Is Everything Predestined?

There was a lady in one of the congregations I served whose name was Moira. A friend of mine found her name difficult to pronounce. Most of us pronounced it as if it were boy-rah. Beyond that, I often wondered where her parents came up with such a strange name. I have since discovered that it is a Greek name. In Greek mythology the three fates were called the Moirai. Could it be that Moira was destined to have her name?

Seriously, what do you believe about destiny? Were you destined to grow up where you did? Were you destined to be famous or poor or tall or—more darkly—to be damned? These questions are ones most of us struggle with. My deeper concern is to ask what God's Word reveals to us. To pursue that question let's go with the Apostle Paul on his missionary journey to the city of Athens where the Greeks loved to argue about such questions. Here he is, invited to the Areopagus to present his views to the Epicurean and Stoic philosophers.

"Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious. For as I passed along and observed the objects of your worship, I found also an altar with this inscription, 'To the unknown god.' What therefore you worship as unknown, this I proclaim to you. The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in temples made by man, nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything. And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him. Yet he is actually not far from each one of us, for "'In him we live and move and have our being'; as even some of your own poets have said, "'For we are indeed his offspring.' - Act 17:22-28 ESV

Paul went on to talk about Jesus and the resurrection. As soon as they heard this most of them laughed at him and walked away. Such nonsense! Luke records, however, that several did pay attention. They may have become Christians, because he names them as Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them. We hear no more about Dionysius and Damaris. It seems that Paul abandoned further attempts to argue philosophy. Yet this intriguing sentence persists: 

"And he made from one man every nation of mankind to live on all the face of the earth, having determined allotted periods and the boundaries of their dwelling place, that they should seek God, in the hope that they might feel their way toward him and find him."

It seems Paul under the guidance of the Holy Spirit is saying to me that I was determined to live a certain period of time in the 20th and 21st centuries in a couple places called Minnesota and Texas. And in a broader sense is the United States, my nation, pre-determined by God to exist where it does during a certain period of time? Is that conclusion confirmed by other parts of Scripture?

In his farewell speech to the children of Israel about to enter the promised land Moses says something as intriguing as Paul. Paul probably had this in mind when he spoke at Athens.

Remember the days of old; consider the years of many generations; ask your father, and he will show you, your elders, and they will tell you. When the Most High gave to the nations their inheritance, when he divided mankind, he fixed the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God. - Deu 32:7-8 ESV

What's this business of giving to the nations their inheritance? And fixing the borders of the peoples according to the number of the sons of God?

I want to pursue these questions in my next posts. Please bear with me. I have no intention of messing with Greek or any other type of philosophy. And I certainly do not want to get involved in some sort of deep abstractions. Rather I want to follow the psalmist as he writes,

But I trust in you, O LORD; I say, "You are my God." My times are in your hand; rescue me from the hand of my enemies and from my persecutors! Make your face shine on your servant; save me in your steadfast love! - Psa 31:14-16 ESV

Fear Not, The Technium Will Save Us!

Do you enjoy getting confused? If so, read on. Today's blog will certainly satisfy your taste.

I recently received a book from my son Nathan. He said he had just finished it and wanted me to read it. And so I have been doing just that this past week. My, oh my, oh my. The book is What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly.

In his daily blog, The Technium,  Kelly writes, 

"I've promised that my recent book, What Technology Wants, will be my last paper-native book. From now on my new books will be born digital. At the same time I am trying to move my existing books into as many ebook formats as possible. I am discovering this is easier said than done. Standards are slippery, conversion tools are sloppy, and there is much hand crafting and tweaking needed. . . "

I am about 1/3 through the paper edition of Kelly's book and struggling. As I read along I inevitably find myself asking, Who or what is this guy's 'god'? Chance? Luck? Technology? Evolution? Homo Sapiens? Natural law? Philosophy? Progress? The universe? Information? Science? Reason? The collective mind? Yes. All of it, wrapped up in what he calls the technium.

He bounces all over the place. One dare not look to him for a consistent use of language and terms or carefully defined meanings. I'm more than confused by what it is he is trying to say.  His terms have assumptions built into them, but they are slippery. He is an atheistic evolutionist who believes in a god called chance or luck. . . And yet, and yet, and yet he, he, he seems to believe in some kind of inevitable progress as promoted by the philosopher Hegel and the old communists. He also speaks about the immaterial and transcendence in an almost spiritual manner. I gather that the technium,  that greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating around us, is that immaterial something that will reverse the inevitable movement toward entropy—the winding down of the universe. Something called exotropy will ultimately save it all—I guess.

Note the use of verbs like evolve, create, make, generate, reveal and nouns like luck, chance, reality, progress, trend, transcendence. There is a philosophy, a belief system, even a theology lurking there. Examples: 

". . . all living species have evolved from predecessors for the same amount of time: four billion years ago." 
". . . hydrogen atoms . . . were created in the fires of the big bang and dispersed into the universe as a uniform warm mist." 
"One day, in a stroke of luck, the water molecule is captured by a chain of unusually active carbons in one pool." 
"As the universe stretched out, it made nothingness. As emptiness increased, so did coolness." 
". . . we don't really know what information is. . . more metaphor than anything else."
"Matter . . . generated gravity . . . The informational process we call life took control of the atmosphere of Earth several billion years ago." 
"The creation of language was the first singularity for humans. . . A few scientists believe that, in fact, it was technology that sparked language." 
"Our genes have co-evolved with our inventions." 
"Progress, even moral progress, is ultimately a human invention."
"We can view the long-term trajectory of exotropy as an escape from the material and a transcendence into the immaterial." 
"Martin Heidegger suggested that technology was an "unhiding"—a revealing—of an inner reality. That inner reality is the immaterial nature of anything manufactured." 

(Does he really know who Heidegger—who loved the Nazis— was or what he wrote? A large chunk of Plato and Aristotle lurks here as well)

"I think there are five pools of evidence for this trend (toward betterment). . . 1) the long-term rise in longevity, education, health and wealth of an average person . . . 2) . . . the obvious wave of positive technological development we have witnessed in our lifetimes. . . 3) . . . advance resides in the moral sphere. . . 4) . . . the immense distance life has traveled in its four billion-year journey from extremely simple organisms to extremely complex and social animals . . . 5) . . the rush toward urbanization. 

"Simultaneous, independent invention seems to be the rule in nature. . . In both realms, natural evolution and technological evolution, convergence creates inevitabilities. _______________

I could go on, but this is enough. In analyzing anyone's writing one must ask two questions about his guiding philosophy or theology:

1. What is his formal principle? 

2. What is his material principle? 

So far, I have only read the first 120 pages, but it is sufficient. His formal principle, that which guides, instructs and informs him, is science, atheistic philosophy and human reason. His material principle, what he believes is happening, is progress and an escape into the infinite immaterial reality. 

I pop to the end for a couple final quotes: 

"In his mythic book The Singularity Is Near  Ray Kurzweil, serial inventor, technology enthusiast, and unabashed atheist, announces: "Evolution moves toward greater complexity, greater elegance, greater knowledge, greater beauty, greater creativity, and greater levels of subtle attributes such as love. In every monotheistic tradition God is likewise described as all of these qualities, only without limitation . . . So evolution moves inexorably toward this conception of God, although never quite reaching this ideal." 

"If there is a God, the arc of the technium is aimed right at him . . . Look what is coming: Technology is stitching together all the minds of the living, wrapping the planet in a vibrating cloak of electronic nerves, entire continents of machines conversing with one another, the whole aggregation watching itself through a million cameras posted daily. How can this not stir that organ in us that is sensitive to something larger than ourselves? 

". . . Technology amplifies the mind's urge toward the unity of all thought, it accelerates the connection among all people, and it will populate the world with all conceivable ways of comprehending the infinite . . . more options, more opportunities, more connection, more diversity, more unity, more thought, more beautiy, and more problems. Those add up to more good, an infinite game worth playing.

"That's what technology wants." 

_______________________

So now you know: God's name is Technology or as Kelly calls it, the Technium. And before this infinite, hidden, transcendent good we bow in awesome wonder!  The Singularity is closing in upon us. The day is coming when the technium's ability to alter us will exceed our ability to alter the technium.

Amen. Hallelu-Technium! Come save us and the universe. 

How Brilliant We Bible Scholars Are!

In previous Blogs I pointed out that we must take various attempts to lead us back into ancient Bible times with a grain of salt. That is to say, be very cautious about those folks who claim that they can look at bits of stone, pottery and bones and tell you exactly what was going on. They also study the text of the Bible as it has come down to us and conclude that the stories in the Bible are, for the most part, fabrications by a variety of later writers who had their own agendas. In other words, those later writers wanted to trick their readers into thinking, for instance, that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, but he didn't, even though Christians thought so for the past 1,900 years. Here's how these post-modern, enlightened Bible historians think:

We wizards have developed tools especially in the past century by which we've caught those old-time Bible writers in their tricks, lies and deceptions. We are ready now to show you who really wrote the Bible. And you'll be surprised at what we've discovered. 

Wanna know how we do it? Here's a few tricks of our own we've developed.

1. Doublets - there are lots of them, stories about the same thing, but written from a different perspective, like the two creation stories in Genesis, the covenant between God and Abraham and two stories of God changing Jacob's name to Israel. Sometimes we even found triplets of stories. They can't fool us.

2. Two names for God - Ha! That's an even better clue. We knew it all the time. Two different groups had two different names for their God.

3. Terms and characteristics -  Besides these peculiar names for God, these groups had other terms that regularly appeared.

These are some basic tools to get us started into unraveling "what really, really happened." Don't forget that this is what all good historians do, check the sources and get back to "wie es eigentlich gewesen ist." 

 Oh, one more insight. That brilliant philosopher George Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831) taught us how things happen, how history moves forward. We bow down before his brilliant insights—and remember that he was brilliant, able to shed light through his powerful mental capacities on the very mind of the enveloping, absolute Spirit or God if you will. Anyway, Hegel taught us that there are always, always, always men and/or groups that have a certain thesis, a certain position they wish to maintain. But then along comes another group with an opposing thesis, an antithesis. So they lock horns, as it were and struggle, even fight with one another until along comes a synthesis, a new understanding, a new place to be. That provides a new triad (thesis-antithesis-synthesis) and sets things in motion once again.

Now since this enlightened understanding from the Age of Enlightenment or Age of Reason, has come to us from this enlightened philosopher, we can go back to the Bible with our enlightened knowledge, look at the doublets and triplets and draw some enlightened conclusions. We can work our way through the entire Bible with this presupposition, this brilliant, light-giving philosophy and determine there was a group we'll have to call the Elohists or E group, because they called God Elohim. And there were the Jahwists or J group, because they called God Jehovah or as many today say, Yahweh. The third source document, by far the largest, included most of the legal sections and concentrated on matters having to do with priests. We'll call those who developed these documents the P group. Finally there's the source material found only in the book of Deuteronomy that we'll call the D group.

So there you have it folks, the JEDP source-documentary thesis or Documentary Hypothesis. This model dominates the field of Bible studies in most mainline protestant seminaries and university departments of religion. It appears there are only a relatively few Lutheran groups, like the Lutheran Church—Missouri Synod and sister synods around the world, that reject this approach. Another time I'll tell you why we Missourians find it so hard to accept the presuppositions behind this hypothesis.

Beware of Philosophy

Butterflies are cool

in the big, huge, green forest.

They fly up so high!

This is a Haiku poem. It is poetry reduced to the bare minimum. Writers of such poetry are called minimalists. There is a minimalist movement among novelists, musicians, visual artists and architects. We who use computers appreciate minimalist computer program developers who reduce our learning curve. Immediate use video games are but one example.

Minimalism is also a way of doing theology. As in the arts, minimalist theologians insist that we need to reduce the 'Gospel' to its bare minimum. In matters that are not an explicit part of their Gospel we are free to express and discover new meanings for the age in which we live. For such folks there is no need for a resurrection or a teaching that Jesus is God. Such views, they suggest, served their purpose in earlier times. Today, however, we recognize that all religions have teachings about God's love and life after death. All of us seek the same things. This 'Gospel' is a Gospel reduced to its bare minimum: God created us, loves us and wants us all to live together in harmony and love. Details beyond that need to be eliminated. They really do not matter.

Such an approach grew out of textual criticism of Biblical texts, that branch of literary criticism that seeks to get as close as possible to the original ancient documents. This is called lower criticism in contrast to higher criticism that tries to establish who, when and where these texts were first written. This has also been called the historical-critical method, an approach that began as early as the sixteenth century by Dutch humanist and Catholic priest Desiderius Erasmus (+ 1536).  It continued among philosophers and theologians in the centuries following and finally led to a widespread distrust of the Bible's authority in anything (see N.L. Geisler, Beware of Philosophy, 1999). Notable among such scholars and philosophers are:

• Dutch-Jewish Pantheist Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677) who rejected the resurrection  and miracles because nature's course is fixed and unchangeable. 

• Scottish skeptic David Hume (1711-76) who insisted that miracles are a violation of nature's laws and insisted that prophecy of future events is nonsense. 

• German theologian Rudolph Bultmann (1884-1976) who believed it is both senseless and impossible not to recognize the Gospels as myths written in a pre-scientific age. Biblical miracles are impossible for modern man. 

• German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) who argued that God is unknowable. We cannot know reality in itself. We can only know what appears to us (the phenomena). Science studies the observable world. That is possible, but anything beyond that is not. All that is left is moral religion, the desire to do what is right. 

• George Wilhelm Hegel (1770-1831) who insisted that history moves forward through a dalectic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis. Using this approach the Tubingen School of F.C. Baur concluded that the Gospel of John had to be a second century synthesis of a thesis-anthesis conflict between Peter and Paul, a conclusion that disregarded evidence of an earlier first century date. 

• Danish Christian Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) who said that higher criticism is not harmful to real Christianity. Faith is rather a blind leap. 

• Martin Heidegger (1889-1976), openly pro-Nazi theologian, who contended that the true meaning of Biblical terms is found in etymology, the study of the history of words. The origin of a term is the key to its meaning. This meaning is mystical, a way by which one comes in contact with the divine. This approach led to the widely used Kittel's Theological Dictionary of the New Testament.

• Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) who insisted that all truth is relative. There are no absolute truths in the Bible. In so saying, he and others like him, asserted that his statement is itself absolute.  

• Charles Darwin and the philosophy of evolution that insists that everything in nature is the result of fixed laws, i.e. the survival of the fittest. 

• Alfred North Whitehead (1861-1947) who wrote in detail of the process of reality by insisting that even God is processing into the future, waiting to see how things will turn out.  

So the procession has continued across the centuries as scholars sought to make a name for themselves, to make some kind of original contribution to knowledge, to push the envelope. Human reason and human philosophy have again and again been exalted above the Gospel of the Scriptures. I need to say much more about that the next time.