fish out of water

so far, work in the public sector has been a humbling experience.

i was close to having a 'niche' in my firm - becoming the go-to guy to do research, draft strong briefs, make strong arguments to judges. i won cases, made clients happy, and began to have specialized litigation knowledge.

to answer the call of service, i am now a member of a team that works on matters on the far side of the legalverse, with skill sets i previously overlooked. i'm learning a new alphabet through trial and error, and each error reveals my incompetence. i feel found out.

took a paycut to start my legal career from scratch again, with folks who are unimpressed with my irrelevant pedigrees. why did i do this again?

Midsommar

The story-line is overdone. I get it.

Once you get past the gore, cliches, and maybe slightly pornographic scenes, there is kind of an important message.

As in every horror movie, there are obvious warning signs the movie's protagonists ignore.

But what's unique here is the reason they ignore it. The professional mostly twenty something males are all anthropologists-in-training. They're deeply indoctrinated into cultural relativism: the belief that no cultural practice should be judged 'from the outside'. They're also motivated by careerism. They're too educated to recognize that a village killing off its elderly with gravity and an ornate sledgehammer is just that: a village killing off its elderly. Preoccupied with their educational ambitions, and led by their penises as much as by their obsession with neutrality, they miss the forest for the trees.

At the same time, I can't really judge them. I too am an over-educated (thirty something) male. I question my questions too much. I don't see the forest or the trees; I'm busy racking my brain to find a good quote to use in the conversation I'm having with myself.

These are my thoughts in between Good Friday and Easter during the pandemic of 2020. I hoped to find something more spiritual to say but this is it for now.

Payce 

Ad Intra: The Gospel of Cosmic Companionship

James Gray's movie Ad Astra is a soulful take on space exploration. Ad Astra is Latin for "to the stars". The film follows Roy McBride's pursuit for his estranged father, Clifford McBride. Clifford is a famous astronaut who spent his life searching for life. That search cut him off from his wife, son, and eventually, his crew. In a sad irony, his "mission" for life led him away from life. (SPOILER!) After a fight with his son, the elder McBridge departs from the station he called home and enters Neptune's orbit a final time. The once great cosmonaut dies as a satellite of a dead planet.

McBride's flaws aside, his desperate search for cosmic company resonates with me. I too, want to know that I am not alone. I want to be reassured that somewhere out there someone is watching with a friendly eye. I doubt I'm alone. We all look at the world around us and long to find a signal of reason. The conflicting pictures of violence and beauty drive us to seek, in a word, reconciliation. We want a vision that reconciles us to the harsh facts of the world while finding firm footing for our ideals and hopes. Yet for many of us moderns, the prospects of this search looks bleak. Camus said that man "feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world.” That silence is what McBride must have felt when he saw Neptune for the last time.


The New Testament attests to the human need for reconciliation. The New Testament paints a vivid picture of a place of justice and peace, where the wrongs are righted and where there's a place for everyone at the table. That place is the kingdom of God. But in order to participate in the kingdom, we must be "born from above" (John 3:3), and Jesus is the only one truly "born from above" (v. 31). The space between us is the reason to go ad astra. But the gulf is too wide. Anti-matter engines can only take us so far. What spiritual technology do we have to cross the infinite?

As we were not born from above, God himself entered Earth's atmosphere. He became born from below. "Since the children share in flesh and blood, He Himself likewise shared the same humanity..." (Heb. 2:14-15). Like Clifford, God sent his son (John 3:16) on a 'mission' - a mission to seek, find, and save. Athanasius sums up the significance of the incarnation in these words: "He became what we are so that we can become even what he is."

The gospels illustrate in unique ways how Jesus participates in our condition. In Matthew's account, Jesus shares our condition by re-tracing Israel's steps. As Israel did before him, Jesus goes to Egypt. He then is baptized, reenacting Israel crossing the Red Sea. He then wanders in the wilderness for forty days, recapitulating Israel's forty years in the desert. In all of this, he is sharing in, summing up, and changing Israel's story. Jesus then goes up to the mountainside, just as Moses did before him. You may recall that the people were too afraid to go up with Moses. But Jesus brings them with him. He sits with them and eats with them. And he tells them what it is like to be in the kingdom. "Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall see God."

Jesus is God in the flesh, the God-with-us, and he catches us up into his story. Because of everything God has done in the Christ, we no longer have to painfully ask, "Who will go up into heaven?" (Rom. 10:6), because the ruler of heaven has come down. As Christ's diplomats in this war-torn galaxy, we transmit this hopeful message through the airwaves: yes, there is life out there, and his name is King Jesus.

It is finished, it is starting.

While Easter is over, the new creation is not. This is one of the messages the Gospel of John is telling us today. The question for us is, where am I in this story? Am I in Christ, in the new creation? Or am I stuck in the past?

John opens, like Genesis, with the words "In the beginning..." - only here, God is the Word, and with the Word. This Word assumed a human body.

Genesis takes the reader through seven days of creation. John takes us through seven signs of Jesus, starting at a wedding in Cana and ending at a funeral in Capernaum. In both creation accounts, we are led to the culmination in the sixth day, when the peak of God's creation is revealed.  In Genesis, that peak is Adam, the first human.  In John's gospel, it's Jesus, who is the new human. Like Adam, Jesus gives names to people, is lonely, and is tempted. Unlike Adam, Jesus does not buckle to the pressure to be like God. Unlike Adam, Jesus does not see being God as a thing to be grasped. While Adam  became like God, Jesus became like us. The new creation reverses the old.

On the place of the skull are two criminals crucified. Jesus is crucified in the middle, recalling the tree of life planted in the middle of the garden. But the cross is not only the tree of life. It is also the tree of knowledge, for to know Jesus is to have life. And there, on the tree, Jesus invites us to eat the bread that is breaking, the wine that is pouring, to have life in him.

Genesis tells us "on the seventh day God finished the work." Similarly, on the end of the sixth day, Jesus tells us it is finished, signaling the end of his work. On the seventh day, God rests from his creation, and on the seventh day, Jesus rests from his. Finally, on the first day of the week, we find God walking in the garden in the cool of the morning. Jesus also walks, appearing as the gardener.

Here, the gospel might have ended. But it continues, and we must, too. As God breathed into Adam the breath of life, Jesus breathes into the disciples the holy spirit. He is starting something new. The first fruit of the new creation is multiplying. 

Problems with Penal Substitutionary Atonement

1. If Jesus physically died in our place, why do we still physically die?
2. If Jesus' death were enough for our salvation, why does Paul say if he were not risen we would still be in our sins?
3. More to the point, what did Jesus' resurrection accomplish? It seems an unnecessary add-on, assuming PSA.

The Euthyphro Dilemma for Divine Determinists

Is the pious loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?

Ever since Socrates' conversation with Euthyphro, this little riddle has produced oceans of ink about the nature of morality. In its modern form, the dilemma asks, "Is the good good because God commands so, or does God say it is good because it is good?"

If you agree to the first proposition, then you run into the horn of arbitrariness: if God commanded the murder of an innocent child, it would be good and indeed obligatory. It would also seem  that moral propositions do not express objective truths about the world around us.  Finally, it would render the expression "God is good" somewhat incoherent, as "good" is merely shorthand for "whatever God commands." If you agree to the second proposition, however you run into another horn: that morality is independent of God's commands. Unless you're ready to give up the Torah in exchange for the Tao, this is not a palatable option.

One effective response by philosopher Steve Lovell is that morality is rooted in God's nature, not his commands. Thus, moral principles derive their validity ultimately not from God's commands, but his loving and just nature. The good is good because it is derived from God's unchanging character. God commands us to love because we're made in his image, and God is love. There have been some objections to Divine Nature Theory ("DNT") but for now it seems to be the strongest response to the dilemma.

The critical assumption underlying the DNT is that God only commands what he actually wants people to do. A command is only good insofar as it reflects God's actual desires, and thus if God issued a command he secretly did not want fulfilled, DNT would not apply. So for a command to reflect his nature, it reflects his desires.

Can Calvinists avail themselves of DNT? I argue they cannot. Calvinists believe God may command X but in fact strongly desire Y.  This is so because God is the cause of every event, including every violation of his commands. Sometimes referred to as the "two wills of God", it has been a sore point in debates between Arminians and Calvinists. Jonathan Edwards:

The Arminians ridicule the distinction between the secret and revealed will of God, or, more properly expressed, the distinction between the decree and the law of God; because we say he may decree one thing, and command another. And so, they argue, we hold a contrariety in God, as if one will of his contradicted another.

Edwards then argues there is no contradiction between God's commanding one thing and desiring another, since where the two wills diverge, God does not actually desire that the command be followed. Since the two wills are defined differently, and only the secret will reflects God's actual desires, their divergence does not imply contradiction. I agree with Edwards here.  The two wills doctrine as crafted by Calvinists is not contradictory.

Nevertheless, by divorcing God's commands from his desires, Edwards exposes his theology to the horns of the dilemma. God's commands do not reflect his desires in every instance those commands are not followed (which is nearly all the time!). As such, Calvinists cannot benefit from DNT. They can't reasonably claim God's moral commands reflect his actual desires for human beings, when most of the time they do not. And since they do not reflect his actual desires, they are not rooted in his nature (since his desires express his nature). 

So then, it seems Calvinists face three choices: give up a coherent morality. Give up God's sovereignty. Or, propose their own solution to the Euthyphro dilemma. I'm all ears for another way out. 

The function of the 'remnant' in Romans 11

The 'remnant' of Israel reveal's God's continuing faithfulness to the nation of Israel.

I ask then: Did God reject his people? By no means! I am an Israelite myself, a descendant of Abraham, from the tribe of Benjamin.

As a member of the tribe of Benjamin, Paul is an ethnic Israelite. As a Christian, he is a member of the 'remnant'. He cites his dual membership as a token that God didn't reject "his people". As FF Bruce puts it, the remnant receives tokens of grace meant to be distributed to all without distinction.

Likewise, Tim Gallant writes, the current state of preservation is not to be understood as the permanent ideal; it is the means to an end, the bridge to a further destination.