Some Notes on Greg Boyd's Crucifixion of the Warrior God Volume 2

Pretty much the same thing as my last post, just on Volume 2. Maybe I should note that these are just stream-of-consciousness initial reactions and hence won't be very polished and might seem too negative to some. But that should have been obvious from the previous installment! In any case, I actually really liked this volume as well, despite the numerous concerns listed below. Notes (again, mostly not very understandable without consulting the book at the same time):

General notes:
-Both volumes have been riddled with innumerable typos - spelling errors, incorrect words, missing words or letters, etc. The endorsements in the first volume contained a number of errors and it just went on from there. I don't know if anyone actually proofread the book or they just didn't care, but it makes it look very unprofessional and this book certainly deserves better than the distinct lack of care it received in this area.
-It's funny that Boyd doesn't seem to often like others using philosophical considerations to determine certain things unless they are his own and for his own conclusions.
-Still demands other interpretations "bear witness" to the cross, whatever that might mean.
-A real question: Non-violence. What is meant by "violence"? What is the scope of this non-violence supposed to be? Is the principle only supposed to apply between humans or are humans supposed to treat other livings non-violently as well? But which other living things? What about plants, fungi, or microbes? Some animals or all? If violence is simply doing harm to or killing a living organism, then we and Jesus would all be violent by necessity since this happens just be living.
-I'm still not entirely sure what "deep literalism" or the "Conservative Hermeneutic" from last volume are supposed to be. Especially when applied to stories when they are thought of as fictional/fables/etc.
-Boyd doesn't seem to see that non-order comes in two varieties - simply not-yet ordered and positively anti-order. So he tends to interpret all OT imagery of non-order as anti-order and associates it with Satan.

On specific pages:
647-648 - Moves way too fast. Generally could be clearer. It seems like the crucifixion itself is being identified as identical with various other aspects of salvation or things normally thought of as consequences of it. So I'm not sure what's going on here or why. It's really hard to follow the line of thought.
650 - 'we must understand every divine accommodation to be a reflection of the self-emptying agape-love of the eternal triune God.' It's not clear what "self-emptying" means here, but is this principle so because every divine action is to be understood in this way? Or is this some special principle here? If the latter, why? If the former, it's not clear what use is going to necessarily follow without smuggling in one's own assumptions here. We'll see.
652-682 - Almost all of this is useless and irrelevant - just a chance to grind an axe against non-open theists.
652-663 - Why is this here? It doesn't deal with defenses of classical theism or responses to his "this is not enough" objection, etc. Also doesn't deal with views that only take parts of classical theism on board. For instance, transcending time and immutable yet also immanent in time, relational, and passible (since immutability and impassibility are definitely not the same thing nor is temporal change required for God to have a real relationship with us or be passible - x affecting y and x changing y are distinct in that changing is one way of being affected but not the only one). On another point, knowledge or experience of God is filtered not simply through Israel's moral beliefs but also its religious or metaphysical ones as well. Hence God's frequent modelling by Israel as a pagan god (that is, using pictures of models of God as used by ANE for gods in general). So accommodation in that sense pretty much guaranteed.
666 - A bit question-begging here it looks like...
667 - Boyd says we must "ground all our thinking about God from start to finish in the revelation of God in the crucified Christ as witnessed to in Scripture." Ground in what sense? Why? What about natural revelation? Similarly for "anchored". If we did this, he asks, would we ever think God was immutable? Sure - why not? Humans suffer and change. Christ was/is human - so he can too. In that sense, so can God. But God can still be immutable in his divinity. A lot of rhetorical, perhaps question-begging, questions here with not too much argument. Seems to confuse ordinary language with metaphysical interpretations thereof (specifically, Boyd's metaphysical interpretations, based on his own prior philosophical convictions - not coming directly from Scripture, despite his own insistence).
668 - Doesn't taking on a human nature mean a change? No, except in the creation.
671 - Not clear what "simple" means here. Looks like it should be more than "lack of parts" but this isn't explained. Also, not clear why an unchanging God "bridging the 'ground of being' with the contingent and ever-changing world" is supposed to be unintelligible. What's supposed to be so especially nonsensical about it? What does this "bridging" even mean anyway?
672 - 1st sentence. The "then" doesn't follow from the "if"!
673 - You can get about everything Boyd wants without jettisoning immutability.
674 - According to Boyd, the Bible is more interested in God's moral qualities than metaphysical, which makes the previous discussions even stranger.
680 - Again, confusing various issues with the issue of power.
686-687 - Some question-begging here, it looks like.
693-696 - Girard. I would like to sometime see some real evidence in favor of his stuff. Is it true?
722-725 - Parts of this seem a bit off. Partly because of a reliance on a bad translation of Galatians 3:24.
731-734 - I don't really see what the biblical evidence is that all these laws of passages were meant to be mere object lessons. Boyd quotes from a bunch of people who agree with him, but there isn't really any biblical evidence of convincing depth on display here. So why accept this as opposed to just saying "I don't know why this is here"? I guess relying on that mistranslation again? Other explanations seem to fit actual biblical evidence better. It seems right for some stories, though...
739 - "It follows that" - no, it really doesn't.
772 - The argument vs. immutability in terms of Jesus' feeling divine abandonment isn't very good. It wrongly associates it with Nestorianism (though, since Boyd seems to be leaning into monophysitism, I guess a more central orthodox view would seem more Nestorian). More unnecessary swipes at non-open theists, in other words.
894 - Confused - if the future exists and God knows it from eternity there is no fact of what they will choose eternally preceding it. That fact, if facts exist and have any location at all, is going to be located in my actually performing that action, not as some prior thing constraining or forcing it. Boyd treats such facts as if they were mere programs that somehow the universe is being made to run, which is completely baseless. What he's doing is, in a sense, smuggling his own views of the future into opponents' views and getting the obvious results from that. Why is this here?
908 - Says God restrains, takes options away, but this is supposed to be somehow non-coercive and not violating free will. That sounds good, but doesn't really elaborate enough to see whether what he says is in fact true. How God does this matters, but Boyd doesn't really say how. But we need to know how in order to be able to assess whether it is really noncoercive,etc. or not. He says his view is clear but it isn't - at least not here. Doesn't really address the objection, I think.
923 - Whether we can imagine something and whether it is true or false are two different things.
936-938 - Not really relevant. Guilt-by-association/appeal to supposed consequences not really pertinent. Issue is whether it's true.
965-968 - Argues based on different sources, ignoring his earlier dictum that he was going to deal with the final form of the text. The question is not what sources were like or meant but what does it mean as it is in fact now? What is the meaning with these put together as they are now? Literal hornet  argument not very plausible. No evidence that there was going to be a hornet annoying them so much they would leave of their own accord.
976 - Something's been bugging me and at this point it became clear. Despite his protestations that he is bracketing out historical-critical stuff and focusing on the story itself, he seems to me at least to be confusing the two. He wants to say the conquest was not God's idea. But that's a statement about what really happened - that there was a conquest and that God wanted something and that the Israelites misunderstood. But Boyd is saying he isn't talking about real life, just the story. In the story itself, however, Boyd wants to say it really was God's idea. But he's supposed to be talking about the story. But he's not. That's a bit disorienting.
979-980 - What God said vs. what was heard. Better, I think, and more in tune with inspiration is to distinguish what God said (which is something filtered through culture, etc.) vs. what God meant. Maybe he said "kill" (because that is the word the human author chose in rendering God's will) and meant something other than kill. So it's not that God didn't say that but his less violent meaning was communicated through a more violent human filter.
1001 - "I trust my treatment ...has demonstrated how..." No, not really.
1013-1014 - The identification of Job's accuser and the chaotic force of Sea is not completely convincing - he doesn't seem to appear as the foe here that Boyd thinks of him as.
1061 - Boyd says the "Aikido-like manner" God won on the cross "clarifies both how and why Jesus was punished for the sins of humanity." Maybe it does that with the causal "how", but otherwise I don't really see where Boyd's explained this.
1062 - Says Jesus submitted to being killed by powers/humans and this defeats the "kingdom of darkness" because it "manifested" God's love. How does that work? This isn't really explained - the connection is unclear. Further on, concerning subverting "the myth of redemptive violence", it isn't clear how this is relevant. Again, the issue is whether it is true that is relevant, subversion or no.
1063 - "I trust it is now clear" - no, not really. Nor is the line of thought in the next sentence. At the bottom, the "then" doesn't follow from the "If so", at all.
1067 - Seems to be saying that people who disagree with him about divine violence haven't "yielded to the Spirit." Ouch.
1069 - I'm not sure all these expressions really refer to Satan.
1072 - Not again...
1087 - Again, it's truth that's relevant here, not this stuff.
1157 - Agreed that Carson is "biased in a deterministic direction" in his interpretations, but it's also just as true that Boyd himself is also but in a non-deterministic direction. Actually, though Carson is clearly biased, of course, I think it's not as strong as Boyd thinks it is.
1158 - "I cannot help but see this 'tension' as a blatant contradiction" - well, of course. That's because of your philosophical views. It's not a formal contradiction. There are a lot of statements here about what Boyd cannot do. Surely the question is about the truth of what Carson is saying, not Boyd's personal inability to agree with, understand, or imagine something. It isn't clear how any of Boyd's inabilities here actually support his historical theories.
1211 - I see no reason to think we can't "be genuinely tempted" by something we believe we cannot do. It depends on what it is and why we think we cannot do it (whether it is prevented by our character but we are physically able vs. we are physically unable to do it, for instance). I might genuinely believe it is impossible for me to kill someone but then really want to kill in a certain situation and be sorely tempted by it, even while still thinking that I ultimately won't succumb. This is different from, say, being tempted to fly when I know I don't have the wings for it. One inability is present within my "action-producing system", the other without.

Some Notes on Greg Boyd's Crucifixion of the Warrior God Volume 1

I like reading Greg Boyd but it's a bit of a love-hate relationship with his books that I have - they are generally good reads, very interesting, full of insight and creativity, clarity and faithfulness, but at the same time bad arguments, questionable assumptions, irrelevancies, and similar flaws. I'm now reading his massive two-volume Crucifixion of the Warrior God: Interpreting the Old Testament's Violent Portraits of God in Light of the Cross. I've just finished Volume 1: The Cruciform Hermeneutic. Through my reading, I've been taking notes of some (not all) of my questions or concerns as I go along. (So, to be clear, a question or concern at one point in the text doesn't mean it isn't answered later in the work - I mostly haven't seen this yet, but am hoping more get addressed in volume two). It's pretty much what I would have expected given my first sentence above and includes many (not so successful, in my opinion) seemingly needless attempts at connecting his open theism with the discussion. I should also note that there was a lot I did agree with, even sometimes when the arguments for what I agreed with were not good (a lack of good arguments doesn't always mean the conclusion isn't right). So without further ado, here are the notes I made on Volume 1 (unfortunately, this won't be very understandable without consulting the book yourself!):

General notes:
-There are way too many irrelevant accusations that various pieces of incorrect (or supposedly incorrect) theology are due in origin to classical theism.
-Much of the "proof" for some of Boyd's assertions in this book amounts to quoting other theologians. More biblical support would be nice.
-It's still not fully clear how the cruciform hermeneutic really is supposed to work. It looks suspiciously like it involves inventing meanings for texts you don't like rather than discovering the meanings they already have. But then the relevant passages would look like they are being retained in the canon in name only, contrary to what Boyd seems to want.
-It seems like in treating the cross as the center of his hermeneutic he is in fact choosing one aspect interpreted in exactly that way that can get the pacifist conclusion he wants, making it absolute, completely exhaustive without any room for further information or truths or contexts, etc. and can only be applied directly in the exact way he wants it to be. There are many weak links here.
-Claims often that opponents' views or methods "can't disclose how the Old Testament's violent divine portraits bear witness to the crucified Christ." But it's not clear what Boyd is demanding here, why we should think his particular demand (as opposed to other potential interpretations of such a principle) is the absolutely correct one, or what meeting it is even supposed to look like.

On specific pages:
70-74+ - Seems to treat the lex talionis as an interpersonal principle - that is, how as a private individual to treat someone who harms you. So he thinks Jesus repudiates the lex talionis in the Sermon on the Mount. But the lex talionis in the OT is actually a principle of legal/judicial action, not of how to respond when someone hurts you. That's part of Jesus' point - whatever might be commanded here, don't take vengeance! But that's not a repudiation of the law itself at all! Boyd doesn't really say anything to argue that the lex talionis really was intended be a principle of personal vengeance, so this section seems to fail. A lot of what follows tends to rest on the success of this, so that's not great for his argument in the larger section. (What's really weird and cuts against what he says here is his agreement that Jesus is not interested in talking about political/legal/judicial stuff)
74-75 - Weirdly, Boyd rests his case against capital punishment or killing of any kind on a story about Jesus that he doesn't think is even canonical. (Later he keeps relying on this as if it was!) I'm not sure how that's supposed to actually support him argument-wise...
150-151 - A bad anti-predestination argument (where by "predestination" I mean the Augustinian-Calvinist variety). There are better arguments than this one on offer, so I'm not sure why he feels the need to offer this seemingly rather poor one. 1) relies on a certain criteria of meaningfulness for a concept such that in order for a concept to be meaningful, those using it have to have something to contrast it with (in some sense of "contrast" not fully explained); 2) assumes that the only possible contrast with the concept of divine love must be some kind of action; 3) assumes without argument that predestination to damnation must of necessity be included in any such contrast or there is no contrast at all; 4) so he concludes that if predestination happened, then the love of God is a meaningless concept. Each of his assumptions in 1-3 are open to serious question!
161-167 - The unity of Christ's life stressed here makes it harder, not easier (contrary to Boyd) to single out the cross as the single defining event. If they're all so interrelated and mutually dependent, etc. this becomes a much more difficult task.
167-170 - Says that the resurrection is not the center since it must be understood in light of the cross. But we could just as easily argue in the opposite direction - that the cross must be understood in light of the resurrection. The atonement must be understood in light of the new creation - means in terms of ends! The resurrection is what justifies the crucifixion. So again, not a great argument here.
chapter 5 - Claims that there are no exceptions to Jesus' commands of nonviolence. But does not give proof that Jesus was speaking about things like official administration of justice within a proper legal/judicial system, etc. After all, Boyd explicitly says elsewhere that Jesus wasn't generally concerned to speak of or to such systems!
226 - Claims that if God ever acted violently that would be hypocritical. But why? Government officials can say not to confine people but are not hypocritical when they put criminals in jail nor are parents hypocritical when they tell their kids that the kids are not allowed to drive the car. Differences in context, authority, position, attributes, etc. do make relevant moral differences!
269-273 - Assumes without any argument at all that issues of divine control and of divine power are pretty much the same. But why?
274 - Not clear what is meant by "wisdom" - weird, unconvincing argument.
384-385 - Odd reasoning in favor of applying the label "Might Makes Right" to the view that divine violence is correct even if we can't see it. The argument is really nonsensical, smuggling in divine power for no apparent relevant reason and making huge, unargued and unwarranted assumptions just to be able to stick a silly label on opponents. What on earth is this even in the book for?
386-387 - Another poor argument against the same view - this time that it would make "good" unintelligible. As if "good" was a purely descriptive word, where the description is what we happen to apply it to in our own human cases (de dicto, not de re) such that any deviation would upend it. But this is pretty implausible (and this sort of argument has been ably refuted elsewhere, so there isn't really much more to add here).
387-388 - Makes claims about competing views that are both unargued and unfair (and inaccurate for many opponents). Also doesn't distinguish between instrumental and non-instrumental value. For instance, sticking a needle in someone is bad in itself but can in some cases be instrumentally good (giving medicine, for instance). Additionally, here and throughout Boyd doesn't really seem to get that there is a distinction between good and right and also between evil and wrong. An intrinsically bad action (sticking needles) can be right in some contexts, for instance. In the same pages, doesn't distinguish between God intentionally hard-wiring our brains a certain way and them being that way through some other explanation (which is odd given that his own theological views actually require such a distinction).
389 - Confuses intuitions in favor of moral rules with intuitions for the exceptionlessness of them. My points just above likely apply here as well - intuition in favor of something always being bad is easily confused with intuition in favor of something always being wrong, for instance. Is it arrogant to think we can perfectly grasp every possible reason or kind of reason such that we can rule out all of them as even possibly justifying an action contrary to a certain moral rule (and carried out by a being very different in position, authority, context, etc. from us)? There is also here an irrelevant objection relating to the supposed "consequences" of opponents' views (as if views have consequences of any kind in and of themselves!).
389-390 - Confuses analogy with qualitative identity. Seems to think we can and do know all the relevant circumstances.
390-392 - More questionable historical diagnoses of unclear relevance. Again, confuses opponents' positions as having something to do with power or the use of it.
404-406 - Thinks that the progressive revelation view which features accommodation to engaging in violence is committed to the cross not being the ultimate revelation. But isn't that rather the point of the view - that the cross is the ultimate revelation and hence the progress and accommodation for earlier violence? That is, that the earlier is merely an accommodation, not ultimately revealing? Further on, Boyd thinks character itself is only how we will or act, which seems to me wrong (character produces will and action - it isn't reducible to it). That's fine if you're a behaviorist, but otherwise it doesn't work well.
406-408 - Assumes progressive revelation can only proceed from falsehood to truth. Why not some truth, then more? Or some ambiguity or unclarity to less? None of these require falsehood and it's weird that he mentions these and then seems to ignore those options.
497ish - Seems to sometimes be saying that it is only via the cross that we can uncover revelation in many OT passages. If so, how then were these passages revelation for its original audience before the cross? If not, what is being said here? What was the nature of OT believers' access to the revelation in the OT in these places?
498-502 - The "Indirect" vs. "Direct" revelation analogy between the cross and the Bible seems a bit strained - they don't seem very analogous here at all. To me, anyway, this seems to confuse rather than clarify.
504-509 - Wants an analogy between proposed exegesis and "prosopological" exegesis which is supposedly in the NT. But it's not clear whether such a thing is even present in the NT as opposed to something similar which uses Scripture in a related way but without it being an exegesis of it.

"You Asked for It" Week 4: "How Could a Loving God Send People to Hell?"

More notes for the next sermon (these are a bit rougher than last time since I was a bit rushed in getting it out):

Here are some thoughts I put together! Hopefully some of these prove useful:

“How could a loving God send people to hell?” When people ask this question I think they often have a couple worries in mind:

1. It seems unloving to deprive people of heaven forever as punishment for a finite amount of sin.

2. It seems unloving to have people tortured forever as punishment for a finite amount of sin.

That is, the problem is both with what the damned don’t get as well as with what they do (and the amount of it too).

Underlying worry 2 is an idea of hell as involving literal torture applied to the damned. While this is a popular picture of hell, the biblical images of damnation are a bit more nuanced. In the Bible, damnation is described in terms of fire, darkness, shame, rubbish, destruction, and death. These pictures are ways of depicting judgment and separation from God and his kingdom. In other words, hell or damnation involves a split between the person and God and between the person and God’s rule on earth. That’s the center of the concept, not hell-as-torture-chamber with God-as-head-torturer.

So just as we can think of heaven as the place of God’s presence and will - and hence of Christians as already in heaven and bringing heaven with them to the earth (Ephesians) - so we can also think of hell as the place of God’s absence and deviance from his will - and hence of people as already in hell in their separation from God and bringing hell with them to the earth. “War is hell”, “I went through hell”, and similar sayings, then, aren’t so far from the truth!

This helps us not only understand worry 2 but worry 1 as well. The damned fundamentally, at the core of their being, do not want God’s kingdom - they don’t want themselves or how they live or think conformed to God’s will nor do they want to live in a world that does so; they simply don’t want the kind of relationship God offers nor do they want to value things the way God values them. Some may want some kind of heaven or paradise or a divinity - just not the actual one on offer!

Not only do the damned not want God’s kingdom, they would not be able to enjoy it even if they were somehow to find themselves there. Cornelius Plantinga, Jr.’s paraphrase of John Henry Newman: “Heaven is not for everyone: it is an acquired taste, and hard to acquire while our taste buds still resemble a crocodile’s back. An unholy person would be restless and unhappy in heaven.”

In sum, the damned are not fit for the kingdom of God nor do they want to be. The kingdom and the damned simply cannot work together. The damned are unfit for the kingdom like a fish is unfit for dry land and would suffer there. Placing the damned into God’s restored creation would be like shoving a rusty tool into the moving gears of a working engine - both will be ruined.

In the kingdom of God, in God’s restored creation, God’s will is done. By definition, the damned are outside this - they do not conform to God’s will nor do they want to. So when the kingdom fully comes to earth and God’s will is fully done and earth and heaven are made one, the damned cannot, will not, and would not take part in that. In character, in deed, and in will, they place themselves outside the kingdom and outside what is to them God’s intolerable presence.

This ability to place ourselves outside God’s will - to place ourselves into a state of hell! - is part of our original design. We were designed to be God’s helpers in shaping creation - and part of that creation is ourselves - and are given the freedom to conform to God’s will or not. Hence, we can shape ourselves in a way in conformity with that will or not. In other words, we can make ourselves through our actions into who we will become – we decide in the present our future character. We become our choices.

In a sense, then, God does not send people to Hell, we choose to become it.  Romans 1:28-32.

“Hell begins with a grumbling mood, always complaining, always blaming others…but you are still distinct from it.  You may even criticize it in yourself and wish you could stop it.  But there may come a day when you can no longer.  Then there will be no you left to criticize the mood or even to enjoy it, but just the grumble itself, going on forever like a machine.  It is not a question of God ‘sending us’ to hell.  In each of us there is something growing, which will BE Hell unless it is nipped in the bud.” C. S. Lewis

Being condemned to Hell is nothing other than being condemned to self.  Hell is our chosen “freedom” from God. “There are only two kinds of people – those who say ‘Thy will be done’ to God or those to whom God in the end says, ‘Thy will be done.’  All that are in Hell choose it.  Without that self-choice it wouldn’t be Hell.  No soul that seriously and constantly desires joy will ever miss it.” – C. S. Lewis

As others have said, the gates of hell, therefore, are locked from within. God doesn’t want to exclude anyone from his restored creation but some people voluntarily exclude themselves. This is why responding to the gospel and turning to Christ is so important - it is a turning to the kingdom, to God’s will and his future restored creation. Those in Christ are ultimately conformed to his will - they embrace it, they want it, they live in harmony with it around them.

(None of this, of course, answers questions like “What about babies” or “What about people who never hear or understand the gospel?” While these are great questions, they are separate from the question considered here, whether a loving God could send anyone to hell - the question here is could not who!)

(There is also the further question of whether God will allow the damned to continue in their ever-deteriorating state or instead will ultimately purge them from creation - traditionalists say yes to the former, annihilationists like John Stott say yes to the latter. That obviously goes beyond the current question!)

Evil as Purposelessness and the Problem of Evil

When we talk about the Problem of Evil, there are really multiple problems we may be talking about.  There is an intellectual problem, which involves dealing with evil as potential evidence against the existence of God.  Then there are various psychological or emotional problems, which involve some kind of psychological or emotional disturbance relating one's belief in, trust of, or relationship with God to some particular evil(s) one is being confronted with.  The latter, of course, often leads to or is connected with the intellectual problem in obvious ways. 
There are various reasons, not necessarily mutually exclusive, why we might suddenly be having trouble with God and evil when faced with some particular evil(s):
(1) We had never really carefully considered evil before or ignored the sufferings of others and so did not previously really appreciate its true awfulness.  This obviously leads into the intellectual problem. 
(2) We are treating ourselves as more important than others or somehow special.  This invites the response, "You knew all about these horrible evils in the world before - what makes you so special that when it happens to you it's suddenly problematic but not when it happens to others?"
(3) We are experiencing the evil as a disruption or dark time in our relationship with God (perhaps a sense of abandonment) and just want the feeling of that relationship to return.  This is more Job's response.
(4) We are dealing with the felt need to give the evil we are facing meaning or a specific purpose.  This is generally accompanied by the assumption that if God is completely sovereign this evil must have a very specific, unique meaning and purpose inherent in it.  The evil, however, seems senseless, pointless and often the feeling of the person going through is "Why, God, why?"  This is the source of trouble I'll be focusing on in the rest of this post.
A response to (4): Even if everything is in God's plan and even if we took a strong Calvinist-type view, that still doesn't actually require each evil to have a special, unique meaning and purpose inherent in it.  God can and will use evil to bring about good or will redeem that evil, but that doesn't mean it has a special and unique meaning and purpose all on its own.
An idea: Think of evil and godlessness as absurdity, as purposelessness.  Our present evil age is characterized by this.  Tragic evil is senseless on its own.  God can bring good out of it, but that doesn't make it any less senseless in its own right.  We can think of the kingdom of God, then, as bringing meaning and purpose to this earth - there is no (ultimate) meaning or purpose outside God.  As Ecclesiastes asserts, life in this current world-state, in that shadow of death and the meaningless absurdities that characterize it, is but vapor.  Only in God is there any transcendence of this - meaninglessness will be swallowed up in meaning, pointless absurdity in glorious purpose.
Evil, then, can be thought of as deviation from the ultimate purposes and plans of creation set forth by God.  It is malfunction, things falling from their goals, failing to be what they should be.  Even if we are speaking of an elevated sovereign will of God as opposed to some other aspect of his will, particular evils can still count as purposeless in just that sense of having no particular, unique purpose to them.  One can think of them, for instance, as spandrels, a byproduct of bringing about things with purpose, or in other ways such that this way of thinking can still remain compatible with a strong view of the divine plan and providence. 

Annoying Theodicy Objections

As a philosopher, this kind of thing frustrates me to no end. From a recent book review:

"A solution to the problem of theodicy, that is, the reconciliation of the existence and effect of evil with the righteousness of the traditionally defined Jewish or Christian God is, to my mind, simply philosophically impossible. The problem arises due to a certain cluster of defined characteristics of God. God is one, omnipotent, omniscient, omnibeneficent, omnipresent, immovable, impassible, the purposeful creator of all, and involved in history. One simply has to give up one or more of these characteristics to explain how evil came into the world, or one has to argue that evil is not truly evil but only appears to be evil from our limited human perspective."

It annoys me when I see this kind of thing coming even from some otherwise good evangelical theologians (having philosophical training, contemporary theologians can often annoy me). One of my favorite Christian authors has even stated that trying to do theodicy or answer the problem of evil is immoral. Unfortunately, they do not give very good reasons - showing that the existence of the traditional God and the existence of evil are compatible is NOT the same thing as making evil good or belittling it or anything of the sort (that is one way of doing it, but only ONE among many). Some people need more philosophical training! I for one would not opt for either side of the false dichotomy that shows up in the quote above.

Ehrman on the Bible on Suffering: A Short Historical Write-Up

Bart Ehrman’s work God’s Problem represents a combination of two different streams of attack on the Christian religion that have gained steam in American culture in the past few years, particularly with the rise and great popularity of the anti-religious zeal of the “New Atheists” (who, in fact, in both age and mostly-regurgitated arguments are ironically on average more on the older side), and – since it is written on a popular level and likely therefore to be rather influential – it is thereby worth looking at. One stream represented in the book is to attack Christianity at its foundations by attacking or trying to cast a bad light on its sacred Scriptures. Another stream is to attack it philosophically, by trying to argue using philosophical reasoning that Christianity simply cannot be correct. In particular, the problem of how there could be an all-knowing, all-powerful, all-good God given that the world as we know it is so full of seemingly gratuitous and horrendous evils has for several thousand years generally been one of the most important objections to theistic religions of all varieties, not simply the Christian one.
Ehrman’s book, then, combines these two streams and argues that the Bible does not give a satisfactory resolution of the problem of evil I have just described in the previous paragraph. Indeed, Ehrman does not seem to think that there is any resolution – or at least not one he would be willing to accept. Indeed, Ehrman’s own problem with the problem with the problem of evil, as it becomes clear as you read his responses to various Christian or theistic proposals regarding evil, is one of the heart or will rather than primarily of the intellect. It seems hard to imagine him being willing to accept a philosophical or intellectual resolution of the problem by proving that it is metaphysically possible for there to be an all-powerful, all-knowing, all-good being and also for there to be evil. This becomes even clearer when one reads subsequent things he has written or said on this subject (he pretty much explicitly admitted as much in an online discussion with N. T. Wright ). In that case, then, contrary to the title of his book, it seems that the problem is really Bart’s Problem, not God’s.
There are a great many very sophisticated and very smart Christian or theistic philosophers of the past fifty years or so who have done much excellent work on the problem of evil – so much so, that atheist philosophers only rarely these days try to attack theism via the problem of evil in its traditional form. Yet Ehrman largely deals with various responses to the problem in his book, when he deals with them at all (he leaves out a lot of interesting and very powerful proposals), by creating caricatures of them and attacking them either in their most unsophisticated forms or in their least plausible forms (and at times, though not always, with rather weak or unsophisticated rebuttals himself). He does not, for instance, deal well with the idea that evil may be a mystery that we are not currently (or, perhaps, will never be) in a position to understand – if, as he is willing to admit, this may be, then why reject God? If there is no contradiction between the existence of God and of evil and we know or accept this but do not know how to explain evil, there does not seem to be any remaining intellectual problem, since that problem is completely tied up with the contradiction, which has been here dissolved in mystery. One is led to conclude, again, that he may have struggled with the problem of evil but it does not seem to have been much at the intellectual level.
Ehrman’s problem seems to be a long rebellion against the Fundamentalist framework he spent so much of his earlier life in and which he is still stuck in and struggling to get out of, a problem I’ve seen in quite a few people who have abandoned the faith. The Bible, in this framework not only needs to be completely infallible in every single one of its written sentences but also needs to be a systematic theology or philosophical handbook by a single author with a single point of view, answering all questions with complete certainty and doing so in a plain and straightforward manner admitting no ambiguity or difficulties. Every answer to every question must be completely and fully answered for all time and for all circumstances, with full and complete assurance. Neither culture nor literary genre (nor the idea of differing manuscripts) are to be admitted into the reading of the text, which, again, means only what it “plainly” means and does and can only mean a single thing, a thing we already have and know.
The Bible, and the Bible’s discussion of suffering and evil, of course, do not fit this framework and hence Ehrman, so stuck in the framework despite his struggles to get out, must denounce the Bible for the lack of a single, clear, certain, unified answer given in a single, clear, certain, unified voice. For him, any answer given by a biblical answer must be read as if it was meant to be the final, ultimate, and only answer to all the sufferings and evil of the world. And since more than one answer is given, he thinks these answers must contradict each other and hence this cannot be the authoritative Word of God (at least in the sense he seems to want and which most Christians believe in) and there cannot be a good answer to the problem of evil at all. But of course, there is no reason to accept the framework of expectations Ehrman is trapped in, whether one is an Evangelical more on the conservative side of things or a Christian more liberal. Again, tellingly, it seems over and over to be Bart’s problem, not God’s.

Mormonism: A Short Historical Write-Up

Mormonism is an American-born religious movement that arose out of the general religious ferment of the American 1800s, which involved much creativity and bucking of religious traditions and a turn to creative, new, yet non-standard interpretations of the Bible and Christian doctrine and a distinct emphasis on prophecy. Out of this general milieu arose groups such as the Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and, initially as an import, the theological system of Dispensationalism. Out of all the many groups that coalesced during this time, the Mormons have definitely been one of the best organized, fastest-growing, and most influential, both religiously and politically (and increasingly marketing themselves as more and more mainstream, whatever their theological idiosyncrasies, in order to gain broader acceptance and to shake off feelings of discomfort that have been associated with them and their particularities).
One can see Mormonism as, in effect, a combined unity of two religious systems. One system, which is more embodied in the teachings of the Book of Mormon and most closely resembles traditional Christian teachings, is very similar to that of a standard Protestant church and is the form Mormonism took in its earliest days before it took on further developments under Joseph Smith and then under future prophetic leaders. This system is that of the local church, or stake, and involves going to church on Sundays for worship and moral instruction as well as the administration of the rites of baptism and communion, which are involved in granting salvation, which requires repentance in baptism and also faith.
The local church, then, represents a Protestant-like religious system focusing on the earthly life and on the procurement of salvation. Particularly Mormon teachings are not as common as general ethical exhortation and teaching from the Bible and hence this religious system is not, and may not seem to many Mormons who have not gone beyond it, to be really all that different from what other Christians do or believe. Mormon missionaries, in particular, tend to stress this system when evangelizing others, trying to avoid most of the particularities associated with the temple system which I will turn to next, and instead trying to present Mormonism as really just another church but one that has now got some things going for it that others do not (a living prophet, for instance). Focusing on this system, they say things such as that they “believe the same things” or “believe the same gospel” that other Christians do and focus, out of all their writings, on the Book of Mormon which well-represents the Mormon version of this sort of religious system.
As time went on, however, another sort of system was laid on top of the Protestant-like system by Joseph Smith and his successors. The salvation-oriented system of the local stake was but the beginning foundation for a much more glorious system oriented towards the exaltation of Mormons – that is, towards their being made into gods in their right just like the Father himself. Salvation, in this system, is merely one of the prerequisites to gain the chance to get one’s foot in the door. Exaltation is the real goal for the whole Mormon religious structure and the exaltation-oriented structure focused on and in the temple as opposed to the stake is the means for achieving it.
This temple system represents a kind of mystery religion, complete with esoteric knowledge and secret rituals designed to secure through the ritual power unleashed thereby the exaltation of the individuals so involved. Mormons who hope to participate in all of this have to meet certain stringent requirements and perform a number of different rituals at various discrete times in the temple before they can be guaranteed godhood. Mormons who have not been or cannot yet be involved in the temple and its uses of religious power may know little to nothing about it or the theological ideas associated with it, particularly given the secrecy and sacredness associated with the whole system.
To be exalted, Mormons must get married in an eternal marriage in the temple, which means that husband and wife will be able join together as gods and start the whole process of creation-fall-redemption-exaltation again with their own spirit children just as God the Father and his heavenly spouse have done with their own spirit children – a process God the Father himself has undergone in a process of embodiment-exaltation, having himself achieved godhood from a lower state. Creation, fall, and redemption are just part of a continuing process developing spirits from their initial states and into full godhood. This process required embodiment, which inevitably brings sin, which requires redemption, and which thereby provides an initial foundation on which to build and acquire final exaltation. Sin and the Fall, then, in this system were parts of the plan in order to turn spirit-children into gods. Christ was simply one of the spirit-children who volunteered and was chosen to carry out that redemption prior to the plan’s implementation, a very different Christ than the traditional Christian one and ultimately a very different system of religion as well.

Update!!! (Finally...)

Wow, it's been a long time since I've blogged on here - about three years! That's what happens when you have two more kids come along and finish off your dissertation! So, update on what's happened since the last post:

October 3-4 2008: I participated in the first Midwest Philosophy and Theology Conference at Lincoln University and met some awesome people there in the process. My paper was entitled "A Mea Culpa for the Felix Culpa?: A Greater Goods Response to the Problems of Evil and Hell" and was an exploration of theodicy or defense without appealing to libertarian freedom (although, as I indicate at the end of the paper, I think the best theodicy or defense will probably need to combine these approaches in some way). The proceedings can be found here. I recommend Anderson and Lim's papers, which were very interesting.

Just a couple weeks later: new baby!!!

Spring 2009: Pacific APA in Vancouver. I gave an abridged version of half of one of my dissertation chapters. For the abstract, along with those of the rest of the meeting, see here.

March 2009: Move to the Bay Area.

Fall 2009: Finish dissertation! Time, Tense, and Mind: A Case Study in Metaphysics and Perspectival Representation is all done! Now if only I could get a job...

Spring 2010: Nope, instead, I get into the Graduate Theological Union at Berkeley in their Masters of Biblical Languages Program (since the only logical thing after not being able to find employment is go back for another degree...). As a master's student, I am affiliated with one of the GTU's member schools, so my choice is the DSPT (Dominican School for Philosophy and Theology) - which is interesting since I'm not Roman Catholic - with Sister Barbara Green as my adviser.

Fall 2010: Start my new program. That's about where I am now. I'll post some more new stuff as I'm able (we had yet another baby in March!).

Christ and Proper Functioning: Past Notes

More past notes. You'll be able to see the beginnings of a self-formation view (see some of my other blogs on this) take shape here as well as me toying with various connections with morality and God.

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10/6/01

No one goes to Hell for not being a Christian. Everyone is headed there anyways - because we are human. Christians are merely those who have opted for the way out.

10/27/01

To be a Christian - to follow Christ, to have Christ as Lord, to love, to be conformed to Christ, to glorify God. It is to function properly - how were designed by God to be. How were we designed to be? To glorify Him and live with Him and one another in perfect joy by loving God and one another perfectly. To live according to design is to live as God wants and thus also being as God wants; we are in His kingdom and have Christ as Lord. As Lord, he tells us and shows us how to love - and so we follow him. He is the perfect example and therefore we try to conform to him. Lord -> glorify -> love -> conform -> follow. Following is the first step in making Christ Lord. We follow to conform and in doing so love and thus glorify God, who is in this way Lord over our lives. All the ways of describing the goal of Christian life are linked.

11/2/01

There must be a sense in which ultimate freedom includes not being able to do certain things the one who is less free can do. This connects with the fact that we can have a hand in building our own character.

11/9/01

He is a good thief = he is successful at doing thief-like things - he functions well as a thief. He is a good person = he functions well as a person - performs functions of personhood. This is a good action = conforms to the standards = is the action of a perfectly good person. Bad = fails a standard of goodness. - He is a bad thief. Evil = bad person/bad action + ?

What does it mean to function well as a person? If we try to figure this out on our own, we can try to give an ethical imperative to try to capture this, like the utilitarians or Kantians. But these will always fail in some case or other. Why, after all, is conforming to utility functioning well? Why is this what it means to perform the functions? Kantianism fares better, but it still cannot cope with actual life. Is morality conventional? Is being good a conforming to our own constructed standards? The Christian answer is that being good is being as God designed us. Pleasure, pain, partiality, impartiality, value and valuelessness all find their fit in the Christian view of goodness. What does it mean to say that God is good? Obviously, He is good by definition. All He does is good, for what higher standard must He conform to than His own? This shows that all accusations against God are unfounded - it is to mistake the Creator for part of His creation.

11/19/01

What are signs of improper functioning of humans? Pain, for one. Improper functioning causes unpleasantness. We are averse to improper functioning. No matter how drawn to it, we still function improperly and thereby experience unpleasantness in some area, some lack of perfect peace and joy. This obviously, however, does not make utility a mark of goodness - pleasure and pain, rather, are consequences of moral life rather than its nature. We know things are meant to be different. All of this coincides with the divine command theory of ethics yet diverges in so far as ethical life is in our nature from God rather than imposed on it bey God - real ethics is an ethics of character rather than rule-following. Ethics does need God, but not for the lame reason that moral law requires a law giver. Ethics needs God because humans and their life need a Creator. Law is a formalization of a way of living - it is a formal descriptions of the way things are done by perfect people. Law is to be followed not because it is law but because it is the way one lives if one is perfect. This is perfect law - God's law. Human law, falling short, is obviously not the same kind of thing.

11/21/01

In Adam, therefore -> No proper function - cannot enter into God's reign. Christ's death and resurrection paid for all sins. In Christ, therefore -> cost of improper function paid - free to enter into God's reign, freed from sin. In Adam, are considered as him and are in fact as him. In Christ, are considered as him and are made to be as him - Christ paid our way into the kingdom of God and proper functioning. Christ triumphed over sin, death, all the powers, and Satan. How? The weakness of the world.

1/9/02

That our proper function is a certain way is part of the background of our lives and how we think - especially how we think morally, no matter how confused we may otherwise be or become.

12/13/02

As free I shape my decisions, my character, myself, my future - I build for myself a future destiny of what I will be for all eternity. Adam and Eve were flawless but not perfect or complete. To bring out this original flawlessness we might call it by perfection and simply say they lacked completion or the fulfillment of what they were. To live perfectly would have been to grow into completion. The incomplete may sin or not - they are on the path of building themselves. The complete may not- they have completed the project of becoming what they are. So my free will expresses itself in perfection through the possibility of falling into sin, while my free will expresses itself in completion through the impossibility (in the resurrection). Some, however, will end their time of making with something which is not what they are but a mockery of it - something which cannot of its own free will go into completion because it has wrought itself fully but as a marred, malfunctioning shadow of what it could have been. Such are those who do not find themselves in the kingdom.

2/19/03

Components of Internal Autonomous Freedom: Freedom of the Will, Self-determination of character, Rationality (full?), Autonomy.

Notes on Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil Chapter 6

Like the previous chapter (reviewed here and here), chapter 6 of Boyd's book has a lot of interesting stuff in it. However, as usual, there's a lot of looseness, unclarity, confusedness, and so on in his exposition and argumentation. I'll give a few examples. To defend his theory against the charge that whether or not there's free will in the libertarian sense, God could just remove the bad guys from the world or do some other sort of intervention, Boyd postulates that God simply can't terminate the bad guys or interfere with them. He says that it is a "metaphysical implication" of creating free beings that they have their free power to influence over a certain amount of time. So the fifth part of his theory is (TWT5) "The power to influence is irrevocable". At first, this is a bit hard to swallow. It doesn't seem all that hard to remove people's power to influence things. Knock them over the head and you've disabled them for a time, kill them and you have removed that power permanently (that is, putting aside complications relating to any sort of afterlife). So to say that God can't in the sense that he literally isn't able to interfere with bad people's bad free actions seems preposterous.

Often, though, it isn't quite clear what exactly Boyd really wants to say. Sometimes he wants to make this a metaphysical thing as if creating a free person at a given time made it metaphysically impossible to take away that freedom or that person, other times he seems to interpret this "can't" that applies to God in a moral way - that is, God can't interfere in the sense that he has obligated himself not to and must, in virtue of his moral character, stand by his commitment. In these times, Boyd sounds pretty much like he's saying something like what I said here. As usual, though, Boyd doesn't seem to really know exactly what he's trying to say or argue and runs together these two different ideas.

One thing he may mean is simply that in order to count as free one must be freely and uncoercedly self-determining up to the very end of one's self-formation. But then it's not clear what to make of people who have been taken out of the world prior to this point. Or why, if we are justified in interfering with people using their freedom to hurt others, God isn't also. Or why, if God isn't, how we could be in any sense. Boyd never really answers this question, though he does mention it - but I take this to be the hardest point of his theodicy to really address.

Or at least one of them. What about Satan and his angels? Boyd seems to think that they are past the point of redemption - their time of self-making is up and they've made themselves irredeemably bad. So why does God tolerate their continuing influence? Boyd here just uses his TWT5, but on Boyd's own view, Satan's time of freedom being over, there's nothing in interfering with Satan that conflict with TWT5. After all, it is also a part of Boyd's theory that (TWT6) The power to influence is finite. That is, one only has a finite time span to be free to make oneself. And Satan's is up, so that pretty much ruins Boyd's main argument regarding Satan's current continuing and active influence.

Notes on Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil Chapter 5B

Sorry about the long time between posts - I've been out of town for a week.

Last time, I talked about the first major section of chapter 5 of Boyd's book. Today I finish my discussion of that chapter. From here on out (though with some bumps along the way), Boyd begins to really shine as he really starts to work out his theodicy in greater detail without all the open theistic baggage weighing him down. He begins the final half of this chapter addressing the question of why, given that we should be free so that we can love or reject God, do we have such a strong power to reject, kill, and do other bad stuff to other people. His answer relies on the idea that God didn't just create isolated individuals for one-on-one relationships. Free creatures were created to live in a society bound together by relationships and mutual responsibility for and towards one another. We are supposed to freely love and care for one another. But to be free love and bless means that we are also free to hate and curse and when we begin to start down that dark path, everyone suffers at the hands of everyone else whether directly or indirectly and we share a collective responsibility for much of the evil that transpires. Some of what he says about this even directly reflects some of the same kinds of things I've said in this previous post.

The one major logical mistake he makes is with his TWT3 - "Risk entails moral responsibility" - which is neither supported by what he says nor is in the least bit true. I'm pretty sure he had something else in mind when he wrote this. Other than this, though, this second half of chapter 5 is very well-done and I think there's really a lot of truth in it or at least is pointing us in substantially the right direction.

Notes on Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil Chapter 3A

I've been reading open theist Gregory Boyd's Satan and the Problem of Evil off and on for a while now. His Trinitarian Warfare Theodicy, which he describes in this book, is interesting and there's a lot to be said for it. I won't say much about it in this post but it is many ways fairly plausible. And then there's the open theist stuff which is interwoven with the actual theodicy (though, as he admits, it is not essential to it). The arguments for open theism here are really not very convincing and make all sorts of errors including logical errors, failure to deal with all the alternatives, confusions about the opposition's beliefs, confusions about modality and temporality, and so on. Rather than attack his open theism, let me here just respond to a few things he says in favor of open theism in chapters three and four of the book.

Chapter three of the book is meant to argue for the following thesis:

(TWT2): Freedom implies risk.

However, all he actually does in this chapter is argue that risk and exhaustive definite foreknowledge (EDF) are incompatible and that Scripture seems to support the ideas of both risk and lack of EDF. None of that, of course, proves that TWT2 is true. That's just a (very simple) matter of logic. I'm really not sure how Boyd could seriously do what he actually does in the chapter and claim that he's argued for TWT2. One could accept everything from this chapter and yet reject TWT2.

Let's take some quotes and see some other mistakes:

"It seems that a decision cannot be risky if its outcome is known an eternity before it is made." Well, it may seem that way, but this is false. After all, a decision can be risky for me even if someone else knows what the outcome will be so long as I do not know. But maybe Boyd meant that for a given individual, if that individual knows the outcome of that individual's decision an eternity before it was made then the decision cannot be risky for that individual. That sounds much better. But it still won't give us what Boyd wants - this can still be false given everything he's said so far in the book. The decision can still be risky, after all, if the knowledge is dependent on the outcome of the choice and not vice versa. That is, if the knowledge does not enter into the account of why someone decided as they did or what the outcome is like but rather the outcome or decision instead enters into the account of why they have the knowledge of the outcome or decision then decision can still be risky. And this does not change if we make the knowledge begin temporally prior to the decision or its outcome - what matters is teleological or explanatory priority, not temporal priority here. Even better, if (as I believe) God is outside of time then his knowledge of free decisions or their outcomes cannot correctly be said to be temporally before the decisions or their outcomes in the first place. So either way, it seems that what Boyd says here and in the rest of this part of the chapter to argue that EDF and risk cannot coexist simply does not work.

For instance, speaking of those who will end up in hell, "If their damnation was certain to God, the impossibility of their salvation was also certain, and there was no risk involved in God's decision to create them." Again, for reasons stated above, not true. God can know that someone will be damned without it being impossible that they will be saved and therefore without it being certain that it is impossible. That p is the case does not entail that not-p is impossible. What is impossible is that both p and not-p, but that hardly says anything about risk. God's creation of a person and then their subsequent creation of their own choices may be explanatorily prior to God's knowledge of those choices, which would answer Boyd's "question of why God would create individuals he knows will end up in hell". The simple answer would be that the knowledge depends on the actual way things turn out, not the other way around - someone who believes in EDF need not also be a Molinist, after all (that is, someone thinks that there are definite facts about which free actions a person does or will do or will in fact do metaphysically prior to the occurrence of such actions or even in the absence of such actions). This in fact would perfectly mirror Boyd's own response to the same question, just without the additional questionable move of denying the existence of a definite future.

Boyd does consider a view somewhat like this that he calls "the simple foreknowledge view", according to which "God knows that certain individuals will be damned but cannot on this basis refrain from creating them". However, according to Boyd, this view "holds that God simply knows what will take place but cannot alter it in the light of this knowledge". This sentence contains a number of confusions. For one thing, the sense in which God cannot alter what he knows is a very trivial one - if someone knows that p then p is the case and if p is the case then not-p is not the case. And one cannot make contradictions true, so one cannot make both p and not-p the case. There's nothing more to this supposed inability of God to alter what he knows. But this hardly raises any sort of problem, let alone any kind of problem over whether God can control what goes on in light of his foreknowledge. After all, foreknowledge is not a monolithic thing - it's not as if all God's knowledge or action will be posterior to what goes on. After all, it may be the case that p at time t and God may, as a result, know that p at time t and therefore decide to do A at some other time (temporally before or after) which in turn makes other stuff happen so that God's knowledge of this other stuff may (depending on the nature of the events) both depend on how things turn out and God's own intentions in action. And so on.

So Boyd unfairly saddles the simple foreknowledge view outlined above (which is actually closer to or perhaps even a version of Boyd's "classical Arminian" picture, contra Boyd) with the additional, inessential commitment to God's foreknowledge being explanatorily useless. So Boyd clearly overlooks other elaborations of this sort of view, ones that do not suffer from any of these problems. In fact, much of his criticisms also saddle the view with belief in a temporal God, something which simple foreknowledge folks may safely and consistently deny. Even if we put my other criticisms aside, were a simple foreknowledge theorist to be an atemporalist about God, most of Boyd's arguments in this section would fall to pieces (for instance, his argument comparing God on this view to the mythological Cassandra).

More on chapter three's arguments from Scripture still to come...

A Quick Note on Self-Formation and Evil

Another quick thought related to the subject of my previous post:

This self-formation view (in combination with Incompatibilist views of freedom) seems to not only solve the Problem of Heavenly Freedom but it also seems to add some extra teeth to the Free Will Response against the Problem of Evil. How so? Well, one reason that might count in favor of allowing people to choose and do evil things is that without allowing that, God is not allowing people to choose for themselves who to be - he is hindering their freedom and autonomy as self-makers and self-choosers. By only allowing a choice for good, God (it may be argued) would be engaging in a kind of coercive violence at the very deepest level in a person - a kind of violation of the worst sort possible.

Freedom, Heaven, and Purgatory

One motivation for my taking on the self-formation view (see more about it here and here) is that it seemed to me to solve what I hear is now called the Problem of Heavenly Freedom (I had only heard of it once in my semester after high school at community college and I hadn't heard any more about it or even knew anyone was working on this until just recently). In a nutshell the problem is that the redeemed will not be able to sin when we are in our resurrected state when heaven and earth have been fully joined and the kingdom of God has been consummated. That is a very important part of the Christian tradition. But it is also an important part that in heaven we will be free - free agents with a free will (no matter what you might say different about our current, fallen state). What makes this even more difficult is when, along with the majority of the tradition, we adopt an Incompatibilist notion of free will (that is, a notion of free will according to which free will is incompatible with our will being determined). Incompatibilism seems to require that for an action or choice to be free we must have been genuinely able to do or decide otherwise. In fact, that's part of the basis of the Free Will Defense against the Problem of Evil - free will requires the ability for me to do good but also do otherwise than the good. But if we are in our eternal state then we can't decide or do otherwise than to decide and do the good. So we've got a problem here - either we can't really be free in our final state or we can do evil in our final state and there's no apparent guarantee that we won't.

One option is just to reject incompatibilism and another is to allow sin in the consummated kingdom, but we should see what we can do without going to such potentially extreme lengths (the latter option being, however, much more extreme than the former, of course). This is where self-formation comes in. If true freedom - true free will - involves being able not simply to form one's actions or decisions but to, more primarily, form one's character than we can see that so long as one has the character one has freely then the fact that one's character excludes some evils from the range of potential actions one can take is no bar to one's choice or will still being free in that action. After all, the limits to one's will are ones that are freely chosen by the agent. So if it is at least in part a result of my freely chosen character that I cannot sin in my final resurrected state then the fact that I cannot sin is then no bar to my freedom. Once upon a time I could sin and therefore choose freely to make for myself a good or bad character, but now that my self-making is over, I have a freely chosen character that excludes sin. Problem solved.

One interesting thing that I've notice, however, and I now know others have noticed as well (Tim Pawl and Kevin Timpe have an interesting paper on Prosblogion where they argue for the same basic sort of view as is presented in this post), is that this sort of view seems to lend support to the idea of some kind of Purgatory. After all, all or at least most of us do not achieve a perfected, fully fixed character in our pre-death lifetimes. So the fixing has to come after death - either in some sort of intermediate state or after resurrection and prior to the final state. Now, if our free abstaining from sin in the final state is to be really free, that fixed character has to be a result of our free actions. But that seems to require that the process of formation and choosing continue after death. It seemingly cannot come instantly at death or resurrection since character is supposed to be a free thing, a result of a process of free formation run by our choices for good or bad. Such a process cannot be too short since character is complex and so is the formation of it and it must be fleshed out with long patterns of activity. So how then do we achieve such a thing? One answer is that we need something like a Purgatory - a kind of opportunity to finish our self-making process freely and prepare ourselves for the consummated kingdom wherein there can be no sin or imperfection.

What about the common Protestant objection to Purgatory that since Christ has paid for our sins, we have no need to be punished for them and since Christ merited eternal life for us, we have no need to do anything to make ourselves fit for the kingdom? This objection seriously misses the mark and misses the whole idea behind this version of Purgatory. On this version, Purgatory is not there to purge the guilt from you or make you merit or otherwise legally fit for the kingdom. This is the common Western Christian mistake of automatically taking everything in terms of merit. This is not about merit or legal status at all, this is about the actual state of our character and whether we are still in fact sinful creatures or not. Sure, maybe Scripture doesn't talk about Purgatory, but so what if it doesn't? There are lots of truths or theological insights that are not explicitly taught in the Bible. So long as there's good evidence for it and it doesn't contradict Scripture, I see no reason to hold against the theory the fact that it isn't explicitly taught in God's Word. So at least this version of Purgatory is perfectly consistent with Protestant ideas in general. If I'm right about this, we have a good case for a kind of Protestant doctrine of Purgatory! Now, I'm still not sure about all of this, but it is interesting and seemingly very plausible.

Divine Hiddenness and the Problem of Evil

The problem of divine hiddenness, roughly, is this - if God's so keen on us believing in him, even to the point of possibly staking our salvation at least partly on it, why does he remain so hidden from us? In other words, how can a reasonable person be blamed for not believing in God if God hasn't made it as obvious to that person as it could possibly be?

For the purposes of this post, I'll leave aside the objection that God's existence is immediately obvious to everyone and so nonbelief is indeed always blameworthy in that sense. What I want to discuss is how distinct this problem really is - is this a problem that's somehow uniquely troublesome to Christians and similar sorts of theists? My answer is no. I'm not really sure what all the fuss has been about surrounding this issue of late (of course, I'm not as up to date on the literature on this topic as I'd like) - in my mind, the problem of divine hiddenness just seems to be one particular case of the problem of evil, albeit a somewhat striking one. Any answer to the problem of evil, it seems to me, will generally do just as well or just as badly as a response to the problem of divine hiddenness.

Now, why do I think this? Well, for one thing, divine hiddenness is just one example of the bad stuff that exists in our world - we were made for direct, "face-to-face" relationships with and knowledge of God and that lack is a bad thing. In that sense, divine hiddenness is just one more evil which God allows and yet which also perhaps results in people being punished, just like God's allowal of murder or rape. The connection with evil becomes even stronger if we take the biblical stance that sin has damaged and does damage our abilities to clearly perceive God or to assent our will to him or his truths. If that's so, and without sin we would in fact perceive God clearly and wonderfully, then the explanation for divine hiddenness lies in part in the explanation of sin and fallen, sinful state - that is, a solution to the general problem of evil. And if we're responsible for that bad stuff and it's that bad stuff that prevents us from knowing God then perhaps we are in fact responsible for any divine hiddenness we experience since it is brought upon us by ourselves.

This seems to me a much better way of approaching the topic than the well-worn answer I've heard some Christians give. According to some, God remains hidden because otherwise, (if, say, he started really obviously revealing himself to people, writing the gospel in the clouds in English, etc.) people would have to believe in him and so would have no free will. There's a couple things people could mean by this. If God revealed himself in this way then...

1. People would have no choice but to believe that God exists and so would have no free will.
OR 2. People would have no choice but to follow God and so would have no free will.

Now 1 is simply not true. Maybe people wouldn't have any choice but to believe that God exists, but that doesn't mean they have no free will. Free will pertains to willing to do something, not necessarily willing to believe something. There are all kinds of things we don't seem to have any choice (or at least very little) but to believe in it yet we still are free. Besides, believing that God exists doesn't necessarily change anyone's behavior - as James says, after all, even the demons believe - and shudder.

But neither is 2 necessarily true either. Why think that this would follow? Adam and Eve were in direct contact and fellowship with God and yet they still chose to disobey God and not follow him. So clearly the obviousness of God doesn't necessarily hinder our will in any way and still allows for us to reject him. Maybe there are some kinds of revelations that would do this, but I'm not sure what that would be or that anyone has ever experienced it (Paul perhaps?) and clearly God can be very obvious without things being like this (he walked with and had direct fellowship with Adam and Eve after all). So in either case - 1 or 2 - I think this sort of objection fails and that a better strategy would be to subsume the divine hiddenness problem under the problem of evil in general.