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  • Pushing Back Against “Waist Down Religion”

    Charles R. Beach

    One of the people I was honoured to work with at Church of God Lay Ministries was Charles R. Beach. Lee College/University students remember him has a professor in modern languages but they also remember him as heading up Pioneers for Christ, leading students out in what we would call now short-term mission trips. He was also a key developer (along with Leonard Albert) in developing the personal evangelism programs that the department promoted and taught for many years.

    Of special interest to Beach were the Mormons, with whom he had extensive contact and whose idea he had studied extensively. Boiled down to the essentials, anyone who wants to share the Gospel to a group of people need to understand a) the Gospel itself (not a given amongst our minsters) and b) the religion or thought process of the people themselves, also not a given amongst our ministers.

    The LDS church has some very interesting teachings, especially dating from their early years, which they’re not forthcoming in presenting to the outside world. Probably as good of a summary of those can be found in Thelma “Granny” Gear’s Momma, Mormonism and Me, but some of these are as follows:

    • God was once a man.
    • God is flesh and bone.
    • There are many gods.
    • Adam is God.
    • There is a Mother God.
    • Jesus had many wives — He was a polygamist.
    • Man can become a god.

    All of this and more caused Beach to characterise LDS/Mormonism as a “waist down religion.” The whole thing is based on procreation, from god(s) on down. Polygamy was a key part of that until it became evident that they would have to sacrifice it on the altar of respectability (another Mormon obsession) and admission of Utah to the Union.

    One of the saddest things my generation has inflicted on Christianity is, in the face of the sexual revolution and the subsequent saturating sexualisation of our society, the fact they they’ve tried to turn Evangelical Christianity into a “waist down religion.” People like Mark Driscoll come to mind first, but there are many others. The usual victims of this mentality are women. As is common in “culture war” conflicts, both sides bitterly oppose each other but at the same time have some common underlying assumptions. In this case the sexualisation of the Godhead underpins both, and some feminists have countered with referring to God as a woman, somewhat in the spirit of the Mormon “mother god.”

    We can go back to the days of the Israelites and their opposing the male/female fertility pantheons around them with pure monotheism. Or we can look at the Christian Church in the wide open mores of the Roman Empire, emphasising sexual purity and abstinence in the face of that society. But no one who seriously looks at the subject can say that the God who inspired and walked through the pages of the Scriptures has a body, a gender in the proper sense of the word, or procreates sexually. That doesn’t stop the distortions that we must deal with at the present, but it certainly doesn’t justify them either.

    It is evident that what we have here is a systemic failure of our Christian institutions, from the local churches to our seminaries, to properly teach the nature of God, and it is a deep shame that we have to debate them the way that we are doing now.

    “I see, Sir, that you are a Prophet!” exclaimed the woman. “It was on this mountain that our ancestors worshiped; and yet you Jews say that the proper place for worship is in Jerusalem.” “Believe me,” replied Jesus, “a time is coming when it will be neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem that you will worship the Father. You Samaritans do not know what you worship; we know what we worship, for Salvation comes from the Jews. But a time is coming, indeed it is already here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father spiritually and truly; for such are the worshipers that the Father desires. God is Spirit; and those who worship him must worship spiritually and truly.”

    (John 4:19-24 TCNT)

  • Twenty Five Years of Positive Infinity

    Twenty-five years ago I received the following notification from Geocities, the free website provider:

    Sat Aug 23 13:59:46 1997…

    Welcome, DON, to GeoCities Personal Home Page Program!
    Please write down or save the following information for future use.

    Your Member Name is: penlay.
    Your Neighborhood is: Athens/Parthenon.
    Your Address is: 4799.
    Your Current Password is: ******

    ********
    NOTE: WE WILL NEVER ASK YOU FOR YOUR PASSWORD. We have access to the database and can get it at any time. Please be sure not to give it out to anyone else.
    ********

    The URL for your Personal Home Page is:
    http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/4799

    If you want to change your password use our editor at http://www.geocities.com/homestead/homeprof.html

    At this location you can also make all other changes to your account profile, including changing your member name and directory listing.

    Some of the very early history of the site–including some of its graphics–is in our “About” page.   A summary of the site after its conversion to a WordPress blog is here.

    Twenty-five years is an eternity on the internet.  Many things have changed since this site was started.  The purpose of the site has not: to be a blessing to those who visit, to be informative in a world where it’s too easy to uncritically accept the “pap” that we’re expected to embrace.

    It took some time to get a structure put together, but by the time this site migrated to WordPress the basic topical structure of the site was pretty much as it is now; you can see this in the “Categories” list on the left.  Several of its features have been migrated to other sites.  The Bossuet Project has its own site now and the Island Chronicles (my fiction) and the Palm Beach Experience have gone to Chet Aero Marine.  This site was self-hosted from the time it left Geocities until earlier this year, when it migrated to wordpress.com.

    At the last anniversary I noted that things were closing in on sites like this.  Most of that censorship has taken place on social media, although some have spilled over into the hosted world.  The corporatist style of mind of those coming up doesn’t bode well for freedom of speech in this country.

    When we first moved to Palm Beach, my parents placed me in Palm Beach Public School, whose principal was Clifford Ripley (believe it or not!)  He placed many pithy sayings in the school handbook, one of which was “Today is the tomorrow you worried about yesterday; make each day count.”  God has given us one day at a time; we need to make it count while we are still here.  This blog is part of my attempt to do just that the last twenty-five years; I trust it has been a blessing to you.

  • The Challenge from Aquinas That Changed Mathematics

    A few years back, in my post If You Really Want to Get Into Trouble, Read the Mediaevals, I quoted Carl Boyer’s A History of Mathematics as follows:

    The son Georg (Cantor) took a strong interest in the finespun arguments of medieval theologians concerning continuity and the infinite, and this militated against his pursuing a mundane career in engineering as suggested by his father. 

    Until fairly recently I didn’t have the information to “flesh this out,” but David Foster Wallace, in his book Everything and More, did just that:

    Elsewhere in Summa Theologiae, though, Thomas (Aquinas) advances a more original argument:

    The existence of an actually infinite multitude is impossible. For any set of things one considers must be a specific set. And sets of things are specified by the numbers of things in them. Now, no number is infinite, for number results from counting through a set in units. So no set of things can actually be inherently unlimited, nor can it happen to be unlimited. (Summa Theologiae, I.a., 7.4)

    This passage gets quoted by G. Cantor himself in his “Mitteilungen zur Lehre vom Transfiniten,” (Contributions to the Study of the Transfinite) wherein he calls it history’s only really significant objection to the existence of an actual ∞. For our purposes, there are two significant things about Thomas’s argument: (1) It treats of ∞ in terms of “sets of things,” which is what Cantor and R. Dedekind will do 600 years hence (plus Thomas’ third sentence is pretty much exactly the way Cantor will define a set’s cardinal number.) (2) Even more important, it reduces all of Aristotle’s metaphysical distinctions and complications to the issue of whether infinite numbers exist. It’s easy to see that what Cantor really likes here is feature (2), which makes the argument a kind of tailormade challenge, since the only really plausible rebuttal to Thomas will consist in someone giving a rigorous, coherent theory of infinite numbers and their properties.

    David Foster Wallace, Everything and More, pp. 92-94

    There are a few things worth noting here:

    • Aquinas didn’t actually argue that the infinite didn’t exist, he argued that it was restricted to God.
    • Wallace really paraphrases Aquinas; for a more exact translation, read it here.
    • It’s tempting to dismiss Aquinas because Cantor disproved him; however, that’s based on the concept of “science” that’s set forth these days. Today we are told that science didn’t begin until we broke off the shackles of religious and philosophical limitations, something that “happened” around the Renaissance. We’ve been doing science from the beginning of civilisation. For example, how is it possible to discuss non-Euclidean geometry, another advance in the nineteenth century, unless we had Euclidean geometry to start with? It’s the same here. Our advances start with what we have, and they don’t always proceed in the nice, straight lines that we’d like to think that they do.
    • It’s highly unlikely that the musings of modern or post-modern theologians will inspire the kinds of advances that Aquinas inspired in Cantor.
    • As noted in this piece, Cantor’s theory of transfinite numbers was controversial, but ultimately won the day. David Hilbert’s famous quote that “From the paradise created for us by Cantor, no one will drive us out” is still valid. Today there are people who are trying to drive us out of that paradise by challenging the whole concepts of infinites and infinitesimals, saying that these don’t exist in the physical world. In a sense they are going back to Aquinas, which is an amusing thought.
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  • Britain’s elites have lost control

    Britain may be recovering from a heatwave, but its politicians are already fearful that winter is coming. Only now, more than 170 days since the war …

    Britain’s elites have lost control

  • Should My Students Be Here?

    Last year, before the Fall semester started, I posted Teaching Secular Blasphemy, where I attacked the whole “perfect life” concept that pervades our culture, inflates our expectations and makes us depressed and angry when they don’t work out. I didn’t attack this idea because of their psychological or sociological damage (which are evident) but because it is inherently unscientific.

    We’re facing the beginning of another Fall semester, and once again I’m up against concepts which are at the same time unscientific and damaging to us individually and collectively. At the tip of this iceberg is the anti-natalist sentiment that pervades the upper reaches of our society. Taken to its natural conclusion, that means that my classrooms should be empty because most of my students are “traditional students,” i.e., people who graduate from high school and start college within a short time. Since their birth was after the Dinosaur Age, and since people being born are bad for the planet, they shouldn’t be there. (Such logic should give academics who advocate for progressive policies pause, but…)

    At the root of this sentiment is the American environmental movement. Now I have students who will go into environmental work, and that’s a good thing. In the fog of amnesia that pervades our society, what they don’t realise is that a great deal of the environmental movement in this country is not fuelled by science but by a system of thought (if you can call it that) which is deeply unscientific and, like the perfect life idea, harmful to us all around. Let me give a few of these assumptions:

    • The world was a pristine, paradisaical wilderness before the arrival of humans. That’s especially pervasive in the U.S., where the presence of the Native Americans is blithely ignored to perpetuate this idea, to say nothing of catastrophic natural events.
    • This leads to the next conclusion: humans are intruders on this earthly paradise. Their footprint needs to be reduced or eliminated to rectify this problem.
    • There are too many humans and the number needs to be reduced, a concept I discuss in We’re Looking for a Volunteer, Ted. (To some extent this problem is solving itself with declining general fertility, but for Americans problems never solve themselves, they have to be eradicated through social campaigns and acts of Congress.)
    • The suburbs take up too much space because of “urban sprawl” and need to be eliminated. Suburbs are additionally the generators of “phonies” which are the bane of a society which values authenticity. To replace these it is necessary to house our people differently, something I discuss in Barack Obama: Dreaming of the 50 Square Metre Apartment.
    • Our solutions should be “natural” and “from the earth.” That’s why renewables are such an article of faith amongst our ruling class, never mind that there are solutions which practically eliminate the carbon output while providing the energy.
    • The only way to get to these results is for everyone’s (well, almost everyone’s) living standards to seriously go in reverse or, put another way, back to poverty.

    There are signs that the generation coming up is starting to put things together on these issues. The most prominent sign of this is the budding pro-nuclear power movement. Boomer environmentalists (with exceptions) made nuclear power into technological pornography for about forty years. This orthodoxy is being challenged, especially in places like Germany, where the reality of a winter without Russian gas is starting to sink in.

    As an engineer and a Christian, I realise that a) problems are made to the solved, and solve effectively and b) God has given us a brain and stewardship over the Earth, and we should exercise both. Additionally I know that my students are created in the image of God and that, although we frustrate each other, they deserve better than the thin gruel they’re served by their elders. My students will do more on a practical level than these myriads of activists will ever hope to accomplish.

    I’m looking forward to this semester, and seeing my students in front of me.

    ,

  • The last American aristocrat — UnHerd

    Not long after the Trump election I was invited to a dinner party of the sort I’d only recently learned existed. Here’s how it goes. The host is wealthy, as are half the guests, and the other half are intellectuals there to provide entertainment. Waiters bring courses prepared by the chef in the kitchen while…

    The last American aristocrat — UnHerd

  • Some Clarification on What I Mean By “Outed”

    I’ve gotten some pushback on my last post Be True to Your School, Or They’ll Go Postal, which concerned recent events at our Church of God General Assembly. One major objection is my characterisation of what happened on the floor of the General Council as the Seminary being “outed.” Probably the easiest way for me to explain this is to go back to something I discussed a long time ago, which I discussed in my post The Woman Who Outed the Archbishop of Canterbury.

    Deborah Pitt was the Welsh Evangelical psychiatrist who published an exchange of correspondence she had back in 2000-1 with the now former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams. My characterisation of this as an “outing” got this response from a commenter:

    His views were not “buried in some of his public writings” as you say. The very statement is an oxymoron. Buried and public? A simple Google search, or even a glance at his Wikipedia bio (these are hardly difficult to access) would provide one with ++Williams views and with links to the full text of several of these articles. There has never been any attempt by the Archbishop to cover anything up and so to say he was ‘outed’ as if he was trying to hide something is absurd.

    To which I responded:

    Given the way that ++Williams writes, it’s certainly possible to bury an opinion in front of everyone. Writing and speaking without clarity or decisiveness is an occupational hazard of Anglican/Episcopal men and women of the cloth, and that’s something I lament in this post and the previous one on the subject.

    Had Williams’ views been better understood in general, the publication of his letters to Dr. Pitt would not have been newsworthy.

    There are several reasons why a person’s “public” writings aren’t well disseminated and understood in their “community,” some of which are as follows:

    1. They’re behind an academic paywall. Some of us can breach that paywall, as was the case with Karl Barth’s girlfriend, but most cannot. In any case, even amongst our clergy, interest in academic publications is limited, to say the least.
    2. They’re couched in the post-modern jargon so that those outside of the “craft” (now I’ve passed from trade union to Masonic imagery) don’t really understand what they are saying. That in part was the case with ++Williams.
    3. In closed systems such as churches, it is in the interest of some people not to have certain information widely disseminated. To do so requires that some people dig and risk consequences for that digging and dissemination. That’s especially true in a hierarchical, episcopal form of church polity, which is certainly the case in the Church of God.
    4. There’s a tipping point where issues which previously weren’t of much interest suddenly become of interest, and those who disseminate previously obscure facts can be justifiably said to “out” someone else.

    In personal outings, it’s the rare one where only the person involved knows what is going on. Usually things get to the point where those who know reach a critical mass and then things come out. That, IMHO, is was basically happened on the floor of the General Council the week before last. Yes there have been many discussions about topics taught at the seminary and elsewhere, but now it’s a matter of record. I’m sure some on the floor wish it hadn’t happened that way, but it did, and now we must move forward.

    ,

  • Be True to Your School, Or They’ll Go Postal

    My father didn’t like rock music. But there was one time he made an exception. My brother was a Beach Boys fan, and one evening at the house he made us stand and listen to “Be True to Your School” as it played on our Magnavox console. My father was big on his sons being loyal to the institutions they were a part of, whether it was country, school or what not.

    I’m not much of an institutionalist to start with, but school had several problems. For one thing, because we moved and switched schools every two years, it was hard to develop a loyalty to any school. But after we moved to Palm Beach, school loyalty was especially problematic, whether it be their blasé attitude towards bullying, my endless problems with English teachers, or their dislike of my college choice. It wasn’t until I went to Texas A&M that I found a school I could truly be true to.

    Recently my church had its General Assembly, and for the General Council the following resolution was tendered, which I discussed in this post

    No Church of God minister or employee of any church or institution associated with the Church of God shall violate Articles 1 & 2 of the Declaration of Faith by naming God using feminine pronouns or feminine titles. The usage of feminine titles or feminine pronouns for God in reference to the Father, Son, or Holy Spirit is a violation of the Declaration of Faith and shall result in ministerial disciplinary action.

    I can feel the eyeroll from my Anglican readers…in any case, many of those who pushed back came from the Pentecostal Theological Seminary. But the real revelation came when one of those who proposed this agenda item was a Seminary graduate who first heard God referred to in these feminine pronouns at the Seminary. Evidently some at the Seminary didn’t like being outed in this way; one reaction in particular was very emotional.

    I strongly suspect that at least some of that emotion came from the fact that the Seminary had been “outed” on this issue. Being outed or coming out isn’t easy; just ask any gay conservative. (They get to come out twice, and frequently the second coming out is harder than the first.) Since I am a bona fide academic with the credentials and teaching experience to go behind it, I think I can address this issue knowledgeably, which blunts those who would attack me with the decidedly “trade union” attitude inculcated by academic credentials, ministerial credentials or both.

    The first task of the educator is to teach his or her students how to think. Concomitant with that is the risk that the student will come to a different conclusion than you did. Academics these days seems to be less and less willing to take that risk, which is why freedom of speech issues are so “hot button” on campuses. Many academics have retreated into a “religion of authority” (to use Sabatier’s term) which is a major reason why academia has become so monochrome in terms of diversity of thought.

    That reality is amplified in the Church of God by two simple facts. The first is that our lay people (and many of our clergy that come out of the laity) don’t have a great deal of formal education relative to those outside of the “movement.” Along with lower AGI, that’s encouraged an inferiority complex among our people, which is amazing considering the impact that modern Pentecost has had on Christianity and the world. To have a seminary at all is a sign that we have “arrived,” not thinking about the fact that the rest of Christianity struggles to keep up with us.

    The second is that many of our pastors, including some very successful ones, are not seminary graduates. To have one take what he learned at the institution and “turn it against” some of his erstwhile professors raises doubts in the mind of others about the value of a seminary education. It’s little wonder that a visceral reaction follows.

    Nevertheless, for any educator the risk of his or her students going against what was taught to them in the classroom is an assumed risk and goes with the territory. Our best response to that is either to defend what we have been taught or admit that we were wrong. Unfortunately the nature of Pentecost and the employment of post-modern “thought” and rhetoric means that many of our seminary academics are singularly unsuited to effectively defend what they teach outside the walls of “Old Kudzu.” I suppose that’s one reason why they left apologetics to the Lay Ministries Department.

    The best we can hope for is that, down the road somewhere, our students, informed by their life and career experiences, will come to appreciate what we taught them back in the day. Years ago I had one student who didn’t strike me as very studious. Nevertheless he went on to get is M.S. and has had an excellent career with a well-respected supplier in the geotechnical industry. He has told others that “I wish I had listened to Dr. Warrington…”

    It would be nice if my own church would listen to someone whose own “home church” was ruined in part by those who taught and those who learned in its seminaries, but given the defensive mentality that reigns that won’t be an easy thing to do.

    ,

  • The Danger of a Good Reputation — American Reformer

    Turning the Tables on Christian Respectability I blame Mrs. Hill. She was my childhood Sunday School teacher and she started it. She taught me the stories of Jesus with her warm smile and worn-out flannel graph. 1,593 more words

    The Danger of a Good Reputation — American Reformer

  • Anointing of Jesus Christ. His Royalty. His Genealogy. His Priesthood. — The Bossuet Project

    In this week Bossuet shows the nature of Jesus Christ from a human standpoint. Many of the earlier elevations discuss his divine origins, but now Bossuet connects him with Israel’s institutions: its monarchy, its priesthood, and its own bloodline, which were necessary preparations for his mission. The elevations: Anointing of Jesus Christ. His Royalty. His […]

    Anointing of Jesus Christ. His Royalty. His Genealogy. His Priesthood. — The Bossuet Project
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