Cavernous Sockets Instead of Seeing Eyes

Averted Eyes and Western Silence

Our previous post addressed the horrendous practice of female genital mutilation (“FMG”).  We wish to follow this theme a bit further.  The practice is occurring in the West; however, it is largely ignored in the time honoured Nelsonian fashion of lifting a telescope to the blind eye. 

Why is the West failing miserably to confront, interdict, and punish this terrible practice?  May we suggest a number of likely reasons.  The first is the West will struggle to oppose this practice because to do so would be deeply hypocritical.  The West has championed the spurious “right” that of woman to her own body in the dishonest attempt to justify wholesale, industrial abortion.  If a woman has a right to kill her own unborn child because of a higher right to her body as her own selfish possession, then she must have a lesser right to submit to FMG.  It would, therefore, be entirely inappropriate to criminalise the choice of a woman to do so.  Does she not have a right over her own body to do with it as she will? Behold the cacophonous silence of Western feminists in contending against the horrific abuse of FMG. 

Of course there is the issue of consent.  Do young women really get to choose freely to genital mutilation, or is it forced upon them by their families?  But this is splitting hairs.
  The West does not know, nor does it care.  It is completely dismissive over what pressures might be brought to bear upon a pregnant woman to abort her child.  With respect to abortion, the presumption is that because the state sanctions abortion as a human right, all abortions are the willing choice of the mother.  Doubtless the same rationale is implicitly projected upon FMG.  If a young girl submits to FMG, it is presumed she wants to, and her volitional consent means that in the West she will be lauded as exercising her right over her own body.  The only “contribution” the West is likely to make is to subsidize the practice and ensure it is done by qualified surgeons, and, oh, if you insist, with a duly notarised consent form.

Secondly, the West has a deep loathing of its own cultural traditions, which means it is necessary to spend a great deal of energy affirming and respecting non-Western cultures.  Marxist and neo-Marxist propaganda has been spectacularly successful at making the West feel guilty about economic prosperity and wealth.  Generally the West holds to the view that it has raped and pillaged the rest of the world in order to raise its own standards of living.  Since, therefore, our own culture is seen as comprehensively putrid, we struggle to criticise the cultural traditions and practices of others.  Our hypocrisy, we deem, will only extend so far.  We are so burdened with false guilt over the imaginary log in our own eyes that we dare not criticise or condemn other cultures.  “They have done FMG for centuries.  It’s their choice.  It’s important and symbolic and deeply meaningful to them.  Who are we to say they are wrong?”

This leads to a third reason by the West turns a blind eye to FMG.  Multi-culturalism is an ideology which claims validity for each and every culture.  Each culture must be celebrated and respected.  Cultural practices which stretch back centuries, in particular, must be honoured and acknowledged.  Multi-culturalism, in turn, is the spawn of two influential Western twentieth century intellectual traditions.  The first is post-modernism which makes each and every human perspective (and, therefore, tradition) equally authentic and valid within its own frame of reference.  The second is existentialism which would “frame” FMG as neither right not wrong, but a legitimate existential choice, if freely chosen or submitted to.

A fourth reason why the West is failing to confront FMG and rigorously outlaw the practice is the influence of its prevailing, established religion of materialism (along with its various denominations of empiricism, scientism, atheism, and evolutionism).  None of these establishment “churches”  have any foundation for ethics or morals beyond what exists.  Since we are all evolutionists now, how can genital mutilation be condemned?  By what standard?  It has worked for other cultures.  It has survived.  And that, dear friends, is that.  Nothing more is permitted to be thought or said. 

For these reasons the West has failed miserably to this point to harry the practice of FMG out of the land.  It will only succeed in doing so if it turns its back on its secular cathedrals and materialist liturgies.  But in failing to cut FMG out of existence, the West is eloquently testifying to its vacuous character.  It is not just a patch over the eye that makes it purblind.  Rather, the West long ago tore out the only eyes it ever had, leaving behind useless empty sockets.  Meanwhile, women are being mercilessly cut, their subsequent lives mutilated, whilst “into the room the [Western] women come and go talking of Michaelangelo”.

Ignominious Multi-culturalism

Rotten Fruit

Multi-culturalism is at first glance an empty anodyne proposition.  Because it ostensibly embraces all cultures, regarding them all as equally valid and good, it has nothing meaningful or helpful to say about any culture.  (To be fair, in reality multi-culturalists are usually marked by a deep loathing for their own culture, but that’s a personal failing, not one of the ethic of multi-culuralism per se.)

Discrimination is a necessary aspect of critical and rational discourse.  Proposition A is “sound” or “unsound”; conclusion C is “invalid” or “valid”.  Action D is “ethical” or “unethical”.  The scale of “good”, “better” and “best” is always useful for critical discernment.  But multi-culturalism requires a pre-commitment that no culture or cultural group shall be subject to such critical analysis or discrimination.  When the Apostle Paul wrote, “one of the Cretans, a prophet of their own, said, ‘Cretans are always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons.’  This testimony is true.”  (Titus 1: 12, 13) he was violating the ethic and principles of multi-culturalism, which requires that we do not say anything bad or negative about a culture.  The endless, relentless positive sentiment of multi-culturalism is nothing more than a Pollyannaish anodyne gush.

But it produces, say the multi-culturalist Pharisees, peace, tolerance and harmony in society.  Everybody tolerates every other group.  Being critical of a culture is a manifestation of intolerance, discrimination and hate speech.  Actually, on the contrary, multi-culturalism foments, encourages and empowers evil.  Society X practises cliterodectomy.  No problem. Who are we to judge another culture.  It has significance and meaning, harmony and purpose in its own context.
 

An horrific illustration of what we are describing has come to light in the UK.  Fourteen hundred children have been sexually abused in one area because multi-culturalism forbad focusing upon an ethnic group perpetrating the crimes.  This from the NZ Herald:

A new report concluded that some 1,400 children were sexually exploited in one northern England town– a damning account of the collective failure by authorities to prevent children as young as 11 from being beaten, raped and trafficked. . . .  The independent report came after a series of convictions of sex offenders in the region and ground-breaking reports in the Times of London that prompted the local council to launch an inquiry.

“The collective failures of political and officer leadership were blatant,” said Jay, a former chief social work adviser to the Scottish government. “From the beginning, there was growing evidence that child sexual exploitation was a serious problem in Rotherham.”  Attention first fell on Rotherham in 2010 when five men received lengthy jail terms after convictions of grooming teens for sex. Later, investigations began into why authorities failed to act even after frontline social workers suggested things were amiss.

Why were the authorities turning a blind eye to this systematic gross abuse of young people and those that preyed upon them?  Because of the ethic and dominance of multi-culturalism.  It turns out the perpetrators were all of one ethnicity, and such things shall not be identified or spoken of.  

Even more damming was the fact that victims described the perpetrators as “Asian” and yet the council failed to engage with the town’s Pakistani community.  “Some councilors seemed to think it was a one-off problem, which they hoped would go away” Jay said. “Several staff described their nervousness about identifying the ethnic origins of perpetrators for fear of being thought racist; others remembered clear direction from their managers not to do so.”  Jay cited examples of “children who had been doused in petrol and threatened with being set alight, threatened with guns, made to witness brutally-violent rapes and threatened they would be next.” [Emphasis, ours]

Since it was not politically correct to focus upon an ethnic group as the perpetrators of a criminal acts,  officials and politicians just hoped it would go away. 

James Delingpole describes the multi-culturalist mindset that led to this debacle:

Q: When is the sexual abuse of children culturally, socially and politically acceptable?

A: When it’s committed with industrial efficiency by organised gangs of mainly Pakistani men in English Northern towns like Burnley, Oldham and Rotherham, of course.

But obviously you’re not allowed to admit this or you might sound racist. That’s why, for example, in today’s BBC report into the fact that at least 1400 children were subjected to “appalling” sexual abuse in Rotherham between 1997 and 2013, you have to wade 20 paragraphs in before finally you discover the ethnic identity of the perpetrators.

And even then, the embarrassing fact slips out only with the most blushing mealy-mouthedness:

By far the majority of perpetrators of abuse were described as “Asian” by victims.

Well hang on, a second. What this phrase seems to be hinting at is the possibility that the men involved weren’t “Asian” (note to US readers: Asian is UK PC-speak for Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, not orientals) but that the victims mistakenly took them to be so. Is that actually the case or not?

Let’s have a look at the names of the Rotherham men found guilty by Sheffield Crown Court in 2010 of raping or sexually abusing girls as young as 12 shall we. Maybe that’ll help.

• Zafran Ramzan
• Razwan Razaq
• Umar Razaq
• Adil Hussain
• Mohsin Khan

Nope. Absolutely no clues there, then…

It turns out the authorities knew exactly what was going on–both that large numbers of children were being systematically abused, and who the perpetrators were, but they decided that a greater good would be achieved if the authorities refrained from any appearance of racism and a transgression of multi-culturalism. 

The local authorities, in other words, knew exactly what was going on. Yet still they did nothing. Why?  Well we’ve already answered that, pretty much. It’s because the kind of politically correct, left-leaning and basically rather thick people that local authorities like Rotherham Council tend to have working for them are so paralysed by modish concerns about cultural sensitivity that they have made an obscene judgement call: better to allow at least 1400 kids to be hideously abused than to be thought guilty of the far greater crimes of being thought a bit racist or accidentally offending someone.

(And this isn’t an incident confined to Rotherham by the way. The same thing happened recently in Oxford, again involving men with decidedly un-Anglo-Saxon names, again over a long period of time because all the relevant authorities were scared of sounding the alarm in case they came across as racist)

Yep, these people really are that thick and warped. They’ve had it drilled into them – probably on courses like this one, organised by Common Purpose – that they must celebrate “diversity” at every opportunity. And if that means letting a few Pakistani men rape kids, douse them with petrol and threaten them with guns, well who are we to judge? Quite possibly it’s one of those vital cultural differences that we’ll be trained better to understand when we attend our next Common Purpose course with some title like Embracing The Other: Leadership Strategies For Multicultural Community Development. Till then, let’s not be quick to cast the first stone, eh? After all, there may be aspects of our culture that they find equally alien and troubling. The rule of law say; respect for women; children’s rights; trendy Western liberal crap like that…

The reality lies here: a finite point has no ultimate meaning unless it is seen in relation to the infinite.  Remove the infinite, eternal and unchangeable God from one’s world-view, and nothing has any real significance or meaning.  Multi-culturalism is an attempt to make all cultures equally valid, equally insignificant.  But its necessary ethical accompaniment is that no culture, no ethnicity may be singled out, identified, or discussed negatively.  Better to tolerate everything, even the grossly criminal. 

Multi-culturalism is a rotten fruit of the West’s regnant atheism. 

A Modern Take on a Venerable Folk Tale

Who Will Help Me . . . ?

The parable of the Little Red Hen has been read to countless generations of children.  It is an old folk tale, probably Russian in origin.  Its ethical point  is delightfully made.  “He who will not work, let him not eat”, said the Apostle Paul, to which the Little Red Hen says, “Amen”. 

There are countless applications of the parable, but one in particular caught our attention recently.  It concerns the wistfulness sometimes expressed by moderns for the “good old days” by which is meant a  longing for Christian ethics and values once held by society, whilst rejecting Christian metaphysics and theology.   The particular occasion was a review of a series of radio programmes in the UK featuring a prominent Guardian journalist, Madeleine Bunting,  bestowing her reflections about Holy Week upon her listeners.

Charles Moore, writing in The Telegraph, reviewed her ruminations, thus:

The striking and original Bunting method was to select a series of Christian-inspired ideas, some of which, she admitted, she missed in the post-Christian world, and to ask what has become of them. These were: glory, sin, salvation, patience and sacrifice. She noticed that modern secular society employs inferior echoes of some – celebrity culture instead of glory, unredemptive self-loathing about body image, weight etc instead of sin and forgiveness – and jettisons others at a high cost.

She was particularly good on patience. She had given it no thought, she said, until she had children, when she came to realise that it is “a vital organising principle of life” and one which is being beaten out of women (who traditionally embody it better than men) by modern time-poverty (“speed and greed”) and the emphasis on worldly success. She pointed out that, from his hour in the garden of Gethsemane onwards, Jesus became entirely patient (hence the word the Passion) until his death, and through this achieved his glory.

Also sacrifice. Ms Bunting spoke of how a pregnant woman might lose hair and teeth and weaken her blood for the child she is bearing. She praised “an altruism beyond calculation”. With the weakening of such concepts, the springs of action fail. The loss of the idea of salvation helps explain the feebleness of modern secular politics, particularly the decline of socialism. She quoted Clement Attlee’s promise in 1945 that Labour “will build Jerusalem”, and complained that a post-Christian society could muster no “salvific vision”. She saw what she called “techno-optimism” as a poor substitute.

Moore then cites Attlee’s bald claim that he could hold on to the ethics and social fruits of Christianity without any of the “claptrap” that undergirded it:

Attlee is supposed to have said of Christianity, with characteristic brevity: “Like the ethics: don’t like the mumbo-jumbo.” 

Ms Bunting appears to be forlornly  wishing that she could preserve the ethics without the Lawgiver.  But remove Him and the ethics crumble into a mocking perversion or an empty cavilling.  The acquaintances of the Little Red Hen wanted the bread without the cost of growing the ingredients, harvesting them, and formed the loaf and cooking it.  Ms Bunting and her ilk are similar.  They want Christian ethics, without the Christ and His Cross.  Sorry. No sale. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

So Go Nomo to the Pomo

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Monday, April 14, 2014  

By Douglas Wilson 

So I have written about the problems of postmodernism, what I have called the problem of European brain snakes. This might seem a little dismissive, but it all works out, because it actually is dismissive. Allow me to collect my thoughts on this in one place.

First, postmodernism, and all the posturing and posing connected thereunto, is utterly inconsistent with the spirit of testimony that faithful Christians love to exhibit. Our testimony (marturia) is to the truth, and the truth is personal and ultimate. When I say the truth is ultimate, I do not mean ultimate in the concerns of our own little faith community. I mean Lord of all that is, Lord of Heaven and earth, and King of all nature. The truth is Jesus, and He is eternal life — and there is no other.

“And I fell at his feet to worship him. And he said unto me, See thou do it not: I am thy fellowservant, and of thy brethren that have the testimony of Jesus: worship God: for the testimony of Jesus is the spirit of prophecy” (Rev. 19:10). “He that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself: he that believeth not God hath made him a liar; because he believeth not the record that God gave of his Son” (1 John 5:10). “I have not written unto you because ye know not the truth, but because ye know it, and that no lie is of the truth” (1 John 2:21). “But the anointing which ye have received of him abideth in you, and ye need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teacheth you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it hath taught you, ye shall abide in him” (1 John 2:27). “This is he that came by water and blood, even Jesus Christ; not by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit that beareth witness, because the Spirit is truth” (1 John 5:6).

Anyone who can reconcile the aroma of these passages with the stench of postmodernism has already had too much graduate school, and should be sent home immediately.

This testimony is the basic reason why all postmodern pretense stands revealed for what it is — relativistic hash. But there are other criticisms that can be brought as well. The circus tent of postmodernism has no central pole, so there’s that. But there are other observations that can and should be made.

The fact that postmodernists have offered cogent criticisms of the pretenses of modernism is neither here nor there — even though I grant they have done so. The reason it is neither here nor there is that modernists can offer cogent criticisms of the postmodernists as well. When two secular positions get to criticizing one other, they are often very astute in their observations, and many of their thrusts go home. After Ammon and Moab were done with Seir they turned on one another (2 Chron. 20:23). Let them go to it, and then go get their stuff. But any Christian academic who in all seriousness publishes a series of papers on how Moab’s post-structuralist critique is worthy of some more chin-stroking on our part is just acting like an Ammonite and should be sent to his tent.

Next, we should reject postmodernism because it isn’t really postmodern. Before awarding the grand prefix post to anything, we should ascertain that it actually is describing something in the rear view mirror. If we look at the foundation stones of modernism, we should quickly identify one of them as being the thought of Darwin — evolution. But why is it that none of these johnnies are saying that they are post-Darwinian? Evolution is a metanarrative, but the only incredulity I can find anywhere is in the discussions of tourists in the parking lot of the Creation Museum. The postmodernists pretend that they are blowing up the foundations when they are actually just painting the eaves a different color.

And then, after we have rejected postmodernism because it is just the next stage of modernism, I will put forward the second half of my koan and say that we should reject it because it actually is postmodern. We should also reject postmodernism because, despite its strongest efforts to be an inconsistent parasite on the body of modernity, it remains a parasite that will in fact destroy its host. Modernity is not dead yet, but if this particular tapeworm has its way, that will eventually be accomplished, and the prefix post will come in fact to pass.

Another foundational thinker for the modern project was John Stuart Mill, and the whole idea of liberty of thought. This is the basis for academic freedom and so on, but academic postmodernists are strangely drawn to the argument “because shut up.” They have shown, they thought, that all orthodoxies are disguised power grabs, which actually turns out to be preeminently true of them. This is the basis for all the hate speech nonsense, and the absolute intolerance for any views other than their own. Someone has aptly said that progressives want diversity in everything . . . except opinions. This really is the result of postmodernism, and postmodernism really is post-freedom. That part is true enough.

And last, postmodernism has been defined as “incredulity toward all metanarratives,” but the problem here is that this is not self-referential. Lack of self-awareness in this is the name of the game. “All metanarratives” is metanarratival, and far from displaying incredulity toward it, postmodernists are gulping it all down with the enthusiasm of a new recruit taking notes at a Watchtower conference. So let’s not listen to them.

We should not be surprised at your inability to stand if your argument is that you have no legs.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Why Lies Digest So Well

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Tuesday, December 10, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

As Flannery O’Connor put it, “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it.” But a falsehood, as Chesterton notes, is engineered precisely so that the listeners would in fact be able to stomach it. Stomachability is a design feature when it comes to a lie. Who would invent lies that nobody is going to want to believe?

But the truth simply is what it is.

This is why truth tellers are always troublemakers. And this is also why the postmodern heart loves the coherence view of truth, and detests the correspondence view of truth. The coherence view includes all those things that might be pleasant to digest, and the correspondence view encompasses the rest of the world, which is not really all that edible. It is measured by criteria other than how it might make us feel half an hour after dinner.

This is why, incidentally, C.S. Lewis is beloved by conservative American evangelicals even though he wasn’t one. He hated subjectivism, and saw that subjectivism was the portal through which every foul error makes its way into the lives of believers. It is the same portal, come to think of it, from which Rob Bell made his escape. The world is simply there, and we are the ones who must conform to it, and not the other way around.

When we conform to the world we are doing with natural revelation what God has trained us to do with special revelation. The issue for us must be “what does the Bible say?” and not “what would we like the Bible to have said?” We learn to read the world because we have been trained by the primer of the Word, and the very first lesson we must learn in order to become “men with chests” is that the right kind of sentiment rests upon an objective moral code that will not budge, however much we wheedle about it.

Here is a postmodern math problem, a story problem, for the current crop of Mark Studdocks that the government school system is busy right now shaping into that shapeless . . . you know what I mean. “There are ten redwoods on the mountainside. Loggers have come with a permit and have cut three of them down. How does this make you feel?”

This modern goo thought is capable of seeping into all kinds of surprising places. I have seen it get to places that at one time I would have said were entirely inaccessible. But denominational walls cannot keep it out. Institutions cannot save themselves with little pieces of paper called founding documents. The only thing that can spare us is truth defended at the testing point, which is to say, the need of the hour is courage.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From Moscow

Queer Theory for the Tea Party

Blog and Mablog

Posted on Wednesday, March 5, 2014 

By Douglas Wilson 

Let us abandon for a moment the idea of culture war, and shift the image over to a game or a sport. Many conservative believers think we are in a straightforward contest of strength, something like sumo wrestling, when we are actually in a chess game with a master who is consistently five moves ahead of us.

I bring this up because of this piece by Michael Hannon over at First Things, warning us off the false ideal of heterosexuality. And if you read that, I would then recommend this response over at Mere Orthodoxy. In this response of mine, I would want to go even farther than Matt Anderson did in registering concern. By “registering concern” I refer of course to the fact that I will be dancing in place, with my hair on fire, and waving my hands over the top of my head.

There are three problems that have each contributed to setting my head ablaze. Let me outline them for you, although concentration might be a problem.

The first problem with this essay is that it represents the triumph of nominalism run amok. Now I have a great deal of sympathy for a particular approach that Christian writers have taken in encouraging Christians struggling with same sex attraction. They do well in teaching these Christians that their identity should not be found in their temptations, but rather in Christ. Whatever our temptations are, of whatever kind, if we have trusted in Christ, we should not be defined by them. We are, all of us, commanded to turn to the form of new humanity in Jesus, and He is the one who sets our foundational identity.

But more than that is going on here.
In many cases, the reluctance to give approval to statements like “I am heterosexual” or “I am homosexual” is actually a reluctance to approve of any abstractions whatever. Everything has to be this table or that one, and we must take care not to veer off into a refried Platonism by seeking to define what a table is in the abstract. But this is overly precious, incoherent, and impossible, all three of which failings are good reasons not to do it. If ever you find yourself teetering on the brink of queer theory in order to avoid Platonism, then you should conclude that Jesus must want you to become a Platonist. I am overstating this, of course, but not by much.

Scripture does not hesitate to use nouns to describe individuals who are classed in that group because of things they do. Presumably they do them because of an inclination to do them, and the apostle Paul does not worry about creating false identities outside of Christ through a simple use of collective nouns.

“Know ye not that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Be not deceived: neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind . . .” (1 Cor. 6:9).

Paul doesn’t worry about it because He knows the power of Christ to change the categories — “such were some of you” (1 Cor. 6:11). But in the meantime, this guy is a fornicator, that guy is an adulterer, and the other guy is a catamite.

So instead of puzzling over what to do about the chess move confronting us right now, we should first reflect on what happened to us five moves back. One of the things that happened was that we lost a particular philosophical battle, and so lost our ability to use collective nouns in making moral judgments. In order to be faithful now, we need to go back and recover that ability. I am heterosexual is a meaningful statement, and as long as I am making it within the boundaries of biblical orthodoxy, I should continue to make it.

The second is the retreat to commitment, where the ever-present refuge of “our faith community” beckons us if the public battle ever gets too hot for us. In his book of that name, William Bartley dissects the pretensions of the liberal mainliners a generation ago, showing how their intellectual “courage” was nothing less than a simple CYA move. Our intellectual evangelicals today remind me of Tallyrand’s observation about the Bourbons — “they had learned nothing and forgotten nothing.” We are in the process of committing the same kind of intellectual suicide, and for all the same reasons, and with the same rationalizations. Hannon mentions that we believers should be fine with Foucault as a strange bedfellow, which I take as a strange suggestion. Professing to be wise, they became fools, and exchanged the glory of the incorruptible God into the image of a corruptible queer theorist, one who incidentally had already been corrupted. He shouldn’t have been allowed in the house, much less the bedroom.

And the third problematic area is the growing distrust of nature and the natural order. This is actually what lies behind my insistence on the new birth. In order to be given a new nature, I must have an old nature to be delivered from. But that old nature is a fallen nature, not an anti-nature.

If we say, on philosophical grounds, that a person has no quintessential nature that can be transformed in the new birth, this has ramifications for the doctrine of regeneration. But it also has just as many ramifications for our ability to object to sex change operations, and for the same reasons. If a man asks a surgeon to change him from a boy to a girl, what is being violated? There is no express scriptural prohibition of it. It offends middle class sensibilities, but I have been reading First Things long enough to have rejected the idol of middle class sensibilities. The apostle Paul would say that such a move was “against nature,” but Foucault, this strange fellow here in bed with us now, is whispering retorts at a furious pace. Nature? Nature?!

Yes, nature. God made the world in a particular way, and has provided us with a manual for understanding in the Bible. But I have assembled enough products that were shipped to me in a box to be able to tell how the good ones work. Say I am assembling a book case. Not only do I have the manual, but I also discover that the intelligent people at the factory have labeled and marked the various parts. That is what nature is like. The world goes together the way God intends for it to go together.

If you want to make sense of it all, then make this resolution. Reject every form untethered nominalism. Confess that Jesus is Lord outside your faith community. And embrace the grace contained within natural revelation. And don’t try to run any workshops on queer theory at Tea Party rallies.

Now there are good Christian people who, for various reasons, are dabbling with one or more of these three problem areas — unhinged nominalism, a retreat to commitment, and a suspicion of natural theology. I do not regard them as evil or wicked, but I do regard them as hopelessly outmaneuvered.

Moderns Versus the Gospel

The War of the World(view)s

The Bible has much to say about God and about how we can come to know him.  What is says is deeply at odds with much of the thinking in the modern world.  And this fundamental difference generates differences in many other areas–differences in people’s whole view of the world.  Modern worldviews are at odds with the worldview put forward in the Bible.  This difference in worldviews creates obstacles when modern people read and study the Bible  People come to the Bible with expectations that do not fit the Bible, and this clash becomes one main reason, though not the only one, why people do not find the Bible’s claims acceptable. [Vern Poythress, Inerrancy and Worldview: Answering Modern Challenges to the Bible (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2012), p. 14.]

It is incumbent upon Christians to understand what is going on when moderns, often with disdain and ridicule, reject the Bible.  There is not just a clash between the reader and the text.  Now the Bible is worlds apart from the modern view–or more precisely, worldviews apart.  This was not always the case.  Generally, when an Unbeliever approached the Bible during the first Christendom (roughly 800AD to 1700AD) he would come knowing about, if not believing in, a creator.  He would also come to the Bible already believing in heaven and hell, in divine judgment, in moral guilt, sin, and punishment.  Most likely he would also believe in the Christ.  In other words, he would come with the general worldview of the Bible already in situ and largely intact.

No longer.  Modernism and post-modernism have excised such beliefs from the modern Unbelieving mind.
 

The confrontation between Belief and Unbelief during the first Christendom was much more akin to that which occurred during the days of our Lord and the Jewish people.   The issue was more pointedly about obedience to the commands and acceptance of the promises of Holy Scripture.  Consider the case of the Rich Young Ruler.  He believed, but did not have saving faith–that is, his belief had distorted the Bible’s Gospel to self-righteousness as he supposedly kept the commandments.  Yet he was unable to pick up his cross and follow Jesus in humble submission to God.  Or take the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector.  The former believed many things taught in the Bible, but did not have saving faith, whereas the Tax Collector did. 

But today the battlefield is different, requiring an adjustment in tactics and approach.  Moderns today are, in general, profoundly ignorant of the content and teaching of the Bible.  Secondly, even if they have some superficial knowledge of its contents, it resembles a foreign language to them.  So, taking the Gospel to today’s Modern requires Christians to learn what amounts to a foreign language (the prevailing world-view of Unbelief)–which, in turn, needs to be dismantled and the Bible’s worldview contrasted with modernism–even as the contents of Scripture are presented. This involves teaching the Unbeliever in his turn a new language–the language of the worldview of the Bible, so that the Unbeliever can begin to appreciate the sense, meaning, implications and the significance of the Scripture’s propositional teaching. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter from Moscow

Ten Theses on Postmodernism

Posted on Sunday, September 29, 2013  

By Douglas Wilson 

This important post originally ran May 10, 2010 at Blog and Mablog.

1. Truth is objective, ultimate, absolute, personal, alive, and triune.

2. Because of this ultimate reality, it is possible for creatures who were fashioned by this living God to know Him as the personal and ultimate truth, as well as to know lesser truths in the created world that we see all around us. We know Him apart from that world, and we know Him through and in that world. We know. Some of us only wish we didn’t.

3. Objective truth does not mean uninterpreted truth. Objectivity in our knowledge of truth means that our interpretation lines up with God’s interpretation of it.
Thinking God’s thoughts after Him is not the same thing as guessing or having opinions. The standard of absolute knowledge is how God knows a thing. The standard of creaturely knowledge is how we know a thing, measured against what God ordained as possible for a creature in our circumstances to know.

4. The fact that truth is objective does not mean that it is constructed out of rough cut two by fours. Those two-inch deep dogmatists, ostensible defenders of the faith, who think that objectivity stands or falls with their pat answers are a big part of our problem. They only provide the pomos with a conservative group to feel superior to, and to have a reasonable point in feeling that way.

5. Truth is more complicated than an eight-foot-long stud wall, with the studs on sixteen inch centers. But it is also more organized than a sticky, undifferentiated mass. We do not have to choose between simplistic and unyielding, and complex and incoherent. How about complex and unyielding?

6. When the pomos taught us that all truth claims were disguised power grabs, they were telling us more about their purposes than they were actually intending to. So Christians who believe the press releases put out by the National Institute for Coordinated Experiments (NICE) really need to get out more.

7. On a related front, the pomo rot has gotten to the realm of science, producing something called “post-normal science,” and you can see the results in phrases like “global warming,” “sustainability,” and every other form of statist hoohah and tyrannical cant. Christians who go for this stuff, unwittingly or not, are just carrying bricks for Pharaoh. Doesn’t matter if they have John 3:16 stenciled on the side of their hod.

8. When modernity announced that the modern age was built by their guys, the secularists, the Christians who believed them were way too easily duped. There should have been less gullibility around here and more checking. Secularism did not fill the houses with good things, did not dig the wells, and did not create great and goodly cities (Dt. 6:10-11). The law required us to give the glory to God for these good things. Instead we have now fallen for the pomo lie that they are not actually good things. The modernist says that “my power and the might of my hand has gotten me this wealth” (Dt. 8:17). The pomo says, “Yeah, well, to say that you can actually get water out of your wells is logocentric, imperialistic, self-serving, and totalizing.” And the consistent Christian just thanks Jesus for all the stuff.

9. The inconsistent Christians writes articles for academic journals explaining how it turns out that the Scriptures, rightly understood, were all along saying just when the latest breeze from off the Zeitgeist Bay would seem to indicate they ought to have been saying. Currently, since the breezes are south by southeast, this actually means saying that the Scriptures can’t be rightly understood, but we can try to fix that later. When you are in the mood for some respectability, and that old familiar ache settles in your evangelical throat, don’t let the fundamentalists get in the way. They think the truth is made out of two by fours anyway, and they will be happy to provide you with any additional cover you might need as you slink out of the faith to accept a post at Calvin College.

10. Jesus is Lord, and not just in our hearts. The only consistent Christian answer to all the contemporary pushing and shoving is some form of resurgent Christendom. We can debate the details later.

Urbane or Prophetic

Paul at Athens

When Christians engage in the public square–that is, in any public debate, whether in the local community or the parliament–some counsel we must become as secular as everyone else.  We must win over the opposition using their frames of  reference.  We must appeal to natural law, reason, and common sense.  We must check in our Christian guns before riding into town to the OK Corral. 

Some claim biblical and apostolic warrant for such an approach.  They argue from Acts 17 where Paul was in Athens, debating with Greeks in the agora, that this is precisely what the Apostle himself did.  Consider the following:

What can we glean from this encounter?  St. Paul, without compromising his message, tailored it to his audience.  He spoke in Hellenistic rather than Judaic terms, as a philosopher more than as a Christian theologian, in a manner that engaged them rather than repelled them.  He relied on common grace rather than on the knowledge and acceptance of Christian doctrine.  “I have become all things to all men,” he says in the book of Corinthians, “So that by all possible means I might save some.”   [Michael Gerson, Peter Wehner, City of Man: Religion and Politics in a New Era (Chicago: Moody Press, 2010) p. 117.]

This is a simplistic, unsatisfactory reading of the text.  It is not an uncommon one, however.   A careful reading will quickly show the error of Gerson’s and Wehner’s view.
 

Firstly, when Paul went to Athens we are told that he was provoked within himself–he was greatly disturbed–when he saw the city was full of idols. (Acts 17:16).  Clearly, Paul was not checking his biblical guns in to the officials whilst strolling around the public square of Athens.  Paul did not adopt the persona of the urbane Greek or Roman: idols and deities are little more than childish superstitions to us more educated folk.  Let’s disregard them for what they are, and discuss the deeper philosophical questions of the day.  No, he immediately began to engage with both Jews and Greeks in the city, preaching Jesus and the resurrection.  The idolatry upset him. 

The Epicureans and the Stoics thought he was so barmy they called him a “babbler”.  Not much common ground there.  When he did get to speak in the Areopagus, he began his remarks by confronting them head on.  He could not have commenced with a more objectionable opening (to the ears of his audience).  He mocks them for their stupidity.  “Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.  For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship. I found also an altar with this inscription, ‘To the unknown god’.  What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you.” (Acts 17:23)  You Athenians are so superstitious, you worship what you don’t know.  And I am going to tell you that which you, in your ignorance, don’t know.  So much for doffing the hat to unbelieving worldly philosophies. 

Paul goes on to proclaim to them the God who created all things, and Who requires that all men should seek Him, has now declared that He will no longer tolerate or overlook the times of ignorance in which the Athenians are walking (Acts 17: 30).  He has appointed a Judge of all other men.  The day of judgment has also been fixed.  God is commanding that all men, including you Athenians, repent of your ignorance and your superstition, and He is commanding you to worship Him.  The proof that the Day of Judgment has been set and that the Judge of all has been appointed is the resurrection of that man from the dead.  (Acts 17:31). 

Some mocked.  Others said they wanted to hear more.  Now compare this actual Scriptural account of Paul at Athens with the gleanings of Gerson and Wehner.  They are reading into the text what they want to find.  They are not being its faithful servants.  Paul did precisely the opposite of what these two authors allege he did.  He confronted the Athenians in their unbelief, warned them of the coming judgment, and urged them to repent.  Whilst reasoning, his argument was thoroughly biblical leaping right out of the pages and scrolls of divine revelation.

It is a great, abiding shame that if ever there was an age in which Christian reasoning in the public square can and must be tied to God and His Christ and His holy Word, it is ours.  Maybe it would be possible for Christians to appeal to common sense, or shared commitments, or natural theology and to make headway were society predominantly Christian.  In such times, even Unbelievers think and act as if they were men of the Christian faith.  But no longer.  We live in an age far more like that which confronted the Apostle in Athens. 

But by God’s good hand, our age is not just an age of Unbelief, it has become an age when all truth is regarded as unknown in an absolute sense.  It is all relative.  It is all ultimately a personal perspective.  Mere perspectivalism, not mere Christianity, rules.  That’s precisely what confronted Paul in Athens: a town replete with idols of every type, shape, and dogma.  Such a society cannot ban–at least initially–the Christian and his faith from the public square.  To the modern Unbeliever, it is just one more perspective, one more view. 

The Christian thus has immediate authenticity when he declares, “I am a Christian, and from my perspective of belief, the following is true . . . ”  Then can come a declaration of absolute and final truth to which all men will be accountable.  In other words, it can come as a rejection of all relativism–even as Paul’s oration rejected all idolatry and the Pantheon. 

When we engage in the public square in such a fashion, there will be two responses: some will say, “Let’s hear more about this.”  Others will mock.  When that happens we know that we have been faithful Christians in an age of Unbelief. 

Books

Book of the Month/July

Posted on Monday, July 1, 2013  

by Douglas Wilson

I have read and enjoyed and profited from a number of Iain Murray’s other books, and in the realm of enjoyment and edification, this book was no different. But it was very different from his other books in several other respects.

The book-of-the-month this time around is The Undercover Revolution, and it is about how infidel novelists wrecked Great Britain. He gives a detailed treatment of two writers, Robert Louis Stevenson and Thomas Hardy, then moves on to show how a swarm of writers transformed British culture, and concludes with a fine statement of the basic Christian gospel.

Murray usually writes what might be called “in-house” biographies or histories, and this book details a much broader intersection of faith and infidelity. Also Murray usually writes expansively, and this book is very short — less than a hundred pages. At the same time, he fits an awful lot into it. This is a good book for jump-starting your brain. Here are a few thoughts that came out of my reading of it.

First, it reinforced the point that has been made multiple times by other capable writers. Consider Paul Johnson’s Intellectuals, E. Michael Jones’ Degenerate Moderns, xxxx’s Architects of the Culture of Death, and Kevin Swanson’s Apostate. A basic review of the lives of those who led the exodus out of the “hypocrisy” of Christian faith shows that they were themselves fourteen carat hypocrites. What they said and what they did were entirely different things. And the fact that they were challenging the Christian establishment on the basis of hypocrisy makes us want to present them with the Hypocrisy Chutzpah Award.

Second, this book reinforced the power of story. In this instance, fiction was used to tell lies instead of what good and godly fiction will always do, which is to tell the truth. In the early stages of this revolt against Christ (for that is what it was), the infidelity was located more in the life of the writer than in the pages of the story (e.g. Stevenson). But as time progressed, the unbelief began showing itself more and more in the course of the stories told (e.g. Hardy, Wells, Shaw). Orthodox faith took far too much for granted, and failed to prepare herself against the onslaught of an unbelieving imagination. Believers were caught flat footed. Murray shows that while this falling away was done in the name of science, actual science had virtually nothing to do with it. This was a narratival conquest.

This leads to the third point. At the time, infidelity was fresh and new and exciting, as the initial moments of an apostasy always are. I am prepared to bet that the very best parties that the prodigal son ever threw were in the first three weeks away from home. But it gets old after a bit, the hypocrisy of the authenticity posers becomes evident, and the unbelievers just run out of stories. In terms of their unpreparedness for an imaginative challenge, the infidels are just past the crest of their high Victorian period.

As Murray wrote about how infidel authors undid British culture, another book could be written about how American movie makers undid ours. English novelists established the novel as a new and exciting (and freshly respectable) form of telling a story. Americans did the same with the movie, and the arc of corruption for both forms of story telling has been generally the same. Currently, they are also both in a teetery state, and the time really is ripe for some subversive story telling.

There is another point that Murray doesn’t make here, but which I cannot imagine him differing with. While these authors made a cultural mess by weaving their lies, it has to be said that the reading public at this time was in a mood to be lied to.

As Murray shows in the last chapter, there is no hope apart from Christ. But Christ — He who is raised to life and seated at the right hand of the Father — must be manifested as alive in the worship, preaching, lives, and stories of genuine believers. Murray tells the story of an actor who was once asked why people would rather go a theater than to a church. He replied that it was because actors portrayed fiction as though it were a fact, while in church they portray fact as though it were fiction.

Kissing Cousins

Getting What We Want

Post-modernism has been called an anti-philosophy.  It asserts there is no truth, only perspectives.  It has lots of “kissing cousins” in the modern world.  Historicism, for example, asserts the same with respect to history: there is no meta-narrative of history–no over-arching, linking story which ties all human experience throughout its collective career into a coherent whole.  There is only what has been; each moment in history has its own meaning and interpretation.

What the Aztecs did with human sacrifice, to take a graphic example, must be studied in its own context in order to understand the perspective in which it occurred.  The context, the perspective, the particular granula warp and woof in which it took place provides its own authenticity and meaning and ethical justification.

Post-modernism is hated by old school Enlightenment rationalists.
  Autonomous human reason was always the great white knight of the Enlightenment and so it produced the era known as Modernism.  Post-modernism has reduced that particular tower to Babelesque rubble.  Post-modernists and rationalists don’t get on too well in the university common rooms.

Darwinism and post-modernism is another kissing cousin.  In Darwinism, randomness is the ultimate reality of the universe.  It “drives” it in a particular direction.  Yes, we know that is an oxymoron, but what can you do?  Darwinism uses stochasticity or the random as a warranting concept to explain everything that exists.  But chance, of course, is inexplicable; it has no meaning.  So, the Darwinian dervish of the thousand qualifications begins and continues.  Chance has produced something which is not subject to chance any longer.  It apparently has meaning, truth, objectivity.  It can be studied and known rationally.  It can be described.

All Darwinists use randomness as their warranting concept for (literally) everything.  But, having done that, they all suspend it and qualify it, modifying  it so as to banish it  to the cupboard of dirty linen.  Darwinists tend to get mad when one innocently proposes some extreme outlandish possibility and then asks the Darwinist to explain why, in a random universe, an outlandish possibility could not possibly occur.  Dawinism always collapses in its own vicious paradox: if Darwinism were true it could not be rationally described and explained; if it can be rationally described, studied, and applied, it cannot be true. 

Darwinism and post-modernism are really lovers at first sight.  It’s just taken it took a good while of blind internet dating to find each other.  But when post-modernism had its coming out ball in the first half of the twentieth century, Darwinists recognized their one true love.  Here is one account of the lovers’ tryst:

If tying Darwinism to postmodernism seems a bit of a stretch, listen to the personal odyssey of the influential postmodernist guru Richard Rorty, now at Stanford University.  In an autobiographical essay, Rorty reveals that he was once attracted to Christianity.  But finding himself “incapable” of “the humility that Christianity demanded,” he turned away from God–only to discover that a world without God is a world without aby basis for universal truth or justice.

Rorty then determined to work out a philosophy consistent with Darwinism.  Like Dewey, he accepted the Darwinist notion that ideas are problem-solving tols that evolve as means of adapting to the environment.  “Keeping faith with Darwin,” Rorty writes,means understanding that the human species is not oriented “toward Truth,” but only “toward its own increased prosperity.”  Truth claims are just tools that help us get what we want.”  (Which means, of course, that Rorty’s own ideas are just tools for getting what he wants–including the idea of postmodernism.  Thus postmodernism refutes itself.) [Chuck Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, 1999), p. 94.]

And, of course, Rorty also condemns Darwinism in the same breath.  Darwinism is likewise an elaborate hoax, willingly subscribed to by the credulous, as a tool to enable man to get what he really, really wants: that is, to be at the centre of his own world, to impart his own meaning onto the world, to reify his own autonomy and central place in the cosmos.  Neither the post-modernist, nor the Darwinist have a logical, rational foundation to their stated positions; both alike are ripped apart by the paradoxes upon which they are built.

Nevertheless but both serve a real purpose–and it is that ultimate goal or purpose which justifies the self-deception.  The real goal is the autonomy of man and his increasing prosperity.  That is worth trading off and ignoring a thousand contradictions and paradoxes.

Behold the edifice of latter-day Western culture. Ain’t it grand. 

Letter From America (About Moral Schizophrenia)

Postmodern Prudes 

In the age of relativism, popular morality hasn’t so much disappeared as become schizophrenic.

By Victor Davis Hanson
April 18, 2013
National Review Online

More than 500 people were murdered in Chicago last year. Yet Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel still found time to berate the fast-food franchise Chick-fil-A for not sharing “Chicago values” — apparently, because its founder does not approve of gay marriage.

Two states have legalized marijuana, with more to come. Yet social taboos against tobacco smoking make it nearly impossible to light up a cigarette in public places. Marijuana, like alcohol, causes far greater short-term impairment than does nicotine. But legal cigarette smoking is now seen as a corporate-sponsored, uncool, and dirty habit that leads to long-term health costs for society at large — in a way homegrown, hip, and mostly illegal pot smoking apparently does not.

Graphic language, nudity, and sex are now commonplace in movies and on cable television. At the same time, there is now almost no tolerance for casual and slangy banter in the media or the workplace. A boss who calls an employee “honey” might face accusations of fostering a hostile work environment, yet a television producer whose program shows an 18-year-old having sex does not. Many colleges offer courses on lurid themes from masturbation to prostitution, even as campus sexual-harassment suits over hurtful language are at an all-time high.

A federal judge in New York recently ruled that the so-called morning-after birth-control pill must be made available to all “women” regardless of age or parental consent, and without a prescription. The judge determined that it was unfair for those under 16 to be denied access to such emergency contraceptives. But if vast numbers of girls younger than 16 need after-sex options to prevent unwanted pregnancies, why isn’t there a flood of statutory-rape charges being lodged against older teenagers for having consensual relations with younger girls?

Our schizophrenic morality also affects the military. When America was a far more traditional society, few seemed to care that General Dwight Eisenhower carried on an unusual relationship at the front in Normandy with his young female chauffeur, Kay Summersby. As the Third Army chased the Germans across France, General George S. Patton was not discreet about his female liaisons. Contrast that live-and-let-live attitude of a supposedly uptight society with our own hip culture’s tabloid interest in General David Petraeus’s career-ending affair with Paula Broadwell, or in the private e-mails of General John Allen.

What explains these contradictions in our wide-open but prudish society? Decades after the rise of feminism, popular culture still seems confused by it. If women should be able to approach sexuality like men, does it follow that commentary about sex should follow the same gender-neutral rules? Yet wearing provocative or inappropriate clothing is often considered less offensive than remarking upon it. Calling a near-nude Madonna onstage a “hussy” or “tart” would be considered crude in a way that her mock crucifixion and simulated sex acts are not.

Criminal sexual activity is sometimes not as professionally injurious as politically incorrect thoughts about sex and gender. Former New York governor Eliot Spitzer — found to have hired prostitutes on a number of occasions during his time in office — was given a CNN news show despite the scandal. But when former Miss California Carrie Prejean was asked in the Miss USA pageant whether she endorsed gay marriage, she said no — and thereby earned nearly as much popular condemnation for her candid defense of traditional marriage as Spitzer had for his purchased affairs.

Critics were outraged that talk-show host Rush Limbaugh grossly insulted birth-control activist Sandra Fluke. Amid the attention, Fluke was canonized for her position that federal health-care plans should pay for the contraceptive costs of all women. Yet in comparison to Fluke’s well-publicized victimhood, there has been a veritable news blackout for the trial of the macabre Dr. Kermit Gosnell, charged with killing and mutilating in gruesome fashion seven babies during a long career of conducting sometimes illegal late-term abortions. Had Gosnell’s aborted victims been canines instead of humans — compare the minimal coverage of the Gosnell trial with the widespread media condemnation of dog-killing quarterback Michael Vick — perhaps the doctor’s mayhem likewise would have been front-page news outside of Philadelphia.

Modern society also resorts to empty, symbolic moral action when it cannot deal with real problems. So-called assault weapons account for less than 1 percent of gun deaths in America. But the country whips itself into a frenzy to ban them, apparently to prove that at least it can do something, instead of wading into polarized racial and class controversies by going after illegal urban handguns, the real source of the nation’s high gun-related body count.

Not since the late-19th-century juxtaposition of the Wild West with the Victorian East has popular morality been so unbridled and yet so uptight. In short, we have become a nation of promiscuous prudes.

— NRO contributor Victor Davis Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. His The Savior Generals will appear in the spring from Bloomsbury Books. © 2013 Tribune Media Services, Inc.

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Nothing Worse Than an Analytic Fairy 

Atheism and Apologetics – Apologetics in the Void
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, 02 February 2013

Yesterday I was having a good discussion on apologetics with Pastor Will Little of Mars Hill, and the discussion dislodged in me a few thoughts on the subject that I thought would be good to note here.

We were talking about presuppositionalism. I think it is crucial for us to distinguish between presuppositionalism as a foundation for the apologist, and presuppositionalism as a subject that the apologist will broach with the unbeliever. There are times when it will be both, but those times are rarer than apologists who are trained Van Til ninjas might think.

If the point is to win men, and not arguments, then we have to understand where the actual hang-up is with that unbeliever.
The fact that we understand the foundational issues does not mean that he does, and what good does it do to bounce arguments off his forehead, which then just lie on the floor unheard?

At the same time, when someone observes that rigorous analytic philosophy leaves a pomo-hipster with marriage problems unmoved, the temptation is then to think that there is something wrong with the rigorous reasoning. No, there is nothing wrong with it, but the hard cold concrete of my presuppositions might need to stay in the basement, holding the house up, while my wife prepares chicken enchiladas for the family and we invite the troubled couple over. The foundation holds the kitchen up, and I can cheerfully grant that the unbeliever was greatly moved by the fellowship around the table without concluding that we shouldn’t have spent all that money on the foundation walls. We can always explain the connection to him later.

Apologetics should always move toward authoritative declaration. The foundation for this is the revealed Word of God. I reason from Scripture, not to Scripture. This makes me a presuppositionalist. But I can be a presuppositionalist without talking presuppositions all the time. In fact, to talk about them all the time can easily become self-contradictory. If they are my presuppositions, then why don’t I presuppose them more?

Sometimes I must deal with a particular kind of unbeliever, a man whose difficulties are all “in the basement.” There we can talk presuppositions because (as ancient stasis theory in rhetoric taught us) that is where his issue actually is. But most of the time, with most of the people we talk to, that is not where the issue is.

These issues will frequently come up in ordinary conversations, but we must distinguish between unbelievers genuinely troubled by the epistemological issues, and the unbelievers who parrot that relativistic nonsense because that is what they were taught, and because that is what lets them sleep with their girlfriends. So, to the extent that we talk presuppositions with unbelievers on the street, we should should do it in street language, and not in the rarified language of the philosophy department. Having done so, we should move as quickly as we can to the real hang-up, as Jesus did when He asked to meet the Samaritan woman’s husband (John 4:16).

If a fellow on the subway tells you there is no such thing as truth, it is better to simply ask him if that is true than to show him the trouble with [Not A > A].

Now in order to declare the truth, I must assume it. And when I assume it, I am going assume as much of it as I can. Having done so, I will take it from there, asking the Spirit to work powerfully in and on the conversation. I don’t want to take the Cartesian approach of narrowing everything down to a minimum hard datum of truth, and then asking the fairy of logic land to anoint it. The fairy of logic land is clean out.

We need the Spirit of Jesus, not analytic fairies. Nothing worse than an analytic fairy.

Educators and Education

Modern Imposters and Gargoyles

What the the role and calling of a teacher?  One Trent Kays deigns to give us ordinary mortals the answer.  Trent describes himself as a “writer, teacher, provocateur, activist, consultant, and rhetoric & writing studies PhD student” so we know we are waist deep in the good oil here.  

For some reason Trent’s answer to the question on the role and calling of a teacher has appeared in the NZ Herald.  Why?  No idea.  Maybe the paper thought that his opinions on the matter were of significance.  There is probably some warrant to this notion.  His own promotional page at the University of Minnesota website claims, “He often writes about society, technology, culture, and higher education issues, and he is in the process of founding a new venture dedicated to practical and progressive ideas for changing education.”

Great stuff.  So what progressive pedagogical revolution is about to descend upon us?  Same old, same old.  The same tired old cliches that progressive and post-modern liberals have been prattling on about since Michel Foucault first said, “Well, I’ll be darned!”

Here is Trent in full cliched flight:

Every semester, I enter my classroom with almost zero knowledge of my students’ interests. So as a rhetoric and writing teacher, I ask them to employ that which is most beneficial to them in their lives: discourse.  I want to know what they think, why they think it, and how they see themselves in the elegant mess we call the world. Indeed, it becomes partly my charge to help students understand how their perspectives are relevant to my course.

Discourse.  The most beneficial thing in the lives of students.  Discourse.  What on earth is that?   It’s just the opinions and ideas you happen to have about the world.  So the role of the teacher is to create an environment where people are liberated to express freely what they really think.  Trent again:

The worst thing a teacher can do is tell students what and how to think. According to Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, this type of teaching borders on intellectual violence upon another, and where teaching is meant to be a liberating affair, it becomes one of systemic oppression.  In many circumstances, I tell my students the classroom is a space for learning. It is a space to explore and discover ideas without fear of being dismissed or lambasted.

Great. Diversity.  Freedom.  So we can reasonably expect that some poor student in Trent Kays’s class might feel emboldened to say, “I think that Osama bin Laden was the greatest revolutionary hero of our generation.”  Some of the students would hiss (at least inside), but Trent would be at his encouraging best.  “Great.  Thanks for sharing.  What makes you say that?  Good.  Good.  What you think is important.  Go on–tell us more.”  This is a high class, state-of-the-art, post-modern teacher at work.  

You can imagine how the students feel affirmed and encouraged.  This is the essence of true education, according to our high flying expert:

I tell them their perspectives, life experiences and ideas are equally important to mine and the subject material at hand.  After hearing this, many sit astonished at the idea their opinions are actually going to be heard. Unfortunately, I hear from students all too often that their opinions, perspectives and ideas are secondary to their teachers’ or even not valued. I find this preposterous. Education is about enlightenment and not the subjugation of one idea for another.

Whoops.  Problem!  Old Trent has slipped into a bit of old fashioned Marxian stereotypical pablum.  Folks like Jacques Derrida have been complaining for ages that if a teacher puts his ideas and beliefs upon a student it is hegemonic–it is a tyranny of one mind over another.  It is subjugation. It is exploitation.  But that is only just your opinion, Trent.  Great that you can express your ideas and perspectives.  Good on you.  But it’s preposterous to think that your (teacher) idea is more important than mine, right.  Your Marxist opinions about teaching are themselves a form of subjugation and exploitation because you are trying to impose them upon your students, and upon us (via your article).

But this is nonsense from another perspective as well.  What would happen in Trent’s classroom do you think if a poor student were to have the temerity to opine that homosexuals were perversely immoral?   One imagines that pretty quickly Trent’s classroom would become a place of “systemic oppression” on the unfortunate holder of such an outrageous opinion.

Trent would then be directly contradicting his own professed position.  For he goes on to tell us most definitely that

There is no objective truth because objectivity does not exist; there are only degrees of subjectivity. An opinion without evidence can be truth as much as fact with evidence can be a falsehood.  Facts are socially constructed, and they only exist because humans are willing to define and name them. This act of naming almost always positions one thing as the opposite to another. The bizarre form of dialectic at work here doesn’t negate the issue that humans construct, name and set these things in opposition.

Once again Trent thinks he has escaped the Cretan paradox.  He has not.  Is the assertion, “There is no objective truth” objectively true, or not?  Clearly Trent acts and speaks as though he believes it to be objectively and universally true–he even attempts to offer a rationale for it.  But alas he fails.  He is hoist on his own petard.

Or, again,

But to say that a student isn’t entitled to their opinion is to devalue the student. It is to suggest that the teacher’s way is the right way, and the student is less than the teacher. These are hardly correct.

Trent is oh-so-politely saying that the opinion that “the teacher’s way is the right way, and the student is less than the teacher” is wrong!  That’s precisely what he is also arguing that a superior and enlightened teacher cannot and must not do.  Trent clearly believes his “opinions” are objectively true and must be systemically and violently imposed upon his students.  Ah, yes, as Orwell pointed out, “all the animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” 

We acknowledge that Trent’s views are wildly popular in most modern education circles–which is to say that most pedagogy now resembles a grotesque post-modern, Marxist gargoyle.  It is, so internally contradictory that it will end not with a bang, but a whimper. 

Supercilious Schtick

Hegemonic Liberals

The New Zealand Labour leader, David Shearer has been getting a lot of schtick.  He has confirmed his belief that New Zealand needs to take taniwha seriously.  For our non-Kiwi readers, taniwha are, according to Maori, mythical spirit monster which dwell in the lands, seas, and rivers.  They need to be placated at appropriate times and places, lest they become angry and do damage. 

This from Patrick Gower at TV3 News:

Labour Party leader David Shearer has long-held beliefs that taniwha must be respected when it comes to Maori and their interests in water. His views can be traced back to his master’s thesis, and he stands by them today.  Water has been the big political issue of the year, but when Mr Shearer was first asked who owned it he didn’t know.

But it turns out Mr Shearer has a degree of expertise on the issue – a master’s thesis in fact. It was called Between Two Worlds, Maori Values and Environmental Decision-Making.  In his thesis he advocated that “the belief in taniwha or spiritual pollution…while they may appear irrational to many…cannot simply be dismissed as irrelevant”. It’s a belief he still holds today.  

“I absolutely stick by that,” says the Labour Party leader. He says we should acknowledge taniwha. “We have been doing that for the last 20-something years when we have made decisions around water.”

Our interest is not so much on what Shearer believes–if he is someone who holds to superstitious animist nonsense, so what.  That’s par for the course for a modern, rationalist politician who is both a socialist and an egalitarian.  As such, idiocy doth become him.  Rather, our interest has been piqued by those superstitious rationalists who are rejecting Shearer’s position.

Take, for example, David Farrar, who opines sarcastically:

Well I don’t think we should acknowledge or give any credence to taniwha. Such spiritual nonsense should play no part in our laws or decisions.

This from a chap who has gone on record supporting homosexual “marriage” on the grounds that homosexual desires are a combination of genes and conditioning.  Since homosexuals are what they are, they need to be allowed to be what they are: ergo, homosexual “marriage” must be respected and accommodated in law.  One wonders why Mr Farrar takes a different view when it comes to Maori who believe in taniwha. 

Since Maori belief in taniwha has to be a combination of genes and nurture on what basis does Mr Farrar reject such beliefs as “spiritual nonsense”.  If enlightened social policy according to Mr Farrar requires recognition of homosexual “marriage”, why not taniwha? 

This is the same Mr Farrar who imperiously tells us that abortion is not murder because, because . . . . he said so.  Yes, we inquire, but why?  Because the “thing” inside the mother’s womb depends upon the mother and has no independent existence.  And this is important because?  “Because I said so–so there!”

The supercilious arrogance of Unbelief is a fearsome sight to behold.  Rational argument and principles come down to nothing more than bias, cant, and superstition.  As any good post-modernist will tell you, Maori perspectives are just as valid as white, middle class, liberal, male perspectives.  Mr Farrar’s attempt to use law to ram his particular narratives down the throats of those he disagrees with–whose views he happens to consider “superstitious nonsense”, denying them the right to be reflected in law or decisions–is nothing more than arrogant, intellectual hegemonic imperialism. 

When Unbelief magically conjures up sky hooks on which to hang its prejudices, disguised as ethical or rational precepts, the only sound worthy of attention is the laughter of Christians mocking those who profess to be wise, but cannot help playing the fool every time they get on the field. 

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Cooking and Counting 

Goo-Mongers – Postmodernism
Written by Douglas Wilson
Friday, 13 July 2012

One of the charges that is laid at my feet with some regularity is that I am an autodidact, unaccountable to no one, and that this unfortunate fact makes me pop off from time to time, and to do so in ways that are clean contrary to what is taught by the certified experts and gatekeepers.

There is a lot going on here, not the least of which is the confusion of certification with education. But that part of it is another topic for another day. For the present, I would like to present a brief explanation and defense for what I would describe as the biblical approach to being contrarian.

“I have more understanding than all my teachers: for thy testimonies are my meditation. I understand more than the ancients, because I keep thy precepts” (Ps. 119:99-100).

This approach eliminates the cocksure sophomore as well as the argumentative crank.

Powerful Ancient Traditions

Gaining Traction in a Post-Modern World

In a world falling apart, universal, timeless tradition has traction.  In the 1960’s the opposite applied.  Western culture was basking in the victory over Germany and the Axis powers; there was a distinct sense that the “good” had triumphed over the “bad” in World War II.  History was on a right course.  The fifties were a decade of the universal and conventional.

Beneath popular culture, however, scepticism was bubbling away, about to burst forth into the public square.  Post-modernism had taken deep root in the intellectual institutions.  Along came the Beatles with distinctly unconventional haircuts and strange musical idioms.  Almost overnight being “square” did not cut it; change, change, change was the new normal.

Fifty years later the Western world has been “narrativised” and “perspectivised” to cynical boredom and jaded detachment.  The only “ism” that has traction is the view that nothing has traction.

Nietzsche Has Triumphed in the West

The Essence of Modernity

To be entirely modern (which very few of us are) is to believe in nothing.

This is not to say it is to have no beliefs: the truly modern person may believe in almost anything, or even perhaps in everything, so long as all these beliefs rest securely upon a more fundamental and radical faith in nothing–or, better, in nothingness as such.

Modernity’s highest ideal–its special understanding of personal autonomy–requires us to place our trust in the original absence underlying all of reality, a fertile void in which all things are possible, from which arises no impediment to our wills, and before which we may consequently choose to make of ourselves whatever we choose.  We trust, that is to say, that there is no substantial criterion by which to judge our choices that stands higher than the unquestioned good of free choice itself, and that therefore all judgment, divine no less than human, is in some sense and infringement upon our freedom.

This is our primal ideology.  In the most unadorned terms possible, the ethos of modernity is–to be perfectly precise–nihilism. 

 David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), p. 21

Douglas Wilson’s Letter From America

Postmodernism and My Neighbor

Goo-Mongers – Postmodernism
Written by Douglas Wilson
Saturday, December 03, 2011

Please let me take a moment of your time so that I might explain why I hate postmodernism so much. It is the same reason, at bottom, why I hate socialism so much. But I repeat myself — they are at root the same thing, actually.

Modernity is a good thing, brought into existence by the influence of the gospel. Modernism was a parasitic ideology, sneeveling in to take credit for those good things it could not produce or sustain.
Like parents who inherit a boodle that they don’t understand, the only thing modernism could do then was rear insolent teenagers with unsightly tattoos — the postmodernists.

Modernism created an abstraction called “the rights of the individual,” around which our classically liberal, democratic polity was to be built. But this abstraction is an idol, and consequently can’t defend itself against the inevitable pomo snark.

So when I defend free men and free markets, I am not doing so for the sake of “the individual.” We had no business departing from the biblical description. I do not believe in the rights of the individual. I believe in the rights of my neighbor. And I can hear the disciples of Jim Wallis now . . . but who is my neighbor?

This is no trifle. The Bible tells us that we should measure our love for God against our love for those we can see, like our brother, our neighbor (1 John 4:20). I cannot see “the individual,” and neither can the postmodernist, which is why denial of the rights of the individual roll so easily off their deconstructing (and yet never deconstructed, how convenient), tongues.

Pursue this to the bottom line. If there is no thing as the “rights of the individual,” then it shouldn’t be a problem if I make off with his wife. If there is no such thing as the “rights of the individual,” then we can jack his tax rates up to the point where we can finally pay for this socialist paradise we have going here. We can reveal the pomo agenda pretty easily, actually. Who do they want to sleep with, and who do they want to tax?

Christians who understand the Bible want to get in the way of this agenda. And they do this, not because they are heirs of some right wing strand of Enlightenment thinking, but rather because they have been taught to love their neighbor.

Peter Berger on Jurgen Habermas

What Happens when a Leftist Philosopher Discovers God?

Peter Berger

This article first appeared in The American Interest.

Society is the social science journal superbly edited by Jonathan Imber. In its fall issue it carries an article by Philippe Portier (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes in Paris), entitled “Religion and Democracy in the Thought of Juergen Habermas”. . . . Habermas has been a public intellectual (a more polite term for celebrity) for a very long time. I have never been terribly interested in Habermas, but the coincidence made me think about him. Portier’s article does tell an intriguing story. It might be called a man-bites-dog story.

Habermas is exactly my age. Our paths crossed briefly in the 1960s, when he was a visiting professor in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, where I was then teaching. We did not particularly take to each other.  I was put off by both his leftist politics and his ponderous philosophical language. (German philosophers, no matter where located on the ideological spectrum, vie with each other in producing texts which are comprehensible only to a small group of initiates.) I also sensed a certain professorial arrogance. I remember reading a response by Habermas to a critic, limited to the statement that he refused to discuss with an individual who quoted Hegel from a secondary source.

Habermas first received a doctorate in philosophy, but moved toward sociology under the influence of the neo-Marxist Frankfurt School, then acquired a second doctorate in the latter field under the fiercely Marxist Wolfgang Abendroth. In 1964 he became a professor in Frankfurt, as successor to Max Horkheimer, who by then was a neo-Marxist icon. Habermas was a hero of the so-called student revolution which erupted in the late 1960s. His students fanned out across West German academia, creating a network which for a while administered an effective ideological hegemony in the human sciences. At the time I found Habermas’ role in this rather objectionable. But I gave him credit for distancing himself sharply from the more radical wing of the student movement, as he later distanced himself from the anti-Enlightenment views of  the postmodernists.

In 1981 Habermas published his magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action, a strong endorsement of reason as the foundation of public life in a democracy. He retired from his professorship in 1993, but not from his role as an active advocate of Enlightenment rationality. It is debatable how far his more recent work still continues under a neo-Marxist theoretical umbrella. His views on religion have shifted considerably.

Portier distinguishes three phases in Habermas’ treatment of religion. In phase one, lasting up to the early 1980s, he still viewed religion as an “alienating reality”, a tool of domination for the powerful. In good Marxist tradition, he thought that religion would eventually disappear, as modern society comes to be based on “communicative rationality” and no longer needs the old irrational illusions. In phase two, roughly 1985-2000, this anti-religious animus is muted. Religion now is seen as unlikely to disappear, because many people (though presumably not Habermas) continue to need its consolations. The public sphere, however, must be exclusively dominated by rationality. Religion must be relegated to private life. One could say that in this phase, at least in the matter of religion, Habermas graduated from Marxism to the French ideal of laicite—the public life of the republic kept antiseptically clean of religious contamination.

Phase three is more interesting. As of the late 1990s Habermas’ view of religion is more benign. Religion is now seen as having a useful public function, quite apart from its private consolations. The “colonization” of society by “turbo-capitalism” (nice term—I don’t know if Habermas coined it) has created a cultural crisis and has undermined the solidarity without which democratic rationality cannot function. We are now moving into a “post-secular society”, which can make good use of the “moral intuition” that religion still supplies. Following in the footsteps of Ernst Bloch and other neo-Marxist philo-Godders, Habermas also credits Biblical religion, Judaism and Christianity, for having driven out magical thinking (here there is an echo of Max Weber’s idea of “ the disenchantment of the world”), and for having laid the foundations of individual autonomy and rights.

Habermas developed these ideas in a number of publications and media interviews. The most interesting source (not discussed by Portier in the article) is a 2007 publication by a Catholic press, The Dialectics of Secularization. It is a conversation between Habermas and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (at the time of this exchange head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, subsequently Pope Benedict XVI). Habermas here gives credit to Christianity for being the purveyor of a universal egalitarianism and for an openness to reason, thus continuing to provide moral substance for democracy. Not surprisingly, Ratzinger agreed.

I am not sure what Habermas’ personal beliefs are. But I don’t think that his change of mind about religion has anything to do with some sort of personal conversion. Rather, as has been the case with most sociologists of religion, Habermas has looked at the world and concluded that secularization theory—that is, the thesis that modernization necessarily leads to a decline of religion—does not fit the facts of the matter. Beyond this acknowledgement of the empirical reality of the contemporary world, Habermas admits the historical roots in Biblical religion of modern individualism, and he thinks that this connection is still operative today. Yet, when all is said and done, Habermas now has a positive view of religion (at least in its Judaeo-Christian version) for utilitarian reasons: Religion, whether true or not, is socially useful. 

Let us stipulate that smoking is unhealthy. Let us then assume that a tribe in some remote jungle believes that tobacco smoke attracts malevolent spirits. A public health official sent into the region does not, of course, share this superstition. But he makes use of it in dissuading people from acquiring a taste for newly available cigarettes—because he knows that some people do the right thing for a wrong reason. Eventually, he thinks, people will do the right thing for a better reason. And that will be the end of the demonological theory of tobacco smoke.

Any sociologist will agree that religion, true or not, is useful for the solidarity and moral consensus of society. The problem is that this utility depends on at least some people actually believing that there is the supernatural reality that religion affirms. The utility ceases when nobody believes this anymore.

Edward Gibbon, in chapter 2 of his famous history of the decline of the Roman Empire, has this to say: “The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful”. When you cross the philosopher with the magistrate, you get Habermas.