptizes,” “baptized,” and “baptizing” could be thought of as variants of the parent word “baptize.”

9. The meaning of the word “intuition” varies with context.

In linguistics, it more or less speaks of knowledge that a speaker may have without necessarily being cognizant of it. In philosophy, it can refer to direct or basic knowledge, knowledge which one does not learn through lessons or anything of the sort, but rather more or less something had from the time of a person’s conception or birth.

10. Though we are all familiar with the probabilistic from of reasoning which is inductive reasoning, there is also abductive reasoning.

An abductive argument may go as follows:

(1) It sounds like Smith just insulted me.
(2) But it is extremely unlikely that Smith would ever do such a thing.
(3) So Smith (probably) did not insult me.

Note immediately that this form of reasoning is not necessarily based on repeated observations of data, as is the case with inductive reasoning.

11. Some noun phrases are adjectival in function.

This is pretty much the case with Saul Kripke’s “rigid designators.” If I stop to ask, “Who is the 44th President of the United States?” I am not asking who Barack Hussein Obama is, but rather am making an inquiry into who has certain properties at the present moment. This is not to suggest that such phrases are many. Just a point of reference; that’s all.

12. Some words are non-referential, including nouns.

The word “nothing” is non-referential. Likewise, the word “car” in “I need to buy a new car” apparently refers to nothing since, if one will be honest with himself, the car he now has is hardly an object which he did have in mind when he says this and goes looking for a new car. Sentences like this seem to function in virtue of connotations and not so much denotations.

13. “Just in case” and “iff” mean the same thing in philosophy.

They mean if, and only if.

14. Sums

A particulate object is not identical with any of its constituent parts. Again, an object is not its parts. Want proof? Take that coffee table in your living room that is five years old. The table is five years old, but the atoms which compose it are 16 billion years old, or rather thousands of years old if you are a YEC. Nevertheless....

15. Metonymy

People do and will speak of objects as if they were identical, and not necessarily of ignorance or subterfuge.

Some metonymy involves synecdochy: “All hands abandon ship!” where the part represents the whole. Other metonyms pertain to relations which do not obtain between an aggregate and its constituent parts: “Germany invaded Poland in 1939.” But there is always some close psychological or extrapsychological connection between the two objects which are treated as being identical.