Ten Observations that an Educated Theist Should Have No Problem Addressing
By: John Horst, Cissp, Issap
Tags: Atheism, Christianity, Morality, Evolution, Religion

I was a journalism student in junior college. Having grown up in church and having met missionaries, after finishing my associates degree I asked my pastor about visiting the country his family came from (the Philippines). I saved up the money; they provided me contacts who I could visit and stay with. There I discovered that college and above was taught in English and would cost me $0.10 on the U.S. tuition dollar to pursue a biblical studies degree. I did the math and was all of a sudden “called.” (That’s just how I roll… I hear the voice of God in the code or the calculator!).

Turned out the school had a Novell Netware network and they needed someone to look after it while the business manager was away for a year. They asked if I knew anything about computers. Well, dad always had the latest (which was the IBM 386 AT back then when I was in high school). One day he brought home a 40MB hard drive. Wow! We’ll never fill that up! we thought. So I said yes and they offered me tuition, room, and board in return for working on the computers and teaching English.

They did not have to ask twice.

After graduating, I ran into the same situation at the seminary in the Philippines I wanted to go to. They needed someone with computer skills and a desktop publishing background, which I had from my journalism studies. Same offer: Room, board, and tuition for an M.A. in Theology. Same outcome — they did not have to ask twice.

I later when on to get an M.Div. from Bethel University here in the U.S. But all this time I have volunteered in smaller churches, preferring to make my living in information technology. This is why if you look at my Medium stories you’ll see a lot of stories on tech and cyber security. I continue to volunteer in a small church while running my own cyber security business with my wife.

So on to Barry’s claims…

(One) —

But if the Bible is supposed to be the go-to source on how existence came to be, bold assertions need to be substantiated. Can any of my theist readers point me to where evidence is presented in the Bible that supports the assertion that a Celestial Being (“God”) created the Universe? I’m having no luck chasing down this evidence. Thanks for your help.

Short and sweet, the idea that the Bible is “…supposed to be the go-to source on how existence came to be…” assumes a very narrow view among Christians. It only appears to be a mainstream view because it is controversial, and on that basis, gets a lot of attention.

If we take a very long (in time) and deep view (among various traditions among Christians, Jews, and Muslims, respectively, over that time), we can start with what Genesis 1–2 is NOT. It is not the script for God’s YouTube Channel. It is also not a reporter’s magical notebook from having magically been in “the room where it happened” — or the garden for that matter.

Genesis is not the script for God’s YouTube Channel. It is not a reporter’s magical notebook from having magically been in “the room where it happened.”

It is a beautifully woven set of stories that draw from the stories of its time, but makes fascinating changes. (E.g. in the non-biblical flood story the “Noah” character narrates the story in the first person; in the Bible’s version Noah does not speak a single word until after the waters subside and they leave the ark).

The typical Christian view is that God has inspired these stories so we can be introduced to ourselves and why things are as they are. The Genesis creation story answers the “why” question, not so much the “how” question. Genesis tells us why things are as they are through a story of how they came into existence. To mistake the latter for the former all but ensures you end up getting everything else wrong.

Barry’s question starts with a correct realization… the first sentence is quite bold. But it is not a logical claim to be proven… it is the stage on which the stories that will be told happens. And God is the main character in the story. The other characters introduce us to ourselves and call us to compare our intentions to God’s.

(Two) —

Barry’s second question assumes quite a bit:

“There is no evidence that a super-natural source (deliberate hyphen for emphasis) is behind it or set it into motion.”

We in the modern West like to have a hard break between “natural” and “supernatural”. That is foreign to the thinking of much of the non-western world, and certainly foreign to ancient world views.

So,if we frame things in terms of “known and unknown” (instead and natural/supernatural) we introduce epistemology into the discussion. My personal theory is that the Black Death is what first shook the assumptions modern people had about how we came to know things. Prior to the Black Death, we knew things because the priests told us they were so. Then people died in the millions — including the priests. We went to them for answers only to discover they had none. I think that is where the soil was seeded for the Renaissance. But the idea that the world around us even had an “order” that could be studied and understood apart from the Church is not something we stumbled into… It arises from the creation story which frames everything around us as ordered by the Creator and for our good.

Over time “unknown” things we described with a religious frame of reference become “known” things because our epistemology has changed.

Before this we appealed to religion to explain what we did not know. There is nothing necessarily “unreasonable” about this in the context of its time. Then we experience nature dramatically and start asking questions about how we come to know things. And over time “unknown” things we described with a religious frame of reference become “known” things because our epistemology has changed.

Here’s a little interesting tidbit you’ve probably never heard about the Galileo affair: He was not persecuted for teaching that the Earth revolved around the Sun; Copernicus suggested that a generation earlier to little controversy. Galileo went further and suggested the Church was reading her Bible wrong — especially texts about the cosmos. Galileo was the first to posit what we now call “phenomenological” language… the sun does not “rise” nor does the moon have its own “light” — yet to this day we use language phenomenologically — we speak of the “sunrise” and the “moonlight”. This is what upset the Church in Galileo’s time… It is as if they asked him: “Are you a theologian???” (An aside: This history is interesting when someone questions the prophets of Global Warming and is challenged with: Are you a scientist???)

“So if ‘God did it’ now seems foolish in light of what is now commonly understood about hurricanes or a neurological ailment — a person writhing on the ground is having an epileptic episode and is not possessed by a ‘demon’ — why do you resort to ‘God did it’ for the Big Bang when a natural answer, if we ever find one, will account for it?”

“God did it” is not foolish in the context of a pre-modern epistemology; it is perfectly reasonable. Barry is assuming a static epistemology — which is probably where the foolishness is to be found. And it seems he at least recognizes the reasonableness of the question of how what existed before the Big Bang got there. He assumes, however, that there is a “natural” answer to that question that is discoverable. This is a perfectly reasonable assumption, but not one for which he can offer any evidence; saying that we may eventually have a scientific answer is not the same as saying we are certain science will eventually offer that answer. So we’re back to where we started; the known vs. the unknown (as opposed to the artificial sense of natural vice super-natural).

What we can induce from centuries of scientific discovery is that for every mystery previously explained by religion that is later explained by science, the scientific explanation provokes more questions — it makes us aware of more mysteries. It would be great to be able to objectively stick an exponent on this trend, but since we can’t I’ll just pick one: For every previously unanswered question, when science reveals the answer, we are provoked to ask ten more questions. As a result we can conclude that the bounded set of what we do not know about the world around us will always be greater than, and subsume the bounded set of what we do know. As a Venn diagram it is a set within a set; as the interior set of what we know grows larger, the exterior set of what we do not grows exponentially larger still. That growing set of the unknown is where theists like me live and think — in a perfectly reasonable way.

We can conclude that the bounded set of what we do not know about the world around us will always be greater than, and subsumed by, the bounded set of what we do know.

(Three) —

As to the “parochial” nature of Christianity and the possibility/probability that life exists elsewhere in the universe, as a theist I would not take exception to this observation:

“We’re made of carbon (among other things); carbon is common and abundant in the Universe; therefore, life could exist elsewhere.”

But then Barry jumps to this:

“If we embrace this idea that life probably exists elsewhere, it follows that you have to recognize the parochial nature of Christianity (my ten questions are primarily directed toward Christians). If Jesus came to Earth to redeem us and to save us from sin and all the rest of it, what relevance does Christianity have for intelligent beings who may be living on the “other side” of Laniakea?”

To embrace the idea that “life probably exists elsewhere” such as to have his conclusion about the parochial nature of Christianity follow logically (as he claims) he would have to show that the conditions for human life as we know it exist elsewhere in the universe. Science does posit the apparent existence of planets close enough to stars like the sun to potentially support human life as we understand it, so there is no good reason to foreclose this possibility…. But I doubt there is enough reason to go from “possible” to “probable” like Barry has done here.

But let’s back up a second to the central claim in Genesis with respect to life. In only one form of life has God invested his “image”. Oceans of ink have been spilled on what this means. But those are theological discussions… we are really having an ontological discussion about this thing called “life”. It is reasonable for the theist to posit some intelligent force behind the Big Bang. Christians call this force “God” and proclaim it to be a singularity and invest characteristics of a person to it. This is perfectly reasonable because this is how we experience this thing we call “life” — as persons.

If there are other forms of “life” elsewhere in the universe created by God, and he invests something corresponding to his “image” in one of those forms such that this form can understand its origins and purpose in terms of its own experience, then there is nothing parochial about Christianity on a cosmological scale. Our weakness as theists really lies in our confusion between theological concepts of God and underlying ontological concepts. This is the root of the divide between Jews and Christians on the one hand, and Muslims on the other. Ontologically we believe in the same thing; theologically our understanding is significantly at odds.

(Four and Five) —

The underlying problem here is how theology and philosophy have broken off as separate disciplines. Theology used to be part of philosophy. So if you had an older philosophical education you would know that St. Thomas Aquinas basically presided over a shotgun wedding, marrying Aristotelian metaphysics with Christian tradition to produce the western theological constructs we now know as Roman Catholicism. And, being from the West, you probably heard the claim that the Eastern churches (Eastern Orthodoxy) broke from the West in the Great Schism… Now that is a “parochial” view. It was actually the opposite, but I digress…

If you study Aristotelian metaphysics you will learn of the distinction between the “substance” of a thing (the thing as it really is) and the “accident” of the thing (the thing as we perceive it via the human senses). Now if you study the Roman Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation, you’ll learn that the priest’s prayer transforms the substance of the “elements” (bread and wine) into the body and blood of Christ. The “accident” of the elements remain the same — they look, feel, taste, etc. exactly the same as they did before.

The problem is the whole idea of a teaching authority arises from Aquinas’s adoption of the Aristotelian proof system as a “rule” for how we think about our faith. So now Aristotle has authorized Aristotle as normative for how I think about my faith?

Here is why I left Catholicism for Protestantism… Aquinas basically “canonized” Aristotle. Not in the sense, mind you, of making him a saint, but rather in the general sense that a “canon” is a rule. So I ask “by whose authority did Aquinas determine that Aristotelian metaphysics was true or normative to our beliefs?” Catholic thought appeals to the authority of the Church. The problem is the whole idea of a teaching authority arises from Aquinas’s adoption of the Aristotelian proof system as a “rule” for how we think about our faith. So now Aristotle has authorized Aristotle as normative for how I think about my faith?

Not buying it. Aristotle was not the one, single, perfect example of the image of God; Jesus is. Neither was Martin Luther buying it; he thought Aquinas’ hyper-formalisms were ridiculous and distracted us from the authority of scripture.

But back to Barry’s observations:

“To say water is holy is to make an empirical claim about something in the world. This vial contains ‘holy’ water, but that vial contains ordinary water… When a priest gesticulates in a certain choreographed manner and speaks Latin in front of a vial of water only one thing happens: Molecules in the air are moved and, depending on the forcefulness of breath and gesticulation, the molecules may or may not touch the vial of water. That’s it. Nothing else has happened.”

His claim here appears ignorant of Aristotelian metaphysics. Barry may disagree with it, which is fine — we have that, at least, in common. But he cannot claim the Catholic belief about Holy Water having some “substantial” property that is different from ordinary water, even if the “accidental” properties are identical, to be unreasonable. In light of Aristotelian metaphysics, the claim is perfectly reasonable. It is also perfectly wrong in my opinion, but that is beyond the point here.

Barry’s understanding is also inhibited by a lack of awareness of the whole Christian tradition, specifically of Eastern Orthodoxy. I have a perfect, first person story to illustrate this. My father was a pre-Trent, Latin Mass Catholic. My sister married an Armenian and the wedding was in an Armenian Orthodox church. I was present when my dad asked the priest one afternoon before the wedding: “What do you believe about the Eucharist?” The priest’s answer was perfect: “We believe the same thing you do. We just don’t feel compelled to explain it; it’s a mystery, after all.” (Me: Not having to explain it is, after all, the whole point of this thing called faith.)

Barry’s last question on this matter:

“How do you substantiate Transubstantiation? Or to be more explicit, how is differential diagnosis employed to determine that Jesus is ‘really, truly, substantially present’ in the wafer and that the wafer is not anything more than a simple admixture of flour and water?”

I think my explanation of the relationship between Roman (Western) Catholicism and Aristotle’s metaphysics is sufficient for this challenge. You cannot have Transubstantiation without a prior adoption of Aristotle’s metaphysics.

(Six) —

Here we have to go back to how we view Genesis and creation. Barry draws a relatively poor caricature of the Judeo-Christian idea of morality that really only resembles a highly literalist/fundamentalist view to define theism. (He seems to be arguing against 19th and 20th century fundamentalism throughout, not theism.)

Many of the ideas of justice and fairness we see in the TaNaK (Old Testament) are also seen in ancient contracts and codes from the same Ancient Near Eastern world of Genesis. But there are some remarkable differences: In the Ancient Near East if a slave fled his master, the community to which he fled was morally obligated to return him. The ancient Hebrews refused to follow this practice and this refusal was later codified in the Torah (Deuteronomy 23:15). So even while slavery as a form of social order remained, among the Hebrews the image of God was to be seen in the slave and they were to be treated accordingly. Obviously it took a very long time for the incongruity between not returning a slave and “thou shalt not steal” to reveal itself. But slavery eventually fell victim to truths that are not proven to us by logic, but are written on our heart and illuminated for us by our religion.

Barry states that:

“Broadly understood, morality is a human construct built on four things: reciprocity, altruism, principles of fairness, and empathy… [and that] morality is an ‘emergent property’ of evolution, a system, so to speak, in which we evaluate intentions and consequences, and become aware of the effects of behavior on other sentient beings.”

First of all he presumes a prior commitment to a materialistic view of evolution when there is a theistic view out there for consideration. Secondly, if you choose materialism, then you really cannot explain how “survival of the fittest” fits in with an awareness “of the effects of behavior on other sentient beings.”

So even apart from the specific ideas of the Judeo-Christian tradition, these concepts of reciprocity, altruism, principles of fairness, and empathy are seen in non-biblical sources from before the times from which the Bible comes to us. This means as humans we did not reason to them from a peculiar set of “commandments” (such as we see in the Torah). Barry is wrong, however, when he claims there to be no evidence that this arises from theism. Anthropology and linguistics are rife with evidence that human belief systems proceeded from an original monotheism (even if being rooted in nature) and developed into polytheism only to be pulled back and ordered into monotheistic systems in Judeo-Christian, and later Islamic, thought.

Barry notes:

“As Franz de Waal once put it, ‘Without empathy, you can’t get human morality. It makes us interested in others. It makes us have an emotional stake in them.’ It should also be noted that rudimentary forms of morality can be found with other animals. Think of the number of videos you’ve seen of animals helping other animals. You’ll even find a video of acorn woodpeckers cooperatively protecting a food supply. In light of the many shared behaviors we have with other animals (including the sharing of food) — why do you think morality is something handed to us from On High when there is no evidence to support this belief?”

Appealing to Franz de Waal’s work requires we ask ourselves from where we get the curiosity and self-awareness necessary to design experiments to see if our concepts of morality appear elsewhere in the animal world. But since those experiments necessarily require an investigator insinuate herself into the relationships among animals, we will not find an answer to that in materialism or science — which a priori presumes investigators insinuate themselves into natural processes to evaluate how other animals respond to variable differences.

To see what I mean, here is a great — and hilarious — example of how morality is not unique to humanity. What this cannot explain, however, is from where came the curiosity among humans to design such an experiment. It also does not explain the anger at inequity shown in this particular experiment.

To say that we see morality in other animal species does not lead us to conclude that we (exclusively of other animals) got it “from On High.” It means morality is a pattern by which the living world around us arranges life successfully. Antony Flew — an atheist philosopher who eventually accepted the notional idea of what he called “Aristotle’s God” — called this “low morality.” On the common foundation of low morality all human religions build their peculiar moral systems. Flew called these examples of “high morality.” But Barry is certainly wrong to assert that there is no evidence that this “low morality” emerged from an awareness of some sort of “god” — anthropology and linguistics provides ample such evidence.

(Seven) —

NB: The level of care Barry brings to his thinking is declining quickly as we go. He observes:

“What’s in it for God to go through all the trouble of ensouling blastocysts only to kill them within days or weeks (“God works in mysterious ways” is not an acceptable response), and because this killing goes on daily throughout the world, why is a woman’s decision to have an abortion such a concern for you when it’s obvious that God is the biggest abortionist around?”

Again he confuses ontology for theology. Ontologically most Jews, Christians, and Muslims believe “life” comes into existence at the point of conception. The moral significance of that belief depends on our theology. But that’s not the worst of his mistakes here. To ascribe the natural loss of the blastocyst as a “killing” done by God is a remarkably foolish conflation of what happens in nature with what is intended by God. This conflation arises from Barry’s failure to understand what is in front of him as he reads the Bible.

His failure, though, is understandable… The stories in the Bible ascribe killing to the command of God. But it is only the hyper-literal approach of 19th and 20th century fundamentalism that tries to explain away the moral offense a theist rightly should feel. Far more common is an approach which understands that we are reading the stories of the people who did these things. That “God commanded” these things is how they interpreted what happened and why. Whether God capriciously purposed the slaughters we read about cannot be understood apart from the larger purpose of the stories. We can never lose sight of the fact that this purpose has a scope — “the heavens and the earth” — which is told to us right from the beginning.

If we insist on imposing the relative moral clarity the whole story of the Bible provides us on the earliest stories of the Hebrew people we will end up having our rightful sense of offense obscure what is right in front of us. The two initial genealogies of Genesis show us that there is a genealogy of violence (the lineage of Cain) and a genealogy of redemption (that of Seth). The Flood story shows us that the genealogy of violence had gained what was almost a final upper hand — essentially foreclosing God’s intent to redeem the heavens and the earth. The logic of the Flood flows from this… as does the logic of all subsequent violence we see the Hebrew people reason as being “commanded by God”. The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, for example, explicitly alludes to the story of the Flood in such a way as to help us understand God’s ultimate purpose.

That we are offended by the violence of some biblical stories only further shows that our moral sensibilities do not exclusively come down from on high.

That we are offended by this only further shows that our moral sensibilities do not come exclusively down from on high. And I am not sure it is possible for us who have the benefit of looking back on the whole story to reconcile our offense other than to postulate that if the “genealogy of violence” overcomes the “genealogy of redemption” God’s purpose in the stories will be overthrown. This is neither a morally nor theologically satisfying way of looking at it. But it makes sense of the stories that are right in front of us — if we will allow them to be what they are and not make them into fodder for an argument against the peculiarities of fundamentalism.

But back to abortion… Personally, understanding the larger story our Bible tells us as a story of God’s intentions vice our own, and of the “genealogy of violence” vs. the “genealogy of redemption”, it seems to me that a way forward on this issue would be to recognize that it is a form of violence for a woman to be forced into child bearing. But it is also a violence done to the child to terminate the pregnancy. This presumes that we agree that the unborn child is a human person in and of him or herself. This belief arises from an ontological idea of human existence.

But now we have to weigh two forms of violence against each other. So let’s say the woman takes a “morning after” pill. The result is her womb does not make a place for the blastocyst. It is expelled and a life has been “taken”. Let’s say she was raped (yet another form of violence against her). When we weigh the violence done to the unborn life against the violence done to the woman, the violence against the woman is manifestly greater than the violence done to a newly forming person well before that person has the self-awareness necessary for us to say he or she has “suffered”. This is also a violence done to the culture, and we see what happens when we allow this — women end up in back alleys at the mercy of quacks.

This does not necessarily make very early term abortions morally “acceptable” to me. But if I step back and realize the compulsion to have every logical i dotted and t crossed is unique both in western and modern thought, I realize that a mature Christian point of view has to be willing to be uncomfortable with the results of weighing these two forms of violence like this, and with considering the violence done to the culture.

If, on the other hand, we get to late term pregnancies, the picture is very different. Now, without a doubt, the unborn child has the self-awareness for us to have to grapple with his or her suffering. The violence to the child is, to me, manifestly greater than that done to the woman. And the violence done to the culture is as well, as we watch someone obviously a person (in any sense of that word that is meaningful and consistent) who is utterly defenseless have their life brutally and painfully taken from them.

I would be willing to live with the moral discomfort of early term abortions which minimize the violence done both to the woman and to the culture if my pro-choice neighbor will agree with me that the unborn child is a human being and that every effort is to be made to prevent the terrible violence of late term abortions. Not every moral question here is answered to my western, modern philosophical sensibilities. But the balance in favor of minimizing violence with a preference for a redemptive culture of life is something I find consistent with the moral ethos of the stories of the Bible — from front to back.

(Eight) —

Once again Barry conflates “theism” with an interpretation that is peculiar to 19th and 20th century fundamentalism. But I am going to wait until after #9 to address this. You’ll see why.

(Nine) — Barry questions:

“I’ve been told time and again that God loves me. If that’s the case, why did God create a celestial torture chamber?”

Again he is missing the distinction between ontology and theology. But to be honest, he is also the victim of another example of peculiarly modern and western ideas of evangelism. Personally, I grew up in the church traditions of people like Billy Graham, can recite to you what we call the “four spiritual laws,” and have actually passed out those “tracts” in my youth. It’s not that the claim “God loves you” is false. The problem is it is cheap. They are three words which anyone can say to anyone else. They are cheap and all but meaningless when they are merely a prelude to an argument as to why you “need to be saved.”

It’s not that the claim “God loves you” is false. The problem is it is cheap. They are three words which anyone can say to anyone else.

The harder thing to do is to “show” this rather than “tell” it. It goes, again, to our relatively poor theology in that we do not understand that if we do not have a robust idea about what it means to be the image of God in our world, our words are all but empty. This is, again, an artifact of modern western Christian thought — not of “theism”. We (in the west) pit the language of evangelism against the language of orthodoxy as competitors to each other. Both end up losing when we do this.

The early church in the Roman empire actually did very little “preaching” (and if they did, it was very quiet and not public). Instead they simply lived out their beliefs to the point that secular writers even took note. Later, the first churches would come together at the “crossroads” (literally “synod”) and discuss what they had come to believe about God. It was not an effort of one to prove another wrong… It was an effort to determine what all Christians agreed on. If extended debate ensued, they would deliberately set the matter aside for future discussions. The belief was that God’s truth is not necessarily obvious on its face, but it was obtainable by mankind with patient dialog in good faith with God and with each other. The “creeds” came from this process. By studiously avoiding the need to be “right” one over another they preserved a unified message, lest their open disagreements pollute that message in the minds of those who did not believe. The idea that the creed expressed the “catholic” faith used that word in its original, lower-case sense: universal.

It all worked great until the folks in Rome decided someone had to be “right”. This was an Aristotelian box they created for themselves, not something germane to the Christian faith or even to theism more broadly. The East put up with this for only so long until a relatively obscure theological idea was forced into a creed by fiat from Rome. The East had enough of this theology by fiat and refused to accept it. Rome went on its own “magisterial” way and the East continued on with the original tradition of theology by consensus.

If you ask an Eastern Orthodox Christian if they are “saved” they will almost certainly respond with something like “I am being saved, I am saved, and I will be saved.” It is a process for them of attending to the image of God and understanding that he created us so that he would be present in his world in us.

So what about this thing called “Hell”. Consider Barry’s observations about reciprocity as part of morality. When we see a lack of reciprocity we are offended. Let’s assume for the sake of discussion that Barry’s ontological materialism ends up being wrong — that there is more to our existence and awareness than this material life. But what if we then see that those who chose the genealogy of violence over the genealogy of redemption get treated the same? If we model this inequity, even among other animals, we see it provokes an angry response. (Just like Franz de Waal’s Capuchin monkeys!)

So why would we be offended by the idea of an angry God? He has created the world, and us in it, that we would be his image in it as a means to accomplishing redemption, and this means seeing the image of God in each other. But some choose not to — they are represented in the story by the genealogy of violence. Why does it bother us that God would ultimately treat them different than those who choose what is represented in the genealogy of redemption? To the latter go rewards; to the former punishment. This is perfectly normal and moral in nature… Why is it otherwise when thinking about nature’s god?

Barry’s “celestial torture chamber” really bears more resemblance to Dante’s Inferno than to anything he reads in the Bible. The theologies we find in the earliest stories merely imagine “Sheol” — a place separated from the presence of God, which would have been recognized as being in the temple. The worst possible form of death for them was to drown in the sea because their descendants would have no place at which to remember them and no place of proximity to the temple. A peaceful (as opposed to violent) form of death was to be “gathered to their kin” in a family grave with proximity to the temple. The idea of a “place” of punishment does not develop until much later but is firmly confirmed by Jesus in the Gospels.

This is one of those things it seems looks dramatically different from a theistic perspective of faith vs. a perspective of materialism. To a materialistic perspective it is inconceivable that a God that “loves me” would leave me in a place of eternal punishment. To a theistic perspective of faith it is inconceivable that a God who “loves me” would treat those who chose to identify with the genealogy of violence the same as he would treat me, who has chosen to identify with the genealogy of redemption.

(Eight — Reprise)

Only now that I have addressed the theological background on Sheol and the fear of dying at sea can Barry understand the Jonah story. Here is another example of the peculiar motivations of the West. To understand this you need to first realize that the very earliest Christians had a vexing problem. They considered the Hebrew Bible as part of their sacred scriptures. But they saw the Jewish leaders of their time as very political. The apostles of Jesus had originally been much the same way. St. Luke’s “Acts of the Apostles” actually reprises the end of his Gospel account by noting how they asked a very political question: “Will you now return the kingdom to Israel?”

Jesus’ answer was firm: it was not for them to know the dates, times, or seasons. It was for them to wait for an empowerment (the Holy Spirit — this is also what moved me away from Catholicism. This is where I find the “Real Presence”) and then would go out and proclaim the good news. This is something Christians have never fully shaken off — the idea that there is a political outcome of one sort or another to promote.

So the early church fathers (mainly in Alexandria of Egypt) wanted to maintain a political separation from Judaism but also wanted to maintain the Hebrew Bible as scripture. How to solve this? They picked off a technique the Greek philosophers of Alexandria used to reinterpret Greek mythology; they allegorized. Jonah was a ‘type’ of Jesus. Even Jesus is heard referring to the Jonah story. 19th/20th century fundamentalism thinks this validates a literal interpretation. But when you understand the underlying way the Hebrews told their stories, no such thing is necessary.

Jesus engages the literary imagination of his day. Jonah was three days in the belly of the whale. Jesus will be three days in the grave. As the whale expelled Jonah the grave will expel Jesus. And at the end, the people of Nineveh will rise up and condemn the people of Jesus’ time for not believing, where they believed the prophet and repented. The allusion to death at sea — and how terrible that was in their imagination — makes this an amazingly powerful story. It is the literary imagination of Jesus’ audience — not whether this should be taken as literally true — that should matter to us as readers today.

But this gets us back to the matter of reciprocity. If God did create the heavens and the earth, and if he created it for our good, that we would conserve this good by attending to being his image in it, and if some choose not to do so and others choose to do so, why does it bother Barry that God would be angry with — and punish — those who reject what he has shown them? Again, we see it everywhere in nature.

(Ten) —

“‘The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.’ That’s a great line from The Usual Suspects.”

No, that idea actually comes more from C.S. Lewis and The Screwtape Letters. The Usual Suspects is a cheap parody. Barry has, though, shown some of the likely provenance even before C.S. Lewis.

“Satan has been referred to as The Great Deceiver (Revelation 13: 13–14 and Revelation 19:20). Seeing that’s the case, how do you know God is not Satan? Think it through. If Satan is The Great Deceiver, it means Satan could be pretending to be God! Right?”

Ten Questions a Theist Cannot Answer? This one is so easy I am almost embarrassed.

The serpent, as a character in the story of Genesis, is later identified with Satan. As a character, it reveals the fundamentally anti-God perspective. God counsels against eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil lest Adam and Eve die. The serpent (I’ll get to this matter of a snake speaking in a moment) counters by denying that there are consequences of so eating. The serpent then says the command was given because God wanted to withhold something from humanity — that knowledge of good and evil.

The first telling of the creation story very clearly states that God’s creation was good, and that the goodness of that creation was complete (with one exception we see later). The second telling — where we start seeing the “LORD God” — is where we see that it was “not good” for man to be alone. But that awareness is shown to us in Adam coming to his own realization that there was no partner found suitable for him. So God completes creation in a very personal and intimate sense (in Genesis 1 completion was in a cosmic sense) by creating woman.

The way to know whether Satan is pretending to be God is amusingly simple. If the message is that God has created you to be his image, and that he has provided all good things needful for you to be his image in this world, and that His intentions for you and your place in his world are clear — that you would be of the genealogy of redemption and participate is his work redeeming the heavens and the earth — then it seems pretty clear to me that that message conforms to the story.

The story of the serpent in Genesis engages the literary imagination of its audience. Only it tells of life coming from God, not from a plant. And it takes the serpent from the ancient stories and actually makes it into a character in the story who has a perspective.

It is only the peculiarities of fundamentalism that insist that the serpent actually spoke. The ancient stories outside of the Bible tell of a man seeking eternal life. He goes east (because the sun rose in the east, thus it was thought you would go east looking for life — it’s also why the Garden is to the east) and discovers a fountain of youth. He dives to the bottom and finds the plant that will convey to him eternal life. He comes to the surface and later sets the plant aside and goes to bathe. Lo and behold, a serpent comes along and steals the plant, and along with it, eternal life!

So the story of the serpent in Genesis engages the literary imagination of its audience. Only it tells of life coming from God, not from a plant. And it takes the serpent from the ancient stories and actually makes it into a character in the story who has a perspective. In Hebrew storytelling dialog is where we learn of the perspective of the characters, so it should be no surprise that the serpent speaks. And when it does, the anti-God, adversarial, and deceptive perspective is revealed to us in the story!

I have no doubt there are those who interpret Christianity for their own gain. I have been around long enough to see the good, the bad, and the ugly in our church circles. If I am listening to someone claiming to teach Christianity who points me in a direction which places anything in the way of me seeing God’s image where he has created it to be seen — in the mirror and then in my neighbor — I’ll simply set that aside as the idol that it is and move along as a committed theist.

This is a very peaceful place to be. Needing to have every modern western philosophical i dotted and t crossed is quite a bit more turbulent. I would pray peace, not turbulence, on Barry as my simple way of being God’s image as I write.