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?

John 3.5 and the Obvious

Well, Mr. Finnell has lately exhibited enough signs of Functional Apologetical Madness to warrant my attention and to serve as a lesson for others. For now, let’s just focus on the November 28 blog post, which is only one example of how apologists sometimes try too hard to argue a certain point.

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How many times have we read somewhere, “Tomatoes are not vegetables; they’re fruit!” When we have encountered this claim, we have dealt with someone who perhaps fails to realize that the average person doesn’t give a rip about fine structural distinctions of the average fruit and average veggies and doesn’t give a rip about the range of recorded historical intensions of the words “fruit” and “vegatable.” Instead, if it’s a plant-like thing that tends to be served like veggies, it’s a veggie per vernacular language convention; if it’s a plant-like thing that is watery like watermelon and tends to be eaten whole while in hand, it’s a fruit per vernacular language convention. And that’s the point: average Joes speak like average Joes, not scientists.

How many times have we read somewhere, “Jackrabbits are not rabbits; they’re hares!” When we have encountered this claim, we have dealt with someone who perhaps fails to realize that the average person doesn’t give a rip about fine structural distinctions and behavioral distinctions of rabbits and hares or the range of recorded historical intensions of the words “rabbit” and “hare.” Instead, pretty much if it hops and has long ears, it’s a rabbit: period, or per vernacular intensions of the word “rabbit.” And that is the point: laypersons speak like laypersons, not scientists.

Meanwhile, guess what: the Bible was written by and for individuals who speak like average persons and not modern scientists. Don’t believe me? What then are we to make of passages such as Leviticus, chapter 11 where insects--which we all know to have six legs--suddenly have just four legs? That’s right: no one in the time of Moses made the taxinomical distinctions of modern science.

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In the same vein, who truly cares about esoteric distinctions of (distilled) water and amniotic fluid any more than we care enough about such things to insist that “watery eyes” are not watery but eyes filled with lipids, proteins, mucal secretions, and also some water? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tears;) )

No one but an anal retentive scientist, doctor, nerd or Campbellite apologist could possibly care about such things. Bear in mind, meanwhile, that the idea that the water mentioned in John 3.5 is amniotic fluid is not something that non-Campbellites just plucked out of the sky or invented out of nowhere. Notice in the John 3 text that Christ first speaks of being “born again" and does not switch to the language of being “born of water” until Nicodemus brings up the language of emerging from his “mother’s womb”! Furthermore, would it not be apt of Christ to utilize Nicodemus’ mention of natural birth in order to contrast man’s fallen nature and the nature of regenerate persons to speak of matters of salvation--especially considering the apostle Paul’s extensive lessons in his epistles on the importance of being regenerate vs. being a slave to the flesh?

Don’t play the game of linguistic anthropology, grammar, pragmatics and discourse analysis if you don’t remember the rules.

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.