Yeah, so it was stupid (once again) to try to stop talking on the Internet. I have a new blog going about classical education at The Discarded Image, and now, realizing that I just can’t do without talking about the Reformation and church history, I’ve put up a second blog at Reformation Renaissance. So there you have it. Just don’t believe Tim Enloe when he says he’s going to stop posting on the Internet.

I now have the basics of a new website dedicated to classical Christian education, theory and practice, up. You can find it at The Discarded Image.

It’s a work in progress, but I’m rather pleased with what I’ve been able to get done just in my spare time the last few days. It only took me my lunch hour today, for instance, to figure out how to put the nifty little audio player in the sidebar. At the moment, it’s linked to audios of biographical sketches I have done for my studies in Church history, but as I get the site up and running and get more audio files recorded, I’ll regularly change those links.

Right now it’s just a plain old-style website. I’ll definitely be writing articles for it, which will appear on the main page, but I’m not sure whether I want to do so in the blog format. We’ll see. Anyway, there’s the opening salvo, so to speak. If classical Christian education interests you, I hope you enjoy this new site.

As I said below, I think this blog has served its purpose and I am, in fact, very hard pressed these days to find any time to write about most of the subjects I have written about here these past 4 1/2 years or so.

However, I am one of those people who has a cacoethes scribendi – a “disease of writing.” No matter how hard I try, no matter what my time limitations, I seem to be constitutionally unable to avoid writing. Just today, in response to something I read on Facebook, I spent my lunch hour writing a short essay called “The Common Good Vs. the Individual Good.” See – I just can’t stop myself.

But again, Societas Christiana seems to have served its purpose. So, what shall I do? I could keep all my writings to myself – which, ironically, is what I did simply by default before the advent of the Internet and the cheap personal computer. But, although I don’t have a fan club (and don’t wish to have one), I’m aware that many people find much of what I write helpful, so it seems a bit selfish to keep it all to myself. Furthermore, I think that in addition to my cacoethes scribendi, I have a cacoethes bloggendi – a disease of blogging.

Accordingly, I will be starting a new site very soon, perhaps even next week. This one will be devoted primarily to classical Christian education (which, like “societas Christiana,” or, “Christian society,” covers a pretty wide range of subjects) and its practical applications in the real world. If this is a subject that interests you, please check back here over the next couple of weeks for updates on the new site.

Life is busier than ever for me these days, so blog time is becoming rarer. Projects I have on my plate right now:

(1) Somehow trying to find time to research and write my Master’s thesis for the University of Dallas, which is on the political uses of the saint cult of Edward the Confessor,

(2) Revamping the Latin program at the school where I teach, so that grades 3-8 will begin to get a better handle on the language and hopefully develop actual reading ability rather than just translating ability, and

(3) Planning and working on a series of classes I hope to eventually make available as a distance education option leading to Certificates in various subject areas.

On this last point, I am presently writing the first of three planned Latin “primers” which will, I hope, fill in the gaps that all current primers with which I’m familiar leave wide open. I am also putting together notes for lectures on Herodotus, Thucydides, the Roman Republic, the Roman Empire, the political theories of Aristotle and Cicero, and Medieval history.

So, I’m increasingly aware that I just don’t have time for blogging anymore. My attempt to start an interesting discussion group here about classical and / or patristic works has fizzled out, and the stats page tells me that I have all of about 100 hits a month on this site. That’s down from a couple of thousand hits a month back a few years ago when I was heavily involved in Internet controversies and writing lots of posts that Protestant apologists could use against Catholics. Honestly, it’s very hard to get motivated when almost no one wants to read what I’m putting out here, and I have no desire to write for the consumption of people who only want to gawk at intellectual train wrecks.

A highly-respected teacher of mine told me years ago that although I was doing good things here, I would never change the world with a blog. The more I reflect on things these days, the more I think he was right. I think this blog has served its purpose and it’s time for me to move on to bigger and better things. I won’t delete it, because I know some people still find the archives valuable. Those readers who have followed my work for years might want to just subscribe to the RSS feed, so that when I finally get some of the above projects ready to go, they will be able to take a look at those.

Thanks to all who have stuck with me over the years.

As a passionate believer in the necessity of a thoroughgoing Christian education, I am addressing this note to anyone else who shares that vision and wants to see Christian education continue to spread across our land. Some friends and I are talking seriously about starting a new Christian liberal arts college within the next couple of years, and I would like to take this opportunity to canvass for support.

The following are some key areas of needed development:

(1) Staff: To start with, the new college will need at least two teachers in addition to myself. One can’t have a college without a faculty, and to teach a liberal arts curriculum will require several committed individuals who can work well together and who collectively and individually possess the necessary training to teach competently across multiple fields of study. The present curriculum plan calls for first year classes in History, Philosophy, Theology, and a Classical Language. My own special area of focus is history, and although I know some philosophy and theology, I would rather have more competent individuals than I to oversee those classes. A good knowledge of Latin and / or Greek in all the teachers would also be desirable. I can teach Latin myself, but my Greek is presently too rusty to allow me to fill that capacity.

(2) Promotional: To get a new school off the ground, we will need some effective promotion, and along with that, serious moral support from a wide array of churches and individual Christians willing to go out and spread the word about the school. A school needs students, and although the plan is for the new school to stay relatively small, the more students we can start out with, the better off financially we will be. Of course, we will not merely be seeking warm bodies to sit in chairs and pay tuition; we will want quality students seriously committed to learning, and also having the spiritual maturity to lead their lives well as representatives of the College over the course of their time there.

A related issue will be accreditation. Although many American Christians do not seem to realize it, Government accreditation these days is essentially worthless as an indicator of quality. There are several good alternative accrediting options available for Christian colleges. Of course, gaining formal accreditation takes time, and we would not likely have that honor for the first few years of operation. For some prospective students (and their parents) this might constitute an objection. “Why should I send Johnny to your little school if the degree he gets might not get him a good paying job or might not be accepted by other institutions he tries to get into later on?”

Accordingly, there will be a real need for supporters of this new school to be able to themselves educate others about the relative benefits and potential disadvantages of formal accreditation, and also about the simple fact (forgotten in our day of utilitarian industrialism) that the basic purpose of true education is NOT “to get a job.” The basic purpose of education, particularly Christian education, is to train oneself to be a virtuous and free human being. Virtuous and free human beings do, in fact, go out and get jobs, but they do not become virtuous and free SO THAT they can get jobs. This is a tremendous area of confusion in our culture, and many Christians are just as confused about it as are many non-Christians.

(3) Finances: Most of the school’s money will, of course, come from tuition, but one of the goals of this school is to provide a high quality education at a very reasonable price. We don’t want undergraduate students having to go into massive debt for this program, as is too often the case with colleges – even Christian ones.

This goal being primary for us, it remains the case that the teachers will have to be paid a livable and appropriate wage (especially the more education they themselves have). A passionate commitment to Christian education can get one a long way, but it can’t pay one’s bills or support one’s family. Especially because this will be a start up school, there will need to be a significant fund set aside to guarantee teacher pay in the event of student defaults and / or attrition during the first couple of school years. It would also be good if a scholarship fund could exist, however small, to help the best and brightest students. Anyone who either has the ability to help directly with these needs, or who has the ear of others who can, would be most welcome.

Another obvious need in this category is for facilities. There is no need to begin this college by actually purchasing land and building brand new buildings. Several more workable options for facilities exist. But of course, facilities have overhead, and so a fund will need to be established to pay for needs in that respect. As a matter of prudence, it would be good to have the whole first year of facilities expenses covered before the doors are actually opened.

(4) Resources: The primary need in this category will be for a library. Although we are aware of several very good schools that started so small that they did not have any kind of library for their first 5 or 6 years, and although some pressure to have a physical library can be offset by the large number of books that are now available for free on the Internet, neither of these is ideal for a really serious college program. A library is more than four walls and a roof that contain stacks of books. It is itself a whole learning environment, and as such, its benefit for students is incalculable.

Furthermore, especially for purposes of obtaining formal accreditation, it will be important for the school to be able to show it has invested in the advancement of learning by providing serious library resources to its students. At a minimum, we would like to have shelves stocked with all the major classic works of both pagan and Christian origin, and as supplements to these, various sets of scholarly materials that may be used for research purposes. Access to online collections of scholarly journal articles is often spendy, but these databases are also invaluable resources to have available for students.

These are the main areas of concern I see at present. If anyone is interested in helping with this project in any capacity over the next few years, please contact me at tgenloe@gmail.com

This is a rambly post without a definite conclusion, so I apologize in advance. I’m just thinking out loud, so don’t take it overly seriously. I saw a news story today about Ben Bernanke talking big about how people and businesses just need more loans to keep our economy going. This sort of stuff just makes me sick to my stomach when I compare it with the ideas about economics put forth in many ancient sources, including but not related to the almost unanimous Christian opinion over the last two thousand years that lending money at interest is at best a very questionable thing to do since it too easily slides into mere base usury.

I don’t know what the answer is to all this, because it’s just a fundamental philosophical (and behind that, spiritual) problem with the way our culture thinks about money and possessions. We think life is about buying, buying, buying, accumulating, accumulating, accumulating – we have no sense of proportion about either the possession of “stuff” or the acquisition of money. Businesses surely ought to be able to make profits, but they don’t have any realistic view of how much profit is enough profit.

And of course, so many people’s jobs, their very ability to provide for their families, is all wrapped up in ventures (such as construction) that can’t be done without loans based on the lender’s hope of future gain. You no doubt remember the potential scare last year about all the ships that might have wound up sitting in port, their cargoes of precious food rotting, because banks wouldn’t loan out money to get the food distributed to the stores because no one could guarantee said banks that they’d get a “good” return on their loans. Fortunately that problem did not occur, but it could have given our screwed up assumptions about money and economics in general.

And let’s not even start talking about loans and education. I am myself the willing recipient of Federal money to go to school, because all the schools are so stinking expensive that unless you get loans you might as well just forget any kind of higher education that will pay off in terms of an Official Piece of Paper that you can show prospective employers in order to get paid a better salary than you might otherwise. But in the meantime, just to get there you have to go into massive debt and contend with a mailbox that regularly gets stuffed with offers from credit card companies to go into even more debt so that while you’re in school you can have all the “stuff” that our culture incessantly preaches you need in order to have “the good life.” Lately I’ve had a “debt reduction” company calling me at home repeatedly, trying to get me to get a loan from them so that I can pay off my other loans, thus supposedly reducing my debts.

What a stinking mess.

I almost forgot to put up a post for this, as well, since a few people wanted to discuss the City of God. Given that it is so huge, I suggest we take it book by book. If there are no objections, let’s start with Book I. Here are my observations on Chapters 1-10 and Chapters 11-22.

Alright, here will start the discussion on this work by St. Ambrose. Feel free to comment, after you’ve read it, on pretty much any angle of it you wish. Background information you may have already would also be helpful to the discussion. Two places you may find the work are CCEL – Ambrose: On the Mysteries and New Advent – Ambrose: On the Mysteries.

Ah, the glories of Medieval political thought! I love this one!

Therefore even as the royal dignity and authority excels all earthly authorities, so no infamous or shameful man is appointed to administer it, but he who no less in wisdom, justice, and piety than in place and dignity is superior to others. Therefore it is necessary that he who is to bear the charge of all and govern all should shine above others in greater grace of virtues and should strive to administer with the utmost balance of equity the authority allotted to him. For the people do not exalt him above themselves in order to grant him a free opportunity to exercise tyranny against them, but that he may defend them from the tyranny and unrighteousness of others. Yet when he who has been chosen for the coercion of the wicked and the defence of the upright has begun to foster evil against them, to destroy the good, and himself to exercise most cruelly against his subjects the tyranny which he ought to repel, is it not clear that he deservedly falls from the dignity entrusted to him and that the people stand free of his lordship and subjection, when he has been evidently the first to break the compact for whose sake he was appointed? Nor can anyone justly and rationally accuse them of faithlessness, since it is quite evident that he first broke faith. For, to draw an example from baser things, if someone should entrust his pigs to be pasture to someone for a fitting wage, and afterwards learned that the latter was not pasturing them, but was stealing, slaughtering, and losing them, would he not remove him with reproaches from the care of the pigs, retaining also the promised wage? If, I say, this principle is maintained in regard to base things, that he is not considered indeed a swineherd who seeks not to pasture the pigs, but to scatter them, so much the more fittingly, by just and probable reason, in proportion as the condition of men is distinct from the nature of pigs, is he who attempts not to rule men, but to drive them into confusion, deprived of all the authority and dignity which he has received over men….It is one thing to reign, another to exercise tyranny in the kingdom. For as faith and reverence ought to be given to emperors and kings for safeguarding the administration of a kingdom, so certainly, for good reason, if they break into the exercise of tyranny, without any breach of faith or loss of piety no fidelity or reverence ought to be paid them.

- Manegold of Lautenbach, Ad Gebehardum Liber, ca. 1085 A.D., as cited by Ewart Lewis, Medieval Political Ideas, Vol. 1 (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, Inc., 1974), pg. 165

This morning, I’ve finally been able to read through the several very “meaty” comments from Nathaniel McCallum, Nathan G., and Jonathan Prejean on the “Trusting the Authority of Scripture Is Not Knowledge” thread below. There’s really quite a lot there, and I would like to try to offer some sort of intelligent replies before the (hopefully) big discussion on Ambrose’s On the Mysteries starts next week. In what follows, I will try to be as succinct as I can. Let me know if I’ve misrepresented anyone’s particular concerns, and especially let me know if my brief replies here make any more sense of my position.

<(1) Canonization as a historical, human process: I agree with this fully. I don’t believe that the Christian Scriptures dropped out of heaven, complete and perfect, as the Muslims believe of the Koran. I have no problem admitting that the people of God in both the Old and New Testaments took a long time to recognize what we would now call the “closed canon,” and that much debate took place in which some books that were later rejected by all were initially thought to be inspired by some, and some books that were later accepted by all were initially thought to be uninspired by some.

The profound historicity and humanity of the canonization process (and also of the writings themselves that make up the canon) is one reason that I generally do not use the term “the Bible” to refer to the Church’s Scriptures. “The Bible” is, as I said somewhere, an artifact of the invention of the printing press making the cheap mass production of books possible and also of the rise of near-universal literacy making the private reading of mass-produced books possible. Add to this the fragmentation of culture-in-general that occurred as a result of the Renaissance’s emphasis on vernacular literature (implying more localized and provincial modes of education), and the fragmentation of the Church catholic in the West that occurred as a result of the Reformation / Counter-Reformation wars, and the result is the need to admit that something really drastic happened to the Western Christian approach to the Sacred Texts and we are still dealing with the fallout from this drastic change centuries later. I think that much Protestant talk today about “the Bible” does not understand this, and that much poverty of theological and apologetical discussion is caused by this lack of understanding.

(2) Inspiration as one-time event or ongoing process: I also do not believe that the human authors of Scripture were merely passive instruments recording static information beamed into their heads from on high – the so-called “dictation” theory of inspiration. The Scriptures reveal in numerous ways their profound historicity and humanity, and if anyone thinks that a “dictation of static information to passive stenographers” position is a necessary feature of Protestantism, I can point him to much conservative Protestant scholarship that disputes that.

Both Nathan G. and Nathaniel McCallum mentioned the “problem” of Esther and the Song of Songs in this connection. Well, I don’t imagine that I as a private Protestant individual have to be able to provide some sort of “objective proof” that any particular book in the canon is inspired. Although many Protestants today do, in fact, hold a sort of “me, myself, and my personal copy of the Bible alone with God in my room, no external authorities allowed” sort of position, I deny that this is the position of the Protestant Reformers from whom I trace my understanding of sola Scriptura. There is indeed a subjective and personal dimension to any given individual’s recognition of canonicity, but I don’t think a cut-and-dried case can be made that this dimension is utterly primary in Protestant thought or that it necessarily eclipses the public, corporate dimension of the individual-as-member-of-a-whole-believing community which testifies to the inspiration of the canonical books.

In this sense, I agree with Nathan G. that “The act and manner of inspiration is always within the believing (or often apostate believing) community, so any transcendence that may be possessed by the written product of inspiration can only be appropriated within the believing community.” So, in my view inspiration would have at least two dimensions: the one-time fact of the “God breathing” (theopneustos) of a given instance of Scripture, and the ongoing work of the Spirit in the whole believing community causing them as a whole community to recognize instances of theopneustos. However, I don’t think I’d be comfortable with saying that the “ongoing inspiration” of the community to recognize the theopneustos books was itself an instance of theopneustos. In other words, I’d want to say that the term “inspiration” in the context of this paradigm has two different meanings.

(3) “Original” and “Derivative” revelation: This discussion has helped me to see that much of my terminology was extremely imprecise and even misleading. Honestly, I had not reflected on my terminology as much as I thought I had, so this discussion has been very beneficial to me in that respect. Let me thus restate my position in a hopefully more constructive manner.

I happened over the last few days to read portions of Jaroslav Pelikan’s work Whose Bible Is It? in conjunction with Harold Bloom’s The American Religion. Bloom does a good job of showing that “the American Religion” – into which category he puts several prominent varieties of Protestantism, Christian Science, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, and the Mormons – is fundamentally a “Gnostic” phenomenon focused on various expressions of the basic idea of “the Inner Light” within the private individual believer. This “Inner Light” provides the private individual with an absolutely unquestionable bedrock for holding the idea that his own private soul is fully competent (the Southern Baptists call this “soul competence”) to judge all religious matters for himself, apart from (and even in willful defiance of) all external authority. Bloom takes pains to argue that this paradigm ultimately turns the Bible into a “limp leather icon” that just hangs there in space, disconnected from all the messy mediatorial features of language and culture – which in turn results in a complex of extraordinarily vapid and unreflective talk about the “inerrancy” of a text that is really never read for what it is, but is basically like a wax nose that can be twisted to support anyone’s particular views, no matter how extreme or distorting.

OK, hold that in abeyance for a minute. Pelikan starts his book with an extremely interesting discussion of “The God Who Speaks,” in which he argues – quite persuasively, I think – that oral speaking always necessarily precedes written accounts of it, and in that sense orality is more fundamental. He doesn’t just cite Plato’s argument for this in the Phaedrus, although for any student of the classics, that argument would be quite persuasive on its own. Pelikan also argues from the text of Scripture that “orality” is primary to “literacy.” A few examples: “The word which came to Jeremiah from the LORD: Thus said the LORD, the God of Israel: Write down in a scroll all the words I have spoken to you…And these are the words that the LORD spoke concerning Israel and Judah.” (Jer. 30:1), and “No one ever spoke as this man speaks…unlike their scribes he taught with a note of authority.” (Mt. 7:29)

However, some pages later Pelikan shows that there is another side to the story: “Because Koholeth was a sage, he listened to and tested the soundness of many maxims. Koholeth sought to discover useful sayings and recorded genuinely truthful sayings” (Ecc. 12:9), and “For everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope, (Romans 15:4), and, of course, “all inspired Scripture has its use for teaching and truth and refuting error, or for reformation of manners and discipline in right living, so that the man of God may be capable and equipped for good work of every kind” (I Tim. 3:16).

It seems to me that what arises from the texts Pelikan presents and the analysis of “the American Religion” that Bloom presents is that yes, there are a lot of Protestants who don’t think very reflectively about what it means to say that “the Bible is the Word of God.” Not only are the humanity and historicity of the texts downplayed in the search for “timeless truths,” but the basic fact of communication that orality precedes literacy is not understood at all by many. (Think here about the typical Protestant argument that “oral tradition” is always necessarily like the party game of “telephone” while writing is always inherently more stable and reliable.)

It will have to be a separate discussion how all of this relates to Protestant language about “the clarity” of Scripture and the “self-interpreting” nature of Scripture and so forth, but let me just say that between the comments in the original post and what I’ve read from Pelikan and Bloom, I’m convinced that I should not have spoken so hastily about “original” and “derivative” revelation with respect to Scripture. Surely it is true – as the Jeremiah passage above seems to say – that at least some parts of Scripture are “derivative” revelation, derived from an earlier oral proclamation. Yet at the same time, surely the “derivative” writing is no less “the Word of God” than the original oral proclamation on which it is based?

Pelikan also helpfully points out that although the spoken word carries more embodied authority than the written word, the written word does in fact preserve some things that the oral word cannot. I would take this observation to support both the idea that Scripture must be integrally a part of the liturgy (and so the liturgy must inherently be seen as a shaping force on our theological reflections) and the idea that Scripture is in a sense “above” the liturgy. Perhaps this needs more fleshing out, but that’s what I’ve gotten so far as I’ve thought about these things. At the least, however, I will say that I don’t have a huge problem with Nathaniel McCallum’s remark that “early Christianity posited a variety of authorities, viewing them as a self-correcting coherent whole.” I think that the best of classical, magisterial Protestantism is amenable to this view, as may be seen by comparing, say, Chapter 1 of the Westminster Confession of Faith (about Scripture) with Chapter 31 of the same (about the role of Councils in arbitrating doctrinal disputes and cases of conscience).

To bring this to a close, one last point from the discussions below. This one is particularly Jonathan Prejean’s concern:

(4) The need for “objective indicia” of faith: In explaining Aquinas’ view relative to mine, you wrote about “the God-given authority to a man to speak with the same authority as Christ Himself. That is not an authority that can be denied within its bailiwick, any more than God Himself can be denied. And it is specifically that kind of authority, the authority of Christ Himself in another man, that must be experienced in order for any other particular instance of authority, including inspiration of Scripture, to be properly grounded in knowledge. Those kinds of actions, action in personam Christi, is what St. Thomas would consider as objective indicia of divine authority.”

Well, I don’t have a problem with this, because as I labored to explain to you in the last post where you and I discussed this, I do in fact recognize the need for objective, embodied, community “indicia” of faith. Where I don’t follow your reasoning is the point where you want to confine the objective indicia to the Roman Catholic Magisterium and exclude all other possible forms or modes of in personam Christi authority. I have said before that I think much of your argumentation against “Protestantism” (and it not just yours, but the Catholic apologetics community as a whole) is directed for the most part at Protestant Fundamentalism, which is a very American, very democratically individualistic and philosophically-unreflective form of Protestantism. It isn’t the position of the Reformers or their immediate Scholastic heirs in the 17th century, and I can’t help but think that Calvin, Whitaker, and Turretin would not be impressed at all by your “objective indicia” arguments.

Calvin, for instance, doesn’t just write in Institutes Book I about the subjective, internal witness of the Spirit as to the canonicity of Scripture. Calvin is no mere subjectivist about Scripture. In the same Book he also enumerates a number of objective (external) tests for the veracity of Scripture, and says, significantly, I think, that the internal witness is the final test. He doesn’t say it’s the only test. But even further, he goes to great pains in Book IV to expound the idea that the objective Church, outside of the individual believer, is God’s minister on earth and cannot be lightly ignored by the individual. Whitaker and Turretin both testify to the utility of Church Councils in arbitrating doctrinal disputes, and their only litmus test here is whether the Councils “agree” with Scripture.

Now, I would say that what that sort of language means needs very much to be explored, but in any case, I just don’t see how these fundamental facts of classical, Magisterial Protestant position are not relevant to your “objective indicia” argument. Fundamentalist Protestants may run around clutching a Book the origin and interpretation of which they cannot intelligibly explain without merely referring to their own private spiritual experiences, but that is most definitely not the classical, Magisterial Reformation position. Calvin, Luther, and all the Reformed (and probably the Lutheran) Scholastics of the next few generations would have been horrified at such a notion of Scripture.

As one final thought for you, Jonathan , I saw in one of your comments that you said the papacy is a matter of “revelation.” If I’m understanding what you mean by that correctly, does that mean that the papal claims are simply and finally disconnected from the actual lived experience of the Church catholic over many, many centuries, and that the claims can never be modified or corrected by empirical reflection upon that experience? Something like that is what I take Dr. Liccione to be advocating, and as far as I can see, it ultimately reduces to sheer fideism – and therefore betrays the historicity of the Christian religion. Christianity is not a private, gnostic-like religion where all its veracity exists only in the individual head (or to use Liccione’s terms, what is “reasonable to me”). Christianity is a very public religion, and has always appealed publicly to external witnesses of its truth. If the category of “revelation” becomes detached from history, then, frankly, I don’t know what the difference between it and Gnosticism is.

OK, all of his is what I got out of reading through last week’s comments. Have I misrepresented anyone’s concerns, or failed to adequately reply to them? Does my position seem to be any more clearer – and hopefully less objectionable – now?

Is Using A Minotaur To Gore Detainees A Form Of Torture?

OK, I’ve given this over a week and not as many people seemed interested as I’d hoped. Nevertheless, I do want to do this, because now that I’m no longer in college and am teaching on lower grade levels, I *have* to have a way to get some serious reading and discussing done, if for nothing else to keep myself sharp. So, here is the consensus that has emerged from the other post:

Everyone wants to read either patristic or medieval works, and since there’s only 3 or 4 of us wanting to do it, I don’t see why we couldn’t do both. I proposed reading Books I-V, XII, XIV, XIX, and XXII of the City of God, and one person wants to add in the parts about the visible and invisible church, which I believe is primarily Book XVIII and XX. I’m fine with that.

The other suggestion is Ambrose’s relatively short work On the Mysteries.

It would probably be easiest to host the discussion here rather than setting up another forum. Any objections to that? If not, let’s try to figure out a date to start this reading.

Increasingly I find that most of what goes on on the Internet is just not worth the time either to be involved in or to read, and as a person who is both a teacher (by profession) and a perpetual student (because I profoundly realize how much about this world I do not know), I increasingly realize that my time is precious and there are many, many things that I just cannot afford to spend it on. I’ve come very close to shutting this blog down (again) recently because – a few good recent discussions aside – I wonder if I can even afford to spend time blogging.

In this light, I wanted to ask if any readers of this blog would be interested in forming a small – and private – reading and discussion group focusing on selected classical and patristic works. I tried to start something like this a couple of years ago, but differing schedules and other factors amongst those who wanted to participate eventually prevented it from happening. So, acknowledging that all of us are very busy and might not be able to commit to regular and specific times or days to talk about particular works, I’d still like to put the proposition out there. What I envision is setting up a private blog or private message board involving a handful of people without any time constraints on the discussions that would take place. If it takes us 3 months to read and talk about, say, a 30 page work, so be it – at least something truly constructive would be going on. Possibly, if schedules worked out, the group might even occasionally have voice chats about the books, using software like Skype or Windows Messenger.

The last time I tried to start this, we were going to begin with Justin Martyr’s Apologies. Personally, though, I would love to read the Iliad again, and Herodotus’ Histories, and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War, and Aristotle’s Politics, and Plato’s Republic, and so on. I’ve also seen some lesser known patristic works I would enjoy reading and talking about – among them St. Ambrose’s On Duties.

So, any takers?

I am working on getting into the swing of things teaching 6 classes at a classical Christian school, and musing, as I have time, about whether to do a Part IV to my “The Reformed Faith and Me” series. I didn’t get it all wrapped up with three parts, but I don’t want to drag out the “autobiography” thing too long, either. I’ll see about that fourth part, and if I can reasonably finish talking about the issues and bring it to a close with that. Bear with me.

In the meantime, I have been doing a good bit of personal reading on various matters related to biblical archaeology and the interfaces between other kinds of science and Scripture, and have found some really fascinating things. I’ll chronicle them briefly, because I don’t have time to go into them in great detail right now.

First is Ian Wilson’s book Before the Flood. I don’t know anything about Wilson or his work outside of this book, so if you do, any input you may have would be helpful to me. Before the Flood, at least, is a very interesting book. Much of it is devoted to chronicling a recently-published theory that the stories of a catastrophic, world-altering Flood that abound in many religions may be based on a real event. Wilson chronicles the seeming discovery of several scientists from various nations working over several decades that about 7,000 years ago, the Black Sea was catastrophically flooded by the Mediterranean Sea. This wiped out an entire advanced civilization, altered the landscape dramatically, and gave rise to a sort of indelible “racial memory” of a Great Flood which has subsequently been preserved in many variations – among them the Noah story of the Bible and the Epic of Gilgamesh.

Wilson’s chronicle of the theory about the Black Sea Flood is extremely fascinating, and insofar as what he presents in the book and how he arranges it, the evidence seems fairly persuasive. Of course, one has to observe that among Christians there will be all the usual disputes about the accuracy of the dating methods used to determine when the Black Sea Flood happened, but that it happened seems demonstrated clearly by the discussion in the book. However, at least the last third of the book is devoted to attempting to prove that the civilization that got wiped out by that Flood had a well-developed and generally civilized sort of Mother Goddess religion, and that although this was retained in various forms by the survivors of the Flood, later it was forcibly suppressed by intolerant, patriarchal, Semitic monotheists (you see where this is going). I did not enjoy the last third or so of the book as much as I enjoyed the first two thirds, but I would still probably recommend it to those who interested in such things.

Second is Trude Dothan’s and Moshe Dothan’s People of the Sea: The Search for the Philistines. From my studies of Greek history, I was already aware that following the Trojan War (ca. 1250 B.C.), Greece entered a long “dark age” brought on by the violent destruction of the then-dominant Mycenaean civilization. Later chroniclers (by “later” I mean over 400 years later) held that a mysterious group of invaders called “the People of the Sea” swept over the Greek islands and systematically, brutally destroyed the palaces and cities, setting the Greeks back centuries.

The archaeological sources I had consulted before were unsure just who these “People of the Sea” were, but the Dothans present some fascinating evidence that (1) they were allies of the Trojans, and (2) at least one contingent of the larger group was the biblical Philistines. Initially beaten when the Greeks sacked and destroyed the Trojan power in Asia Minor, the “Peoples of the Sea” subsequently swept across the Mediterranean pillaging and razing everything and everyone they could find. At last, in approximately 1191 B.C., the Philistines in particular made a frantic assault on the Egypt of Pharoah Rameses III, and were stopped at great cost to the Egyptians. At that point, the Philistines decided to settle down in, of all places, the biblical Canaan. About a hundred years later (1090s B.C.) came the Davidic Kingdom, under which so much of the Israelite’s trouble with the Philistines arose.

I haven’t finished this book yet, but the whole thesis about the Philistines is just terribly fascinating. Another highly recommended read.

Lastly, thanks to the rank “demythologization” efforts of Wilson in Before the Flood, I decided to take a look again at some of my older “Bible and Science” types books in order to refamiliarize myself with some of the contested issues, such as the dating methods by which scientists determine how various events and artifacts are to be classified and arranged on the timeline. Since one of the corollary suppositions put forward by the particular scientists who generated the Black Sea Flood theory is that the Bible’s account of the Flood was written much, much later than the other “Mother Goddess” worshippers’ accounts, and is likely derivative from them, I poked around in my books looking for whatever I might be able to find as counterarguments.

I found one very interesting thing in Marvin Lubenow’s Bones of Contention. This was a very interesting argument, via P.J. Wiseman in the 1930s, that the book of Genesis was actually written by many hands and only later “redacted” by Moses. Lest this sound like a quacky Liberal attack on the veracity of Genesis, let me hasten to say that according to Lubenow, many conservative Bible scholars embrace Wiseman’s theory because in fact it has the end result of providing evidence that Genesis 1-11 are actually (as Lubenow puts it) “transcripts of the oldest writings in human history.” How does this work?

Because I do not claim to fully understand the theory, and at any rate, I do not possess the qualifications in Old Testament studies to confirm or argue against the theory, I will only recount what Lubenow says, and leave it to the reader to disagree or do follow up reading. Basically, the idea is that the phrase “These are the generations of…” (TOLeDOT in Hebrew), repeated 11 times in Genesis, are ancient Mesopotamian “colophons,” or declarations of the name of the author of the document in question. These “colophons” were always put at the end of a particular record, and so whenever we find the phrase “These are the generations of…” in Genesis, we know that we have reached the end of a particular record and are about to start a new record. This in turn means that Genesis 2:5-5:2 was originally written by Adam or his immediate kin, that 5:3-6:9a were originally written by Noah or his family, that 6:9b-10:1 were written by Shem or his family, that 11:10b-11:27a were originally written by Terah (father of Abraham), and so forth.

The role of Moses in all of this, given that the book of Genesis itself (unlike the other four books of the Pentateuch) nowhere says that Moses wrote it and that we know he was thoroughly trained in the best of the sciences of the Egyptians, was as the editor / compiler / redactor of the (probably clay tablet) copies of all of these original documents. So in a sense Moses did “write” the book of Genesis, but in the sense of putting together numerous ancient records into one continuous story – which makes Genesis, as Lubenow said, “transcripts of the oldest writings in human history.” One other thing Lubenow points out is that usually the arguments that no written records could have existed so far back in history are derived from evolutionary assumptions about “primitive” man and what he was and was not capable of doing. Speaking as a believer in creation, though, Lubenow seems correct when he says that if Adam was created with the ability to speak, it is silly to imagine that he could not also write, since speaking and writing are parts of the same complex phenomenon of language.

At any rate, this is the sort of stuff I’ve been reading in my spare time lately. Pretty fascinating, all of it!

Persuasion is Power; Power is Persuasion

In Alexander and Caesar, Plutarch shows us the final descent of the Greeks and the Romans from persuasion to power. Although the original idea of cosmopolis was a form of the contemplative life, a world-city of rationally self-sufficient sages, it eventually became an active life, melding disparate peoples together by a persuasiveness that only came from power.

It is interesting to observe Plutarch’s medical language of different characters in his Lives. He calls Lycurgus, who accomplished a bloodless reform “a wise physician,”[55] and Caesar, who accomplished a very bloody reform, “the gentlest physician,” sent “by no other than a divine intervention.”[56] Likewise, he calls Agesilaus “the only man that was fit to heal the public malady, the arbiter of all their difficulties, whether relating to the affairs of war or peace.”[57] Yet he echoes his own earlier words about Pericles’ warning to the Athenians: Agesilaus grasped for more than he could reasonably hold and so lost for Sparta all that she had attained before he came to power.[58] Alexander is not called a “physician” directly, but he is called “[Fortune’s] own characteristic handiwork” for the task of “civilizing Asia.”[59] Alexander was “a very great philosopher,” because by his deeds he “changed the savage nature of countless tribes.”[60] Perhaps the difference between a physician and a philosopher is not great, and Plutarch is telling us that societies frequently become so ill that only brute power can persuade them?

To revisit the observation of our first page, if Plutarch shows that if captive Greece took captive its own captor, it also the case that both were taken captive by their own worst impulses. Plutarch, a liberty-loving Greek, seems forced to admit that power inexorably trumps persuasion. Attributing Rome’s dominance to “divine escort and the fair wind of Fortune,”[61] he bows to the fact that “some divinely ordered fortune, commissioned, in the revolution of things, to put a period at this time to the liberty of Greece.”[62] Although he says of Rome that “Fortune laid the foundations, and that Virtue finished the building,” elsewhere he says “Virtue made Romulus great, but Fortune watched over him until he became great.”[63] Though seemingly ambiguous as to whether Fortune (necessity, power) or Virtue (will, persuasion) was primary in founding and preserving Rome, Plutarch nevertheless weights his presentation toward the former.

The contrast between Greek persuasion and Roman power is evident in the titles “On the Fortune of the Romans” and “On the Fortune and Virtue of Alexander,” and in the treatment of the two nations’ heroes. Fortune cut off Alexander to make room for Rome,[64] and prevented Brutus from hearing the news that might have helped him prevail over Caesar.[65] The Morals essay on Rome closes by noting Rome’s military might – as if power justifies itself. By contrast, the Morals essay on Alexander notes near its end that if the Greeks prevail it is through Virtue, but if “the enemy” prevails it is through Fortune.[66] Rome, a cooperative venture between Fortune and Virtue, was to be an immovable anchor in a constantly changing world.[67] The implication is clear: power trumps persuasion.

Plutarch’s Alexander nobly told his men that “the end and perfection of our victories is to avoid the vices and infirmities of those whom we subdue,” yet, near the end of his conquests, he himself has become “more audacious and lawless than he had been.”[68] In this light, it seems that for Plutarch civilization can only be secured by the persuasion of power, making society “the rule of herdsmen over beasts.” As a closing reflection, perhaps worthy of future explication, I find myself wondering if Plutarch meant the following as a metaphor for the downgrade of the two cultures from persuasion to power, from reason to necessity:

[Fortune] has sufficiently wreaked her jealousy at our great success on me and mine, and has made the conqueror as marked an example of human instability as the captive whom he led in triumph, with this only difference, that Perseus, though conquered, does yet enjoy his children, while the conqueror, Aemilius, is deprived of his.[69]

Notes

[55] “Lycurgus,” in Volume 1, pg. 62.

[56] “Comparison of Dion and Brutus,” Volume 2, pg. 665.

[57] “Agesilaus,” pg. 68. By contrast, Aristotle says, “a physician is not expected to persuade or coerce his patients, nor a pilot the passengers in his ship” (Politics 1324b30).

[58] Ibid., pg. 73.

[59] “On the Fortune and Virtue of Alexander,” pgs. 383 And 391.

[60] Ibid., pg. 397.

[61] “On the Fortune of the Romans,” pg. 323.

[62] “Demosthenes,” Volume 2, pg. 435.

[63] “On the Fortune of the Romans,” pg. 343 and 349.

[64] Ibid., pg. 377.

[65] “Marcus Brutus,” in Volume 2, pg. 659.

[66] “On the Fortune and Virtue of Alexander,” pg. 485.

[67] “On the Fortune of the Romans,” pp. 319-377.

[68] “Alexander,” in Volume 2, pgs. 187 and 197.

[69] “Aemilius Paulus,” Volume 1, pp. 416-417 (emphasis mine).

Many Catholic apologists make the argument that the Protestant reliance upon Scripture as the sole infallible rule of faith (sola Scriptura) is defective because it implies a previous reliance upon the authority of the Catholic Church as the “publisher” and Christ-delegated interpreter of Scripture.

From the moment I first encountered this argument, it seemed philosophically suspicious to me. The first question suggested to me by the argument is, “Why don’t we need another authority standing behind the Catholic Church to guaranteed its authority so that we can then trust its judgments about Scripture?” Which immediately suggests the further question, “Why don’t we need a fourth authority to guarantee the third authority that guarantees the authority of the Catholic Church which then guarantees the authority of Scripture?” And so forth. Thus, this Catholic argument has always seemed philosophically suspicious to me because it looked like an epistemological variation on the classical philosophical ontological argument that no infinite regress of causes can exist.

Aristotelian metaphysics (according to my limited understanding of it) holds that a real infinite regress of ontological causes cannot exist. The reasoning in Aristotle’s works gets pretty complicated, and I’m not going to try to summarize it except like this: human reason as an activity of the mind engaging the world is in a certain sense the search for causes, and an infinite regress ultimately results in no graspable cause since every postulated cause has a previous cause, ad infinitum. This would ultimately imply the destruction of human reason itself as a viable tool for understanding the world. Applying this ontological argument to epistemology, then, seems to me to yield the conclusion that an epistemological infinite regress would likewise result in no graspable cause of knowledge, and so in this way would destroy human reason itself as a viable tool for understanding the world.

Well, certain Catholics that I know claim that my whole argument about this subject is hokum, and that I not only don’t understand what Aristotle is saying but that I also am guilty of just blowing smoke in a kind of “studied ignorance” that really makes Aristotle say the exact opposite of what he actually says. They respond to my epistemological infinite regress argument in order to try to save their “You have to trust the Catholic Church’s infallible authority in order to be able to trust the authority of Scripture” argument. To me, not being an expert in Aristotelian metaphysics (I am much better with his ethics and politics), their response gets as complicated as Aristotle’s original text, but here is how I understand their claims:

The basic Aristotelian theory of knowledge holds that nothing exists in the intellect except it first impinges on the physical senses. There are no such thing as “innate ideas,” ideas that the human mind is born knowing and which it uses to interpret the world of experience. Rather, the human mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate), awaiting impressions from the senses so that the reason can then abstract the universal essences of particular singular things in the world of experience. The mind thus only “knows” universal essences, not particular singular things.

Now Holy Scripture is a book, and as such it contains and transmits ideas. Ideas are not things that impinge upon the physical senses, and so strictly speaking, the mind cannot “know” the things that Scripture teaches (knowing being a precise technical term). This being the case, what one does when one trusts in the authority of Scripture is simply belief. It is in no way knowledge. Beliefs can be wrong; knowledge, by definition, can never be wrong. One may certainly have a true belief (a belief that conforms to empirical reality) or a false belief (a belief that does not conform to empirical reality), but one can never have “true knowledge” or “false knowledge.” Those categories would be as absurd as “married bachelor” or “square circle,” because by definition knowledge simply is the mind’s conformity to empirical reality.

As a belief and not knowledge, then one’s trust in the authority of Scripture as God’s revelation could be wrong and it must be subjected to the test of knowledge coming to the mind via empirical sense data. Now living people and their direct activities do impact one’s senses continually, and from these sensory impacts real knowledge, not just possibly true belief, can arise. Furthermore, an “authority” is a source that knows, not a source that believes. If it did not know what it was talking about, then what it was talking about could possibly be false, and this would not do any good for someone wishing to trust in its judgments. For these reasons, this Catholic argument seems to be saying, only living people can properly be called “authorities.” A book, even a (purportedly) Divine Book such as Holy Scripture, cannot be an “authority” because it conveys no “knowledge,” but only “belief.”

Now, assuming that I’ve summarized this Catholic argument correctly, here’s where they claim the rubber meets the road for the Protestant. The Protestant, they assume, is nothing more than an isolated private individual person – an individual who eschews all objective connections to the external world by setting his own subjective mind up as its own self-contained, self-justifying source of information about and interpretation of the world. Because he is an isolated mind communing only with his own subjective impressions and eschewing all correcting factors outside of his own mind, he lacks what might be called “objective indicia” (criteria) for rooting his beliefs about God in the actual empirical world of human experience.

Consequently, the Protestant’s trust that the Holy Scriptures are God’s revelation and are thus fully authoritative for man’s religious life is a purely rootless and subjective belief. His trust is not knowledge in any sense of the word, for it is divorced from the only actual source of knowledge – extramental physical sensory experience, most particularly of living people external to himself who can function as said “objective indicia” for rooting his faith in reality. The Protestant is thus left in the unenviable position of being a rank fideist. Like the Mormon who reifies his subjective experience of the “burning in the bosom” as the ultimate test for the truth of his faith, or perhaps even like a Muslim who simply chooses to believe that there is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His Prophet, the Protestant simply unthinkingly clings to a book whose identity, contents, and proper interpretation he can never establish with certainty (i.e., the state of knowledge rather than mere subjective and possibly false belief). All he has – and indeed, all he can ever have – is his own opinion / belief about Scripture’s identity, contents, and interpretation. In short, all he has – and indeed, all he can ever have – is his own rootless and unverifiable “private judgment” about these things. And that, says the Catholic, is an absolutely unworthy foundation for something as high and holy as the Christian religion.

By contrast, this Catholic argument seems to continue, the Catholic individual does have objective indicia for rooting his faith in extramental and empirical reality. He has objective indicia in the real living persons who make up the Magisterium of the Church. These persons, because they are empirically living and empirically acting individuals can and do provide real knowledge that can and does connect the individual person’s (mere) trust in the veracity of Scripture to the extramental empirical world. The Catholic thus eschews “private judgment” and instead submits his own endless capacity for generating mere ungrounded belief to an extramental and empirically verifiable living entity that really and truly knows what it is talking about. This is the authority known as the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Thus, the individual Catholic is not “on his own” like the Protestant (allegedly) is; the individual Catholic can have his beliefs corrected by the Magisterium, and thus, at least in a kind of derivative sense, the individual Catholic can have real knowledge.

This is, at any rate, what I take my Catholic detractors to be saying. I’m not entirely sure I’ve represented the chain of their reasoning correctly. For one thing, I’m not sure if they are actually claiming that the Catholic Church has knowledge of God and His revelation, let alone that they as individual Catholics have a knowledge derivative in a sense from the Magisterium. I’m not clear about this because they go on to call themselves Thomists, and according to my limited understanding of Thomist epistemology, there cannot be in the same human mind knowledge of an object of faith. To have knowledge of something means that you cannot have faith concerning it, and vice versa. Objects of faith are not sensory, and since knowledge can only come through the senses, there cannot be knowledge about matters of faith. How then these Catholics would ultimately be in a better position than they say I as a Protestant am in, I am not sure.

At any rate, since they like to rail against me as someone who just blows smoke, I figure that by putting up what I hope presents itself as a serious attempt to understand their argument, some sort of progress in the dispute might eventually occur. I’ll wait a bit to see if any of them bite by weighing in on this post, and then perhaps I’ll say some more.

The Persuasion of Power

In Greece, many factors paved the way from Cleisthenes to Alexander. The polis, seemingly initially successful in balancing the One, the Many, and the Few, finally failed. Some speculated that by transforming the Athenians “from steady soldiers” into “mariners and seamen tossed about by the sea,” Themistocles “injured the purity and true balance of government.”[21] During the Peloponnesian War, the Greek cities manifested an excessive desire for individual, not corporate, liberty. As the Spartans told Athens, “there will be peace if you give the Greeks their autonomy.”[22] In this light, a contrast between the leaders of the two great wars is intriguing. Themistocles persuaded the Athenians to abandon the city to the Persians for liberty’s sake: “We have indeed left our houses and our walls…not thinking it fit to become slaves for the sake of things that have no life nor soul…”[23] Less than fifty years later, however, Pericles failed to persuade the people to abandon the things outside the walls because, as they told him indignantly, it would mean “nothing less than each man having to abandon his own polis.”[24] After a brief flowering of democracy, it seems that the Greeks started to bite off more than they could chew: Pericles “admonished the Athenians, and told them beforehand the ruin the war would bring upon them, by their grasping more than they were able to manage.” After Pericles’ death, “so great a corruption and such a flood of mischief and vice followed, which he, by keeping weak and low, had withheld from notice, and had prevented from attaining incurable height through licentious impunity.”[26] This implies that only the persuasion of Pericles had held back a deeper Greek desire for the exercise of power.

Elsewhere in Greece, persuasion lost to power after the Spartans conquered the Athenians in the Peloponnesian War. Plutarch blames the “influx of gold and silver among them that thence ensued,” and notes, via the example of one Epitadeus that “covetousness consented to by others” led to “the ruin of the best state of the commonwealth.”[27] As the Lycurgan system of education and discipline broke down, individuals began to place themselves above the city – “The public interest was neglected, and each man intent upon his private gain.” Indeed, “It was dangerous, now Agis was killed, so much as to name such a thing as the exercising and training of their youth: and to speak of the ancient temperance, endurance, and equality, was a sort of treason against the state.”[28] Accordingly, the next reformer found it impossible to persuade by mere words. Cleomenes, like the Gracchi of Rome, was moved by “something of heat and passion always goading him on, and an impetuousity and violence in his eagerness to pursue anything which he thought good and just.” He had mixed motives: “To have men obey him of their own free-will, he conceived to be the best discipline; but likewise, to subdue resistance, and force them to the better course was, in his opinion, commendable and brave.” Upon becoming king, his temper led him to believe “that it would be easier to bring about an alteration when the city was at war with the Achaeans,”[29] and so he abandoned persuasion for power. In fact, in the context of his attempt to restore the Lycurgan order, Cleomenes invoked Lycurgus’ example, “who being neither king nor magistrate, but a private man, and aiming at the kingdom, came armed into the marketplace…” By this action, Lycurgus himself had showed that “it was difficult to change the government without force and fear.”[30] Plutarch’s judgment on Cleomenes’ reform is succinct: “to use the knife, unless in the extremest necessity, is neither good surgery nor wise policy, but in both cases mere unskilfulness; and in the latter, unjust as well as unfeeling.”[31]

Agesilaus also illustrates the Greek devolution from persuasion to power. Though he started well, Agesilaus succumbed to placing his private interests above the common good both of Sparta and all Greece: “to gratify the whims of a boy, he had been willing to pervert justice, and make the city accessory to the crimes of private men, whose most unjustifiable actions had broken the peace of Greece.” When the other Greeks send ambassadors to Sparta to ask for a general peace, Epaminondas spoke “in behalf not of Thebes only, from whence he came, but of all Greece, remonstrating that Sparta alone grew great by war, to the distress and suffering of all her neighbors. He urged that a peace should be made upon just and equal terms…” When he could not get his own way in the negotiations, Agesilaus re-declared war on the Thebans, complaining that “what could be peaceably adjusted, should; what was otherwise incurable, must be committed to the success of war, it being a thing of too great difficulty to provide for all things by treaty.”[32] Thus, although “it was not the design of Lycurgus that his city should govern a great many others,”[33] by the time of Agesilaus, “their fall came from their assuming foreign dominion and arbitrary sway, things wholly undesirable, in the judgment of Lycurgus, for a well-conducted and happy state.”[34]

Not long after this, Alexander put an end to Greek internal strife by creatively combining persuasion with power. Alexander, “[Fortune’s] own characteristic handiwork,”[35] proved himself a true philosopher not just by his words, but by his deeds, “spreading civilization among foreign princes” – that is, spreading Greek culture. Advocating cosmopolis (a “world state”) rather than merely polis (a local city-state), Alexander eschewed his teacher Aristotle’s idea that the Greeks should act as the master of all other peoples. In himself he united persuasion and power: “as he believed that he came as a heaven-sent governor to all, and as a mediator for the whole world, those whom he could not persuade to unite with him, he conquered by force of arms, and he brought together into one body all men everywhere…”[36] Alexander’s actions reveal not the caprice of Fortune, but the force of the Virtues: he “desired to render all upon earth subject to one law of reason and one form of government and to reveal all men as one people, and to this purpose he made himself conform.”[37]

In Plutarch’s portrayal, Alexander prevailed through Virtue, Fortune only offering him opportunities.[38] Eventually, however, subtle Eastern despotism corrupted Alexander. After killing his friend Clitus in a fit of drunken rage, Alexander wept. The Aristotelian Callisthenes tried persuasion: he “used moral language, and gentle and soothing means, hoping to find access for words of reason, and get a hold upon the passions.” By contrast, the maverick Anaxarchus, chided Alexander and proposed an arbitrary criterion of justice for conquerors: “he himself ought to be a law and measure of equity, if he would use the right his conquests have given him as supreme lord and governor of all.” Like Jupiter, Alexander should think that “all the actions of a conqueror are lawful and just.”[39] Alexander heeded Anaxarchus, and eventually had Callisthenes killed. Power trumped persuasion, even in Plutarch’s paramount example of Greek Virtue.

The Roman turn from the libertas of the Brutuses to the principatus of the Caesars followed a similar course as that of the Greeks. During the Second Punic War, making use of popular ill will, the enemies of Marcellus incited the demagogue Publicius Bibulus, “an eloquent and violent man,” to oppose him. “He, by assiduous harangues, prevailed upon the people to withdraw from Marcellus the command of the army…”[40] Here is a foreshadowing of the gross demagoguery that would eventually prevail in the time of Caesar, in which the noble art of persuasion would become the slave of an agenda of mere power.

At the same time, there is an interesting example of persuasion, still alive and kicking in both Greeks and Romans. Though fighting a bitter war against the Macedonians, “neither the people nor the state of things which were now to be dealt with were such as to require a general who would always be upon the point of force and mere blows, but rather were accessible to persuasion and gentle usage.” Accordingly, Titus Flamininus “worked rather by fair means than force; of a persuasive address in all applications to others, and no less courteous and open to all addresses of others to him; and above all bent and determined on justice.”[41] Yet, Titus’ beneficence did but aggrandize “the indigent and distressed” Greeks, whereas by contrast, Philopœmen’s courage was nobler, defying Roman power in the name of Greek liberty.[42]

Later, Marcus Cato’s virulent anti-Greek sentiments led him to debase Greek rhetoric – persuasion – as coming only from the lips, whereas Roman words come from the heart and lead to the glorious exercise of power. He feared “lest the youth should be diverted that way, and so should prefer the glory of speaking well before that of arms and doing well.” Indeed, Cato’s mature judgment on the fate of Carthage consists of four terse words calculated to persuade the Romans that only power can solve the problem: “Censeo, Carthago delenda est” – “I also believe that Carthage must be destroyed.”[43]

It took the radicalism of the Gracchi to destroy the Roman emphasis on persuasion. In terms of both external political order and internal character, the Gracchi formed the turning point in Roman history. “Tiberius, in the form and expression of his countenance, and in his gesture and motion, was gentle and composed, but Caius, earnest and vehement.” Tiberius’ oratory was “gentle and persuasive, awakening emotions of pity,” while Caius’ was “impetuous and passionate, making everything tell to the utmost…” The shift from persuasion to power may be seen in the fact that when Caius spoke, “often, in the midst of speaking, he was so hurried away by his passion against his judgment, that his voice lost its tone, and he began to pass into mere abusive talking, spoiling his whole speech.”[44] The murder of Tiberius was the point of no return: it was “the first sedition among the Romans, since the abrogation of kingly government, that ended in the effusion of blood. All former quarrels which were neither small nor about trivial matters, were always amicably composed, by mutual concessions on either side…”[45] After his brother’s death, Caius showed himself “a far more thorough demagogue, and more ambitious than ever Tiberius had been.” His very posture when speaking, facing the people, “marked no small revolution in state affairs, the conversion, in a manner, of the whole government from an aristocracy to a democracy, his action intimating that public speakers should address themselves to the people, not the senate.”[46]

The civil wars contain several noteworthy illustrations of the replacement of persuasion with power. When Sulla sent Pompey to pacify Sicily, and the Mamertines complained about Pompey’s jurisdiction, he exclaimed, “What! Will you never cease prating of laws to us that have swords by our sides?”[47] With his brutal tactics, Pompey “revived the terror of the Roman power, which was now almost obliterated among the barbarous nations.”[48] In the wake of the tyrants Cinna and Carbo, “the city was brought to that pass by oppression and calamities that, being utterly in despair of liberty, men were only anxious for the mildest and most tolerable bondage.”[49] That bondage appeared with Caesar, who chose “to be first rather amongst men of arms and power, and, therefore, never rose to that height of eloquence to which nature would have carried him, his attention being diverted to those expeditions and designs which at length gained him the empire.”[50] Caesar, indeed, “carried the Roman empire beyond the limits of the known world” and sought a dominion “bounded on every side by the ocean.”[51] His ministrations as a “physician” to a Rome “carried about like a ship without a pilot to steer her” made everyone “thankful that a course of such wild and stormy disorder and madness might end no worse than in a monarchy.”[52] When Caesar entered Rome and helped himself to the treasury, the tribune Mettellus confronted him with the authority of the laws. Caesar retorted, “If what I do displeases you, leave the place; war allows no free talking. When I have laid down my arms, and made peace, come back and make what speeches you please.”[53] Not even Cicero, “the one man, above all others who made the Romans feel how great a charm eloquence lends to what is good, and how invincible justice is, if it be well-spoke,” could stop the destruction of persuasion. In the end, his persuasive words could not stop the power of the sword of those who “demonstrated that no beast is more savage than man when possessed with power answerable to his rage.”[54]

(To Be Concluded)

Notes

[21] “Themistocles,” Volume 1, pg. 165. This is no doubt a reference to the desire for domination (empire) that characterized Athens after the Battle of Salamis in 480 B.C..

[22] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.139.3.

[23] “Themistocles,” Volume 1, pg. 171.

[24] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War 1.143.5.

[25] “The Comparison of Fabius With Pericles,” Volume 1, pg. 282.

[26] “Pericles,” Volume 1, pg. 257.

[27] “Agis,” Volume 2, pg. 348.

[28] “Cleomenes,” Volume 2, pg. 361.

[29] Ibid., pg. 360-361.

[30] Ibid., pg. 366.

[31] “Comparison of Tiberius and Caius Gracchus with Agis and Cleomenes,” Volume 2, pg. 421.

[32] “Agesilaus,” Volume 2, pgs. 64 and 66.

[33] “Lycurgus,” Volume 1, pg. 87.

[34] “Agesilaus,” Volume 2, pg. 70.

[35] “On the Fortune or Virtue of Alexander the Great,” in the Loeb Classical Library edition of Plutarch’s Moralia Vol. IV, trans. Frank Cole Babbitt (Harvard University Press, 1957), pgs. 383 and 391.

[36] Ibid., pg. 399.

[37] Ibid., pg. 405.

[38] Ibid., pg. 415.

[39] “Alexander,” Volume 2, pp. 196-197.

[40] “Marcellus,” Volume 1, pg. 470.

[41] “Flamininus,” Volume 1, pg. 550.

[42] “The Comparison of Philopœmen With Flamininus,” Volume 1, pp. 570-571.

[43] “Marcus Cato,” Volume 1, pp. 512, 522, and 525.

[44] “Tiberius Gracchus,” Volume 2, pg. 387.

[45] Ibid., pg. 401.

[46] “Caius Gracchus,” Volume 2, pg. 408.

[47] “Pompey,” Volume 2, pg. 84.

[48] Ibid, pg. 87.

[49] Ibid, pg. 81.

[50] “Caesar,” Volume 2, pg. 218.

[51] Ibid., pp. 234 and 256. The idea of a domain “bounded on every side by ocean” conveys the Ancient idea of the oikumene, the “ecumenical” or worldwide dominion. The Ancients believed that the whole world was enclosed by a vast body of water, a celestial Ocean, and so to have a domain “bounded on every side by ocean” would literally mean that oneself ruled the entire universe.

[52] Ibid, 237.

[53] Ibid, pp. 242-243.

[54] “Cicero,” Volume 2, pg. 454 and 479.

It’s almost funny how often I’ve done a post with a title like this, either on my old website Grace Unknown or on this blog since it’s inception. Seems like I did a post with this title every time a new quarter or semester or school year started. The difference this time is that unlike the last 9 years, the school days that are about to begin are going to see me on the other side of the room, as the teacher rather than the student. I’m going to be teaching Latin to 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th graders, and World History to 7th and 8th graders.

As of now, I’m nearly finished with my lesson plans for the entire first quarter, a fact which makes me very happy since I’ve been hearing that a lot of teachers aren’t able to get that far and sometimes end up pulling their hair out wondering what they are going to do the next day in class. Of course, I know that what is on paper is certainly not going to wind up being exactly how it goes in the classroom every day, but it’s still a nice “security blanket” to have the whole first quarter mapped out before it even begins.

I’m glad that I’ll be teaching so much Latin and on such a diverse spread of levels. I hope that doing this will enable me to get even better at Latin this coming year than I have been so far. To be honest, though, I’m most excited about the World History class. The period I’ve been assigned to cover is from the Fall of Rome (5th cent. A.D.) to the Glorious Revolution in England in 1688. Pretty huge chunk of history, and obviously I’ll have to leave tons of stuff out just to even basically survey that period of over 1,000 years.

I’ve decided to spend the first week of the first quarter talking about a Christian view of history – what it is, how we should interpret it, and how we should go about doing it ourselves. A major conceptual tool I’ll be using is a scheme derived from Augustine’s City of God under four headings: (1) God created history, (2) God controls history, (3) God came into history, and (4) God will end history. Along the way, if it isn’t too much for 7th-8th graders, I also plan to discuss the very great difference than the B.C. / A.D vs. B.C.E. / C.E. ways of reckoning history make for how we think about history and its meaning.

The next 8 weeks will be spent on a “Review of Rome,” because it seemed to me that there’s not much sense in teaching kids about “the fall” of Rome if they don’t grasp why Rome was so important in the first place. So, most of the first quarter is going to be spent reading the stories about the great Roman generals and heroes and philosophers who built first the Republic and then later the Empire. We’ll start with Romulus and work up through Emperor Theodosius and the beginning of the Christian Roman Empire. That should set us up nicely for a survey of the Middle Ages next quarter. Going to be a lot of fun, I think. I just hope the kids think so, too.

In a letter to Augustus Caesar, the poet Horace wrote that in the arts, the humanizing things, “Captive Greece led captive its own captor…”[1] If the sentiment is true in the arts proper, what about in politics, which is an ethical art?[2] The political zenith of Greece, the polis, was based on the idea of free and equal citizens deliberating about the just and the unjust, with a concern for the common good. Unfortunately, the polis failed in reality. After the Persian War, Athens tried to dominate other powers, and this brought on the Peloponnesian War. That War, in turn, ushered in a cycle of conflicts in which the only form of persuasion that availed was brute power. For their part, the Romans began well, with a grand Republic in which persuasion trumped power. When the Republic began to expand throughout the Mediterranean, however, this began to change. Although initially paralleling the Greeks in their emphasis on persuasion, by the time Rome decisively pacified Greece at Corinth in 146 B.C., power had replaced persuasion for Rome, too. This paper will use data gleaned from twenty-four of Plutarch’s Lives and two of his Moralia essays to analyze these devolutions from persuasion to power.

The Power of Persuasion

In Greece, the power of persuasion has many illustrations. To formulate his laws, Lycurgus used the persuasive powers of Thales’ songs, which were “exhortations to obedience and concord…conveying impressions of order and tranquility.” By them, the people “were insensibly softened and civilized, insomuch as they renounced their private feuds and animosities and were reunited in a common admiration of virtue.”[3] Lycurgus, eschewing half measures, knew that he “must act as wise physicians do, in the case of one who labours under a complication of diseases, by force of medicines reduce and exhaust him, change his whole temperament, and then set him upon a totally new regimen of diet.”[4] Theseus, desiring to bring all Attica together, faced the dissensions of the people “which he by his persuasions appeased, going from township to township, and from tribe to tribe.” By advice and promises, he drew the people to himself – though some came because, “fearing his power, which was already grown very formidable…chose rather to be persuaded than forced into a compliance.”[5] Solon used poetically garbed “moral sentences…to correct, chastise, and stir up the Athenians to noble performances.”[6] Solon mediated the conflict with Pisistratus by private “conferences” designed to “compose the differences.”[7] With words and deeds, Solon “without the aid of any ally, achieved his most important measures by his own conduct.”[8]

Three examples of Greeks trained in oratory stand out. Themistocles appealed to the Athenians’ passions against the Aeginetans, and persuaded them to use their newly acquired silver to build a fleet rather than distributing it among the populace – a persuasion which gave them the means to master the power of Persia.[9] Later, by “prodigies and oracles” he convinced the Athenians to abandon the city, take to the ships, and beat the Persians in the straits of Salamis.[10] Pericles “turned those soft and flowery modulations to the austerity of aristocratical and regal rule,” and “was able generally to lead the people along, with their own wills and consents, by persuading them and showing them what was to be done…to yield submission to what was for their advantage.”[11] At a critical point in the Greek resistance to Macedon, Plutarch describes Demosthenes’ work this way: “such was the force and power of the orator, fanning up, as Theopompus says, their courage, and firing their emulation, that, casting away every thought of prudence, fear, or obligation, in a sort of divine possession, they chose the path of honour, to which his words invited them.”[12]

Rome, by contrast, did not have a strong beginning in terms of persuasion over power. Under its founder and first king, Romulus, she used anything but rational persuasion to advance herself. Unlike Theseus, who performed great deeds “out of his own free will, without any compulsion,” Romulus, beset by troubles, founded Rome “out of mere necessity.”[13] The rape of the Sabine women well sums up the point of the early Roman reliance on power over persuasion. Romulus, “being naturally a martial man, and predisposed too, perhaps by certain oracles, to believe the fates had ordained the future growth and greatness of Rome should depend on the certain benefits of war, upon these accounts first offered violence to the Sabines…” To this first strike of power, the Sabines responded with persuasion: “they sent ambassadors to Romulus with fair and equitable requests, that he would return their young women and recall that act of violence, and afterwards, by persuasion and lawful means, seek friendly correspondence between both nations.”[14]

Elsewhere, Plutarch shows another sort of persuasion at work: religion. From her beginning, Rome had been “formed by daring and warlike spirits, whom bold and desperate adventure brought thither from every quarter.” She “had found in perpetual wars and incursions on [her] neighbours [her] after sustenance and means of growth, and in conflict with danger the source of new strength.” Numa Pompilius, however, “judging it no slight undertaking to mollify and bend to peace the presumptuous and stubborn spirits of this people, began to operate upon them with the sanctions of religion.” Instituting and overseeing “such combinations of solemnity with refined and humanising pleasures, seeking to win over and mitigate their fiery and warlike tempers,” Numa “filled their imaginations with religious terrors…thus subduing and humbling their minds by a sense of supernatural fears.”[15] This account suggests that power and persuasion are not necessarily absolute antitheses, but might be creatively combined to produce more civil stability than either could alone.

In the early years of the Republic, by contrast, rational persuasion ruled. When the Romans were wondering what to do about a conspiracy to restore the king, Brutus exhorted them, “Let every man speak that wishes, and persuade whom he can.” Valerius, soon to be named “Poplicola” because of his solicitude for the people, worked hard to “render the government, as well as himself, instead of terrible, familiar and pleasant to the people,” to persuade them that he was no tyrant by visibly subordinating the symbols of power.[16] Indeed, “in instances where peaceable language, persuasion, and concession were requisite, [Poplicola] was yet more to be commended; and succeeded in gaining happily to reconciliation and friendship Porsenna, a terrible and invincible enemy.”[17] When the plebs withdrew from the city because the rich were abusing them, they did so “without committing any sort of violence or seditious outrage, but merely exclaiming as they went along, that they had this long time past been, in fact, expelled and excluded from the city by the cruelty of the rich…” The patrician Menenius Agrippa responded with “much entreaty to the people, and much plainspeaking on behalf of the senate,” using the well-crafted words of a moral fable to resolve the crisis.[18] Later, in a riot sparked by Coriolanus against the tribunate, the Senate and the consuls pacified the plebeians “using much tenderness and moderation in the admonitions and reproofs they gave them.”[19]

Unlike Livy, Plutarch makes only a passing mention of the magnificent oration of Camillus when the Romans were debating whether to refound their city, or to move to Veii. He notes that the senate “used their best endeavours, by kind persuasions and familiar addresses, to encourage and appease the people” in both private and public meetings. Like Livy, however, Plutarch places the weight of this instance of persuasion not on long speeches themselves, but on the terse, chance words of a centurion “to halt and fix his standard, for this was the best place to stay in.”[20] Whether long or short, at this point in Roman history, it is the power of words, not arms, that persuades.

(To Be Continued)

Notes

[1] “Epistle 1,” in The Complete Works of Horace, trans, C. Smart (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1894), pgs. 277 and 284.

[2] Nicomachean Ethics 1113a1

[3] “Lycurgus,” in Plutarch’s Lives Volume 1 (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2006) pg. 61. Subsequent references to Lives will be noted by the title of the Life followed by “Volume 1” or “Volume 2” and page numbers.

[4] Ibid, pg. 62. It should be noted that Lycurgus did rely to some extent on the threat of force.

[5] “Theseus,” Volume 1, pg. 16.

[6] “Solon,” Volume 1, pg. 120.

[7] Ibid., pg. 139.

[8] “The Comparison of Poplicola With Solon,” Volume 1, pg. 160.

[9] “Themistocles,” Volume 1, pp. 164-165.

[10] Ibid., pp. 169-170.

[11] “Pericles,” Volume 1, pg. 236.

[12] “Demosthenes,” Volume 2, pg. 435.

[13] “Comparison of Romulus With Theseus,” Volume 1, pg. 54.

[14] “Romulus,” Volume 1, pg. 37 and 39.

[15] “Numa Pompilius,” Volume 1, pg. 96.

[16] “Poplicola,” Volume 1, pp. 146 and 149.

[17] “The Comparison of Poplicola With Solon,” Volume 1, pg. 160.

[18] “Coriolanus,” Volume 1, pg. 323.

[19] Ibid., pg. 332.

[20] “Camillus,” Volume 1, pp. 210-211. The oration is found in Livy’s History of Rome V.51-55.

There is a trend in today’s Plato scholarship that seems to want to find ways to make Socrates, the great opponent of sophistry, appear almost as sophistical and logically or existentially misleading as many of his opponents. One place this comes up is in Socrates’ argument in the Gorgias that doing injustice is worse than suffering it (469b), which occurs after the discussion of who has the greatest power in the city. Polus assumes that most people, even Socrates, would welcome having the power to do whatever they liked in the city, to the point of seizing others’ possessions, exiling them, or even killing them (468e).

Socrates says that these things must be judged by whether they are just or unjust, and then asserts that he who does injustice is worse off than he who suffers injustice (469a-c). Later, he expands this by saying that the one who does injustice and does not pay the just penalty for his deeds will be even more wretched than before (472e).

This argument seems counter-intuitive at first. Is it really true that the one who suffers being murdered is in a better condition of soul than the one who commits the murder? Or to take a lesser example, is it really true that the one who suffers being tortured is in a better condition of soul than the one who does the torturing? And, if someone commits these evils and gets away with them, is it really true that he is less happy than he would be if he had been caught? No wonder Polus says, “You are attempting to say strange things indeed, Socrates” (473a), and laughs because “no one among human beings would assert” such things as Socrates does (473e).

These questions highlight the issue of the ethics of wielding power. Socrates asks Polus what he would think if he, Socrates, suddenly announced that he now had the power to do any violence to anyone he liked (469d-e). Polus balks at this scenario, but he almost immediately gives the examples of the tyrant Archelaus and the Great King to try to prove that, at any rate, unjust men can be quite happy (470d-471d).

The conversation proceeds, and Socrates obtains Polus’ agreement to the premise that doing injustice is “more shameful” than suffering it (474c). But in this agreement, the important fact emerges that Polus does not consider “shameful” to be “worse,” because “worse” is about pain and badness (475a). Apparently, “shameful” is less objectionable than “worse,” since the former involves no (physical) pain.

Nevertheless, Socrates gets Polus to agree that if one “shameful” thing surpasses another, it must do so in either pain or badness. Since those who suffer injustice feel more pain than those who do it to them, doing injustice does not exceed suffering injustice in pain. This leaves only exceeding in badness, so doing injustice must exceed suffering injustice in badness. But if doing injustice exceeds in badness suffering injustice, doing injustice must be worse than suffering it (475c-d). Lastly, if this is the case, it would seem to follow that no one would willingly prefer to do injustice, since it is worse than suffering injustice (475e).

Here an objection arises. The examples of the tyrant Archelaus and the Great King demonstrate that Socrates’ idea that no one would prefer doing injustice to suffering it since the former is more painful needs some qualification. These are real existing human beings, and they do, indeed, prefer to do what many (most?) other human beings consider to be unjust. What, then, does Socrates mean?

One possible way to answer the question is in light of the closing myth of the dialogue (523a-526d). There we read that human judges often inadvertently pervert justice because they are distracted by the external appearances of the body and the physical world and do not see souls for what they are. But, just as a body with long hair or scars will retain these after death, so too does the soul retain its characteristic “marks” when it is separated from the body at death. Consequently, to judges that are not distracted by appearances, but who see realities, the justice or injustice of a soul is plain:

…when they have arrived before the judge…[he] halts them and contemplates each one’s soul, not knowing whose it is; but often, laying hold of the great king or some other king or potentate, he perceives that there is nothing healthy in the soul, but it has been severely whipped and is filled with scars from false oaths and injustice, which each action of his stamped upon his soul, and all things are crooked from lying and boasting, and there is nothing straight on account of his having been reared without truth; and he sees the soul full of asymmetry and ugliness from arrogant power, luxury, wanton insolence, and incontinence of actions, and having seen it he sends it away dishonorably, straight to the prison, having come to which it is going to endure fitting sufferings. (524d-525a)

To tie this to Socrates’ argument that no one would prefer doing injustice because that is worse than suffering it, it would seem that such men as Archelaus and the Great King do not realize that they are worse off because they themselves are distracted by the appearances of their earthly lives and do not properly contemplate the state of their souls.

This view seems borne out by Socrates’ similar discourse in Theaetetus 176e-177a:

My friend, there are two patterns set up in reality. One is divine and supremely happy; the other has nothing of God in it, and is the pattern of the deepest unhappiness. The truth the evildoer does not see blinded by folly and utter lack of understanding, he fails to perceive that the effect of his unjust practices is to make him grow more and more like the one, and less and less like the other. For this he pays the penalty of living the life that corresponds to the pattern he is coming to resemble. And if we tell him that, unless he is delivered from this ‘ability’ of his, when he dies the place that is pure of all evil will not receive him; that he will forever go on living in this world a life after his own likeness – a bad man tied to bad company…

What should a man who commits injustice do, then? According to Socrates, he should “willingly go to that place where he will pay the just penalty as quickly as possible, to the judge as to the doctor, hurrying lest the disease of injustice, become chronic, should make his soul fester with sores underneath and be incurable” (480a-b).

It should be obvious that all of this depends on the notion that the soul is separable from the body and survives the death of the body. This topic is not addressed in the Gorgias, but is discussed at length elsewhere in the Platonic corpus. For instance, in Phaedo 103b-107b, the argument for the immortality of the soul is developed. Following this, in 107c-108c appears the argument that since the soul is immortal, the care of the soul should be our primary business.

From 113d-114c, we learn that all souls are judged after death according to the deeds they have done in the body, and that they are “purified by penalties” of any wrongs they did and “suitably rewarded” for the goods they did. Further, there are such things as “incurable” souls, souls which “because of the enormity of their crimes, having committed many great sacrileges or wicked and unlawful murders and other such wrongs – their fitting fate is to be hurled into Tartarus never to emerge from it.”

Souls which have “purified themselves sufficiently by philosophy live in the future altogether, without a body,” and if one wants to be one of these souls, one “must make every effort to share in virtue and wisdom in one’s life, for the reward is beautiful and the hope is great” (114c).

As noted, Socrates’ argument that doing injustice is worse than suffering it depends on the idea that doing injustice “marks” the soul, that the soul survives the death of the body, and that there are judges who exist after death who will see these “marks” and be able to punish the soul accordingly. In the Gorgias, Polus does not object to these views about the soul, so we may assume he agrees with them. Callicles also does not object, but since he clearly loses interest in the course of the dialogue (501c; 505c) and there is no response from him to Socrates’ final speech, we do not know what he thought.

Having discussed in the previous two parts of this series my instability-driven conversion to the Reformed Faith and my subsequent extremely overconfident early years in the Reformed Faith, I’ll now turn to summarizing the major events and developments that occurred from early 2002 to late 2008.

An Examined Faith

Encountering apologetics and theology in my early twenties had taught me to “love the Lord my God with all my heart, soul, and mind” (Deut. 6:5) and how to strive to “Cast down imaginations, and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” (1 Cor. 10:5). Becoming deeply immersed in the Internet apologetics culture had subsequently taught me how to “Earnestly contend for the faith once for all delivered” (Jude 3), but it had not taught me “the peace of God which passes all understanding” (Phil. 4:7) or how to “give an answer for the hope that is within [me]…with gentleness and respect” (1 Peter 3:15). My intellectual and spiritual formation was in some respects seriously lacking, but it took me a number of years to realize this and, by God’s grace and the help of many good friends (and a few enemies, too), to take the necessary steps to begin correcting the deficiencies.

Somewhere along the way of my liberal arts studies, even before my long, arduous seven years of formal schooling at New St. Andrews College, I ran across Socrates’ maxim that “The unexamined life is not worth living.” That statement struck me as an excellent non-biblical description of the biblical maxim, “Examine all things carefully; hold fast to that which is good” (1 Thess. 5:21). As I pursued my liberal arts studies (even prior to my formal schooling at New St. Andrews College) I found myself inevitably pushed into having to examine a number of things that I had been taught by those who had helped me to become Reformed. As I began at some point to realize that, to paraphrase Socrates, “the unexamined faith is not worth holding.” A few bulletpoints will suffice to show the extent of the inquiries I felt forced to make.

The Reformation: Centerpoint of All Christian History?

Was the Reformation the centerpoint of all Christian history, the thing towards which centuries of shocking corruption had pointed for the restoration of the pure pattern, and also the thing back to which the theological and cultural developments of the last couple centuries needed to be directed for the restoration of the pure pattern? Was all the rest of Christian history meaningless except as seen through the lens of a few decades of soteriological controversy in the 16th century?

This large-scale inquiry was driven by my (admittedly then somewhat shallow) immersion in Medieval history, thanks to which I discovered that there had been other reformations prior to “the Reformation” and that they had been just as important for what they did and did not do as had the 16th century one. In fact, the reforming impulse itself seemed to be an inherent part of the Western theological tradition, and tracing it through history demonstrated to me that without the earlier reforms, there could have been no “the Reformation” later. The debts that “the Reformation” owed to the earlier reformations were incalculable, and as I studied the latter, I could no longer glibly speak of “the Reformation” as if it was just obviously the centerpoint of all Christian history.

Christians – real honest to goodness God-loving and Scripture-soaked Christians had worked for the reform of the Church long before Martin Luther. Since in some significant ways their concepts of what “the Gospel” meant were articulated differently from Luther’s, this seemed to entail that “the Gospel” was a much bigger thing than the polemical constructs created in the 16th century to fight a very specific battle which had not existed earlier and which would have been incomprehensible to Christians at many earlier stages of the reforming process.

Most Reformed people that I engaged on the Internet during these years had no awareness of, let alone any interest in, the other reformations before “the Reformation.” Most of them had no awareness of, let alone any interest in, learning about other ways to think of the implications of “the Gospel” than that of the 16th century. In fact, many simply chose to denounce me for daring to ask unusual questions about unknown things. Why couldn’t I just be satisfied with the status quo of awareness of, discussions about, and polemical defenses of “Reformed Theology”? The answer was, of course, that once one has seen that the “map” one has been given has some significant problems, it is difficult to keep relying upon it as if it is an omnicompetent guide to the landscape.

At any rate, this large-scale inquiry of mine soon got all mixed up with perceptions on the part of my opponents that I was advocating a kind of “relativism” or “sanctified skepticism” about the theological claims of the Protestant Reformation. It seemed to some that I was saying we could not trust the theology of the Reformers at all because it had some blindspots and also some influences upon it that were less than “purely biblical” in nature. Such claims went contrary to the accepted story about the Reformation – namely, that it was a recovery of the purity of Bible-alone theology and that our greatest aspiration as heirs of it today should be to simply repristinate it, to treat its theology as “timeless truth” lost for ages, buried by corrupt hierarchies more interested in tradition than Truth, and then suddenly, gloriously rediscovered in the 16th century.

As I continued my inquiries, I discovered that large segments of American Protestantism believe a cluster of great myths about both “the Reformation” and themselves. The myths include at least these: (1) that the Protestant Reformation was essentially like a reinstallation of the Church’s operating system from scratch on a brand new hard drive, (2) that there is only one possible way to read Scripture’s key terminology about salvation faithfully, (3) that each private individual is called by God to be a Luther-Before-the-Diet-of-Worms every day of his life, because the particular shape of the Christian life that was is the normative shape of the Christian life for all time, and, of course, (4) the “Us Vs. Them” mentality of American Fundamentalism that I have already chronicled as a major problem my own upbringing forced me to struggle with. I believed that I could demonstrate the falsity of all of these myths, and although I did not always make it clear in controversy with others, I also firmly maintained that the Reformation itself was better than all of these things and that, cleared of all these things, its theology was well worth continuing to defend in today’s world.

Needless to say, these factors created enormous obstacles to the proper evaluation of my inquiries, and the situation was only further deteriorated by my frequent immoderate responses to polemical characterizations of my views. I know not what heart motivations my various opponents had, but for myself, it was very easy to be polemical against them. I had what I thought was a strong foundation for my various claims – even of I did not have as good an understanding of the claims themselves as I would later have – and for a long while it was difficult for me to understand why my claims provoked such strong reactions. Despite many learned volumes that I could refer to by well-respected Evangelical and sometimes even Reformed writers, it seemed to me that as a general rule contemporary Reformed people on the Internet thought that the Reformation could be reduced to a narrow set of ideas labeled “soteriology,” which set was isolated from engagement with the rest of God’s world.

I could, for instance, find dozens of conversations online about the intricacies of the points of the TULIP, dozens about the Reformation’s five solas, but I could find no substantive conversations about matters of literature or politics or culture (save, of coures, for jeremiads about how bad our “secular humanist” world is). I could find dozens of vehement assaults on Catholicism as it was portrayed by standard (and, I came to think, sometimes unreliable) traditional Reformation polemics, but few, if any, real attempts to understand Catholicism on its own terms before attacking it. As I surveyed the landscape of contemporary Reformed writings both on the Internet and off, my general observation was that the majority of all who called themselves “Reformed” refused even to touch, let alone to take seriously on its own terms, the enormous wilderness outside of their view of “Reformed theology.”

In terms of my own perceptions at this time in my life (and let me say that in fairness, my opponents would not see their own attitudes and actions this way, of course), the reactions to my work seemed a lot like some Medieval map-makers, who, according to popular caricatures of them, had simply labeled unknown parts of the world the realm of dragons and then become accustomed to direly warning that sailing beyond the accepted boundaries would result in falling off the edge of the flat earth. I got a lot of polemical mileage (or at least, I tried to) out of portraying my various opponents as members of a “clique” uninterested in anything except artificially-isolated areas of truth that concerned “spiritual” things. Sometimes I used terms like “gnostic” to describe what I perceived as their flight from the world of space, time, and history, and I’d then spice that characterization up with (at that point in my development, half-informed) talk about the “Platonic” nature of their theology. Another thing I would do – trying in my own limited way to follow the Socratic ironic tradition of highlighting the difference between appearance and reality – was to talk about my opponents’ theology as a set of “slogans” that had no real content but were only “mindlessly chanted” in the same manner as the very “Romanist traditions” that they themselves so often attacked with respect to Catholicism.

Of course, such immoderateness on my part provoked predictable responses, and now, with the benefit of hindsight, if I had it to do all over again, I would do it a lot differently. Some of us, it seems, only learn by making mistakes – sometimes bad ones that have repercussions for many years afterwards.

At any rate, for several years, I wandered around in the wilderness of the “undiscovered country” that had been created by the contemporary Reformed world’s almost purely inward-looking set of interests. My wanderings were widely interpreted as “compromise,” and often the things that were said about me in this connection grieved me greatly, most especially because there seemed to be no way to effectively make people understand what I was really up to. However, along with the fact that my spiritual authorities (my pastors and elders) assured me that they saw no serious reason for concern with the basic program of what I was doing, I hung onto Gandalf’s famous words in the Lord of the Rings: “not all who wander are lost.” In my case, at least, my wanderings remained basically stable because I remained convinced that the doctrines of the Reformation in terms of authority (sola Scriptura) and salvation (sola gratia and sola fide) were basically true. The problems I saw and was trying to solve did not have to do with a suspicion that these tenets of the Reformation were false, but with a realization that the way in which these tenets were frequently articulated and defended in our present-day situation was in some significant ways problematic and needed to be corrected.

For instance, I could see no long-term good in maintaining that there was nothing outside the world of “Reformed Theology” that was worth taking seriously on its own terms. I could see no long-term good in construing the claims of the Reformation and that, supposedly, “Reformed Theology” was a self-contained, self-interpreting, and self-correcting system of belief focused only on “saving souls” – everything else being basically irrelevant to our lives as Christians. Too much of the world was left unaccounted for by the mentality that “the Reformation” as it was articulated and defended in the 16th century – or more accurately, as the 16th century had come to be represented by 20th-21st century American Protestants – was the centerpoint of all Christian history. The more I learned, especially in terms of my studies of the connections between the Medieval world and the Reformation, the more I saw that the “map” of the Reformation which most of us were using today was faulty. It didn’t get everything wrong, of course, but some of the things that it got wrong were pretty bad and only made the whole enterprise look ridiculous to those who did not confine their inquiries to “Soteriology alone.”

As one of my mentors at New St. Andrews said some years back, the Reformation was a real war and we dare not give up its achievements, but we also need to understand that because it was a war it was not the model of a maturing Christian culture. What we as contemporary Protestants needed, I believed (and still believe) is a maturing Christian culture that is based in the Reformation, but not limited either to it or to later “patriotic” construals of it that lop off large portions of God’s World in the name of fidelity to God’s Word.

To avoid being prolix, I’ll stop this entry now and save further summaries for another post.

In this segment, I will reiterate and expand on the very much Fundamentalist-like understanding of the Reformed Faith that I embraced in my early years of being Reformed. I will then outline how I came to question – and then to repudiate – this very harmful Reformed variety of Fundamentalism.

How Some Things Began to Change

In an important sense, everything that has happened to me for the last 8 years, and so, everything that has occurred to alter the very much Fundamentalistic understanding of “the Reformed Faith” that I chronicled in the first part of this series, boils down to one key point: my discovery of and immersion in the classical Liberal Arts. Although I had been skirting the edges of the Liberal Arts for years in my own private studies, I did not enter into a really thoroughgoing engagement with them until I began my undergraduate work at New St. Andrews College in the Fall of 1999.

Thanks to a wide variety of authors in many, many books I had read over the course of several years before I came to New St. Andrews – but especially during my time there – I came to see that the Christian religion, the Christian Gospel, is about far more than “saving souls” from a radically corrupted order of “mere” space and time. I came to see that the Christian religion and the Christian Gospel are fundamentally about a “societas Christiana,” a new order of society which in every area of human life under the sun – art, science, politics, literature, architecture, recreation, philosophy, history, jurisprudence, etc. – strives to bow its knee to the Sovereign Lord Christ, who sits at the right hand of God until all His enemies are made His footstool.

If you’re Reformed and this doesn’t sound familiar to you as a description of the Christian life inaugurated by the Gospel, think of it in terms of the phrase you often hear Reformed people use of their (usually) amillennialist eschatology: “already, not yet.” The term “eschatology” doesn’t mean merely “the doctrine of the last things,” but “the doctrine of the final goal (end) of all things.” Eschatology isn’t just concerned with what will happen in the distant future, but with the here and now as a particular stage of life on the journey to the future. What is happening now flows into, and in fact, significantly shapes, what will happen in the future. And so, interestingly, the Christian’s faith, which Hebrews 11 says is the substance of things hoped for – i.e., the substance of future things, is intrinsically wrapped up with the present. The Christian’s goal is not to ignore or even to vilify the present in favor of an idealistic future hope, but to work in the present toward the culmination of all things in the future. Accordingly, the Christian Gospel isn’t about “getting souls saved” and letting the rest of the world twist in the wind because supposedly only “spiritual” things matter. Holy Scripture says that Christ’s resurrection is “the first fruits” of a new creation, and “first” fruits implies that there will be other fruits. In Christ, God is remaking this sinful world, progressively undoing the effects of the Fall. The Gospel is about all of life, not just a subset of life that is arbitrarily labeled “spiritual” in contradistinction to another “unspiritual” subset.

In this light, allow me to reproduce in full a piece I wrote in 2001 expressing (with all the unrealistic idealism of a new convert) the way that my exposure to the view of life advocated by my teachers at New St. Andrews had affected my vision for what it meant to be “Reformed.” This was written for my old website (which some readers here may remember) Grace Unknown.

Why This Site?

A fundamental axiom of the Protestant Reformation was that the Church of Jesus Christ is “reformata et semper reformanda”—”reformed and always reforming”. The Church is not merely to be reformed according to the Word of God, but striving always to be more in conformity with that Word than before.

This is a noble goal, but it is one which we in the Reformational camp too often fail to achieve. For all our heroic and manful striving for “the truth of the Gospel”, how often do we convey to outsiders the false impression that truth is our only concern? How often do we present the Reformation as if it was solely a battle for truth in the abstract and not for truth adorned with practical goodness and beauty? How often do we talk about the Gospel and its radical solution for sin but fail to live its radical solutions for every day life?

From its inception on the America Online network in 1998, this site was oriented towards introducing Fundamentalist and modern Evangelical Christians to the Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century and its modern adherents. I myself had come out of a theology-light, experience-heavy modern Evangelical background, in which I had successively moved from Baptist to charismatic to theological nomad-ism, wandering between churches unsure of anything more than the handful of basics that C.S. Lewis called “Mere Christianity”.

Over the course of several years of intensively studying doctrinal, cultural, and apologetics issues, I learned to approach the Christian faith from the standpoint of “objective Truth”, mainly conceived of as theological propositions that could be rigorously defined and vigorously defended with the tools of reason, evidence, and philosophy. An intellectual terror to every agnostic and moral relativist was I!

But something was missing, and long it was before I realized what. As I devoured books about the propositions of the Christian faith, I continually faced the inability of my modern Evangelical theology of “grace” to produce real, lasting victory over sin in my life. Increasingly I found myself driven towards the theology of the Reformation. It alone seemed to offer hope of actually overcoming sin by focusing my attention on Christ and His perfect righteousness rather than on my own filthy rags and merits earned through “letting go and letting God” and the pseudo-sacrament of “the altar call”. Though I didn’t know it then, I was beginning to sense the goodness and beauty of the Reformational view, despite continuing to think of it almost entirely in terms of truth.

In late 1996, I formally “converted” from my modern Evangelical view to the view of the Reformed branch of the Protestant Reformation. Unfortunately, because I had come from a tradition that radically de-emphasized historical and theological knowledge, my first four years in the Reformed faith were largely characterized by a pendulum swing in the opposite direction. Instead of an excessive emphasis on personal piety in daily living, I now had an excessive emphasis on correct doctrine held in the head.

This is not to say either that I completely avoided doctrine in the former phase or completely ignored personal holiness in the latter phase. Still, the marked tendencies of each phase tended to be rather out of balance in opposite directions, as did the daily life I led in pursuit of those tendencies. As an anti-intellectual evangelical, I had been pietistic and ineffective. As an intellectualized Reformed believer I was rationalistic and ineffective. It was a long time before this strange irony became evident to me.

In 1998 I discovered the work of a small group of men and women in tiny Moscow, Idaho. At first I simply read their periodical, Credenda / Agenda (“things to be believed / things to be done”). As time progressed, I read some of the books put out by their publishing arm, Canon Press. Space fails me to describe how astounded I was at the vision of Reformational faith and practice they set forth. Here indeed was uncompromising theology and concern for truth, but not truth portrayed as dry propositions to be plugged into a “Christian worldview” and practiced mainly on the battlefield of apologetics and polemics. Rather, here was truth portrayed as something to be incarnated in the real world, not merely speculated about in the mind (or in the disembodied fashion characteristic of the Internet!)

Here was theology that was to be lived out in the everyday mundane activities performed by ordinary flesh-and-blood people, and in ways that showed that truth to be not only true, but good and beautiful. Here was theology that could equally be taught by systematic theology books or by washing the dishes day in and day out.

Here was a deep concern for reforming marriage and the family according to the unambiguous teachings of the Scriptures—federal, responsible husbands, submissive wives, obedient, believing children—and not the nebulous prattling of “family values” ideologues.

Here was objective truth that was unafraid to face any contender on the field of intellectual endeavor, yet which could devastate the most die-hard agnosticism by simply laughing at it over a cup of fine wine or meditating on the simple pleasures of a kiss.

Here were Reformed believers who could uphold liberty of conscience without slipping into the lawlessness of unrestrained private judgment; Reformed believers who embraced and learned from all of Christian history rather than just the parts they liked during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Here was a Reformed concern for the Gospel that, while upholding the Reformational solas in their full rigor, could yet reduce Roman Catholic perfectionism to ruins simply by being more concerned with how a man treated his wife and children around the dinner table than with how many books about sola fide he had read or how vigorously he could defend sola Scriptura.

Here was a Christian faith that was concerned not with throwing away the world of matter and history in the name of gnostic “soulwinning”, but with redeeming the world of matter and history through generational faithfulness to Christ.

Here were Christians who could eagerly study ponderous works of scholastic theology at need, but who felt that sometimes the best way to learn truth was to read good poetry, sit down to a Sunday feast with one’s family, or listen to Beethoven’s Fifth.

Here was a Christianity that strove diligently to submit all areas of life to the lordship of Christ, for the glory of God alone, on the firm, glad foundation provided by the beautiful reconciliation of divine justice and divine mercy in the imputed righteousness of Christ.

In other words, here were Christians who wanted to actually live Christianity in all its glorious ramifications. It was a cool, calming breeze for one who had first burned himself out with pietism and then plunged headlong into a process of nearly burning himself out with rationalism. Faith and reason, life and doctrine, law and Gospel—all the dichotomies we modern Christians are so familiar with were here united into coherent, balanced wholes.

This is not to say, of course, that the practitioners of this vision are perfect—having fellowshipped with them all for some time, I can say that they themselves are the first to deny that. They, too, are in a process of unlearning the hollow modern lies and caricatures of Christian faith that even we Christians have been raised to believe. They, too, are just beginning their journey to the future by molding the present according to the best lessons of the past. They too, are learning how to be medieval Protestants.

Though I discovered their work in 1998, it has only been recently that it truly began working its medieval magic on my mind and heart. Such was the dimwittedness of my modern mindset that it took so long for the simple things to penetrate. Now having been inspired by their vision and the way I have seen it lived out among them, I decided in June of 2001 to reorient the message and format of Grace Unknown.

No longer will this site be geared towards merely introducing generic, modern Reformational Protestantism. That entity, I am convinced, is in trouble in our day precisely because it shares so many assumptions with the dying Modern paradigm it claims to abhor—assumptions such as the primacy of the individual’s experience over the corporate experience, lack of interest in beauty and goodness as the complements of truth (the three faces of culture), historical tunnel vision, a “right-wing” reactionary mentality, and more.

These are decrepit modern idols that we confuse with their healthy medieval counterparts, and our complicity with those idols is something that our Roman and Orthodox opponents are all too happy to exploit in their efforts to demolish the simple, grand, beautiful, medieval truths their own systems cannot comprehend.

But far too many of us in Reformational circles unwittingly aid our opponents in their attacks on us. We are content with the moniker “Reformed” without the very medieval substance that goes with it. We treat the Reformation as if it was reactive, not proactive, and overcome with admiration for Luther and Calvin we try to live our lives as a role play of their unique situation.

The Reformation was, as medieval Reformed author Douglas Jones puts it, “a real war, and we dare not give up the victories gained there”. Nevertheless, the Reformation was not the model of a maturing Christian culture (which is how we often treat it). Rather, it was a period of “emergency living”, a time for heroic deeds against a tyrannical Rome and the emerging blindness of the Enlightenment. The Reformation era is full of immortal deeds worthy of song and poem (and how very unmodern is that sentiment!), but these deeds are not the normative pattern for all of subsequent Church history.

It is time for those who stand in the majestic medieval traditions that culminated in the Reformation to embrace those traditions without apology. This entails so much more than getting the solas right and thumbing our noses at anachronistic attempts to keep the Imperium Romana alive and kicking. It entails looking towards heaven while yet embracing the good life here that comes from exploring and enjoying God’s many gifts in this world. It entails the positive vision of building a genuinely Christian culture that transforms the whole world for Christ—one family at a time, one church at a time, one heart at a time.

This is the soul of medieval Protestantism. This is godly reverence for the past, godly strength for today, and godly hope for the future.

Sir Thomas More once wrote that this sort of Protestantism was “too glad to be true”. May it ever be so that we are found pursuing a vision that can only be calumniated in just this way—too glad to be true!

Tim Enloe, September 2001

The above piece is an example of “the Light Side of the Force,” so to speak – the positive, non-polemical, constructive side of what was happening to me.

Unfortunately, there was a Dark Side. I had come to the full-orbed, organic, world-embracing and world-transforming vision of the classical and Christian Liberal Arts late in life. I started at New St. Andrews when I was 27, and did not finish until I was 35. This being the case, one would have thought that I could not have claimed any superior virtue in the Liberal Arts over the Reformed world that I was criticizing. In my more self-congratulatory moments, I would have optimistically described my own attitude as an “I see the problem, but I’m wrapped up in it, too, and am trying to find the answers I don’t yet have.” Nevertheless, as I went about applying the insights gained from my ongoing Liberal Arts studies to Reformed theology and apologetics, many of my Reformed critics took me to be saying “I am better than you bozos, and I wish everyone could just be as smart and informed as me.” Why was that?

Again, the culprit was the remaining adversarialism of the “Us Vs. Them” mentality of the Fundamentalist world, transferred into my attempts to present and defend the Reformation against all the “monsters” slavering around outside the camp. Having become Reformed largely as a reaction to personal spiritual problems which I identified as being rooted in “Modernity” (the complex world and life system built up over the past 300 or so years), I spun nearly everything I learned in my Liberal Arts studies as Darkness Vs. Light attacks on “Modernity” – and of course, on anyone I identified as being enmeshed within it.

On many occasions, the combative rhetorical posture I adopted to fight “Modernity” not only deeply offended those with whom I disagreed, but encouraged them to reject my views and to think poorly of me. Many times, for instance, I would flaunt my latest readings in the faces of others, as if although I had never heard of, say, William of Malmesbury two weeks ago, I was suddenly an expert in his thought and its relevance to our own lives after having read a couple of dozen pages of him last week for a class. I would fulminate about the great wisdom to which the unwashed masses (those not undergoing the sort of education I was) did not have access, and pretentiously rattle off lists of books they had never heard of but which I had read and which I (arrogantly) thought I had mastered on only one pass through. I would exaggerate the intellectual errors made by those who held different views than mine, and portray those errors as absolutely debilitating to the witness of Protestantism in our world.

In short, for all the intellectual changes occurring in me as a result first of becoming Reformed and then as a result of embracing a very untypical culturally-broad form of the Reformed Faith, I was in my heart still an advocate of a starkly Black or White, Truth or Error, Life or Death, Fundamentalist vision of reality. As Jesus said, “Out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks,” and mine sure did. To sum up the rhetorical problem, let me reproduce another piece I wrote on a message board where my attempts to bring to bear my new learning on contemporary problems were not being as deeply appreciated as I thought they ought to be. Written three years after the optimistic, almost friendly one produced above, here is “the Dark Side” of what was happening to me, in all its nasty glory.

I Hate My Generation 4/6/04 9:34 am

by William of Malmesbury (Tim Enloe)

A number of years ago Shane Rosenthal of ACE wrote a wonderful little article called “I Hate My Generation.” In it he lamented the fact that our generation doesn’t read seriously, but is always grasping after the immediate impression, the trite and superficial understanding. Citing de Tocqueville’s amazing observations about American cultural introversion, Rosenthal bitterly wrote of the absolute poverty of biblical understanding amongst professing Christians in America and invoked Postman and Nietzsche as witnesses to how populism has simply destroyed the average person’s ability to follow an argument and make a rational decision about a complicated issue.

Of course, he was talking about Modern Evangelicalism, that nearly ubitiquous milk-toast form of Christianity from which a lot of us converted. Evangelicals certainly don’t read seriously, as I have been discovering firsthand for the last year. Rosenthal hates the Evangelical generation, and I am with him there. But personally, I think his article has much broader applications, to the professing Reformed community as well. There’s something really interesting about the facts that Calvin was thoroughly acquainted with the classical rhetorical tradition (his first book was not the Institutes, but a commentary on Seneca) and that the kind of Reformational education that existed in the late 16th century and going into the 17th produced Spenser and Sydney and Lex Rex and Vindiciae Contra Tyrannos, not to mention much great music that is still enjoyed today. But these days, the ability that such Protestants had to write profound epic poetry or analyses of political theory simply doesn’t exist – and most Reformed people don’t even have the patience to try to work their way through such productions of our most immediate ancestors.

We can recite “the Five Solas,” but we can’t decipher the classical imagery in The Faerie Queene. “Reformed and always reforming,” you know. These days, call yourself Reformed and read Cicero and Quintillian and William of Malmesbury and the Letters of Pope Gregory VII and Marsilius of Padua and William of Ockham and Pierre d’Ailly and a dozen others, and then use this stuff to construct historical arguments that aren’t “mainstream Reformed” (=Modern Evangelicalized Reformed), and what do you get? “You’re so arrogant!” “How dare you think your views are superior to mine?” “Don’t talk about that Conciliarism stuff and pretend it has any bearing on the historical context of the Reformation’s doctrinal protest. To the law and to the testimony, and if they agree not with my novel, schismatic exegesis it is because they have no light in them!”

This week alone I have had to explain to three Protestants, all of them professing Trinitarians, why Mormon and Jehovah’s Witness baptisms do not constitute Christian baptisms on the terms of the Nicene Creed. And why? Well, their worldview was so radically shaken by what they consider to be the horrifying implications of admitting that “Romish” baptism is a legitimate Christian baptism and Roman Catholics are therefore Christians that they would rather tacitly deny the Nicene Creed and orthodox Trinitarianism than re-think their little prejudices about the “dirtiness” of the Roman Catholic religion and the “purity” of Reformed religion. Never mind that the Reformers accepted “Romish” baptism (because they knew if they didn’t they would entirely cut themselves off from the historic Church and render themselves entirely lacking in any ability to claim authority as ministers); today we are wiser than the Reformers, having purged the Reformation of the last of the “Romish leaven” that poor Luther and Calvin missed.

And worldview thinking, man. Let’s not even go there. One nominally Calvinistic baptist in another forum, who recently came in telling everyone that the world is going to run out of resources pretty soon because of “overpopulation” and that Christians need to sit around worrying about this despite the fact that God is in control of everything, even told me that he had no need to apply the Christian worldview to the many forms of intellectual trash which he simply uncritically imbibes from his secular junior college because hey, it’s all “common sense,” don’t you know. Worldview thinking is such a neglected skill among the Reformed, apparently, that its considered a height of Great Wisdom to respond to a simple remark about the universal presence of “bias” in the human knowing process by intoning “That’s postmodernism! You’ve just made knowing truth impossible!”

Others, big names in contemporary Protestant apologetics, appear to have made it entirely through “Evangelical” seminaries without developing a Christian worldview, and thus, have obtained advanced degrees in “How to Neutrally Exegete the Naked Text of Scripture While Pretending that Other People Who Disagree With Your Conclusions Just Don’t Like Truth” and “How to Make Christianity Politically Subservient to Caesar and Pretend that Polycarp Died Because He Wanted a Private Christianity Worshipping A Private God Off In the Corner.” It makes me want to weep.

Call yourself “Reformed” and use every minute of your time exploring the grandeurs of abstract soteriological propositions, and everything is cool. Spend your days trying to peer into other people’s souls to determine whether they “really” believe the Gospel, and you will not have any troubles with your friends. Obtusely pretend that the Second Great Awakening didn’t just twist Presbyterianism inside and out and leave us with this big stinking mess of sectarianism, individualism, sentimentalism, and sacramental rationalism, and you are just on the cutting edge of Reformed discourse. Always support “Evangelicals” no matter what shallow, prejudiced trash they come up with about Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox, and you demonstrate your deep and abiding love for “the Gospel” and “Christian unity.”

But try to talk about such important things as the implications of the Nicene Creed for politics or the necessity of applying biblical thinking even to questions like environmental problems or the theological implications for leftover Fundamentalism’s bigoted anti-Romanism of actually understanding the motivations and goals of Medieval saint cults, though, and all bets are off. Apparently I’m supposed to spend my days ONLY reading books about TULIP and the solas and how to damn Judaizers and have no culture and pretend to be “objective” so that all criticism simply bonks off my concrete skull, but I still get to claim that I “love truth” and that my opponents are “discontent” with it.

Yes, indeed, I hate my generation.

If the first piece shows the unrealistic idealism of a new convert, the second one shows the bitterness of that idealism after it was spoiled by some very bitter Internet fights with other Reformed people who had taken deep offense both at my excessively combative rhetorical stance and my attempts to broaden the realm of discourse that could be considered legitimately “Reformed.” The tragically ironic thing about the second piece is that it actually does contain much intellectual and theological substance that is fully in keeping with a generally Reformational outlook on life, but my mode of delivery and choices of words served to obscure that substance and keep the cycle of “Us Vs. Them” – or rather, “Me Vs. Them” – going to everyone’s detriment.

To sum up this post, then, my exposure to serious studies of the Liberal Arts starting in the Fall of 1999 had begun to change some things in my outlook and attitude, had begun to chip away at the old destructive Fundamentalist tendencies I had brought with me into my practice of the Reformed Faith, but there would yet be a few more hard years of bitter controversy with others and deep personal struggles on the intellectual and spiritual levels before I would reach a more balanced perspective.

There are those who believe that one’s personal story should not be put out on the Internet for public consumption, and who, accordingly, tend to be critical of blogs for supposedly being “online diaries.” I agree with the basic point that public wallowings in narcissism are not a good thing, and as an ex-Fundamentalist-Evangelical, I also believe that there is a decidedly unhealthy tendency online (following pre-Internet practices) to wed the credibility of Christian Faith to dramatic “personal testimonies.” In this light, I debated for a while whether or not to even write a post like this. Why inflict upon the world one more unasked for autobiography? A good question.

I’ve decided to do this set of posts for several reasons. For one, this blog is demonstrably not an online diary. Although on perhaps a dozen or so occasions over the last five years I have written autobiography-type posts, ninety-nine percent of the content here consists of essays exploring various intellectual and cultural issues. However, the last five years of my online activities have featured a great deal of conflict with other Reformed people. My motivations, my intellectual maturity, my spiritual condition, and even on occasion my very sanity, have been openly questioned by other Reformed people who have had difficulty understanding why I have written so many critical things about the Reformed world as a whole. I have been accused many times by Reformed people of seeking to deceive the unwary by asking questions that they are not equipped to handle, of despising lawful Reformed ecclesiastical authority, of undermining confidence in God’s ability to speak clearly to men in Scripture by questioning what the very concept of “clarity” means, of obfuscating the supposedly “simple” truths of the Faith by persistently appealing to man-made traditions that make the Word of God of none effect, of distorting the Reformed Faith and trying to overturn the Reformation solas by bringing pre-Reformation intellectual and cultural theological categories to bear on Reformation questions, and, at the last, of sliding down the slippery slope to Roman Catholicism.

On the one hand, the advice that several people have given me seems wise: don’t worry about what people on the Internet, who don’t know you at all outside of your writings, think about you. Real, in-your-face relationships are a far better indicator of where you are in life than the often gossipy talk of people who use the Internet like a role-playing game – that is, by imagining themselves to be heroic Defenders of All That Is True, Good, and Noble while treating other people, others who bear the image of God, like mere simulacra. Rather than brothers to be loved and helped, other people are treated as obstacles to be destroyed. This certainly has been the opinion of a number of my critics, who have often enough labeled me a “danger” to the spiritual well-being of others.

On the other hand, I think that while the “personal story” mode of discourse is overdone in our society, if it is kept within reasonable bounds it can be helpful. Contrary to the myth of radical individualism, the experiences of each individual are not absolutely sui generis. One thing that emerges from a perusal of even, say, ten or twenty autobiographical exposes drawn from any religious community is that some experiences and perceptions are often widely shared and form a significant link between otherwise diverse people. Sharing and examining similarities of thought and experience can aid others in working through similar problems. Not all public sharings of “personal testimonies” are necessarily exercises in narcissism. It is my hope that this set of posts will achieve the former goal, not the latter.

Where I Came From

I grew up a Fundamentalist. By “Fundamentalist” I mean what seems to be the default position of American Christians, which is characterized by at least the following things. First, there is a pronounced emphasis on personal, subjective religious experience as the focal point of the Christian life. Second, there is a commitment to the idea that the Bible is the only reliable source of authority. Third is a belief in the absolute clarity of the Bible to oneself, such that all of one’s own beliefs are “obviously” biblical, while the beliefs of those who disagree with oneself are “obviously” unbiblical. Fourth is a premillennial dispensationalist view of the end times. Fifth, there is a tendency to reduce the doctrinal content of the Faith to short lists of Absolute Bedrock Principles, in this case, the famous “Five Fundamentals” put forward between 1910 and 1915,:”(These are: [1] The inerrancy and final authority of the Bible, [2] the Virgin Birth of Christ, [3] the doctrine of the substitutionary atonement of Christ, [4] the doctrine of the bodily resurrection of Christ, and [5] the imminent return of Jesus Christ to earth.)” Sixth is a general lack of interest in the history of the Church outside of one’s own denomination. Seventh is a severe addiction to “the culture war” mentality, in which Fundamentalists are the preeminent force for Truth and Morality, while the rest of the world, captive to “Secular Humanism,” is evil and has to be boycotted, murmured against, and frenetically warred against. Finally there is a deep-rooted, reactionary fear that “the world” will exercise a subtle, creeping influence upon one’s own soul if one is not eternally vigilant to be “sold out to Jesus.”

Two things need to be said here. The first is that I am very grateful to my Fundamentalist upbringing for continually exposing me to Scripture. Like my biblical namesake, I have known the Scriptures and their power from infancy, and for all the deep spiritual and intellectual troubles that Fundamentalism (and the powerful legacy it left behind when I abandoned it) has caused me throughout my life, I am thankful that I was raised with Scripture, made to internalize its stories, language, and thought forms, and given the unshakeable confidence that whatever life’s problems might be, the Scriptures are the final authoritative Word from God.

The second thing that needs to be said is that other than this ability to deeply root a person in faith in the Scriptures, I believe that Fundamentalism has been almost a complete disaster for American Protestantism, and represents a form of severe intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and cultural immaturity. A number of writers have analyzed Fundamentalism (and its stepchild, Evangelicalism), including George Marsden (Fundamentalism and American Culture, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism, Reforming Fundamentalism), Nathan Hatch (The Democratization of American Christianity), Mark Noll (The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind) and Iain Murray (Revival and Revivalism). I recommend all of these books highly for recovering Fundamentalists.

Although Fundamentalism rooted me in salutary confidence in the Scriptures as the Word of God and ultimate source of spiritual nourishment, it failed to give me a realistic sense either of my own generation’s place in “the Grand Scheme” or of the limitations of my own spiritual horizons and interpretive abilities. As a Fundamentalist, I developed an amazing ability to think critically about other people’s views, but zero ability to crititically think about my own views. It is with shame that I now recall how, when as a Dispensationalist I was examining the claims of Reformed amillennialism, my first and most natural response was to mock its emphasis on “covenant theology” because, I told myself, the words “covenant theology” doesn’t appear in the Bible but the word “dispensation” does. “Obviously,” I scornfully thought, amillennialism was a belief held by people who had serious trouble believing “the plain words” of Scripture.

The upshot here is that Fundamentalism failed to create in me a sympathy for other Christians who disagreed with me and my (unrecognized) faith tradition. Indeed, in typical Fundamentalist fashion, if you had tried to present me with the claims of a doctrinal “tradition” in my late teens and early 20s, I would have scoffed at the very notion of “tradition” as a force to be recognized and allowed to operate in one’s mind. I would have instead proclaimed with a megaphone that I had no traditions but “the plain meaning of Scripture.”

Now if one applies this shockingly literalistic and uncritical mentality to any given area of doctrine or practice where Christians disagree, one gets a recipe for shameful contentiousness toward brothers with whom one disagrees. One develops an “Us Versus Them” mentality in which We are the Good Guys standing up for Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, while They are the Bad Guys always looking out for a way to slither away from God’s Plain Truth as found in the Bible Alone. This is “the dark side” of the Fundamentalist reverence for the Bible, and looking at my lifei n retrospect, I see that I carried its hermeneutical solipsism over into my first few years of being Reformed.

Nevertheless, not to be overly harsh, Fundamentalism did at least give me a passion for seeking to know Truth, and that passion (which should be separated from the self-imposed, self-blinding, self-righteous ignorance of Fundamentalist sectarianism) eventually led me in quite a different direction than anyone could have predicted. Although I didn’t know it when in my very early 20s I arrogantly proclaimed, having not read a word of Calvin from his own pen, that “John Calvin was a very smart man, but I think he got a lot of things wrong,” the odd mixture of ignorance and passionate desire for Truth was leading me to a place and to a view of life that I would not have predicted for myself.

Where I Was Trying To Go

In my early to mid-20s, I experienced a crisis of faith which was rooted directly in my Fundamentalism. It’s not necessary to go into details other than to say I had what I felt were irremediable doubts about my salvation. If you are or have been a Fundamentalist, no doubt you can fill in the blanks and unerstand exactly what I mean. Fundamentalism had no answers for my spiritual malaise. The problem was precisely the intensive focus on myself, but all Fundamentalism could do was send me back to myself. Fundamentalism repeatedly sent me back to my own internal states of emotion and spiritual awareness, and to my own understanding of Scripture, largely uninformed by any broader streams of Christian tradition, and largely unaccountable to anyone else.

At the same time as this crisis, however, I experienced an intellectual awakening. I had always been a voracious reader and had always shown academic proficiency in my primary and secondary school years, and at some point this led me as a young adult to the intellectual side of Christianity. If i remember aright, it started with an interest in the Creationism Vs. Evolution controversy, but soon branched out from there to a wide variety of issues. Primarily through the discipline of apologetics, I became profoundly aware that the Faith could nourish not just the spirit, but the mind as well. For several years, I devoured apologetics books like there was no tomorrow, and from there I further branched out into other fields: history, philosophy, expositions of traditional doctrines, and cultural and political works.

Among the books I encountered in this adventure were works by Reformed authors such as Francis Schaeffer, Michael Horton, and R.C. Sproul. To make a long story short, I thought the Reformed view of the world had a lot to offer intellectually, but like many who eventually become Reformed, I was dragged into the fold kicking and screaming all the way through the morass of polemics about predestination and free will. The Reformed book that at last broke through my resistance was R.K. McGregor Wright’s No Place For Sovereignty, of which two points stood out to me – (1) “responsibility” means that man is “response-able” to God, i.e., he is capable and required to respond to God, and (2) the Bible never ties responsibility to free will. At my particular point of doctrinal understanding then, these two points totally reoriented my thinking about predestination and destroyed all my remaining resistance to Calvinism. Additionally, and most importantly, about a year or so before I actually became Reformed the book Christ The Lord: The Reformation and Lordship Salvation, put out by a group of Reformed and Lutheran theologians, seemed to definitively solve my existential problem with assurance of salvation by teaching me that Christianity is not about my own internal spiritual states but about continually returning to the Cross, continually redirecting my focus from myself to Christ crucified for me.

These two things, becoming a Calvinist (admittedly on the basis of unfortunately one-sided polemical theology) and finding the resolution of my spiritual difficulties in the doctrinal tradition of the Protestant Reformation completely reoriented my life.

What Happened When I Got There

Everything came together for me in late 1996, and I at last embraced the Reformed understanding of the Faith. For the next few years, I avidly read every popular work of Reformed Theology I could get my hands on. Michael Horton’s Putting the Amazing Back Into Grace, The Law of Perfect Freedom, In The Face of God, and Where In the World Is The Church?. R.C. Sproul’s Chosen By God, Grace Unknown: The Heart of Reformed Theology, Willing to Believe, and Faith Alone. I read Luther’s Bondage of the Will, tried (unsuccessfully) to read Owen’s Death of Death in the Death of Christ, and picked my way through Calvin’s Institutes and Francis Turretin’s Institutes of Elenctic Theology. I avidly followed Modern Reformation magazine, and made great use of websites such as Reformation Ink.

My ingrained Fundamentalis habit of thinking in stark “Us Vs. Them” categories had only been exacerbated by my several years of deep immersion in apologetics literature, which, despite the moderation inherent in many of the sources I was reading, developed in me a severe polemical spirit, a craving for “being right,” and a desire to fight with – and more importantly, to decisively defeat – those who were “in error.” Arminians, of course, were the first target of choice. For many Reformed people, you simply can’t be Reformed without unrelentingly polemicizing against the “man-centered” doctrines of Arminianism. Though I had myself been an Arminian all my life, the dramatic experience of actually becoming Reformed effaced my memory of the turbulence I had myself experienced as I worked through the issues. Suddenly, Calvinism was just “obviously” true, and Arminians were simply idiots who couldn’t read “the plain meaning” of the words on the pages of Scripture. Overnight, I seemed to forget how intense had been my own struggles to find the Truth, and I surrendered to a scornful disdain for other Christians who weren’t as “enlightened” as I, thanks to the Reformation, had become.

(If you’re an Arminian reading this, please note that I am here describing my view after my conversion to Reformed. I am not describing my view of Arminianism now, which is decidely different.)

In a very short amount of time, I came to treat almost anything written by Reformed authors in the way that, ironically, Michael Horton had warned against in one of his works when he said that some treated the TULIP like Mao Tse-Tung’s Little Red Book. That is, I came to treat works by Reformed authors in a sort of “sociopathic” way, as absolute delimiters of “Truth” against “Error,” and as providing the very boundaries of “rationality” against “irrationality.” I thrilled to read Reformed people opining that “We can no longer tolerate Arminianism,” and endlessly holding up a pristine return to the Reformation doctrinal heritage as the cure-all for all the ills of our grossly corrupted “Modern Evangelical” worldview. Giving an amateur nod in the direction of Saul of Tarsus, I was “more zealous for the traditions of my fathers” than was helpful for actually finding and making proper use of Truth. Ironically, though I felt the Reformation had delivered me from Fundamentalism, the way in which I approached being “Reformed” was fully in line with the intellectually sloppy, spiritually arrogant, and culturally destructive habits of Fundamentalism.

Take just one important point. It is interesting that reducing the Reformation to “The Five Solas” and reducing Calvinism to “The Five Points” – thus ruthlessly excising every other concern from the realm of “Reformed Theology” – is precisely what Fundamentalists do when they reduce the Christian Faith itself to “The Five Fundamentals.” A critical person would ask some questions here. Who says that these five things, and no others, are “the” fundamentals? Where did this supposedly authoritative list of “the” fundamentals come from? What is the justification for banishing everything else to the periphery of one’s intellectual and spiritual interests? How does it comport with Christian charity toward brothers to claim that the Reformed Faith, with its emphasis on grace, delivered one from doctrinal blindness, while at the same time one remains blind to the angry, bitter denunciating attitude one has toward those who have not seen their way clear to embrace “the doctrines of grace“? Is it possible that “being Reformed” is not an end itself, but only a means to an end, and that one may have to continually reform one’s own attitude toward “Reformed” in order to mature as a Christian? A critical person would think to ask questions like these, but like many young, dumb, American male Reformed converts I didn’t ask them. I was Right, They were Wrong, and that was that.

At the same time as I was getting deeper into my newfound Reformed religion, my interest in apologetics led me to an intense desire to defend the cause of the Reformation from Roman Catholicism. Unfortunately, I didn’t try to understand Catholicism by seeking out and reading its best theologians and writers. Rather, I got my foundational understanding of Catholicism from two sources: first from Reformed and Lutheran polemical writers, and second from the Catholic Internet apologetics community. Being a Fundamentalist myself (albeit with the modifier “Reformed” tacked on), I could easily spot the reverse-Fundamentalism that afflicts the apologetics world like a cancer, but I remained blind to the continuing destructive influence of Fundamentalism in myself. I spent several (ultimately fruitless) years vigorously defending sola fide and sola Scriptura from people who exhibited a mirror image of my own behavior. That is, from Catholics who got their understandings of the Reformation from severely unlearned and intemperate popular sources written by their own side, supplemented by extensive interactions with the Fundamentalist wing of the Reformed world. Like many Fundamentalist-Evangelical converts to the Reformed Faith, I did not see how I conflated the principles of American Fundamentalism with the principles of the Reformation itself, and the result was megabytes of space and hundreds of hours of time wasted on defending pop-Protestantism from pop-Catholicism.

For several years, in fact, I was heavily involved with online apologetics ministries dedicated to presenting the doctrinal claims of the Reformation and their relevance to the contemporary Christian world, particularly with reference to the doctrinal and historical claims of the Roman Catholic apologetics community. I zealously bought into most of the established Reformation apologetics portrayals of both “Romanism” and the Reformation. I gravitated toward the notions that (1) generally speaking, Roman Catholics did not have “the Gospel,” (2) that the Council of Trent had “anathematized the Gospel,” (3) that the Reformation had “recovered” the Gospel after the long, corrupt night of “the Dark Ages,” and (4) that though I couldn’t see the hearts of individual Roman Catholics, it was probably the case that the only ones among them who were “saved” were those who consciously (if silently) rejected the formal soteriological teachings of their Church.

Although I never thought about Roman Catholics in a Jack Chick-like manner, my deep ignorance of the historical moorings, doctrinal sophistication, and enormous internal variation of the Reformation traditions kept me captive to popular slurs. When combined with my Fundamentalist heritage of self-insulated combativeness, it was a recipe for what a Civil War general described as endless “war, and war to the knife.” Like the good Maoist chanting Communist slogans or the good American chanting half-remembered, half-understood slogans about “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” from the Founding Fathers, I could be found ready, willing, and able to chant all the accepted slogans and security passwords of “Reformed Theology.” As taught by Scripture alone, we are saved by grace alone and Christ alone through faith alone to the glory of God alone (“the Five Solas“). Like any good Reformed lemming, I thought I was committed to “reformed and always reforming” (the goal of semper reformanda), and I was ever so grateful to God for sending the purity of Reformation Light to dispel the culpable Darkness of Medieval superstition (the dismissal of pre-Reformation times implied by the slogan post tenebras, lux, “after darkness, light”) and restore “God-centered religion” and “the doctrines of grace” to the Christian consciousness. My interest in Catholicism was entirely polemical, my concern for the Reformation was entirely defensive, and my understanding of both was largely rooted in caricature.

This brings my story to the Fall of 1999. It is now time to move on, to a segment that should be called “How Some Things Began to Change.”

A few days ago I finally had time to listen to the now 5-year old debate between Doug Wilson and James White on the topic of whether Roman Catholics are members of the new covenant. (Yes, despite being a former student of Doug Wilson’s and a former Internet combatant with James White, I had never been able to listen to this debate).

It was interesting, to say the least. Given my past history with James White, I don’t think it would be prudent for me to write any sort of detailed comments about the debate. I’ll just say that I found it very useful for clarifying certain things, especially a few points of White’s theology and apologetic orientation that I had not to this point understood very well. One thing I appreciated a lot was that both men were very cordial to each other, despite their strong disagreements. You can download the debate for free at this link.

I’ve been extremely busy lately, with job training seminars, preparing lesson plans for this Fall, and getting into temporary accommodations while my family looks into buying a house. Things will continue busily for a while, and I don’t know what I’ll be able to do here. However, I have made the decision to go ahead and begin putting things together for a different sort of website altogether. I’m tentatively calling it “Reformation Renaissance.” I’m not sure when I’ll be ready to go live with the new site, but when I do I’ll likely incorporate this blog’s archives into it on a subdomain. If you’re among the seemingly ever-decreasing number of readers of this site, stay tuned for the new one to go online sometime in the next couple of months, I hope.

I’ve been thinking a good bit about apologetics lately, not least because I had been lined up (no longer, alas) to teach a high school apologetics course. Anyway, since apologetics has been on my mind so much lately, I thought I’d “recycle” a couple of my old posts relevant to the topic. Here they are:

+ Toward Responsible Internet Apologetics
+Real Love of Truth

This is an interesting perspective. I like it:

I generally think a person has to read ten books on a particular subject before he can intelligently follow a conversation among the experts. I don’t mean ten books on history in a broad sense; what I mean is that you need to read ten books on the American War for Independence, or the Protestant Reformation, or the Crusades, before you can follow the conversation on those particular topics. By the time you have read fifty to a hundred books on a particular area, you can begin to really understand the subject. These numbers are arbitrary, but this truth is certain: Never assume that having read a book on a subject makes you an expert in that area. After reading one book, you know something, or a lot of somethings. After ten books, you begin to realize how much you don’t know. After a hundred books, you might know what it is you don’t know. – Ben House, Punic Wars and Culture Wars, pp. 139-140

I recently found a site where people are recording major classical works such as Herodotus’ Histories and Plutarch’s Lives and making the recordings available for free download. This seems like such a helpful thing to do in this age of widespread useof multimedia that it’s given me an idea. I’ll need some help with it, and I want to solicit help with this post.

I think that a lot of people would be pleased to be able to listen to good primary source Reformation theology on their way to work or on their morning jogs or during their workouts and so forth. Now, I am not talking anything so ambitious as recording, say, all 1,000 pages of Calvin’s Institutes or whole volumes of Luther and Bullinger. I’m talking about Reformation-era sermons and tracts that are available in the public domain. There’s lots of this material on Google Books, and some on sites such as Reformation Ink.

Would anyone be willing to volunteer time to reading and recording these things so that I can put them up for free download? I can do some of it myself, but there’s simply too much for me to do by myself. If you’d be willing to help with this idea, please send me a note at tgenloe@gmail.com. Thanks.

For the last month or so, things have been pretty chaotic here. It started when I wrote some posts about Catholic convert stories to help a friend out, and like a dummy allowed free commenting on them – which immediately sparked a controversy. I took the posts down because my purpose is not to be an Internet controversialist, and also I thought the posts needed some touch up work. Then I moved the whole blog over here to this free site and wrote a few more posts “off the cuff” that I later decided did not need to have been written, and took them down. Then I started a secondary blog to house Protestant answers to Catholic apologetics propaganda. Got all of about 12 people interested in that one on the first day, and the latest count is 4, so now that blog is down, too.

I’m sorry for the “up down, up down” thing. To be perfectly honest, as I’ve moved deeper into the world of classical Christian education over the last few years, I have become very unsure where I fit in anymore on the blogosphere – if anywhere. I actually get sick and tired of blogging about twice a year, and in the almost 6 years this blog has been around, I believe I’ve completely shut it down at least 4 times. I’m surprised some readers have stuck around as long as they have.

Five years ago I thought Protestants would be just thrilled to start finding out that much of the Middle Ages offers significant support for central Protestant emphases. Wrong. The more I wrote on that subject, the more readers I lost. People didn’t want to hear about Luther’s reliance on Wessel Gansfort, Pierre D’Ailly, and Jean Gerson for much of his understanding of the role of Councils in interpreting Scripture. They just wanted to hear someone else retelling the Grand Old Story of the speech at the Diet of Worms so they could “thank God for the Reformation” and go back to their surfing. Bar room brawls over pop-theology and pop-apologetics topoi that wouldn’t last two seconds in a sober-minded intellectual environment easily took attention away from examinations of the downgrade of Protestantism in America thanks to the forces of democratization and the bad forms of Enlightenment philosophy. Blog posts that heavily footnoted original Latin sources and used thousands of words to trace out the connections between, say, Cicero’s and Calvin’s political theories were just too “out there” for many Protestant Internet surfers. The intricacies of the TULIP and paeans to Absolute Predestination are so much more thrilling to the Average Protestant Guy’s soul than, say, examining the connections between the ethics of Socrates and the ethics of the New Testament.

Now I know that numbers aren’t equivalent to truth. It would be better to have 5 readers who were actually learning something and helping me to learn things, too, than 5,000 who were only stopping by to see if I was going to say something really rhetorically outrageous that they could pop off a few dozen words in reply to while on their coffee break at work. But this blog has over the years required a great deal of time to maintain, and because of the role I want to play in the Christian world – educator, not facilitator of pop-theology, pop-history, and pop-apologetics – it’s likely that 99% of what I would post here would continue to be for those I thought I wanted to reach out to – the ordinary guy in the pew – of the “That makes me sleepy; let’s go watch the knock-down drag-out foodfight on the Apologetics Message Board” character. I want no part of that, and “the market” has made it clear what it thinks of that.

So anyway, sorry for the late craziness. I’m trying to figure out, I guess, what my place on the Internet is. Please bear with me.