Home

  • From Hard Currency to No Currency

    What a difference two decades makes:

    Predicting the imminent collapse of the U.S. dollar, a Russian lawmaker submitted a bill to his country’s parliament Wednesday that would ban the use or possession of the American currency.

    Mikhail Degtyarev, the lawmaker who proposed the bill, compared the dollar to a Ponzi scheme. He warned that the government would have to bail out Russians holding the U.S. currency if it collapses.

    The old Soviet Union had what we called a “state-controlled” currency, i.e., the Soviet rouble was what the government said it was worth.  Prices and wages were likewise fixed by the state, as was the exchange rate.  As long as the Soviet economy was isolated, the system held together, although living under it wasn’t always pleasant.

    Given that, Russians differentiated between their own currency (a “soft currency”) and Western currencies, especially the U.S. Dollar, as “hard currencies”, with the latter very much desired.  Although the legal status of holding same varied from prohibited to tolerated, that didn’t stop people from trying to get same.

    When the country and its system came apart, the currency followed suit, resulting in tragic/hilarious situations such as the one I describe in Half a Million Roubles.  Is it Enough?  But the distinction between internal soft and external hard currencies remained.

    Now we see things reversed, with the Russians obviously considering their own currency a hard currency and ours as the soft one.  My take is that they are correct but I would observe the following:

    1. The U.S. Dollar has become a soft currency (that being a relative term) because it, like its old Soviet counterpart, is a creation of the state.  The big difference is that it is freely traded and backed by a strong economy with a long history of stability, which means that people have faith in it.  It’s also subject to manipulation by same state, and that’s certainly the case, especially these last five years.
    2. I think that, sooner or later, the Fed will run out of bullets in their easing gun, and we will have inflation and a general loss of the faith that holds things up.
    3. I think that the wisdom of holding U.S. Dollars should be left to the Russian people and not be the subject of legislation.  Predicting dates like this can be problematic, and in any case the Russians have shown a great deal of ingenuity in dealing with the ups and downs of their “coin of the realm”.  I doubt that Americans are anywhere as near ready for such an event here.

  • If They'd Known He Was a Republican, They Wouldn't Have Honoured Him

    Abraham Lincoln, that is:

    A public university in President Abraham Lincoln’s home state of Illinois is adorned with a plaque that states Lincoln – arguably the most famous and influential president in American history – was a Democrat.

    Lincoln was a Republican.

    History is such a stinker sometimes…

  • Thinking and Living Bureaucratically in America

    National Journal’s Ron Fournier is sorry:

    I’m sorry you campaigned for reelection on the famous false promise: “If you like your health care plan, you’ll be able to keep your health care plan. Period.”

    I’m sorry your aides debated whether to tell the full truth (that people could keep their insurance only if it hadn’t changed and if it met your standards) and decided instead to institutionalize the lie.

    I’m sorry that when Americans recognized the deception you tried to reinvent history: “What we said was you can keep it if it hasn’t changed since the law passed.” No, no, no, no, no—that’s not what you guys said.

    I’m sorry you didn’t trust Americans with the truth.

    Unfortunately, like the X-Files, the truth was out there.

    It wasn’t easy figuring out what this monstrosity called Obamacare was all about, which prompted Nancy Pelosi to make her famous remark that they’d have to pass the bill to find out what was in it.  But one thing was clear, to me at least: you couldn’t keep your health care coverage (and I’m thinking individually here) after it was passed if there were ANY changes in the policy.  I wasn’t even sure that the additional provisions mandated by Obamacare (such as keeping your mid-20’s children on the plan) wouldn’t give the government the opportunity to cancel everybody’s policy and start over. So I acted accordingly.  Up to now, things are good, or as good as they can be.  But one never knows.

    A long time ago one visitor to my web site family, after reading this, asked me if I was a prophet.  I told him I’d leave that up to him.  I think there’s too much self-validating “leadership” out there, based on my experience in the church.  And, based on the performance of the current Occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, that problem isn’t restricted to Christian churches.

    I certainly wouldn’t claim a prophetic gift here.  What I will claim, however, is that years of working in my family business, including dealing with the Internal Revenue Code, all of the other laws and regulations out there both Federal and state, and of course selling into a market dominated by public works, convinced me that survival depends, in no small measure, on thinking bureaucratically.  Many of my fellow U.S. citizens thought that I was crazy (and many doubtless still do)  but realistically dealing with the maze of government stuff, including what laws and regulations really said rather than what people thought they did, was essential in keeping things moving forward.

    That does alter your life.  It’s one reason why I take such a jaundiced view over the civil marriage debate.  If people on both sides really understood the nature of American family law–and I’ve documented some of this on this blog–they too would call for the abolition of civil marriage.  Instead we have a debate driven by people who place the sentimental value of a piece of paper from the government ahead of the reality behind it, and whose goal is to convince enough people deluded in the same way that their take on the subject is the right one.

    But I digress.  Is this heavy emphasis on “thinking bureaucratically” or “living bureaucratically” unAmerican?  Of course.  But we have a choice: we can stumble through life swallowing the pap our leaders feed us with catastrophes following, or we can take the trouble to sort things out the way they are and get through them in reasonable order.  I wouldn’t be silly enough to say that such leads to infallible success; stuff happens, the bureaucrats sometimes get the best of us.  But as Keith Green used to sing, we do our best, and God takes care of the rest.

    People say that these United States won’t survive the current state of affairs.  That’s doubtless true.  But I think we need to concentrate on making things better for the inhabitants than fixating on the nation itself.  After all, Jesus Christ died for sinners, not nations.

  • My Perspective on Driven Pile Drivability Studies

    Recently I had a round of correspondence with a county official in Washington state re pile drivability studies and their place in the contract process.  (If you’re looking for some explanation of this, you can find it here).  His question was as follows:

    During the bidding process, is the contractor’s sole basis for anticipating the size of the hammer needed the WEAP analysis? Does a contractor rely solely on design pile capacities or does the contractor combine geotechnical boring logs and cross-sections with his expertise? Who will be ultimately responsible that a large enough hammer is considered in the bid and brought to the site, the contractor or the preparer of the design package?

    My response was as follows:

    First, at this time the WEAP analysis is the best way for contractor and owner alike to determine the size of a hammer (both to make sure it isn’t too small with premature refusal, or too large and excessive pile stresses) necessary to install a certain pile into a certain soil.

    It is a common specification requirement for a contractor to furnish a wave equation analysis showing that a given hammer can drive a pile into a given soil profile.  As far as what soil profile is used, that’s a sticky issue in drivability studies.  Personally I always attempt to estimate the ultimate axial pile capacity in preparation of a wave equation analysis.  There are two important issues here.

    The first is whether the piles are to be driven to a “tip elevation” specification vs. a blow count specification.  For the former, an independent pile capacity determination is an absolute must.  For the latter, one might be able to use the pile capacities if and only if he or she can successfully “back them out” from the allowable capacities, because the design factors/factors of safety will vary from one job and owner to the next.  Some job specs make that easy, most don’t.

    Even if this can be accomplished, there is the second problem: the ultimate capacity of interest to the designer and the one of interest to the pile driver are two different things.  Consider this: the designer wants to know the pile with the lowest capacity/greatest settlement for a given load.  The pile driver wants to know the pile with the highest capacity.  If you use the design values, you may find yourself unable to drive many of the piles on a job or only with great difficulty.  I’m seeing a disturbing trend towards using the ultimate capacity for design and running into drivability problems.

    As far as responsibility is concerned, that of course depends upon the structure of the contract documents.  I’ve discussed the contractor’s role; I would like to think that any driven pile design would include some consideration of the drivability of the piles.

    Some of the FHWA publications I offer both in print and online (including the Driven Pile Manual) have sample specifications which you may find helpful.

    Hope this long diatribe is of assistance.

    After this, there’s another way of looking at this problem from an LRFD (load and resistance factor design) standpoint that might further illuminate the problem.  The standard LRFD equation looks like this:

    \sum _{i=1}^{n}{\it \gamma}_{{i}}Q_{{i}} \leq \phi\,R_{{n}}

    This is fine for design.   With drivability, however, the situation is different; what you want to do is to induce failure and move the pile relative to the soil with each blow.  So perhaps for drivability the equation should be written as follows:

    \sum _{i=1}^{n}{\it \gamma}_{{i}}Q_{{i}} \geq \phi\,R_{{n}}

    It’s worthy of note that, for AASHTO LRFD (Bridge Design Specifications, 5th Edition)  \phi can run from 0.9 to 1.15, which would in turn force the load applied by the pile hammer upward more than it would if typical design factors are used.  Given the complexity of the loading induced by a hammer during driving, the LRFD equation is generally not employed directly for drivability studies, and the fact that \phi hovers around unity makes the procedure in LRFD very similar to previous practice.

    The problem I posed re the hardest pile to drive vs. the lowest capacity pile on the job is still valid, especially with non-transportation type of projects where many piles are driven to support a structure.  When establishing a “standard” pile for capacity, it is still the propensity of the designer to select the lowest expected pile capacity of all the pile/soil profile combinations as opposed to the highest expect pile resistance of all the pile/soil profile combinations necessary for drivability studies.

    Put another way, the designer will tend to push the centre of the probability curve lower while the pile driver will tend to push the centre of the probability curve higher.  This is a design process issue not entirely addressed by LRFD, although LRFD can be used to help explain the process.

  • Why Sydney Anglican Subordinationism is Lame

    Now that my serialised posting of My Lord and My God is done, we can tackle what is, for Anglicans at least, the obvious question: what relationship does this have with the Sydney Anglicans’ contention that subordination does, in fact exist in the Trinity?  This has been batted around since the issue first hit the Sydney Synod back in 1999.  Defence of same has followed, from this to this and this.

    You have to hand it to the Sydney Anglicans: the Archdiocese which has “stood firm” while the rest of the Province has wavered didn’t get that way by messing around.  Subordinationism per se has been generally regarded as heretical since the collapse of the Roman Empire.  For an Archdiocese that prides itself by its orthodoxy, it was a bold move.

    The weak point in Sydney’s idea is that one can separate the function of the persons of the Trinity from their essence.  As Mark Thompson put it in his monograph:

    Again, the word ‘subordination’ is often taken to mean that one person is somehow less than the other. In this particular case, some suggest the word implies a ‘subordination of being’, that the Son is somehow placed below the Father in being. In other words, he is not as fully God as the Father is. This is indeed the ancient heresy of Arius and those who advocate this view clearly stand outside the orthodox Christian tradition. Yet there is another way of speaking about ‘subordination’: to refer to a difference in function between the Father and the Son. This is ‘functional subordination’ and it is very different from the suggestion that the Son is somehow less God than the Father. Far from being a false reduction of the Son’s divine nature, this way of speaking emphasises both a sameness of nature or being and a difference in function. The Doctrine Commission’s report makes clear repeatedly that it is using the word ‘subordination’ in this second way. It explicitly and repeatedly denies a ‘subordination of being’.

    That is simply a theological nonstarter.  God’s essence, his attributes and his actions are one in the same; they cannot be separated.  Back when David Ould attempted his last defence of this topic, I pointed this out to him, to which his response was as follows:

    And yet, surely, they do! It’s simply not enough for us to state that “all attributes to God are essential to Him” without also recognising that there is a clear distinction between the Father, Son and Spirit. They are three persons who relate to one another in particular but not identical ways. Thus unless one wants to just blend all three into non-differentiated persons (in which case, why are they three persons in the first place) we have to concede that there are differences.

    And this is seen, not least, in the particular relationship between Father and Son.

    To which I responded as follows:

    Although there is no doubt that there are differences amongst the persons of the Trinity, the requirement that divine attributes be essential to God stands, unless, like Moses Maimonides, you assert that you really cannot state that any characteristic be properly attributed to God.

    The problem of the subordination of the Son to the Father vs. the deity of the Son is one of the stickier problems in Christian theology.  Ante-Nicene theology was uniformly subordinationist and (especially in the East) infused with Logos theology which (I think) originated with Philo.  The problem—and anyone who has read Origen wrestle with this issue, esp. in his Commentary on John is aware of this—is that, in the context of Greek philosophy, there was no “clean way” to assert the inequality of the Father and the Son without potentially compromising the Son’s deity.  That became Arius’ sticking point, and his solution was to deny the deity of the Son.  The Church rejected Arius’ solution, and rightly so, but still using Greek philosophy to explain the relationship of the persons of the Trinity amongst each other, has ended up setting subordinationism aside in order to preserve the theistic integrity of the Trinity.

    Subordinationism and logos theology, however, are essential in establishing a connection between God and his creation that precedes the Incarnation of the Son.  That’s an important point; it was certainly so in Patristic times, when the Greeks asserted that the “God over all” had little or no interest or connection with the creation, and today with Islam.  I am aware, however, that the interest in Anglican circles re subordinationism has not been driven by this consideration.

    Having considered this at length, I came to realise that the solution to this conundrum doesn’t come from philosophy but from mathematics, which is why I wrote My Lord and My God.  This basically allows subordinationists to have our/their cake and eat it too, i.e., assert the essential, uncreated nature of the Godhead in all of his Persons and at the same time recognise the subordination/difference amongst same Persons.

    Although I understand Anglicans’ dislike for theological adventurism given 40+ years of hard experience in the matter, I think a solution of this kind is important if we are to understand the God we worship and communicate to the very limited extent that we can the reality of his nature.

    He never responded to this.  To my mind, I’m not sure whether he understands what I am trying to do or not.  But what I have done has solved a critical theological problem of their own making, and I always try to appreciate people who bail me out when I’m in a tight place.

    But that leads us to the motivation of the Sydney Anglicans’ embrace of this theology; subordinationism above leads to subordinationism below, and especially between men and women.  But here too I don’t think they have thought things out very well.

    If we go back to the infinity model, we can show that, within the Godhead, the Son can be less than the Father, and the Spirit less than the Son.  But what does that really mean?  We instinctively see that, if we do the area comparison analogy, the Son’s area is “less” than the Father’s.  Since the days of Dedekind and Cantor it has been shown that all infinities are not equal; establishing a neat “ratio” between them is another matter altogether.  Thus subordination and rank in the Godhead don’t mean the same thing as it does here.  That’s perfectly fitting with the nature of God and the nature of his creatures.  As God himself explained to Isaiah, “”My thoughts are not your thoughts, and my ways are not your ways,” declares the LORD. “Just as the heavens are higher than the earth, so my ways are higher than your ways, and my thoughts are higher than your thoughts.”” (Isaiah 55:8-9 GW)

    Bringing things back to earth, the Sydney Anglicans use subordinationism to buttress their idea that, just as there is subordination in God, so also should there be subordination between men and women.  But that doesn’t take into consideration one important aspect of the classical world: the system was rank-driven from top to bottom.  Modern concepts of “equality” were unknown in the ancient world, and the concept is dicey even today, although we try very hard to hide that fact.  A high-born woman would have been superior to a low-born man, especially if the latter happened to be her slave.  The Roman system had patricians and plebeians built into the system at the start, and ended up with the honestiores and humiliores at the end.  All of these categories were populated by both sexes.

    So I think we’re going to have to look elsewhere to the solution of this problem.  In the meanwhile I think I have demonstrated that the Sydney Anglicans’ concept of subordinationism in the Trinity is lame and subject to revision.

  • It's Back to Gay Apparel at Christmas

    After Hallmark stepped into it:

    Critics took to Twitter and Hallmark’s Facebook page, accusing the company of making a political statement by using the word “fun” to replace “gay.” Some Facebook commenters said they would never again buy Hallmark merchandise and that the change amounted to the company rewriting Christmas classics in the name of political correctness. Others suggested removing the word “gay” demonstrated a homophobic bias.

    The company initially responded by saying the multiple meanings attached to the word “gay” meant the sweater’s lyrics would be “open to misinterpretation.”

    When you get everyone upset in this debate, you know you’re really laid an egg.

    But Hallmark should have realised that most of us wear “gay apparel” all year.  As Domenico Dolce of Dolce and Gabbana fame noted:

    The two men so cherish the idea of the family, had they ever thought of getting married. “What?! Never!” they answer in chorus, “I don’t believe in gay marriage.” Dolce laughs. In Catholic Italy, has their sexuality proved a problem? “No, never,” says Dolce. “The fashion industry is full of gays.”

    The more we drown in our politically correct stew, the stupider we look.

  • My Lord and My God: The End of the Journey

    For an introduction, explanation and links to the entire work, click here.

    We have come a long way in our theological adventure concerning the deity of Christ and the nature of the Godhead. Our friends from the Watchtower who have followed us this far are probably glad that such a trip is finally coming to an end. Some of our Trinitarian friends probably don’t feel much better about this voyage either. For both of these groups we can only be grateful that they have come this far on such a subject.

    One of the occupational hazards of those who deal with the cults is to become so riveted on the errors of the cults that they miss a very important point, i.e., that the most serious errors are committed by those who really don’t care one way or another. Too many today find any such journey into the truth to be a tiresome business; they just want to feel good and forget about the rest. Having to stop and actually seriously consider an issue such as this is just too much for some. These are the people who are in the most serious difficulty because those who stand for nothing will fall for anything, and in our time we see too much of that for comfort. As we begin a new millennium we realise that we are living on borrowed time, because when people in general lose their concept of truth they are only preparing themselves for power hungry opportunists – the Antichrist being chief amongst them – to move in and take everything they have for his own aggrandisement, up to and including their lives and souls.

    The fact remains, however, that the identity of Jesus Christ is the central question in human history. It is one that cannot be ignored; it must be faced. The Scriptures clearly teach that a) he was and is God and b) he is subordinate to the Father. To deny these requires either to deny the truth of the Scriptures – the authoritative witness of the life of Jesus on earth and of what came immediately after — or to interpret them against their own plain sense. Both have been tried, the former by liberal Christians and non-Christians and the latter by such groups as the Watchtower

    Of these two the first is most important. Without a fully divine Saviour it is not possible to break the power of sin and death over us and to bring us to everlasting life. This is what the Arians, lost in a philosophical maze and more zealous for God’s honour than God himself, did not realise. The Arians were content to have themselves a “perfect man” who somehow received value enough to effect the redemption, rather than God himself who was sufficient in every respect himself.

    In asserting this, though, those who affirmed three persons in one God – Trinitarians – had to come to grips with how a changeless, timeless God could intervene in the history of the creation and ultimately become one of us to redeem us. Their solution reflected what the underlying philosophical thought that had come into Christianity would allow. We have seen, however, that it is certainly possible to explain, if mathematically and not philosophically, how it is possible that God could be both the unmoved mover of the universe on the one hand and moved to tears by the death of Lazarus on the other. Such a relationship, both between the persons of the Godhead on the one hand and between the Son as God and man on the other, can only be explained if we first are prepared to take the Scriptures’ assertion seriously that the Father is, in fact, greater than both Son and Spirit.

    But to reiterate such a diatribe would be repetitious, and we have been repetitious enough. On this account this work has been too long, but on the other hand we have but scratched the surface of a subject that has filled volumes in the past and could justify more in the future. Our ultimate goal with such a work as this is and must be to help bring all who claim the name of Christ to the feet of our ascended Master and for all of us to proclaim with one voice, “My Lord and my God!”

    , , ,

  • The Exorcist's Author Injects Himself Into Another Horror Story

    Every Halloween, he comes out of hiding:

    William Peter Blatty will emerge from his burrow, the stately Bethesda home where he lives with his wife of 33 years, to watch the 7:30 p.m. showing on Halloween. Afterward he will submit to questions from audience members. Blatty will bear the cross of his mammoth success, which was fused long ago to the kitschy holiday by virtue of its terrifying imagery. Never mind, he says, that the story is more about the mystery and power of faith than the ultimate violation of a 12-year-old girl by evil forces.

    “I can’t regret ‘The Exorcist,’ ” he says after a moment’s pause for his curtailed comedy career. “It’s done so much for me and for my family. And it’s given me a great deal of freedom to write what I want.”

    I never liked horror movies.  Perhaps it was running poor health as a child before I moved to “where the animals are tame and the people run wild” (a horror experience of its own kind) but the idea of paying hard currency to be scared out of my wits has never appealed to me.

    So I, taking in much of life in the 1970’s, missed ‘The Exorcist’.  Blatty wasn’t the only one whose career was altered by the success of the film.  Its music came from one Mike Oldfield, who came off from messing around with Kevin Ayers to become a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic.  That did have an impact on my life.  It also changed Richard Branson, whose Virgin Records was getting started and which was transformed by the success of albums such as Tubular Bells (where ‘The Exorcist’ got its music) and the incomparable Hergest Ridge.

    But Blatty is involved in another horror:

    Mere steps away from lunch is evidence of the fallen, in his eyes: his beloved alma mater, which he believes has drifted perilously into secularism. This month, Blatty submitted to the Vatican a petition with thousands of signatures and a 120-page institutional audit that calls for the removal of Georgetown’s Catholic and Jesuit designations if it does not comply with every little rule in “Ex Corde Ecclesiae,” John Paul II’s constitution for affiliated colleges. The university, for its part, says the “Catholic and Jesuit identity on campus has never been stronger.”

    Bill, what are you doing? people have asked him.

    Bill, times change. Let it go.

    Bill, why are you punishing the school you love, the school whose scholarship money rescued you from a childhood of restless poverty in New York, the school that made possible your life, that cemented your faith?

    “If you truly love someone that you think needs to be in rehab, you’ll do everything you possibly can to get them into rehab,” Blatty says. The last straw, he says, was Georgetown’s invitation of Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, to be a commencement speaker in May of last year. Sebelius has a record of supporting abortion rights, and abortion is the issue that really sets Blatty’s nerves on fire.

    Now this is a horror story I’ve seen before.  An institution that shies away from defending its own tenets in its own institutions won’t do it with anyone else.  That’s the point where the Episcopal Church blinked re James Pike.  I hope that Blatty and his co-signers get a response.

    It’s interesting that the controversial speaker was none other than Kathleen Sibelius, who now presides over the slow train wreck of the Obamacare rollout.  Had Georgetown known what was coming, it might have thought twice before inviting her.  As it is, that administrative, legal and economic bungle is now becoming a horror story that will dwarf ‘The Exorcist’ before it’s done.

  • My Lord and My God: Why Arianism Failed

    For an introduction, explanation and links to the entire work, click here.

    In the course of our discussion we have made reference to a lot of history surrounding the original Arian controversy. It took nearly a century to sort things out on this. Organisationally the Watchtower is separate from the Arian churches of long ago. To begin with there was too much time separating the two; also, the Watchtower’s Arianism is but one part of its distinctive agenda.[1] The original Arians’ objective was to take over the Christian church in its entirety rather than to found a distinctive organisation. So why did they fail in their task?

    The usual Watchtower explanation of this is that Trinitarian doctrine was imposed by the state. They tell us that the emperor Constantine called the Council of Nicea, outlawed Arianism, and that was that[2], until the likes of Russell and Rutherford came along with the Watchtower. This theory is especially dear to the Watchtower because of its aversion to the state at any level. For people who don’t vote, hold public office or even pledge the flag, the state support of any doctrine — even when same state has been gone for over five hundred years – is the kiss of death; it just can’t be right to them.[3]

    The problem with this idea is that it is half right. Constantine certainly did make the Nicene formula state policy during his lifetime. But the Arian controversy outlived him; moreover his descendants and successors were active participants in the dispute as much as he was, and not only on the Nicene side. The Arians, semi-Arians and other assorted doctrinalists found state sanction and support too tempting to pass up, just like everyone else. We need to take a deeper look at this issue to see just what the facts are. This is admittedly a difficult task, because the Arian controversy is one of the most complicated and difficult periods in the history of Christianity to keep up with, let alone to interpret. The following is the condensed version of this history.

    Since Arius first proclaimed his denial of the deity of the Son in Alexandria, it was here that interest in the subject came up first, and also Arianism’s most important opponent – Athanasius, presbyter and later bishop, who opposed Arianism with a single minded intensity that lasted the rest of his life. It was he who helped to inspire Constantine to call the Council of Nicea in the first place, and he (along with others such as Hosius of Cordoba, in Spain) to force the church to squarely face the problem of Arianism and to do something about it. Arius was condemned at Nicea and the doctrine of the homoousious – that the Father and the Son were “of one substance” – became state supported orthodoxy. But this is where the Watchtower’s account of events begins to run out, because this was not the end of the matter, but only the beginning.

    Even though the homoousious was official, it was not received everywhere with equal enthusiasm. In the western, Latin churches, it was accepted almost universally, in large measure because it squared with the Trinitarian theology first developed by Tertullian and expounded by others that had become standard in the west. In Alexandria it was also well received for the most part. But in places such as the lower Balkans, Asia Minor, Antioch and Jerusalem, it was not accepted. This was not because eastern churchmen were prepared to deny en masse the deity of Christ (a few were) but because a) the word homoousious had Monarchian connotations as a result of its use in the east previous to Nicea and b) a natural conservatism just didn’t care for the novelty of a formula set forth in a forum (a “universal” church council) which was as much a novelty as the homoousious. This dislike for the formula was used by the few real Arians (and those who wanted to use the new movement for their own political purposes, such as Eusebius of Nicomedia) to keep their cause alive for many years.

    It didn’t take long for this to surface; Constantine’s first priority was unity and peace in the church, and he pardoned many of Arius’ boosters and exiled Athanasius for opposing all of this and thus creating “division.” The process of back-pedalling on the Nicene formula began in Constantine’s lifetime, and was instigated by the emperor himself.

    When Constantine died in 337, the Roman Empire was divided between his three sons, Constantine II, Constans and Constantius. The first two divided the western half and promptly got into a war, which ended with Cosntantine’s death in 340 and Constans’ assuming sole control of the west. Constans was a pro-Nicene emperor in a pro-Nicene part of the empire. Unfortunately he in turn was murdered in 350; three years later the last remaining brother Constantius became sole emperor.

    This was a problem for Athanasius and his Nicene friends because Constantius was opposed to the Nicene formula. Athanasius, having returned to Alexandria after Constantine’s death, was promptly exiled again until 346; Constantius exiled him again in 356. The real Arians would of course have liked to have replaced the homoousious with the formula that the Son was unlike (anomoios) the Father, but the conservative eastern churchmen were not prepared for this. Instead Constantius’ reign is punctuated by a series of councils (very much under the emperor’s supervision) where the church groped to define the relationship between the Father and the Son in any terms except the two just mentioned. The climax of this took place at Rimini in Italy, where the Son was proclaimed to be like (homoios) the Father. This was a weak as it could get; many things are “like” others in some respects but unlike in many others. Jerome wrote, “The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian.”[4] This also illustrated that Constantius has managed to bring both the eastern and western churches to heel on this issue.

    When Constantius died in 361, Julian became emperor, and promptly made public the fact that he was a pagan. He recalled all of the exiles in the hope that the feuding factions of the church would destroy each other and thus the church. But they did not; without imperial interference, and with the mediating work of those who wanted to both affirm the Nicene formula and solve some of the problems that led to its widespread rejection. When Julian’s hope for discord was unrealised, he exiled Athanasius again, but the tide against Arianism in any form (which was becoming more extreme all the while) was turning.

    Julian perished on the field of battle in 363; with him perished the last hope of official paganism in the Roman Empire. He was succeeded by the Nicene Christian Jovian, but only briefly; the following year the empire was divided again. Valentian I took the west; he was both of the Nicene faith and tolerant of others. His brother Valens, who ruled the east, was neither; he once again enforced the homoios against the Nicene faith. Athanasius, recalled under Jovian, was exiled again, if briefly. But the church was turning against Arianism in any form, and it was now dependent upon imperial support for its continued domination. That support perished in 378 with Valens’ death on the battlefield at Adrianople. The Nicene Gratian, who was already emperor in the west since 375, succeeded him. Gratian appointed Theodosius as emperor in the east, who called the Council of Constantinople in 381 to affirm the Nicene faith as the faith of the church.

    With this Arianism was finished as part of the main body of Christianity; it persisted with barbarian groups such as the Goths and the Lombards for many years afterwards but eventually they either became Nicene themselves or were absorbed into the populations they conquered. In its day it had the support of emperors and at least the sympathy of much of the church, especially in the east where Christianity was the strongest to start with. So how did this doctrine, with so much going for it politically, fail?

    To answer this question – and really to get to the main practical point of a book such as this – we need to start by looking at the main protagonist for the Nicene cause – Athanasius. His entire life was spent in defending the Nicene cause, not because it was philosophically “good and beautiful” (to use an old expression of the Greeks) but because he realised from the start that only a fully divine Saviour was capable of redeeming people from their sins and bringing them to eternal life. He himself put it this way:

    For seeing that men, having rejected the contemplation of God, and with their eyes downward, as though sunk in the deep, were seeking about for God in nature and in the world of sense, feigning gods for themselves of mortal men and demons; to this end the loving and general Saviour of all, the Word of God, takes to Himself a body, and as Man walks among men and meets the senses of all men half-way, to the end, I say, that they who think that God is corporeal may from what the Lord effects by His body perceive the truth, and through Him recognise the Father.[5]

    But is it really necessary for Jesus to be God in order for him to save people? Watchower theology tells us that Jesus was a perfect ransom for the sins of mankind; his work on the torture stake was precisely enough to redeem the sins of people, both past and present. Once this ransom was paid, the sin problem was solved; the perfect man had come, the ransom was paid without need of “change” if you please. Today millions of people in the Watchtower believe this for their eternity. Why couldn’t Arius and his friends, with the frequent backing of the government, convince the world of this so many years ago, before the Nicene faith became so rooted in Christian belief that it was necessary to go off and form a well disciplined cult such as the Watchtower to perpetuate such beliefs? And is this correct in any case? We now pose two crucial questions to try and sort this out.

    Why Should God Care About Us?

    When you engage people to talk about such things as God, the afterlife and other related subjects, one of the amazing assumptions that frequently surfaces is that God will simply save everyone just because he could not bear to see anyone go to Hell, because everyone is good, or whatever reason they might want. The underlying assumption of this is that God has some kind of obligation to “do the right thing” in the eyes of man, and that this binds him.

    One of the real achievements of the philosophers is to put this issue into focus. They told us that God is uncreated, that his existence is entirely self sufficient, that he is eternal, that he is above time, that he is entirely different from his creation, that he does not change, and so on. All of these concepts are Biblical. Where one main divergence comes is in how God relates to his creation. As we have noted, one of the underlying assumptions of the Bible is that God takes an interest in the affairs of people and that he intervenes on our behalf in many different ways, whether it is in delivering the Israelites out of Egypt, giving them the Law, sending them the prophets, and of course in the fullness of time sending Jesus Christ.

    The philosophers, on the other hand, saw no good reason why God should be involved in the creation, let alone in the affairs of people. He does not need this creation to exist, or to add anything to his own existence, or for any other reason. If we do not assume that the creation is eternal, then God had to stop what he was being to accomplish this; this implies change, which God does not do. More change comes if he decides to actually intervene in the affairs of people, or to alter the course of creation, or whatever. There is simply no compelling reason here why God should be involved in the creation. People who have not thought this out have no real basis to show why God should save them or do anything else. They simply assume that, because they are, God should do something about it. It is amusing to see people who on the one hand laugh at the idea that people believed that the earth was at the centre of the universe and on the other seriously think that God is under some kind of obligation to help them just because they are human and “deserve” it. If there is any “centre” of this universe it is God himself, not us.

    People in the Watchtower like to use phrases such as “God-dishonouring[6]” to describe the doctrine of the Trinity, but the basic truth is that any contact that God has with his creation is “God-dishonouring” especially if we restrict God to be the Father. Under this scenario any time God steps out of his eternal, timeless, self-sufficient existence he is degrading himself. Inserting the “perfect man” as the Watchtower does doesn’t really solve the problem because the perfect man is in reality as much a part of the creation as anything else; God doesn’t have any reason to have to do with the perfect man than with anyone else. According to Arian theology, the perfect man appeared at a definite time just as anything else did. So the existence of this “perfect man” doesn’t help our problems at all; he just adds to the confusion.

    The deists, some of whom helped to found the American republic, picked up on this and posited that God simply put the creation out to run by itself without divine intervention. But the Bible does not teach this; as we have noted, the Bible tells us that God is certainly interested in the course of his creation in general and in us in particular. The Bible also tells us why this is so: “For God loved the world so much that he gave his only begotten Son, in order that everyone exercising faith might not be destroyed but have everlasting life.” (John 3:16) The whole process of God’s dealings with us are driven by love; moreover they are not out of necessity but an act of God’s free will and desire. This is the point where we come past the philosophers; they correctly discerned the nature of God, but they could not tell us that God loved us or would come and meet with us and help us.

    But how can God carry this out, when he is so far above us? The answer, of course, is that God set forth a mediator, who on the one hand is really God and on the other is able to meet us poor creatures where we are. That mediator is the Son, and to follow up on the work of the Son the Spirit. Arians of all kinds immediately object and say that such a combination is in reality impossible. In doing so they basically end any worthwhile discussion of God meaningfully intervening in the affairs of the creation. Arianism is a losing proposition because, when they deny the existence of a truly divine mediator, they end any meaningful discussion of a relationship between God and his creation.

    And the process of mediation started with the creation itself; this is why the Bible tells us that all things were created through the Son. This is why many of the Church Fathers tell us that it was the Son that appeared at every theophany in the Hebrew-Aramaic Scriptures. Finally of course this is why God came to become a man and to live among us, to die and rise again, to procure our salvation. All of this is possible because, at the point of negative infinity, the Father generated the Son and the Spirit, that, though God be alone, we might not. As is always the case with God, there are no accidents; things are planned before the foundation of the world, in reality in the foundation of God himself.

    Our considerations of the nature of infinity and divinity have shown that we can look at both multidimensionally. This is not a defect; it makes it possible for the Son and the Spirit to interact with us while at the same time to be God. In addition to making time contact possible, it also made possible contact in the worst possible way, namely with our sin, and it is to this subject that we now turn.

    How Can We Be Redeemed?

    Now that we have established that a) God is not obligated to redeem us and b) God made provision in his beginning to solve the problem, we need to take a look at just how this works. This is the question of utmost importance to us because without such a solution we will never achieve eternal life; we will be consigned to eternal death, death that does not end. Here again we need to consider the Watchtower’s solution to the problem. They tell us that only a certain amount of sin needs to be redeemed, and that Jesus Christ, the perfect man, was just enough for that sin.

    Such a view, however, presumes a totally inadequate concept of the problems that people have in getting from the state they are in to God. To begin with, why should the “perfect man,” created at a finite point in time as they claim he was, be a sufficient sacrifice for anything? The Law set forth an involved and specific system of sacrifices of animals and other foods for all kinds of sins that the Jews might commit. How did each of these animals, both in kind and number, be allocated for certain sins? Why not just, say, sacrifice one animal on a periodic basis and be done with it? Why was it necessary for the “perfect man” to come along and do the whole job when other created beings could have done as well?

    The reason why any sacrifice is acceptable to God is because he himself said that it was. No created being, however wonderful it might be, has any value in and of itself – we refer to this as intrinsic value – and only becomes a worthy sacrifice when God himself sets a value on it. A good example of this is in the first sacrifice, that of Cain and Abel:

    And Abel came to be a herder of sheep, but Cain became a cultivator of the ground. And it came about at the expiration of some time that Cain proceeded to bring some fruits of the ground as an offering of Jehovah. But as for Abel, he too brought some firstlings of his flock, even their fatty pieces. Now while Jehovah was looking with favor upon Abel and his offering, he did not look with any favor on Cain and upon his offering. (Genesis 4:2a-4)

    Although there are some important symbolic considerations here, the fact remains that Jehovah designated Abel’s offerings of animals as acceptable while Cain’s offerings of grains were not. This designation was completely in Jehovah’s prerogative and the offerings themselves had no intrinsic value one way or another. If they did, then we could still make these offerings and they be effective. The Jews went through this system for many years and never really got ahead of their sins. What was and is really needed was something with some intrinsic value to be offered up and completely clear the sin problem once and for all.

    That took place when Jesus Christ, as both God and man, offered himself up for the sins of the world. He had intrinsic value from the very beginning not only because he had received it from the Father but also because he was God himself. This enabled him to not only redeem the sins of the world – both present and future – but also to really go far past them. This is the point of the whole diatribe in the book of Hebrews on the subject of the old covenant and the new. In the old covenant a flawed priest offered an inadequate sacrifice for sins in a man made temple; Jesus Christ, a perfect priest, offered himself in a temple made by God. As God, both Jesus’ worth and his perfection are fully guaranteed; such could not be assured under any other circumstance.

    This, however, does not explain what was obvious from the last part, i.e., how could a changeless God take on sin? When John saw Jesus coming to his baptism, he exclaimed, “The next day he (John the Baptist) beheld Jesus coming toward him, and he said: ‘See, the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world!’” (John 1:29) Taking away that sin was the centre of Jesus’ mission; there can be no getting around this. How could God even touch the sin of the world, let alone take it away? And doesn’t this very act in a specific point of time imply change? Neither sin nor change is proper to God. How can this all take place with God involved?

    Our considerations have shown that God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are all God. They also show that they are all one. We have seen that God’s place in things is unique; there can be no other like him. “Listen, O Israel: Jehovah our God is one Jehovah.” (Deuteronomy 6:4) The Father did not generate the Son and the Spirit to result in three gods. There can be but one divine essence, one who is the foundation of the universe. We have shown, however, that the Son is the mediator between God and his creation, that the Son is capable of being God while at the same time having the ability to accommodate both the sin of the world (in order to take it away, not to come to some kind of agreement) and interaction with us. This interaction includes his incarnation. The ability of the Son to limit himself is not only the result of his humanity, but also because of the nature of his divinity, which is as good as the Father’s but, as we have seen, not as great as the Father.

    We need at last to consider another important matter: is taking away sin all there is? The idea of a perfect ransom implies this. It tells us that, once the sins are taken away, there are no more problems with God. But the Scriptures don’t support this view either, and in not doing so they add a whole new dimension to getting to God that many overlook.

    Removing the sin problem is important. We don’t need to take this lightly, even though it is so easy to do in this age where the whole concept of sin is almost passé. It is not passé with God however; our sins are an obstacle we cannot ourselves surmount if we plan to be in unity with God. Sins, however, come from somewhere and are not just accidental. They are the result of acts of our will. It is reasonable to say that, if our sin alienates us from God, then the root causes in our will and nature do the same. So it is necessary to fix both if we plan to spend our eternity with God.

    How did we get into this fix? The beginning of the Scriptures tell us that God set our first parents in the garden to live the kind of life with God that he had intended from the start. Our first parents responded to this by doing the one thing that God had instructed them not to do, i.e., eat of the tree of the knowledge of good an evil. This act ended their time in the garden and set them out to have to make it on their own, with all the problems and woes that come with that.

    In the garden Adam and Eve were given all the provision they needed to live with and for God. They were certainly endowed with free will (they proved that the hard way) but God offered them a way to live with him. In turning this down, however, they discovered that getting back to Eden wasn’t as easy as they might have thought. Their own sin stood in the way, obviously, and their sinful propensities only made things worse. But the central problem was that, once they had walked out on God’s plan of mutual dwelling, they discovered that they lacked the capability of getting back to God by their own resources. There are several ways to explain this, but our considerations of our finite, limited nature and God’s infinite, unlimited nature show that we as creatures of semi-infinite life and finite nature simply do not have what it takes to get to God.

    Now this is an awful situation: what is to be done? The solution came from God in the long successions of covenants and dispensations that are described in the Scriptures. Their object was first to establish a relationship between man and God, to form an alliance between the two, and to provide some kind of system to enable man to have the sin taken out of his life. The Hebrew-Aramaic Scriptures show a real awareness that sin just doesn’t happen. People make sinful decisions; however, at that stage of the walk between man and God, just getting the sin paid for was made the priority.

    Sooner or later the whole problem of the sinful nature of man needed to be addressed. This is the point where the perfect ransom gets into trouble; we can obtain redemption for all the sins we want, but if the nature that commits them isn’t addressed, then we really haven’t solved the problem. The solution came with and by Jesus Christ, and he himself put it to Nicodemus by night: “In answer Jesus said to him: ‘Most truly I say to you, Unless anyone is born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God.’ Nicodemus said to him: ‘How can a man be born when he is old? He cannot enter into the womb of his mother a second him and be born, can he?’ Jesus answered, ‘Most truly I say to you, Unless anyone is born from water and spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.’” (John 3:3-5)

    We hear people talk about being “born again” so much that it doesn’t have the impact to us that it did with Nicodemus. If we really step away from the way we have made such a revolutionary concept so conventional it hits us that Jesus’ message is simple: we need to be made into new people. “Consequently if anyone is in union with Christ, he is a new creation; the old things passed away, look! new things have come into existence.” (2 Corinthians 5:17) We need to be recreated, and recreated by the one who created us in the first place, God himself. For us to have fellowship with God it is necessary that we be recreated with God himself living in us: Once this takes place God can live in us and we in him, and we can participate in his divinity, as man does not have the resources to be or be made into God.

    It was this which Jesus prayed for: “…in order that they may all be one, just as you, Father, are in union with me and I am in union with you, that they may be in union with us, in order that the world may believe that you sent me forth.” (John 17:21) God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are one because they are all God and of one essence. We too can be in union with God if God lives in us and we live in him.

    Jesus himself made this possible. We said that all things that are attributed to God are a part of his being. We remember that Jesus said that he is the bread of life, the way, the truth and the life, etc. It is central to God’s perfect plan that Jesus himself in his life and very being would make this union between us and God possible.

    • Jesus was generated at negative infinity in such a way that he could accommodate us in our created state; thus, it was necessary that the Father be greater than him, but not better. This accommodation included his union with a human soul and body to be a man and ultimately to take on – and away – the sin of the world.
    • At the fullness of time, Jesus was united in a complete union with a human soul and a human body and took on our human state, with all of its limitations. He directed his divinity into the situation he was in through his authoritative teaching and through the miracles he performed during his ministry. He became living proof that it was not only possible but also desirable for God to live in man.
    • Jesus took on our sins at Calvary. He was at once a perfect high priest, the perfect sacrificial victim, and the shedder of the perfect blood that was sufficient for all sins.
    • In the power of God he rose from the dead. In doing this he not only undid Adam’s sin but also the consequence of this, namely death. He gave us the authority to become God’s children. (cf. John 1:12) He had this authority as God.
    • He returned to the Father from where he came, and will return to rule the earth as God intended it to be done in the first place.

    The plan of our salvation was not an accident; it was planned from the beginning. God himself went though the whole thing rather than leaving it to a simply created surrogate. The Spirit, God’s own presence in his plan, does the follow up to this. God’s intimate participation in our redemption, made possible by the special nature of the Son and the Spirit, sets Christianity apart from any other proposed way to God because God himself is the road to himself, the only really worthy road. When Christians realised this, Arianism was doomed, and consigned to the margins of history.

    [1]We spend a lot of time on the Watchtower as the chief defenders of the idea that Jesus is not God, but we should not overlook the fact that Unitarians have been doing this for a long time as well. The problem here is that Unitarians and the Watchtower may be at one on this issue but this is where it ends; beyond this we are looking at two groups which are very different in outlook. Unitarians tend to be very open and sceptical about a wide variety of issues while the Watchtower is equally dogmatic and rigid. The Unitarian denies the deity of Christ because no one in their opinion can prove it right; the JW denies same because headquarters in Brooklyn has declared that it is wrong. Such a reality speaks of an entirely different approach to belief.

    [2] The Da Vinci Code sets forth the same proposition, and it has no more merit there than it does in the hands of the Watchtower.

    [3]No, we’re not missing it by a thousand years; the Byzantine Empire was in fact one and the same state with the Roman Empire, despite its vastly different approach to a lot of things. It did not end until the Turks took Constantinople in 1453.

    [4]Jerome, Dialogue Against the Luciferians, 19.

    [5]Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 15.

    [6] The concept of “God-dishonouring” is strong in Islam, too: “It does not befit the Majesty of ALLAH to take unto Himself a son.” (Qur’an, 19:35a)

    , , ,

  • The Saudi "Tipping Point" With the U.S. Is Iran

    It’s finally boiled over to the point where our sycophantic media can’t ignore it:

    The breach became dramatic over the past week. Last Friday, Saudi Arabia refused to take its seat on the United Nations Security Council, in what Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi intelligence chief, described as “a message for the U.S., not the U.N,” according to the Wall Street Journal. On Tuesday, Prince Turki al-Faisal, a former head of Saudi intelligence, voiced “a high level of disappointment in the U.S. government’s dealings” on Syria and the Palestinian issue, in an interview with Al-Monitor.

    And the problem is broad-based, too:

    What should worry the Obama administration is that Saudi concern about U.S. policy in the Middle East is shared by the four other traditional U.S. allies in the region: Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates and Israel. They argue (mostly privately) that Obama has shredded U.S. influence by dumping President Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, backing the Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi, opposing the coup that toppled Morsi, vacillating in its Syria policy, and now embarking on negotiations with Iran — all without consulting close Arab allies.

    The list of grievances is long.  In the case of Syria, it wasn’t Obama’s fault–liberal interventionists like Samantha Powers were itching for a fight with Assad–but because the American people, another group wearying of the current Occupant, were tired of more Middle Eastern adventures.  Other than that, everything else, like Obamacare, is now “owned” by same Occupant.

    Although all of this has soured things, the one thing that has led the Saudis to make the break “cleaner” was the Occupant’s footsies with Tehran.  Evangelicals are fed a steady diet of former Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad’s mantra to “wipe Israel off the map”.  While I wouldn’t minimise such a threat, I wouldn’t take it at face value either.  Iran’s strategic dream is to establish hegemony over the Arabian Peninsula, as I noted many years ago:

    Iran’s real objective in developing nuclear weapons is to rule both sides of the Persian Gulf, and that includes Saudi Arabia. Obtaining that would also accrue to them Mecca and Medina, which would make a Shia state the guardian of the Muslim holy sites for the first time in history. It would also give them the bargaining power to do pretty much what they wanted with the West, and that would include their objectives with the State of Israel. Calling for Israel’s destruction whips up the Arab street; getting Saudi Arabia warms the hearts of the rulers.

    Middle Eastern politics is not an amateurs’ game, wasn’t in Bible times, isn’t now.  But foreign policy has never been this country’s strong suit.  When Barack Obama was elected in 2008, the elites swooned because they thought we had, at last, left our boorish provincialism behind.  But that was only possible if we had left them behind.  That too, given the right circumstances, can be arranged as well.

Design a site like this with WordPress.com
Get started