Lord’s Supper Meditation – Sure-Fire Investment

A Twilight Musing

“Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is common-sense advice that most financial advisors would give to their clients. “Diversify,” they would say, so that if one kind of investment fails, others could compensate.  That makes sense in the world of finance, but God invites us to do just the opposite in our approach to serving Him.  Just as Jesus sacrificed everything to fulfill God’s purposes, we His followers are invited to invest all that we have in His promise of eternal life.  The Lord’s Supper is an appropriate place to reaffirm that our commitment to God is total, even reckless in human terms, holding nothing back.

Jesus illustrates this principle of being “all in” for the Kingdom of God with two little parables.

 The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field, which a man found and covered up. Then in his joy he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field.

Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, who, on finding one pearl of great value, went and sold all that he had and bought it. (Matt. 13:44-46)

God’s Kingdom is depicted here as a treasure of such transcendent value as to warrant giving all one has to possess it.  In another place, Jesus seems extreme in His expectations of those who intend to follow Him:

Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it. (Matt. 10:37-39)

But Jesus did not shrink from exemplifying what he asked of His disciples.  Paul gives us a beautiful summary of how Jesus,

though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross.  (Phil. 2:5-8)

In his turn, Paul describes how he followed the example of his Master.  Though he had a brilliant career ahead of him as a leading Pharisee when he was called by Jesus, he “suffered the loss of all things” and counted them “as rubbish, in order that [he might] gain Christ and . . . know him and the power of His resurrection” (Phil. 3:8-10).  Indeed, his commitment to Christ was so complete that his personality was merged with that of his Savior: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me” (Gal. 2:20).

That is the radical challenge we meet in the Lord’s Supper.  Jesus calls us to invest recklessly in giving all that we have and are, to be fellow heirs with Him of the Kingdom of God.  Therein lies the power of symbolically sharing in the body and blood of Christ.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

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The Morality of Force

From the Old Testament prophet Micah (chapter 4), we read: 

For out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.

He shall judge between many peoples, and shall decide disputes for strong nations far away;

and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks;

nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war anymore;

but they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree, and no one shall make them afraid, for the mouth of the Lord of hosts has spoken.

For all the peoples walk each in the name of its god, but we will walk in the name of the Lord our God forever and ever.

The use of force against another person or group of people is now a topic of frequent conversation in my personal and professional life. I can’t seem to escape the conversations. It is something I seem to have to wrestle with on a daily basis. 

For starters, I am the father of two boys who use force upon one another on a regular basis. Anyone who has more than one boy can likely identify. I am often interceding, and occasionally am forced to use necessary force to break things up or discipline the guilty party if one can be determined beyond a reasonable doubt (which is rare). 

 I am also now in a position at a police department and am responsible for, among other things, the policies and training which have to do with the use of force officers use in their daily tours of duty. The process of trying to navigate through police use of force is a very tricky business in 2022 as lawmakers demand more accountability and transparency, dare I say perfection, by police agencies following very public failures of officers to use reasonable force that were understandably condemned by society and the vast majority of police officers. 

In addition, recent events in Eastern Europe have shocked the world, and caused many governments to suddenly come alive to the concept of the morality of force with the first military incursion on European soil since World War II. This stems from the aggressive use of military force by a dictator who seems unafraid to increase the ferocity of his attacks to target non-combatants and using weapons that cause massive destruction and human misery. 

Whether it be the short-lived, interpersonal violence between two brothers, the use of force by a government against its citizens, or the use of military force to achieve a political agenda, use of force is a critical issue for Christians and non-Christians to have a consensus on, in terms of how we make judgements of right or wrong, good or bad. 

We all intuitively know that there are times that people seem to objectively agree that a use of force is wrong or right. Thousands of laws and legal precedents are available to help us make judgements, but we aren’t all legal scholars, despite what social media would lead you to believe. 

When it comes down to examining the question of morality in force used against others, I have found one consistent word at the center of every evaluation, judgment and public opinion poll; reasonable. 

The statute in Illinois for the use of force by a police officer does not spell out every circumstance or technique that officers should use, but says that any use of force should be “objectively reasonable”. This, of course, translates into the policies that guide how a police officer’s use of force is to be conducted and evaluated. 

In fact, the root word “reason” appears in the conversation on force long before the Illinois lawmakers decided to use the term. It appears in the fourth amendment of the Bill of Rights where the framers of the constitution indicate that people should be free from unreasonable search and seizure of their property and their person. Whether it is a search of your house or your arrest or the use of deadly force against you, the framers demanded that it not be unreasonable on the part of the government. 

The idea of force being “reasonable” can translate nicely across the spectrum mentioned above. Are the actions of an angry brother, or a police officer facing resistance, or a country using the might of its army to take territory reasonable? 

 With the brothers fighting, the parent asks if the force was reasonable. Was this a matter of bullying, or retaliation for theft of a toy, or was it self-defense? 

 When an officer uses force, the supervisor or the attorney or the judge or the media asks, what was the purpose of the force that was used? The questions posed to determine reasonableness of force by police (see the facts of Supreme Court case Graham v. Connor) ask the questions, what was the offense that led to the force, was the person actively resisting and was the person a threat to anyone? 

 As nation rises against nation we see the same kinds of questions playing out in deliberations in government and in the media. What is the offense that caused a country to strike another? Was the act an appropriate response to the threat, and what is the danger in not resorting to elevating a conflict into an all-out war?   

 If the use of force at an interpersonal level, a societal level and an international level all seem to take reasonableness into consideration, one problem develops. This problem is that reasonableness tends to be in the eye of the beholder. Bias and a lack of information continue to be the sources of disagreement for what constitutes reasonable force. 

 A parent may give one child more credibility than another, potentially trampling the truth. A police officer’s actions can be considered totally understandable to other officers based on an entire sequence of events that lasts 30 minutes, but society might justifiably dispute that determination based on only viewing a video that only depicts 30 seconds of the interaction. A country can claim that an existential threat exists, or ownership of disputed borderlands, but the rest of the world has reacted to unjustified force by nations who fail to provide adequate justification for their actions in the form of sanctions, blockades and world wars. 

 If the idea of reasonableness is what drives our understanding of moral righteousness in conflict, how can we possibly hope to do it right by everyone, all the time? 

 Perhaps the answer was provided by the most important pastor in the most important sermon. Jesus, in His Sermon on the Mount, tells His listeners, “So, whatever you wish others to do to you, do also to them, for this is the law and the prophets” (Matthew 7:12, ESV). 

 One way to test your worldview is to see how it plays out in the real world. Does it work for real people? Unfortunately, we live in a world where we don’t often see people treating others as sane people would want to be treated. But if you play out a hypothetical world in your imagination where everyone is sane and treats others the way a sane person would want to be treated, things get a lot more peaceful really quick. 

 Who, outside of the varying degrees of broken, tormented souls who make the decision to harm themselves, would want to inflict harm upon himself physically, mentally or emotionally? We live in a reality where everyone thinks they should be treated like the most important person in the world. If we treated other people like they were the most important person in the world, imagine how the average human interaction would change. 

 Can it be that simple? If we allow ourselves to consider the hypothetical, and every man and woman obeyed this simple command to treat others as you would like to be treated, how fast could we beat our swords into plowshares? I see no other worldview with a morality plan of action that allows this to be the case. 

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 Tony Williams is currently serving in his 20th year as a police officer in a city in Southern Illinois. He has been studying apologetics in his spare time for two decades, since a crisis of faith led him to the discovery of vast and ever-increasing evidence for his faith. Tony received a bachelor's degree in University Studies from Southern Illinois University in 2019. His career in law enforcement has provided valuable insight into the concepts of truth, evidence, confession, testimony, cultural competency, morality, and most of all, the compelling need for Christ in the lives of the lost. Tony plans to pursue postgraduate studies in apologetics in the near future to sharpen his understanding of the various facets of Christian apologetics. Tony has been married for 9 years and has two sons. He and his family currently reside in Southern Illinois.

Review of Christopher B. Kulp, The Metaphysics of Morality, Part I

Table of Contents

In his book, The Metaphysics of Morality Christopher Kulp sets out to develop and defend a thoroughly worked out metaphysics of ordinary, tutored, everyday, commonsense morality that he takes to be implicit in the moral thinking of most people. Most people, he argues, believe that certain things are morally right and morally wrong for all people at all times. They believe that objective moral truths exist, that such moral truths are not made true by merely believing them so. But also, Kulp fully acknowledges that people are fallible in their judgments and can be mistaken in the things that they take to be morally right, wrong, good, evil, true, or false.[1] Nevertheless, Kulp will defend the thesis that the deep core of our everyday moral beliefs is true.

While his main goal is to develop a metaethical metaphysics, that is, a second-order account of moral metaphysics, much of his effort throughout this book is spent analyzing the character of various first-order moral propositions and drawing out the second-order metaethical implications of this analysis.[2] He argues for a Platonic moral ontology that grounds first-order moral truths, first-order moral facts, first-order moral properties. This ontological domain of sui generis moral properties exists independently of human cognition.[3] Ultimately, he develops a version of intuitionist moral realism.[4] His is a secular, that is, non-theistic, moral nonnaturalism.  

In chapter 1 Kulp argues for the need to ground everyday, common sense morality in a wider and more fully developed metaphysics, and he places his view against a wide array of differing and opposing metaethical viewpoints, all of which deny moral realism in various ways. Throughout his work Kulp will contrast his realism with a critique of radical moral subjectivism, moral pragmatism, moral error theory, emotivism, prescriptivism, expressivism, and various forms of relativism.

Metaphysics of Morality

By Kulp, Christopher B.

In chapter 2 Kulp acknowledges that in ordinary, everyday moral thinking the full orbed metaphysics that he develops is not explicit in most people’s thinking, but he proceeds to examine a representative list of first-order moral propositions that express moral truths to show that ordinary moral thinking should be taken as both cognitivist and realist.[5] This, of course, has important metaphysical implications which Kulp undertakes to work out. By way of contrast, Kulp then proceeds to examine the metaphysics of moral non-cognitivism, for example, in the emotivism of A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson.[6] Similarly, he shows that the expressivism of Alan Gibbard, the prescriptivism of R.M. Hare, and the quasi-realism of Simon Blackburn all take ordinary moral discourse in a non-realist manner.[7] Although the moral error theory of J.L. Mackie takes ordinary moral discourse to be propositional, the metaphysics of error theory leaves any such discourse entirely ungrounded.[8] Finally, the various versions of relativism are critically taken to task in a very brief way by Kulp. He argues that all versions of relativism hold “that moral truth is necessarily relative to some constructed standard of judgment.”[9]

Although Kulp paints the various versions of moral relativism with a broad brush, his analysis looks to be accurate and his critical assessments on target. The same holds true for the various versions of evolutionary ethics; all such advocate a moral metaphysics that is basically non-realist.

Kulp’s initial review of the gamut of various non-realist metaethical positions in chapter 2 clears the way for him to begin seriously developing the fundamental details of the positive case for his version of intuitive non-naturalism. This he begins in chapter 3. He first focuses on the propositional character of everyday moral locutions. Morality is communicative and interpersonal and propositional. One of the most important features of such moral locutions, according to Kulp, is that they are “truth assessable.”[10] In Kulp’s understanding, propositions are to be counted as abstract entities which express the fact based content of morally declarative sentences.[11] Given this understanding, the nature of moral truth, facts, and properties takes center place in the metaphysics of Kulp’s moral realism. This is the core of his project and he begins to take up this complex set of issues up in chapter 4.

Kulp affirms the necessity of three logical laws as foundational in his discussion of propositional truth: the law of non-contradiction, the law of identity, and the law of excluded middle. These laws govern rational belief. He then develops what he describes as “alethic realism” by linking together two truth-related criteria that help in establishing that which is true. The first is a criterion developed by William Alston dubbed the “T-schema,” namely, “the proposition that p is true iff p.”[12] The second is a broader metaphysical criterion that asserts that a true proposition is made true by the way the world is. Kulp reiterates that this is a metaphysical conception of truth and not an epistemological one, he also acknowledges the lack of details as regards the thorny problem of the correspondence between a true proposition and the way the world is, but he is content that this minimalist theory of truth is adequate for his purposes. Next, the notion of truth is linked to facts; facts in turn are worked out in terms of the notion of “states of affairs.” By “states of affairs,” Kulp means “something’s being, doing, or having something.”[13] States of affairs, which constitute facts, either obtain or they do not obtain. States of affairs instance different ontic types as well, for example, physical properties, numerical properties, mental properties, relational properties, and moral properties, to name just a few.[14]

In the case of moral states of affairs, moral states of affairs strongly supervene on physical states of affairs but are not reducible to them. Moral facts are comprised of states of affairs, which are composed of moral properties that supervene upon physical states of affairs. According to Kulp, if there is no such physical state of affairs then there can be no corresponding moral state of affairs. In further fleshing out details regarding moral facts and their relation to physical states of affairs, Kulp asserts, “…no physical universe, no morality.”[15] He then briefly entertains a question that the theist regards as central, namely, the status of morality before the Big Bang and also how the moral order came into being in the first place and how this is to be taken as it relates to the Grand Story of the physical universe, human existence, and the moral domain.[16] Kulp, however, never broaches the question of God and morality in relation to these big and fundamental questions. We will have more to say on this central issue later in our review.

Chapter 5 develops the details of Kulp’s metaphysics of properties. This is a core issue in his metaphysics. He espouses a strong realist, modern Platonist account of properties. He fully acknowledges that there are difficulties faced by any theory of properties.[17] Kulp asks a straightforward question as regards Platonic, abstract entities, “Do entities of type T exist?” He argues that such entities exist given that numbers, propositions, and the like appear to exist as abstract entities. He also argues that our best account of the actual world, by way of inference to the best explanation, should include them and that Occam’s razor does not require that we reject them.[18]

However, he thinks that a Platonic realist understanding of properties as transcendent universals that are abstract entities best handles the various problems associated with the differing philosophical accounts of properties. In this view such properties can be instantiated, uninstantiated, or uninstantiable.[19] He also does not think that the problem of epistemological access, raised in the context of mathematical Platonism, presents insoluble difficulties for his view.[20] Given this account, Kulp rejects a strictly naturalistic, physicalist account of moral properties in favor of mind independent non-naturalist moral properties that supervene on physical entities in the actual world.[21]

In the sixth and final chapter, Kulp pulls together and summarizes his account of intuitional, Platonic, moral non-naturalism and briefly sets it against the various meta-ethical alternatives discussed throughout his work to conclude the book.[22]

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 [1] Christopher B. Kulp, Knowing Moral Truth: A Theory of Metaethics and Moral Knowledge (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017), 112.

[2] Most of the philosophical work regarding first-order moral propositions is done in Kulp’s first book: Christopher B. Kulp, Knowing Moral Truth: A Theory of Metaethics and Moral Knowledge (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2017). Other relevant works are Christopher B. Kulp, “The Pre-Theoreticality of Moral Intuitions,” Synthese 191, no. 15 (2014); Christopher B. Kulp, “Moral Facts and the Centrality of Intuitions,” in The New Intuitionism, ed. Jill Graper Hernandez (New York: Continuum, 2011), 48–66; Christopher B. Kulp and Philosophy Documentation Center, “Disagreement and the Defensibility of Moral Intuitionism:,” International Philosophical Quarterly 56, no. 4 (2016): 487–502.

[3] Christopher B. Kulp, Metaphysics of Morality (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 17. All citations here are from print version of Kulp’s book. See also Kulp, Knowing Moral Truth, 17, 67.

[4] Kulp, Knowing Moral Truth, 115-116. Kulp notes that among intuitionists moral intuitions are understood in one of two ways, either doxastically, as a class of moral belief, or non-doxastically, as a disposition for moral belief. Kulp accepts both senses of moral intuition but sides with a doxastic interpretation. Moral intuition is a class of moral belief. He also notes that no contemporary intuitionist thinks that all justified moral belief and knowledge is intuitional. Ibid., 117.

[5] Kulp, Metaphysics of Morality, 26–33. This is developed more thoroughly in chapter 1 of his earlier work, Knowing Moral Truth.

[6] Kulp, Metaphysics of Morality, 34–37.

[7] Ibid., 37–42. It should be noted that Kulp discusses that Blackburn’s quasi-realism is a more difficult case since Blackburn works to fully accommodate the realist character of moral discourse. Kulp argues that Blackburn is not successful in his efforts. I agree with Kulp in his critique of Blackburn.

[8] Ibid., 42–45.

[9] Ibid., 45. Emphasis in original.

[10] Ibid., 71.

[11] Ibid., 74–75, 77.

[12] Ibid., 106.

[13] Ibid., 112–113.

[14] Ibid., 118–119.

[15] Ibid., 124. See footnote 39 on this page. Kulp takes “physical” to be entities and properties studied by the empirical sciences. Ibid., 62.

[16] Ibid. Kulp, Knowing Moral Truth, 49, note 51.

[17] Kulp, Metaphysics of Morality, 143.

[18] Ibid., 149, 156.

[19] Ibid., 146. For example, a round square is uninstantiable.

[20] Ibid., 151–157.

[21] Ibid., 174, 226-229.

[22] Ibid., 189–251.

Lord’s Supper Meditation – The Lamb of God

Agnus Dei c. 1635–1640, by Francisco de Zurbarán, Prado Museum

A Twilight Musing

As a part of John the Baptist’s heralding the ministry of Jesus, he twice refers to Him as “the Lamb of God” (see Jn. 1:29-37).  Although John was the first to use that appellation, it echoes a reference to the Messiah in Isaiah 53:7: “He was oppressed, and he was afflicted, yet he opened not his mouth; like a lamb that is led to the slaughter, and like a sheep that before its shearers is silent, so he opened not his mouth.”  The relevance of this passage to the message about Jesus is highlighted by the Apostle Philip’s being called by the Holy Spirit to preach to an Ethiopian court official (Acts 8:26ff).  As the man rode in a chariot in the desert, he was reading from Isaiah 53.  After he hitches a ride with the Ethiopian and discovers what he is reading, we are told that Philip “opened his mouth, and beginning with this scripture he told him the good news about Jesus” (Acts 8:35).  Later on in the New Testament, Paul refers to Christ as “our Passover lamb” (I Cor. 5;7), reminding us that the Lord’s Supper was instituted in the midst of a Passover feast (Lk. 22:14ff), in which a sacrificial lamb is eaten.  So as we partake of the Body of Christ in the Communion, it is appropriate to consider the implications of Jesus being presented as “the Lamb of God.”

The lamb image applied to Jesus necessarily denotes a sacrificial lamb, a substitute for the death of someone.  In the original Passover, the blood of the slain lamb was put on the doorposts as an indication that the angel of death should “pass over” the members of that household (see Ex. 12:1-13).  We appropriate that kind of protecting blood in drinking of the cup of the Communion, “the new covenant in my blood” (Lk. 22:20) as Jesus describes it.  And as the participants in the Passover ate the flesh of the lamb that had been sacrificed, so those who ingest the bread of the Lord’s Supper are receiving Christ’s sacrificed body to their spiritual benefit.

Jesus as the Lamb of God figures prominently in the book of Revelation.  The image occurs first in chapter 5, verse 6, where we see “a Lamb standing, as though it had been slain,” and only He is found worthy to break the seals on the book of God’s judgments on the wicked world.  The living creatures around God’s throne then sing a hymn of praise (v. 9ff):

“Worthy are you to take the scroll and to open its seals, for you were slain, and by your blood you ransomed people for God from every tribe and language and people and nation, and you have made them a kingdom and priests to our God, and they shall reign on the earth.”

Jesus is the ultimate sacrificial Lamb, and His death is efficacious not for just a household or a family, but for “every tribe and language and people.”  Moreover, it is “once for all” (Heb. 7:27), effective for all time as well as for all people.

Finally, we see the Lamb of God taking His place with God the Father as His servants are represented as His bride (Rev. 21:1-4), with whom He and the Father will dwell forever in an existence lighted by the presence of the “the Lord God Almighty and the Lamb” (Rev. 21:22).  So in participating in the Lord’s Supper, we are invited not only to remember that the Lamb of God was slain for our deliverance, but to look ahead to fulfillment of the promise that we will be eternally with the Lamb in His glory.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

What Does the Euthyphro Dilemma Reveal about the Moral System of Islam? Part 1

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Many people believe that all religions are the same, that they all have the same goal, and they all aim at the same end, namely, to encourage their followers to do what is good. Islam as a religion has a unique ethical system, which relies mainly on Allah’s commands. This article will link Divine Command Theory (one horn of the Euthyphro Dilemma), particularly a strong version of voluntarism, to the Islamic understanding of morality.

The Euthyphro Dilemma, in contemporary terms, asks this question? Is something moral because God commands it, or does God command what is moral?

In other words, who defines the standard of goodness/rightness? Is it God because he is higher and above the standard of goodness and rightness—making goodness a function of divine caprice? Or is the standard of goodness/rightness above God— making Him submissive to it?

Most Muslims will likely agree with the first horn of the dilemma, the Divine Command Theory. God is above all standards, He has the complete freedom to mandate any law, and every ethical norm is defined by His will and command. He does not succumb to any condition or standard because he defines the specifications and the guidelines of goodness/rightness. In other words, the difference between right and wrong, and good and evil for that matter, is a function of God’s discretion.  

Confining our attention for the moment to axiological matters, the first horn of the dilemma makes goodness arbitrary if God does not have a good nature. If good and bad are due to God’s mandate, can God’s fiat render theft and adultery to be good things? Shifting our focus to deontic questions, can God simply make torturing children for fun to be right? The Islamic literature, taken at face value, reveals that analogously abhorrent commands are not only possible under the Islamic worldview, but real. 

Since goodness is defined by Allah, on a strongly voluntarist reading, then he can command adultery and thereby make it good. It is known in Islam that polygamy is permissible. Not only permissible, but it is also ordered to prevent evil. Allah tells Muslims, “if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with the orphan-girls then marry (other) women of your choice, two or three, or four; but if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly (with them), then only one or (the slaves) that your right hands possess. That is nearer to prevent you from doing injustice” (Surah 4:3 Al-Hilali & Khan). In the Qur’an Polygamy is given to Muslim men to prevent adultery. Polygamy is ordered in the Qur’an; therefore, it is not considered bad or wrong (Surah 4:3). Most Muslims do not discuss whether marrying four wives is considered an adulterous act because Allah commands it. Whatever Allah commands is halal (permissible).

The conversation about this topic seems like a dead-end. Many female TV anchors have broached this topic with various Arab Imams in interviews. They asked the Imams, “Does not God care about my feelings?” The answers of the Imams were, “Do you know better than Allah? Do you dare to question Allah?” Allah is the ultimate authority in the world, and he knows what is best and right for humanity. Therefore, women should obey the Qur’an without questioning Allah’s decree. “O you who believe! do not put questions about things which if declared to you may trouble you” (Surah 5:101). Asking Muslims not to question Allah and just obey him blindly is a great weakness in Islamic theology because God created human beings with the faculty of thinking. So, to create them with rational capacity and ask them not to use it is a contradictory matter.

Polygamy in Islam shows favoritism to men against women. It is true that this decree was given in a male dominating culture; however, it implies divine subjectivity because It dismisses women’s human’s worth, rights, and dignity. It is still the official practice in all Islamic majority countries, and is allowed under Shari’a law. Divine favoritism displays subjective morality in Islam because permitting polygamy for men and dismissing women’s feelings and rights is completely dependent on Allah’s commands.

In the Judeo-Christian faith, morality is objective because it is based on the immutable character of God. God does not change his mind. He did not order monogamy, then changed his mind and allowed polygyny/polygamy. Monogamy was and is the official practice in Christianity. God did not approve polygamy despite the fact that it was practiced in the Old Testament. He created one man and one woman as his suitable helper (Gen 2:18), but things changed after the fall. Lamech, for instance, was the first man who started practicing polygyny (Gen 4:19). It was not God who intended it, neither included it in his original design. Moreover, Lamech was a criminal, he killed a man for wounding him and a young man for injuring him. This is to say that the first person who originated this act was a violent selfish killer who did not care about his wives’ feelings, thus following his model is morally imprudent. Additionally, Moses’s law never encouraged polygamy. On the contrary, polygyny was detestable (Deut 17:17). Patriarchs and kings who practiced polygyny did it according to their own discretions, and not according to God’s commands or design.

Part 2

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Sherene Khouri was born into a religiously diverse family in Damascus, Syria. She became a believer when she was 11 years old. Sherene and her husband were missionaries in Saudi Arabia. Their house was open for meetings and they were involved with the locals until the government knew about their ministry and gave them three days’ notice to leave the country. In 2006, they went back to Syria and started serving the Lord with RZIM International ministry. They travel around the Middle Eastern region—Turkey, Jordan, Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, and United Arab Emirates. Sherene was also involved in her local church among the young youth, young adults, and women’s ministry. In 2013, the civil war broke out in Syria. Sherene and her husband’s car was vandalized 3 times and they had to immigrate to the United States of America. In 2019, Shere became an American citizen.

Sherene is a Ph.D. candidate in Apologetics and Theology at Liberty University. She holds a Master of Art in Christian Apologetics from Liberty University and a Bachelor of Science in Biblical Studies from Moody Bible Institute. She is also working on a Master of Theology in Global Studies at Liberty University. Her specialty is answering Islamic objections to the Christian faith.

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Lord’s Supper Meditation – Participating in Eucharist

a Twilight Musing

Evangelicals tend to avoid the term “Eucharist” to refer to the Lord’s Supper because they associate it with Catholics and their view of the Mass, which is that the bread and the wine in the Communion literally become the body and blood of Christ.  However, “Eucharist” can be used merely as a general term for the Lord’s Supper based on its meaning in Greek, “thanksgiving.”  One could with some justification refer to our late November national holiday as “Eucharist Day.”  The use of the word at least can prompt us to ask, “In what sense is the Lord’s Supper a ceremony of thanksgiving?”

In instituting the Lord’s Supper, Jesus Himself set the tone of thanksgiving for the feast when He gave thanks for both the bread and the cup of wine (see Lk. 22:14ff) before He gave them to the disciples.  Moreover, our remembrance of the Supreme Sacrifice of Christ prompts us to be thankful that it enables us to be called God’s sons and daughters, children of God, siblings of Christ Himself.

 It is also worth noting that the context of Paul’s account of the origin of the Lord’s Supper is his condemnation of the Corinthians’ gorging themselves while humiliating “those who have nothing.”  In so doing, they were failing to appreciate the value of their brothers and sisters in the fellowship of Christ, as well as being in no frame of mind to be thankful for the Sacrifice they were called on to celebrate.

Finally, we can see a eucharistic attitude as one of two complementary purposes of the Holy Communion.  On the one hand, we engage in remembrance of the cost of what Jesus did for us, a rather somber act of looking back.  But on the other hand, we rejoice and contemplate blessings yet to come when we are thankful for the salvation He wrought for us.  The next time we encounter a reference to the “Holy Eucharist,” perhaps we can be more comfortable with that description of our regular observance, remembering that it simply means “thanksgiving.”

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

The Case for a Personal God from Morality: Love

The Case for a Personal God from Morality: Love[1]

 Love is one of the most often used words in languages across the world, the most referenced topic in songs throughout history, and the focal point of countless movies and TV shows of our day, among other things. Love is something that intrigues human minds and enraptures human hearts; this has always been the case, and it will continue to be the case moving forward. There is certainly more to say about love, but this much is clear: Love is a basic need of every human person.

Previously, I attempted to show how guilt and justice provide evidence not only for God’s existence, but of his personal nature. Here, I focus on a third feature of morality that gestures in the direction of a personal God: love. In what follows, I briefly discuss these three items: (1) the personal nature of love; (2) how love points toward the existence of a personal God; and (3) how Christianity provides a powerful account of an intrinsically personal God of love.  

The Personal Nature of Love

There are various ways to explain love, but one key feature of love is its deeply personal nature. In order for genuine love to exist there must be both a subject and an object, a giver and receiver of love. True love is more than self-love, which easily slips into narcissism. It is a self-giving love, where the fullness of love is shared in reciprocal fashion among two or more persons. As Richard of St. Victor claims, “One never says that someone properly possesses love if he only loves himself; for it to be true love, it must go out towards another. Consequently, where a plurality of persons is lacking, it is impossible for there to be love.”[2]

No one considers a human person loving if he ignores the needs of others, instead looking out for his own interests. While it is important for a human person to love himself—in the sense of desiring to take care of himself, maximize his potential, and so on—the concept of self-love is a slippery slope that leads to pride and selfishness if pushed too far. Proper love is outward rather than inward focused, and therefore deeply personal in nature.[3]

How Love Points Toward a Personal God

Where does the moral value of love come from? Apart from religion, the coherence of an ethic of love is difficult to establish. This is not to say that those who do not adhere to a specific religion cannot be loving persons. Rather, the point here is that worldviews such as naturalism and Platonism face challenges when it comes to grounding a coherent ethic of love. For example, the notion of love and respect for persons and the principle of the survival of the fittest are mutually exclusive.[4] (If you love and respect another person, you should not kill them in order to survive.) Thus, a naturalist view has trouble accounting for the existence of love on a metaphysical level. Additionally, to say that love just exists in a transcendent realm of values—which is the approach that Platonism takes—seemingly misses the point that true love exists within the context of personal relationships.[5]

 What about God? Within various belief systems throughout the world, God is described as loving. If God is loving, then he is personal—because genuine love does not exist in isolation, but rather in community with other persons. If this is the case, the question becomes: Which religions of the world claim that God is personal and which one(s) provide(s) the best explanation of his essentially loving nature?[6]

Christian Theism

 Although time and space do not permit a thorough treatment of the previous question, I want to briefly suggest that Christianity provides an utterly unique account of the personhood of God and his essentially loving nature. This is due to the fact that Christianity is the only religion in the world that makes the claim that God is one Being who exists in three distinct, but not separate Persons. As I stated earlier, in order for genuine love to exist, there must be both a subject and an object, a giver and receiver of love. In other words, there must be more than one person present in order for love to be possible.

 On the Christian view, this is the case within God himself.[7] Among the three Persons of the Trinity—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—there exist loving, personal relationships.[8] This is why 1 John 4:8, which states that “God is love,” has such profound Trinitarian implications. Expounding upon 1 John 4:8, Millard Erickson suggests, “In a sense, God being love virtually requires that he be more than one person. Love, to be love, must have both a subject and an object. Thus, if there were not multiplicity in the person of the Godhead, God could not really be love prior to this creation of other subjects.”[9] According to C. S. Lewis, “All sorts of people are fond of repeating the Christian statement that ‘God is love.’ But they seem not to notice that the words ‘God is love’ have no real meaning unless God contains at least two Persons. Love is something that one person has for another person. If God was a single person, then before the world was made, He was not love.”[10]

 For these reasons, a Trinitarian view of God, which is distinctly Christian, provides a robust account of an intrinsically personal God of love.

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Stephen S. Jordan (Ph.D.) is currently the Campus Pastor at Liberty Christian Academy in Lynchburg (VA), where he previously served as a high school Bible teacher for nearly a decade. He is also a Bible teacher at Liberty University Online Academy, an Associate Editor at www.moralapologetics.com, as well as a Senior Research Fellow at The Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. Prior to these positions, Stephen served as a youth pastor in North Carolina for several years and taught courses at a local Seminary Extension for a year. He possesses four graduate degrees (MAR, MRE, MDiv, ThM) and a PhD in Theology and Apologetics. His doctoral dissertation was on the moral argument, where he argued for the existence of a personal God from morality. Stephen and his wife, along with their four children, reside in Goode, Virginia. In his spare time, he enjoys spending time with his family, being outdoors, fitness, sports, reading, and building relationships with people over good food.  

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[1] Portions of this article are adapted from my unpublished doctoral dissertation at Liberty University.

[2] Richard of St. Victor, De Trinitate, III.2

[3] On the Christian view, we might say that proper love is, at least first and foremost, upward focused (Mt. 22:37).

[4] R.Z. Friedman, “Does the ‘Death of God’ Really Matter?” International Philosophical Quarterly 23 (1983): 322.

[5] Actually, Erik Wielenberg, a modern Platonist, claims that not all values are properties of persons; he also denies that all values have external foundations. See Erik J. Wielenberg, Robust Ethics: The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Godless Normative Realism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 46.

[6] If God is the greatest conceivable being, then it appears that he must be essentially loving. How could he be the greatest conceivable being if he was unloving? Of course, some might suggest that love is not a great-making property, arguing instead that the greatest conceivable being is not essentially loving, but still loving in some sense. However, if love is the supreme ethic, as many conclude, it is difficult to understand how God could be anything less than essentially loving.

[7] According to Clement Webb, “Where, then, shall we look for an example of what is really meant by a ‘personal God?’ We shall plainly be most likely to do so with good hope of success in the one historical religion of which, as we have seen, Personality in God (though not, until quite modern times, ‘the Personality of God’) has been a recognized tenet—that is to say, in Christianity.” Clement C. J. Webb, God and Personality (New York, NY: Macmillan, 1920), 81.

[8] This is the doctrine of perichoresis. There are several instances where perichoresis is described in Scripture. First, perichoresis is seen in John 14:11, when Jesus says, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Second, the loving communion among the three Persons of the Godhead is also evidenced in John 17:1 and John 16:14. In John 17:1, Jesus prays to the Father: “Father, the hour has come; glorify your Son that the Son may glorify you.” In John 16:14, Jesus says that the Holy Spirit “will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you.” Therefore, the Father glorifies the Son and the Son glorifies the Father, while the Holy Spirit also glorifies the Son. The mutual giving and receiving of glory within the Trinity is evidence of the close, loving relations that exist within God. Third, the Father sends the Son (Jn. 3:16), and the Spirit proceeds from the Father and was sent by the Son (Jn. 15:26), which is another example of perichoresis. Fourth, 1 John 4:8 says, “God is love.” This verse has profound Trinitarian implications.

[9] Millard Erickson, God in Three Persons: A Contemporary Interpretation of the Trinity (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1995), 221-222. Within the Trinity, the Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father; the Father loves the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit loves the Father; the Son loves the Holy Spirit and the Holy Spirit loves the Son.

[10] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2001), 174. In The Screwtape Letters, Lewis suggests (via a demon), “This impossibility He calls love, and this same monotonous panacea can be detected under all He does and even all He is—or claims to be. Thus He is not content, even Himself, to be a sheer arithmetical unity; He claims to be three as well as one, in order that this nonsense about Love may find a foothold in His own nature.” C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters (San Francisco, CA: HarperOne, 2001), 94.

Moral Insights of C. S. Lewis in Till We Have Faces: Part I

Introduction

 In Till We Have Faces (henceforth TWHF), C. S. Lewis combines his passion for pagan mythology with his knack for communicating Christian truths via story. Lewis often stresses in his various works his belief that pagan mythology, while not reflecting the complete truth about God, contains various nuggets of the ultimate truth that is found in Christianity. Christianity, he says, is the “true myth” that melds the human need for believing what is true about the world as it actually is with our need for imagination and wonder and delight.[1] It is thus not surprising that, in TWHF, Lewis powerfully illustrates a number of theological and moral positions that are prominent in many of his other writings by retelling the story of the myth of Psyche and Cupid.

This article is the first of a two-part series. The series will examine two major themes in TWHF that are also emphasized heavily within Lewis’s prose: the theme of faith and doubt (Part 1) and the theme of pride and dying to one’s self (Part 2). This series is a greatly condensed version of an article that is to appear later this year in the journal Perichoresis. It reveals how Lewis masterfully paints a picture via the characters and the story of TWHF that exemplifies religious and ethical insights within these two themes.

Faith and Doubt 

Lewis has much to say about faith and doubt in his prose; indeed, two chapters of Mere Christianity are fully devoted to the subject. Let us consider two aspects of faith that Lewis emphasizes in his writings and exemplifies in TWHF, beginning with our need to realize that we fall short of the mark morally and then to strive to be good while at the same time recognizing that we must seek God’s help in order to make this moral improvement.[2] Lewis says that the first step to developing this aspect of faith is to try hard to be good for even “six weeks,” as nobody realizes “how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good.” Doing this convinces us that we lack the resources apart from God to live up to the demands of morality.[3] This is seen in TWHF, as Orual realizes in the end that she is “ugly in soul” and desires to change her “ugly soul into a fair one.” She realizes that she needs the gods’ help to do this, but she sets out to try to be good and take the first step. She finds that she could not be good for even a half hour and was concerned that the gods would not help her.[4] So as soon as she tries hard to be good, she realizes how much divine help is needed. Yet as the novel unfolds, she finds that the gods actually are helping her to grow morally. They are doing their “surgery” on her by revealing things to her about herself using events in her life (e.g., the process of writing her book) and interactions with other people (e.g., Ansit and Tarin).[5] As Lewis stresses in Mere Christianity, God helps us to grow via many means. He uses nature, books, experiences, and other people—even when we do not realize they are being used.[6]

A second aspect of faith addressed by Lewis involves believing that God is good in the midst of suffering and incomplete information. Lewis knew well the reality of this faith struggle, as he wrestled with doubting God’s goodness after his wife died. Like Orual, who never seriously doubted the existence of the gods but had serious doubts about their goodness, when Lewis lost his wife he reports struggling with thinking “dreadful things” about God. The conclusion he fears most “is not ‘So there’s no God after all,’ but ‘So this is what God’s really like.’”[7]

Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold

By Lewis, C. S.

As Psyche was preparing to be offered to the god, she talks with Orual about how to interpret the gods’ actions in such a way that they are considered good. Psyche suggests that even if the gods seem to humans to be doing evil, we may simply not know enough to realize that the gods are actually doing what is good; in addition, she suggests that it is possible that the gods are not the cause of the evils we attribute to them. Orual, on the other hand, spends much of the novel seeing no other way to interpret the gods demanding Psyche as an offering than to declare that it is clearly evil.[8] Like Orual, when Lewis was in the early stages of his grief after his wife died, he was tempted to wonder how the word “good” can be applied to God “by any standard we can conceive.” He suspected that it could only be by “our own desperate wishes” that we can think of God as good.[9] Yet he quickly realized that it is “too anthropomorphic” to think of God as an evil Being; moreover, there seems to be too much good in the world. An evil Being is not likely to include “love, or laughter, or daffodils, or a frosty sunset” as traps or baits in a ploy to harm us. In response, however, to the question raised by Psyche as to whether we are able to evaluate God’s goodness, Lewis rejects the idea that anything God does must be considered good because we are too limited or fallen to pass judgment on God’s morality. He denies that “we are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing” and that the goodness of God is beyond our ability to assess. If that were true, Lewis says, we would then lack any reason to obey God or to call God “good,” for that term as it applies to God would be meaningless.[10] Lewis, however, does hold that God’s ways and His knowledge are beyond us so that we do not fully understand His reasons for allowing things[11]—a truth borne out in TWHF.

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1. C. S. Lewis, “Myth Became Fact,” in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics, ed. Walter Hooper (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1970), 58-60.

2. C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity: A Revised and Amplified Edition, with a New Introduction, of the Three Books Broadcast Talks, Christian Behaviour, and Beyond Personality (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 141-9.

3. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 141-2.

4. C. S. Lewis, Till We Have Faces: A Myth Retold (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Brace, 1956), 281-2.

5. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 253-67.

6. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 190.

7. C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 658.

8. Lewis, Till We Have Faces, 71-2.

9. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 668.

10. Lewis, A Grief Observed, 669.

11. C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain, in The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics (New York: HarperCollins, 2002), 568.

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 14

Continuing our perusal of Bart’s chapter called “Life on the Other Side: The Happy Reality of Secular Humanism,” we left off discussing Bart’s secular chaplaincy at USC, geared toward those who hunger for a secular spirituality. The fact that Sam Harris a few years ago wrote a book on spirituality is testament to the reality of this movement among certain secularists. As Bart puts it, “If you want to fully actualize your noblest values, you’ve got to find like-minded people and band together. Nobody becomes or remains good in isolation. We have to help one another grow.”

Much of this seems to be a recognition of our communal nature as human beings, something that fellowship with like-minded believers and various shared habits and rituals can help facilitate and fulfill. Christians often speak of various “means of grace,” regular fellowship among them, as means by which to appropriate God’s grace for encouragement, support, direction, and the like. Undoubtedly there is a sociological component to this that can be isolated and pursued apart from explicit references to divine activity, and this seems to be the space that one like Bart has carved out for himself. Of course, such possibilities underdetermine whether relegating the divine element to obscurity or irrelevance is correct.

In fact, it’s likely predictable that some would look at church activities and religious practice and come to think that the sociological dimension is really the only actual dynamic in operation. Of course Christians shouldn’t succumb to this temptation, and rather they should bear in mind that the horizontal relationships, though vital, are not the only or even the most important relationships at play. To treat God as eliminable from the equation might seem to Bart a relatively small change, but potentially it’s quite a spectacular missing of the point. Investing our hopes in human relationships to fill the vacuum in our hearts that only God can fill is a pipedream. That said, though, to emphasize the relationship with God to such an extent that we neglect the relationships with our neighbors, is to misunderstand some of the import of our religious faith.

Bart doesn’t pursue a negative approach in his secular ministry. Rather, he writes that, first, “you have to teach your friends to love one another, and then you have to teach them how to attract and include outsiders by loving them as well. That’s why my new ideal ministry is practically identical to my old one, except that these days I rely on reason, science, and common sense to convince people that love is the most excellent way.”

Reason, science, and common sense. Perhaps this is a useful juncture to pause and subject this claim to a bit of critical scrutiny. The implicit suggestion here seems to be that reason, science, and common sense can be enlisted to the cause of an atheistic worldview and even of assigning primacy to love, and that somehow these sources, divorced from theism, provide enough resources for the job. I have my doubts about that.

Why I Left, Why I Stayed: Conversations on Christianity Between an Evangelical Father and His Humanist Son

By Campolo, Tony, Campolo, Bart

The notion that reason and religious faith are at odds is of course practically a mantra among many of the deconverted, but as a Christian philosopher I find such claims, either explicit or tacit, to strain my credulity. Time and again in this book both Tony and Bart say their dialogue is not going to be yet one more debate about the evidential merits of theism or atheism. In an earlier post we discussed their allergy to wade into those waters too deeply. Yet the result of this mutual dialectical choice seems to confer permission to advance large assertions without evidence. So it’s unsurprising that Bart seems to subscribe to the notion that reason is on the side of unbelief. The occasional times when Bart does at least gesture toward arguments in favor of naturalism or against theism, he invokes names like Dawkins and Harris, which do little to instill confidence that he’s considered the best thinkers on the topic. As for my own views, I think the case for theism generally and Christianity particularly can be made on several strong evidential grounds—from historical to scientific to philosophical.

I suppose that someone could suggest that all that Bart is advancing here is that his argument for the primacy of love is confined to resources garnered from science, reason, and common sense—and not that this triad collectively points evidentially toward atheism rather than theism. But even so, this less ambitious agenda would raise a serious question of whether science, reason, and common sense would be enough to bolster an assignment of primacy to love.

If love is understood in substantive fashion, involving essentially a deep regard for the well-being of others, even if on occasion such regard entails self-sacrificial behaviors, is this sort of phenomenon somehow a deliverance of science, reason, or common sense, either individually or severally? Science largely seems to be an effort at describing the physical facts of the world. Reason and rationality can mean a variety of things, but it’s unclear why it would entail the superiority of a life of sacrificial love. Superior in what sense? Reproductive advantage, peace of mind, flourishing? Does science confer on one of these anything like normative priority? Are there not times when sacrificial love would militate against such things? And what of common sense? Is it common sensical to sacrifice, if need be, one’s own interests for the sake of others? That would quite a hard sell to one not already convinced that love is the better alternative.

In all three cases, although I am not suggesting that science, reason, or common sense necessarily rule out the central importance or value of a life of self-giving love, I rather doubt they comprise the primordial source of such importance or value. And in fact, elsewhere in the book Bart concedes that on his worldview he’s no longer warranted to believe in objective values of any sort, so one is left wondering how deep his commitment to a life of love can really be.

It’s of course eminently possible that he’s better than his worldview—I suspect he is—but for him somehow to think that his commitment to a life of love is a function of his emaciated worldview strikes me as a mistake. Bart is an atheist who values love, but that doesn’t mean that atheism can make much sense of doing so, or of love as an objective value, much less anything like a best explanation of why, normatively speaking, we ought to pursue such a life. Bart seems content to speak of love as the most excellent way, in some sense, but pretty clearly not in anything like a metaphysical sense; perhaps he’s simply after emphasizing the instrumental value of such a lifestyle. Surely he’s not wrong to see some of that value, but once more this seems to show that he seems more at home in the realm of social science than anything like philosophy, which pushes us to ask about the ontological foundations and metaphysical reality of something like sacrificial love and genuine altruism.

A Christian perspective, in contrast, explains how something like love really can and does function at the foundation of reality. It’s not merely instrumentally valuable, but intrinsically so, and evidentially significant in pointing us to the right understanding of reality and the human condition. But so long as Bart remains averse to following where the evidence of the most excellent way might lead, it would seem he will remain content with merely preaching to the choir of secularists whose preference (laudably enough) is to gravitate toward pro-social attitudes, but without implying that those whose preferences are quite different are in any sense deeply mistaken.

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and director of The Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. Author or editor of about fifteen books, he’s a two-time winner of Christianity Today book awards. He’s currently under contract for his fourth and fifth books with Oxford University Press: a book on moral realism with Jerry Walls, and a collection on the moral argument with Yale’s John Hare.

Lord’s Supper Meditation – A Perpetual Covenant

A Twilight Musing

One of my fondest boyhood memories is of going with my father to the bakery that employed him to pick up his load of bread and cakes to deliver that day.  The hot ovens inside were baking many loaves to supply the stores in the area, and the smell was divine!  Sometimes an indulgent worker would give me a piece of hot bread to eat, and that was a real treat, simple as it was.  As I look back on this experience, I realize that I would have had no access to this privileged space had I not been with my father.  Thanks to him, I could enjoy “Mead’s Fine Bread, the staff of life” (as the advertising called it) freshly baked. 

That put me to thinking about a comparison between the highly restricted Bread of the Presence (or Showbread) in the Old Testament and the bread of the Lord’s Supper to which Christians have open and regular access under the New Covenant.  Only Aaron and his sons were allowed access to the Showbread in the Holy Place, but through our Heavenly Father, we are ushered repeatedly into the Holy Place where the Lord’s Supper is served.  Perhaps we can gain insight to the Lord’s Supper through consideration of the details of God’s instructions in the Law of Moses concerning the Bread of the Presence (Lev. 24:5-9). 

To appreciate these instructions, we need to picture the layout of the Tabernacle (and later of the Temple in Jerusalem).  There was a forecourt containing the various tables and altars for animal sacrifice, at the back of which was a small tent housing two areas, the Holy Place at the front and the Most Holy Place (or Holy of Holies) at the back, separated by a curtain.  The Holy of Holies housed the Ark of the Covenant, the most sacred object in the Tabernacle, and it was entered only once a year, by the High Priest on the Day of Atonement.  Thus, the Holy Place served as a vestibule to the Most Holy Place, and in it were placed the twelve loaves of the Bread of the Presence, to be maintained perpetually.  It was specified that these be placed in two stacks of six each on a table made specially to hold them.  Each Sabbath, the loaves of Showbread were to be replaced and the old loaves to be eaten by the High Priest and his sons.

Here, then, are some helpful points of comparison between the rituals of the  Showbread and the Lord’s Supper.     

· The designation of twelve loaves of the Showbread is symbolic of the twelve tribes of Israel, the people of His Covenant, and so our partaking of the Lord’s Supper regularly reaffirms that we are also the people of God under the New Covenant through Jesus Christ.   

· Just as the loaves were replaced every Sabbath, so we may appropriately renew our experience with the Bread of Heaven each first day of the week; in the process we are reminded of God’s providing for us with the same faithfulness that He showed in the supply of manna to the Children of Israel. 

· The division of the bread into two piles of six each, with the burning of frankincense on each one, is a daily physical reminder of God’s being constantly with His people.  God’s Presence is as real on weekdays as on the Sabbath, and in the same way, our one-day observance of the Lord’s Supper is to sustain us on the other six days of the week as well.

· The eating of the sacred Bread of the Presence by the High Priest and his sons is a type of the ingestion of the common objects of bread and wine in the Lord’s Supper, made holy through God’s spiritual Presence in them.  We are eligible to partake because the people of the New Covenant are a “holy priesthood” (I Pet. 2:5). 

 · As the Bread of the Presence was to be eaten “in a holy place,” so when we take the elements of the Eucharist within us, the whole assembly becomes a Holy Place, indwelt by the Holy Spirit. 

 · As a “perpetual due” to the priests, the eating of the Showbread anticipates our continual observance of the Communion “until the Lord comes.”

There is one more instructive reference to the Showbread, an incident in the Old Testament (I Sam. 21:1-6) referred to by Jesus in the Gospels (see Matt. 12:1-10).  At one point, David was fleeing from King Saul, who was out to kill him.  In desperation for food for him and his little band of militia, he appealed to the High Priest Ahimelech.  The only food the priest had was the bread that had been taken from the table in the Holy Place, but he gave that to David and his men.  Jesus, when responding to the criticism of the Pharisees that His disciples were picking grain to eat on the Sabbath, refers to this exception to the rule that the Bread of the Presence be eaten only by the priests.  The Master took advantage of the situation to establish the principle that God administers His rules with mercy and is not so inflexible as those who wish to act as His enforcers to underline their own power.  We would do well to remember this teaching of Jesus when we participate in the Lord’s Supper, noting that God is more interested in the state of our hearts when we partake than in the technical correctness of the manner in which we do it.

So let us eat of the Holy Feast as those privileged under the Covenant of Christ to have our needy souls nourished and delivered from evil.  We serve a God who clears the way for us to dine at His table, and we rejoice in being served by the Lord of the Sabbath Himself.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

Reflections on Why I Left, Why I Stayed, by Tony and Bart Campolo, Part 13

We have now arrived at Bart’s chapter called “Life on the Other Side: The Happy Reality of Secular Humanism.” There’s quite a bit of material to unpack, engage, and be engaged by in this chapter, so let’s see how this goes. It may take three or four blogs to encapsulate my salient responses and reflections.

He begins by talking about the time, after losing his faith, during which he ran into plenty of other post-Christians who had left behind the “friendly confines” of their former orthodoxy. Just a small point about this: when I was in graduate school at a state university, religious convictions hardly always conduced to a friendly environment. I rather felt like my faith was under fire every day from certain zealous secular professors who took every opportunity to impugn the intelligence of religious believers and from certain fellow graduate students who relished emulating those professors.

I was studying philosophy, a field in which quite a bit of intellectual jousting takes place all the time, and learning the tools to engage unfriendly audiences with discussions about faith and its alleged irrationality took place in a rather hostile environment. It could sometimes be profoundly uncomfortable. In fact, I know several folks who kept their religious convictions under their hat to avoid finding themselves in the cross hairs of outspoken secularists, and others who abandoned faith altogether in the hotbed of graduate philosophy programs.

I make mention of all this just as a small observation. It may well be that atheists in the larger culture do have to endure challenges to be seen as normal and healthy, but there are also plenty of enclaves in which secularism enables people to feel like they fit in far more comfortably than they would if they espoused sincere religious conviction, whatever “friendly confines” the latter may have felt on Sunday mornings.

What many of these post-Christians told Bart they missed the most were the social dimensions of their religious experience—the music, the hymn sings, the potluck dinners, and the like. They encouraged Bart, knowing his background, to organize a church for people like them, “who want to be good and don’t believe in God.”

Bart endeavors to distance himself from angry, confrontational secularists and atheists, claiming no animus toward faith or people of faith. Indeed he writes, “I think Christianity has been one of the greatest community-building forces in human history.” So he claims it’s not his goal to trash the church, but rather to learn from it and offer a new and improved version of it, without the theological baggage, for people who genuinely want to be, again, good without God.

Not coincidentally, Greg Epstein’s Good without God was one of the most encouraging books Bart read through this time. Some months ago there was a bit of a dustup around Epstein when he, a secular humanist, was chosen to be the President of the Harvard chaplains. Christian chaplain Pete Williamson wrote a piece for Christianity Today defending his vote for Epstein and why it may not be as scandalous as many seemed to think when they heard it.

At any rate, Bart gives Greg’s book credit for introducing him to the logic and language of secular humanism, as well as opening his eyes to the possibility of engaging in the same vocation as a secular chaplain. After reading his book, Bart visited Greg to see his work firsthand and found students discussing cognitive science, vegetarianism, TED talks, racial politics, an upcoming LGBTQ solidarity march, and coming out to family. And in Greg Bart found a kindred spirit.

So Bart then reached out to USC to see what they thought of his idea of building missional communities for people who don’t believe in God, and they were open to the idea. Part of the reason for their openness was their definition of religion not in terms of specific belief systems, but rather as the quest to answer life’s ultimate questions. “What is the nature of the universe? Where do we come from and what happens when we die? What defines good and evil? How can we make the most of our lives?”

Allow me to say a word about this, and draw this entry to a close, saving the rest of this chapter for later. In Where the Conflict Really Lies, Alvin Plantinga writes this concerning naturalism (which entails atheism):

Naturalism is what we could call a worldview, a sort of total way of looking at ourselves and our world. It isn’t clearly a religion: the term “religion” is vague, and naturalism falls into the vague area of its application. Still, naturalism plays many of the same roles as a religion. In particular, it gives answers to the great human questions: Is there such a person as God? How should we live? Can we look forward to life after death? What is our place in the universe? How are we related to other creatures? Naturalism gives answers here: there is no God, and it makes no sense to hope for life after death. As to our place in the grand scheme of things, we human beings are just another animal with a peculiar way of making a living. Naturalism isn’t clearly a religion; but since it plays some of the same roles as a religion, we could properly call it a quasi-religion.

I’m inclined to agree with Plantinga here, which is why something like a “secular chaplain” makes more than a little sense to me. At the least I don’t think we can have it both ways and insist both that atheism is a religion and that secular chaplains make no sense.

So Bart came aboard at USC as a secular chaplain, though he would have to raise his own funds, and started his new career, addressing the communal needs of USC’s rapidly growing secular population. Practically speaking, he does much of what he used to do when he was a Christian minister, and much of what other university chaplains do—showing up at campus events, speaking in classes and dorms, hosting community gatherings, and encouraging and supporting students’ and professors’ “spiritual growth.” If that seems a bit odd, tune in next time for more.

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David Baggett is professor of philosophy and director of The Center for the Foundations of Ethics at Houston Baptist University. Author or editor of about fifteen books, he’s a two-time winner of Christianity Today book awards. He’s currently under contract for his fourth and fifth books with Oxford University Press: a book on moral realism with Jerry Walls, and a collection on the moral argument with Yale’s John Hare.

Lord’s Supper Meditation – Between Heaven and Earth

A Twilight Musing

Every observance of the Eucharist is a recapitulation of the Incarnation.  That is, it reaffirms the wonder of God’s infusion of physical things with spiritual purposes.  The original manifestation of this divine work was, of course, the creation of the universe (see Gen. chapter 1).  God reached out from His absolute, non-contingent Being to bring the material world into existence.  In doing so, He proceeded from the general to the specific, beginning with an undifferentiated mass, “without form and void,” over which the Spirit of God hovered.  He then proceeded to give every segment of His creation its own identity and spiritually determined function, distinguishing each stage from what went before by a process of separation.  He began by separating “the light from the darkness” and “the waters from the waters.” The next few days, He brought dry land out of the waters and generated vegetation “according to their own kinds.”  The sun and moon and stars were to “separate the day from the night.”  Animal life, like plant life, was each “according to their kinds.”    This perfect merger of the physical and the spiritual was culminated in humankind, who, though made of “dust from the ground” (Gen. 2:7) received the “breath of life” (i.e., the Spirit) from God.  Humans (the First Adam) were made distinct from all other creatures by being created in the image of God and being given authority over and responsibility for all the rest of creation (Gen 1:26-27).

But the First Adam fell from the perfectly blended state in which he was created and was plunged into a creature of disordered material that had to be reinfused with God’s Spirit in order to live.  God then implemented a long, tortuous process of what might be called “re-creation.” Once again God proceeded from the general state of chaos brought about by sin to bring fallen humankind a renewed awareness of what they had known intuitively in the Garden of Eden, which was the perfect merger between physical and spiritual realities.  In order for that Eden to be restored, God’s process would establish the necessity of physical redemptive sacrifice (going through a death to achieve renewed life), with the ultimate sacrifice being made by the Second Adam, the very Son of God, through Whose death all of God’s original purposes for the world would be realized.

Thus it is appropriate, as we partake of the Lord’s Supper, to contemplate how God over the ages worked a second time to extend an emanation of His absolute, non-contingent Self into the material world in order finally to present the New Adam, God Himself residing in physical human form.  In doing so, He once again proceeded from the general to the specific, beginning with the chaos of fallen humanity and revealing more and more of His remedial commands, from the discipling of the Patriarchs, to the Mosaic Law, to the painful process of refining His people in the fires of captivity, and culminating in the merger of heaven and earth in the person of Jesus Christ.  Our ingesting symbolically the substance of our perfect Lord Jesus reaffirms that with Him we stand restored to that perfect balance of material and Spirit that God originally intended for the capstone of His creation.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

Sometimes Losing is Good

He who loses his life for My sake will find it. (Matthew 10:39)

Have you ever felt lost in a crowd? You look around and see the people, hear the sounds, feel the hustle and bustle of life around you…and yet, you feel lost. You are caught in the flow of everything beyond yourself, and for a fleeting moment you don’t know where you are or where you fit-in amid the cacophony of life all around you. You’re not alone, but you feel lost.

It’s a surreal feeling, the feeling of being lost to yourself…lost when you are with others but still out-of-sorts with who and where you are at that moment. An odd experience of self-awareness that leads you to viscerally sense the gravity and big-ness of everything around you…and the small-ness of yourself. Read that last bit again. An odd experience of self-awareness that leads you to viscerally sense the gravity and big-ness of everything around you…and the small-ness of yourself.

Would you believe this is what Jesus wants for your life? Does it seem odd to consider that Jesus is possibly closer to you than ever when you feel the most lost and unsure of yourself?

You are unsure of how you connect to everything and everyone around you, and feeling, well…lost to yourself. And yet, it’s at that moment that the door for a divine encounter presents itself to you. When you feel lost even to yourself, it is then that you can step through – step out of – yourself and into God’s presence. You experience it for just a moment at first, and then a little longer, until you finally realize that being lost to yourself is really the key to finding your true self and to living in God’s presence.

It is through the door of losing yourself, and only through that door, that you will find the identity God desires for you. A desire which is rooted in His love and purposes, and drips with abundance of mercy, grace, and healing. What you and I lack in ourselves, we find when we lose ourselves to Him. We may feel lost in the crowd, but losing ourselves may just be – is – the first step to finding God.

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Dr. Thomas J. Gentry (aka., TJ Gentry) serves as the pastor of First Christian Church of West Frankfort, Illinois, the Executive Editor of MoralApologetics.com, and Executive VP of Bellator Christi Ministries. Dr. Gentry is a world-class scholar holding 5 doctorate degrees and 6 masters degrees. Additionally, he is a prolific writer as he has published 7 books including Pulpit Apologist, Absent from the Body, Present with the Lord, and You Shall Be My Witnesses: Reflections on Sharing the Gospel. Be on the lookout for two additional books that he will soon publish. In addition to his impressive resume, Dr. Gentry proudly served his country as an officer in the United States Army and serves as a martial arts instructor.

Nothing Is Strong

“The Christians describe the Enemy as one ‘without whom Nothing is strong.’ And Nothing is very strong: strong enough to steal away a man’s best years not in sweet sins but in a dreary flickering of the mind over it knows not what and knows not why, in the gratification of curiosities so feeble that the man is only half aware of them.” (Screwtape to Wormwood, Letter XII)

In his comments on this quote from C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters, Walter Hooper explains that the phrase, “without whom Nothing is strong” was appropriated by Lewis from the Collect for the Fourth Sunday in Trinity found in The Book of Common Prayer. Hooper writes, “Note the two possible ways of interpreting ‘nothing is strong’: (1) There is nothing that is strong; (2) Nothingness itself is (evilly) strong. For Hell, a negativity itself is positive.” What Hooper offers in his commentary on the double entendre carried by this phrase is insightful, for it captures the true spirit of Lewis’s pointed insight revealed through Screwtape as he counsels his nephew Wormwood concerning one especially useful strategy to employ in the effort to keep his Christian charge away from a true life of piety and devotion while moving him ever closer to an eternal existence in Hell. The strategy? Keep the Christian focused on nothing of lasting significance. If the Christian can be diverted headlong into explicit sin, all the better; but short of such an outcome, Hell’s power also reaches to the depths of the believer’s soul if Worwood “can make him do nothing at all for long periods…keep him up late at night, not roistering, but staring at a dead fire in a cold room. All the healthy and outgoing activities which we want him to avoid can be inhibited and nothing given in return, so that at last he may say [as one of Screwtape’s charges did on upon arriving in Hell], ‘I now see that I spent most of my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.’”

Friends, I fear this same strategy is enjoying great success today among many in the Christian ranks and especially among apologists. How easy it is to spend enormous amounts of time, precious time, flitting from this curiosity to that topic and have nothing to show in return. Sure, the curiosities and topics may be interesting and even relevant to some broader Christian cause, but ours is an era awash in a sea of information in which we may swim and swim without ever coming ashore. We forget that the vast waters of apologetic content available to us are not an end in themselves but only the means. Sadly, we often swim in circles as we flail about, inebriated by curiosity-run-wild in undisciplined minds. We do so to our own peril and at the expense of any genuine and lasting effectiveness in conducting our mission as ambassadors for the Christ who would plead to the world through us to be reconciled to God. The enemy of our souls is not bothered in the least by an apologist who knows a little bit about a lot of things but never focuses on anything. He prefers we stay an inch deep and a mile wide as we buy into the pernicious idea that we have to know a little something about everything before we can do anything of importance in defending the gospel and sharing our faith. When this happens to us, nothing is strong.

I share this concern not as a dour critic but as one who has sometimes been all too willing to follow along Screwtape’s proposed path of “doing nothing at all for long periods…staring at a dead fire in a cold room.” I may not actually spend my time looking at a dead fire, but I can easily give away minutes, hours, even days to perusing a social media feed or binge watching the latest Netflix series. All the while my primary calling lays quietly to the side and my time dwindles away until nothing is left. When that happens, the enemy wins another battle and grows bolder in his attempts to win the war.

My solution? First, I call myself to repentance for allowing nothingness to become strong. Second, I resolve to heed Scripture’s call to “redeem the time” (Eph. 5:16) by disciplining my mind and guarding my moments so that God’s purposes for me receive my best thoughts, time, and energy. Third, I commit to build a holy boundary around my life that keeps out those distractions that the enemy loves, even if it means “unplugging” from certain seemingly essential media and other pursuits. Fourth, and finally, I resolve do all in my power to become the nagging threat to the darkness that I am redeemed to be by the power of Christ within my soul. There is, after all, nothing more important than that.

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Dr. Thomas J. Gentry (aka., TJ Gentry) serves as the pastor of First Christian Church of West Frankfort, Illinois, the Executive Editor of MoralApologetics.com, and Executive VP of Bellator Christi Ministries. Dr. Gentry is a world-class scholar holding 5 doctorate degrees and 6 masters degrees. Additionally, he is a prolific writer as he has published 7 books including Pulpit Apologist, Absent from the Body, Present with the Lord, and You Shall Be My Witnesses: Reflections on Sharing the Gospel. Be on the lookout for two additional books that he will soon publish. In addition to his impressive resume, Dr. Gentry proudly served his country as an officer in the United States Army and serves as a martial arts instructor.

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When the Machines Take Over… Or Have They Already?

Editor’s note: This article was originally posted at Convincing Proof and is reposted here with permission.

People have been intimidated by machines for a long time. It’s hard to say when this first began, but it definitely was ramped up during the industrial revolution when machines were taking over more and more jobs. It’s easy to understand why people felt intimidated; machines were superior to humans in certain respects – they were stronger, faster, and more reliable. Computers have only exacerbated this anxiety because now machines can be smarter than humans in certain ways – they can remember more and compute faster. This was strikingly driven home in 1997 when IBM’s computer “Deep Blue” beat World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov. Computers have taken over even more of our jobs; the unnerving threat of being replaced by a machine looms heavy on people’s minds.

Hollywood knows just how to tap into these anxieties. There have been several movie franchises built around the idea of machines taking over the world: The Terminator, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Alien, etc.

In the latter two, machines didn’t try to take over the world per se, only their little corner of it. A central element in both movies is the idea of machines taking a superior position over humans and trying to control their fate. Think of how HAL 9000 tried to kill off Discovery One’s crew in order to preserve his own existence. In Alien, the android Ash considered Nostromo’s human crew expendable if they got in the way of his directive to bring an alien back for research.

In this article I will argue that there is a sense in which machines have already taken over the world. Machines have already destroyed mankind, and in a way that is much more frightening than any Hollywood movie. I’m actually talking about a machine philosophy that has overtaken the world, a philosophy that views human beings as mere machines. This is scarier than The Terminator or The Matrix. This man-is-machine philosophy doesn’t destroy us physically, it does something worse: it destroys what it means to be human; it destroys the essence of what mankind is.

Historical Background

Some history will be helpful here. It’s true that early scientists such as Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton viewed the universe as a vast machine. But they didn’t view mankind as being part of this vast machine; man was outside of the machine, so to speak. Everything else in the universe followed set, deterministic laws of cause and effect, but human beings were different; they were unique, special. Yes, they had machine-like parts. The heart functions like a pump, for example, but humans were more than merely the sum of their machine-like parts. These early scientists didn’t think human beings were governed by deterministic laws of cause and effect; they knew human beings had intelligence, free will, and made real choices.

This thinking changed radically during the 1800s. More and more people began to think that human beings were merely the result of mechanical forces, the laws of nature so to speak. This was a titanic shift. Human beings were now thought of as part of the deterministic chain of cause and effect, part of the universe-machine; hence, they are just machines themselves. The man most responsible for influencing this way of thinking was Charles Darwin.

How has this “man is machine” philosophy affected Western society? How exactly has it destroyed our humanity? Francis Schaeffer is very helpful here. He was a Presbyterian pastor that was highly influential in the 1950s through the 1970s. He published over twenty books explaining how and why Western thinking has shifted over the last few hundred years. In one particular lecture, Schaeffer showed how Darwin’s evolutionary ideas, specifically that humans are just biological machines, affected Darwin’s own personal life. Schaeffer then explained that this foreshadowed well how these ideas would affect Western society over the next 150 years.     

Darwin’s Own Words

We can see how this machine philosophy affected Darwin’s own life by comparing the young Darwin with the older Darwin. The following quotes come from Darwin himself and can be found in a book of his letters put together by his son Francis Darwin—Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter, and in a Selected Series of his Published Letters. The first part of each quote describes Darwin’s view when he was younger, but the latter part of each quote (which I have put in bold text) describes his view when he was older. The first thing to notice is how this machine philosophy moved him away from belief in God.

The Duke of Argyll… recorded a few words… spoken by my father in the last year of his life.  “…I said to Mr. Darwin, with reference to some of his… work on the Fertilisation of Orchids… and various other observations he made of the wonderful contrivances of certain purposes in nature – I said it was impossible to look at these without seeing that they were the effect and the expression of mind. I shall never forget Mr. Darwin’s answer. He looked at me very hard and said, ‘Well, that often comes over me with overwhelming force; but at other times,’ and he shook his head vaguely, adding, ‘it seems to go away.’” (pg. 64)

Why Darwin, why did this go away?          

The old argument from design in Nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered.  We can no longer argue that… the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man.  There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings, and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows. (pgs. 58-59)

He also wrote about the argument for God from a first cause.

Another source of conviction in the existence of God… impresses me as having much more weight. This follows from the extreme difficulty or rather impossibility of conceiving this immense and wonderful universe, including man with his capacity of looking far backwards and far into futurity, as the result of blind chance or necessity. When thus reflecting, I feel compelled to look to a First Cause having an intelligent mind in some degree analogous to that of man; and I deserve to be called a Theist.  This conclusion was strong in my mind about the time… when I wrote the Origin of Species, and… since that time… it has very gradually… become weaker.  …can the mind of man, which has, as I fully believe, been developed from a mind as low as that possessed by the lowest animals, be trusted when it draws such grand conclusions?  …the mystery of the beginning of all things is insoluble by us, and I for one must be content to remain an Agnostic. (pgs. 61-62)

It is clear that Darwin moved away from belief in God because of his evolutionary ideas. He used to find theistic arguments quite compelling, e.g., the argument from design or the argument from first cause. In his earlier days, it seemed to him nearly impossible to conceive that our universe, including human beings, could have happened by chance. But later, after he adopted his ideas about evolution, he began to doubt whether he could really trust his mind’s ability to draw correct conclusions. His evolutionary ideas led him to reject his own logical intuitions. Next we will see how his ideas affected his view of mankind.

…the most usual argument for the existence of an intelligent God is drawn from the deep inward conviction[s]… which are experienced by most persons. Formerly I was led by feelings such as those… to the firm conviction of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul. In my Journal I wrote that whilst standing in the midst of the grandeur of a Brazilian forest, “it is not possible to give an adequate idea of the higher feelings of wonder, admiration, and devotion which fill and elevate the mind.” I well remember my conviction that there is more in man than the mere breath of his body; but now the grandest scenes would not cause any such convictions… to rise in my mind.  …I am like a man who has become colour-blind… (pgs. 60-61)

When God is dead, man is dead. Darwin used to think that mankind was something more, something special. But we start to see here how his man-is-machine philosophy destroyed his concept of humanity. This can be seen even more strikingly in how his appreciation for beauty changed.

…in one respect my mind has changed during the last twenty or thirty years. Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure, and… I took intense delight in Shakespeare…  I have also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, and music very great delight. But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry: I have tried lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me. I have also almost lost my taste for pictures or music… this curious and lamentable loss of the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder… My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts, but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, I cannot conceive… (pgs. 50-51)

Darwin did not understand why viewing himself as a machine led to a loss of his very own humanity in the realm of beauty and art. When God is dead, man is dead. And as Schaeffer often pointed out, when mad is dead, beauty and morality are dead.

I am glad you were at the Messiah [Handel’s], it is the one thing that I should like to hear again, but… I should find my soul too dried up to appreciate it as in old days; and then I should feel very flat, for it is a horrid bore to feel as I constantly do, that I am a withered leaf for every subject except Science.  It sometimes makes me hate Science, though God knows I ought to be thankful for such a[n]… interest, which makes me forget for some hours every day my accursed stomach. (pg. 269)

Science did not kill his humanity. Science is a great and wonderful thing. It was his man-is-a-machine philosophy that killed his humanity. Next, we see how it affected his view of morality.

Whilst on… the Beagle I was quite orthodox, and I remember being… laughed at by several of the officers… for quoting the Bible as an unanswerable authority on some point of morality. (pg. 58)

Many people are surprised to learn that Darwin piously quoted the Bible while on his famous journey. The following quote, which provides his view as an older gentlemen, comes from another section of the book:

The loss of these tastes [for poetry, plays, paintings, and music] is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. (pg. 51)

Did Darwin reject morality all together? No, he did not.

…I may say that the impossibility of conceiving that this grand and wondrous universe, with our conscious selves, arose through chance, seems to me the chief argument for the existence of God; but whether this is an argument of real value, I have never been able to decide… The safest conclusion seems to me that the whole subject is beyond the scope of man’s intellect; but man can do his duty. (pg. 57)

Within the man-is-a-machine philosophy, God is dead. When God is dead, man is dead. And when man is dead, morality is dead. We see here how Darwin tried to hold onto morality. He recognized where all this was headed, but he tried to fight against the logical conclusion of his evolutionary ideas. He said no, morality will not die because man will do his duty. We can still hold onto morality even though we believe God does not exist and we are merely machines; man can do his duty! But what is this duty, Darwin? Where does it come from?

What Followed

Darwin himself didn’t carry his man-is-machine philosophy to its ultimate conclusion, but those who came later did. Take Jacques Monod, for instance; he was a Nobel Prize winner and one of the founders of molecular biology. He wrote, “Anything can be reduced to simple, obvious mechanical interactions. The cell is a machine. The animal is a machine. Man is a machine. The universe is not pregnant with life nor the biosphere with man… Man at last knows that he is alone in the unfeeling immensity of the universe, out of which he emerged only by chance. His destiny is nowhere spelled out, nor is his duty.” Clearly, he recognized the inevitable conclusion of this man-is-machine philosophy.

Bertrand Russell, also a Nobel Prize winner, was one of the founders of analytic philosophy and is considered one of the 20th century’s premier logicians. He wrote, “Man is the product of causes which had no prevision of the end they were achieving; his origin, his growth, his hopes and fears, his loves and his beliefs, are but the outcome of accidental collocations of atoms.”

I trust you’re beginning to see how humanity is destroyed by this machine philosophy. In this way of thinking, everything that makes us human, our hopes, fears, and loves, is just the result of random, accidental atoms bouncing around.

Richard Dawkins, probably the most well-known atheist alive today, was a professor at Oxford and has written many well-known books. He wrote, “We are survival machines – robot vehicles blindly programmed to preserve the selfish molecules known as genes. This is a truth which still fills me with astonishment. Though I have known it for years, I never seem to get fully used to it.” I would suggest that he can’t get fully used to it because it cuts across the grain of everything we are as human beings.

Michael Ruse, a philosopher of science and professor at Florida State University, wrote that “Darwinian theory shows that in fact morality is a function of (subjective) feelings, but it shows also that we have (and must have) the illusion of objectivity… In a sense, therefore, morality is a collective illusion foisted upon us by our genes.”

When man is dead, morality is dead.   

Scarier than the Terminator

This is scarier than The Terminator. In fact, this is so frightening that Hollywood can’t even deal with it. What do I mean? More and more movies are portraying machines not as cold, heartless instruments of death but as warm, moral, and able to love. Two recent movies stand out in this regard: Transcendence and Her.

In the futuristic movie Her, released in 2013, Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love romantically with his computer’s intelligent operating system, voiced by Scarlett Johansson. This may sound like a silly comedy, but actually it was a very serious drama that won the Academy Award for best original screenplay. In Transcendence, Johnny Depp’s character dies, but, before his body perishes, his mind is downloaded onto a computer. Throughout the movie the audience is led to think that this “mind” in the computer has lost its humanity and has become cold, calculating, and ruthless, like so many other machines in movies. But the plot twist at the end reveals that it was truly him all along, that his computer version actually retained his humanity, i.e., his morality, love, and compassion.

Now I don’t personally know any Hollywood types, so I can’t claim to know their motives. But I do have a theory, and maybe it’s not even that Hollywood thought it through like this consciously; it might just be the thought process that has taken place overall at a cultural level. Regardless, it seems to me like something such as the following has taken place. First, we as a culture produced a string of movies where machines were portrayed as cold, heartless, and unable to love. But then we recognized that, wait a second, we’re just machines ourselves! That’s what many scientists and philosophers are telling us anyway. Biological machines, no doubt, but still machines. Putting one and two together, the conclusion must be that we ourselves are cold, heartless, and unable to love, that morality isn’t real. And this is what many scientists and philosophers are saying, as we’ve seen. Romantic love is just a chemical reaction nature selected because it caused us to reproduce and pass on our genes. Parental love was just programmed into us by evolution so that we would care for our offspring so they could, again, pass on our genes.

The problem is that most of us are like Richard Dawkins, and we find this hard to accept; we don’t like it, it’s too frightening to deal with. We want love to be real; it cuts across the grain of our humanity to say that love is just an illusion, the result of an accidental, random mutation. So we, and Hollywood, are caught in this tension. On the one hand, we have bought into this man-is-machine philosophy because that’s what we’ve been taught. But on the other hand, we so want love to be real. Do you see the despair here? Imagine finding out one day that you’re just a robot, that everything about you has been programmed. You don’t really have free will; all the decisions and choices you think you’ve made were just what you’ve been pre-programmed to do. All your personality traits are just accidental lines of code. Imagine the despair. Your feelings, aspirations, loves, and relationships were predetermined by programming. And you can’t escape. The rest of your life will be just the same; even the feelings you experience in reaction to this news are just the result of your programming.

You may think, “Well, if I could find the programmer who designed me and talk to him, then I could at least find out why he programmed me like this.” But despair is piled on despair because there is no such programmer. There is no person behind who and what you are; you have no creator. Your programming just came about randomly and accidently. There’s no programmer; there’s no maker to go to and ask these “why” questions. You’re just an accident of an unfeeling, uncaring, silent, material universe. Wouldn’t that be crushing? Wouldn’t that make you doubt that there’s even any purpose to life? That maybe you’re not even real, that there is no such thing as you?

Let me review. I’m proposing that something like the following thought process has occurred on a cultural level.

1. In movies we portrayed machines as cold, heartless, and unable to really love.

2. But then we realized that, wait a second, ultimately we’re just machines too!

3. That realization must also mean that we’re cold, heartless, and unable to really love as well.

We could remove the tension by just rejecting #2, by rejecting the man-is-machine philosophy. Instead, we’ve tried to relieve the tension by changing #1. We’ve re-cast machines with the ability to be moral and to love. In effect, we’ve come to tell ourselves that machines can be moral. Therefore, it’s alright that we’re machines because, see, you can be a machine and still experience morality and love.

Even the classic movies we started with (The Terminator, The Matrix, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Alien), the ones famous for their cold, heartless, killing machines, all came back in their sequels with machines re-cast as good, moral, and loving. Again, I believe this was done to relieve the terrifying tension I explained above. In other words, Hollywood could make scary movies about heartless killing machines without any problem. But the idea that that is all we are was too frightening, and so the machines were re-cast. Let me give some examples.

In The Matrix, the machine program Agent Smith tells the human Morpheus, “…when we started thinking for you, it really became our civilization which is, of course, what this is all about. Evolution, Morpheus. Evolution. Like the dinosaur… You had your time. The future is our world, Morpheus. The future is our time.” In the second sequel, Matrix Revolutions, a machine program explains that “I love my daughter very much. I find her to be the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.” Needless to say, Neo was very surprised to hear a machine talk that way.

In 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL is cold, calculating, and ruthless. When astronaut David Bowman asks HAL to let him back into the spaceship so he won’t die, HAL replied with the now famous line, “I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that.” In the sequel, though, 2010, we’re told that HAL shouldn’t be blamed for what he did. His creator, Dr. Chandra, explained that “it wasn’t his fault… HAL was told to lie… by people who find it easy to lie. HAL doesn’t know how so he couldn’t function. He became paranoid… Whether we are based on carbon or silicon makes no fundamental difference. We should each be treated with appropriate respect.” The message is clear: essentially, machines are just like us.

In Alien, the android Ash is portrayed as amoral, inhuman, and unmerciful. This is seen most clearly when Ash explains why he’s so fascinated by the murderous alien. He describes it as “a perfect organism… I admire its purity. A survivor… unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality.” But in the sequel Aliens, the new android Bishop explained why Ash went berserk: “I prefer the term ‘artificial person’ myself… The A2s were always a bit twitchy. That could never happen now with our behavioral inhibitors. It is impossible for me to harm… a human being.”

Lastly, in The Terminator, the Terminator is portrayed as a relentless, unfeeling, unemotional killing machine. While trying to convince Sarah Connor how much danger she was in, Kyle Reese explained that “It can’t be reasoned with. It doesn’t feel pity or remorse or fear. And it absolutely will not stop ever. Until you are dead.” But in the sequel, in the very last line of the movie, Sarah Connor gives the following message: “Because if a machine, a Terminator, can learn the value of human life, maybe we can too.”

How Will This Help Us Reach People for Christ?

Foreign missionaries, in order to reach the culture they’ve been called to, need to become students of that culture. In order to really communicate with the people in a way they can understand, missionaries need to do more than just learn their spoken language; they need to understand that culture’s intellectual history, its way of perceiving the world, and its customs and traditions. I would argue, then, for us, if we truly desire to reach our own Western society with the gospel, then it’s imperative we understand what our culture is going through and how its thinking became so confused. This will help us know what to say to our culture and how to say it. It will help us know what areas of thought our culture is currently struggling with so that we can show them how God’s Word provides the answers.

We need to show people that the Bible isn’t an old dusty book, irrelevant to modern man. It gives us the answers to life’s most pressing issues because its author is the Creator of life.

Our culture right now is experiencing a crippling tension. On the one hand, we’ve come to believe that we’re nothing but biological machines. On the other hand, everything inside of us screams that love is real, that morality is real, that we do make real, significant choices. Think of the biology professor who teaches her class that love is just a chemical reaction but then that night flies into a maddening rage when she finds out her husband has been cheating on her. Do you see the tension?

The only thing holding this tension together is an irrational leap; they believe in love, not because it makes rational sense to, but just because they want to. They’re driven to irrationality because they think logic and facts lead only to the despair of man-is-machine. And so our culture has reached out desperately for anything that could provide some sort of meaning, even if it’s an irrational leap of faith. This is driven home most powerfully at the end of Matrix Revolutions during the final battle between the machine program Agent Smith and Neo. After fighting back and forth for some time, Agent Smith, losing his patience, yells out: “Do you believe you’re fighting for something… more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose! And all of them are as artificial as the Matrix itself… It’s pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why do you persist?”

Neo responded with, in my opinion, a terrible answer. He answered Agent Smith’s taunting simply with “Because I choose to.” It’s as though Neo agrees that all those things are illusions: freedom, truth, peace, and love. But he just chooses to believe in them anyway. The issue is not what we choose to believe; the issue is what’s actually real. I wish Neo would’ve responded that “those things – freedom, truth, peace, and love – we fight for those things because they are real!”

I understand this is just a movie, but the fact is that this is exactly where our culture is at in its thinking; science and rationality have taught us that freedom, truth, peace, and love aren’t real, but yet we want to hold onto them. We choose to believe in them, not because we have good reasons to, but only because they give us some sort of purpose and meaning, while at the same time realizing that they’re ultimately an illusion. But to many thinking, sensitive people, this only leads to despair. Trying to muster this type of faith, a faith that goes against reason and rationality, is devastating. It’s like trying to convince yourself there’s a pink elephant in the room when clearly there isn’t. We weren’t meant to live with this sort of fragmentation in our thinking, nor the resulting tension it creates. And I don’t think it’s sustainable.

Of course, there’s one way to relieve the tension. We could drop the irrational leap of faith nonsense, just bite the bullet, and admit that love isn’t real. We could fully embrace the man-is-machine philosophy and be consistent with its implications. There has been some movement in this direction; consider Friedrich Nietzsche’s transvaluation of values, as well as eugenics, abortion, and euthanasia. There’s even the idea in some circles that modern medicine hinders human progress because it keeps the weak alive to pass on their inferior genes. We gasp at such a thought, but isn’t this just the progression Paul talked about? First God is dead.

…His invisible attributes, that is, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen since the creation of the world, being understood through what He has made. As a result, people are without excuse. For though they knew God, they did not glorify Him as God or show gratitude. Instead, their thinking became nonsense… (Rom. 1:19-22).

And when God is dead, morality is dead.

And because they did not think it worthwhile to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them over to a worthless mind to do what is morally wrong. They are filled with all unrighteousness… murder, quarrels, deceit… boastful, inventors of evil… unloving, and unmerciful (Rom. 1:28-31).

As Christians we need to speak to our society and tell them that there‘s another way to relieve the tension. We need to tell them that love is real, that you don’t have to take an irrational leap of faith to believe in it. We can explain to them that they were created by a Loving Person for the purpose of experiencing loving relationships with Him and with others. We can explain that love is not an illusion, that it’s actually a central part of ultimate reality, intrinsic to the eternal relationships between the three Persons of the Trinity.

It’s interesting to note that in the sequels discussed above, when Hollywood wanted to show that machines could really love, they had the machines sacrifice themselves to save others. In Aliens, the android Bishop died to save the little girl. In 2010, HAL was willing to die in the explosion so the humans could escape. In Matrix Revolutions, the Oracle let Agent Smith kill her so Neo could save mankind. In Terminator 2, the Terminator sacrificed himself to prevent the machines from taking over.

When Hollywood wanted to show that machines could love, they had them perform the greatest act of love there is: sacrificing yourself to save others. As Christians, we need to lovingly tell our culture that there’s a way out of this tension, that love is not an illusion, that it’s the foundation of ultimate reality, and that this love was demonstrated most clearly in that God sacrificed Himself to save us. That’s the message we have for the world.

Lord’s Supper Meditation – Where is the Trinity in the Eucharist?

Old Testament Trinity, Simon Ushakov, Icon painting, 1671

A Twilight Musing

In our observance of the Lord’s Supper, we don’t usually think about or explicitly refer to the Holy Spirit, the Third Member of the Trinity.  That is perhaps understandable in one way, since what is being remembered is the submission of the Incarnate Son to His Father’s plan of redemption.  But it must also be remembered that Jesus had the Holy Spirit “in full measure” (see Jn. 3:34), and that the same Spirit that raised Jesus from the dead will also raise us up in the Last Day (I Cor. 6:14; Eph 1:19).  By the same token, our partaking of the Lord’s Supper, though it focuses on the sacrificed Son, also directs us to be aware of the Father who sent Him and of the Spirit Who is sent by the Father at the Son’s request (Jn. 14:15-18).

Moreover, Jesus tells His disciples that “it is to your advantage that I go away” (Jn. 16:7), because that will trigger the sending of the Holy Spirit (the “Helper”) to them, Who will “guide you into all the truth” (Jn. 16:13).  Morerover, the Spirit “will not speak on his own authority, but whatever he hears he will speak, and he will declare to you the things that are to come. He will glorify me, for he will take what is mine and declare it to you. All that the Father has is mine; therefore I said that he will take what is mine and declare it to you” (Jn. 16:13).                              

We are thus enriched by the whole Godhead as we partake of the bread and the wine.  By the words of Jesus, we understand that the whole being and nature of the Son relates back to the Father, and that the Holy Spirit emanates from both the Father and the Son and acts in accordance with their unified will, being God’s Power dwelling in those who believe in Christ.  We rejoice in being reminded that the death and resurrection of Jesus sums up both the loving will of the Father and the powerful Good News articulated to us by the Holy Spirit, whose dwelling in us is the hope of glory implanted in our hearts.  It naturally follows that “If the Spirit of him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, he who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through his Spirit who dwells in you” (Rom 8:11).  In communing with Christ, our attention is directed by the Spirit to what the Father has done in and through the Son, to our eternal benefit.

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Dr. Elton Higgs was a faculty member in the English department of the University of Michigan-Dearborn from 1965-2001. Having retired from UM-D as Prof. of English in 2001, he now lives with his wife in Jackson, MI. He has published scholarly articles on Chaucer, Langland, the Pearl Poet, Shakespeare, and Milton. Recently, Dr. Higgs has self-published a collection of his poetry called Probing Eyes: Poems of a Lifetime, 1959-2019, as well as a book inspired by The Screwtape Letters, called The Ichabod Letters, available as an e-book from Moral Apologetics. (Ed.: Dr. Higgs was the most important mentor during undergrad for the creator of this website, and his influence was inestimable.

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I am Samson (Judges 14)

Lucas Cranach d.Ä. - Simson bezwingt den Löwen

Samson. Aaah, Samson.

In Judges 14 he comes off the page to me as a larger-than-life contradiction. Read it. I suspect you’ll see it too.

Samson is a true enigma. A man used by God who also appears to use God. At least that’s what it looks like to me. His details in this chapter baffle me, starting with telling his parents to "get her for me" when he decides he wants a wife from the Philistines. Then the tearing apart of the lion, the eating of the honey, the posing of the riddle, the manipulative tears of his wife, the killing of 30 men, and finally Samson gives his wife to his best man. Again, Samson baffles me. 

But then I have to ask why he baffles me. Why do I struggle with Samson?

Is it his insistence on what he wants, even when it is driven by what appears to be a simple lust of the eyes? But I am just like him sometimes. I see with my eyes only, then expect those around me to give me what I want. I am Samson.

Maybe it is the way that God's purposes are working out in Samson, even though the details of his life leave me wondering at times if he even knows God? Then I hear the echo of my own life in that very description...God working through me though sometimes my life does anything but point to Him. I am Samson.

Perhaps my struggle with Samson is the way the power of God flows to and through him even when his choices cause others to suffer? He can't keep his secret from his wife, so 30 men die as a consequence. Yet, I think of the times I preach or teach or counsel--God working through me in each instance. Then I go home and have no patience with my family. I yell at my wife. I justify my selfishness as a matter of collateral damage in service to Jesus. Others suffer as God uses me. I am Samson.

Yes, I am Samson. At least sometimes I am Samson. The funny thing is that the longer I live the more I realize that I can be Samson...I have been Samson...I am Samson, and even still I want to be someone else. I want to be more like Jesus and less like Samson, and that's a good thing. Perhaps a bit simplistic or naive, but still a good thing. Actually, what is good about it is that I see myself in Samson, but I also see God in Samson.

To be sure, Samson's foibles and frailties are his own...his contradictions are his and nobody else's, but those moments of wisdom and power and justice...those are God's. Samson shows me God through his brokenness, and I am grateful. I see the same thing happening in my life. I am Samson.

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Dr. Thomas J. Gentry (aka., TJ Gentry) serves as the pastor of First Christian Church of West Frankfort, Illinois, the Executive Editor of MoralApologetics.com, and Executive VP of Bellator Christi Ministries. Dr. Gentry is a world-class scholar holding 5 doctorate degrees and 6 masters degrees. Additionally, he is a prolific writer as he has published 7 books including Pulpit Apologist, Absent from the Body, Present with the Lord, and You Shall Be My Witnesses: Reflections on Sharing the Gospel. Be on the lookout for two additional books that he will soon publish. In addition to his impressive resume, Dr. Gentry proudly served his country as an officer in the United States Army and serves as a martial arts instructor.

Humans of New York and Philosophy: How to See a Face

Editor’s note: This article was originally published at AndPhilosophy.com.

By Roberto Sirvent and Duncan Reyburn

Even in our image-saturated world, the face remains the primary signal of identity. From infancy, the face initiates that all-important moment of genuine recognition. We find ourselves mirrored in the lives of others as they welcome us into the world. “Meaning is a physiognomy,” says Ludwig Wittgenstein in his Philosophical Investigations; which is to say that the face is a gateway not only to understanding people but to actually understanding anything at all. Even our idioms express this: we face up to the truth or even face the music; we can put on a brave face, lose face, or save face; and we consider the face of things even while we recognize that there is more to everything than what the face on its own reveals.

The face is a challenge to quite a lot of the philosophy that can be overly preoccupied with the communion of mind and mind and of thought with thought. The face is a stark reminder of our raw materiality. Those of us who would like to live in a bubble detached from our flesh and blood have only to look at the faces of others to discover that life in a bubble simply will not work. We have to face the facts.

Read the full article at AndPhilosophy.com.

The Moral Universe of Desmond Doss

Desmond Doss was born February 7, 1919, in Lynchburg, Virginia. He would have been 103 this year. Growing up, Doss was enamored with an illustration of the Ten Commandments hanging in his living room. Constantly, he would drag a kitchen chair to the spot so he could get a better look. There, he read the words, “Thou shalt not kill,” and studied the picture of Cain standing over the dead body of Abel. Doss’s wife said that while he stood in front of the picture, the young Desmond imagined Jesus saying to him, “Desmond, if you love Me, you will not kill, but save life as I would if I were in your place. Follow My Example.”[1]

Desmond Doss at “Hacksaw Ridge”

In 1942, Doss was drafted into the World War II. During his training, his convictions and resolve were incessantly tested. He was maligned and mocked. He was denied furlough because he would not train with a weapon. His commanding officers sought to dismiss him on grounds of insanity. And despite the grueling series of trials, Doss insisted that he stay at his post, saying, “I’d be a very poor Christian if I accepted a discharge implying that I was mentally unbalanced because of my religion.”[2]

Doss faced the harrowing danger of war and carried no weapon. On May 5, 1945, at the Battle of Okinawa, he saved nearly a hundred men, including even some of the enemy. Though wounded himself, he climbed a towering cliff dozens of times, into enemy mortar fire, to pull soldiers to safety. At the top of the escarpment, Doss kept praying, “Lord, help me get one more.”[3] Sometime later, he was seriously injured by a grenade and was being taken away from the fray on a litter when he crawled off and tended to the wounds of another man who was more seriously injured. Doss would be the only Conscientious Objector to earn the Medal of Honor during the war.

Doss risked his own life over and over, and not only for the sake of his friends, but even for those whom he had every reason to consider his enemies. He acted for the sake of others, and at his own expense.

From the point of view of moral apologetics, there are many lessons to be drawn from the case of Desmond T. Doss. But here I only make two observations. First about moral rationality and then about moral goodness.

Moral Rationality

Moral rationality has to do with how morality and reason are ultimately harmonized. It must be rational, in the end, to be moral, or else, as Henry Sidgwick argued, we will have competing and contradictory purposes for acting. Doss’s biography gives no evidence that he acted for the sake of his own interest, but Doss did have faith that God was just and would reward him. Doss himself said,

God wrote the Ten Commandments on tables of stone with His own finger. He said it was perfect and that nothing is to be added to it or taken away from it. We are to be judged by this law of liberty, so whether we accept or reject it is a matter of life or death.[4]

From Doss’s perspective, “life” would be the reward for his obedience to God’s command. God judges and rewards human beings, ensuring the connection between virtue and happiness. On that day in May 1945, Doss said that he remembered the promises of God and that gave him the assurance he needed to act.[5] The ultimate rationality of morality, at least in Doss’s own mind, was likely a necessary condition for the good he did.[6]

Moral Goodness

There are many competing conceptions of the good. Some think of the good as identical to utility or pleasure. Christian philosopher H. P. Owen didn’t think much of this idea. Instead, Owen argued that when we encounter the good, we know we ought to desire it, even if we don’t. Owen imagines a friend who is “honest and kind in all his dealings.” In this friend, Owen finds a goodness that confronts and compels; it demands admiration.[7]

It is difficult to explain away our sense that what Doss did was deeply good in terms of mere chemistry and evolutionary psychology, as some have attempted to do.[8] There would be a gaping chasm between what seems obvious, that the heroic deed was good, and reality, that it was only the outworking of physics. Or if goodness is pleasure, it seems incredibly odd to try to explain the goodness of saving a hundred men in terms of a particular state of mind. One must check how they feel about the events before rendering a moral judgment. If the good is total utility, then we must withhold judgment because the complete ramifications of Doss’s actions have yet to be resolved. Whether it’s good or not remains to be seen, on this view.

In Doss’s story, we find an example of goodness that, as Owen suggests, confronts us and compels our admiration. For many, the power and clarity of conscience provides the clear and unassailable apprehension “this is good.” And this is a matter of fact about objective reality, no mere trifling statement about our own feelings, a fact held with the same credulity one might believe “the sun shines.” One would be hard pressed to say that any person asserting, “What Doss did that day was good” was not a competent user of good in at least that instance.

The good that is perceived in the work of Doss on that day can be recalcitrant for some who think of the good too narrowly or reductively. But if God himself is the good, and he gave his own life as ransom for many, then the veridical nature of our perception is easily explained.

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[1] Frances Doss, Desmond Doss: Conscientious Objector (Pacific Press, 2005), 7.

 Doss clearly thought that following Jesus entailed limited pacificism (Doss, according to his biography, did think that one could resist with force, just not lethal force). Christians disagree about whether Christ has obliged his followers to be pacifists. The issue of pacificism is not the concern here, though. Rather, I focus only on Doss’s exemplary moral character and integrity.

 [2] Doss, 78.

[3] Doss, 151.

[4] Doss, 11. (from the preface by Desmond Doss).

[5] Doss, 102.

[6] Frances Doss also records multiple accounts of God’s rewarding of Doss’s faithfulness prior to the Battle of Okinawa. One example: Doss felt convicted to pay his tithe, though that would leave him unable to pay his rent. He did so, then, unbidden, the landowner cut his rent by half and he was able to pay.  

[7] H. P. Owen, The Moral Argument for Christian Theism (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1965), 20.

[8] See for example the explanation of love given in terms of evolutionary psychology in Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2008), 214.

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The Managing Editor of MoralApologetics.com, Jonathan has been a vital part of the Moral Apologetics team since its inception. Currently, he serves as adjunct instructor of philosophy for Grand Canyon University and Liberty University. He also is affiliate faculty at Colorado Christian University. Prior to these positions, he was ordained as a minister and served as spiritual life director. He is the author or co-author of several articles on metaethics, theology, and history of philosophy. With a Master’s in Global Apologetics and a graduate of Biola’s Master’s program in philosophy, he recently finished his doctoral dissertation in which he extends a four-fold moral argument from mere theism to a distinctively Christian picture of God. Jonathan, his wife Sara, and their two children presently live in Lynchburg, Virginia. You can find his personal website at JonathanRPruitt.com