North American Intelligent Design and Rule by Diktat

"F*ck climate science!"

A post on the North American Intelligent Design website Evolution News is apparently in favour of the idea is that the Smithsonian Institute is being called to heel by the Trump Administration. Here are some quotes (with my emphases) from the article & accompanied by my comments. 

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Evolution News: New Criterion editor Roger Kimball rightly takes issue with the assumption that correcting the problems with the Smithsonian Institution is a mere “footnote” to a larger agenda. On the contrary, he sees it as being of “central” importance. 

My Comment: What is that larger agenda and why is kicking the Smithsonian into line of central importance? The Evolution News article then quotes Roger Kimball....

Roger Kimball: The Trump administration just announced that it would be conducting a detailed "internal review" of the Smithsonian's exhibitions and curatorial practices in order to root out wokeness and return the sprawling agglomeration of museums to their founding purpose (on who's say so, I wonder?).  It is part of the fulfillment of [Trump's] Executive Order to abolish the racist and divisive practice of DEI.  [See picture] below.....

Click to enlarge.

My Comment:  My take on the subject of "Wokeness" can be seen here. (The term is used as an alarmist political rallying cry by the far right - whom one might refer to as the "unwoke".).  See also here. 

Whatever one's opinion of Western society's current malaise and its philosophical disquiet, it is in fact an ethos which has slowly evolved since the enlightenment (and ironically it may even have its roots in the Reformation with the latter's emphasis on individualism, self-determination and freedom of conscience). But, one thing is clear: This ethos hasn't been imposed by centralised diktat, but as the above quote actually acknowledges it's evolution was a gradual process. In contrast I read the above as very much in favour of our aspiring would-be-dictator Trump commandeering the institutions of education in favour of what is likely to be an imposed "unwoke" agenda. To the credit of the conservatives mentioned, they have shied away from the methods of diktat because it is likely they have understood it to be an attack on the hard won democracy of the Western world. It's no surprise that the Putin admiring Donald Trump "understands" the world of commandeering. 

The article continues as follows....

Evolution News: Denying human exceptionalism is intended to make human visitors to the museum feel animal-like and without special dignity. Though phrased in scientific terms, that’s as corrosive a message as the rest of the radical messaging.

My Comment:  Pointing out that human life is very much of a piece with the animal kingdom doesn't necessarily conflict with human exceptionalism. As I don't trust the alarmist assessments of the "unwoke" I would want to see chapter and verse where the Smithsonian explicitly rules out that humans are "animals++" or "animals 2.0". They may actually leave answering that big religious and very controversial question to visitor opinion; that would be the democratic way. 

Yes, that's right, I don't trust the stuff that Evolution News comes up with either. Some of its pundits are not what I would consider to be sufficiently competent (See here). I suspect that the above quote is working from a naïve "God did it xor evolution did it" dichotomy.

Evolution News: Arguably, it’s more corrosive, in that it attacks something — being human — that’s far more fundamental than being American. Social restoration, so urgently needed, can’t be accomplished if the public is consistently being told we are little better than animals in the forest. In telling us that, over and over, our institutions of science education train us to act like animals. And in that, they are succeeding.

My Comment:  Oh yes, the ethos that we are no more that animals in a meaningless and purposeless universe is corrosive of society. But to my mind the "unwoke" MAGA agenda is even more corrosive as it tries to usher in a government which attempts to fix "problems" by diktat. Aping the criminal and lying Putin regime is the direction I fear MAGA is going: Putin is to Russian Orthodoxy as Trump is to North American evangelicalism.

In comparison I have a lot more sympathy for genuine atheists such as this who have become captive to an all but empty philosophy and yet who have no intention of "correcting the problem" of theism by commandeering churches. In contrast does Evolution News, by identifying itself with the Trumpism, aim to impose upon us its philosophy of classic dualism? 

INTERESTING LINKS

1. "Trumptruth" trumps truth

When you don't like the news shoot the messenger boy

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c2dj217z2w6o

2. A creeping Dictatorship?

Step back and take it in: the US is entering full authoritarian mode

3. Trump Scared of Putin?

The global struggle of Democracy vs Autocracy and the weakness of Trump

Just one man can stop Russia's war on Ukraine, warns expert - and it's not Trump or Putin

4. Trump acolyte Bannon talks up civil war in the UK!

Bannon, like Putin may actually want to see a civil war in the UK.

Britain is on the brink of civil war, says Steve Bannon

Let's recall that Bannon has a favourable view of Russia's dictator.  See this quote from Wiki....

Bannon has defended Trump's ties to and praise for Russian president Vladimir Putin.[399][422] He expressed a belief that traditionalists see Russia as an ally. Bannon said they "believe that at least Putin is standing up for traditional institutions, and he's trying to do it in a form of nationalism—and I think that people, particularly in certain countries, want to see the sovereignty for their country. They want to see nationalism for their country" rather than a "pan-European Union".[422] According to the book War for Eternity, Bannon met Russian far-right political philosopher Aleksandr Dugin in Rome in 2018 to advocate closer relations between the United States and Russia, as well as Traditionalist philosophy.[423][424] Bannon supports closer ties to Russia to ally them against China.

To bad about allying with Russia against China, Bannon old son! Looks as though Putin has found his true friends.

5. I hope this isn't true

I've often wondered if Trump is his own man or if foreign powers have a hold over him. After all he seems powerless re: the Ukraine War. 

Putin has 'kompromat' file on Trump, says ex-KGB agent

But then there is this with Bannon taking a predictable view:

MAGA faithful turn on Trump over Ukraine policy shift

Mike Pence gives a warning....

Mike Pence has ‘no doubt’ Russia will attack Nato country if successful in Ukraine

6.  Stirring up Xenophobic Emotions

The following list of characters who have had a tendency (or more than a tendency in some cases) to exploit fears around unfavored "outgroups". They identify these "outgroups" as the people to blame for one's problems and discontent.  They use these fears to drum up a strong group identification.

At some stage it's worth me expanding on this subject more fully as the social exploitation of xenophobic emotions and "home team" identification is common to both political autocrats and religious cult leaders. Needless to say Adolf Hitler was the prototypical model for this kind of behavior.

Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Nigel Farage, Kim Jong Un, Noel Stanton, David Berg, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Ken Ham....etc

In Search of Spiritual Fireworks

I've complemented Premier Christianity magazine on its mix of articles before: It doesn't present a plastic, sanitised or sectarian Christianity but instead an authentic version with all its warts, messy contradictions, unresolved questions and raw tensions. So if it's going to be representative of the true state of Christian affairs then along with what to me is agreeable I would expect to find articles by commentators that I wouldn't necessarily see eye to eye with; for example it has recently published another article by the fundamentalist leaning R T Kendall (See here for an earlier article). But even in Kendall's article we find him candid and up front about one significant aspect of Christianity as we shall see.

The article in question appears in the September 2019 edition of Christianity and is entitled Word vs Spirit. As I suggested in my earlier blog post Kendall is a dualist and probably a "gnostic" dualist at that;  that is, he sees Christian conversion only rightfully completed if one has gone through some kind  initiation into the "deeper things of the Spirit". In my previous post on Kendall  I quoted a certain Jonathan Hunt (Hunt seems to be associated with the conservative evangelical Metropolitan Tabernacle) who comments on Westminster Chapel in the days of R T Kendall's tenure (See here):

The sad decline of Westminster Chapel into the charismatic extremes of today was begun even then. (See the Rev Iain Murray’s comments upon RT Kendall’s ministry here)

Although this quote comes from a rather sectarian source and must be treated with caution*** it is evidence of Kendall's charismatic credentials. Given this background it is no surprise that in the current article we find Kendall taking it for granted that there exist "Word" and "Spirit" versions of Christianity which fall into quite distinct categories: For him one can major in "Word "Christianity and minor in "Spirit" Christianity or alternately one can major in "Spirit" Christianity and minor in "Word" Christianity. His desire is that this dichotomy is resolved.  But is it really such a clear dichotomy as Kendall makes out?

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As in my first article on Kendall we find him once again casting aspersions on the church for its failure to live up to his expectations. His expectations are in fact predicated on his world view, a world view which filters his observations through a Word vs Spirit polariser. In his mind the church is culpable for not bringing together Word and Spirit. To solve the problem we must...

...all see the urgent need  for both Word and Spirit to come together as in the book of Acts. 

As is so often the wont of stern evangelicals like Kendall, he is not the kind of guy who minces his words about what he identifies as sin in need of repentance:

Those who read this (i.e Kendall's words) may - just may - be gripped to lament and repent over our situation and intelligently pray that the honour of God's name which has long been behind a cloud will be restored....there is no fear of God in the land or in the church....we are in a deep deep sleep with little or no expectancy and no great concern  or outrage over the conditions around us

Kendall has a low opinion of both Word centred and Spirit centred Christians :

Those [Spirit] people who run to church because they know they will be riveted by exciting and fearless preaching are hard to find. So much of what comes from Word pulpits  is "perfectly orthodox perfectly useless" as Dr Martyn Lloyd-Jones used to say. 

For Kendall large swathes of the Church are in the doldrums of an utter uselessness. People who love the Word are not seeking power and people who love the power of the Spirit are not seeking the Word.

But what does Kendall mean by power? To this end he alludes to the signs, wonders and miracles in the book of Acts. Fair enough; a few restored amputated legs, the raising of the certifiably dead, authentic prophecies and miraculous insights etc would be a welcome manifestation of divine power.  (Although Kendall doesn't mention miracles of revival where there is seemingly inexplicably rampart conversion in response to preaching). Things like this are measurably hard evidence of God's paranormal power.  But in a candid admission Kendall tells us that this kind of thing is exceedingly rare:

I believe many need to hear this message - myself included. I long to preach with power and authority. I personally experienced that kind of power and authority only once or twice so far in my lifetime. I have seen some miracles and healings over the years but very few. True miracles and verifiable healings are exceedingly rare. 

Well at least Kendall has got something right; we see very little overt evidence of divine paranormal power.  So why this dearth of miracles and conversion avalanches? But Kendall thinks he knows the answer to that: He blames their absence on church people who have failed to address his dichotomy. Yes, he's that kind guy and his message of a lack of faith, expectancy and failure is common in charismatic churches who seek to rationalise and explain away the absence of what their version of Christianity leads them to expect. In an inversion of Peter Abelard* one can hear sentiments very similar to the following among Charismatic  leaders:

How many times have you said, “I’ll believe it when I see it!” That’s the traditional approach, based on the ability to tangibly see things to know they exist. But from a spiritual level, we want to switch that around. The Truth principle is this: I’ll see it when I believe it! This means we see it with our spiritual eyes, before it actually manifests in the real world.

This kind of philosophy provides a ready means of explaining away crushed expectations by apportioning blame for lack of faith. In practice what "I’ll see it when I believe it! " really means is "I'd better believe it when I first hear it from my spiritual guides".  What's being asked for here is that the "evidence" planted in the ears by the these guides should not be the subject of observation and critical analysis. "Don't analyses it" is a phrase that has been used by Ellie Mumford about the notorious Canadian Toronto Blessing. These epistemic attitudes disenfranchise the Christian's intellect and encourages the notion that a sheer teeth gritting belief is what is needed to conjure up the miraculous when the evidence, apart from the vehement assertions of one's spiritual guides, simply isn't there. When the promised miracles fail to materialise then the explanation that there is someone out there with deficient faith who is to blame is likely to cause bitter disappointment, recriminations, angry backbiting and division; when what they are hoping for and expecting doesn't come about a witch hunt may ensue as they seek for whoever is stultifying the power of the Spirit. What these people are unlikely to accept is that manifestations of divine paranormal power are not under the control of human strength of belief and that the appearance of this power is probably humanly inscrutable. There are times when divine paranormal power is very overt and other times when it is more covert. Overt measurable displays of paranormal power is an act of divine fiat and does not necessarily have a link with belief, expectation, holiness or prayer because the plan behind it may be beyond our understanding.

Given the bitter recriminations that often follow in the wake of the kind of world view that Kendall promulgates it is no surprise to me why many traditional evangelical "Word" orientated Christians (Such as we see in the Metropolitan Tabernacle quote above) have washed their hands of the likes of Kendall and even go as far as to suggest that overt Pentecostal power is confined to the early days of the New Testament. That may be going a bit too but I'll say this: In my experience many Christians cannot be blamed for a lack of motivation in seeking that the power of God's Word.  As the saying goes the pen is mightier than the sword and seeking sensationalist spiritual fireworks before something is declared to be "in the Spirit " is going to underrate and devalue much of what goes on in churches. Word and power go together; they cannot be separated into distinct Spirit vs Word categories. Sometimes divine paranormal power is overt and sometimes it is covert. But Kendall's dualist world view prompts him to dichotomise sight and sound even though both are active information bearers:

Most of my own preaching over the years - I wish it were not true - has been entirely Word preaching  with little power. When people listened  to me they would say "Thank you for your word". That is what they came for, that is what they got. They did not  come to see anything.; they came to hear.

You can't separate word and power like this: hearing and seeing are both God given senses. Words are never empty and sights always convey a message.

But the absence of hard measurable miracles doesn't mean to say people don't have their own anecdotes of experience of paranormal power; it's just that anecdotal miracles have an epistemic distance which means that only those who directly experience them can imbibe their reality. But for the rest of us the human weaknesses for unreliability, gullibility and confirmation bias can compromise the value of anecdotal testimonies which report on one-off events and erratic phenomena. Kendall simply hasn't  taken into account epistemic distance when he has declared his sweeping write-offs. Instead he embarks on a blame game which has all the potential to trigger off damaging witch hunts and divisions. Moreover, the spurious Spirit vs Word dichotomy can take Christians eye off the ball as they undervalue what they can do, what they see and what they hear and instead merely mark time waiting for enough holiness and prayer to usher in those spiritual fireworks. They then become perfectly useless. Kendall is part of the problem, not part of the solution: He is imposing his dualist categories on the church. No fear of God? Really? Am I really to believe that, say, reformist Christians who are so diligent in their study of the Word have no fear of God?  

Charismatic gurus have a tendency to fall for a version of gnosticism: They cannot identify God's power in the everyday, the prosaic and the common place especially so as the church becomes increasingly marginalised from and irrelevant to the surrounding culture and its learning. So in the absence of measurable paranormal power they turn in on themselves seeking God in the inner life and in inner-light revelations of gnosis. The mass swoon for Jesus events then become the vicarious measure of power and an existential fix for an existential crisis.  But such events are far too close to trance like states and group hysteria to be immediately classified as authentic. One has to be cautious about these "outpourings of the Spirit": They resemble too closely the phenomenon of dancing mania (and also this: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-48850490) for them to be automatically and uncritically classified as authentic. 

Lastly we've got what is very likely going to be another entry in my false prophecy list: 

I truly believe that the Word and the Spirit are going to come together maybe soon. If Smith Wigglesworth has been quoted correctly, we are long overdue to see his 1947 prophecy fulfilled. He reportedly forecast that the Word and the Spirit would come together and that this move would eclipse the Wesleyan and Welsh  revivals and spread all over the world. 

Who knows; we may well see a display of overt divine power, but we won't see a coming together of Word and Spirit simply because it is predicated on the fallacies of a dualist world view. Whilst the activity of the "Power of the Spirit" is registered by dualists only in swoon for Jesus and mass trance  events you can be sure that the polarisation will remain in place; for many people swooning for Jesus  just isn't sympathetic to their personality and rides roughshod over their God given way of appropriating and expressing the faith.  Let us remember that John Wimber's "Third Wave"  never really infused the whole church**; that's in spite of the fact that Wimber's charismatic stance was more intelligent, more conciliatory and more inclusive than other charismatics before or since. The old divided order has reasserted itself probably along cultural and personality fault lines. But in the final analysis this may actually be a good thing: God doesn't keep all his apples in one basket. If one lot of apples go bad, there are still a lot of other baskets!

Postscript (19/9/19)

In the absence of the overtly paranormal (which isn't under human control, prayer or no prayer, holiness or no holiness) I can see straight away that Kendall's concept of a union of "Spirit" and "Word", will never happen. As I have said in the text Kendall's underlying dualist ideas are spurious.  What Kendall thinks of as a dichotomy is in fact nothing more than cultural and personality differences in the expression of faith; some people lean toward analytical and verbal expressions of the faith (Logos) and others a more mystical and intuitive union with the divine (Mythos). The fault lines here are  archetypal and can be observed throughout Christian history.

In my opinion what counts most is that different personality types and cultures cultivate mutual respect and appreciation. But even this is, I believe, a tall order given the human susceptibility toward spiritual conceits and deceits.. Kendall is an example of why mutual respect is difficult: The foible he exemplifies is that humans are precious about the maintenance of their own sense of spiritual one-up-manship and this leads to mutual badgering and the inflaming of mutual antagonisms. The irony is that Kendall himself is feeding these polarising fires and the harder he and others like him blow the more mutually hostile the opposing sides will become. As I have said below, although Wimber's "Third Wave" never broke the charismatic gnostic mould, the days of John Wimber do feel like a more reasonable albeit short lived era.

Kendall's article is evidence that the goal of some Charismatic Christians to "convert" the whole church to a quasi-gnostic version of the faith has failed: They brought no covert "supernaturalism"  to the church (as Kendall admits) and only succeeded in dividing Christians along personality and cultural fault lines. They would not accept that these fault lines can be resolved by rising to the challenges of reciprocal relationships and complimentary service. Instead they only succeeded in inflaming and polarising the differences with talk of initiation into superior forms of spirituality.


Footnotes
* "I seek understanding so that I might believe" rather than "I believe so that I may understand". Probably the truth is an iterative combination of these epistemic approaches.

** That may be because Wimber's new wave never really broke free from the old Pentecostal gnosticism. Since Wimber the "Bethel" brand of churches represents an example of a return to the old ways of thinking. See here for example. See also here for a reference to Grantly Watkins who is pushing Bethel thiinking.

*** Sectarian groups have a tendency to solve the problem of unity by drawing a line round one particular uniform (and sometimes controlled) Christian sub culture and then declaring it to be the one and only true representatives of Christianity. In some ways Kendall is only getting from the Met as good as he gives!

Genesis Literalism: Vineyard Fellowship

 Biblical literalism could look like this if taken  far enough!

My friend James who takes as keen an interest in the state of Christianity as I do drew my attention to a Vineyard fellowship's statement of faith and pointed out that the statement's article number 4 (See below) likely suggests they are Genesis literalists. He is very probably right, unfortunately.  We are both concerned about the rundown intellectual state of parts of the church as so often manifested by its embattled fundamentalist wing. For example, the claim that the age of the cosmos is a mere 6000 years is particularly absurd and beyond Christian academic circles this belief is surprisingly widespread among scientifically illiterate & gullible evangelical Christians who are spiritually intimidated by extremists like Ken Ham and his small retinue of tame credentialed scholars. Because young earthism has rather weak arguments in its favour that these weak arguments are tendered by "credentialed scholars" is a very important piece of supporting evidence for the scientifically illiterate rank and file who believe these arguments.

Below I reproduce the parts of the statement of faith that are relevant to our concerns. There is however one caveat to make: A statement of faith, however literalist, doesn't necessarily imply fundamentalist attitudes in the fellowship itself. In any case it is quite possible that the statement was written by the fellowship's mentoring organisation and that the members themselves don't use it as a way of sharply distinguishing the sheep from the goats, the outsiders from insiders, as a fundamentalist would do.

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VINEYARD: #2 WE BELIEVE that God's kingdom is everlasting. From His throne, through His Son, His eternal Word, God created, upholds, and governs all that exists, the heavenly places, the angelic hosts, the universe, the earth, every living thing and mankind. God created all things very good.

MY COMMENT: No problem: The above, I think, is a fairly standard folk concept of God's ultimate sovereignty and cosmically comprehensive creative action. However, I wonder if Vineyard would accept Denis Alexander's interpretation of "all things very good" meaning "fit for purpose". I suspect that they wrongly interpret "very good" as connoting "perfection". In fact they probably haven't twigged the difference between connotative language and notational language.

VINEYARD: #3 WE BELIEVE that Satan, originally a great, good angel, rebelled against God, taking a host of angels with him. He was cast out of God's presence and, as a usurper of God's rule established a counter-kingdom of darkness and evil upon the earth.

MY COMMENT: Satan's rebellion and fall is well established Christian doctrine. But has Satan really established a counter kingdom on earth? In his vanity he might think he has (Luke 4:6) and try to act like a king (see Rev 13:1-2) but given the totalising nature of God's sovereignty it looks to me as if there is only room for one King in the cosmos! How can the power of such a King be "usurped"? As Daniel 4 makes clear in the case of Nebuchadnezzar, it is only God that rules even when vain kings try to act like God. See also Romans 13. Having a view of Earth as a kind of dark satanic almost hell like place is unbiblical and cult like. See for example the following quote from a Jehovah's witness with whom I corresponded over some years. He expressed his opinion on the subject of Satanic sovereignty as follows:

Jehovah has allowed Satan to rule this Earth and set up governments, knowing that a bad government is better than no government at all (anarchy). But he does not approve of the various governments, in fact he says through Jesus Kingdom will do away with all of man's governments See Dan 2:44. (February 1982)

If we read Dan 2:44 we see that this Watchtower Follower is reading too much into it. This reading is encouraged by the JW's who see themselves very much as a holy competing counter-culture marginalised on the edge of the much hated greater society. If one reads Daniel 2:44 we see that it is telling us that God is going to set up a new kingdom in place of the old corrupt kingdoms - that isn't to say that those old kingdoms weren't God's kingdoms: There are God's kingdoms albeit abused by Satan and human beings.  Romans 13:1-2 makes it clear that God does approve of governments and in fact they have been established by the sovereign God himself:

Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves.  (Roms 13:1-2)

Typically of a fundamentalist extremist our Watchtower follower has gone far too far in his assessment and understanding of the Bible which he interprets through the lens of the teaching of his spiritual superiors in the Watchtower. The world is still God's approved kingdom although many abuse their delegated power. Given that government is God's government it must be treated with respect and not despised as Satan's domain providing pretext to be used and abused according to corrupt selfish ambition.

I see Vineyard's statement of faith as coming too close to the Watchtower model that earth's governments are a Satanic counter-kingdom. I read that as evidence of a reactionary response of an increasingly marginalised christian culture which in consequence sees itself as something very other and contrary to the powers that be and has difficulty identifying with the wider social sphere. This is the realm of Trump popularism which all too easily lapses into conspiracy theorism.

VINEYARD: #4 WE BELIEVE that God created mankind in His image, male and female, for relationship with Himself and to govern the earth. Under the temptation of Satan, our original parents fell from grace, bringing sin, sickness, and God's judgement of death to the earth. Through the fall, Satan and his demonic hosts gained access to God's good creation. Creation now experiences the consequences and effects of Adam's original sin. Human beings are born in sin, subject to God's judgement of death and captive to Satan's kingdom of darkness.

MY COMMENT:  This is the article James draws our attention to. Things start to go badly wrong here; see my reply to James below where I explain this more fully and also James comments on it: As we shall see a pathological Western Christian dualism shines through the above statement.

VINEYARD: WE BELIEVE that the Holy Spirit indwells every believer in Jesus Christ and that He is our abiding Helper, Teacher, and Guide. We believe in the filling or empowering of the Holy Spirit, often a conscious experience, for ministry today. We believe in the present ministry of the Spirit and in the exercise of all the biblical gifts of the Spirit. We practice the laying on of hands for the empowering of the Spirit, for healing, and for recognition and empowering of those whom God has ordained to lead and serve the Church.

MY COMMENT: I wouldn't say I have a big issue with any of this but it betrays something I have always maintained QUOTE: We believe in the filling or empowering of the Holy Spirit, often a conscious experience, for ministry today UNQUOTE: Regarding the latter I note this: Presumably given  "often a conscious experience",  it follows that the empowering of the Spirit is often not a conscious experience! As I point out in this blog post, Charismatic Tony Higton also admitted that "Baptism of the Holy Spirit" doesn't necessarily entail a conscious experience. Therein lies the rub: Many who seek of the "Baptism of the Spirit" expect it to be accompanied by some kind of epiphany ushering in a spiritual power game changer. This may not always happen thus causing disappointment to be internalised and suppressed. Moreover, subsequent to this spiritual non-event the promise of spiritual power is not always be very noticeable: False prophecies, failed healing, authoritarian leadership, spiritual spin, young earthism and prosperity teaching are all presided over by fellowships which claim to be under the auspices of so called privileged charismatic power!

VINEYARD: #9 WE BELIEVE that the Holy Spirit inspired the human authors of Holy Scripture so that the Bible is without error in the original manuscripts. We receive the sixty-six books of the Old and New Testaments as our final and absolute authority, the only infallible rule of faith and practice.

MY COMMENT: "The Bible is without error in the original manuscript"!!. That is often the refrain of fundamentalists; They know that in the transmission through history copies and translations of the Bible will accumulate errors if only small errors and therefore can't be absolutely error free. But for the fundamentalist mind anything less than 100% truth tends to register as nothing short of 100% error! And so there is a need to posit the "infallible original manuscripts"; (as if anyone reads them!). What they don't acknowledge is that this immediately tips the whole discussion of what is "God's Word" into the domain of human reasoning and debates about historical provenance: For who is going to decide what are the original manuscripts and by what criteria? Such a decision will depend on our fallible extra-biblical historical knowledge and understandings. Just what constitutes the "originals" will be arguable. In any case aren't the original documents the texts generated by the inspired writer before they underwent any copying? If not then how many copying processes are allowed before a text is deemed not to be original? Is the humanly developed understanding of information redundancy allowed to be invoked to show how it can be used to recover truth in the face of error? But worst of all for the fundamentalist doctrinaire concept of infallibility is that large portions of Biblical meaning are transmitted not via notational language but by connotational language; that is, text which is just a trigger or key opening up huge domains of cultural association; in this process the recipient is highly proactive in assigning meaning. It could be argued that only the texts in their original language "hold" the right connotational meaning because connotational language is highly culturally specific and therefore the source text must be packaged together with its source culture before any infallible meanings can be arrived at. If so then the fundamentalist mindset would suggest that our much copied and translated bibles, set as they are in our own culture, are of dubious value since it is impossible for them to be infallible. This is especially so because so much biblical meaning is derived from a proactive connotational reading, a process largely driven by the fallible recipient and his fallible cultural mental resources. But to regard the highly complex biblical reading process as too error prone to be of value is an absurd conclusion which naturally follows on from the fundamentalist tendency to equate anything less than 100% truth as nothing short of 100% error! The fact is our Western Bibles and the Western culture providing  the lens through which we recover biblical meaning are clearly fallible channels, but that doesn't prevent those channels delivering truth about salvation; it's just means we have to be little less epistemically arrogant about our grasp on Biblical truth. The embattled fundamentalist mind seeks to anchor indisputability & infallibility in a revered static object, but given that information involves propagation and a highly proactive interpretation by the recipient we start to understand that "God's Word" is much more a process than it is a static material object.

Hand waving jesters in the direction of so called "final and absolute authority and infallibility" are used by authoritarian fellowships in an attempt to settle disputes about meaning in an authoritarian way, completely oblivious to the implicit epistemic uncertainties in their position. These fellowships really do need a lesson in epistemic humility. Since the "extraction" of Biblical meaning entails information transmission, the resources of cultural thought forms and connotational processes entailing much  heavy cognitive lifting done by the human recipient, there is no room for the arrogance of infallibility that we so often see in fundagelical fellowships. The incoherent doctrine of "infallibility" is there to give embattled fellowships the secure authoritarian barriers behind which they can feel both epistemically safe and find a pretext to condemn outsiders for heresy. 

VINEYARD: #11 WE BELIEVE the whole world is under the domination of Satan......

MY COMMENT:  No, the world is not under the domination of Satan although Satan and (wo)man introduce much corruption; the world is under the sovereignty of God although that authority is the light touch of God's permissive will. This sort of article of faith is so easy to use to write off modern science in favour of a medieval fundamentalism and/or conspiracy theorism.

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Here is my original reply to James: 

It is difficult to interpret 4 as unambiguously young earthist, but I suspect that young earthism is the view they hold, although I hope I am wrong. However, I can do business with young earthists as long as they don't make it a faith test, unlike extremists such as Ken Ham.

What I do see here, however, are hints of dualism. Well OK, there is the dualism of God vs his creation. But superimposed on that by Western Christianity is a dualism in the created world. i.e a "spiritual world vs matter" dichotomy. Sometimes this "spiritual" world is all but elevated above creation. e.g. notice that in the Vineyard statement of faith it is not clear that the world of Satan is part of the created order: It goes straight in with the fall of Satan and his Angels without making it clear they must be created beings and that their disobedience represents a pre-Adamic fall in the created world order and who knows what effect that had on creation. Notice that the Vineyard's points on the Satanic fall come before the doctrine on creation expressed in point 4.  Moreover, notice that in 4 we read: "Through the fall, Satan and his demonic hosts gained access to God's good creation. Creation now experiences the consequences and effects of Adam's original sin".  Access to God's good creation? But didn't Satan and his Angels have access to creation anyway because they were also created beings? Hence there is no recognition that the fall of Satan and his angel  had any effect on creation or that they are created beings. There seems to be a taken-for-granted subliminal assumption here that Satan and his cronies live in a separate world and that they only had access to the created world via man's fall. Does that make them uncreated "gods" then?

This is dualism, bordering on gnosticism. This is where I find the origin of many of the problems of contemporary Western Christianity: I suspect that it helps motivate a young earthist doctrines. For them, matter is seen as somehow "inert" and often bordering on the profane, part of Satan's kingdom, recalling somewhat the gnostic ideas of a creative demiurge.  It also explains why Western minds cannot make any sense of the paranormal: "Billiard ball" matter is not supposed to have the properties such as we see in hauntings, UFO events, crypto-zoology etc. The paranormal starts to fall into place if we see the created world as consisting of differing modes of conscious cognition akin to the difference between a rational waking state and a dream state.

That the kind of dualism implicit in Vineyard thinking is an error is suggested by Colossians 1:15-18 where we find that Christ created all things and that includes Satan. 

I further suspect that there is a tendency in Vineyard toward leadership authoritarianism and the usual "holy spirit" Christians vs non-holy Christians dichotomy.

***

Below is James reply to my reply, which I include because it adds materially to the case in view; in particular James noting  "the absurd idea (occasionally posited in some extremist circles) that there was no death of any kind in the world until Adam sinned, as per this Vineyard quote" is very significant and probably clinches the case  that we are dealing with Genesis literalists. 

 Hi Tim,

Yes indeed - thanks for the reply.

I agree. I don’t detect any unambiguous alarm bells ringing for me here, but a couple of cautionary observations. Number 4 looks like an inferred nod towards a rigid Biblical literalism and a creationist doctrine. However, like you, I too can do business with folk like that, as long as they remain outside the ‘my way or the wrong way’ camp, and don’t take creationism as the exclusive sine qua non of Christian faith.

Like you, I’m also somewhat unclear what this is all about -- “Through the fall, Satan and his demonic hosts gained access to God's good creation. Creation now experiences the consequences and effects of Adam's original sin".

If it’s to do with the absurd idea (occasionally posited in some extremist circles) that there was no death of any kind in the world until Adam sinned, as per this Vineyard quote - “Under the temptation of Satan, our original parents fell from grace, bringing sin, sickness, and God's judgement of death to the earth” - then we are dealing with a ridiculous, although probably internally harmless, viewpoint, as it obviously isn’t true.

“Through the fall, Satan and his demonic hosts gained access to God's good creation. Creation now experiences the consequences and effects of Adam's original sin".

I don’t know what to make of this statement, especially the “access to God's good creation” as it’s rather ambiguous. This ambiguity is quite common when you take Paul’s obviously non-literal exposition in Romans 5:12 and turn it into an historical commentary - it gets rather muddied. Satan and all his demonic hosts are part of God’s creation too - there is a strict category distinction between God and everything else, including the demonic world, as St. Paul reminds us:

"The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together. And he is the head of the body, the church; he is the beginning and the firstborn from among the dead, so that in everything he might have the supremacy.” Colossians 1:15-18.

Given the foregoing scripture, it makes little sense to talk of Satan and his cronies “gaining access to God's good creation” because they were always part of God’s good creation to start with, until they fell through pride (see Ezekiel 28:15–17 and Isaiah 14:12–14). It could be just a bit of harmless doctrinal sloppiness, or it could be a rabbit hole into some more perturbing beliefs, but I guess we’ll find out in due course.

Best Wishes

James

Why Dualism?

Cartesian ghost in the machine dualism is a very prevalent philosophy of human nature: One has to be mentally proactive in order to be able to think round it, and unless a determined effort is made to unthink it, it is the default philosophy of many religions and the prototype of a wider cosmogony of spirits and matter.

In preliterate societies spirits are not just about ghosts in human machines but also about entities that haunt and inhabit rock and tree. In fact preliterate animism is returning to western societies in the form of neopaganism. Amongst Evangelical, Pentecostal, and Charismatic (=EPC) Christians the ‘ghost world’ is also an extended and elaborated affair that goes well beyond a belief in the ghosts encased in human bodies. EPC Christians envisage an Earth populated by numerous spirit beings haunting the material world and yet distinct from it. EPC Christians are likely to distinguish themselves sharply from all forms of paganism and yet there are aspects of their doctrine, particularly fundamentalist EPC doctrine, suggesting a subliminal connection with it.

Fundamentalist versions of EPC Christianity are never really very clear about the created status of Satan and the so-called spirit world. Anyone who believes the early chapters of Genesis to be a comprehensive literal account of creation has little to say about the fall and creation of Satan or of a spirit world in general, simply because the first chapters of Genesis say next to nothing about these subjects. Moreover, if one believes that the history of the world doesn’t extend much further back than 6000 years there is little room for the creation of a spirit world and its presumably checkered history. In fact in fundamentalist circles it is usual to believe that it is only the fall of man that has corrupted the world of created matter and not Satan. The creation Cosmogony of Christian fundamentalism, then, goes straight in with an up running spiritual world of angels, demons and Satan. Effectively the fundamentalist Christian believes the spirit world is uncreated and thus distinct from created man and matter thereby blurring the distinction between divinity and spirits as in the preliterate model.

Thus in some ways, then, fundamentalist Christianity is not so far removed from a preliterate weltanschauung. And yet there is great inconsistency here. The New Testament Biblical picture is that only God is uncreated and all else is created, spirit beings and all - see Colossians 1:16ff. The essential NT dualism is one of God verses everything He creates and not a spirit verses matter dualism; if pressed, however, the Christian fundamentalist will admit this. But why is the effective belief in a spirit versus matter dualism so prevalent? Why does it seem to reign supreme in the religious world? As a world view what is it trying to come to terms with? What is it trying to explain and make sense of? What needs does it satisfy? Please excuse me at this point as I swap into a mode that involves some anthropological hand waving as I attempt to guess the answers to these questions.

I think there are a variety of reasons why matter/spirit dualism is so favored and some of those reasons revolve around attempts to come to terms with the problem of suffering and evil (cf. gnosticism). Also, the left/right brain dualism of accountable and reducible cognitive processes versus unaccountable irreducible intuitions may have a bearing. But there is one factor that, in my opinion, stands out above the others and this is that sentient humanity perceives itself as standing over and against an apparently insentient surrounding world of phenomena and noumena. Preliterate societies come to terms with this dualistic discontinuity by associating sentient spirit stuff with everything around them and thus maintain a semblance of homogeneity in their worldview. However, for us in the industrial west the apparent insentience of matter has been thrown into sharp relief with a mechano-instrumentalist paradigm that sees matter in terms of the patterned behavior of insentient yet autonomous elementary material noumena. This paradigm has become so developed and successful that it now looks to have the potential of giving us the very opposite of the preliterate diet of spirits with everything: instead the materialist turns the tables and views human sentience as an illusion and an aspect of material insentience thus bringing about a different kind of continuity of ontology. This, of course, won’t do for the religious mystics who have simply reacted by reaffirming with even great vehemence their dualism and assert the existence of a competing spiritual world, thus throwing the matter vs. spirit dichotomy into such sharp relief that it echoes the Gnostics loathing of matter and a belief in a material world controlled (if not created) by a Satanic spirit who competes with God’s Spirit.

As a fairly conventional Christian theist I accept what I believe to be a fundamental New Testament form of dualism; that is, God versus the created order. But apart from that and within the created order itself I’m inclined to reject a matter versus spirit dualism. I have always been attracted to positivist, phenomenological and idealist philosophies, and believe mind stuff to be the primary ontology. There are therefore other ways of removing the awkward discontinuity between mind and matter.

A Hemisphere Short of a Brain.

In 1995 I sent a rather tedious article to the leaders of my church entitled “The Lie of the Land”: it related religious expressions to the left/right partitioning of the brain (Note to self: Don’t bother next time). The left/right brain split is a scientific icon that has entered popular culture and has become a rather distorted caricature of the actual situation. The true picture is a little more complicated than the icon suggests. However, the notion of a distinction between an analytical left brain and an intuitive right brain is an apt symbol and metaphor for a pervasive cultural and temperamental division, a division that I’ve tried to express in a thousand ways: e.g. knowledge verses feeling, interpretation vs. face value, head vs. heart, rationalism vs. fideism, Morlocks vs. Eloi.. etc. In my article I related this partitioning to the split in Evangelical Christianity between charismatic and non-charismatic. A mildly charismatic ethos now actually pervades mainstream evangelicalism; the traditional strict and particular evangelical remnant having gone their own way. The latter have a tendency to gather themselves into small puritanical enclaves who dignify their self marginalization with thoughts of being the protestant heroic last stand against the Roman antichrist conspiracy of the end times.

Since 1995 I hadn’t seen anyone else relate left/right brain structure to the contemporary Christian scene until I read the Book “Saving Christianity” by Hilary Wakemen. Wakemen is a liberal Christian who believes the traditional Christian doctrines that place a premium on a belief in the miraculous should be raided only for their symbolic meaning rather than any assumed literal meaning, a meaning that for many fundamentalist Christians has become a Shibboleth. Wakeman is what I call a ‘constitutional’ believer: Just as a literal monarch no longer exists in the UK and has been replaced with a symbolic constitutional monarch, likewise many of the literal Christian doctrines have been replaced by symbolic meanings in the minds of liberal Christians.

Liberal Christians are usually more self aware than EPC (Evangelical/Charismatic/Pentecostal) Christians. (EPC Christians often make a virtue out of an unquestioning non-reflexive gullibility and equate criticism with cynicism. In fact recently an EPC leader stated that he much prefers gullibility to ‘cynicism’). So I wasn’t surprised to see that Wakemen was aware of the left/right brain metaphor. Neither was I surprised by the ironic way she applied this metaphor: For her EPC, with it doctrinal shibboleths, is too left brain oriented! This didn’t surprise me because Liberal Christian Don Cupitt made a similar ironic plea against the traditional ‘propositional faith’ way back in the early 80s in his 1984 book “The Sea of Faith”. In fact Cupitt is so ‘constitutional’ in his faith that he is arguably an atheist! But why are Wakeman and Cupitt being ironic here? : because EPC, with its very ‘right brain’ swoon for Jesus worship has had a tendency to accuse the intellectual liberal Christians and their careful scholarship of precisely the same over emphasis on ‘head knowledge’ - that’s their term for left brain stuff! (sorry I can’t cite anyone here, but it’s something I have become aware of).

But there is more irony to come. The post evangelical, post charismatic emerging churches are also very wary of a ‘left brain’ Christianity, and are inclined to indulge in the same irony of accusing EPC Christians of being too left brained! See this thread on the Network Norwich web site where I had a brief encounter with what I guess to be an emerging church Christian. This Christian took issue with Network Norwich columnist James Knight (a Christian who attends the very Charismatic Proclaimers church) for portraying a faith that is too taken up with competing truth claims and propositions. Emerging church, with their touchy-feely postmodern communal neo-ritualism, are seeking to connect with the Divine with their ‘right brains’ rather than their ‘left brains’. And yet to compound the irony James Knight, in a later article, considers an authentic faith in the Divine to be over and above a mere propositional apprehension of God!

So everyone is accusing everyone else of being too left brained, too intellectual in their faith and blaming the poor old enlightenment for our religious angst and of “emptying the haunted air and gnomed mine” (Keats). The ironies here are exquisite, but all in all it’s hardly surprise, surprise. Religious leaders, especially EPC leaders, are hard put to it to interpret the meaning of contemporary science. Ostensibly science paints a mechanical picture of the world, or at least a world reducible to mathematical patterns of elementals: a seemingly a mindless dehumanized cosmic weltanschauung in which the mystique traditionally accorded to humanity looks to a spurious anomaly. Many religious and mystically minded people instinctually feel that there is something missing from this worldview and their knee jerk response is to retreat into the non-analytical, the holistic and the apparently irreducible world of the intuitive; In short the ‘right brain’.

For myself I have always been in favour of a) Understanding the conflict between ‘left and right brain’ expressions b) Looking for some kind of synthesis rather placing a premium on one over and above the other. However, I have always had a soft spot for a ‘nuts and bolts’ mechanical view of the cosmos (comes from too much play with Meccano as a child), and yet I believe the Philosopher John Searle to have a very compelling point when he suggests that the cosmos has present in it an irreducibly first person ontology.

As far as unraveling these tricky issues is concerned I don’t think EPC is going to be much help as long as it continues to glory in an uncritical unselfconsciousness. Although one doesn’t have to be stupid to be an evangelical, sometimes it helps. The largely post-charismatic, post, evangelical Emerging church are still on their honey moon with a youthful postmodernism and are not likely to be of much help at the moment. The best bet probably lies with the liberals: They seem to be self aware enough and to have no guilt complex or shame connected with intellectualism. However, the constitutional God of Don Cupitt is too extreme for me and looks to be cop-out, and a road to nowhere.


In some ways the overall picture daunts me in other ways it excites me. It daunts me because the enigma of the relationships between mechanism and personality, and between noumena, cognita and dreams seem to present insurmountable problems. And yet the whole scene is exciting because of the sheer mystery of it all. Mystery, like food, is for devouring; but like food there must be an endless supply of it and it looks to me as if there is enough mystery here to last for an eternity. “Man doesn’t live by bread alone...”