The Restoration of Some Things

Edward Feser's reply to Hart's most recent essay has surfaced in The Public Discourse. Feser does attempt to defend himself from the charge that his eschatology differs widely from what the Scriptures teach, and he ends up resorting to some remarkable exegetical maneuvers:

I agree with the premise that all of creation will be redeemed. But it simply doesn’t follow that there will be animals in Heaven. To make such an inference would be, among other things, a fallacy of division. (If your stylist assures you that you are not losing your hair, it doesn’t follow that you won’t lose a single strand.) For all Hart has shown, that all of creation will be redeemed entails only that something of the corporeal and animal worlds will exist in Heaven. That our bodies will be restored to us in the resurrection suffices to guarantee that much.

On Feser's view, so long as all finite reality in existence at the time when God is "all in all" is redeemed, all of creation will be (technically) redeemed. There need be no strong similarity between what is in our world and what will be in the eschaton.

Of course, on this view "all of creation" would be redeemed if in age to come all that exists is a (redeemed) heap of coffee grounds, a tapeworm, and the members of AC/DC. Technically, Angus Young alone would do it.

A Webb of Confusion

Stephen Webb's recent article, "The End of the Analogy of Being," follows a now familiar pattern. Webb sets forth a characterization of some thinker that bears almost no resemblance to what that thinker said, and, on consulting that thinker's works, I usually find him to be saying the exact opposite. Webb is hardly ever clear, when he attributes a belief to someone, if that belief is explicitly held or a consequence (welcome or otherwise) of that thinker's views. And, if the latter, Webb never says what the specific propositions are that lead to the portrait Webb paints.

Step 2: The Absolute Simplicity of Any Unconditioned Reality

This is the second step in a proof for the existence of God that has been the subject of an ongoing series. In the First Step, we deduced the existence of at least one unconditioned reality. This argument draws heavily on Robert Spitzer’s New Proofs for the Existence of God.

In the first step, we saw that if any reality exists—any reality at all—there must be at least one unconditioned reality. In this article, we will be drawing out the consequences of this with respect to simplicity. We will see that an unconditioned reality must be absolutely simple.

The term “simplicity” is a term of art. In common parlance, simplicity often means something like the lack of content or what is easily understood. We naturally consider “1”, for instance, to be simpler than the operation “1+1” or the number “32.” “Simplicity,” as we will use the term here, will not mean what is easy to understand or what lacks a richness of content. Simplicity will be used in an ontological sense to mean that which is without parts, boundaries, or incompatible states.

Christ the Cipher

How Christians read the Old Testament has always been a matter of some controversy. Not, however, until the rise of fundamentalism have moral questions about Old Testament the stories of genocide been particularly pressing. Contrary to what one finds in the more brutish anti-religious polemics, it is not the case that Christians have always read the Bible as the straightforward documentation of facts about the past, only retreating in modernity to metaphorical and spiritual readings in modern times.

Fundamentalism, however, is a demonstrably modern phenomenon; whereas sophisticated spiritual, typological, and metaphorical readings of Scripture stretch back to the beginnings of Christian exegesis. In considering how we should read the “hard passages” of the Old Testament, less literal approaches are often the more traditional.

In Defense of Henri de Lubac

Ed Feser's recent post, Natural Law or Supernatural Law, continues his tendency to regard de Lubac as a kind of arch-enemy. The accusation, which he has raised before, is that de Lubac tends to absorb the natural into the supernatural, abolishing the distinctions between the two.

There seems to me little resemblance between the portrait of de Lubac that Feser sketches and de Lubac himself. De Lubac strongly distinguished between the natural and supernatural orders. Take his brief Catechesis on Nature and Grace (Ignatius Press 1984). De Lubac states that the "supernatural remains forever unnaturalizable ...," it is "that divine element which man's effort cannot reach (no self-divinization!) ...." (41). Or again, "between our human nature and our destiny [i.e., the supernatural] there lies an 'infinite disproportion.'" (32) Over and over again, de Lubac emphasized this "infinite disproportion" between the orders of nature and the supernatural. 

Metaphor in Practice

"[The Israelites] waged war against a foreign nation. The text calls those combining against them Amalekites. For the first time the Israelites were drawn out fully armed in battle array... Moses, standing on a hilltop far away from the furor of battle, was looking up toward heaven with a friend stationed on either side of him.

"Then we hear from the history the following marvel. When Moses raised his hands to heaven, those under his command prevailed against their enemies, but when he let them down, the army began to give in to the foreigner's assault." St. Gregory of Nyssa, The Life of Moses (HarperSanFransisco, 2006) 17.

"Moses's holding his hands aloft signifies the contemplation of the Law with lofty insights; his letting them hang to earth signifies the mean and lowly literal exposition and observance of the Law." Id, 75.

St. Gregory's bold assertion of the superiority of the non-literal exposition of the Law of the Old Testament over the "mean and lowly literal exposition and observance of the Law" doubtless runs contrary to the instincts of some of the hermeneutic traditions arising after the Protestant Reformation. The literal exposition tends to lead to a more univocal meaning, regulated by the text itself, giving epistemological certainty as opposed to a method that would lead to a multiplicity of meanings that must be judged on the basis of extra-biblical criteria. If the Bible serves as the epistemological foundation of all things Christian, then the Christian would be desirous of finding a method that grants definite certainty, that can be clear enough to delineate those beliefs and practices which may be permitted, and those that may not be. St. Gregory's hermeneutic undermines this certainty.

The Apologetics of Transcendence

My essay, "The Apologetics of Transcendence," appears in First Things' "On the Square." An excerpt:

When the anonymous Christian in Nicholas of Cusa’s dialogue “On the Hidden God” is asked by his pagan interlocutor to explain the difference between Christians and pagans, he answers that followers of Christ know they cannot comprehend the divine. This seems a strange mode of apologetics, one particularly unsuited for the age of science. Any strategy that would identify ignorance as a basic element of the Christian faith (indeed, as its specific difference) could hardly counter the claim that science has revealed the basic structures of nature, rendering the “God hypothesis” obsolete.

But Nicholas of Cusa does not advance a nescient faith, and understood correctly, the claim made in this dialogue is well suited to counter atheism’s scientific imperialism. Cusa’s critique of paganism could be brought to bear on the pretensions of scientism by showing that, first, naturalistic accounts cannot in principle achieve more than accidental, partial truths about even the natural world, and second, that the God that Christians worship is not the kind of being that could be crowded out by scientific accounts because of the ontological difference between God and the world.

Read the rest here.

Against Faith in Faith

My essay, "Against Faith in Faith" has appeared in First Things "On the Square." Here is an excerpt:

It has become a strange and unfortunate commonplace that one must have faith in faith—faith, that is, in the ability to commit oneself to truths that transcend rational justification—not only out of respect for faith’s intrinsic (if futile) beauty, but also as a means to the truth. Confronted with inadequate evidence for the deeper truths of life, one must conjure up a commitment to ideas for which the subjective act of faith can be the only ground, and one must believe not only in the content of faith but in the faith-act itself.

Read the rest here.