Perspicuity of Scripture

Ok, I'm having some troubles with the doctrine of the perspicuity of Scripture, and I was wondering if someone could help me out. I'll outline what's been going through my head; it's not supposed to be a knock-down, drag-out argument against perspicuity, but rather what I'm struggling with.

First, why is the issue important? It seems to me that there are three major options: go with an institutional church (Roman Catholicism or Eastern Orthodox), admit perspicuity of Scripture on matters of salvation, or be elitist (only those who have the time and energy to devote to thoroughly studying Scripture in its context could really know the truth, and even then it's doubtful; a variant on this would be a priesthood of scholars who pass on their "knowledge" to the masses).* I'm currently not liking any of the options; elitism certainly seems contrary to the Biblical message and I think that RC and EO have issues in their interpretations on Scripture (they don't seem to have kept the message as faithfully as they claim). It seems that the hope for Protestantism is that the individual can indeed get the basics out of Scripture without any (human) help.

Empirically, this does seem to be lacking. It could be entirely possible that most of these Protestants in the end agree on the important issues, we just can't be sure what the important issues are. I would like to see some support of perspicuity before accepting a position like this, however, and quite frankly the only kind of argument I see doing any work at all is a sort of "Protestantism is right, Protestantism needs perspicuity of Scripture to get off the ground, therefore Scripture is perspicuous." Except that it seems that we need Scripture to be perspicuous to be sure of Protestant claims.

Below are basic summaries of some of the arguments I've heard which I simply don't accept and why. In the end, I'm having trouble finding Biblical support for perspicuity, and the empirical troubles make me want to dismiss it if the Bible doesn't support it.

• Argument 1: God knows language, would want to give us a message we can understand, and therefore did.
  Reply: Arguments for "God would do something, therefore . . . ." just don't fly. If God hasn't told us what God would do in a situation, let's leave some room open for God's own decisions. Further, if God decides to use a tool, then God is restricted by that tool. We first need to settle the question of the extent to which perspicuity could even possibly be applicable to 2000 years of humanity over a wide range of cultures, not to mention when found in a text which is unabashedly culturally rooted itself (Paul wrote letters to specific situations in the churches, after all).
• Argument 2: Scripture verse X says that God's message (or some phrase that we can take or even twist to mean God's message) is clear/understandable/able to save/etc. Therefore, Scripture is perspicuous.
  Reply: Show me a verse which actually applies to the Bible in our current context, and I'll listen. God's message, however, is not only the written word; many times this is referring to a proclamation, or the content of a message (Paul uses it synonymously with the Gospel at points). Even insofar as it is referring to a written message (such as the Torah in certain Psalms and Deuteronomy, or possibly Paul's writings), it is always within an interpretive community (the Israelite institution, or the new church complete with disciples who had been with Jesus and eyewitnesses, as well as churches which had heard more of Paul than we have in his letters). In short, there is no similar situation to our own in which the Bible talks of God's word being clear, and the way in which these verses get used for the purpose of perspicuity is an example of why I am so fed up with both the doctrine and low-church Protestantism as it is.
• Argument 3: Elitism is false, and RC and EO make false salvific claims, therefore we are left with Protestantism under the assumption of perspicuity of Scripture.
  Reply: So who makes the judgments on what Scripture means? If the individual, the this begs the question. If the learned individual, then we have elitism. If the community, I would want to see why I should trust the given community; RC and EO provide some evidence of continuity with the early church, even if I doubt that it is anywhere near as strong as they claim. An alternative would be communities which show forth the fruits of the gospel the best. Low-church Protestant bodies don't really seem to qualify for either.
• Argument 4: Even if you deny perspicuity of Scripture, you still need to listen to tradition and have thus simply moved the problem to a different level.
  Reply: This is simply not understanding the critique offered by traditionalists. The tradition is embodied in a living interpretive community. There is a framework for how to interpret the Bible set up through listening to the thousands of voices surrounding oneself, starting with those nearest and working its way outward. I can always ask questions to clarify what someone living meant by a comment, and I at least share similarities of culture with those close to me in place and time.

So, there are my basic thoughts. I'm hoping there is something wrong; however, I'm having trouble seeing what it is. I at least as a scholar can go and research the issues, but what can we expect of the common believer? Do we simply say that anyone who is actually serious about their faith needs to go through a rigorous academic course in order to really know what they're talking about with Scripture? I know that the Bible verses I usually hear quoted in a typical church by laypeople seem to me to be woefully misunderstood, and insofar as they are used appropriately this seems to be random luck. However, muzzling laypeople doesn't seem to be a good option either.

I'm probably simply missing something simple here and making a fool out of myself. Oh well, better to admit to being a fool than to continuing struggling with doubts because I can't bother to ask other people for help.

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* Edit: I guess this could be falling into the modernist purely objective/purely subjective false dichotomy; maybe there is no infallible authority, but we can still make our way anyhow (even if Scripture is theoretically inerrant, perspicuity is required to make this infallibility practical for most people). An Anglican position could then work, allowing revision but listening to the tradition. This would still seem to invalidate most Evangelicalism. Alternatively, do we drop (or marginalize) orthodoxy for orthopraxy? Even here, there seems to be some issues with perspicuity, but not as many; I don't think people disagree on many of the issues so much as ignore them. Plus, there still is the issue of salvation: even though we should be like Jesus, and we have a good example in Jesus himself what that is like, what is it that saves us and enables us to be like Jesus?

Yet another option is postmodernism and/or relativism. Not that I'm comfortable with this option either. However, at least let us get it straight that relativism and subjectivity do not entail anti-realism; they simply entail that whatever is actually real cannot be summed up in absolute/objective statements. So on this view, reading Scripture is a process where as we read, we gradually learn, without necessarily being able to say without remainder that a given view is correct. Again, I'm not completely comfortable with the view, but at the same time I don't think that it's quite as weak as a modernist critique suggests (of course it doesn't support modernism. That's hardly a critique of it.) and if perspicuity fails it may be the best way of retrieving a quasi-Protestant way of going about church.

Ideas concerning Platonism

Currently reading: Henry of Ghent: Metaphysics and the Trinity by Juan Carlos Flores

I heard an argument the other day which has me considering Platonism (see paper at http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~thorgan/papers/Conceptual.Relativity.htm). The argument itself, as I heard it, goes somewhat like this: there are times when two people are arguing, and there is both a sense in which they disagree (they aren't just talking past each other), and yet regarded within their own conceptual schemes, they are both right. A couple examples are in order. The first example, given in the paper I read, would be that of Carnap and the Polish logician. There are three books on the table, and so Carnap says that there are three objects while the Polish logician says that there are seven (the three books, plus all mereological sums; every set of two books, and the set of all three). There is a sense in which "object" in context dependent, but at the same time they are disagreeing. Another example given to me by the friend who is currently championing this view is that of a libertarian and a compatibilist regarding the good. Given the different accounts of the will, what it is to be good is different on the two accounts (if nothing else, the libertarian charges the compatibilist with reducing morality to aesthetics, and the compatibilist charges the libertarian with grounding morality on randomness). But if libertarian L and compatibilist C both say "x is good", then they could both be correct even though their theoretical notions of the good are contrary.

That's mainly as far as the paper itself goes, arguing that there is this weak inconsistency in thought which can be explained through an indirect correspondence theory of truth. I personally like to think of it as thinking about what we're talking about more than what words we are saying; metaphysics is not merely formal logic. At any rate, however, here are my thoughts on the issue. The inconsistency only comes up if we are descriptivists; that is, we say that the meaning of a word is settled through a description of it. But, if we set that aside, then the inconsistencies in arguement disappear. In particular, what I am thinking about is a reference theory of language; "good" can be used truthfully by L and C because it is primarily a reference, with theoretical descriptions coming afterward. Now, the question is, what is it referencing? I wonder to what extent it can be purely phenomena, given the different phenomena that different people would use. Even if we all have given moral role models, L & C could be referencing the behavior and so on of different role models. Zagzebski in some essay somewhere writes that in the Christian case, Jesus could be the referent of sorts; while I find this idea compelling, I would like to see some more done on how even a non-Christian and a Christian could both be right in calling something "good." Similarity between referents, maybe, with Jesus as the supreme referent which most accurately describes the notion? But then we need something to adjudicate between the referents to tell which ones are more the given attribute, and we couldn't do this without some sort of notion of the attribute in question in the first place. There are other options available, but I (on an intuitive, not logical level) think that they all come down to the matter of providing some sort of unity behind diverse concepts. It is leading me to rethink something along the lines of Platonic Ideas. For the moment, at any rate.

Medieval Trinitarian Theology

Currently reading: The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus by Richard Cross

I figured that I'd jot down some things I've been learning this summer; maybe someone else will be interested, maybe not, but it'll force me to think through it. The main thing I've been reading up on so far has been 13th century trinitarian theology; mainly Duns Scotus with some Henry of Ghent, but also a little Bonaventure and Aquinas (especially after being corrected on some errors in thinking on my last post). Much of the following is recapping a dissertation I've been reading by Russell Friedman, entitled, In Principio Erat Verbum: The Incorporation of Philosophical Psychology into Trinitarian Theology, 1250-1325.

All of the thinkers in this period look back to Augustine and Anselm in their formulations of the Trinity. Many of the strategies of these two are incorporated into later, more precise Scholastic thought, though in different ways. Aquinas and Bonaventure are similar in their thinking, yet develop differences which are further developed by succeeding thinkers.

One model of thinking about the Trinity involves looking at the relations between the persons. Augustine in particular champions this model (though I believe that similar steps were taken by at least one of the Cappadocians; I'll have to look this up). The key thing is that whatever distinguishes the persons in God can't be an essential property as they all have one essence. Neither can it be an accidental property, as God doesn't have any accidents in an Aristotelian sense (besides, we don't exactly want the persons to be accidental to God's nature, even if we are going with a contemporary, non-Aristotelian framework). The only other Aristotelian category which makes sense once you remove talk of accident and substance is relation. The divine persons are therefore distinguished from one another through their relational properties. In most beings, relations are a cheap manner of being, even below accidents; the fact that there are more books than DVDs in this apartment has nothing to do with the being of the books or DVDs. However, when these relations are within the divine essence, they have a manner of being as full as any substance.

Aquinas in particular takes up this line of approach. The persons are distinguished not merely by relations, but by opposed relations; the Father has the relation of paternity to the Son, and the Son has the relation of filiation to the Father. The Holy Spirit must have a relation to both Son and Father in order to be distinct from them, and so they both have the relation of active spiration to the Spirit and the Spirit has the relation of passive spiration from both the Son and Father (thus, the relation account demands the filioque).

Bonaventure, on the other hand, tends to take the lead of Richard of St. Victor and his emanationist model. In this model, the relations of origin become the most important; what makes the Son a distinct person is the origin of generation (procession in the mode of nature), and what makes the Spirit a distinct person is the origin of spiration (procession in the mode of will). The Father is who he is through being ungenerated. Generation and spiration are simply intrinsically different from each other and do not need opposing forces to distinguish them.

Now, here is an important thing to note: even though I have said that Aquinas and Bonaventure foreground the respective views, for them this is merely a conceptual distinction. Both speak of relations and both speak of emanations, but the ordering is the ordering of our concepts; these are really identified within God. Franciscans and others sympathetic to the Franciscan viewpoint on this issue, however, took the matter a step further. In particular, Henry of Ghent incorporated Augustine's psychological model of the Trinity along with Aquinas' philosophical psychology (with some tweaking). Augustine, in his De Trinitate, likened the Trinity to the memory, intellect, and will. Henry identifies the procession of generation with the procession of the mental Word (intellect/understanding) (thereby identifying procession in the mode of nature with procession in the mode of intellect), and the procession of the will (linked to love) with the spiration of the Spirit. Duns Scotus, Henry's pupil, follows in this, making this psychological emanation scheme his complete account of the Trinity by collapsing the relations into the emanations (this is, of course, leaving out many details on all sides).

I'm struggling with the psychological view of the Trinity myself. It's foreign to much of contemporary theology, and seems to be rather anthropomorphic. At the same time, I've been working through some reasonings for looking at it. Looking at the Son as God's understanding (as a simplification, at least; all of the above accounts separate God's understanding qua Son from God's understanding qua God), one can then make parallels to John's prologue, or Proverbs 8 with wisdom, or Genesis 1 with the ordering of the world from chaos. Similarly, identifying the Spirit with God's will makes sense considering who the Spirit is and how the Spirit acts in the Christian (at least as a broad characterization; I'm going for the big picture here). Similarly, it does seem like there is an outward movement from ourselves when we know something and when we will something, which nonetheless remains with ourselves. Finally, it does not seem (overly) anthropomorphic to say that God has a will or understanding; these seem to be pretty standard traits attributed to God and even within philosophy flow out of the cosmological argument. None of this is to imply that we have even the foggiest idea of God's phenomenology.

This Post is Untitled

Currently reading: The Beauty Of The Infinite: The Aesthetics Of Christian Truth by David Bentley Hart

So, life has just gotten a lot less hectic. The semester is over (I should be getting grades back tomorrow - I'm still a trifle apprehensive about that), and I am done with Starbucks as of last week Tuesday. So now I have some time off to study effectively, and make up for the fact that I've been mostly a general studies philosopher until now. Of course, what happens is that on any given day, I'll have either discipline or concentration, but never both; I can either sit and stare at a text for hours on end and get through 30 pages, or goof off online most of the day and cram 30 pages into a well-oiled brain. Plus or minus 1/2-1 page of a Latin text with 16th century Italian shorthand as I start reading Henry of Ghent (it's still easier than reading Sanskrit). I'm frustrated by the fact that I seem to tire so easily; my mind has a set amount of energy at the beginning of the day, whatever I actually need to get done, and it never seems to be apportioned the way I need it.

In other news, I just came across the following website: http://www.meontology.net. I think it's a little too cluttered, though.

Potential Thesis Topics

One more day left of finals; I'm done studying for the night and waiting for the energy drink to wear off so that I can go to bed. As I'm up anyway, here's two potential thesis topics concerning Scotus that I've been batting around:

• Scotus' notion of contingency. Modern modal accounts make contingency out to be such that if x is contingent, then it is possible that x and it is possible that not-x. Contingency thus gets relegated to the realm of possibility; that is all there is to it. Thus, that which is contingent can be viewed as random or arbitrary, though not necessarily so. Scotus grounds contingency purely in the will, and predominantly in the divine will; all other contingency comes back to this. Thus, we explain possiblity in terms of volitional contingency, rather than contingency in terms of (logical or metaphysical) possibility; room is opened for that which is neither determined nor random.
• Eternal generation in the Trinity. This has been a big debate at Trinity; many have abandoned the view for a sparser Trinity, or merely kept the judgement behind eternal generation (that which is begotten is of the same nature as the begetter) while either rejecting or remaining silent on more than that. Aside from arguments that biblical exegesis really doesn't support the view after all (an argument outside my area of expertise), there are the philosophical arguments that EG results in ontological subordinationism. As one who has been on the side of EG (at least in maintaining its logical possibility, with further decision needing help from both systematic and biblical theologians), I would be interested in looking at a medieval view which I could take as an example which both puts for a rigorous account of EG while has the conceptual tools to defend itself against the contemporary philosophical arguments. I guess for this Scotus is as good as Aquinas or perhaps Anselm, but it provides a different explanation for those who have difficulties with Aquinas' theory of the divine persons as relations.

Reflections on Academics

Thinking through last semester as to why it was so stressful, I think one of the things is that I feel like I have to effectively study for three different reasons, each with a substantial amount of stuff to get through.

1. Short Term: I need to get through school and get my degree. Further, I need good grades to get into a good doctoral program. At the same time, classes seem to tie into the other two areas of study at a depressingly low rate; often, it feels like I simply need to get through a class in order to jump another hoop. Better classes provide atlases for the topic in case I want to return in my own time, but I still feel overwhelmed at the end of the class by the subject matter and not prepared to deal with it.
2. Long Term: The research which follows more-or-less stable interests and which gives me an area of specialization. I need something which I can write on, and afterwards feel like I actually knew about what I was writing. Also, I need an area of interest which reminds me why I am in philosophy and theology. Sometimes I can tie this into class papers, but when classes are all across the board or are intro classes (or both, like this semester), I'm not quite sure how to pull this off.
3. Edifying: I have specific questions at specfic times, and I want to be able to study more about them. These questions change around, so this isn't a long-term study project, but it is something which would help me immensely if I had time for it. Unfortunately, the other two areas are more practical and I feel more pressured into studying them so that I can eventually get a job.

The long and short of it is, I don't have time to do all three at any level of quality (especially when making time for my wife and working a draining job with unstable hours), but I need all three for one reason or another. Trying to do all three often leads to burnout, which leads to doing none of them. Further, I don't always know who to trust on given issues, especially when it comes to reading theology; there's always another argument, always another exegesis, and quite frankly, I am less than impressed by much evangelical writing (not that I'm typically any more impressed by liberal, or postmodern, or non-evangelical Reformed writing). So I don't feel like I can know anything about an issue without spending tons of time and energy which I don't have researching it. I am at the point where I am afraid to start researching more than a single topic at a time; given the real world, I feel pulled apart in all different directions, and in the end going in none (or in all, grisly results included).

Anyone have any tips for getting out of the mire?

On Rabbits

Our rabbit Tiger loves to escape. When we would put him in a pen made up of cardboard boxes, he would spend so much time nudging at cracks, jumping over low spots, and running headlong into weak points in the wall. We never could build a pen which would hold him in; even when I tried taping boxes together, the little bugger pulled hard enough to take them apart again.

Now, we finally got him a real pen. No escapes from this one. Tiger finally has a place which is decently larger than his cage where he can run loose for long periods of time, as we do not need to watch him constantly.

So what does Tiger do with this newfound freedom? He still tries to escape. He'll endlessly dig up the cloth at the edge of the cage, hoping that he'll discover a way out eventually. He'll poke his little nose in between the wires. Sure, the new setup is not ideal, of course he'd rather have the run of the house, but it's a step up from his cage. But he'll spend his time looking for a way out instead of playing while he has time.

How many times am I like Tiger?

End of Semester, etc.

Currently reading: The Philosophical Vision of John Duns Scotus
by Mary Beth Ingham and Mechthild Dreyer

End of Semester

The end of the semester is nigh. And good thing, too; it's probably been one of the worst semesters I've had. But, in two weeks the 17 hour load will be gone, I will be done with coursework, I can actually start reading the books I'm interested in (ok, continue reading, but without guilt), and soon after I can quit Starbucks and maybe get a job as a tutor, or something else with some positive level of job satisfaction. I was going to hold on until the end of the summer, but I got turned down for the Logic adjunct professorship at Trinity and so I really have no reason to delay the decision.

The New, Improved Medieval Me

Summer reading list: medieval philosophy and theology. I had gotten a bit disenamored of the medievals last fall, but they still had an odd fascination for me. I finally realized why: I was trying to treat them as analytic philosophers. Now, while the level of rigour and analysis is similar, modern philosophy doesn't much like systems. Analytic philosophy in particular tends to be concerned with discrete problems. While analytic philosophers themselves may out the problems together into a larger whole, they don't do this so much in their writings. So I can read Plantinga on modal logic and on epistemology without having to connect the two.

When I had tried this on Scotus, however, I only got bogged down in what seemed to be endless details. It was Aquinas that brought me back, however, through contemporary Thomists Gilson and Clarke; I was able to see the whole which made the parts meaningful. So I thought, I wonder if Scotus' thought was this developed? As Scotus did not leave behind a Summa, it is more difficult to see this in his thought, but the book I'm reading through right now (see top of this post) is helping me to see the bigger picture and getting me re-interested. That, and realizing that Scotus is his own philosopher/theologian and not just an Aquinas alternative.

Thesis

So, with all the reading I want to do, as well with preparation for a doctorate program in the area, I have to wonder if it may be appropriate to change my thesis topic yet again. Sure, I've been telling everyone for a semester that it was going to be Kierkegaard and Shinran, and that's interesting enough, but I have done anything official yet. On the other hand, I need to do something quickly; my one reader is on sabbatical in the Fall, so I have to have at least an idea of the flow of the paper by the end of the summer.

Our New Pet Tiger

Joy and I decided that we wanted a pet, but a dog or a housecat would just cause too many problems. A dog need more attention than we can give right now, and a cat would leap up and destroy all of Joy's knick-knacks. So, enter the Tiger: a lovable lop with tan coloring and black stripes. Intelligent critter; can get out of almost any setup of cardboard boxes we make to pen him in. So most likely we'll need to get a real pen so that he can exercise without constant supervision.

Gotta Have Soul

Currently reading: The Chosen by Chaim Potok

Reuven, when my Daniel was four years old, I saw him reading a story from a book. And I was frightened. . . . It was a story in a Yiddish book about a poor Jew and his struggles to get to Eretz Yisroel before he died. Ah, how that man suffered! And my Daniel enjoyed the story, he enjoyed the last terrible page, because when he finished it he realized for the first time what a memory he had. . . . I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, 'What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!'
- The Chosen, by Chaim Potok

How often am I like Daniel! It's so easy as an intellectual to go through systems of philosophy, to preach the benefits of one set of ethics over another, to go through abstruse metaphysical points as merely a mind. It really is only recently that I seem to be able to feel the suffering in a text at all rather than note it as one piece of information that helps me to understand the story.

(btw, credit for recommending the book, which has been a rewarding read, goes primarily to my uncle, Dr. Corduan, for bringing it up in Western Religions years ago, and secondly to Dr. VanGemeren who mentioned something by Potok in a recent Intro to OT course which reminded me that I should read it)

In other news, I think I got my boss to change my hours at Starbuck's to a more humane time. 4:45 in the morning (at night?) is just not right, and 5:45 isn't much better.

Cause and Effect

I've been ruminating a bit on the nature of causation, and I've been coming to a couple conclusions that I figured I would jot down. I think that the way we think of causation in our scientific age is backward, and it is creating unnecessary problems in the areas of mind-body relations* and freedom of the will**. This won't be an argument for either a soul which is distinct from the body, or for any form of libertarian free will (to perhaps excessively oversimplify, that in order to be free in doing an action, it must have been possible for me to have done the opposite); it is merely an argument that a conceptual shift makes these concepts more plausible.

First, the mind-body problem. It is commonly remarked that we have no idea how an immaterial mind could interact with a material body, so the concept of a mind causing physical motion ends up being incoherent. However, I would suggest that the opposite is the case. Mind-body interaction is precisely where the concept of causation comes in; it is clearer that I cause the billiard ball to move by intentionally picking it up then it is that the billiard ball moves because a pool stick hit it. The willing agent is the primary locus of concepts of causation, with concepts of physical causation being analogous to the primary sense.

Second, the notion of libertarian free will. If I am libertarianly free, then by most accounts there must be at least some actions for which it is possible that I could have done otherwise then I did (though this need not apply to every action, and even this simple phrase is nuanced differently in contracausal- and agent-causal- libertarianism; regardless, the basic idea remains). It has been argued that this is nonsense; I perform actions for causes, and to talk about the indetermination of my actions is simply to say that I act randomly, which surely doesn't get us anywhere. However, I again would suggest that this critique is possible because we put physical, efficient causation as primary (where efficient causation is more or less the typical view of causation in science; A causes B means in some way that A makes B happen). There seems to be a different type of causation, though, which has been ignored as it cannot be reduced to efficient causation. I can write down some words here, and I did it for a reason; I can point to that reason as a sort of "cause". However, what is so incoherent about suggesting that I could have written different words in the same circumstance, while having reasons for those words? Neither act was random, yet neither was determined. In addition, it might be time to recover Aristotle's telic cause; the "cause" of my actions could be said to be their goal, which allows some maneuverability in my acting. Telic causes may not apply to nature (at least, efficient causes seem to be more fashionable), but it may be that efficient causes similarly do not apply to acts of volition in the same way they do to nature.

To go out on even more of a limb (would that be going out on a twig then?), it seems that to some extent, in the case of efficient causation, the effect is not separate from the cause. I'm getting slightly less than analytical here, but I think this is why we shy away from deterministic views of human volition: if my acts are all determined, I don't really exist. I am a lump of causes coming together without remainder.*** If volitional causation is primary then, I think we start approaching a Berkelian view where minds of some sort are the reality of things. The physical world would not exist separately from these minds. This step I think is more of a leap than the previous two, but I think there is something to it.

At any rate, given some of the above discussion contingency would be regarded as acts of volition rather than merely that which is neither necessary nor impossible (and as such, almost random; at very least stuff put together in a sort of piecemeal fashion).****

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* By "mind", I am referring to not just reason, but also the will, and perhaps primarily the will. I also would contend that reason and will entail emotion. For the curious out there, my own views on the issue fluctuate between Thomism and (a properly conceived) Cartesianism.
** Again, for the curious, my own views here are that of a(n agent-causal-)libertarian, heavily influenced by Duns Scotus.
*** Which seems to allow that while human beings cannot be determined and free, as they would ultimately be determined by something outside of themselves and so not existent, God can be determined (and so incapable of sinning) as God would not be determined by anything outside of Godself and so the same problem would not apply.
**** This idea, which was part of what started my ruminations on these issues, comes directly from Scotus.

Quote of the day:
"If it looks like an Evangelical duck and it quacks like an Evangelical duck, it may not be an Evangelical duck. The quacks may have different semantic content." - Dr. Vanhoozer, in a discussion of Van Til's take on Barth

New Semester

Currently reading: The Resurrection of the Son of God by N. T. Wright

So, the new semester begins. I'm actually having to go back to tests and textbooks; I think that my independent studies and seminars have made me soft. Although it may be nice to actually have fellow students to talk to - it gets a little lonely being the only person working on certain research interests.

So, here's the schedule for the semester:

• Intro to Old Testament
• Intro to New Testament
• Systematic Theology II: Christ, Sin, and Salvation
• Karl Barth
• Religious Epistemology

I'm looking forward to the last two classes the most; systematic theology had looked interesting, and the subject material certainly is, but I'm currently a bit disappointed while reading the first book for the course. I've gotten used to rigorous argument and analysis, which some theologians don't really seem to use that well. I suppose that they are much better than I am in putting theory into practice and making doctrine relevant; I'm just tired of:

• The awful presentations of medieval views (whether Aquinas by Evangelicals, or Scotus by Radical Orthodoxy, or Augustine by various people)
• Being told how we should all live based on a couple poor inferences (even if the Biblical picture of the person is as a mind-body unity, this doesn't jusify the statement that we need to play sports or we are not "full-orbed" Christians)
• Lack of interaction with various sources (I don't care if one regards the Catholic view of justification and merit to be blatantly wrong; at least take more than a sentence to dismiss it. Aquinas does regard Scripture to be foundational and has read it and written a few commentaries; I think he is most likely fully aware of Ephesians)
• The type of argument that goes something like "The Bible says A; we use similar or the same words to describe B and C, so therefore to reject B and C is to be unbiblical" (*cough* discussions of sovereignty *cough*). This often is attended by a "attempts to dismiss B and C come from being philosophical rather than Biblical," despite the often quite philosophical framework which is being used for the "Biblical" view.

This is not to say that all theologians are of this sort (I like reading many theologians, even at times those who aren't as rigorous; Moltmann comes to mind), but I hear the basic lines often enough that it is getting rather tiring.

Now that I've ripped apart one book, here's one to commend: Intimacy or Integrity by Thomas Kasulis. It's a fascinating study of comparative philsophy and trying to understand different ways of thinking. In particular, he is focusing on inter-cultural conflicts in which the two parties agree on all of the facts, and simply think that the other side is irrational in acting as it does. Kasulis traces this back to a difference in understanding how things relate and the different focuses that the given cultures have; he then takes this insight on an extended thought experiment to show how these different views of relations have implications for epistemology, rational argument, metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, and politics. I'm mostly interested in the difference between Analytic philosophy and East Asian thought (Kasulis himself developed many of his thoughts on the matter in thinking about Japanese philosophy), but the main points are applicable to many other areas (he brings up a few times the traditional thought patterns ascribed to men and women in Western culture; in addition, I think it would be relevant to differences between Western and Eastern Christianity).