A friend and former student wrote recently of having her heart broken by a man who had told her he loved her and wanted to make a life with her.

“Why would God allow me to be hurt like this?” she understandably wondered. “I’m not a kid, not foolish in relationships, said and did all the things I thought I was supposed to say and do, and out of the blue he dumps me. How can such a thing be part of God’s good plan?”

So here’s some of what I replied, which some of you will recognize is the perspective I outline in my book on the problem of evil (Can God Be Trusted?) and in my book on our calling in the world (Making the Best of It):

I believe that God does indeed “work all things together for good” (Rom. 8:28). But that oft-quoted Scripture needs to be understood carefully.

God works with the world as it is, and while he moves among us and in us to achieve his purposes, he does so in a world he created in which (for good reason) people are free to do at least a certain amount of mischief, choose a certain amount of wrong choices, and prevent a certain amount of “optimality” in their own lives and in the lives of others.

In this context, God himself makes the best of things. We therefore can trust that there is no better way for him to direct our lives than he is doing as we trust and obey him.

But we don’t have to believe that everything is as good as it would have been had people not made bad choices—us or others. For part of God’s sovereign, good, and wise plan is to allow for a certain amount of “slippage,” as I would call it, a certain amount of sin and stupidity and willfulness that keeps things from being as good as they could have otherwise been. And sometimes God is able to work with that evil in order to accomplish some good things, such as training us in faith and patience and love when others fail to act properly—and vice versa, of course.

Since I sometimes choose to sin and since it is God’s will that I am free to do so—not that God wills that I sin, of course, but that I am free to do so, at least to a limited extent—then I suffer and others do, too. And the same is true the other way, naturally. If my spouse or my friend or my boss or my insurance agent chooses to mistreat me, or even just screw up without any malice, then I suffer some of the consequences. That’s the way of the world as God has made it in order to accomplish his overarching and ultimate purposes. For among those great purposes is to promote love and goodness, and those qualities are not possible without freedom, including the freedom to not love and to do evil.

It may be also that we are not able to become fully mature without a certain amount and kind of suffering. Given our various sorts of brokenness, perversity, confusion, and so on, it may be that the only way for God to rehabilitate us is through a regimen that requires rigorous reorientation and training.

I find this outlook to be comforting because it is both realistic and hopeful. It is realistic in that I don’t have to try to pretend that everything that happens is somehow simply a good thing. Some things are bad, and a lot of things are less than the best or even a mixture of good and bad.

This outlook is also hopeful because I do believe that God orchestrates our lives such that things are as good as they can be without him continually abrogating the general rules by which he governs the world in order to secure not only the greatest overall good but also the greatest good for each one involved.

One of my students recently pressed me on this point and asked, “So do you believe that this is the best of all possible worlds?”

I suppose I do believe that—with the crucial proviso that this is the best of all possible worlds given all that God is trying to do and all that God has to work with, which includes, it seems, letting human beings wreak a certain amount of havoc.

So maybe this man you have loved just plain treated you badly. We don’t have to try to sugar-coat that. Instead, we can trust that God is using even that shock and disappointment to help you move ahead in his overall plan for you. (We can even hope that God is using this experience to help him somehow, also, in due course.) God knew this hurt was coming and he let it happen, so I believe it must be something he can use for the good—not just the greater good, but for your good also, since he loves you in particular and not just humanity in general—or he wouldn’t let it happen.

By the foregoing I don’t mean that God is stuck with the flow of events and doesn’t ever do miracles. Sometimes he does, and we can always pray for one in a particular situation!

But he mostly doesn’t perform them and I refuse to believe that he doesn’t do so simply because we lack faith or whatever. I think he doesn’t do them because he generally doesn’t want to. His purposes are generally achieved better indirectly, by working through Spirit-filled Christians doing his will, yes, and also everyone else ultimately doing his will, which includes their freedom to do things that are not his will (in the sense that they are against his preferences and law) that nonetheless he can employ to bring about good—again, such as testing and strengthening our faith when things go badly.

Let’s remember that God worked through some pretty bad people and some pretty awful events in the Bible to get some important things done, as well as through his holy ones and through happy events. And that pattern continues to this day.

I hope this helps, at least a bit. Does it?

A few correspondents have asked me what I think of the new “Evangelical Manifesto,” recently released by a group of evangelical leaders (including—full disclosure—some friends of mine).

Another friend, Prof. Alan Jacobs of Wheaton College, grumps in the Wall Street Journal about how boringly moderate it is, among other sins. But let’s just see if that’s such a bad thing.

The nice people at Merriam-Webster tell us that “manifesto” means “a public declaration of intentions, motives, or views: a public statement of policy or opinion.” Jacobs wants the writing to be “punchy” and the document to be “short,” although he recalls that the most famous manifesto ever, the communist one, amounts to a small book.

Still, this one is twenty pages, and when I read it, I wondered why anyone would care what I thought about it. It strikes me as completely sensible, moderate, intelligent, a bit wordy here and there, and kinda dull.

And isn’t that a pleasant change!

Manifestoes typically offer a sweeping analysis of something dreadfully wrong that must be changed —this instant! or at least by next week! Such revolutionary documents trade in stark dichotomies and demand bold choices upon which hang matters of great moment.

Many statements of Christian belief in the past, furthermore, have included not only positive statements but also negative ones. “We believe this, and cursed be those who believe that.” The technical term for the latter phrases is “anathemas,” and plenty of them have been pronounced against heretics of all stripes over the centuries.

This statement, however, goes only so far as to mildly distinguish evangelicalism from fundamentalism and theological liberalism, which seems to be a necessary thing to do every few years, it seems, as new generations of journalists, politicians, academicians, and other teachers of the public keep needing to keep those distinctions clear.

Otherwise, however, the main importance of this document is that it makes manifest the moderate, intelligent, concerned, and active evangelicalism that is rarely manifest in accounts of North American religion. For it is the the nutty or the nasty who make the news. It is the preachers who unqualifiedly bless or condemn America, who reduce politics to a few key agenda, who proclaim their particular doctrinal varieties as “true Christianity,” who perpetuate a binary view of a complex world, and who call for immediate and drastic action to put everything right.

. . . And who enjoy damning their enemies—that is, everyone who disagrees with them over any detail.

So I agree with Brother Jacobs that “An Evangelical Manifesto” doesn’t get the pulse racing, let alone the blood boiling. Instead, it offers assurance to a worried society that many evangelicals are capable of moderation, are willing to offer “on this hand and on the other hand” qualifications, and have ideas that are not reducible to “punchy” slogans intended to incite action at the expense of reflection.

In that, I think “An Evangelical Manifesto” is well worthwhile.

Am I excited about “An Evangelical Manifesto”?

No, not really . . .

. . . for which I sincerely thank God.

In this last post, I’d like to reflect on how Richard Dawkins unwittingly and certainly unwillingly helps the Christian Church, as well as the other theists he so energetically opposes.

In particular, he helps us by showing us how some of us sound to people such as he, as well as to others who also do not share our premises. I was struck as Dawkins spoke at how similar was his style to that of many Christian apologists and preachers I have encountered/endured through the years.

For instance, he presented major issues in a simplistic fashion only to dispatch them with breathtaking swiftness. Here’s one example.

Dawkins averred that theism is patently contradictory. A God who can see the future with certainty (because of omniscience) thus is powerless to do anything other than what he foresees himself doing, thus compromising his omnipotence. Voilà! Theism is incoherent!

Well, maybe. But a first-year theology or philosophy of religion class would be taught that omnipotence is correctly defined precisely against logical contradictions. God “can’t” make a square circle, for instance, because there is no such thing and by definition cannot be. And there are lots of other (non-)things God “cannot” do, such as “exist and not exist,” “be everywhere and nowhere,” and so on.

Among that set would be God foreseeing that he will do X and then his not doing X. There is no abrogation of God’s freedom here. God can do what he wants to do—that’s true freedom. And if he foresees himself doing what he wants to do, how is he any the less free when he actually does that particular thing?

I’d like to think that I have now answered this question to everyone’s satisfaction. But I know I haven’t. The debate continues in high-level philosophy over these long-standing issues.

So here’s a handy rule of thumb in intellectual disputation for Dawkins and for the rest of us: Any argument held by intelligent people is unlikely to be summed up accurately in a few sentences, much less adequately refuted in a few sentences.

Second, in his UBC talk Dawkins frequently traded in unexamined assumptions. For instance, he denounced religion as prompting people to kill, but he never paused to consider if there might be any instances in which killing might be a good thing. He got into trouble later with the vegetarians, as I mentioned in my last post, because he refuses to toe their line and promote their cause. So according to Dawkins some killing (of animals and vegetables for sustenance) is apparently not only okay, but a good thing.

Furthermore, he didn’t consider whether sending a few thousand troops into Rwanda, as Gen. Romeo Dallaire wanted us to do to prevent the killing of 800,000 people, might have been a good thing to do, presuming that those troops would almost certainly have killed at least a few miscreants.

No, Dawkins just played on the prejudice that “religion promotes killing.” And I’m afraid that that’s just the way theists sometimes play on assumptions in their own audiences, such as “atheists have no morality” or “belief in evolution means you disregard the Bible.”

So here’s another rule of thumb: Beware of sweeping generalizations about complex issues that might just be inadequate to the subject. (As A. N. Whitehead put it, “Seek simplicity—and distrust it.”)

Third, Dawkins played the “victim” card, claiming that atheistic scientists honest and true, such as himself, were being persecuted by a nasty religious resistance. (Indeed, one of his UBC emcees worried aloud that all right-thinking atheists such as himself and Professor Dawkins were under siege—an idea that struck me, listening to him in the grand hall of his employer, one of Canada’s best universities, as a ludicrous sort of paranoid wishful thinking.)

Theists play the same card, of course. Atheistic scientists have somehow ganged up with The Media, The Government, and other Monoliths to attack the true faith, making it impossible to stand for the good old verities anymore.

To be sure, it’s not as if everyone’s totally delusional in this weird mirroring of victimhood. Dawkins and Co. are indeed whacking away at theism and theists, and many theists have eagerly responded in kind. But for either side to claim victim status in a world in which people’s livelihoods and even lives are actually at stake because of what they believe seems grotesquely to lack a sense of proportion.

A third rule of thumb, then: Of course you have opponents, or you’re merely spouting truisms. Press on with a good argument, enjoying the freedom you have to do so (which many others lack), rather than indulging in a whine.

Fourth, Dawkins claimed certain virtues for himself and his kind: civility, reasonableness, open-mindedness, and the like. Then he proceeded to mock his intellectual opponents. In a display of impressive conceit, he projected photos of covers of books written to respond to his arguments, some of them written by his professional equals, and then referred to them as his “fleas,” himself clearly being the big dog in the metaphor.

So much for civility, reasonableness, and the rest. Much worse, however, was Dawkins going on (and on) to scorn religious people in general.

The lowest moment was simply astonishing for its symmetry with, of all things, Nazi propaganda. (I recognize that it is incendiary and perhaps even a cliché to associate one’s opponents with the Nazis, but hear me out on this one and see if the parallel seems fair to you, too.) Dawkins showed a news photo of a group of Hasidic Jews and then immediately cut to a photo of the Monty Python comedy troupe dressed as the moronic family of Gumbys.

As my jaw dropped, Dawkins then played to the titters in the crowd (some of which surely were simply nervous) by going back to the Hasidim photo and then forward to the Gumbys again, just in case anyone missed his point.

—Which was what? That Jews are stupid, or at least those from Eastern Europe (where the Hasidim used to be most populous)? He didn’t actually say what his point was, but I should think that the Anti-Defamation League and B’nai B’rith might find it worthwhile to inquire of him just what he does mean to say.

Oh, I wish I could say that we theists never resort to cheap insults such as that. But we have (think of the century-plus of cartoons depicting Darwin as a monkey) and we still do.

In sum, Dawkins indicts theists powerfully, but in a quite ironic way. His actual arguments may or may not be substantial—I don’t think they’re terribly difficult to counter, as lots of other writers have shown. But his style holds up a mirror to many of us theists in auditoriums, pulpits, classrooms, and living rooms across the world who attack our opponents in ways just as vicious and as hypocritical as anything Dawkins does.

So here’s one last rule of thumb I commend to Richard Dawkins as it has been commended to me and my kind by Someone we should listen to: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.”

Richard Dawkins has traveled the world, sowing his particular gospel of atheism, science, rational argument, and the courage to live in the light of The Facts.

He has appeared before countless audiences, participated in dozens of debates, and handled hundreds of questioners. But he seemed surprised, even nonplussed, by the line of questioning he received from several members of the UBC audience who patiently lined up to press him on . . . vegetarianism.

By the time Dawkins encountered the third such questioner, he was moved to wonder aloud whether he was encountering some sort of “lobby.” No, just the West Coast.

Yet this particular issue presented an intriguing window into Dawkins that had not been provided in his presentation. For his presentation was mostly offensive, in the sense of attacking positions he disliked, rather than defensive, in the sense of offering cogent reasons for adopting his own life philosophy. (His presentation was also at times astonishingly offensive in the other sense, but more about that in my third post.)

Being pressed about vegetarianism, then, we got to see Richard Dawkins construct and defend some ethics. And what a ramshackle thing he produced!

Dawkins tried to combine several incommensurate ideas and the result wasn’t pretty. He first espoused a Peter Singer-ish resistance to “speciesism” on the grounds that evolutionary biology draws no clear lines between, say, chimpanzees and humans, or cows and humans, or any other living thing and humans. “We’re all cousins,” he said, in a dangerous metaphor indeed.

(Fascinatingly, he actually used as one of his examples of nature not providing a clear line the lack of a clear distinction between a human zygote and an adult human being. “It’s a continuum,” he claimed, as I think he should, given his premises. But Dawkins as radical pro-lifer? The mind reels. Perhaps he should be nicer to those folk on the Religious Right with whom he apparently shares an important basic conviction.)

One might have thought he would go on to affirm his conversion to a secular form of ahimsa, the Jain doctrine of “doing no harm” that results, in the most extreme form of piety in that religion, in devotees starving themselves to death so as not to deprive even rice plants of life.

Instead, Dawkins also affirmed his dislike for inflicting pain on other beings, including the suffering of fear of pain to come as well as pain experienced now. (It’s not clear from evolutionary biology or from atheism just why anyone should have qualms about inflicting pain on other beings, especially if it is in one’s interest to do so. But let’s move on.) He concluded from this conviction that we should not inflict suffering and should eat accordingly. We have no reason to think that carrots suffer, so they’re fair game (so to speak), while animals are not.

Okay, then, the questioners wanted to know, why aren’t you using your global reputation (they all seemed to be fans of his) to commend vegetarianism?

To his credit, Dawkins had the honesty to confess that he had tried to be a vegetarian, but kept “relapsing.” This brought some sympathetic chuckles from the audience. At least, he said, we should be against all those factory farms and other places that mistreat animals.

The vegetarians, however, would not be put off. Logic is logic, facts are facts, and Professor Dawkins seemed to be flinching in the face of them.

I’m not a vegetarian. But I think the vegetarians were completely right to press him on this matter. Let me illustrate.

I’m a cannibal. I know not everyone approves of cannibalism, and I’m not proud of it myself, but I just love the taste of human flesh. I’ve tried substitutes, experimented with various recipes for animal meat, and I’ve stayed on the wagon for months. But someone puts a nice bit of roast human in front of me and I just have to give in.

Now, to be sure, I’m strictly against bad treatment of the humans in those factory farms. I think they should be given lots of fresh air, proper food, exercise, and the happiest life possible. And I think we should spare them any idea of their impending doom. Just sneak in at night, tranquilize them into a stupor, and then ship them off to the abattoir.

See how humane I am? Surely with all of my concern for the proper treatment of these tasty humans you’re not going to press me to actually stop killing and eating them, are you?

Is there any question you would? Of course you would, because if there are no ethical grounds for killing and eating humans, then it’s missing the point to insist on their kindly treatment before you process them into steaks.

Lest you think I’m invoking cannibalism as a cheap trick, other UBC questioners wanted him to explain why we did not extend the rights we accord to humans. If “we’re all cousins,” then shouldn’t all species be accorded the same rights? Wouldn’t keeping animals in farms, or even relatively pleasant zoos, be simply wrong the way “Planet of the Apes” showed it would be wrong? Dawkins had trouble even getting these questions into focus, it seemed, as well he might. For he was facing the grim logic of his own premises. Once you have assailed that stupid religious privileging of humanity (as he explicitly did, and as did one of his UBC professorial emcees before him), then where does logic take you?

So much, then, for eating meat—and for wearing fur or leather, for that matter. Indeed, so much for the whole animal-rights syllabus of errors. I wonder, indeed, if Professor Dawkins would enjoy trading witticisms with an angry crowd of PETA supporters?

Oh, how easy it is indulge in the sport of finding fault with another point of view! How sobering it is to maintain ethical consistency with one’s own!

Having had at the hapless Professor Dawkins, then, regarding both his rhetoric and ethics, in my third post I’ll let him get in a few rounds on the likes of me. But for now, let’s just think of him blinking back at the vegetarians who are out for—well, surely not blood . . .

So someone at the University of British Columbia (UBC) decided it was a good idea to bring Richard Dawkins to campus to give a free public lecture. Fair enough. He’s an academic celebrity and there are precious few of those.

The two (two!) professors who introduced him, however, introduced him as someone who could impressively relate the humanities and the sciences. That claim deserves a little scrutiny.

Lots of people have analyzed and criticized Dawkins’s arguments over the years. Indeed, there are whole forests’ worth of books now in print responding to one or another of his anti-theism volumes. And who can count the number of phosphors employed similarly in the blogosphere?

What I will do over the next three posts is to offer what I hope will be some observations that complement these direct engagements with this ideas, and I will do so indeed from the perspective of the humanities.

Let’s begin with one of the most ancient of the liberal arts and consider Dawkins as Rhetor, as orator, as public speaker.

I was impressed with Dawkins’s poise, diction, and sense of comic timing. He is obviously good at this kind of thing and it was fun to see him do it.

I also enjoyed his crusade on behalf of truth: even if it offends people, even if it robs them of comfort or purpose in life if such is grounded on delusions. We evangelicals like to say similar things about the central importance of truth, and it was a little eerie, as well as gratifying, to see him press the same agenda on an audience that might prefer it if everyone just left everyone else alone to just seek Truth, Goodness, and Beauty, or at least Happiness, Comfort, and Purpose, in Their Own Way—as current cultural orthodoxy has it.

We evangelicals also like his emphasis upon evidence and argument. Vigorous apologetics might be out of style or even in bad taste in some circles, but not in ours. Bring it on! we say, and Dawkins seems glad to oblige.

Except he isn’t. Or, at least, he wasn’t today.

For instead of a sustained, well-evidenced argument, he resorted to a sort of drive-by shooting, a “Top Ten List of Things Atheists Detest about Monotheistic Belief.” Assisted by a clever PowerPoint presentation (although it was likely on Keynote: I stand with Dawkins as a fellow Macintosh user), he moved through a preposterously ambitious list of objections: religion causes violence, religion is unscientific, religion is irrational, religion is oppressive, religion hates women, religion prompts “speciesism,” and more. Little in the way of argument was offered, even less of evidence.

For example, Dawkins maintained that religion has prompted people to kill other people, while atheism has never done so. And he took about three minutes to make this rather sweeping point.

Strictly speaking this is correct: Not believing in God probably never roused anyone to go kill someone else.

But not believing in God, of course (of course, Professor Dawkins), means that one has relieved oneself of a significant restraint on all the other motives one might have for killing someone else: such time-honoured motives as land, power, wealth, ideology, and the like. And, indeed, that is precisely what we see in the bloody twentieth century: atheistic regimes claiming more lives than all previous regimes put together. So atheism is hardly off the hook when it comes to global violence.

Dawkins likes to say, and did say again, that religion is based on faith, while science is based on evidence. What Dawkins doesn’t say, and didn’t say again, is that faith is also based on evidence. So the parallel is simply false and he (and many others) needs to rethink the relationship of science and faith. (I have written a bit about faith and evidence in a trio of posts, starting here.)

Dawkins also chided Christians for the argument from design on the grounds that they misunderstand natural selection as mere chance, thus ridiculing Darwinism with Fred Hoyle’s famous analogy of the hurricane blowing through a junkyard and constructing an airliner thereby. There’s something valid to Dawkins’s reply. But it literally doesn’t begin to explain all of the “black boxes” of complex mechanisms in nature the intermediate phases of which can hardly be conceived to have accumulated merely via natural selection, as Michael Behe and others have shown. Dawkins doesn’t engage this serious, science-based argument, and instead contents himself with a quick thwack at stupid theists instead.

And that’s what most of the talk was: a smart atheist bashing dumb theists. Such an event is fun, perhaps—in the way that shooting fish in a barrel is fun for the uncompetitive and untalented—but it seems rather unworthy of the latest Great Champion of Freethinking Atheism.

I indulge in that bit of sarcasm to chide Dawkins on the other truly hypocritical dimension of his presentation. Not only did this tribune of reason and evidence offer precious little of either, but this defender of civil and forthright controversy resorted frequently to mere joking in place of argument. Indeed, in the most egregious part of his presentation, he played a video clip of a British comedian taking easy aim at touchy and violent Muslims, Christians, and Jews.

It’s not that either Dawkins or his comedic surrogate were all wrong. They scored some genuine points. It’s that the whole mode of engagement was not engagement at all, but rather simply a barrage of insults and reprimands.

And that’s the main point: Dawkins did not seriously advance a particular outlook, showing how it offered superior explanations for such vital matters as, say, love, altruism, morality, guilt, aspiration to life after death, or even the rational basis for science itself—all of which have indeed been explained and defended from various theistic standpoints. Instead, he merely took shots at other points of view from an assumed, but not demonstrated, height of moral and intellectual superiority.

So as I sat in UBC’s grand Chan Centre Theatre among hundreds of students and professors, I was embarrassed, I confess, to be a member of the UBC community: embarrassed at the fawning introductions by two professors who clearly could not distinguish between a legitimate philosophical argument and a mere tour de force; embarrassed that this excellent university had not invited any capable person to respond to his remarks in the spirit of proper intellectual exchange; and embarrassed to know for certain that there is no way these same university sponsors would endorse a similar talk by an eminent Christian scholar who offered an alternative point of view—not scientists such as Francis Collins, John Polkinghorne, John Lennox, or Alister McGrath, let alone philosophers, theologians, or cultural historians (for in the apologetical combination of these disciplines is the true discourse of Richard Dawkins in this mode) such as Nicholas Wolterstorff, Nancey Murphy, William Lane Craig, or Rodney Stark.

So it was a sorry spectacle indeed.

And that was the formal presentation. Things got much more interesting, however, in the question-and-answer period that followed. On that, my next post.

The single most viewed post on this blog so far has been “Jesus, I’m NOT in Love with You.” As of this writing, it’s had over 8000 views.

In that post, I engage in a little criticism of a certain trend in contemporary Christian music. So, in the spirit of “Better to light a candle than curse the darkness,” I happily recommend a new album by Canadian singer Jon Buller and two of his musical friends. It’s “The Hymn Project” and it’s a simple setting of a dozen or so great hymns and songs for three male voices and a guitar or two.

Here’s the solid gold list: My Hope is Built on Nothing Less - Come Thou Fount - All Creatures of our God and King - Blessed Assurance - Great is Thy Faithfulness - The Old Rugged Cross - Trust and Obey - It Is Well With My Soul - My Jesus I Love Thee - Jesus, Priceless Treasure - Jesus Loves Even Me - I’d Rather Have Jesus - His Eye is on the Sparrow.

I had the privilege of teaming up with Jon, his band, and his group “Hear the Music Ministries” at a worship seminar they held in Winnipeg a few years ago. The highlight for me was borrowing a guitar from Jon and doing my best Eric Clapton impression in a blues his band generously played behind me. Confident as I am that no one actually mistook me for Mr. Clapton—or even for a decent amateur player, which I wish I were—it was nonetheless a blast.

Happily for this album, however, Jon and his friends are much better than decent amateurs, and their beautiful and imaginative vocals and guitars give new life to these fine expressions of worship.

Here’s what I wrote to endorse the album on Jon’s website:

In The Hymn Project, we find what we badly need to find: skillful music and rich lyrics that can fill in the empty spaces left by so many of today’s thin praise songs. What a high standard is set by these deceptively simple arrangements of classic hymns! Older Christians will rejoice to hear these good old hymns refreshed; middle-aged types (such as I) will be inspired by these clear declarations of the gospel; and younger listeners will perhaps finally realize why so many of us miss “the old songs.” This really is an album for everyone.

Now, I’m all for new music and not simply the recycling of the old, no matter how worthy the result. But some old stuff needs to be part of our repertoire of praise, too, and this album proves it. I bought twenty of them to give away over the next year to friends and family. Check it out: It’ll do you good!

Amid all the arguments among Christians regarding the roles of men and women in home, church, and society, one of the most prominent nowadays is the argument from the Trinity, namely, that the way the persons of the Trinity (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) relate and are related to each other tells us something important about how men and women are related and ought to relate to each other.

And no wonder some argue this way. What a trump card! “Our view of gender is rooted in the very nature of God!”

The first troubling thing to notice here, however, is that this argument is deployed by both complementarians/patriarchalists and egalitarians/feminists.

Complementarians argue that the members of the Trinity are indeed co-equal, as the Nicene Creed makes clear, but also that the Son and Spirit willingly submit to the Father, and the Spirit humbly bears witness, not to himself, but to the Son. Thus, the argument continues, women can submit to men, as they ought to do (which is a point argued on other grounds) without feeling automatically devalued.

Egalitarians argue from the co-equality of members of the Trinity to the opposite conclusion. They say that the members of the Trinity do play different roles, but none of them dominates the others. Indeed, they are all involved in all aspects of divine work, from creation through redemption to consummation, in an interplay of mutual joy and cooperation.

For my part, feminist/egalitarian that I am, I think the complementarians get the better of this sort of argument. The Father is always pictured in the Bible in the supreme position and never “rotates off” that position for another member of the Trinity. The Son always is pictured as deferring to the Father, and the Spirit is sent by the Father in the name of the Son, and delights in drawing attention to the Son, not to himself

But my complementarian friends are getting the better of what is, in fact, a pretty useless argument.

The problem I have with the complementarian reference to the Trinity is that it is a bad theological move to attempt—by anyone, on any side of this issue.

For one thing, the Trinity is/are three and when it comes to gender we are instead talking about two. So the parallel is not neat, which may suggest that it’s not a parallel at all.

For another thing, the divine Father and Son are depicted as, yes, two males, and even the Biblical pronouns for the Spirit are masculine—even though our theology reminds us that God is not actually male. So there is no connection between hierarchy and gender in the Trinity, no female/feminine person submitting to a male/masculine person. Again, the parallel is not at all exact, which may suggest that it’s not a parallel at all.

Finally, it is Genesis 1 that introduces human beings—male and female—as created in the image of God. And in this passage there is no reference to the Trinity as implying anything about gender—nor does any other Bible passage so argue.

(The one text that comes to mind—although it doesn’t mention the Trinity or the Holy Spirit either—is I Corinthians 11. But this is a notoriously obscure passage, what with head coverings, angels, and other complications of what might seem initially to be a nice, clear hierarchy. Just what Paul is arguing and just what he is trying to get the Corinthians to do as a result has occupied commentators for two thousand years. Maybe the complementarians are right about this one, but it’s not exactly a transparent case.)

So all that the complementarians are incontrovertibly left with is a Trinity that “proves” that hierarchy sometimes can be a good thing and can be present among equals. And we all already knew that.

You don’t need to probe the mysteries of the Godhead to show what any sports team, or large business, or military unit already shows you: some groups do better when they are arranged hierarchically even among members of equal dignity. And some don’t. The End.

Many theologians (I among them) strongly endorse circumspection when it comes to the attempt to use one of the great mysteries of the faith—the internal life of God in the Trinity—to shed light on some other doctrine. Some doctrines do require deployment of the doctrine of the Trinity to understand them properly—most notably Christology, soteriology, and pneumatology. But the question of gender seems to be one of those theological subjects not much improved by reference to the Trinity—as is evidenced by the fact that everyone seems to be able to selectively access this doctrine in the interest of contradictory understandings of gender.

In short, I find this whole line of theological reasoning unhelpful to an investigation of gender. There are lots of good arguments to consider on both sides. But this isn’t one of them.

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(I offer my own set of arguments in Finally Feminist: A Pragmatic Christian Understanding of Gender, from which this post is revised.)

There is a lot of huffing and puffing nowadays about “postmodernism” and “skepticism” and “certainty” and “absolute truth.” And it’s been going on for a long time.

On one extreme we have those who affirm that all statements are simply indications of one’s own state of mind, simply matters of opinion, and have no determinable reference to reality. On the other are those who declare their belief in absolute truth and in the absolute truthfulness of their conviction about their favourite absolute truths.

I’ll deal with the radical postmodernists/skeptics/cynics/social constructivists/solipsists another time. (I’ve already dealt with postmodernism in a previous book—Humble Apologetics—and doubtless will again.) Today, let’s deal with the other end of the scale, those who declare not only that certainty is to be had, but that right-thinking people and particularly Christians ought to say that we have it about the main convictions of our outlook.

Alas, too many of these folk proclaim that anyone (such as your servant) who questions whether a human being is actually equipped to enjoy certainty about his or her convictions is guilty of betraying the faith. Some of these folks are clearly off their rockers, while others seem sensible enough on most matters, if regrettably strident and rigid on this one.

The situation boils down to a simple distinction between two kinds of certainty. The former describes a situation and the latter describes a state of mind.

The former kind of certainty entails a situation in which one knows something, let’s call it x, and one somehow knows that one both knows x and knows that one could not possibly be wrong about x. One is certain, that is, in the strong—really, in the absolute—sense that one somehow knows enough about one’s situation to know that one has apprehended x entirely, that one has interpreted x correctly, and that there are no more data to be had that might alter one’s perception of x, such as new information suddenly showing up tomorrow or next week.

Indeed, one somehow knows that there is no possibility of the situation being other than it seems—that one might be in The Matrix, for instance, or (to go back a few hundred years to Descartes) that one is being deluded by an evil demon or (to go back a few thousand years to Daoism) that one is actually a butterfly dreaming he is a man, rather than a man dreaming he is a butterfly.

To be sure (and I told you I’d deal with the radical skeptics soon, so let’s do it now), there is little reason to believe that we are, in fact, being deluded by an evil demon or that we are butterflies dreaming that we’re people. So one doesn’t have to feel awash in a sea of doubt just because the theoretical possibility arises that things are other than they appear.

The main point today, however, is that one also cannot claim to be in an epistemic situation of certainty, either. For how could a human being claim such a thing? We all too often are mistaken about things, change our minds about things, find out new things about things (!), and so on. Worse, our own theology (if we’re Christians, say) or our own common sense (if we’re honest) tells us that we tend to see what we want to see, to hear what we prefer to hear, and to believe what is in our interest to believe.

Again, it’s not as if our sense experience, say, or our memory, or our logic is utterly unreliable. Of course not. It is to say instead that our perception of reality is never other than limited and biased and is always at least possibly mistaken because of our limitations and biases.

Some Christians retort that our certainty is guaranteed by God. Because God speaks only absolute truth, they say, and because we Christians possess God’s Word in both the Bible and in the testimony of the Holy Spirit, then we can and should claim two things: that we know absolute truth and that we know that we know it beyond question—that is, certainly. Anyone who says otherwise is claiming that the Bible might be wrong and the Holy Spirit might not be trustworthy.

Those are serious charges indeed, but they need to be laid elsewhere. I happen to believe that the Bible and the Holy Spirit do, indeed, speak the truth. Now, what “truth” means in this context requires some careful nuancing, to be sure. But it remains the case that no matter in what sense the Bible and the Holy Spirit speak truth, my epistemic limitations and biases remain.

I, that is, cannot somehow get outside my own head to look back on my situation and see without any possibility of error that I am seeing things (such as the Bible or the testimony of the Holy Spirit) exactly aright.

In fact, we fall into an infinite regress here, where I look at myself looking at myself looking at myself ad infinitum, trying to get to some location of absolute sureness that I now could not possibly be wrong because I have surveyed all there is to know about this situation and I know that my biases aren’t getting in the way and I know that something else (an evil demon, a hallucinogen, a hypnotic suggestion) is not affecting me in any way.

I can only ever say how things look to me at present.

Now, I may well know this or that truth about reality. Two plus two might indeed equal four, period. In fact, I think a lot of things that I believe about reality are just plain—that is, absolutely—true. I do not at all deny the existence of absolute truth nor do I deny that we human beings can know absolute truths. I am saying instead that we cannot know certainly that we know absolute truths or that we know that this particular thing, x, is absolutely true. We human beings are never in a situation such that we could not possibly be wrong—and that’s what certainty in the former sense is.

We can, however, be highly convinced of x. In fact, we can be so convinced of the truth of x that we live our lives as if it were true. I live my life as if Newton’s laws of motion and optics were true. I live my life as if what my wife tells me were true. And I live my life as if the gospel were true. (In fact, I believe that last part so thoroughly that even my job depends upon it!)

So I think it’s fine to say that I am “certain” about these things. When I do, I am reporting on my state of mind. I am saying that I am so highly convinced of them that I entertain no serious doubts about them. I think, and feel, and act with untroubled confidence in them.

And that is what the Bible promises me: that I can enjoy such confidence—note that word: such “with-faith-ness” (con fide)—that I can make crucial life decisions according to such convictions.

The Bible, that is, doesn’t promise somehow to lift me above my human limitations into an epistemic situation such that I can know something truly and also know that I know it truly and could not possibly be wrong. How could I, as a human being, ever experience something like that?

(And those who quote passages such as Luke 1:4 and Hebrews 11:1 need to consult the Greek lectionaries to see what is actually meant in the English translations that use “certain” words therein. Those words do not mean certainty in the former sense I’m defining here.)

No, the Bible promises that I can know with such assurance, such conviction, such well-grounded faith that I then can and will act in accordance with that faith—and thus be faithful.

This is, finally, the point of it all. We Christians “live by faith, not by sight” (2 Corinthians 5:7)—and so does everybody else, actually, since no human being can transcend our common situation of epistemic finitude. In fact, if we enjoyed all the certainty (in the former sense) that some Christians say we should claim, well, then, we wouldn’t need faith anymore. We would just know things, and we would know that we were entirely right about them.

Instead, we know things more or less well, just like I know various people more or less well, or various songs more or less well, and thus I have more or less confidence in my knowledge of them. I don’t know anyone or anything in such a way that I could not possibly be wrong about them.

Is that a bit scary? Yes, it is, and I think fear motivates a lot of people who spout off about absolute truth and certainty and the rest of it, and who condemn anyone who suggests that we can’t be as sure of things as they say they are. But claiming certainty in a big, belligerent voice doesn’t alter the situation one bit. And I wish such bullies would calm down and face, so to speak, reality.

Welcome to the human condition, friends. We have to sort out the world as best we can, with whatever help we think we have found.

I think the Christian religion, the Christian Church and, especially, the Christian God help me to know things much better than I ever would on my own. But they don’t make me other than human or lift me out of my humanness. They don’t make me certain.

And I’m certain about that.

Normally this blog attends to matters mainly of the mind and spirit. But mind, spirit, and body all are honoured at my favourite restaurant in this foodie town, The Pear Tree, located just over the Vancouver/Burnaby border on Hastings at Gilmore.

My beloved and I have been enjoying The Pear Tree since shortly after its opening, when we moved here ten years ago and found this gem just a few blocks from our house. Chef Scott Yeager has gone from strength to strength in the kitchen, last year receiving 7th Place honours at the international Bocuse d’Or competition in France as Canadian team captain. (He is coach of this year’s team.)

Appetizers, if I may say so, are Scott’s speciality. His frothy lobster “cappuccino” is the finest lobster dish I have ever had, and his scallops are simply the best anywhere. Main dishes are reliably tasty and inventive, without ever being weird–so reliable, in fact, that I routinely order food from Scott that I would rarely order anywhere else–and there is always a high-value table d’hôte option. Desserts are superb. (Kari and I usually have the lemon and chocolate desserts, respectively, although occasionally she walks on the wild side and has the extraordinary crème brulée).

Wife Stephanie runs the front of the house, and is as good at her job as Scott is at his. The service is simply flawless. Always appearing right when you need them, the staff come and go in friendly silence. No grandstanding, no ingratiating chit-chat to push up the tip, they leave you free to enjoy your dining mates while supplying every need before you quite realize you have it.

Be warned, though: If your preference in high-end restaurants is “dinner as a show,” with spectacular dishes served con brio in a breathtaking room, then you’ll be disappointed here. The Pear Tree offers instead a soothing ambience, sensibly plated meals, and self-effacing servers. It is all about you, your companion(s), and the food.

Will heaven be like this? Oh, I hope so! Bring your biggest credit card (although folks from big cities elsewhere will be impressed at what a relative bargain it is) and treat yourself and someone you love to The Pear Tree. Vancouver magazine has routinely praised it as “The Best of the ‘Burbs” every single year since it opened in 1998, but I think it’s simply The Best in a town of great restaurant values.

It’s getting towards the end of the academic term throughout North America, and it’s time to confirm a thought that haunt the corners of many student minds particularly this time of year. It’s not a pretty truth, but it needs to be said:

Your intelligence, your chance of competing successfully in the global marketplace, your ability to contribute meaningfully to the world, and your entire worth as a human being is precisely correlated to your grades.

The corollary to this axiom is that you must do everything you can to earn or otherwise obtain the highest grades possible, even if that includes shameless flattery of professors (”Have you been working out, sir?”), dark hints of litigation (”I don’t know how my parents, or their attorneys, will feel about any grade lower than a B+”), or obsequious alacrity in helping in the classroom (”Here, let me move that podium for you, ma’am, and get you some nice, cool water to go with the chocolates I’ve brought, and fan you while you lecture”).

You must also ignore your friends, romantic partner, children, neighbours, and anyone who happens to have fallen among thieves and is now lying wounded at the side of the road.

You must neglect basic habits of personal maintenance, such as proper diet, adequate sleep, vigorous exercise, and even minimal hygiene. (That last one will make your ignoring your friends and family much easier on them.)

You must remember that it is not learning that counts, not the acquisition of skills, not improving your self-discipline, not preparing for a lifetime of service to others, and certainly not glorifying God. No, no, no! All that matters is grades. For they are the true and sole measure of your entire personal worth.

That’s how we think of Mother Teresa, right? Quite the academic powerhouse she was in her native Yugoslavia, and the world admired her for it.

Billy Graham? Globally famous for the senior papers he wrote at the end of his B.A.

Martin Luther King, Jr.? No one would have heard of him if he hadn’t received a doctorate.

All through history, the story is the same. The heroic, the saintly, and the otherwise-admired have had one and only one thing in common: high grade point averages.

Or maybe not.

Maybe, instead, grades matter only to a few kinds of people—or, at least, they ought to matter to only a few kinds of people.

Some people need to know whether they have what it takes to go on to the next level of education. Some people need to know in what subjects their talents lie. Some people need to know whether they should continue in school at all or pursue another line of work. And a very few people will be more competitive in the job market because of higher grades—but not as many as you might think. (Very few jobs depend upon GPA, even in the professions, even in the academic profession.)

That’s it. The rest of us really don’t need to care about grades, do we?

But some people are, I believe, not only sweating over B+ versus B, but are earning A’s and doing so contrary to the will of God. These people are “succeeding” only at the cost of relationships with others, at the cost of their physical and mental and spiritual health, and at the cost of a proper understanding of who they are and what their lives really are about.

And these people usually grow up to be quite successful in their careers, leaving in their wake the predictable wrecked marriages and angry children and furious former friends.

GPA isn’t even a good measures of intelligence, let alone of the total worth of a person. Lots of smart people don’t do all that well at school and finally break out of it, only to prosper in a field in which their talent can blossom.

And lots of people who aren’t particularly brainy contribute to the world according to their different gifts: gifts of kindness, gifts of industry, gifts of reliability, gifts of creativity, gifts of clarity, gifts of hospitality, gifts of love.

So please hear this from a guy who has spent his whole life in the academy and finds great joy in it: It’s just school! And not everybody’s great at it! And it’s good that some people aren’t, so that they get out of school and do something else—which is, let’s be clear, most people!

You are not your GPA. So please, students, don’t succumb to the pressure to act now like you think you are.

I hope instead that during your last weeks of school you will study in order to get out of your schooling what you wanted to get when you started, back in January or September. Remember ‘way back then? Remember what your hopes and dreams were, what your objectives were, what the point of it all was?

I hope that this end-of-term pressure will help you focus on what really does matter to you, rather than on what, for most of us, really doesn’t matter: grades.