Threads from Henry's Web

Category: Christianity

  • Using Reason to Judge Revelation

    One of my objections to inerrancy is that it is impossible to demonstrate. Lacking a perfect standard external to the Bible and also lacking perfect understanding, we are unable to actually demonstrate that the Bible is, in fact, without error. Some apologists seem to believe that if we just apply the right set of standards to all the literature before us, the Bible will stand out as inspired and inerrant as opposed to all other claimants.

    The problem is that if God reveals something to you that you cannot know in any other way, by what means do you determine that it is true?

    Previously I have written that determined what is an authoritative, inspired source is defined within a community, rather than in some externally objective fashion. Thus if one wanted to compare the revelations of Christianity and Islam, the Bible and the Qur’an respectively, one would need to compare the communities rather than the books. In practice the books are defined and judged by the communities involved. That sort of comparison is a daunting task, and neither of these communities (nor any others I know of) consistently seem to come out well. There is always the “everybody’s human” dodge, but that only makes it harder.

    Christopher Smith discusses some issues related to this in his post Some Objections to Newman’s Anti-Rationalist Polemics. There his main concern is applying our conscience to scripture. For example, what does one do about commands to genocide in scripture? This is a question closely related to my current series on theodicy.

    Referring to Newman’s claim that scripture is not to be judged by its contents, but rather by its credentials (an iffy proposition, to say the least!), Chris says:

    The kind of thinking described above may resolve the problem of divinely-ordained genocide in the Old Testament for the Bible inerrantist, but it also resolves the problem of divinely-ordained unbeliever-killing for the Muslim Brother. And of course, Newman applied it selectively. . . .

    I would add that if anything God commands is right by virtue of the fact that God commands it, a variation on this same statement, then how can one possibly tell the difference between divine and demonic? This is a major reason that I often equivocate (or some would probably use less charitable words) on the revelation aspect of scripture and dwell heavily on the experiential aspect. I tend to see scripture as a record of experience with God, revelatory in the sense that I judge it to be experience of the divine, but not in the sense that it provides extraordinary information that could not be acquired otherwise.

    Now there must be revelation in there if people are experiencing God, but we have a very imperfect idea of what is divine revelation and what is part of what we bring to the table. On the key question here, acts of God which seem to be morally reprehensible, I would say that we need to ask just how much of all of that was what God brought to the table, and how much was the result of what humans brought with them.

    I would submit that even when we have come through an experience that we say has profoundly changed us, we have only been changed a little at a time.

    Chris starts his concluding paragraph thus:

    Reason, of course, can lead people to differing beliefs, as well. I do not claim that reason is perfect, pure, or easy to use. . . .

    Good point, and that’s why we constantly put things to the test, both of reason and of experience. When someone comes out and says, “God told me to injure or kill people for no valid reason,” we can know that it’s wrong, and by definition, if wrong, it is not God.

  • Christian Carnival CCXXXIV Posted

    . . . at A True Believer’s Blog, a first time host. Go over and check it out!

  • Who Speaks for Religion?

    If I went around my neighborhood asking friends and neighbors just what evolutionary biology was all about, then went and found an evolutionary biologist and asked him to defend the comments of all the “evolutionists” in my neighborhood, I think he would be justly annoyed. He would probably tell me that these people didn’t understand the details of the field and in fact that most of them didn’t understand the broad outlines. He would certainly define terms differently than they did.

    Suppose, in turn, that I chastise him for using eccentric terminology and not understanding the real issues involved in the field because, after all, this is the way that regular people, folks who haven’t been to university and studied such stuff, understand the terms. How dare he refuse to defend their viewpoint? After all, one must defend this activity as it is actually understood out there among the masses.

    Pretty stupid of me, no? Well, that’s a slightly exaggerated version of how I felt upon reading the post Saving Religion from the Religion Scholars. What is a “religion scholar” anyhow? Can I start referring to evolutionary biologists as “science scholars”? Probably not. I’d get accused of failing to comprehend the many and various disciplines involved, the terminology used, and the interests and perspectives.

    I’m not here to defend the particular “religion scholar” referred to in the post (nor to attack him, for that matter). That’s not the major issue. I would point out that I could always find one biologist who says really dumb things (I think Answers in Genesis and Reasons to Believe could provide me with a couple), and declare as a result that we should rescue science from scientists in general.

    The simple fact is that religion is not a single entity, the study of religion is not a single field, and the arguments against one sort of religion are not effective as arguments against another sort. You may want to make it so for convenience, but it really doesn’t work. I don’t get worried when an atheist chooses to argue against someone else’s beliefs and then demand that I defend them. I simply shrug and move on to more productive pursuits.

    Now most atheists with whom I have interacted have taken the time to hear what I’m saying, just as I try to take the time to hear what they’re saying. It should shock nobody to discover that not every atheist has the same set of beliefs, and not every person who has some religious beliefs shares the same set.

    It should similarly come as no surprise that those who spend their time studying one scholarly discipline that is part of the broad field we call religion will have specific vocabulary and ways of talking about the subject that those who are not specialists don’t share.

    To use myself as an example, I am often called a “theologian” by laypeople. I’m not a theologian. I don’t claim this, as some think, because I don’t like theology, but because I am not trained as a theologian, and haven’t researched or taught in that broad set of disciplines grouped under “theology.” My actual training is in Biblical and cognate languages, a field which requires no religious commitment, just a scholarly one. My actual work, to the extent I’m involved in religion, is popularizing, but that still doesn’t make me a theologian.

    Within Biblical studies and theology there are again many subfields. Just as I am annoyed when a “scientist”–a physicist, for example (with reference to nobody in particular)–claims to speak authoritatively regarding biology, I am annoyed if someone whose training is in pastoral ministry claims to speak authoritatively on issues of Hebrew grammar. Each person will have some knowledge of other fields, but we must each be careful.

    Thus nobody speaks for religion, and it’s even less likely that anyone could than it is for science in general. If we are to have dialog on these issues, then we will have to take the time to find out the specific nuances of our opponents’ views. If those hardliners on either side of the issue don’t want to do so, that is their loss.

    (Note: James McGrath has also blogged on this issue.)

  • James McGrath on James A Herrick

    There’s at least one benefit to regularly reading certain blogs, and that is that you get comfortable with the topics on which you trust that particular blogger. It’s impossible to check everything or to read even a tiny fraction of the books I’d like to read, so this is very helpful.

    One of the blogging voices that I have come to trust on religion and writing about religion is James McGrath of Exploring our Matrix, and he has just reviewed James A. Herrick’s book Scientific Mythologies. That’s a book that would quite possibly make it to my reading list, and indeed many of the things in the review show that it’s a topic I would appreciate. Yet the result of reading the view is that I won’t be bothering too soon.

    The review itself, however, is well worth reading. Words like “myth” and “mythology” get thrown around quite loosely, and McGrath cites quite a few examples of this from the book he is reviewing.

    All of which is my very long winded way of telling you to go and check out his review.

  • Horrors! A Plague of Bible Reading!

    . . . or so I might be led to believe by reading Christians Spend Too Much Time Studying the Bible (HT: JakeBouma.com). I don’t know enough about the pastor who wrote this, so I can’t say whether it provides an appropriate balance for his congregation. Perhaps he is plagued with church members whose noses are always in their Bibles causing them to neglect families, jobs, and service to their community.

    But I must say that I haven’t encountered many of the type of Christians to whom he seems to be speaking. Some liberals have a stereotype that sees evangelicals totally involved in doctrinal and Biblical studies, leaving no time for social action or for actually living the gospel. It’s balanced, I think, by those evangelicals who imagine liberals joyfully shedding orthodox doctrines for no better reason than that they don’t like the feel of orthodoxy. Yet I have actually met very few examples of these stereotypes. The overwhelming majority of evangelicals I know are very active living the gospel as they understand it, and most liberals reject doctrines for what seems to them, at least, good reasons.

    This post seems to imagine most Christians as being sort of like the Pharisees, studying doctrines and traditions in great detail, and presumably also tithing their “mint and dill and cumin” so to speak, while “neglecting the weightier matters of the law.” (That’s from Matthew 23:23 for you Biblically illiterate folks!) Perhaps someone could show me a survey or some other type of evidence as to where this is largely the case today. I certainly do believe many Christians neglect their duty to love others, but I fail to see where it happens because they are too busy studying the Bible.

    Perhaps I just haven’t been around enough, but I’d love to find the church that requires an admonition to study their Bibles less. Perhaps I could preach there and I could allude to Bible stories I imagine are well known, and not have to provide a summary.

    Brian Jones, the post author, makes some good points:

    1. There truly were no leather bound New Testaments dropping from the sky immediately after the resurrection.
    2. Christianity truly has prospered in times of limited literacy.
    3. Very few early Christians could have afforded the cost of a complete Bible in times when they had to be transcribed.
    4. It is quite possible to be a good Christian with limited Bible knowledge.

    But I believe that he has failed to truly think through any one of these possibly valid points. Let’s look at them briefly, one at a time.

    1. There truly were no leather bound New Testaments dropping from the sky immediately after the resurrection.

    Does anybody but me see at least one culturally conditioned error here? No, I don’t mean “leather bound.” I’m talking about the idea that one would have to have the Bible collected into one place before one could get busy studying it line by line and verse by verse. We have a prejudice toward collections and large volumes, but smaller manuscripts were common in Biblical times. It didn’t mean people studied less. It meant they studied differently.

    Further, he seems concerned only with the New Testament. While the New Testament canon was not settled for some years, there was considerable stability in the major portions of the Hebrew scriptures at that point, certainly the Torah and the Prophets. That made a considerable amount of Bible available for studying along the way.

    2. Christianity truly has prospered in times of limited literacy.

    I’m reminded of the testimony I heard from a Cambodian pastor. He told how they lived in a refugee camp along the Thai border, and they had only one Bible for thousands of Christians. One leader kept the Bible and they would all have times to go and study with him. Otherwise they worked from memory.

    We have very little tolerance today for long Bible readings, but in a time of limited literacy, public reading was a much more common practice. (By “public” I do not mean to imply large audiences, merely that a literate person would read to a group.)

    The importance that these people placed on the Bible is reflected in how quickly they translated portions of it into new languages as the gospel progressed. Again, they didn’t study less, the studied differently.

    3. Very few early Christians could have afforded the cost of a complete Bible in times when they had to be transcribed.

    Quite true. We should be very thankful that the Bible was preserved through times of such hardship and that it is so accessible today. It is a great blessing. It’s quite possible that one of the reasons we actually study it less is that it is so much more easily available. We would value our Bibles more if someone was trying to burn them all.

    4. It is quite possible to be a good Christian with limited Bible knowledge.

    Just so. It’s also quite possible to become a “good” Christian in the last moments of your life as you are being executed–witness the thief on the cross–but I wouldn’t recommend it if you have any alternative. Just because you can do something doesn’t make it the best thing to do.

    All this doesn’t support the conclusion:

    Most Christians today assume that to be a Christian means to have a personal relationship with the Bible instead of the risen Jesus.

    In this case at least I have met examples of the breed. They quite worship their Bibles, and fail almost completely to find the God of whom the Bible speaks. But they are not as common as the quoted paragraph implies.

    What we need is balance. The Christian life consists of many spiritual disciplines. Studying the Bible is just one of these. Bible study can also be a purely intellectual discipline. It can be practiced for the wrong reasons. But in my experience it is rarely those people who are actually dedicating large amounts of time and effort to Bible study who are actually missing out on the rest of the gospel.

    Most commonly it is those people who talk most about the Bible and study it least who also seem to practice bibliolatry–they worship their Bibles. Not really, you know. What they actually worship is themselves, and the ego stroking they get from those who believe they are studying their Bibles. They don’t have to actually study.

    A plague of Bible reading? Bring it on!

  • Free Speech, Appropriate Speech, and Communion Wafers

    The incident in which a university student took a communion wafer from a Catholic church instead of eating it has stirred up an incredible amount of controversy. For background I’m going to link to just three posts, which in turn will allow you to find all the information you want on the incident and probably more.

    These are:

    Those posts and the related links should give you a chance to discover what you want to know.

    There is one particular point I want to comment on myself, however, and that is the confusion of arguments appropriate for free speech as opposed to appropriate speech. What I mean by that distinction is the difference between actions that should be legally sanctioned, and that one might restrain oneself from taking.

    I’m a pretty extreme advocate of free speech. I’m opposed to campaign finance laws because I see them as infringing on free speech. I think pornography should be legal with the exception of child pornography involving exploitation of children. I think it should be quite legal to insult, vilify, and ridicule. I’m opposed to speech codes in most circumstances. (Private property and gatherings are an obvious exception, where people choose to come together under particular rules.)

    At the same time I restrain myself from much of that speech, and there is a good deal that I believe to be legal that I will not listen to or watch, nor will I facilitate its appearance in any way. That includes the majority of what’s classified as pornography. (I restrict this to “majority” because some people have some incredibly wide definitions of pornography. I will watch an ‘R’ rated movie, for example.) I don’t like excessive use of profanity, and make it my aim not to use such language myself.

    But I believe that there must be a difference between what I think is a good idea, and what is legal. That is a difference that is essential to a free, and thereby diverse, society. I like to restrain myself from certain types of insults to whole groups of people. In some cases I do so because I believe that such insults are simply not true. Most general insults (“all Muslims are violent”, “all Christians are bigots”, “all gays and lesbians are promiscuous”) are not true in the first place, and thus truthfulness alone is enough reason not to use them. Others involve simple courtesy.

    Now let me relate this to the issue of the communion wafers and the reaction to them. I feel this one personally because though I’m not Catholic, I am a fairly high church Methodist who holds to a “real presence” view of the Eucharist. In other words I am one of those people who thinks that something happens when the minister blesses the elements of the Eucharist, and I hold those elements sacred. I don’t believe in transubstantiation (though I should note that many comments have indicated an incorrect understanding of that doctrine) but rather that Jesus is especially present through the Holy Spirit. I believe they should be treated with respect, just as other sacred symbols.

    I’m not particularly offended by people who disagree with me on this, but I am offended at the idea of desecration. Let me distinguish a few gradations here. Speech indicating that my view of the Eucharist is stupid is inoffensive. If you don’t believe what I believe, you’ll find my belief silly at best, and my desire to protect some bread and juice as a bit ridiculous. I’m OK with that. A college student grabbing a wafer is a college prank. It’s a little nasty, but the reaction has been way over the top. College students will do silly things. I know I did. (Note here that a Catholic will almost certainly see this act as a more serious thing than I do based on our respective theologies and traditions.)

    Trying to get some communion wafers so as to especially desecrate them is something I find offensive. It diminishes the stature of the person proposing it in my eyes. Presumably that person will not care about that, but it’s important to understand my position. I have no problem associating with and cooperating in many areas with someone who despises my religion. There is a level of action regarding that contempt that will make such friendly relations difficult.

    I want to add one note. At least in my tradition, the fact that bread was made for communion is not the critical issue, so if you “score” the bread before it’s blessed, it would be a simple property crime, and one on an item of very small value. So in order to commit the desired blasphemy and insult, one would need to get bread that had already been blessed, which could get into some interesting legal issues. Just how much can you disrupt a church service without meriting a “disturbing the peace” charge or some such thing. I really don’t know and hope I don’t have to figure it out.

    Now my point here is that I have found some behavior that is insulting to me, something I find very inappropriate and even reprehensible. I can argue why I feel that way, but many other people will not agree with me. Should I be protected from such an insult?

    In a word, No! Barring some action stepping across legal lines in some other area (theft, actually disturbing the peace as opposed to existing where someone would prefer you don’t, violence done to an actual person) I believe the law should permit me to be insulted in this way. The wafer may be the body of Christ to me, but it’s a cracker to the law. The result is much worse if the law starts to recognize something spiritual.

    So what is my own actual reaction? “PZ, I think that was quite rude.” That pretty much covers it. And I don’t want that opinion of mine to have the backing of law.

    [And just to be clear these e-mails to PZ are both rude and illegal, and those who make such threats should face the full weight of the law.]

  • The Pain of Reinterpreting Scripture

    In several recent posts I’ve been referring to the relationship between scripture and evolution, and particularly how I moved from young earth creationism toward theistic evolution not because I studied evolution and became convinced, but because I studied Genesis and became convinced it was not narrative history.

    At the same time I’m looking at bit at theodicy, specifically the question of how a God who employs violent means (or at least appears to do so) can also be seen as a good God. This also requires one to look in some perhaps disturbing ways at how we interpret scripture. For example, if I take the Genesis flood to be literal history and also as a direct action of God, then I have a level of violence in God’s behavior towards humans that is much harder to explain, in my view, than the mass extinctions that occurred millions of years ago, or than the ongoing struggle for survival in the natural world.

    Why is it so difficult to take a new look at scripture and to decide to take some things in some way other than as a factual historical account or as a transfer of data?

    In my own experience I would list fear first. This fear is of two types. There is one’s own fear that in the process of looking at scripture in a different way, one may become separated from one’s community and support structure. I remember sitting down in Hebrew class and encountering some of the classical problems in the way we understand scripture. What was around the next corner?

    One’s own fear of losing one’s anchor is bolstered and validated by the fear of one’s family and friends back at home. When I was still in the Seventh-day Adventist Church, I thought this was a feature of smaller, more isolated denominations. Now that I am a member of a United Methodist congregation I have come to realize that this is nearly universal. Even in conservative evangelical churches that are sending their young people to conservative evangelical schools there is a tension between the way they have been raised and what they might learn in seminary.

    The fact that some young people come back from seminary quite thoroughly altered, and not always to the good, simply feeds into this fear. I would suggest that we look at this differently, however. Might it be possible that less young people would lose their moorings in their community, if that community prepared those young people to joyfully undertake a voyage of discovery rather than repeatedly trying to make those moorings more secure?

    Let me illustrate from my programming experience. I recall an early effort written in C, in which I had had a serious bug in a function. I worked on the code but found nothing that I thought should cause the problem. When I tested it again, however, it started to work. There was something in what I had done that had fixed the problem without me knowing it. For some time I was afraid to tinker with that function, because I was afraid that I would break whatever unknown thing I had unknowingly fixed!

    I use words built on “unknown” intentionally. Part of the problem we have here is that preachers and teachers do not talk enough about how interpretation is accomplished. To many young people about to leave for college or seminary, Biblical interpretation is a black box. They have read a number of texts and they know how they are supposed to apply, but they aren’t all that sure why. The good thing about the black box is that it is acceptable to their friends and relatives.

    At seminary, a professor may ask them to take the black box apart, i.e. to make it no longer be a black box. The professor may suggest applying a different black box just to get the students to start asking what’s inside. There are many tricks of the trade for getting students to think.

    I think that there is a fear here on the other side–the fear of pastors that their parishioners won’t sit still to learn what went into interpretation, or that they will choose to get rid of a pastor so irreverent as to tinker with the nuts and bolts of Biblical interpretation. That’s why so frequently even in pulpits held by preachers who are skilled in historical-critical methodologies, we never hear the method, even if it has been applied in preparing the sermon. The results, such as sources, dating of documents, forms, and so forth are presented as the products of another black box.

    These black box results are often presented with great confidence, and become, to the parishioners, the true meaning of scripture. When someone else gets different results form the black box, for example dates for Mark that vary from 45 – 85 CE, that’s disturbing, and people begin to wonder if seminary ruined the pastor.

    It’s not that easy to solve, because it would require us to spend a little more time dealing with the nuts and bolts and a bit less time merely exhorting congregations to live more precisely according to the interpretations they have always held.

    But there would be a major benefit. When you know what goes into creating a new interpretation, you also know how to argue against something that doesn’t make sense, and so instead of a journey into the unknown without a map, you can explore with reasonable confidence, always knowing that there are some landmarks, and if the landmarks run out, you know how to survey the territory.

  • The God Exception – Excursus on Theodicy

    Theodicy is a relatively interesting thing, and I’m really going to discuss a popular aberration, so those of you who have real backgrounds in theology can tune out, or critique me for oversimplifications.

    One basic way of stating the entry point for Christian theodicy is that there are three key things we believe about God and the world: 1) He is good, 2) He is all-powerful, and 3) Evil exists. These three cannot be reconciled as normally defined, and thus much ink is spilled in trying to work with them. No, that’s not the whole of theodicy, nor does it always have to be stated that way, or derived from this irreconcilable (or more commonly inconsistent) triad.

    In popular discussions the details are often bypassed, and we get a simple argument against the existence of God because there is evil. “I don’t believe in God because so many people suffer,” someone announces. Believers often fail to look behind the statement in response.

    The argument from suffering really doesn’t go to the existence of God as such, but rather to the nature of God. I recall having this discussion in a philosophy of religion class in which I said simply, “What if God is evil?” I think now I would use “indifferent” as an example, but I used evil. “That would be too horrible to contemplate,” said one of my fellow students. But the fact is that “too horrible to contemplate” does nothing to establish that something isn’t true.

    This particular form of theodicy has to occur within a framework of religious views. The triad is only inconsistent because Christians believe that God is both good and omniscient. One possible way to reconcile these is by simply saying that God isn’t one thing or the other. For example, a dualist has no difficulty reconciling these points. God is good, but he isn’t all-powerful. He’s in conflict with an evil power.

    I encountered this the other day in discussing the book of Joshua. How can I question the command to kill all the Canaanites if it is a command given by God? It’s a good question. Is there some standard of good that is above God, and if so who made it? If God is the creator of everything, doesn’t he get to say what’s good? There’s a whole new can of worms! But the more direct question here is how do you reconcile God’s action here as recorded in scripture with God’s actions or statements elsewhere in scripture?

    That’s why it’s so important not to interpret scripture based on any narrow selection of passages. For example, what do I learn about God by reading Ezekiel 18:32 (for I have no pleasure in the death of anyone) and then comparing it to God’s action in the flood when God is sorry he made humanity and decided to wipe them all out except for eight people and start over. You may say that they were all wicked and deserved to die, which is indeed what the story says, but the action still seems extreme.

    If we turn then to Job, whose children are killed along with many of his servants, because God allows the adversary (the satan, but don’t read a Christian concept of “Devil” here) suggests that Job can’t take it. They may not be 100% innocent, yet the only reason given in the story for them to die is to help God prove a point.

    I’m not going to dig into these stories much right now, but this leads me to a point I feel I can discuss with more confidence than a philosophical question. How does one reconcile Biblical statements, stories, and their implications in such a way as to present God as just and good? Can this be done? When I’ve looked at a few incidents, I’m going to return to the question of whether evolution actually presents a more serious issue for theodicy than do many standard Biblical stories.

    In conclusion let me give one warning. As Christians we need to beware of answering one objection to God’s justice by making God look bad in another way. For example, if one suggests that God was simply carrying out justice in the flood because everyone other than Noah and his family was irredeemably evil, we should also ask why God didn’t intervene in a more successful way earlier. When dealing with a classroom, for example, I found that when one intervenes early, one will have greater success, whereas if one ignores a problem long enough, one loses control of the classroom. Is it not possible here to answer God’s justice problem by portraying God as inept?

  • Christian Carnival CCXXXII

    . . . has been posted.  This time my contribution was from my wife’s devotional list, but I’m still linking the carnival from here.

  • Chuck Colson says Scripture Commands Limited Government

    Chuck Colson writes a guest column at the Christian Post, in which he argues in favor of limited government from the Bible.

    In it, he tells the story of a friend of his who bought some property to create a children’s camp for inner city children, surely a most desirable goal. Over the next two years, his friend was harassed by various regulators and bureaucrats with overlapping and incomprehensible regulations. The delay, he says, cost millions of dollars and considerable delay.

    Now assuming all the facts of this story are correct, I’m certainly in sympathy here. One of the major problems of modern government is the complexity of regulations as we solve problems with one set of standards by creating another, and create new federal jurisdiction, for example, where we see failure at the local government level.

    I would like to see the government forced to simplify things and to move out of numerous areas of regulation. In other words, I like limited government.

    But Colson finds a way to make his view the Christian view by claiming to take it from scripture. I wanted to say that he is prooftexting, because that is the best I can do imagining just how he might derive such a thing from scripture. In actuality, he doesn’t even prooftext–he just asserts conclusions about what is scriptural. While I can imagine where he might get these conclusions, I cannot be certain of the texts.

    He says:

    There is a profound Christian question at stake here. Scripture says government has just two objectives: to preserve order and do justice. How did we get from that simple function to a government that requires 18 different permits before you can build a new bathroom—or expand a campground for needy kids?

    I can imagine a hermeneutic that would derive part of that from Romans 13:1-4, but it wouldn’t do too well. There are numerous passages about justice in the prophets, but I don’t see the part about limiting the function of government.

    In fact, in Israel, where the prophets worked, there were regulations about what to eat (Leviticus 11), how to worship, even how to handle the blood of an animal you kill while hunting (Leviticus 17:13-14). Israel was, in addition, a monarchy, with only relatively informal constraints on the power of the king from prophets and sometimes people (the details are debatable). People’s sex lives were also intensely regulated (Leviticus 18), something that surely goes beyond the bounds of limited government. Oh, but I forgot. Modern conservatives think it’s a disaster if the government interferes with our economic freedom, but it’s open season on personal moral issues like sexuality.

    So in the context of such a government, just how much could the prophets be calling for “limited” government? It simply isn’t there. There are certainly discussions that condemn rulers for immoral acts, but still there is no limitation that says, for example, that the king can’t take in taxes and assign them to whatever he wants within the limits of moral behavior.

    But what about the New Testament? In Romans 13, for example, which I cited (and I confess I don’t know which scriptures in particular Colson is bending to his will on this matter), Paul is urging subjection to the Roman government, which was certainly not terribly limited as to its activities in the provinces, and only slightly so in Rome proper. Paul is calling for Christians to be subject to a government that was quite susceptible to not just overstepping it’s bounds a bit, but to rampant evil and destruction.

    So while I’d like to support the idea of limited government, and indeed might do so even more consistently than does Colson by including limitations on the government invasion of private sexual activity, I don’t see that the Bible explicitly espouses it, and in the only government directly commissioned by God the government was not terribly limited.

    Let me give one more example for those who doubt this. Compare the need to get permission to deal with wetlands, however small. That’s an issue that comes up regularly here in the Florida panhandle, and I think regulators are sometimes over the top and lack common sense on the issue. Landowners, however, also frequently lack good sense. But compare that to the sabbatical year and the year of Jubilee, when one would be ordered not to plant and harvest for an entire year. How does that relate to absolute control of one’s property?

    I absolutely do not want to argue that the Bible supports me rather than Chuck Colson. In fact, I don’t think the Bible provides us with any blueprint for a secular or religiously diverse state at all. To the extent that one can support limited government and civil liberties from scripture, it would be via the route of supporting the dignity of each person and their importance before God, and not by means of explicitly stating how government should function.

    I truly object to one major thing in this entire article, and that is contained in this next paragraph:

    When we go to the polls in November, we should beware of any candidate promising that government will solve all our problems. We need to work to keep government doing its right roles and no more, because if we do not, it will eventually cease to function at all.

    This paragraph follows immediately the paragraph stating that the Bible states the limited function of government which I quoted previously. Now we have it. If we vote for “that other guy,” you know, the one who wants to use government programs to solve problems, we are not behaving properly as Christians.

    Which is, bluntly, hogwash. As Christians we know how we should be motivated. I can argue with Chuck Colson or any other conservative about the means by which they would accomplish Christian goals, but unless I want to become a judge in the sense intended in Matthew 7:1, I should stick with criticizing the means and not try to pretend that my particular views on means or my particular candidate is the right one for all Christians to support, nor should I question the motives they claim.