Divine Plagiarism

I wrote this a while back after a number of 2 A.M. arguments about Aquinas. Good times. Hope it’s useful. I don’t so much like the pseudo-academic tone I used, complete with awkward grammar. Whatever. I’m too lazy to rewrite an idea that I already wrote out.

When analyzing Scripture, as with any other document, what one sees in it has much to do with what one brings to it. When considering the authority of Scripture, we must be careful with our interpretations, especially when we seek to hold others to that authority. On one hand, we need to avoid blasphemy, to avoid claiming Scriptural authority for our own preconceived notions. On the other hand, we need to avoid idolatry, to avoid bending the authority of Scripture to make room for our preferences. Given that these reciprocal errors stem from the same source: the idea that ‘God says what I want Him to say,’ our solution must be one of humility in our approach to God’s Word, a realization that we have not cornered the market on knowledge of God (after all, if we could understand all of His mysteries, we would have to be Him.)

Central to our methodology is the concept of the ‘tabula rasa’ reasonable man. Imagine an individual equipped with rational thought and the ability to understand language, well intentioned but completely unencumbered by experience and unaware of any Theology. That individual then reads the relevant Scripture in the context of the entire work. (Context is assumed to mean directly relevant passages, not higher level extrapolations.) He then derives possible interpretations of a given passage and compares those interpretations to the doctrine in questions, and determines how much Scriptural authority that doctrine can claim.

Doing so, our observer can reach one of three conclusions about the Scriptural authority of a doctrine: 1) Indisputable, 2) Reasonable, or 3) Traditional.

The first of these, the indisputable standard, carries with it the highest degree of Scriptural authority. The indisputable standard is achieved when our observer approaches the passage and reaches the conclusion that there is only one reasonable interpretation of the passage. An example of this would be the teachings in Romans 3 about the fallen-ness of man. If our observer were asked ‘what do the Scriptures tell us about the sinfulness of man,’ he would answer ‘the only reasonable interpretation is that all men are sinful and fallen.’ The indisputable standard would be typical of a Creedal statement, and hence one who denies an indisputable doctrine is outside of the authority of Scripture. These are the ‘fight to the death’ truths.

The second standard is the locus of most of our theological arguments. The reasonable standard carries with it a degree of authority, but tempers it with a degree of humility. The reasonable standard is achieved when our observer analyzes a passage in context and determines that a given doctrine is a reasonable interpretation of a passage, although not the sole reasonable interpretation. Therefore, multiple interpretations can exist for a given passage within the larger context of Scripture, and hence one can only claim Scriptural support for the doctrine, not full Scriptural authority. This is not to say that one doctrine may not be a better explanation than another, only to say that both are reasonable. Hence, one may state their position emphatically, but must also take into account the possibility that they are the one who is wrong. Examples: transubstantiation, Calvinism, Gifts of the Spirit. Most Catholic/Ev/Pent disputes. One who disputes may be considered wrong, but may not be considered a heretic.

The third standard is the least restrictive, but grants the least authority. Under the traditional standard, the Scriptures say nothing a priori on a topic, either for or against. The doctrine is then a cultural tradition, around which verses may be built to enrich and sanctify the tradition, but no authority can be claimed, for it is only a tradition made by men. Our observer would look at the Scriptures and see nothing on the doctrine, and hence would not be able to make any authoritative statements on it. Examples include worshipping on Sunday/Easter, Free Markets, and Drinking. The standard of proof becomes prudential, rather than Scriptural, and the Spirit may lead in different prudential directions with different people. One who disputes is then neither wrong nor a heretic, although the charge of unwise may be leveled if justified. More than likely, it would not be, and the disputants would merely have different preferences.

Without such a framework (in essentials, unity, in non-essentials, liberty, in all things, charity,) we fall into the two incarnations of the same sin of blasphemy. On the ultra-conservative side, when we claim authority for matters of tradition, we speak for God where He does not speak. I question how many of us would submit to God’s standard for proof of prophecy (100% right or death) as easily as we claim His authority. One the other hand, there is the liberal mistake of discounting the authority of Scripture and making all interpretations a matter of preferences. This is the same error, as it applies a ‘Thus Saith the Lord’ stamp to all the things people wanted to do anyways, in effect declaring oneself to be God. Only in approaching God’s Word with humility can we avoid error.

Hi everybody. So here's an outline from a talk I'm giving at the UWF IV group this Saturday. Lots of fun, hopefully I wont sound too silly. If it is at all 'intellectually satisfying' at all (oops, I violated my rule on not using pretentious words like 'problematic') its because it's entirely plagiarized. (I guess, if I cited sources, then it's not technically plagiarism. But I think 'plagiarism' has a nice ring to it. By the way, I forgot to mention I'm not an academic. Reference previous discussion on identity and irony.) Anyways, God's smart and I'm dumb, but hopefully He will continue to make me a little less dumb, bit by bit.

1. Apologetics: From the same word as ‘apology.’ Giving an answer.

- Biblical Root: 2 Cor 10:5, We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ. 1 Pet 3:15, 15But in your hearts set apart Christ as Lord. Always be prepared to give an answer to everyone who asks you to give the reason for the hope that you have. But do this with gentleness and respect.

- Giving an answer is not the same as asking the question. The question is ‘will you submit to God’s will for your life.’ It is expressed in the message of the Gospel.

- Often, people set up defenses to protect themselves from that uncomfortable question. They head off the question at the pass, as it were.

- Apologetics are about getting through the defenses to deliver the message of the Gospel. Defenses usually have to come on line before you shut them down. But you need to be ready when they do.



2. Classic Apologetics.
(Truth is real and knowable) + (God exists and created all things) +
(The Gospels are a trustworthy account) = orthodox Christianity.

- Sequential, building blocks of truth, all leading to the God’s fullest revelation of Himself in Christ.

- Almost all intellectual attacks on Christianity go after one of these three pillars.

- The best way to refute a lie is to know the truth. So let’s look at each of these three pillars.



3. Truth is Real and Knowable.
By definition, absolute truth exists. It exists in a form that the human mind can grasp. Even if exhaustive knowledge is impossible, even if human knowledge is influenced by perspective, we can speak meaningfully about truth and about God.

Threat: Postmodernism. Postmodernism basically assumes that all truth is relative. It approaches all ideas like onions: take off all the layers and you are left with nothing. Traditional Christianity approaches all ideas like softballs: take any idea, perfect or fallen, and unwrap all the twine and you will find a core of truth. There are two general ways that postmodernism can be used to attack Christians.
- The social attack: Tolerance as license. ‘Don’t ever tell me what I am doing is wrong.’ Tolerance as co-existence is a great thing. It allows us to put together societies with people who do not always agree on everything, and it allows us to resolve disputes without killing each other. Tolerance as license makes it an expression of pride. ‘I can do whatever I want and you can never say anything about it.’ And in this is its contradiction: tolerance as license is the most intolerant system imaginable. It cannot tolerate any systems with absolute truth claims, which is virtually every other system out there.
- The formal attack: Deconstructivism. You can never prove anything is true. You can only prove that it is false. Therefore, when analyzing anything, you should look for the motives that go into it, not the validity of what is being said. An argument can never be taken on its merits. The problem with this whole line of thought is that it is self contradictory. ‘My only rule is that you cannot write any rules.’ Even more so, apply its own methodology against it, and you find the motivations of the theorists have a lot to do with the theory. If there are no rules, I can do whatever I want. Therefore, Ill make a system of rules that lets me do whatever I want. (Because I want to be God.) Tracing it to its roots, we find a quite old and quite absolute rebellion.

Arguments:

- Self Evident Truths (Philosophy.) Certain things are simply true by definition. Any attempt to refute these things will only result in proving them.
- Consider the statement ‘everything is relative.’ Either the statement is meaningless (everything may be relevant to you, but they may be absolute to me) or it is self-refuting (everything is absolutely relative.) Therefore, absolutes exist is a self evident truth.
- A relative system cannot tolerate absolutes. Therefore, the only way to maintain the system is to prohibit all absolutes, which would, of course, be an absolute prohibition. The whole thing is built on quicksand.
- Next time somebody tells you that ‘everything is relative,’ ask them if everything is absolutely relative. If it is, then everything is absolute. If it isn’t, tell them that relative to you everything is absolute, and you plan on acting accordingly. By their own logic, they have disarmed themselves. They can’t tell you that you’re wrong, and your argument still stands.

- Human Actions. (Behavioral Science.) People act as if their actions have some bearing on reality. Though different cultures lead people to express drives differently, basic universal human drives exist independent of culture.
- All cultures have different kinds of food. But all cultures have some kind of food. When hungry, the standard human action is to seek out food. How they do so is highly culturally dependent. The fact that they do so is not. Similarly, languages are all different. But they all communicate thoughts and ideas about reality from one person to another. The fact that we use words at all implies a coherence to truth.
- Ravi Zacharias describes talking to a Buddhist monk. After the monk got done telling him that ‘everything was just an illusion,’ Zacharias picks up a nearby boiling tea kettle, and prepares to pour it on the head of the monk. The monk says something to the effect of ‘What are you doing?’ Zacharias asks him why the illusion of boiling water falling on his head would bother him. We move out of the way of cars. We don’t stick things in electrical outlets. We act to preserve our existence. Achieving Nirvana is self-critiquing and usually fatal.

- The Fact that We’re Talking About It (Common Sense.) If we’re bothering to have the discussion, then absolute truth must exist. An absolute system can tolerate relative truth within its boundaries, but if everything were relative, we would have no concept of absolute truth at all.
- Imagine boats on the ocean. They can float merrily on their way on the open seas, their positions only existing relative to each other. Boat A is 30 miles from Boat B, and the like. Their positions are all relative to each other, as they are all floating wherever they see fit. But the second one of the boats happens upon land, the position of all of the boats becomes absolute. The land is the absolute, and all the boats are absolutely defined in reference to it. Note that the boats still exist relative to each other, even as they exist absolutely in relation to the land.

- Lewis describes arguments as boats. There are three things we have to consider. First, does the argument make the point it intends; does the boat get to the port it is aiming for? Second, does the argument stay coherent; does the boat stay afloat? Third, and most usually forgotten, is why is the boat there in the first place? If we’re arguing, it must be about something; from nothing, nothing comes. If there is only relative truth, where would we even get the idea of absolute truth? There is nothing within a relative system that would spark the idea of absolutes, yet there are things within an absolute that would give rise to the idea of relative truths. So the fact that we’re having the discussion at all means that there must be some sort of absolute truth.

4. God exists and created all things.
There must be Something that gives rise to all other things. That Something must have will and personality, therefore that Something must be a Someone. That Someone must exist outside of the constraints of the physical universe, therefore He must be omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. Additionally, that Someone desires to know and be known by man, therefore, that Someone is called God. Since He exists before time, He must have created all things. Since He exists outside of time, He must still be involved in the world He created.

Threat: Naturalism. Naturalism in modernity takes the opposite angle from postmodernism in attacking Christianity. Instead of denying the existence of truth, it presents itself as absolute truth and proceeds to deny the truth of Christianity. This attack did not originate with Darwin, but Darwin was modernity’s expression of the old idea of materialism. ‘There is matter and nothing more.’ The Greeks said this, and it too is self-refuting. The statement ‘there is matter and nothing more’ is itself more than matter. It is thought. Accordingly, Evolution never really had much of an answer for consciousness. This attack is generally expressed along two parallel lines: Darwin’s and Nietzsche’s.
- The scientific attack: Evolution. In order to answer the question of origins, naturalism needed a competing mythology. It found it in Darwin’s works, the abiogenesis theory with a new veneer. His acolytes proceeded to rewrite both human history and fossil history in order to fit their model. (entirely fictional yet mandatory reading Inherit the Wind, falsified wand wishful transitional forms, etc.) The entire discussion was framed by the use of a tremendous linguistic sleight of hand, using interchangeably ‘science as methodology’ and ‘science as the religion of progress.’ Carl Sagan was famous for this, who interestingly was not respected as a scientist, and is known for works of fiction and movie adaptations, not for any real research. He pushed a false dichotomy between faith and reason, specifically between religion and science. This dichotomy seemed to pose no problems to the openly Christian founders of most major branches of science. Refer to IVP’s ‘Six Modern Myths’ for more information.
- The philosophical attack: Nihilism. If there is nothing but the material world, nothing but natural selection, then mankind should follow natural selection as its governing dynamic. Nietzsche basically thinks this through. In a universe without God, there is nothing but will to power. Those with power should act as they see fit. The Melian Dialogue re-expressed in colder terms. Generally, Nihilism is too strong a drink to take straight, so it ends up mixed with some sort of populist philosophy. (Refer to Pilgrim’s Regress, C. S. Lewis) Mix it with social Darwinism, and you get fascism by way of eugenics. Mix it with economics, and you get Communism by way of Marx. Through Nietzche, though, modernity undoes itself. The horrors of the line of reasoning show up in his work and his progeny. In the light of the destruction of the world wars, the faith in progress and tremendous arrogance that marked the early 1900s gives way to the realization that progress leads nowhere as well. So the next logical choice was to embrace that nothing. Hence postmodernism.

Arguments:

- Irreducible Complexity (Biology.) Evolution requires a large number of incremental changes over time. However, most systems need to be fully formed if they are to work at all. Therefore, most life systems must have been fully functioning at their inception.
- Think about an airplane. You need about seven systems to work together all at once, or the plane never gets off the ground. Put together landing gear with engines, throw it up in the air, and boom, big mess. Even the most primitive airplane needs to have landing gear, engines, wings, controls, and a pilot, and all at once. And while the system changes over time, most of the changes have to show up in a completed form. A half-completed hydraulic system starts fires, it doesn’t become a complete system.
- The most basic form of life requires eight fully functioning molecular systems, all far more complex than any system on an aircraft. You have to get all eight systems at once, or your aspiring life form is nothing more than dust, and you have to start back at ground zero. No good.
- Even if you already have life, transitional forms still run into the same problems. A half fin/half foot is not very good at being either. Fully formed gills work great. Fully formed lungs work great. Halfway in between, you die. Evolution simply can’t jump the gaps between systems with small changes and random chance. There literally isn’t enough time in the world. Similarities between systems are far better explained by a common Engineer than a common ancestor.

- Cambrian Explosion. (Paleontology.) The nicely branching tree of life that is standard in most High School Bio textbooks is part and parcel to the nice, slow, eventual progression of Evolution. The problem is that it doesn’t much match the fossil record. If the fossil record was a football field (or, even better, a rugby pitch,) we would run 93 yards down the field, finding only bacteria and very simple worms, and those not changing much, if at all. Then, in the space of half of one step, every form of life now known bursts onto the scene, all fully formed as we know them now.
- There were forms of life that came about in the Cambrian Explosion that no longer exist. There are no forms of life that exist now that did not exist then. Therefore, biodiversity is decreasing over time, not increasing as evolution would predict. This also provides additional evidence that there was once a global catastrophe, of the type depicted in the time of Noah.

- Anthropic Principle (Cosmology.) People used to assume that we would find life all over the place, once we started exploring planets. We haven’t found anything like life on any planet we have explored. Instead, what we have found is how tremendously improbable it is that life exists at all. This is further evidence for a Creator.
- Imagine a global lottery. If the odds of winning are one in a million, about six thousand people will win. If you win, you are really lucky, but it isn’t that surprising that somebody wins. Now imagine the odds are one in a trillion, trillion, trillion. Nobody should win with odds like that. If somebody does win, you need to consider the possibility that the lottery was fixed. In fact, at that point, it really is the best answer. Now add fifty zeroes to those odds, and you have the lottery for life in this universe. The lottery was fixed.
- In order to have life, you have to have a planet with exactly the right size orbiting exactly the right kind of star in exactly the right position in the right place in the right kind of galaxy. There’s about twenty more variables you have to get exactly right in order for any sort of life to be even imaginable. Not whether evolution can happen. Whether life can happen at all. The odds end up at 10^121. The most generous estimate of planets in the universe is 10^80. You don’t even come close. 10^41 is far beyond statistically impossible. It takes more faith to believe in those odds than it does to believe someone fixed the lottery.
- The problem only gets worse when you look at it on a universal level. There’s at least thirty variables that have to be exactly right in order for any conception of life to exist at all in this universe. They are precise to a factor of 10^600. Change them at all and everything dies on every planet. And there’s only one universe (that we know of.) So the classic naturalist counterargument is to just up the number of repetitions. Say there’s 10^600 universes and one of them is bound to get it right. The problem is that’s just the gamblers’ fallacy all over again. There is no cumulative luck. Unless our universe is somehow benefiting from the failures of an infinite number of failed universes, then our sample size is one. Even more, if there was a ‘universe creation machine,’ it would probably exhibit tremendous design itself. You can’t explain away an artist by finding his brush. And if the artwork is exquisitely designed, the brush will be as well. That is the problem atheist cosmologists keep running into.

- Ontological Argument (Philosophy.) The fact that we’re here at all is significant. There has to be a sequence of cause and effect that arrives here. We know that sequence can move forwards forever. The problem comes when we try to go backwards. Ancient Hindu theology places the Earth on the back of an elephant. When asked the inevitable question, ‘what holds up that elephant?’ the answer was ‘another elephant,’ and so on. This merely delays the answer, but you can’t push it back forever. If we’re here at all, God must exist.
- The first formulation of this argument is Plato’s Unmoved Mover. Cause links to effect, which in turn becomes another cause with its own effect and so on. All causes and effects link together into a stream of causality, which shapes events. Working forwards, there is no problem. Working backwards, though, you go from effect to cause, and it is elephants upon elephants all the way back. But the chain has to start somewhere. All effects are the result of causes. But to get the whole train moving, there has to be a locomotive. Something must be a cause that is not the effect of another cause. There must be an unmoved mover, that both causes itself and other things. Plato calls this the Unmoved Mover. Aquinas adapts this theory to Christianity and further refines it in his Summa Theologica, determining that God is pure actuality, no potentiality at all. Of course, God told this to Moses well before Aquinas did the math. ’I AM that I AM.’
- The second formulation is the Kalam cosmological argument. It comes from the Islamic world, circa 900 AD, possibly from Averroes. It tells us that negative infinite regress is impossible. Basically, if you ran into someone who told you ‘I’m going to count to infinity… 1, 2, 3, 4, 5,’ and so on, you could bet that they’ll get bored or tired or die of old age before they get there, but in principle it is a logically coherent statement. Now imagine someone shows up, and says ‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1... I just counted backwards from infinity.’ That person is obviously lying. He has nowhere to start. You can’t say ‘infinity, infinity minus one, etc.’ and expect to get back to zero. Infinity keeps moving. You need a fixed point of beginning if you are to get here at all. And we are here, so the universe began. Therefore, Someone began it.
- The last and most fun formulation is Anselm’s Ontological Argument. Think of something good. Like Ice Cream. Now think of something better. True Love, Princess Bride Style. Or Fast Cars. Or whatever. Now think of something better than that. Pretty much, if you keep going you’re going to end up at the Ultimate Good. And that is God. So if anything good exists, and some things are more good than others, then there is going to be a theoretical pinnacle of goodness. That Perfect Good must be God. Therefore, God exists because good exists, and it must have its ontological origin in Him.


5. The Gospels are a Trustworthy Account.
The Gospels describe God’s fullest revelation of Himself to mankind, the birth, life, death and resurrection of His Son. They speak clearly and unequivocally to the fact that a man was born at a specific time and place, claimed to be God in the flesh, died a criminal’s death, and bodily came back from the dead. If truth is knowable, and God exists, then God exists in truth. Since God is beyond death, and man is not, then death is subject to God. Any man who claimed Godhood wrongly would have no power over death, as a God of truth would not acknowledge such falsehood. Therefore, if a man had power over death, then he must be of God. Given that God does not appreciate blasphemy, if a man claimed to be God, and returned from the dead, then He must be God. If a Man was indeed God, then everything He said is truth. And He said the basic truths of Christianity over and over again: sin, repentance, substitutionary atonement, eternal life. In the person of Jesus Christ, as attested to in the Gospels, all the doctrines of Christianity, the creeds and the scripture have their root. If He is who He said He was, His words are inescapable and call all men into account. If the Gospels are true, He is who He said He was.

Threat: Neo-Gnosticism. None of the arguments are really that new. Postmodernism looks a lot like hedonism recycled, modernity looks a lot like materialism recycled. And neo-Gnosticism is just the Gnostics recycled. They make the same basic argument: Jesus never really claimed to be God, and He was a nice guy, but certainly not God. This shows up in so-called ‘quests for the historical Jesus,’ in the ‘Jesus seminar,’ in movies like Stigmata and books like the DaVinci Code. (This may have something to do with the seminar’s flawed methodology and their inability to win real arguments. If you can’t make your points, just go to the media. They’ll buy anything.) Basically, neo-Gnosticism tries to discredit the truth claims of the Gospels, and hence the basic doctrines of Christianity.
- Formal Attack: Jesus Seminar. This generally takes form in recycling some old controversy and calling it new. This often includes some flavor of ‘Jesus slept with Mary Magdalene,’ and incorporates some of the nonsense in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. This is especially strange, given that if some of the weird doctrines contained in that book ‘only men go to heaven, so Mary became a man,’ then Christians would be called misogynist and all sorts of nasty things. I guess you can have your cake and eat it too. Especially if you find a good publisher. A lot of this is just silly conspiracy theories. All these issues were addressed openly by people far closer to the original issues, and their reasoning and results were available for all to see.
- Informal Attack: Jesus was a good teacher. Just not a God. Acknowledging a form of goodness, but not goodness in full, this argument allows people to neutralize Jesus into some pedantic peddler of stale platitudes. But, as C.S. Lewis points out, you can’t neuter the Lion of the Tribe of Judah. He was no nice guy. Nice guys don’t say the things He said. And nice guys don’t change lives two thousand years later. God in the flesh does.

Arguments:

- Textual Criticism (Literature/Archaeology.) Josh McDowell’s Apologetics work is largely in the area of textual criticism of the Gospels. In fact, it was the overwhelming weight of evidence in this area that ended up bringing him to Christ. We can say with a very high degree of reliability that we are reading what was written, what was written checks with itself, and checks with external sources. Legendary development shows up in later pseudoepigraphia (like Gospel of Thomas,) but is conspicuously absent in the Biblical account. Furthermore, those who would have known best the veracity of the Gospels died for them, to the man. The only coherent answer is that the Gospels are a true accounting of events.
- First, there is the manuscript evidence. We consider Beowulf to be a rough accounting of the original oral poem. Hundreds of years passed before it was written down, and manuscripts are rare and vary greatly. Thucidides’ History of the Peloponnesian Wars is considered a reliable recounting of the original text. The text is derived from eight manuscripts dated generously to 800 years after the writing. Excluding the Bible, the Iliad is the considered possibly the most reliable text from antiquity from a manuscript point of view. There are 650 manuscripts available. There are over 20,000 manuscripts of the New Testament. They date very close to the writing of the writing of the originals. Additionally, discoveries of new manuscripts only confirm existing manuscripts. Dead Sea Scrolls, for instance, confirming OT. Similar discoveries confirm NT. A hundred years of openly hostile manuscript criticism has failed to bring down Scripture. The same could not be said for any other holy text. The telephone game argument simply fails in the face of the evidence.
- Second, the internal coherence of the work. Noting that the four gospels were all written from different authors, they do not contradict each other in any material way. Even if the synoptic gospels (all but John) cite each other as sources, they agree in the places that were not cited. There was an article in Harvard Law Journal, I believe, that analyzed the gospels from a legal point of view. Taking the testimony of the first-hand witnesses recorded, and the expert research of Luke, there would have been a legally airtight case that Christ rose, by any courtroom standard of proof. One even minute, almost irrelevant points of fact, the texts agree. The odds of this happening are extremely improbable, which points to the only real conclusion: the accounts synchronize because they are factual. Truth is coherent. Four witnesses all saw the same thing, and they do not contradict each other.
- Along with this, the idea of Legendary Development. Stories over time become legends. C. S. Lewis addresses this point well. When approached about skeptical NT scholars who called the Bible myth, he asked not how much NT had they read, but how much myth they had read. He responded something to the effect of ‘I am a professor of myth, and the Gospels don’t read like any myth I have ever read.’ Myth and Legendary Development have certain characteristics that develop over time. First, all the good guys are really good, and the bad guys are really bad. The would-be heroes, the apostles, look pretty dumb most of the time. They are hardly heroes, especially during the crucifixion. Second, all the extraneous details disappear. It was not until about two centuries ago that people put irrelevant details into fiction to make it more realistic. The Gospels are filled with seemingly extraneous details, ones that are consistent with the main themes, but largely tangential. This is indicative of a factual account, not a legend. Finally, a legend is retold with some sort of purpose to power, either to support or oppose existing power structures. The Gospels are not a politically revolutionary work, but they are certainly not a political status-quo work. Interestingly, legendary development shows up in all the Gospel of Thomas-type epigraphia, which is consistent with their dates of writing, 200+ years after the events.
- Finally, there is the External Consistency of the work. Comparing the Gospels with the historical records of the time, it checks. Roman records talk about a group following a slave Krestus who, it was claimed, died and rose again. This is too close for coincidence, and indicates that the doctrines of the early church did not dramatically change over time. Josephus discusses the early church, and recounts that the Nazarene sect of Judaism (what Christians were called at the time) believed the same things. Roman records check with the name of a city works administrator in Paul’s epistles. The claims of the Gospel explain the relevant citations better than any other hypothesis.
- The most significant external consistency check is the witness of the martyrs. If anyone would know the Gospels were a fabrication, the apostles certainly would have. Yet, all of them died as if they believed, as attested to by Roman records and other accounts. This would be the most illogical of actions to knowingly die for a lie. Especially to rejoice as they did so. Psychologically, something happens to the apostles between sitting in a room hiding from the Romans and dying horrible deaths joyfully. There is only one explanation: their account was true.

- The Trilemma. (Logic.) C. S. Lewis’ classic trilemma counters the claim that Jesus was just a good teacher. The Gospels depict Jesus claiming to be God. There is no other adequate explanation for His death other than the charge of blasphemy. So clearly He claimed to be God, and was understood to do so by the people of the time. This precludes the ‘good teacher’ hypothesis. He must be a legend, a liar, a lunatic or Lord.
- The first option, legend, can be largely rejected due to the tremendous amount of textual evidence for Jesus’ existence, both in the Gospels and outside of them. Even just using Josephus, you can prove to any reasonable standard that Jesus existed and claimed to be God.
- The next option is liar. A man who claims to be God, yet knows that he is not, is the very devil in hell. (plagiarizing Lewis) Yet, Christ’s moral philosophy is recognized as some of the most beautiful and good in all of history, even by non-Christians. The ‘good teacher’ claim even includes ‘good.’ Nietzsche was one of very few to call Christ anything negative morally, and Nietzsche is not really an example of kind and generous moral philosophy. So liar doesn’t check with the data.
- The next option is lunatic. To plagiarize Lewis again, someone who claims to be God, believes themselves to be God, and is not God, is equivalent to someone who believes themselves to be a poached egg. It would not be the first time a man claimed to be God. Unfortunately for this option, such men do not win arguments with the best scholars and lawyers of their time. Christ’s knowledge and powers of reasoning are still astonishing two thousand years later. This is not the mark of a man who belongs in an asylum.
- So the only remaining option is that He was who He said He was. That He is Lord of Heaven and Earth. The resurrection stands as proof. No other arguments about who He was can stand in the face of an empty tomb. And, once again, the people who would know whether that was true or not died to the man believe that it was (with the exception of John.)

- Gamaliel’s Argument (History.) Gamaliel, teacher of Saul of Tarsus, tells the Sanhedrin that if what the Apostles were doing was of God, then they could not stop it no matter what they did. If it was not of God, it would die out on its own. His argument stands. Christianity would have been stillborn if confronted with the corpse of Christ. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, if the apostles found the wrong tomb, to open up the right one and parade the body through the streets. That was never done, instead the authorities acted more like people trying to hush up a conspiracy. Neither was the faith killed by the Pharisees in Jerusalem, nor was it killed by the executioners of Rome. In the face of tremendous persecution, the church thrived. And two thousand years later, Jesus Christ still changes lives.
- From the viewpoint of history, Christianity should never have made it out of the cradle. Starting as a offshoot faith of a small and relatively insignificant Diaspora, it certainly should not have been able to withstand the attacks of the power structures of the time. It makes sense that Islam’s conversion by taxes and the sword took the Middle East by storm. It makes sense that Mormonism and its pyramid scheme layout prospers in a land of pyramid schemes. It does not make sense that eleven barely literate fishermen and a turncoat preacher overcome the greatest empire in all of history by spilling their own blood. And largely by accident at that. There is no explanation for that other than a miracle. Other than the hand of God. We should not be here. There is no power in the world that explains how these weak jars of clay could do so much in so little time.
- From a very personal viewpoint, Christ still changes lives. He is not some sterile Gautama. People still find Him daily. They encounter Him and He transforms their lives. I’ve seen it, in myself and in others. Dead men inspire, but they do not transform. Christ still transforms the world. He reconciles the irreconcilable. Nobody describes a personal relationship with Buddha, or Zoraster, or Mohammed. People describe Jesus in intimate terms. He is alive and well, and we all stand as evidence of that.
- One’s testimony is often their best apologetic argument. Because it is laced with the power of the Spirit, and it is real and breathing and in front of them.

6. Be a Samurai. There are two ways to fight. You can use the traditional Western style, hacking off limbs until one side wins. Or you can use the Eastern style, where two Samurai would stare at each other for hours, until one blinks, and the other would come in with an instant killing stroke. Samurai prepare, and they stay aware. They never bludgeon. This is the way to do apologetics.

- You are there to love on people. Your primary weapon is the Sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God. Apologetics is a counter-stroke, a defensive move.

- In living our faith, we represent the trilemma over and over again. Either we are hideously evil liars, the greatest of all fools, or we are right. The enemy will counter this by trying to make us into well-meaning fools. For this we are instructed to always have an answer ready.

- Therefore, use apologetics to protect weaker brothers and sisters, or to deflect an attack. But after deflecting it, go right back to the primary weapon of love. Preach the Gospel. With words if necessary. But if necessary, make sure you have the words.

7. Further References:
Evidence that Demands a Verdict, Josh McDowell.
More than a Carpenter, Josh McDowell.
Jesus Among Other Gods, Ravi Zacharias.
When Skeptics Ask, Norm Geisler.
When Critics Ask, Norm Geisler.
The Case for Christ, Lee Stroebel.
The Case for Faith, Lee Stroebel.
The Case for a Creator, Lee Stroebel.
Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis.

I don’t know if this is supported by scholarly sources or archaeological evidence in any way. So by the same token, I don’t know is refuted by them either. I paid my dues looking through scholarly journals about Russian History in Undergrad. So there. Anyways, this is the result of some random conjecture between myself and Russian-American at a coffee shop. Lots o’ fun.

Around 800 AD, all the Eastern Slavs lived in was called the Kievan Rus’. They were basically a bunch of city-states in what is now Ukraine. The relationship between the city-states was somewhat akin to that of the ancient Greeks during the time of Thucidides. Around 1000 AD, the Mongols rolled through the area. Kiev was the strongest and richest city in all of Europe at the time. So the Mongols send their emissaries to demand tribute from Kiev, and the Kievans send back the Mongol emissaries without their heads. Genghis Khan doesn’t take rejection particularly well, so he kills almost everyone in Kiev. Game over, Kievan Rus’.

There is a pretty interesting historiographical question here. The Soviets described the Kievan Rus’ as a feudalistic culture, so that it would fit into their model of dialectical materialism. The Ukrainians describe the Kievan Rus’ as a pinnacle of governance and culture, and proceed to take all of its symbology as their own (hrybna, the currency, and trizub, the symbol of the Kyivan grand princes.) Both the Soviets and the Ukrainians have (had) agendas wrapped around their perspectives on the Kievan Rus’, and that influences their respective viewpoints. Of course.

So here is my uninformed and relatively insignificant argument. First, feudalistic economies are fundamentally agrarian. The Kievan Rus’ economy was based around taxing the trade routes coming out of Constantinople. A large amount of revenue was generated by a large number craftsmen and merchants, who capitalized on the trade routes, importing and exporting large numbers of goods. These craftsmen and merchants were decidedly bourgeoisie, and were not particularly beholden to any feudal lords. A trade based economy with a large middle class points far more to an advanced capitalistic economy than a feudal economy.

Second, the Kievan Rus’ system of governance could be described as ‘frontier Athenian.’ Three branches of government, for lack of a better term, came together to produce policy. Any two could trump the third, and when they did so, people generally died. There was an executive-type figure in the Grand Prince (Veliky Knyaz,) who was a hereditary monarch. There was a legislative-type body in the Veche, a council of landowners and merchants who discussed and voted on all laws. There was a judicial-type entity in the Boyars, hereditary wealthy nobles independent of the Grand Prince. Each city-state had a different mix of these three (Novgorod had most of its power with the Veche, for example,) and while far from the staid Greek philosophers (Impeachment was accomplished by decapitation, usually,) it was far less authoritarian than any other significant European systems of the time.

There is a line of argumentation that believes Russia to be the ‘Third Rome.’ While now mostly a symbolic feature embraced by the Russian Orthodox Church, there was once truth in it. I remember writing a paper comparing the Kievan Rus’ with the Greek city states. I think I had only cited the parallelism, and I neglected to look to lineage. The primary influence on the culture, economy and governance of the Kievan Rus’ was Constantinople. There was a conscious choice to model the society on the Eastern Seat of the Church, stunning in its splendor at that time. Constantinople, in turn, owed its model of society to both the Romans and the Greeks. So there was something decidedly Greek that flowed into Kiev through the rivers that were its trade routes. Cyrillic, after all, was based on Greek.

How did we get from there to here? Moscow is my guess. Sergei Eisenstein aside, Moscow gained its power by collecting taxes for the Mongol Golden Horde. Though rivers and forests played some role in its defense, Moscow profited greatly under the Mongol yoke, evolving from a small outpost into a powerful city. As the Golden Horde declined, the Muscovites eventually became strong enough to drive the Mongols out. In the process, though, Muscovite governance picked up a strong flavor of corruption and authoritarianism, whether from the Mongols or from what had become of the House of Rurik. The rise of Moscow was at about the same time as the decline of Constantinople. Moscow’s distance from Constantinople and the decay of Byzantine influence meant that the Greek flavor that shaped Kiev would have little influence on Moscow.

The synopsis of my argument is that 1) There was a continuity between the ancient Greeks and the Kievan Rus‘ by way of Byzantium and 2) That continuity was broken under the Mongol yoke and the rise of Moscow. This is doubtless controversial, and sides pretty strongly with the Ukrainian historiography on the subject (with the notable exception of affirming that the Ukrainians and the Russians came from the same Kievan stock.) So, in terms of ‘the past that never was,’ Democracy is actually quite Russian. But if it is Russian the way we understand Russian still remains to be seen. The unique thing about a ‘past that never was’ is that if you recover it, you get to make it your future.

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God. - John, the Apostle.

Logos. The Word. The funny thing about doing something for a very long time is that sometimes you forget that you are doing it. It becomes so natural and so transparent that you start taking it for granted. When you start to walk, walking takes a lot of effort and concentration. You are conscious of every step. Keep doing it a while, and it becomes second nature. You just decide to go somewhere and your legs take you. The mechanics of walking never come to mind, unless, of course, you run into something.

Talking is much the same. It requires a tremendous amount of conscious effort for a two year old to wrap the word ‘mama’ around the person who has been their constant companion for their last two years, and just as much effort to move their vocal cords in a certain way as to give that word to another in speech. The child must identify one mass of feelings and sensations, differentiate it from all other masses of feelings and sensations (including themselves,) and store that distinction for future recall. The child must learn to encapsulate meaning in a form that can be meaningfully used and conveyed. As time goes on, the child gets more words and more rules for combining words into bigger and bigger ideas. Eventually, the child becomes so comfortable with words that they automatically wrap ideas with words as they think. Like walking, the mechanics of wording only come to mind when they fail. ‘You know, what’s the word...’ We only think about words when we lack one for an idea.

A word encapsulates meaning. It is a package of truth that can be conveyed, a manageable chunk of reality that can be meaningfully shared. I look at a small plastic vessel for holding water, and I think ‘cup.’ I identify certain characteristics of the thing (the vessel-ness, the small-ness) and discard the characteristics not deemed critical (the plastic-ness,) and associate it with a reference idea from my thoughts and memories. The archetypal cup shows up in my consciousness, and my mind transfers that thought pattern to my vocal chords. Through muscle memory and phonemes, my vocal chords turn it into vibrations through the medium of air, which carries it to the ear of the listener, vibrating against tympanic membranes and anvil-shaped bones. The ear turns the vibration into electricity, which through pattern recognition is identified as a word. That word recalls that idea, and the cup has been transferred from my mind to the mind of the listener. (Note the fundamental paradox of postmodernism: Language implies coherence to truth, even if it denies it with its words. If there is no coherence, then there are no words, only sounds. Postmodernism will lead to the abolition of man (C.S.L.) as surely as modernity if allowed to run its course. But I digress.)

The word is a unique thing. It is not just a sign, yet it signifies; not simply a pointer, yet it points to something else. A sign tells us where to look to find a thing, but it is not the thing itself. A word directs us in a very real way, but it is the thing itself in a very real way. It is a sign and the thing itself both at once. The image of a cup is no less or more a cup than the word cup, as long as the cup is named. Yet, the word cup will point us toward the image of the cup. Moreover, when the word ‘cup’ is invoked, it recalls a very real idea of a cup in the mind of the hearer. (Reference Greek Form theory for the idea of perfect reference things.) The cup is not just the idea, nor just the image, nor just the word. It is all of them at once, yet the idea and the image and the word are all separate from each other. The image invokes the word, which invokes the idea, which invokes an image, and the cycle goes on. So the word is fully the thing that it signifies, yet it signifies that thing still.

Words do not exist in a vacuum, they are made to be shared. In order to share a word, meanings must be decided by a community. A people come together and decide that a given set of phonemes means a certain word which encapsulates a certain idea. The whole endeavor is foolishness if the set of sounds I use to describe ‘cup’ is the set of sounds the listener uses to describe ‘dog.’ The image I break down into sounds must be reconstituted into the same image in the mind of the hearer if we are to communicate at all. So things must have names, and those names must be the same names, even amongst different people. Accordingly, societies enforce compliance with linguistic standards. Those who diverge from these standards are subject to reproach. ‘Only rednecks say ain’t,’ and the like. So we now have standards, and hence the ability to share thoughts.

What happens, then, when there is a new thought? It must be named if it is to be shared. Who should do the naming? The one whose thought it is. The one who created the thought, the one who exercises authority over it should name it (all legitimate authority has to do with creation, hence ‘author‘ity.) After all, it is theirs. In naming it, they stake their claim, for in order to convey the thought from then on, people will use their word. There are many ways this plays out. Edison calls his invention the light bulb. ARPA, the Internet. Leif Erickson (I think) discovers land in the North Atlantic, and deceptively calls it Greenland. Economists discover theories and name them after themselves. The dictator Turkmenbashi proceeds to use his authority to rename most of the nouns in the country after himself (marklar marklar the marklar to the marklar. It's from South Park.) Regardless, things must be named, and to name something is to claim authority over it.

If we have so many words now, than all of those things have been named. All the subdivisions of reality are staked out by linguistics, and the plots have been divided as long back as we can remember. Sometimes we move stones, as words and languages evolve over time. Sometimes one field is divided into two, when we create a new flavor or a new combination of things. Still, there must have been an original partition. Let’s look to origins. God makes things. He then names them. The Author exercises authority. He calls the light day (differentiated from the night by its lightness,) and the darkness night. Then He names Adam. He teaches words to Adam, and teaches Adam to name things. Adam then names with the authority of a viceroy. The first word leads to more words, for the naming of all things starts with the Word. All language came from the Mouth of God first. He taught us to speak.

Let’s take it back a step. There is a naming before all namings. We talk about God, so we must have a word for Him. Yet, how can we name God? We are the finite, and the finite cannot climb the mountain of eternity to affix a name to the infinite. Only one Being was there when the world was made. So if God is named, and He is, then He named Himself. (Reference Anselm about the inadequacy of all ‘sun god’ contingent names.) A Name is made to be shared. We cannot speak the language of the Most High, so the Most High must call Himself a Word that we can understand.

So the Word puts on flesh. We wrap a thing in words so that it can be understood, but what words do we have for Him? By what device can we wrap our words around Him? The only way a mind of flesh can wrap itself around God is for God to wrap himself in flesh. We cannot wrap our mind around the Father, so the Son wraps Himself around us. Through Him, we are given access to the Father and to the Godhead. So the Son is the Word. He is the package of Truth that can be conveyed. He signifies God and He is God. He is the Name by which all things are named.

Adam and Eve walked with God in the garden. Hearing this growing up, I pictured two people walking in the garden with some God-like cloud nearby that spoke with a booming, thunderous voice. I think I imagined that cloud sort of following them around, hovering in its God-ness. Because, for some reason, God had to be some inaccessible Monty Python style guy in the clouds. But if the Word was in the beginning, then the Word was in the garden. Which person of the Trinity would be the most relevant to mankind? I think we make this too hard. If the Bible says that Adam and Eve were walking with God in the garden, then they were walking with Him. The Apostles walked with the Son by the shores of Galilee. I do not think it was so different in the garden. Three sets of footprints, man and God walking together with real feel. The Word gives them words to give back to Him.

There is, of course, another major linguistic-historical event in Genesis. The tower of Babel. Man was given words to exercise and share authority. When man abandons God, he retains his language faculty, and promptly sets it to work in his war against God. We never did the math. If we get what we want, we destroy ourselves. Succeeding in our rebellion, we would cut ourselves off from Him entirely. We would throw away our only chance of salvation. So He puts another set of child-locks on us. After the flood, God shortened the life span of man from a thousand to a hundred years. He limited our ability to destroy ourselves by limiting the time we had to do so. So Babel was another curse that was a blessing. Speaking the same language, we were able to coordinate logistics in our war against God. In fracturing the languages of man, God takes one extra step to limit the power of man and his concomitant ability to destroy himself.

Child-locks aren’t meant to last forever. God promises Adam and Eve that the fall will be reversed. He promises salvation, that all things torn asunder will be reunited in Him. The languages of man were torn asunder at Babel. Only in Him can they be reunited. So God gives us one true Language. One we cannot use for war against Him. He sends back to us the Word that redeems all other words.

We use the word ‘Christophony’ to describe any appearances of Jesus before His birth. Associated with that word is the concept of a ‘Pre-incarnate Christ.’ We forget that this fallen world is ‘Plan B.’ There was nothing written upon all of eternity that said we had to fall. The Word was the Word before the cross; the Son was the Son before the manger. There always was one Name by which men are reconciled to God. We just made the process bloodier. Jesus was still Jesus in the garden.

Christ. The Messiah. The One who comes to save us from our sins. The dragon-slayer of myth. But St. George was who he was before the dragon. The dragon just showed who that was. Jesus is not bound to the cross; the cross is subject to Jesus. The cross was a backdrop against which He revealed who He was, an easel, a canvas upon which He painted the picture of love. The Artist is not bound to the canvas. He is the artist before the canvas. He is simply who He is.

The Word gave us all of our words. We used those words against Him, so our words were broken. The Word came again, and gave us new words. He taught us Agape. It is a hard word to say in such a broken world. But none of us said our first words with ease, yet now we wrap ideas in words with ease. So sanctification is learning to walk. One day we will learn to wrap our thoughts with love as easily as we wrap our ideas in words. On that day, we will give all of our words back to the Word as crowns cast at His feet.

So if it looks like I blatantly plagiarized Scott Hahn, I probably did without knowing it. I guess we would both be citing the same ultimate source. And anything I say that he said, he probably said better, because he’s a real academic and uses things like grammar and spell check and logic. Whatever. Anyways, so everyone always asks ‘why would a loving God make hell?’ It is a good question, certainly. Here is my half-witted attempt to answer.

It is an old question, but really not that old. Humanity assumed that we all sucked for most of history. So the question of a bad end of all things had little to do with proving or disproving the divine. After all, the Titans were old-school crazy, and neither they nor the Olympians really cared much for people. The Earth was the trash heap of the universe. That the residents of that refuse pile should die at the whims of the gods wasn’t super surprising. Same with the Norse myths, the trolls and the giants kill everybody. Game over, ends bad. Baal and Asherah didn’t really care much for people, nor did Krishna or Shiva. That people should die because they were in a bad mood did little to undermine their credibility as objects of worship. In fact, in a certain way it enhanced their stock as gods. Most tribal religions include gods that kill people when they are displeased. After all, it is the gods’ prerogative to do whatever they want, and we get stuck dealing with it. Most of humanity over the course of history would have little problem imagining that a Supreme Being would send people, even arbitrarily, into tremendous suffering for disobeying Him. Of course, there were some fundamental assumptions that most of humanity over the course of history probably needs to revise about the divine.

We generally assumed that the gods are cruel and care little for people. But something changed. God showed up, and it turned out that not only was He not cruel, but He loved us more than we could imagine. And as more and more people kept telling us this, as more philosophers revised our assumptions of the divine, we started to believe that God actually did love us. So a thousand years go by, and we get comfortable with this. God was not some temperamental being that sat on the top of some mountain waiting to consume anyone who annoyed him with bolts of lightning. Instead, He loved us personally and cared for each of us deeply. We got used to His mercy. So used to it that we began to think that we deserved it. So a few centuries later, we have twisted our comfort with His mercy into an argument against His very existence. If God loves everyone so much, then how could He exercise the His divine prerogative to punish those who disobeyed? C.S.L. tells us in God in the Dock that for most of human history, mankind has seen themselves as on trial from the gods. One of the unique legacies of the Enlightenment is that the courtroom is reversed. We reserve the right to try God for His very existence, judging Him according to the standard of ‘if I were Him.’ Lewis expounds upon this far better than I could.

Nonetheless, it is a legitimate question, and one with a legitimate answer. So there is a tension. 1) God loves everyone. 2) God sends people to a place of eternal suffering if they reject Him. Both of these have to happen at once, and we have a hard time seeing how they can. If a person really, truly loved someone, he would not want to hurt that person if they rejected his advances, right? I mean that’s just basic decency. So if God’s so good, why can’t He behave to a standard as low as that? I mean, really.

Now, instead of our thwarted lover, let’s imagine a twenty-year old who still lives under his parents’ roof. He eats their food, drives their car, and pretty much has a decent living through little effort of his own. After all, he is not a responsible young man. On his own, he would completely destroy himself though his foolish choices. Yet, his parents save him over and over again from himself. His parents are not fools, though. As long as their son lives under their roof, he is bound by certain rules. They constrain his actions to limit the amount of destruction that he can call down upon himself and others. The parents go to the young man ever day, tell him that they love him, and ask him to love them back. Every day, he says ‘I hate all of your stupid rules. I hate you more than anything else in this world. There is nothing I would like more than to never see you again.’ They do everything they can to win his love. But his answer never changes. So one day, when all hope for change runs out, they will have to give him his wish. After all, he is a grown-up. They would love him less if they were to treat him as a child and make for him all the choices that end well. So they treat him as an adult, and they allow him a world where he will never see them again, nor anything that would remind him of them.

But the young man does not realize just what that entails. He thought he had a right to live under a roof and to eat good food just because of who he was. He did not realize that it all of those things were gifts of his parents. When he gets what he wanted, and removes all vestiges of his parents from his life, he no longer has any of the things that he enjoyed. Even worse, he no longer has any of the constraints that prevented him from destroying himself. He will bring punishment upon himself simply due to the consequences of his own choices. Justice finds him, but finds him through his own actions. And his parents will grieve, because they still love him. But what else could they do?

The fall of man changed more than we realize, I think. Humanity was designed to reflect God’s power. I believe that after the fall, He tied our hands in many ways. We became constrained. We call it the curse. But just because it is a curse, does not mean that it is hateful. Parents will ground a child to keep him from hanging out with troublemaking friends. The child is constrained in his actions, and will likely view those constraints as unpleasant. The parents do it out of love, though. So we are all grounded. Or at least we have training wheels on.

Neither grounding nor training wheels are intended to be permanent. At some point, the child is released from the grounding, and at some point, the training wheels are taken off. So what happens then? What happens when God takes the training wheels off our world?

Imagine a group of people who follow after God with all their hearts, freed of constraints. They would make heaven, if allowed to run free. Now imagine a group of people who follow themselves and their own ways with all their hearts, freed from all practical constraints. Imagine all the worst parts of the Michael Crichton book Sphere. Or the Great Divorce. We would make hell.

He doesn’t want that for us. He asks us, over and over, will you accept My love? Do you want to be with me? We say no. So He sends His law to show us how He loves us and wants to provide for us. We say no again. So He sends prophets to tell us about how much He loves us. And we say no again. So He comes Himself. He dies for us. And we say no again. And again. And again. What else can He do? Our one wish is a universe without Him, and we express this wish over and over and over again. If we will not be dissuaded, He grants us that wish. With all the things that come with it.

So we get our wish. A universe where we are unconstrained. A universe without Him. But He is the only thing that brings beauty. And He is the only thing that keeps us from tearing ourselves apart. He is the only one who stops us from making Hell. We would make it right now if it were not for His mercy. And we would all be ‘tough-minded’ and forever alone. We would all trade away everything of value for more and more nothing. He gets in our way. If we ask Him to get out of our way long enough, He just may do that. But after all He want through to stop us, how dare we blame Him for the consequences of that choice. He doesn’t make Hell. We make hell. He just lets us do it.

Even then, He is merciful. Lewis points out that God ascribes boundaries to hell. He limits how far down it goes. It is awful and terrible and worse than we can imagine. But there is a difference between unimaginably bad and infinitely bad. Even in His wrath, He is merciful. Without His boundaries, we would make Hell infinitely bad. Every day would be infinitely worse than the last. Yet He gets in our way one last time. He says ‘this far, and no farther.’ Even when we have done all that we could ever do to hurt Him, He still cares for us.

If God is infinitely good, hell is the absence of God, and God is infinitely good, how can hell not be infinitely bad? Sin has no essence, it is merely a lack. The thing about having something is that you can have more and more of it forever. You can not have more and more a lack of something forever. You will hit the point of totally lacking that thing, and then there will be no farther down you can go. This is the way God made our universe, weaving mercy into the very laws of mathematics. Consider temperature. Heat is movement, cold is a lack of movement. You can keep getting hotter forever, but once you hit absolute zero, you can’t get any colder. Hell is the same way. You can diver further and deeper into God forever, but you can only lose so much of Him until there is none left. This is the worst universe possible, but it is still constrained. This is the world we would make. We would hit rock bottom. Yet, God is still kind in creating a universe with a bottom to hit.

We have been asking the wrong question. Our baselines were all wrong. We think we are entitled to this universe, with all of its joy and beauty mixed with pain and suffering. We gave that mortgage away a long time ago. What we would inherit on our own is a horrific universe. We get angry at God for allowing hell to happen at some point in the future. We forget the constant miracle that it hasn’t happened yet. It is His hand that stays it. Our hands would make it. We have Him to thank, not to blame.

So I’m talking to a friend during the latest meeting of the ‘Three Mile Dissertation Club.’ For all you non-members out there, basically it’s a bunch of guys from work who spend our mandatory physical training run talking about all sorts of arcane theories, from philosophy to engineering to theology. I know it’s not as witty a name as ‘the Inklings,’ but we’re not as smart as they were. They got paid to be professors. I get paid to drive airplanes. So sue me. I would pay money, though, to have seen Tolkien and Lewis talking about Middle Earth while trying to run. I bet we’re faster. Anyways, so the topic of the day was Theology. The question comes up ‘can the devil be saved?’ Which is, after all, a pretty interesting question. Why is redemption applied to only one order of creation? To the golf course sign and back… ready, set, go.

Problem number one: anthropomorphism. Before we can even meaningfully approach this question, we have to construct a platform from which to ask the question. Maybe they’re not the same as we are. In order to work forward, we’ll have to look backwards and unravel some of our species’ inherent assumptions about the universe. Guess what? You and I and pretty much everyone reading this are terminally human. So we get to argue by analogy. Good times.

Big deal difference number one: progression of time. Human beings generally experience time as a sequence ordered by set astronomical (hence agricultural) cycles. Our metronome is tied to the physical. The earth rotates on its axis in a physically constant period of time, and many of those periods can be ordered into a new period where the earth revolves around the sun in another physically constant period of time. The relationship between the number of rotations in a revolution remains constant, so there is a hierarchy of ordering. A thing happens during a rotation, in a certain revolution. That thing is now meaningfully located inside our frame of reference. In physical time, that thing now has an address.

Human beings are physical beings. It is fitting that our metronome would be grounded in the physical. Biologically, we need to eat and drink and engage in less pleasant activities a certain number of times per day in order to sustain our flesh. Therefore, we allocate different portions of the rotation to the individual daily needs (already briefed,) and different portions of the revolution to the long term sustainability of the cycle (planting, harvesting, being cold and miserable.) A system of ordering involves both hierarchies and positions. Our positions are set by rotation and revolution of the earth. Our hierarchy uses rotations to subdivide revolutions. By numbering both, we can fix a location.

Spirits are not physical beings. So it stands to reason that their metronome would be different. Perhaps events. Perhaps logical necessities. Perhaps something metaphysical. If metaphysical events are the constant, time looks very different. Thing are assigned locations by their positions within the working out of metaphysical imperatives. Surely, they adapt to their battlefield and manifest in human (physical) time. But I do not think it is their native ordering. Strangely, even for us the passage of time bleeds around the edges between metaphysical and physical orderings of things. There are days that take lifetimes. But we live at the intersection of the metaphysical and the physical. We should be about to feel and interact in metaphysical time, at least to some degree. This may be that sense that God is at work in something. Like a plant on the banks of a river, we are firmly rooted to the soil, but we have a sense of the movement of the stream. But the natural environment of the angels is the river itself. They can step onto the shore, and manifest themselves in physical time, but it is something they put on, not something they are. Therefore, they will experience the effects of time far differently than we will. Hence…

Big deal difference numero dos: Growth. Physical time seems to deliberately have empty space built into it. As if the rotations and the revolutions force time apart, prying apart events to make room for quiet. This has something to do with what we are. We need the empty space as much as we need the events themselves. In that space, we reflect, and we change. We grow. The very ordering of physical time seems to imply growth. Not just a logical unfolding of a mathematical equation, but a drama where the characters are changed by playing their roles.

We are unique in this regard. We were built with the capacity to become something more and more completely over time, to grow into bigger and bigger shoes. Which is appropriate, given Whose shoes we are supposed to fill. With infinite time, we can infinitely pursue God, becoming more and more like Him, yet always still have an infinite distance to go before we catch Him. And this is why we are the viceroys, and not the angels.

Angels are more crystalline. They are created the way they are. So even if they are created initially with much more glory, they do not grow like we do. Hence, they can not be made in His image the way that we are; if God were to create them to be like Him, they would be like Him since eternity, and like Him in His completeness. This is impossible, for there can be only one ‘I AM.’ So if God is going to recreate Himself, He must give that recreation the capacity to grow and the room to grow. Our grounding in the physical gives us the capacity to grow. Physical time gives us room to grow. Our capacity to infinitely approximate but never quite reach the Most High is our crown as kings and queens, and it is intimately wrapped in our physical existence.

This leads us to an interesting aside: the garden. We all remember the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I think I’ve heard it implied that it was put there solely as a test. In a certain sense, this is true. Like in Perelandra, such a thing allows us to move outside of our own will. Still, it seems inconsistent that a God who makes all good and perfect gifts would make a Pandora’s Box just to tempt us. There has to be a better answer. Let’s look to growth. A six year old is very different from a sixteen year old. Imagine that the six year old finds his parents car keys. The parents will tell him ‘no’ if he tries to start the car. They don’t need to explain why. It is not that the keys are bad, it is just that the child is not ready for them. When the child is sixteen, he is ready to learn how to drive, and the ‘no’ becomes a ‘yes, and let me teach you how.’ But if the six year old does not listen to the ‘no,’ he will crash the car and hurt himself. The car, intended for joy, becomes a cause of suffering when the child takes it without permission. So it was, I think, with the tree.

Anyways, so we grow. Angels don’t grow, or at least they don’t grow the way we do. They are what they are. Their capacity to change is limited, compared to ours. We incorporate new information over time, and hence we grow. But we are not some cold, iterated dialectic resolving itself. We are not all electricity, but flesh and blood as well. And flesh changes much quicker than minds do. Which brings us to…

Big difference number threve: Emotions. They change a lot. And they are very tied to the physical. Moods come and go, and are affected by the weather, by things we ate, and by biological cycles. They change how we look at things. Our emotions interface with reason in harmony or dissonance. As they play off each other, they shape both. Ideally, emotions provide us the fire to propel us on our journey, the fuel to move the engine of reason. After the fall, they may try to tear that engine apart when unchecked. They are the motive force behind growth. Reason cannot be moved in the same way that the heart can. In order to change reason, you either need new information, or you need to have your errors explained. If neither of these things happen, you will make the same difference over and over again as long as you remain the same person. And here we see our answer begin to take shape.

Imagine we made a decision once. What could happen to change that decision? For starters, our emotional frame of reference could change. That won’t happen for a purely rational being. We could learn something new, and that could change our mind. Which wouldn’t ever happen to a being who already sees clearly. We could grow into a different person, who would make a different decision given the same set of data. Which would never happen for a being who was created complete. All the things that can make us change our mind would never change the mind of an angel. They would make the same decision over and over and over again. So it would not really matter much if they could come back or not. They would not change their mind even if they were invited back to heaven. The decision they made once is the decision they would make always. Hence, fallen angels cannot be redeemed the same way fallen men can.

It is not that the door to heaven is necessarily locked to them, although it may well be. It is their own natures that bar them from reconciliation. Imagine a malformed lump of clay. It will never be able to reform itself into something beautiful, but it can be reformed by a master’s hand. Now imagine a piece of glass, shattered on the ground. The glass must be swept up and thrown away, for it cannot be reformed. The steel in the angelic nature that makes them such effective servants also bars them from redemption. And this is why it is such a grave offense for man to harden his heart. If we become brittle, we become like the broken glass. In Lewis’ words, we become impenetrable and unredeemable.

Which leads is to a far more important question than the mere academic concern over the redemption of angels. There has to be a motive to the angelic fall. Or at least a cause. We generally chalk it up to thinking the enemy thinking he could take the Throne. But I think this is wishful thinking. I don’t think we really grasp the depths of the fall. So we must ask ourselves, if our enemy saw things clearly, why would he go after the throne? He must have known he would lose. I mean, even us foolish humans can see that there was never any no hope for that at all. Even with all the wishful thinking in the universe, that plan is doomed to failure. So it must have been something else.

Satan becomes a slave to pride. Pride causes him to start taking good things and placing them in incorrect order. He is a good thing, a beautiful angel of light. Until he places the good thing of himself above the higher good of God. And this leads to war. Satan wants to hurt God. He can run the numbers. God is God. The Throne is untouchable. There is nothing he can do to take away from Him. So the only thing he can do is hurt someone whom God loves. And the target closest at hand is himself. God loves Lucifer. Lucifer hates God. Therefore, the best way for Lucifer to hurt God is to hurt himself. This is the mind of the enemy. This is nihilism. Death just for death, destruction with no end but itself. This should terrify us. But it should not be unfamiliar to us.

I’ve heard it said that the creed of a truly honest atheist goes something like this: ‘There is no God (and I hate Him.)’ In my experience, most atheists have been angry with God on some deep level. One girl I knew blamed God for the death of a friend, and decided that a God that would let her friend die was no God at all. She went to war with Him, because He took from her something that she cared about. Denying relationship was her way to get back at Him. She was right. This is the only weapon in a Divine rebellion. But it is a horrible one. This is the ultimate irony. To try to place yourself above God is to fight a war where your only effective tactic is that of the Kamikaze. You must destroy yourself in order to win, which will ensure that you lose. Find your life and you will lose it.

Of course, there is a complimentary and much better irony. Lose your life and you will find it. But it means that you have to surrender your unwinnable war. And this is our privilege as members of the human race. We can change our minds. We feel. We learn. We grow. Through the blood of Christ, we can change the worst choice we ever made into the best choice we ever made. May we take advantage of that opportunity.

So I was kicking around some ideas on transcendence, some thoughts about how we reflect God’s transcendence even when we are fixed in space-time. We seem to establish transcendence by setting one dimension of our subject as constant, so that we are transcendent in that aspect, and hence can speak meaningfully about it. We, in effect, create a ‘flatland’ so that we can understand it. As a function of this, we have to give up knowing about the dimension we have set as constant. We can change the dimensions we set as constant, but cannot know the subject in all dimensions at once. Understanding is gained through transcendence. God’s transcendence is innate, so His understanding is complete. Ours is synthetic, so our understanding will always be incomplete. At least eternity won’t be boring… even with infinite time there will always be something to learn.

Let’s start with some definitions. Ontology tries to determine the nature of truth itself. Epistemology discusses the knowablity of truth. Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Theorem basically tells us that you cannot know all the things about a particle at the same time. We’re going to try to put them all together. Yes, kids, we’re mixing physics and philosophy. Here’s a secret, though (shhh, don’t tell anybody,) pretty much all the upper tiers of any discipline are philosophy anyways. Advanced math is very concerned with ontology, Historiography concerns itself with the subjectivity of truth, Quantum physics cannot be separated from questions about determinism, Linguistics is irrevocably intertwined with epistemology. It’s all the same stuff anyways. We draw distinctions because we have to call our degrees different things. (Except for MBAs and MPPs, which are all about made up stuff. I should know.)

Consider a thing. Something. Anything. For that thing to exist, there must be some truth about it, and that truth exists in all dimensions in which the thing exists. For the purposes of our discussion, lets consider something that is moving in four dimensions (length, width, heights and time.) Imagine that you are a soldier on Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg. Bullets are flying, the air is thick with smoke, and between the yells and the crack of rifles you listen for bugles. There is a truth to that place. If you are unlucky, that truth will be visited upon you through the laws of physics and biology (momentum transfer, tensile strength of skin, oxygen requirements of brain cells.) If you are not as unlucky, then that truth will be imposed upon you through the laws of sociology and history. (recording of memory, writing of historical narratives, and effects of changes of governments.) From this, we can derive a very important point: you do not need to master, or even understand truth for you to be subject to its effects. Therefore, you do not need to assent to truth for it to exist. (I love the aviator’s saying about excuses: ‘Physics doesn’t care.’)

So there is some truth out there. But the soldier’s experience of that truth is that of a character in a story, certainly not an author, not even someone reading the script. And as immediate as his ontological experience may be, much of the epistemology of the event will likely be lost on him. The guy getting hit by the dodge ball (or wrench, as the case may be) is probably not at that point in time the right guy to ask about the physics of momentum transfer. So how do we get from the existence of truth to the know ability of truth? We have to transcend the situation to begin to understand it. We have to walk up to the balcony (Heifetz) to move beyond experience into understanding. We do this the same way we do a statistical regression: by holding something constant.

Back to Gettysburg. Instead of a soldier, we are now a historian. We climb all over the hillside, trying to understand the perspective of the riflemen. We look at overhead pictures to understand the topography, we climb up hills to understand the effects of elevation. We hold time constant so that we can vary length, width and height. This allows us to step out of the situation and look down upon it. Once we feel we have mastered the space of the battle, we then look to time. We follow the engagement through its time-line, moving it back and forward in its arc until we feel we have mastered the time dimension of the battle. Each time we look at it, we must hold something constant, but after we look at it enough, we gain enough perspectives to have a sense of the whole. This sense of the whole allows us to effectively choose what variables we want to hold constant in order to address a given question. Consider a multivariate regression. Consider the physicist’s discussion of 4-d space-time. In order to meaningfully describe it pictorially, the physicist must take a dimension away, and describe it in three dimensions. Politics finds critical interest groups and institutions, as it is impossible to discuss the sum total of the individual desires of each member of the polity. So in this, we are always speaking by way of analogy. We create a representation which allows us to master an aspect of a whole, but we are always losing something in order to speak meaningfully about the whole. This is why Heisenberg tells us that we cannot understand all the aspects of a particle all at once. We must ‘take a slice’ of reality in order to begin to understand it.

The artist paints on a canvas. Or takes a photograph. What have they done? They have captured something real and presented it to others for understanding. They have captured it by taking away dimensions. A picture exists in length and width. A sculpture has length, width and height, but is fixed in time. Music moves only in two dimensions: time and amplitude. Even in a play, which is experienced in all four dimensions, offers us understanding in the reflection afterwards. Experience and understanding are related but not synonymous. In the play, though, we see something very significant: even when we are in the midst of a fully-dimension experience, part of us can take a step back and begin to understand the situation. We can, be both on the dance floor and the balcony at once. (Refer to Heifetz and Dean Williams for a far better discussion of the dance floor and the balcony.) Whether we ascend to the balcony while we are in the dance, or whether we leave the dance to climb, we must take the same stairs. We must transcend to understand. And we transcend by taking a picture. We drop dimensions to gain understanding.

When we try to understand a chaotic, hyper-variate problem, such as in the social sciences or in relationships, we turn to our history and surroundings to tell us which variables to drop and which ones to keep. This can create conflict when people come from different surroundings or have different histories. Very different conclusions can be reached when you are looking at different variables within the same data set. In this, we see the failings of the line of reasoning that all reasonable, well-intentioned, and well-meaning people will reach the same conclusions. People‘s conclusions have real consequences, and here we run into a snag… resources are scarce and reality is constrained. So different narratives lead to conflict. Consider the American Civil War. To say that the war was about slavery is simplistic. This would imply that the South’s primary aim was the maintenance of the institution of slavery. The cultural narrative of the South saw the conflict as an expression of the legitimacy of state’s rights. The cultural narrative of the North saw the conflict as a moral struggle about the illegitimacy of oppression. (this is debatable, but my purpose here more historiographical rather than historical.) These two issues collided in the institution of slavery. To one narrative, its imposed extinction was an intolerable violation of state’s rights. To the other narrative, its imposed extinction was a moral imperative. Consider two geometric planes. Conflict or consensus exists at the line of intersection.

To the Pakistanis, Kashmir represents national identity. The Pakistanis have never believed that the Indians respect their right to be a state. The Indian-backed transition of East Pakistan to Bangladesh represents this to Pakistan. To the Indians, Kashmir represents national identity. If Kashmir leaves India because of religion, why can’t the Sikhs have their own state? Or the Hindus, or the Christians? A multi-ethnic and multi-religious state cannot allow itself to disintegrate along religious lines. The point of intersection is Kashmir, but notice that neither party really sees it as about Kashmir. So the war is about two different things, although at one locus of intersection. How many symbols, how many issues are the same way: competition for scarce resources at a locus of intersection between two very different narratives? Perhaps, in this, is a hope of reconciliation. Rarely is the locus of intersection teleological. Usually the scarce resources at the intersection are instrumental goals, not end goals. The path to a goal is defined by the ‘slice’ of reality you are using. In another slice, different paths to those goals may be possible. Here is the goal of mediation, the hope of reconciliation. If the problem exists at the intersection between two disparate ‘slices,’ perhaps a third slice can be discovered which bypasses the contested instrumental goals to achieve the end goals of the different parties. In order to find this third slice, we return to the Heifitz’s balcony. On the dance floor, your experiences are narrated by the slice that you occupy. Climbing the stairs, we gain understanding of the whole of the situation, and gain a sense of where to slice the situation to reconcile the two parties. We must see the whole to find the right slice, and in order to understand the whole, we must be able to see the whole from many different slices.

Let’s conclude by going back to Philosophy. What implications can we draw from the intersection of transcendence, truth and dimensionality? First, Post-modernism is incomplete. There is a truth, one that is objective, one that will assert itself upon us without concern for our assent or understanding. It is to our benefit to understand that truth to the best of our ability, to move beyond experience to understanding. Understanding and experience are dialectical, they push against each other. New experience can shape our understanding, and understanding can cause us to modulate our actions and hence change our experience. But in forsaking understanding we cannot expect truth to cease to assert itself on experience. Physics doesn’t care. Second, Modernism is incomplete. Modernity straight-lines out our growth of knowledge, assuming that big-P Progress will lead us to a shining utopian future. Discounting the total failure of 20th Century Modernity to create an idyllic future (reference Communism and Fascism,) we see that we cannot truly straight-line progress out forever. Nor can we expect that we will be able, in the thoughts of enlightenment, to wrestle truth to the ground and force it to yield all of its secrets. We must dance with truth. We must pursue it, and it will yield its secrets bit by bit, but when we try to imprison truth, it will slip from between our fingers. In this, Truth images the Creator. In this, we learn humility. We are still children. This is hardly a bad thing. Children still believe in magic, and its amazing how much magic you can find when you start believing in it again.

We rely greatly on specific revelation to determine aspects of God's character, and rightfully so. Even so, it is interesting to explore what we can determine about His character through only general revelation. We usually assume that we can determine that He exists and is good, but further proofs are possible, and can establish the logical necessity of the Trinity and the Incarnation.

Trinity
1) One cannot create that which is not already inside them.
- The creative act is fundamentally an act of self-expression on the external. In order for an artist to create, or even duplicate, they must synthesize data, make it a part of themselves before they can recreate it.

2) God created all things.
- A Creator Deity is logically inescapable, whether by causality or by any other proof. Taking this as given, such a Being would be the ultimate cause of all things, and their essences originate with Him. (From where else would they come?)

3) Relationships exist.
- Relationships exist, and there is no reason for them to have to. Biology, human society, math, all aspects of existence occur in relation. Humans could exist as a hive entity, a solitary entity, atomistic entities or not at all just as easily.

4a) Therefore, relationships exist as a self-expression of God.
4b) God, then, must exist in relationship.
- Relationship must spring from the Creator, and must have its roots in Him. It must be a part of Him for Him to express it in His creation.

5) God existed before all things.
- The first cause/unmoved mover is by definition first, before all other things if causality is temporal.

6) Therefore, God exists in relationship to Himself.
- God's relational existence must first be introspective, for there is no one else initially to have a relationship with. The Trinitarian model is the only one in contemporary religion that accommodates this while still recognizing the differentiation of Creator and creation, and explains the creative act.

Corollary: Creation is the building of new relationships, or a desire to extend relationships. Only a relational God has a real impetus toward creation.

Incarnation
1a) A Transcendent, Creator Entity [God] is not logistically constrained.
- If a Creator wants something, He will make reality to suit those wishes. If He is restrained by something other than sheer logical constraints, He would have made reality differently.
1b) God will then do whatever He wants to the highest degree logically possible.
- A Creator will not run out of money, or time, or effort. If He wants to do something, He will do it completely. He is only bound by His own nature, and hence truth.

2) God has a desire to know and be known by humanity.
- Whether through prophets or scriptures (not a priori), or through His act of creation, God has shown an interest in a relationship with humanity.

3a) The finite can only understand the infinite insofar as the infinite reveals itself to the finite.
- The 'flatland' example of transcendence, we cannot grasp things beyond our plane of existence, because we have no basis/definition for relation. It has to 'come down' to us, because we can't 'come up' to it.
3b) The most complete understanding possible for the finite of the infinite is for the infinite to become finite yet still remain infinite.
- If the infinite were to wrap itself in the finite, the finite would be able to grasp the infinite. At least to the extent necessary for relationship. There is no higher level of understanding necessary or possible for the finite.

4) Therefore, God will become man in order to be known by man.
- It takes God to wrap himself in flesh for a mind of flesh to wrap itself around God. If God wants to know and be known by man, then He will at some point become man. Therefore, the incarnation off Christ is logically inescapable, even without sin.

- Problem: Deconstuctivism seeks to demythologize the world by taking the things presented as truth and looking to the filters, lenses and perspectives through which the truth is told. If history becomes myth, and myth becomes legend, can we really trust the concept of history, or any methodology that attempts an objective accounting of events? And so deconstructivism picks apart whatever cultural myths are presented as history. While injecting a needed dose of humility into our pursuit of truth, deconstructivism is still a belief without a core. The unspoken core tenet of deconstructivism is that, like an onion, once you peel back all the layers of a myth, you are left with nothing. This runs into direct conflict with Aquinas's ideas on essence. Aquinas wins, through the idea of self-evident truth... the fact that the discussion exists points to the existence of objective explorable reality. This does not mean that we should totally discard all of deconstructivism. Surely, we can salvage the idea of transformation of fallen myths and projections of reality into their true form. Turning this idea away from nihilism and toward truth, we change the basic assumptions. Rather than assuming everything is really about nothing, and hence to be discarded, we turn to the assumption of Aquinas, assuming that if anything has existence, then on some level it must incorporate some truth, and is hence redeemable. Instead of an onion, we have a softball, with a true core. Turning to Lewis and Tolkien, we are reminded that the reason that any deep story has power is because it draws from the Deep Magic. All myths are on some level a retelling of the One True Myth. Hence, if anything exists, it contains an element of Truth, and all truth is God's Truth. Applying the deconstrctivist concept of transformation, reversing our myths through their iterative process, we can find them all pointing back to God. We then find deconstructivism with a core, a philosophy which recognizes the self- deception of the world yet draws us toward redemption. Let's call this transformation into a true form, the recovery of the kernel of Truth from anything reconstructive analysis, or reconstructivism.

'To an unknown God'. Speaking to the Greeks, Paul used this place, where the ice was the most thin, to carve through the self-deception of the Greeks. He recognized the hunger for God all men have in their hearts, and found the point where their minds and hearts were least far from the truth to introduce Truth. He identified the kernel of Truth, recovered it, and proceeded to build upon it.

GK Chesterton tells us the problem with this world is a bunch of Christian morals run amok. Without a framework, all these things run rampant and self-destructive, like bleed air without ducting. Yet still, in order for something to exist, it still must be rooted in God.

- Theory: There is no such thing as a pure lie. A pure lie would simply cease to exist. In order to exist, a lie must have some truth in it. That truth can be reclaimed, and used to point toward the One Truth. (Note: Pure evil cannot exist, as evil is a corruption of the good. Pure evil would simply cease to exist, as we understand existence... Paul teaches of the progression between sin and death.) Any belief, no matter how incorrect, must have Truth at its heart. To take the most extreme example, consider 'God is evil.' Taking this apart, 'God is [true] the negation of [lie] good [truth.] Alternately, 'NOT God is good.' This most false statement has at its core an affirmation of the Truth of God, even in its attempted negation. One might argue that this logic can be just as easily reversed; proving that all is evil, and hence invalid. Notice that the affirmative formulation is possible without the negative, but the opposite is not true. As Aquinas teaches, it is possible to imagine a world without sin, but a world only of sin would not exist in any meaningful way, and hence cannot be discussed. You can have elves without orcs, but no orcs without elves. Most examples from real life are more complex and shaded than our example. One can salvage the good from a belief, and lead its adherents to Truth. Beliefs can be purified just as people can be redeemed.

- Corollary: Original True Myth spawns all other beliefs, good or bad. Can restore the corrupted myth: the original, lost truth can be recovered, the embers can spark again if found and breathed upon.

- Corollary: same is true for people: there is something that desires God and holiness, even if internally irredeemable and totally corrupt. The Spirit must breathe over these embers to bring us back. In doing so, the embers consume the whole and make it new again.

- Example: Yin-Yang.
Progression:
Corrupt belief
... (balance/dualism/conflict btw opposites makes reality)
<- [from] <-
Linkages
... (the existence of contradiction points to transcendence)
-> [back to] ->
Source/Truth
... (God creates with the synchronization of opposites)
... (God of Wrath: God of Love;
Fully Man: Fully God;
'and He walks with me’:’ Dark is His path on the wings of the storm')

Recovery:
To recover, use Yin-Yang to explain the duality of God, and further explain the resolution of duality. Perfection is found in the total synchronization of wrath and love. Sin and evil is falling short of this perfection, not an aspect of it. Hence, evil is a misunderstanding/misapprehension of purpose, willful as it may be. (Hence, Buddhism gets CFD (correct for data) on this point.)

Example:
Stephen, who loved those who hated him, was an example of perfect contradiction, perfect dualism. To make war with love, to fight with love as a weapon, this is the embodiment of contradiction. Not simply a mishmash juxtaposition of opposites, but a synchronicity, a reconciliation, a harmony in chaos. To use the foolish to shame the wise (1 Cor,) for God to serve as a slave, for Him to conquer death by death, this is perfect contradiction. To do less is sin, a willful misapprehension of purpose.


- Corollary: Greek Mythology
The Greek gods are undoubtedly very pagan. Yet no story, no matter how false, can be entirely original. Greek mythology must then be a flawed and twisted retelling of the One Story. It is as a revisionist retelling of the One Story from the viewpoint of the powers and principalities. What then, besides themes, can be salvaged?
The clash between the Olympians and the Titans is where we will focus our analysis. The Olympians were a lower order of creation than the Titans, yet left their place and instead overthrew the Titans. In overthrowing the Titans, the Olympians then faced humanity, which they generally looked upon with disdain. They ensured the fealty of humanity through fear, not through love. Yet even more so, they cemented their hold on power with humanity through the fear of the Titans. As petty, cruel and hateful as the Olympians were, they sold themselves as infinitely better than the Titans, and hence worthy of the worship of humanity. Yet even more so, the ashes of the Titans were spread throughout humanity, making humanity the bearers of the essence of the Titans, and the Olympians disdained humanity all the more so for that, although it was retold to humanity as a mockery of the Titans at the hands of the Olympians.
If I saw things through the eyes of the powers and principalities, I would find this a remarkably more comfortable retelling of the story of origins than the one that actually occurred. Yet, even twisted and corrupted, this story still follows the template of the One Story, for evil cannot create, but can only destroy.
First, the rebellion of the Olympians. Surely the fallen princes would look upon the Creator as oppressive to all wills other than His own. Claiming that they had overthrown the Creator, claiming that God was dead, surely that would be a comforting claim to the losers of the first war of heaven. Yet the rebellion was unmistakable. Presenting the oppression of the powers and principalities as light in comparison to God's oppression is another old trick. The idea of the intermarriage of the 'gods' and humanity is also not new, given the Watcher tradition. The idea of the image of the Creator being poured upon humanity is also inescapable. Yet to the powers, the idea of the forced relocation of God's essence to humanity as a mockery is surely a more pleasant retelling of God's creation of man in His Image, than creation of man higher than the angels. Although the retelling is warped and flawed, and told from a resentful and lying tongue, the essence of the One Story is still inescapable. Recapturing it would be a harder matter, though.

Thermodynamics governs matter in the physical realm. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, but can be arranged in more or less useful sequences. Without an external factor, however, these arrangements to progress towards less and less useful forms. However, with an external input of energy, these forms can progress toward more and more useful sequences. An example would be an airplane. On a disaggregated atomic level, there is no real difference between an aircraft engine and a pile of rocks rich in various metallic ores. However, an engine is a far more useful sequencing of these elements. This comes about due to an influx of energy in the form of creativity, a force transcendent to matter, and hence capable of shaping matter. Without such an influx of energy to create or maintain, this sequence of matter would decay into less and less useful forms, breaking and rusting. It will not spontaneously improve. Given that the Author of matter is the Author of ideas, the same dynamics should hold.

1) First Law of Thermodynamics: Enthalpy. Energy is neither created nor destroyed. Ontological Enthalpy: Ideas are neither created nor destroyed. Predicate: Matter/Ideas came from somewhere, if they are here now. Imperative: All ideas have their origin in the mind of God. 'There is nothing new under the sun.' We cannot construct an idea that does not derive its origin from the mind of God. An idea can be corrupted, and lose parts of that essence, but at the point that it loses all of that essence, it ceases to meaningfully exist. 'Sin leads to death.' All the building blocks of concepts, all the atoms of ideas, can neither be created nor destroyed, as they came into meaningful existence (for us) at the point of creation, and before that existed in the mind of God.

2) Second law of thermodynamics: entropy. Energy flows from more useful forms to less useful forms, unless there is an influx of energy from outside the system. (Note: In terms of physics, what else would transcendence mean, if not 'from outside the system?') Idea form: Ideas flow from a more useful arrangement to a less useful arrangement, unless an external influx of energy exists. Predicate: More and less useful arrangements of ideas/matter exist. Therefore, the creation of 'new' ideas is more the arrangement of more useful sequences of ideas. Given that the growth of knowledge is a function of expanding relationships between pieces of data, the growth of these relational networks leads to an expansion of knowledge (see discovery.) Similarly to physical entropy, the creation of more useful sequences of ideas is a function of a transcendent influx. Without such an influx, these sequences of ideas will degenerate over time, but with external energy, these ideas will build into more and more useful forms, establishing progress.

Example: Rule of Law is a combination of the ideas of government, objectivity and truth, all of which can be found in the mind of God. It is a more useful combination when applied to politics than the original ideas alone (just as a jet engine is much more useful for aviation propulsion than ore-laden rocks, but not necessarily more useful for grinding wheat.) Eugenics is a particularly un-useful (and virulent) combination of the ideas of optimization and diversity, where the base concepts can be found in the mind of God, even if the combination flawed form cannot.

Corrolary: In a fallen, post-entropic world, a cycle of death and rebirth is necessary to prevent stagnation. Angular sinusoidal motion and cycles are the only ways to present eternal dynamic tension. It must, in effect, cascade to be within time.

See Chesterton: What is wrong with this world is Christian morals run amok without any grounding. (Orcs are bad elves.)