Tag: Paradox

Sunday, August 16, 2026

From “High church” perspective

The man who is entirely convinced

It is very hard for a man to defend anything of which he is entirely convinced. It is comparatively easy when he is only partially convinced. He is partially convinced because he has found this or that proof of the thing, and he can expound it. But a man is not really convinced of a philosophic theory when he finds that something proves it. He is only really convinced when he finds that everything proves it. And the more converging reasons he finds pointing to this conviction, the more bewildered he is if asked suddenly to sum them up.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Anselm’s god

It is nothing short of blasphemous to base an understanding of salvation on the idea that God gets angry or has a brittle ego. Anselm’s god is not the God of the Church, but a medieval monarch projected into the heavens.

Clark Carlton

Theotokos

Yesterday, the Roman Catholic and Orthodox celebrated the Assumption (Catholic)/Dormition (Orthodox) of the Theotokos, the Mother of God — a title we recognize for good reason:

Mary was not just a temporary or purely physical conduit of the Incarnation. The relationship between Jesus and his mother was transpersonal and transcendent to biology. She was truly the mother, and not simply the “bearer,” of God’s Son.

Patrick Henry Reardon, The Jesus We Missed: The Surprising Truth About the Humanity of Christ

I have heard this important truth dismissed, with Mary discussed as if she were a pipe and Jesus were water flowing down from heaven to earth through her, disguised as a human I guess. In fact, I heard it on WMBI, the flagship station of mainstream Evangelicalism in my day.

And no, I’m not exaggerating. Granted, it was a kind of devotional show, not deeply theological, and aimed at women, which may or may not have contributed to such slop passing whatever filters Moody Bible Institute had. If this were actually a firm opinion of the speaker, she would be a heretic.

The early Ecumenical Councils were all focused on the person of Christ. One such Council rejected calling Mary “Mother of Christ” in favor of “Mother (birth-giver) of God,” the point being to give no quarter to those who would divide Christ’s humanity from his deity. But Mary gets a lot of glory reflected onto her from her Son.

Nietzsche

Nietzsche was limited in his understanding of Christianity by the forms it assumed following the eleventh-century Papal Reformation and the later sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation. He therefore suffered, as have all Westerners since the Great Division, from a deficit in the experience of Orthodoxy. For hundreds of years, Roman Catholicism and Protestantism were the only Christian options known to Western thinkers. The old Christendom of the first millennium was forgotten, and the new Christendom that evolved from the Great Division was separated from Eastern Christendom.

John Strickland, The Age of Nihilism

I would not suggest that Nietzsche would have dropped all objection to Christianity had he encountered the first millennium expression, preserved in the Christian East, nor that his critique of Christianity is like rain off the back of a duck to Eastern Christians. He’s still an acid test for the Christian profession of anyone of a philosophical bent.

From, loosely speaking, middle church

Spittle-flecked modernism

[Ralph] Elliott said his liberal professors knew how not to run afoul of the more conservative base by knowing just how to speak: one way in the doctoral seminar, another at a revival meeting. I once heard one professor of this generation speak, a biblical scholar who taught his graduate students the then-standard historical-critical view that the Book of Isaiah was written by two or three or many people, centuries apart, one of whom may have been the actual Isaiah.

In the pulpit, though, this scholar said, “Some people get all sidetracked over whether there was one Isaiah or more. I say, if one Isaiah is good, two’s better! Amen! And if two Isaiahs are good, then three’s better! Amen! In this fallen world in need of Jesus, we need every Isaiah we can get.” The crowd roared in approval, none the wiser that they had just amen-ed modernist biblical criticism.

… Elliott concluded the doublespeak was about power, not truth. People employed theological jargon precisely because it enabled them to camouflage what really mattered to them: organizational power.

Russell Moore, Blasphemy Laws Are Blasphemy.

For what it’s worth, Orthodoxy doesn’t choke on modern biblical scholarship as much as fundamentalists and evangelicals do. That’s a long story, and I’m pretty sure I’m not qualified to tell it. But I benefit from it.

Still, having lived in an anti-“modernist” world for almost two-thirds of my life, I found this anecdote interesting. You could do worse than reading Moore’s whole column.

Something to cling to

To know that the Biblical stories have a phenomenological truth is really worth knowing. The poor fundamentalists are trying to cling to their moral structure. I understand why, because it does organize their societies and their psyche. So they’ve got something to cling to, but they don’t have a very sophisticated idea of the complexity of what constitutes truth. They try to gerrymander the Biblical stories into the domain of scientific theory—promoting creationism, for example, as an alternative scientific theory. It’s like, that just isn’t going to go anywhere. The people who wrote these damned stories weren’t scientists to begin with. There weren’t any scientists back then—there’s hardly any scientists, now.

Jordan Peterson, Biblical Series I: Introduction to the Idea of God Transcript.

I’m not endorsing Jordan Peterson as a Bible interpreter or as anything else. My personal fascination with him is long over — because logorrhea wears me out, I think. So I don’t even know whether he’s broadly right or broadly wrong about things.

But he’s at least directionally right here about the protestant fundamentalist approach to the Bible.

The sects and the Bible

A similar, but more sophisticated, complaint of monograph length came from John W. Nevin in 1849 when he rounded on what he called the sect system. According to Nevin, “This professed regard for the Bible” was what “distinguishes the sects in general.” But to Nevin the difficulty in that profession was as manifest as it was stupendous: “If the Bible be at once so clear and full as a formulary of Christian doctrine and practice, how does it come to pass that where men are left most free to use it in this way…they are flung asunder so perpetually…instead of being brought together?” This anomaly showed that the principle of “no creed but the Bible” was “absurd and impracticable”; it breathed “the spirit of hypocrisy and sham.”

Mark A. Noll, America’s God

Panning low church

Sundry flakes

Ellen Davis, who teaches theology at Duke Divinity School, recounts how one of her students “had a job interview at a Christian school in California where staff members cited the lack of recycling bins as an expression of their faith: by using up ‘resources’ as quickly as possible, they were hastening the coming of the Lord.”

Robin Phillips, Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation

Granted, that’s nut-picking, but it’s a “truth is stranger than fiction” nut. Much commoner is to watch conflict between Israel and its neighbors with unseemly intensity because one is convinced that “the coming of the Lord” becomes more imminent particularly as peace goes south in the Bible lands.

I “followed” Phillips, the author of Rediscovering the Goodness of Creation, on his journey to Orthodoxy through Calvinism — superficially like my journey, but Phillips was far more philosophically inclined than I. He was fretting about gnosticism infiltrating putative Christianity while still Protestant, penning one pivotal piece titled Are Calvinists Also Among the Gnostics?. I don’t know how he would modify it were he to write on the topic again from an Orthodox position.

Reductionist Evangelicalism

Rod Dreher recounts his argument with a nondenominational Evangelical who contended that church in the Metaverse is the wave of the future:

At one point, I asked him if there was, to him, any spiritual difference between worshiping in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, and doing so in a tent church set up in a Wal-mart parking lot. He said no. At that point I gave up. For him, churchgoing was about nothing more than exchanging information and being in the company of like-minded worshipers. You could do that in the Metaverse, he said; there was no meaningful difference between fellowshipping in person, and virtually.

This reductionist view was not one I can recall holding, and my not holding it may have contributed to my separation from what I call “frank evangelicalism” to a Reformed faith that was occasionally evangelical-adjacent. I hope it’s a fringe position, but I catch a whiff of it every time someone says Orthodox and Catholics spend too much money beautifying the places where they worship.

Not just a little manipulation, but a deeply pernicious manipulation

Here’s a typical Friday night youth group meeting. After the songs had been sung and the sermon had been preached and the eyes were closed (by most) and the mood was soft, the pastor would come up on stage and lay it on thick. “How many of you are still holding something back from God? He wants all of you!” The problem is, he would say this to thirteen-year-olds who had no clue who they were yet. So to say, “I give all of myself to God” can easily morph into “I give all of myself to whatever the leaders tell me to do.” Talk of surrender is more credible, and a lot more respectful of each child’s humanity, if leaders are also giving young people critical thinking skills. Why not teach them Bible basics and the creeds while giving the child space to think for themselves, without emotional manipulation? Well, I can think of a reason. It’s harder to control kids that way.

Jon Ward, Testimony (bold added)

I knew long ago that the wheedling “evangelists,” who Ward portrays accurately (though my encounters were in evangelistic crusades, not regular Friday night youth groups) were engaged in a kind of psychological manipulation. But Ward, in the italicized portion, heightens my understanding of the perniciousness of that manipulation.

Only wonder understands anything.

St. Gregory of Nyssa

I don’t do any of the major social media, but I have two sub-domains of the domain you’re currently reading: (a) You can read most of my reflexive stuff, especially political here. (b) I also post some things on my favorite no-algorithm social medium.

The paradox of the self-denying mind

I jokingly said on FaceBook a few weeks ago that I thought I’d lost my need for certainty over the last decade, but I wasn’t sure. One of the areas which no longer move me to indignation very often is the “Creation/Evolution” controversy.

As if by force of habit, however, I do still read about it when I stumble onto something. I probably have 3-4 unread books in that general area, as well as having read a dozen or more over the years – and a dozen is probably a gross underestimate.

I’m not really competent enough in the hard sciences to rely on primary sources sources, but there are some accounts for intelligent non-scientists that seem to be at a fairly high level. I take them all with a grain of salt, however, as (1) it has become clear that everybody has an ax of some sort to grind – else they wouldn’t be writing about it and (2) one side sounds pretty good until I revisit the other side.

There are Christians whose integrity and intelligence I respect (it is because I respect and read them that I stumble onto articles and books on the controversy as often as I do) who are adamant foes of evolutionary theory and proponents of Intelligent Design. But I don’t share their visceral passion. They may be right and I may be wrong. I was wrong once.  (Thought I was a second time, but I was wrong.)

Here’s my full bona fide, extemporaneous disclosure of what ax I have to grind – I who can go weeks at a time without thinking about the controversy:

  1. “I believe in one God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth and of all things visible and invisible.” (Nicene Creed)
  2. I.e., I believe there is an invisible creation, which conventionally is called “supernatural” but is in fact just as created as the visible, “natural” created world. The key distinction is not nature versus supernature, but created versus uncreated. And only the Holy Trinity is Uncreated.
  3. The uncreated Holy Trinity is impenetrable by science or reason generally, but has revealed Himself in Jesus Christ. That’s Himself. Not scientific detail about the past. (And not – cover your eyes, Hal Lindsay and Tim LaHaye – details of earthly life that are yet future.) The Old Testament preeminently reveals Christ typologically; secondarily, it reveals God’s dealings with earthly Israel and its neighbors. If there’s tertiary purpose – and there probably is – it doesn’t come readily to mind.
  4. Although there are Orthodox Christians – including Father Seraphim Rose, who was no intellectual slouch – who adhere to something like a full-throated Creationism® (used as a term of art for creation in 6 days of 24 hours about 6,000 – 10,000 years ago), I do not by any means understand that to be obligatory. My own position, very lightly held except for the preceding points, is generally Intelligent Design rather than Creationist®.
  5. Whatever else you can say about it, the theory of evolution has been scientifically fruitful. So, I’m told, was the theory of alchemy. If you can get the whole Guild on the same page, it tends to make things interesting and productive even if the theory later collapses. So evolutionists have not been dogmatically hanging onto a delusional and unproductive theory just because it reinforces a prior commitment to metaphysical naturalism (though one of their own famously said he’d prefer any natural explanation to any supernatural explanation because of such a prior commitment).
  6. I do not understand Darwin to have said anything about the origins of life – only about The Origin of Species.
  7. I don’t think neo-Darwinism has much more to say about the origins of life than did Darwin – except, perhaps, a few just-so stories.
  8. I believe in what Wesley J. Smith calls “human exceptionalism.” Regardless of the origin of the human species in evolutionary terms, there’s within us a microcosm of the one in whose image we are made.

Believe it or not, that’s all preliminary. The actual occasion of this posting is my discovery (if I’d read it before, I had forgotten) of an essay by polymath George Gilder, titled Evolution and Me. Gilder does not diminish the importance of others’ work in Intelligent Design, but takes his own path away from any materialistic reductionism through Information Theory:

I came to see that the computer offers an insuperable obstacle to Darwinian materialism. In a computer, as information theory shows, the content is manifestly independent of its material substrate. No possible knowledge of the computer’s materials can yield any information whatsoever about the actual content of its computations. In the usual hierarchy of causation, they reflect the software or “source code” used to program the device; and, like the design of the computer itself, the software is contrived by human intelligence.

The failure of purely physical theories to describe or explain information reflects Shannon’s concept of entropy and his measure of “news.” Information is defined by its independence from physical determination: If it is determined, it is predictable and thus by definition not information. Yet Darwinian science seemed to be reducing all nature to material causes.

As I pondered this materialist superstition, it became increasingly clear to me that in all the sciences I studied, information comes first, and regulates the flesh and the world, not the other way around. The pattern seemed to echo some familiar wisdom. Could it be, I asked myself one day in astonishment, that the opening of St. John’s Gospel, In the beginning was the Word, is a central dogma of modern science?

In raising this question I was not affirming a religious stance. At the time it first occurred to me, I was still a mostly secular intellectual. But after some 35 years of writing and study in science and technology, I can now affirm the principle empirically. Salient in virtually every technical field — from quantum theory and molecular biology to computer science and economics — is an increasing concern with the word. It passes by many names: logos, logic, bits, bytes, mathematics, software, knowledge, syntax, semantics, code, plan, program, design, algorithm, as well as the ubiquitous “information.” In every case, the information is independent of its physical embodiment or carrier.

I wont go much beyond that teaser about any details. Gilder speaks for himself, and you’ll find him persuasive or not for yourself.

But I do want to say this: I have difficulty seeing this as a “breakthrough description of the case against Darwinism” (Discovery Institute blurb) in any way that should affect non-scientists like me. Perhaps it really is a breakthrough scientifically (don’t expect to see white flags waving, however), but I’ll relegate that question to the scientists themselves.

For non-scientists like me, Gilder’s argument is cumulative evidence that there’s more going on in humanity, if nowhere else, than that which can be explained materially. The proverbial “bottom line” is kind of old hat:

Materialism generally and Darwinian reductionism, specifically, comprise thoughts that deny thought, and contradict themselves. As British biologist J. B. S. Haldane wrote in 1927, “If my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain, I have no reason to suppose my beliefs are true . . . and hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.” Nobel-laureate biologist Max Max Delbrück (who was trained as a physicist) described the contradiction in an amusing epigram when he said that the neuroscientist’s effort to explain the brain as mere meat or matter “reminds me of nothing so much as Baron Munchausen’s attempt to extract himself from a swamp by pulling on his own hair.”

Analogous to such canonical self-denying sayings as The Cretan says all Cretans are liars, the paradox of the self-denying mind tends to stultify every field of knowledge and art that it touches and threatens to diminish this golden age of technology into a dark age of scientistic reductionism and, following in its trail, artistic and philosophical nihilism.

Anyone who has taken philosophy knows that the “meat machine” is – well, a philosophical possibility. But I can’t live that way. And every word the materialist says to prove materialism to others says that he can’t live that way, either.

As I lose my need for absolute factual certainty, that’s evidence enough for me.