Threads from Henry's Web

Author: henry

  • Two Stories about Prayer in School

    . . . but they supposedly recount one incident.

    The first came to me via the Traditional Values Coalition alert e-mail, which is generally quite strident. It referred me to this story on Alain’s Newsletter, which tends to make the TVC alerts look calm, collected, and irenic.

    Now here’s another story, this time from The Columbian. You need to read both stories to get the picture here. I’m not going to quote extensively from them.

    I think one can get most of the facts out of these stories, if one ignores the hyperbole and possible reconstructions. But if you look at what is reported and what is emphasized in each story, you will see an excellent example of how to slant news. It’s not by actually concocting facts from thin air. I think completely fabricated data is quite rare, but creative selection is quite another matter. Rather, it’s by means of reporting certain specific things.

    You see, if a group of students were refused permission to pray outside of class time and without disrupting the activities of the school, in other words, in good discipline, I would certainly be angry at the school. This sort of thing does happen, but it’s generally the result of ignorant school officials, lacking good judgment and sometimes fearful of lawsuits, though if they’re that stupid they should be subject to lawsuits. On this point everyone from the ACLU to the ACLJ can agree.

    I’m firmly in favor of prayer. I’ve written a couple of books on it, though only one is still in print. I teach weekend seminars on prayer. I’m not against prayer. Got that? So if the facts were solely as stated in the Alain’s Newsletter report, then no problem. Reinstate the students and let them pray.

    But there were certain things that defied probability, and so I looked for other stories to see if things would clarify themselves just a bit. I was doubtful of the claim that complaints came from “one Satanist” student. That’s one of those elements of a story that’s just too good (for the side of the writer) to be true. It might be, but I doubt it. Note that the offer of a classroom in which to offer prayer is missing from the Alain’s report.

    Now constitutionally I’m not 100% on the boundaries, but if the facts are as The Columbian reported them, I think the school officials will turn out to be within their rights, even though their reaction sounds excessive to me based on the provocation. Other facts could change my mind on that. On the other hand, if the disruption of traffic resulted from hecklers, and not from the actions of the praying students, I would be opposed to the actions of the school officials. The problem is that it is precisely key facts such as that one that are hard to dig out once emotions are high.

    I think the following facts are key:

    • The offer of a classroom and the appropriate supervision
    • Was it the praying students or hecklers who were disruptive (or a little of both)?
    • What was the response of the praying students to the school’s authority? If that authority was properly exercised, and yet resisted, that would explain greater sanctions.

    But more important than the legal issues, which are not my forte in any case, are the issues of Christian values. When we pray publicly, what message is it that we are trying to send? There is a good point here in Matthew 6:5-6. I don’t think we should read such a short message as condemning public prayer, as I have heard done, but the purpose of prayer should be questioned. If the purpose of the prayer is to make a show, to shove it in people’s face, then I think we need to reevaluate our actions. For example, if a classroom was indeed offered, as the school spokesman indicated, then the question would be why pray in the commons?

    Again, I think it is quite possible that more facts need to be brought out in this case, but based on what I have seen I would have serious concerns, both about the actions of the students and the sanctions imposed. I’ll have my eyes open for more clarification.

  • Moderate Christian Blogroll

    I’ve been way behind on giving alerts to what is happening on the blogs of the Moderate Christian blogroll, so today I did a bit of work, and I think I’ve improved the options for linking to one another by providing an aggregator that itself has an RSS feed. This only allows either titles or titles + summaries. It won’t copy your entire post, and it provides links back to your posts. If anyone is uncomfortable with this, please let me know. It is no more than the current aggregator prints, but it does add the aggregated RSS feed.

    I created a blog solely for the purpose of testing how these worked on wordpress.com blogs, so right now I’ve posted the instructions there. Check these out here. A copy of the aggregator is available as a page on this blog, here, along with the feed URL for the aggregated RSS feed.

    I am going to try using that blog for awhile to post updates from the blogroll, perhaps 5 blogs at a time, but I’m not sure that is even necessary, considering what the aggregator accomplishes. If I link to any posts from here it won’t be just because they’re on the blogroll, but rather because I want to comment on them. I might give up on this option, but that wordpress.com blog will stay up in any case to help me help those who have wordpress.com blogs.

  • Coops Series on the Atonement

    Coops is doing a series on the atonement. He says:

    Being the seasoned theologian and all (sarcastic), I thought it would be a fantastic topic to get to know better – especially since I’ve heard quite a bit about it in liberal and emergent circles lately. It may be good to really get my head around such an amazing concept (as best as I can, anyway).

    Yep! Sounds like a good topic to me. I’ll be reading.

  • Hebrews Audio Series

    Those who are following my irregular series on Hebrews on this blog may be interetest in the audio series that just started on the Pacesetters Bible School News Blog. This follows completion of the series on 1 Corinthians. This series has 15 messages, each about 20-25 minutes. They will be posted Monday through Friday in the morning.

    The first in the series is God’s Concept of Communication and deals with Hebrews 1:1-4.

  • Theodicy and Openness Theology

    Some time ago I made a few remarks on Dr. William Dembski’s article, Christian Theodicy in Light of Genesis and Modern Science (last accessed 3/4/07). I think it’s a wonderfully well-written article, though I disagree with his conclusions. I’m going to discuss this article a bit more, but first I want to cover one or two points (in separate posts) that are peripheral. The first one is Dembski’s treatment of openness theology. In general, Dembski is quite fair to his opponents in this article, but I think he misses the boat just a bit on dealing with openness theology, as one generally does when one attributes motivation to other people’s beliefs.

    The entire section to which I want to respond is contained in a single paragraph on page 34 of the essay, starting with this:

    The overwhelming reason for truncating divine foreknowledge in current theological discussion (especially among openness and process theologians) is to assist in the task of theodicy.

    This misses the point somewhat. I certainly did not come to favor openness theology because I needed it for theodicy. In fact, I regard theodicy as a generally doomed business. Theodicy has proven useless to me. When I watched my 17 year old son die after a five year fight with cancer, it was not any principled theodicy that kept my spiritual life alive. It was simple experience of the presence of God, even around the time of death. God is whatever God is.

    No, the problem for me is that there is simply a gap between God as portrayed in different passages of scripture and even the God I experience. I don’t mean that my experience of God challenges scripture. In fact, one of my major reasons for accepting the authority of the Bible is kind of in reverse. The God that I experience in prayer, meditation, and worship, is so effectively described by the vocabulary of the Bible, that I have to accept the probability that my experience is similar to the Biblical writers.

    In fact, my personal experience of God is fractured in similar was to what a surface reading of many Bible passages presents. Without going into great detail, one needs to reconcile the God who “declares the end from the beginning” (Isaiah 46:10) is “the same yesterday, today, and tomorrow” (Hebrews 13:8) and yet “if a nation will turn from its evil, he will change his mind/relent” (Jeremiah 18:1-11). Many of us have become so theologically adept, whether we’re theologians or not, that we can reconcile those texts without thinking, bring the meaning of each into line with our theology.

    Similarly my personal experience of God goes through times of absolute sovereignty in which I feel carried forward without choice, and yet at other times places at which God allows me broad freedom. If my concept of God is too narrow for this experience, how likely is it to be broad enough for an actual infinite God who is the ground of all being?

    For openness theologians in general, and for me in particular, reconciliations of these aspects seem somewhat shallow, and seem to truncate one concept or another. The Bible speaks of humans having choices with consequences, consequences that would be different had humans behaved in a different manner. God repents frequently. In the book of Jonah, the prediction is that Nineveh will be destroyed in 40 days. The people repent, and God repents. God’s grace is given priority over at least the appearance of his foreknowledge.

    Thus my motivation in exploring openness theology is more an effort to give full weight to all of these aspects of scripture and personal experience of God in my theology. I have never seen free will or such broader approaches as openness as all that helpful. In the end, God created absolutely everything, good and bad, whether he did so directly as in special creation or indirectly as in an evolutionary model. If God is the ground of all being–a definition I like–then all chains of causation lead back to God, and all things happen because God wanted the universe to be that way. This remains true whether he limits his foreknowledge or not.

    In such theodicies, a limited God is absolved from having to remove evils for the simple reason that he is incapable of removing them.

    Well, no, not really. In such theologies God would be incapable of creating logical inconsistencies in the universe. Thus the finite beings cannot simultaneously have full freedom and yet be restricted from being evil. I recall interviewing Dr. Richard Rice, one proponent of openness theology a few years back for a conference on the Religion Forum, and he commented that it was not that God could not know everything, but that he chose to create the universe in such a way that he would not know everything. (I lost the transcript of that talk, so that is from memory, but I believe it is an accurate representation.)

    But why engage in such theodicies at all? No sound arguments show that divine foreknowledge is logically incoherent. To argue against God knowing future contingent propositions invariably involves questionable assumptions about how the world, though created by God, might nonetheless impede God’s knowledge of the future.

    Except that what is actually argued is that God impedes his own knowledge of the future. Now I have not read every exposition by openness theologians, and I imagine there are those who would limit God in the way Dembski describes, but that is not a necessary component of openness theology. Openness theology would best be expressed, in my view, solely as God’s approach to interaction with this finite universe. It’s a way in which various possibilities have been reconciled in the finite, when in the infinite they had no need of such reconciliation.

    Further, I think that the coherence of free will and foreknowledge is quite illusory. William Lane Craig’s lengthy exposition to the contrary notwithstanding, I would still regard a fixed future as incompatible with free will. That’s a long discussion in itself, however, so I will hold with just the assertion at this point.

    Moreover, divine foreknowledge does not preclude human freedom. If God foreknows what I shall choose, then I shall not choose otherwise. It doesn’t follow, however, that I can’t choose otherwise. As William Lane Craig puts it, “my freely chosen actions . . . supply the truth conditions for the future contingent propositions known by God.”62 In contrast to theodicies that attempt to justify God’s goodness/benevolence by looking to divine limitation, I’m going to argue that full divine foreknowledge of future contingent propositions is indispensable to a theodicy that preserves the traditional understanding of the Fall (i.e., one that traces all evil in the world back to human sin). [Citations in this passage are from from William Lane Craig. I reproduce footnote 59: William Lane Craig, “Divine Foreknowledge and Newcomb’s Paradox,” Philosophia 17 (1987): 331-350, available online at http://www.leaderu.com/offices/billcraig/docs/newcomb.html (last accessed January 12, 2006). Access date is Dr. Dembski’s.]

    Here we see, I believe another example of the type of reconciliation I’m talking about. For Dembski, preserving a traditional understanding of the fall is important, and thus he looks for a reconciliation of the various elements that includes that traditional understanding. I believe that he operates in a way that is very similar to the openness theologians, and for that matter to most everyone else, in that he sees a number of teachings in scripture and hopes to provide an overarching theory that will account for them all. I have no problem with that. I simply point out that others are operating on the same motivation, and not simply moving the boundary markers in order to make themselves feel better about God.

    One option at all times is to reexamine our understanding of any particular point in the light of whatever evidence we have available. This means that the ideas of free will, of sovereignty, of evil, and yes, the traditional understanding of the fall can be examined again and again as we try to reconcile the various pieces of information available to us. There is no God-given general theory of divine sovereignty and human will. That is something we have to look for.

    In addition, we have to look at the sources. One difference between various approaches to theodicy is sources. What weight is given to scriptural statements over observations of the natural world? I would have to say, for example, that an observation of the history of life on this planet creates an interesting question about the God who “sees a sparrow fall” (Matthew 10:29) and the God who permits “survival of the fittest” as the driving force in the diversity of life.

  • Should a Pedophile be Welcome at Church?

    I’m not sure how to react to this story, but I think it’s a good one for discussion. On MSNBC I found the following story: Sex offender can worship – with conditions. I find the story troubling. As a grandparent of 5, I have to ask whether I would regard it as safe to have my grandchildren at church with him. At the same time, I would also have to ask what alternative I would propose to minister to such a person.

    The church made a covenant of restrictions on his activity, monitoring, and accountability. But one church member expressed the question quite well:

    Mary Carlson, a single mother of an 8-year-old girl, has fears despite the covenant. “He is a pedophile, and this pedophile might be fantasizing about this little girl across the aisle,” she said.

    As a United Methodist, I uphold “Open hearts, Open minds, Open doors,” at least insofar as I can make any real meaning of the slogan. But this open?

    Any thoughts?

  • Two New Gaps in the Fossil Record

    I love it when these kinds of news stories hit the popular media. A new species of dinosaur was discovered by Michael Ryan in Alberta while he was a graduate student, and the find has now been published in the Journal of Paleontology, according to MSNBC. The dinosaur species is named Albertaceratops nesmoi, and it provides an intermediate between earlier, long-horned dinosaurs and more recent, shorter horned forms. (Note: I am not a subscriber to the journal, nor a paleontologist, and do not have access to the original article.)

    To quote:

    That makes the newly found creature an intermediate between older forms with large horns and later small-horned relatives, said State of Utah paleontologist Jim Kirkland, who with Douglas Wolfe identified Zuniceratops in New Mexico in 1998. He predicted then that something like Ryan’s find would turn up.

    Of course, our creationist buddies will certainly both fail to see this as an intermediate, and point out that there are huge unfilled gaps to either side, thus inspiring my title after the fact. 🙂

  • Commending an Honest Apology

    Laura on Pursuing Holiness has now apologized for an earlier comment on Rick Warren and Saddleback Church. I share her original concerns about misreporting of numbers. I do believe that pastors are often careless with the details, thinking they are not terribly important. But especially when you’re in Rick Warren’s position, you can’t afford that.

    I generally agreed with the sentiment of Laura’s original post, though I didn’t comment at the time. But I thoroughly approve of her response to a challenge and to new information. Now why can’t more of us provide an honest apology!

    She said:

    I may disagree with their accounting methods for the Saddleback church roll, but I was way out of line for suggesting that Rick Warren was being deceitful. I have absolutely no evidence that he was. The bottom line here is that I tossed a post out there, having done no research on either the topic at hand or Warren Smith, the article’s writer. I regurgitated Smith’s opinion with a total lack of skepticism because it fit with my world view. That “fake but accurate” nonsense is something for which I have repeatedly, and justifiably, criticized the mainstream media. I’m sorry that I did it. Aside from the fact that it was hypocritical of me to do the very thing I’ve criticized others for, I failed to give the benefit of the doubt when I should have given it. There’s no excuse for it, and in the future I will be a great deal more cautious in what I write. For whatever it’s worth, I apologize.

    Wow! Bravo! I can use that as an example when I teach on Psalm 51 and true confession, which is totally unlike what politicians tend to do. Way to go! If there was an award for demonstrating what she and I both meant by “philophronos blogging” it would go to her post.

  • Civility in Political and Religious Debate

    Joe Carter at the evangelical outpost is going after Ann Coulter. He’s very concerned about civility:

    Our political culture has truly become debased when even conservatives now accept what James Q. Wilson has described as the elevation of self-expression over self-control. (Perhaps it is to be expected, though, of a movement that has replaced the wisdom of Russell Kirk with the soundbites of Rush Limbaugh.) We have heartily embraced the leftist ideal that we have an inherent right to be as stupid and as banal as we want. . . .

    Now I’m not a conservative, and I believe that Ann Coulter is definitely an excellent target, though I would prefer to deal with how totally wrong she is than how rude. From my point of view there are plenty of rude people on both sides of the political spectrum, but I don’t think rudeness or incivility is their primary problem.

    I’m led to wonder whether one of the signs of trouble in our political process is that we’re talking so much about how we say things rather than about what we say. I do believe how we say things is important. There are words and ways of expression that tend to produce dialogue and discussion, and there are others that tend to destroy it.

    At the same time, despite any preference for civil debate, there are people out there who are just plain stupid. In fact I’m pretty sure it was Russell Kirk, whom Carter quotes favorably, and whose prose I truly enjoy despite differing from his positions substantially on many points, whom I heard lecture at an Intercollegiate Studies Institute gathering when I was an undergraduate. One of the students perceived him as being excessively negative about the American people and asked him about it. His response? “But I don’t like the American people. I think they’re dumb.” (This is strictly from memory, and the year was 1975 or 1976, so I could be wrong on my memory.)

    The problem is that there is a point to civility that all political movements need to take into account. There is a big difference between persuading others in dialogue and firing up your own base. I really deal with this more in religious dialogue. Frequently people bring me jokes about various varieties of non-Christians, things that they think are a real killer. “How would a such-and-such answer this?” they ask me. Generally I have to say that they won’t be impressed. Atheists jokes may fire up the congregation by making them feel that they’re smarter than the supid atheist portrayed in the joke, but trust me, actual atheists you meet won’t generally be stupid, and they won’t be impressed with your joke that suggests they are.

    The same thing goes for Republican jokes, Democratic jokes, or for that matter Moderate jokes. If you make the standard “nothing in the middle of the road but a yellow stripe and dead skunks,” I won’t even get offended while I catalog you as stupid and shallow. There’s a whole rhetoric involved in reaffirming our own beliefs and our own side, and assuring ourselves that we’re really smarter than average and better than all our opponents. In general, it fires us up for the fights against all those other people.

    I expect such things will continue, whether I like them or not. When it all becomes a serious problem is when the fight rhetoric, the locker room hype becomes the sole way in which one communicates one’s message. That seems to me what’s been going on in American politics. I see it on both sides. Right now I hear repeatedly from conservatives here in the south (I live in a congressional district that went overwhelmingly for Bush in both 2000 and 2004) about how awful it is that people say the things they do about “our president.” But many of the very same people were saying quite similar things about Bill Clinton when he was president.

    Which sneakily leads to my next point. Criticism is necessary and essential. If I think the war in Iraq is a mistake, it is dishonest and irresponsible for me to pretend it is a good thing. It is right and good to criticize the government and its officials for bad policies. We need to have a vigorous debate, but target that debate in such a way as to persuade. I could suggest attacking policies rather than people, but I think that misses the point. What I need to do is attack people for specifics if I want to persuade people who can be persuaded.

    That is the distinction that I’m looking for: We need to express ideas with vigor, but use ways that have a chance to inform and persuade those who are in any sense open to it. From outside the conservative camp, I can say that Ann Coulter’s rhetoric is not all that helpful. It may stir up the conservative troops but it alienates even the “slightly less conservative” crowds. But at the same time I don’t want to see conservatives or liberals fail to express their viewpoints vigorously. Too frequently we see the alternative to rude attacks as being watered down statements that are practically meaningless so they won’t offend.

    I appreciate vigorous statements of opposing postions. I expect to make vigorous statements of my own positions. Nonetheless, for the most part, I view the advocates of opposing positions as decent and sincere people who do believe that their policies–stupid as they sound to me–are for the good of their community or country. That is what I’d like to see in American politics–vigorous, clear debate on specifics, along with the acceptance that most of us want what’s best for the country.

    I’m not sure that balance can be maintained, but I try. 🙂

  • The Definition of Reasonable

    I have great sympathy with the Libby jury, which now wants to know just how to define “reasonable” according to this Washington Post story.

    I have always wondered just what “reasonable doubt” means, and it appears that lawyers really have very little idea either. Perhaps my own problem is that I find doubt so eminently reasonable. My Christianity is a serious conviction, but most of the details are quite subject to doubt. I’m quite willing to say “I don’t know.” In some ways, belief in God is simply a huge “I don’t know.”

    But these little incidents with the jury system always set me to wondering just how valuable the jury system is at this point. From my layman’s point of view it seems that we gather a group of people who are too stupid, too busy, or too apathetic to be aware of an incredibly high profile case, then we put them in the jury box, and feed them precisely what the judge determines they ought to hear, and tell them to decide someone’s life.

    After I’ve thought about it for a bit, I generally come back to the conclusion that with all of its faults, the jury system is better than the alternatives. If I was innocent, I think I’d prefer a kind of expert panel. In Libby’s case, for example, we could find a couple of neutral experts on memory, others on jury and investigative procedure, others on administration in political offices. It seems to me that such people would be much more capable of making a determination.

    In its earlier form, a jury trial made it harder for a superior to pack the case. After all it’s easier to appoint one corrupt judge than it is to pack a jury. Now our concern is more with popular influence and with access to evidence that is not part of the record, the record being all-sacred to attorney’s. It reminds me of a chat I had with one of my college professors who was also an attorney, and had a part time practice. He explained his strategy for a criminal case, and a question he was going to ask a certain witness. I said that not being an attorney, I would hate to argue with him, but it sounded like the answer to that question would be inadmissable. He said I was absolutely right, but by the time that was settled, it would be in the jury’s minds, and while stricken from the record it would stay there.

    I’ve never been summoned for jury duty, something that surprises me since a number of people I know have been summoned several times. But now I wonder if I would make it past voir dire. Perhaps my definition of reasonable would not seem reasonable to the legal profession. After reading the extensive discussion of jury selection for this trial, I wonder even more whether we can end up with a group of people who have any chance of determining “reasonable.”

    Perhaps I just don’t trust “the people” enough. Actually, I’m pretty certain I don’t. The only people I trust less are the people’s leaders.