This is a port of my Twitter thread on the topic, and the structure reflects that:

Well, I saw The Odyssey last night. I have a number of assorted, mostly minor thoughts, and I figured I would toss them into a thread here. If you care about Nolan-specific spoilers (or for some reason even Homeric spoilers), beware.

The movie is LOUD. Expect small earthquakes during action scenes if you see it in theaters.

I actually don’t hate the bard at all. I would, however, have liked to hear more full lines. And goodness these poems would take forever to get through if he kept using that stick so much.

Eumaeus might be my favorite character here.

“Let’s not bother getting supplies before leaving Troy” is the dumbest move imaginable, and we could blame it for everything Odysseus suffers. But in retrospect in Nolan’s framing maybe it’s intentionally semi-suicidal, almost a self-inflicted punishment.

Honestly I kind of like Telemachus Parker.

“Zeus’s Law” here: the gloss as “Do unto others” is slightly hilarious and beautiful in its shameless Christianization. Nolan’s Odysseus is of Holland (no, not Telemachus Parker), not Homer.

Robert Pattinson is still a vampire in this movie.

The color palette looks cool, even if I would also like to see in movies a RETVRN to genuine vibrancy.

Sinon really does look weird. And sound weird. Also, “Odysseus! Feel free to add some stuff” is one of the worst lines of dialogue.

Honestly, I didn’t think the more contemporary dialogue style was bad overall. There were some awkward moments, especially Sinon’s line mentioned above, or the use of “assess the situation,” but on the whole I think it worked fine. Even so, I probably would have preferred the traditional route of loftier British talk.

More on Zeus’s law: the justification about “gods in disguise” is a huge theme. So Edward Cullen mocks beggar-Odysseus with “Are you a god?” repeatedly. I can only think of how this connects to Homer’s repeated epithet “godlike Odysseus”. The beggar isn’t a god, perhaps, but close enough.

“The power of the sacrifice is in the cost of the person making it” would have made actual ancient polytheists look at you like you’re mentally disabled. The gods don’t care (directly) what it costs you, only how it establishes their honor or suits their fancy.

Given how stupidly Odysseus views hunting, if I were among his men I would not have agreed to send him for food while we explored.

Zen-thena seems a lot more like a therapist than a goddess. It does not seem likely she is meant to be an actual, concrete person. But I’m not sure she’s entirely unreal, either. Nolan’s gods seem more like semi-sentient forces behind the universe, in which case a PTSD hallucination might just be a legitimate appearance of what this kind of deity

“Who doesn’t understand thunder? Fire? A child’s smile? A good harvest?” Nolan treats the gods by nature allegory-maxxing

I wish Polyphemus actually spoke more but appreciate the effect that his minimal vocalization has. He’s pretty terrifying, though, and feels physically more like Hesiod’s Titan-adjacent primordial monsters.

Thank you Nolan for always keeping Polyphemus’ sensitive areas adequately dark. I’ve never been more grateful for shadows.

I actually like the Trojan Horse design. It doesn’t seem half as unrealistic as people made it sound, especially in the shots where you can more easily see the texture of the wood.

The woman who assumes all men are rapists is a creepy witch. What did Nolan mean by this???

Odysseus’ cleverness and trickery are way less prominent in the movie than in Homer.

It’s wild that a modern rated-R movie cut out all the sex from Homer. I love it. Good job, Nolan. A lesser man would have shown us Odysseus “mounting Circe’s gorgeous bed.” And Calypso’s. Repeatedly. (But I still think it should have been clear he was doing this to some extent.)

The way the Lotus flower is used here is intriguing. Seeing as it seems his own readiness governed the whole process, it slightly shifts the center of moral gravity of Odysseus’s stay with Calypso from her to him, despite the other ways the movie sands away some of his guilty edges.

The omission of the Phaeacians seems like it was absolutely necessary for Nolan’s approach to the gods and his xenia theme to work the way he wanted. That doesn’t mean I like it.

Where did the Laestrygonians get all that metal armor??? That’s an INSANE amount of iron (I guess?) for one random island people to have

Odysseus’ more delayed and more unified identity reveal in the movie makes for a much more effective dramatic moment than the slower and staggered version in Homer. But this strips much of the plotting and scheming from the poem, which are peak Odysseus.

Odysseus should have been spending 3-5x more effort on every shot of that bow.

“Our age of bronze is collapsing” isn’t that bad of a line for dramatic movie dialogue standards. The whole speech, though, is curious. Homer’s Odysseus carried plenty of sorrow and some real regrets, but nothing similar to this. Once again, it feels like a very modern, and probably more Christianized, angle.

Even so, you get the impression from several scenes in Homer, perhaps even more in The Iliad, that some of the ancients did still reflect pretty deeply on the human costs of these wars. So why were people so willing to fight them all the way to the brutal limit? The psychology of this demands attention.

A good chunk of the suitors don’t die. It’s a bit jarring as a difference from Homer, but it fits the Christianization Nolan has been up to.

I just realized Nolan has adapted Homer without a single scene of men playing athletic games.

I was NOT expecting Odysseus and Penelope to sail away to Valinor. How are they supposed to find the Straight Road?

Preamble: A Defense of Speculation

Why explore hypothetical questions the Bible does not really address? What profit is there? Is this to “go beyond what is written”?

It is certainly possible to speculate in useless or even harmful ways. As much regard as I have for Thomas Aquinas, for example, even I get tired of 15 questions composed of 72 articles about the nature of angels, most of which seem of little importance except as an exercise in working out what must be true about creatures of pure intellect.

But hypothetical questions receive their utility by what they reveal about what is or what was true in the real world. For example, if a child asks what would happen if they put their hand on a hot burner, the situation they described will hopefully not happen, but your answer will tell them an important truth about how reality works. This applies as well to the past. Asking a question such as, “What would have happened if my parents’ had never met?” also offers the child a window into, if nothing else, how real life reproduction works.

Speculating about the world before and apart from the Fall, then, is a diagnostic question that helps us shed new light on the non-hypothetical questions such as “How did God create man?”, “Why is man mortal?”, “What is the difference between nature, grace, and glory?”, or “What is the difference between problems caused by sin and the natural limits of being creatures?” Such questions are valuable both as doctrine and as practical parts of prudence in ethics or even politics.^[1]

Now, with my self-justification out of the way…

Unfallen Survival

Ever since I was a kid I wondered quite a bit about how “not dying” would have worked if man had not fallen. There were simple, more boring questions: what would happen if you didn’t eat? There were more extreme examples: what if you were in an explosion? What if you jumped off a cliff? Would it be impossible to cut a person’s head off with a sharp enough object? How would the skin keep the blade from piercing?

As an adult, I realized this question runs into several possible distinctions. What’s the difference between immortality and indestructibility? What’s the difference between glorified immortality, as we will have in the resurrection, and the freedom from death that preceded the Fall? In what sense are these things “natural” or not? Was Adam originally free from death by nature, by supernatural grace, or extrinsically by Providence? God gave man food, but he was not subject to death: did man’s bodies need food to run, and if so in what way?

I never did go about any thorough study of these questions in themselves. Some of them have nonetheless appeared along the way, and I’ve given them plenty of thought over the years. On some points I have found there was great controversy at various times, e.g. the Reformed lambasting the Socinians for teaching man was naturally mortal.

The traditional Reformed position, to the best that I understand it, holds that man was created immortal in a limited sense. Specifically, before the Fall:^[2]

1. Man had the ability not to die.

2. He had no necessity to die.

3. His body was made of parts that in themselves could come apart, leading to death.

4. The perfection of the soul would have preserved man from internal bodily breakdown.^[3]

5. Because man was righteous, God would not allow him to die from external damage.

Now, for what it’s worth, I’m not interested in proving or defending any of these at the moment. I do think they all have adequate warrant. But the mechanics of the third and fifth points are what interest me most.

It seems obvious that man’s body has some physical capacity for being destroyed, and that no plausible changes before the Fall would be likely to wholly eliminate this. As long as a man is flesh rather than diamond, for example, it should be possible for axes and machine guns to rip it to shreds. As long as gravity works pretty normally and men’s bones were not made of titanium, falling from an adequate height should be able to break his spine. This aligns with point (3) above: the parts of man’s body are, in their own right, capable of being separated, which kills you.

Now, as it happens, in the Garden of Eden, it seems plausible Adam and Eve were pretty well protected. It seems like it was a fairly idyllic. God had hand-planted it, the animals there seemed to submit to Adam while he named them, and its borders were such that a couple cherubim with a sword could permanently keep anyone from getting it. That it was a garden rather than a forest, a plain, an island, or some other more natural environment suggests a level of curation and enclosure, as though God specifically made a “playground” or even a “nursery” for early man. So we can probably safely imagine that setting this environment up at all would be one of the methods God had to prevent unfallen man from death by external causes.

This, however, does not account for everything. There are two important qualifications right off the bat. First, as many have argued,^[4] the geographical details surrounding Eden suggest a high elevation, perhaps even a mountain. This almost has to be case if a river flowed out from it and divided into four down the line. At high elevation, then, we can expect the possibility of altitude accidents. Opportunities to fall to great injury or death would seem likely to present themselves, especially as Adam and Eve would have begun to have children, and I am assuming sinless toddlers would still be accident-prone. Besides this, elevation often means extra rocks, so more dangerous objects.

The second important qualification is that, of course, man never could have stayed confined to the Garden of Eden. Besides the valid observations of people like James Jordan that God surely intended Adam and/or his descendants to go out beyond the Garden to work, expanding his exercise of dominion and using natural resources from elsewhere to the glory of God, there is simply population to consider. Without the Fall, and thus without human death and presumably also without fertility issues, the population would have to rapidly expand until one garden of any size would be too small, and people would need to migrate elsewhere. So whatever protections the Garden may have offered, people would also be operating in other, less protected environments over time.

If, then, bodily dangers would still exist without the Fall, some perhaps in the Garden and probably far more without, how might God have kept men alive in keeping with man’s righteousness and God’s law? I can think, with the limited biblical evidence we have, of three main factors, ordered here from most to least certain:

Providence

Simply enough, God takes care of people by the things He decrees will befall them. If He ordains whatsoever cometh to pass, then He can simply use that providential governance of His over nature and will to prevent people from ending up in deadly situations. This I have no doubt He would have done to some extent or another, just as He does it now, orchestrating events so that I don’t accidentally get myself killed on the interstate. But with providential preservation, God’s methods of saving people’s lives would thus be rather remote and indirect. So what about more direct methods?

Angels

This is my first step of real speculation, but I don’t think it’s a baseless one. The idea is simple: until man was fully able to fend for himself, developing adequate protections against harm and methods of recovery, angels would watch over. I mean this in exactly as toddler-parenting a way as it sounds. To return to an earlier example, if someone were taking a nice stroll in Eden, came upon a cliff, and walked right over the edge, I think it’s quiet likely an angel would have leapt up and caught him.

This is not pure guesswork, mind you. Rather, the Bible already indicates that man began in some sense under the care of the angels. We know they are ministering spirits meant to serve us (Heb. 1:14), who are God’s heirs and children. This sets us the relationship as like unto a household servant to a king’s son, who might take a great deal of charge or care over the child while younger. That relationship is further supported by their relationship to the Torah. The Torah is portrayed precisely as a childhood tutor until maturity (Gal. 3:24-25), and likewise the Torah was given and administered through the angels (Acts 7:53, Gal. 3:19, Heb. 2:2).

All this is, of course, to neglect a more overt point of connection that attentive readers might also have noticed: I did not select the example of walking off a cliff by accident. As it happens, we have in the Scriptures only one example of a sinless man lasting for more than 5 minutes, namely Jesus. It seems plausible to think that, if we can glimpse anything about how God might have treated men apart from the Fall, some of it would appear in the life of Christ.^[5] In the life of Jesus, we see agents actively aiding Him at certain points, including immediately following His temptation in the wilderness and during His distress in Gethsemane.

But looking at the temptation itself is also instructive. There Satan tempts Jesus precisely to jump off a cliff (well, technically the top of the Temple), and his argument is from Psalm 91:

For He shall give His angels charge over you,
To keep you in all your ways.
In their hands they shall bear you up,
Lest you dash your foot against a stone. — Psalm 91:11–12

It’s important to note here that Jesus does not claim Satan is incorrect. His rebuke is not that God would not send angels to save Him, but only that He ought not put God to the test. The angels coming to minister to Him immediately after the temptation further corroborates this point. Psalm 91 describes God’s perfect and comprehensive protection of the righteous against all evils, and while for those of us sinful and fallen we do not see protection of quite such a literally thorough nature (I have certainly done worse than dash my foot against a stone before), it seems plausible that, apart from the Fall, this may be exactly how God would have treated us.

So, while this is still speculation, I think it is fairly well-supported. Had man not fallen, I expect that God would have protected him from external dangers to life and limb through the ministry of the angels, who might pick up people who fell, shoo dangerous animals,^[6] halt falling tree branches, and otherwise keep up from getting killed until the time of our full maturity. (Along similar lines, I also think the angels would have served as our practical teachers for art and technology, so that we eventually could to manage and master the world on our own. According to traditional angelology, which is a real word, angels directly perceive the inner workings and natures of things, so in all probability under their tutelage we might have advanced incredibly rapidly.)

The Tree of Life

The final factor, and perhaps the most speculative, is the Tree of Life. The Bible does not tell us a great deal about the mechanics of the Tree of Life,^[7] but we know it could lead man to live forever. Whether this was from a single bite (like effects of the Tree of the Knowledge) or required regular consumption we do not know for sure. Whether it would be ordinary food while in our original, limited immortality or would give us our final, glorified immortality, we also do not know, although I tend to lean toward the latter. There is also the reference in Revelation to its leaves being “for the healing of the nations,” a reference which I think inspired Shawn Smucker’s portrayal of the leaves as having broad healing powers.^[8]

In any case, we do not have a ton to go on here. But since man was created with a limited form of immortality and a body that could in principle be damaged, I am inclined to believe that, even with angelic guardianship, it might have been the case that unfallen man might at times be injured. Again, accidents happen, not always because of sin. And I would be surprised if our bodies in their original state were invulnerable as opposed to simply free from the need to die.

So, for my final piece of speculation, I think it is not implausible that the Tree of Life may have been involved in healing and sustaining unfallen man. Whether this involved the fruit, or the leaves, or what-have-you, I really don’t know. But it seems at least reasonable to imagine the Tree of Life could have helped us, well, stay alive.

Conclusion

This was, as I said, an exercise in great speculation. But, as I said at the start, I do not think such speculation if wholly without profit. After all, such hypotheticals attempt to answer factual questions about the real world, in this case, “How did man’s original immortality work?” In the process we got to look at the doctrine of providence, the relationship God designed between men and angels, fiction recommendations for Smucker and Dekker, and all the things God decided not to tell us about the Tree of Life specifically to keep nerds like me in our place.

More importantly, I think this kind of exercise sets us up to reflect more realistically on the difference between the world as created, as fallen, as being redeemed, and as remade. It gives us another angle to consider the relationship between nature, grace, and glory, which is structurally the heart of the redemptive story. It definitely can play a curious role in debates on creation, especially in dealing with bad arguments connected to many popular versions Young Earth Creationism, a position which can be more plausibly defended by a more careful account of How Stuff Works apart from the Fall. Were one inclined, such an analysis might also be usefully employed to analyze edge case questions of ethics and political theory, something I certainly am not prepared to go into here. But, here as elsewhere, the world is a highly interconnected thing, as are the truths we know about it. I for one like testing those connections, and I don’t think I even got electrocuted doing so.

1. Yes, people who fuss about prelapsarian political speculation, e.g. in The Big Bad Wolfe Book, are missing the point.↩︎

2. This summary is drawn chiefly from Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theolgoy, vol. 1, topic 5, question 12.↩︎

3. For my part I wonder if the fruit of the Tree of Life would have also helped with this. Come to think of it, if you like speculating about the Tree of Life in perhaps more fantastic ways, you might consider checking our Shawn Smucker’s novel The Day the Angels Fell. Smucker’s writing has a very curious effect (or affect), and his story about what happened to the Tree of Life after the Fall scratches an itch I find hard to define.↩︎

4. Off the top of my head the completely uncontroversial figures of James Jordan and Michael Heiser.↩︎

5. Obviously this is still complicated by the fact that (1) Jesus came into a fallen world, despite Himself being sinless, and (2) Jesus had a very specific and special mission. Nonetheless I think we may cautiously use the example to strengthen a case that has other parts.↩︎

6. Some of you are probably thinking, “Wait, surely there were no dangerous animals before the Fall?” I do not agree. I am with Thomas, Augustine, and a host of others that harmful animals had the same exact nature before the Fall, and that man was simply protected from them by (1) the Garden, (2) other divine aids, and perhaps (3) the likelihood that even violent animals before the Fall might have obeyed the will of man, their master. But what about animals eating each other? I don’t consider animal death a consequence of the Fall but part of the goodness of creation and the nature of animals, which, lacking a rational soul, holiness, or the fruit of the Tree of Life, had nothing within them capable of preserving the parts of their body from breaking down. The ecosystems and food chains we see today are probably messier and less pleasant than before the Fall, but also probably mostly the same in their basic structures.↩︎

7. The trials God sends us…↩︎

8. Related to this would be Ted Dekker’s portrayal of an unfallen Other Earth as a place where people were commonly injured but healed quickly and easily with fruit from the blessed trees in their realm.↩︎

Currently, the most advanced LLMs have a context window of 2 million tokens.1

For the unfamiliar, a context window is essentially the working memory of a language model, the text it can actively use and refer to in a given run. Tokens are units of meaning in the text, representations of part or all of a word as actually used. These days, an average English word is roughly 1.3̅ tokens. So the most advanced AI today can handle up to approximately 1.5 million words, about 3.12 Lord of the Rings’ worth.2

(This upper limit is also more hypothetical than actual, as most models begin to behave very poorly long before you max out the technical limit.)

While triple Lord of the Rings sounds like a lot of content, in perspective it’s not all that much. It’s around 82 hours of reading, which strong readers can easily exceed in just over a month. (Or, if you are like a recent student of mine, probably two days. Don’t ask me how.) At my school, the technically-optional-but-what-is-wrong-with-you-if-you-don’t-do-it reading program expects about 600 minutes a month, so across your entire education you could easily read over 8 times this much just doing the minimum.

So where am I going with all this? Math is fun and all, but surely I have some actual point.

I am one who, despite many grave reservations about the sudden explosion and many dubious uses of generative AI, has tinkered with it extensively. No amount of broader concern can change my deeply ingrained need/fascination/habit/compulsion to experiment with new technologies. And one of the persistent problems with LLMs is their essentially stateless nature. Once a model has been trained, it has a certain fixed amount of material already baked in, and anything new you do with it does not change this baseline unless you do something like fine-tuning. If I tell a given model, say GPT 5.4, that I am a fan of Richard Hooker, this does not change the model at all. By default, it will forget this detail by my next conversation, when the pristine original model is loaded afresh with no further content.

“But wait!” you interject. “I told ChatGPT two weeks ago that I hadn’t been eating enough and now it always warns me about eating disorders! How does it remember to do that?” Well, this is where “memory” as a feature in chat interfaces comes in. This kind of memory does not work like memory as we know it. Rather, sometimes during or after a conversation, whether implicitly or explicitly, the model may flag that something you have said should be remembered, so it adds it to a set of memory notes, summarizing what you said. These memory notes are not part of the model but are injected afresh into new conversations. The model doesn’t, then, actually digest information into itself and retain it. Rather, it produces a set of notes that it will look at again next time to know what’s going on.

In a sense it is like the 2013 Zachary Levi Hallmark movie Remember Sunday.3 A waitress meets, dates, abandons, and then audaciously reintroduces herself to a guy named Gus who had a brain aneurysm and lost the ability to form new long-term memories. Throughout the day, he writes down anything important he needs to know for the future, and in the morning he reads all his notes to know what’s going on in his life, despite remembering nothing since his aneurysm.

So, to translate the analogy, the brain aneurysm is the end of an LLM’s training, the context window is short-term memory, and the “memory” features of a chat interface are the sticky notes.

Gradually, working with and around such limitations on AI projects has helped me begin to see the sheer scale of how much human life and identity relies on the gradual accumulation of thousands, indeed millions, of tiny facts, memories, and experiences. For example, if you were to take a random journal entry and try to help an LLM understand it, think of how many pieces of context would be needed. In fact, let’s use an example text:

After school, Morwen came around again, and today was apparently The Day. Emeldir finally told her that she is leaving.

So, to give to an LLM the basic understanding of these two sentences that the author or someone close to the author would have effortlessly, you may need to pass in:

• The author’s place at the school (student? teacher? parent? administrator? tutor? other staff?)

• The identities of Morwen and Emeldir. Again: students? teachers? staff? parents? Are they even of the same status or role?

• The relationship between Morwen and Emeldir. Why does one care about the other leaving? How much will she care? How long has this been building?

• The meaning and context of Emeldir leaving (leaving what? why? to where?)

• The author’s own concern for the matter: why does the author care about Morwen and Emeldir’s relationship? Is there a history there? Is this part of a larger arc? Why does the author seem to have known Emeldir is leaving before Morwen, even though it appears to matter to her?

• Is “The Day” capitalized as a matter of the author’s style, to signify meaning, or in reference to some objective occasion?

And this is just the beginning. These pieces of information are roughly the minimum for that excerpt to communicate adequate intellectual and emotional sense, but for all we know the text might be enriched by further data, more information about the school or previous writing. It might have allusions or wordplay that is invisible without further context. Furthermore, this only consists of two sentences. A whole journal entry might be exponentially more complex. Add a few more references to a few more people with their own histories and you might easily need hundreds or thousands of words of context injected to get the whole picture.

The point here is the sheer scale and density of particular memories that make up our consciousness and our identities. For me to think like myself, I must remember dozens of inside jokes, hundreds or thousands of individual experiences or anecdotes, the identities of several hundred, maybe thousands, of people, my general and particular histories with most of them, the gists of many hundred books, thousands of specific quotes, scenes, and moments from those books or TV shows or movies or Adventures in Odyssey episodes, dozens and dozens of scholastic terms and distinctions, millions of tiny moments, and far, far more.

This great constellation of things that define my own mind are, philosophically speaking, accidents of my being. This is in contrast to my substance, that foundational combination of form (i.e. defining organization) and matter that turn “human nature” in the abstract to “Caleb Dixon Smith” in the concrete. Just the organization, the “blueprint,” as it were, of human features doesn’t produce Caleb Dixon Smith. Just a hunk of disorganized matter does not, either. Bring the structure of human nature to the matter supplied by my parents, though, and you get me. Then, having been individuated as myself by the union of form and matter, the rest is a series of accidents.

To be clear for those not already working in Aristotelian terms, the accidents are the features beyond the bedrock of this is a human being that I can have or not have while still one human being either way. There are big accidents like sex: humans can just as well be male or female, but it so happens the matter I was made from was disposed to being male. There are small accidents like the heart-shaped scar on my shin that I got from walking atop (or, rather, stepping down badly from walking atop) a harrow. There are weird accidents like my memories of Dad playing all the Dr. Elmo Christmas music, not just “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer,” and the further accident of my inheritance of the same habit. There are complicated accidents like the autistic wiring of my brain or the fact of my having been born just in time to grow up with peak cinema (2000s movies FTW) and to watch always online smartphones destroy all our psyches.

Accidents are weird, metaphysically speaking. On the one hand, they are often viewed as “second class” to substance because they do not determine ultimately what something is. There is something quite important about the fact that I am substantially a human being rather than a mushroom, and none of the accidents of my personal features outweigh that monumental distinction. On the other hand, they are, to invoke another set of distinctions, a matter of act rather than potency, i.e. they are what I really, actively am, the living and realized ways that I exist. To be is to be good, and my accidents are the shape of the actual existence I have in distinction from any other person. There is no Caleb Dixon Smith without the substratum of a human substance, but, on the other hand, the substratum is only that, and the fully actual real life Caleb Dixon Smith is only here and who he is because he is male, 5’ 9”, 170 lbs, 31 years old, born of E.R. and Patty Ann, Floridian, Presbyterian, obscenely nerdy, unreasonably devoted to Owl City, allergic to Bermuda grass, and otherwise healthy as a horse.

A language model, however complex it gets, is still essentially not like this. The model qua model is form without matter, a blueprint for how to manipulate the matter of the computing hardware. And it really only actually4 exists while running, while actually processing the current inputs to produce an output. It doesn’t quite accrue accidents as there is no underlying substance to hold them. The accumulation of accidents can be mimicked by injecting context or fine-tuning a model, but fundamentally it’s not the same thing as a persistent being developing all the marks of its own specific life. Thus there is a certain sterility to most LLM output. Models are general, not particular. They did not form inside jokes during high school.5 They do not remember that one time they fell off into a dolphin pool at Seaworld, contra the memories of their parents. Lacking bodies, they do not have a running disagreement with their wives over whether 78 degrees is “cold.” These artifacts are definitively divorced from the accumulation of individuating properties that follow existing in the real world.

Some of you are no doubt thinking that, although current AI models don’t have these things, this has no relevance to their eventual potential skills or capacities and no bearing on their moral status or consciousness. Sure, whatever, I don’t care,6 because that’s not what this is about. It’s also true some of these things could change. Future setups might drastically alter the picture and relation between training, fine-tuning, context management, etc. Maybe one day their “memories” will be almost as good as those of a woman scorned. I grant it! (Though in the meantime context management feels like an annoying proof these things are in fact presently far, far, far inferior to the New Gods that AGI fanatics would have us imagine.)

But the more significant point really isn’t about the limitations of LLMs. It’s about the volume of particularity that makes human life what it is. We are accidentally alive in both the philosophical and the colloquial senses. It matters a great deal that we are human beings, something we all share, but it also matters a great deal to and for us that we are not just human beings in the abstract but concrete lives that accumulate millions of habits, memories, bodily marks, experiences, dates, relationships, and all other manner of properties that make us ever more distinctly ourselves. In the end, we shall be at our most completely human when we are also fully realized in the whole host of our perfected accidents, irreducibly and idiosyncratically distinct from every other individual who has ever lived.7 And the manifold brightness of these glorified accidents will shine to the glory of the Creator, who somehow possesses all the perfections of all our accidents in a far more eminent and transcendent mode.

Bob and I go back. Way back. Back before September 11^th. Back before the internet. Back before ludicrous seat belt laws. We go all the way back to middle school, which was around about thirty-five years ago. Bob was there the first day I walked into my new school in the sixth grade. I had just moved down to Florida from Georgia. I still remember the first whole sentence he spoke to me – “You gonna eat that?”

If you’ve never met my father, this opening paragraph from his book of short stories1 can serve as a tolerably effective introduction. Take the name “Bob.” The description of seat belt laws as “ludicrous.” The picture of a best friend as someone you met over the question, “You gonna’ eat that?” And Florida.

My dad and I are different in innumerable ways. What we like to do at home is gives a simple illustration. I am usually most content in a chair from which I can read, write, research, meme, code, edit Linux configuration files, and modify video games I will never get around to playing. My dad has a much different inclination. Perhaps his favorite place to be is his barn, inherited from my grandfather, in the midst of hundreds of acres of Smith family land, most of it covered in pine trees. There he works: sometimes on most needful things, such as maintaining the land and the pine trees for their vicennial cutting, or repairing cars. At other times he simply reorganizes, redecorates, or repurposes old things for the fun of it. Indeed, the older he gets, the more the barn looks like a tropical hangout2 and the less like a base of farming operations, though it still gets plenty of use both ways.

This difference between us flows neatly into our broader profiles. The contrast is superficially quite dramatic. On one hand, you have a man at home in the Florida soil, whose back has been gradually baked by the sun into a dark red, speaking in an immediately recognizable Southern drawl, probably about his favorite local seafood restaurants, as you visit with him after the service at his Southern Baptist church, a tradition he’s been part of his whole life. On the other, you have a guy who would hardly ever gone outdoors in the first 18 years of his life had he not been made to, who gets whiter every year, speaking in the closest approximation to a generic “American accent” that can grow in north Florida, probably about no-knead pan pizza, as you catch him in the midst of the Psalm Roar at his CREC church, where he’s been for about three years.

Still, for all this jarring contrast, we have a surprising amount in common underneath. Take, for example, our naming conventions and general vocabulary. Neither of us can quite abide either bestowing or calling anything by a conventional name. I grew up being called, despite my skeletal frame, “Chunky,” or even “Chunky Monkey.” Every single cat we ever owned was to him “Fang” or “Fang-O,” while a good number of our dogs were just “Dummy.” One important reference file on his computer I had to consult from time to time was (and I assume still is) named “Peradventure.” When my dad’s doctor got him on regular injections of some sort, he always labeled in the calendar “Shoot ER.” And his prose (sometimes even his speech) is littered with such popularly neglected expressions like “whilst,” “betwixt,” “vex,” and “I reckon.”

As for me, anyone who has seen my blog posts have guess I have struggles with “normal” naming, but there is more to it. One of my son’s often goes by “Potato” or even “Mr. Potato Head.” Any time we have had a pet (in those brief periods), the only names I recognized were “Doggo” and “cat.” Rather than a “to-do list” I have a Faciendum that I access on my phone named Moto Patri or perhaps my desktop Daemon Moderans. I make extensive use of circumlocutions in conversation about anything that counts, and my expressions include “in no wise,” “most certainly,” “What needest thou?”, and “verily.”

Musical taste is another way one can easily see our curious mixture of similarity and difference. Neither of us really listens to the mainstream things around us. Our preferences are largely opaque to our peers and sometimes family, with our wives tolerating the quirks as the kids might have mixed feelings. For my dad, the most distinctive love is reggae, trop-rock, calypso, and the like, almost anything that might mentally transport one to a tropical island. For me, we’re talking video game soundtracks, film scores, Owl City, Lindsey Stirling, and, just to keep things a tad more normal, some old Relient K. And he has passed on to me an appreciation for Dr. Elmo that goes beyond “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” into the eccentric selections “Grandpa’s Gonna’ Sue the Pants off of Santa,” “Texas Chainsaw Christmas,” and “Grandma’s Killer Fruitcake.” And whatever our respective playlists, we both play the same music over and over until our families beg for mercy.

Then there is our writing. It is a point of similarity indeed that we both write. What we write, however, has historically been quite different. While I believe I have seen E. R. Smith Bible commentaries typed up somewhere in my dad’s stuff, the vast majority of content he’s finished (unless in secret) is fiction, usually short stories. Thus Sun, Sun, and Salvation, which I have discussed before, and Holly, Jolly Christmas Tales.3 By contrast, I have been blogging, and occasionally writing published articles, about theology, ethics, and philosophy for the past 15 years, and while I wrote a lot of fiction in second and third grade, good luck finding any stories I’ve written as an adult.

Perhaps the area in which our differences and similarities are most curiously intertwined are in our vocations. Both of us are teachers, though in very different positions. He’s been at this for over 20 years at a public school4 in Perry, Florida of all places, navigating bureaucracy and all manner and range of behaviors, beliefs, and backgrounds in students all over the place with multiple grade and class shifts. I, meanwhile, have only recently finished three years at a small classical Christian school, all in a sixth grade class never larger than 13 students of roughly the same theological and moral bearings. We both love the job (even if I can’t fathom surviving the version of he handles), and indeed I sometimes think I have discovered a bit about his own life and heart over these past couple years stepping into such similar shoes. When I was at home I never knew much of his school life, but starting my own version and reading the Mr. Pratt stories in his books have opened my eyes a hair to a world I never quite saw he’s been living in.

For all this mix of similarity and difference, as a kid I often found the differences more visible and, I must admit, often frustrating. We both woke up early, and I would immediately start reading at the breakfast table, irritated that he would make me put my book away once the next couple people sat down. If there was no school, chances were high I would soon again be dragged away from my book, or the computer, or the GameCube in order to head to the barn and do outside stuff. I might have to work on cars (who needs to learn anything about those, amirite?), help cut and/or haul limbs in the fire lanes, repair a shed, dig up and transport a palm tree to the front yard,5 or otherwise inconvenience myself. Sometimes I could have sworn he was making up things to do, and in retrospect I don’t doubt this was sometimes true, whether because he thought that it would be fun or that a kid with that attitude needed more things to do anyway or that we could use some skills and some time learning from our father. Occasionally, I glimpsed a valuable lesson and tried to embrace it. More often my dad tried to tell me and I wasn’t prepared to hear the wisdom, imagining my adolescent reasoning was superior. We always could argue, and I was fairly good at it, and now I tell clever sixth-graders what’s wrong with their attitudes and find myself wishing their confident little minds could see what I see as an adult. Sorry, Dad, I see now the error of my old ways.

It is on this last point, the many efforts my dad put into teaching me, that I find myself reflecting most significantly. Neither of us, I think, has a natural knack for earnest conversations, but my dad always saw to it that he communicated the most important things I needed to learn. He taught me to work harder than I felt like and to listen to my elders with respect even on the occasion I could out-argue them. He taught me that if a pan full of grease catches fire, you should put the lid back on rather than let the flames loose. He taught me to drive both the tractor and the truck, even though I never let on to occasionally enjoying the tractor. He taught me to sing at church lest I rob God of the sacrifice of praise, a conversation he might have forgotten by now but I certainly never did. He tried over and over to teach me that social conventions matter whether I find them rational or not, and I eventually learned the lesson the long way around by reading people like Richard Hooker, only to realize I could have just listened to Dad to begin with. He taught me about women, at least to the limited extent I was able to follow along, and made sure I knew to look for “God-fearing, good-looking, and good-cooking.” And on the note of the fear of God, he taught me more than anything else to entreat God as Father, to rely only on the blood of the Son for salvation, to listen to the Holy Spirit by reading the Bible with faith and prayer, and to return all blessings with abundant thanksgiving, enjoying the pleasures and kindnesses with which God has filled our lives. If there is any similarity between us that really counts, all the quirks and tics aside, it is the view of this life he successfully communicated and planted within my own soul, represented by the Bible verse that makes up his whole Facebook bio:

Nothing is better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that his soul should enjoy good in his labour. This also, I saw, was from the hand of God.

— Ecclesiastes 2:24

Thanks, Dad. Now go eat at Deal’s, grab a drink from the barn fridge, and go enjoy some good in your labor.

I had the misfortune to see the following quote from a recent post by David Reece on CrossPolitic appear in my Twitter feed today:

Most natural law proponents will not very clearly define their view.

When they do, they either:

(1) agree with theonomy that the propositional revelation of the Triune God (Scripture) is the lone standard for doctrine and practice (including for the civil power), or

(2) disagree with theonomy that the propositional revelation of the Triune God (Scripture) is the lone standard for doctrine and practice (including for the civil power).

If they disagree, then they reject Sola Scriptura and the term “natural law” provides a useful distinguisher from theonomy.

The manifold errors in this little passage I will discuss momentarily. First, though, I decided to grab a free trial to the CrossPolitic Substack so I could read the rest of the article and try to do a more complete job responding, rather than leaping on a snippet alone. The core issue I want to flag here is the definition of sola Scriptura as it relates to natural law. There are a few other things wrong with the article as well (indeed, no part of it is particularly salvageable),1 but I would like to narrow my focus to this point.

The Definitions (Which Are Erroneous)

Sola Scriptura

Reece makes his key claim about sola Scriptura here:

Many natural law advocates want to say that they (1) believe in Sola Scriptura, and (2) they believe in the ability to authoritatively derive the law of God from a source other than Scripture alone, namely, natural law.

Listen to me carefully. That is not Sola Scriptura. That is Scripture plus some other process of authoritatively deriving doctrine.

He proceeds to elaborate on what sola Scriptura means by creatively expositing WCF 1.6, which reads as follows:

The whole counsel of God, concerning all things necessary for his own glory, man’s salvation, faith, and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men.

He expands on this point to note that it covers everything. Everything necessary for man’s life is in Scripture, which surely includes everything needful for politics and ethics and the like. So if we have the Bible, we have no need to look anywhere else to learn of such matters.

Natural Law

So, with his definitions and explanations about sola Scriptura in place, he moves on to defining natural law. This, he claims, is a shapeshifting term full of ambiguity. He says that natural law is “a term that normally means ‘what I find reasonable’ when used in either an ethical or civil context” before proceeding to lay out a taxonomy of sorts. Never mind that most of the usages he gives are basically just strawmen, either things no one actually believes or else simply ways in which random fools use the term off the tops of their heads. The list is below:

1. Irrationalistic Natural Law: The claim to be able to determine what ought to be done based upon feeling, experience, or a non-rational intuition. Where the heart is defined as feelings and you are told to follow your heart. This is the ethics of Romanticism and Walt Disney.

2. Rationalistic Natural Law: The claim to be able to determine what ought to be done based upon logic alone. Logic is how God thinks, it is a set of forms used to interpret content, but it has no content in itself. These natural law proponents are smuggling in terms through experience (see below) or philosophies (like Scripture).

3. Empirical Natural Law: The claim to be able to determine what ought to be done based upon sense experience alone. Without making logic an additional attachment onto this axiom, experience is a mere chaos that cannot sort itself. Rationalistic and Empirical Natural Law normally end up collapsing into each other, so we determine what is good by reasoning through our own experiences. This does not take into account our finite perspectives, limited experience, and fallen nature.

Before proceeding, I should note that the people who hold to a view resembling (1) almost never use the term “natural law.” The second and third versions sound like taxonomies one has made by accident, misunderstanding the people who speak of logic or empirical knowledge in ethics. The claim that an empirical view would not take in account our finite perspectives, limited experience, and fallen nature sounds like doing an empirical take badly, since finitude and limited experience are things people can empirically verify characterize human life anyway. Even for fallen nature, though the full reality of original sin cannot be known empirically, it is perfectly possible and has often been done for people to observe How Stuff Works and realize all actual humans are very dysfunctional creatures.

Finally, though, he moves into the fourth definition, what he identifies as the Reformed view and names “Innate Natural Law Theory.” I want to quote the definition here to make something quite clear:

The Reformed view of natural law involves innate categories, written on the heart of all image-bearers that cause us to make judgments—we excuse and we condemn. However, this innate knowledge is not the source of certainty about right and wrong but rather a mirror to show us our own hypocrisy.

The first sentence is more or less correct, and the second sentence is wildly contrary to any historic Reformed, Protestant, or even Christian views generally.

There are, off the top of my head, three chief problems with this second sentence that rejects a use of natural moral light as providing certainty about ethics in favor only of an accusatory role.

1. There is no conflict between providing moral knowledge and providing a mirror of hypocrisy, so the “not, but rather” construction needs to be justified; the matter is not either/or.

2. If these innate categories provide no moral certainty, then neither can they provide any certainty about our own hypocrisy or about hypocrisy being a bad thing.

3. This accusatory role differs drastically even from the traditional Reformed “First Use of the Law,” exposing our sin and need for Christ. Historically, Protestants have viewed this role as the conscience providing moral axioms and applying them to our own cases to produce the judgment that we are deeply guilty. But since Reece denies that our innate moral categories provide certain knowledge, he seems to replace this function with an alternative, one flavored by presuppositional concerns: “the contradictory beliefs, valuations, and choices of men cause them to be without excuse in the sight of God.” Rather than our sure innate knowledge of a moral standard applied to our choices revealing our sinfulness, the model seems to be our own self-contradictions between our alleged beliefs, values, and choices proving we are hopelessly lost. The model moves from seeing you are guilty according to a known standard to realizing you must be guilty according to some standard or another because you constantly morally contradict yourself.

He then continues with what appears to be his core contention: “The Reformed view is not that a second authoritative source needs to be put side by side with Scripture as an infallible standard of knowledge.” The wording here is loaded, but it seems especially targeted against the “two books” language which speaks of nature and Scripture as both ways in which God has communicated to men. “Infallible standard of knowledge” is a fishy phrase here, and it’s hard to be sure how he is using it except perhaps to make you want to agree with him out of an instinct to reserve “infallible” for Scripture.

Then he moves on to a curious section in which he identifies four possible relationships between the Bible and natural law in order to establish that natural law approaches are “useless” in ethics and politics. The four possibilities:

1. The Bible and the natural law contain the same content. In this case, he says we should just keep talking about what the Bible says and ignore the potentially misleading philosophical language.

2. Natural law contains less than the Bible. In that case, he says, might as well stick with the Bible, as natural law is less useful.

3. Natural law contains more than the Bible on some points and is thus a standard in those areas. This, he notes, Protestants must reject as incompatible with sola Scriptura.

4. Natural law contradicts the Bible. In this case, he points out, natural law must be rejected.

What I find fascinating here is that, after complaining about the alleged lack of definition for what natural law is, he writes this section without reference to any definitions at all. Indeed, a cursory familiarity with the actual natural law tradition would make this section almost unintelligible. No one who is familiar with the kinds of things Luther, Calvin, Melanchthon, Vermigli, Hooker, Witsius, Junius, Hemmingsen, the Westminster divines, the assembly at Dort, the Reformed Orthodox giants like Turretin, or any other representative historic Protestant and Reformed authors wrote about natural law could even have contemplated proposing this dilemma. (He also makes the claim in the conclusion of this section that when people speak of God’s law as discernible through two sources and then make a focus on reasoning from creation, “God is dishonored and his word is not exalted as it should be,” without explaining how or why this is the case.)

Correcting the Errors

So, fundamentally, what’s wrong with his argument?

It’s all about nature, grace, and definitions. I will tackle these in the reverse order as above.

Natural Law

Natural law is where Reece has most violently departed from the Reformed and Protestant approach, and where he seems to be the least aware of the traditional teachings. He complains about the lack of definitions, but as it happens, Protestants have historically defined natural law pretty rigorously. It is not a wax nose, and most of its actual features do not resemble anything Reece reflects awareness of in his article.

Historic Definitions (Lots of Quotes)

Let us survey a few definitions. First comes from Herman Witsius, famed 17th century Dutch Reformed covenant theologian:

The law of nature is the rule of good and evil, inscribed by God on man’s conscience, even at his creation, and therefore binding upon him by divine authority… It is moreover to be observed, that this law of nature is the same in substance with the decalogue… This law is deduced by infallible consequence from the very nature of God and man.2

Our next definition comes from Niels Hemmingsen, a 16th century Danish Lutheran at the University of Copenhagen:

The law of nature is a certain knowledge, imprinted on the minds of men by God, of the principles of knowing and of acting, and of the conclusions proved from these principles that are in agreement with the proper end of man. Reason constructs these conclusions from the principles by necessary consequence for the government of human life, so that man may recognize, want, choose, and do the things that are right, and avoid their opposites; and God has bestowed on men the conscience as the witness and judge of all these things.3

Speaking of Lutherans, here are a couple random bits from him, across multiple sources.

Natural law is a practical first principle in the sphere of morality; it forbids evil and commands good. Positive law is a decision that takes circumstances into account and conforms with natural law on credible grounds. The basis of natural law is God, who has created this light, but the basis of positive law is civil authority. When theft is punished by hanging, this occurs according to positive law on acceptable grounds, but not as in the case of the Draconian law which condemned every thief to hang, even if he stole only a chicken; this has no acceptable grounds and is contrary to nature. Consequently it was said that this law was written in blood.4

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It is natural to honor God, not steal, not commit adultery, not bear false witness, not murder; and what Moses commands is nothing new. For what God has given the Jews from heaven, he has also written in the hearts of all men. Thus I keep the commandments which Moses has given, not because Moses gave commandment, but because they have been implanted in me by nature, and Moses agrees exactly with nature, etc.

But the other commandments of Moses, which are not [implanted in all men] by nature, the Gentiles do not hold. Nor do these pertain to the Gentiles, such as the tithe and others equally fine which I wish we had too. Now this is the first thing that I ought to see in Moses, namely, the commandments to which I am not bound except insofar as they are [implanted in everyone] by nature [and written in everyone’s heart].5

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Thus should one deal with all property unlawfully held, whether in public or in private, that love and natural law may always prevail. For when you judge according to love you will easily decide and adjust matters without any lawbooks. But when you ignore love and natural law you will never hit upon the solution that pleases God, though you may have devoured all the lawbooks and jurists.6

Perhaps dearest to me on this point is Richard Hooker, who was my best introduction to the subject of natural law. He uses a different terminology, preferring “law of nature” for the laws that govern physics and biology and the like, while “law of reason” he uses for the laws that govern rational beings, namely humans:

The law of reason or human nature is that which men have discovered, by process of natural reasoning, that they are perpetually and universally bound by. We know the laws of reason by these marks, and those who keep them resemble in their actions the works of nature herself. All of nature’s works are necessary, and beautiful, with nothing superfluous or lacking, and so will be the works of anyone who follows the law of reason. These laws can be discovered through reason, even without divine revelation, and indeed are so apparent upon investigation that they have been known to the world from the beginning of time… Men often call these laws, “the law of nature,” because this is the law which human nature is universally obligated by reason to follow, but our term “the law of reason” seems more precise. This law encompasses everything which men naturally know (or at least may naturally know) to be seemly or unseemly, virtuous or vicious, good or evil.7

Finally, here is Francis Turretin, giant of Reformed Scholasticism:

Natural law is taken strictly and properly for the practical rule of moral duties to which men are bound by nature… [The Reformed orthodox] affirm that there is a natural law [arising] from a divine obligation being impressed by God upon the conscience of man in his very creation, on which the difference between right and wrong is founded and which contains the practical principles of immovable truth (such as: “God should be worshipped,” “parents honored,” “we should live virtuously,” “injure no one,” “do to others what we would wish them to do to us” and the like). Also that so many remains and evidences of this law are still left in our nature (although it has been in different ways corrupted and obscured by sin) that there is no mortal who cannot feel its force either more or less. Now they wish this law to be called natural, not because it has its origin from bare nature (since it depends upon God the supreme lawgiver), but because it becomes known from the aspect of creatures and the relation of man to God, and the knowledge of it is impressed upon the mind by nature, not acquired by tradition or instruction.8

Similar passages to many of these abound in figures like Calvin, Vermigli, Melanchthon, and many more.

Enough Quotes: What is Natural Law?

So what do these passages have in common? What kind of account of natural law emerges from them? We could summarize the features below:

• The law is natural. This has two related meanings here:

  • The reason for the law and its content is our nature, that is, what we are, how God made us, and how we relate to Him as our Maker.

  • We know the law naturally, i.e. God “pre-loads” our minds with its first principles/fundamental rules (though not necessarily all its conclusions).

• The law is universal. Because it is based on how God made us, it applies to all men at all times.

• The law is rational. Once someone knows what men are like and who God is, the things the law requires you to do or not do logically follow from its first principles. By valid reasoning, you can go from “what man is like” and “God made man” all the way to specifics like “Fornication is immoral” or “People should regularly rest from daily labors and worship God publicly” or “I should not slander the natural law tradition on the Internet while claiming to be Reformed.”

• All men know it. This does not mean all men know everything about what is right and what is wrong, but all men do know the basics: you should do good things, not bad things; God deserves your worship; life is better than death; you should treat your neighbor as you would like to be treated. The answer to every moral question ultimately traces back to these basics that everyone knows.

• This law is equivalent to the Great Commandments and the Ten Commandments. The traditional Protestant view is that every moral truth follows consequently from the commands to love God and love neighbor, that these two laws are necessarily implied by man’s nature as a rational creature under God, and that the Ten Commandments represent a summary and guide to all the main implications of those two great commandments.

• The knowledge of the law is hindered by the Fall. Only the Turretin quote here directly addresses this, but it comes up often enough in Hooker, Calvin, and elsewhere. The reason for the hindrance must be carefully understood: the problem is not that unbelievers have no access to its truth without Scripture. On the contrary, as was said about, the whole law follows logically from the basic and clearly evident realities of man’s nature as God’s creature. The law is there to be known. But the fall hinders man’s willingness to reason about it clearly along with the strength of his recognition of its chief implications and the reliability of man’s teachers, such as parents, educators, and social or political leadership, who sinfully fail in passing down both what the conclusions of the law are and how to think about it correctly.

Sola Scriptura

Let’s go back to the part I quoted first, where Reece treats the following statement as equivalent to sola Scriptura: “the propositional revelation of the Triune God (Scripture) is the lone standard for doctrine and practice (including for the civil power).”

This is a great confusion, as it fails to distinguish between the Christian faith and, well, stuff in general. Now, do not misunderstand: the Christian faith touches on all of life in various respects, and it directly addresses the purpose of life as a whole. But the faith as the faith consists in the articles of supernatural doctrine and the means of grace. This affects and orients the rest of life, but it is not identical to every other part of life. It is in this respect kind of like the relationship between a church service and a daily vocation: there is a sense in which corporate worship is the most important thing and gives meaning and orientation to the daily vocation, but a church service is not building bridges or teaching classes or writing books or doing laundry.

All this is a preamble to make the point that the historic Reformed definition of sola Scriptura does not claim Scripture is the lone standard for anything and everything. Rather, the statements about what Scripture is perfect and sufficient for are nearly always specified as “for faith,” “of faith,” or “for the faith.” For example, Turretin defines it in the terms of Scripture being the “only and perfect rule of faith”9 and of the Scriptures containing all things necessary for salvation so “that they can be a total and adequate rule of faith and practice.”10 To be as specific as possible, the Reformed usually identified Scripture’s role as the only and adequate source of supernatural truths (e.g. the Trinity, the way of salvation, the resurrection of the body, and anything else man could never find out from general revelation) and the only and adequate rule for the way to salvation.

So only in the questions “What do Christians believe about things unseen?” and “What must we do to be saved?” do the Reformed propose Scripture as the only rule, source, or standard. In other matters, it is not the lone or sole source, but instead the highest and only infallible verbal source. It speaks without error and can always be trusted as carrying divine authority for whatever it says, but it is not the only thing that speaks. For an obvious example, take fly fishing. Scripture in no wise teaches us how fly fishing works, how to get better at it, or anything else of the sort. It does speak to fly fishing in one sense, in that it tells us it should be done to the glory of God and with love toward neighbor, but these aren’t specific to fly fishing. They apply to all things. For a moderate example, take the conquest of Jericho. The conquest of Jericho isn’t a supernatural mystery one must know to be saved nor is it part of what we must do to be saved, and one could have known about it without the Bible (e.g. by being to witness it personally, like Rahab), but whatever the Bible says about it is most certainly true, and contrary historians must yield.

Conclusion: The Most Exquisite Harmony of Scripture and Natural Law

With ethics, then, Scripture is not the only source of true information. The fundamental principles of ethics are not uniquely revealed in Scripture, but rather God has planted them in every human mind. That, for example, we should not needlessly harm people is a basic principle every man knows from within all his days, and even pagans who’ve never heard one iota of Scripture are generally quite aware of it. Points like this are frequent in Reformed writers like Calvin or Vermigli.

So what use is Scripture in ethics? Much in every way. First, it restates everything that has been part of the natural law since the day God made Adam and makes it clearer and more certain with the voice of God backing it up. Since it is not always easy to determine whether something is right or wrong by reasoning from first principles, God put His own verbal stamp on all the most important heads of the law for our edification. Beyond this, He illustrated for us further with examples and illustrations, whether the model of Torah, the narratives with endings of blessing or punishment, the prophetic critiques of specific personal or social sins, or anything else, which gives ordinary people far more to go on to understand the law.

But Scripture adds no new moral principles that God “left out” from general revelation, and, more importantly, it is not the ground of right and wrong. Good and evil were what they were since the beginning, long before Moses put pen to paper. The reasons that things are right or wrong go back to God’s own nature and how He designed us. Natural law makes this point explicit: X is good and Y is bad because X fits how God made you and what He made you for, whereas Y cuts against the grain of your design, being bad for you as a rational creature from a good Creator. Scripture is thus here like the owner’s manual for a complicated kitchen appliance: it gives you the whole scoop of how it works, how to use it, how to avoid safety hazards, etc. Without the manual, you can still learn how to use the appliance by inspection, trial and error, and the like, but you are more likely to make mistakes, miss things, or go the whole time without realizing you could have drastically improved or simplified what you did.

To go back to Reece, then, this is the main reason why we should speak of natural law. Out of his silly four options, the option that the Bible and natural law teach the same ethics is correct. Both teach love of God and love of neighbor, and everything else follows from those two things. But his inference that this makes natural law talk pointless is unjustified. Scripture mostly reminds us what is right and what is wrong, chiefly to get us to repent and to help us progress. Natural law as a framework turns the focus onto the how and why behind what is right and wrong, helping us to understand ethics rather than only obey. It looks at how God designed us, how the human machine works, what is beneficial or harmful, and it connects the dots. Nothing about this threatens sola Scriptura as the Reformed and wider Protestant traditions have historically understood it.

Theonomy here falls into essentially the trap of flattery with Scripture, trying to honor it by attributing to it false things. On this point, I return to Richard Hooker, dealing with a similar case of people abusing the notion of Scripture’s sufficiency in his day:

There are two opinions concerning the sufficiency of Holy Scripture, each opposite to the other, but both repugnant to the truth. Rome teaches Scripture to be so insufficient that, without adding traditions, it would not contain all revealed and supernatural truth necessary for salvation. Others, rightly condemning this view, fall into the opposite ditch—just as dangerous—thinking that Scripture contains not only all things necessary for salvation, but indeed simply all things, such that to do anything according to any other law is not only unnecessary to salvation but unlawful, sinful, and downright damnable. But whatever is spoken of God or things pertaining to God other than the truth, even if it seems like an honor, is actually an injury. And just as exaggerated praises given to men often turn out to diminish and damage their well-deserved reputations, so we must likewise beware lest, in attributing too much to Scripture, such unbelievable claims cause even those virtues which Scripture truly possesses to be less reverently esteemed.11

Addendum: Further Reading

• A post of my own about proving the whole law from natural knowledge:
  

• So much of this argument (especially much of what I said in conclusion) is well-handled in Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which I have been citing. Read it, preferably in the Davenant modernization if you are new to this.

• Martin Luther has an excellent little treatise about natural law and the Torah, which I have also cited here: “How Christians Should Regard Moses.”

A week or so ago some influencers posted a lament about how they “had” to abort their child after a Down syndrome diagnosis. Naturally, this set Twitter ablaze with debate over their inadequate justification for murdering their child. The debate has continued almost uninterrupted since then.

The thing about abortion debates is that they are basically the only ones to ever make me angry, and they’re also the “easiest” in the sense that the arguments for abortion are terrible. So when I get involved in these debates on Twitter, something will inevitably happen. Either I will be less charitable than normal, more excessive in laying out my argument than normal, or both.

This time around was no exception. As I ran into a particular thread and started getting into the weeds of the debate, I ran into a golden opportunity. A plucky pro-choicer produced the premise that moral protections rely on personhood, which in turn relies on agency and/or consciousness. This is, of course, a terribly weak point in pro-choice philosophy, so I decided to push back on it. We got a couple replies in before my last post, with which I got a bit carried away, began channeling medieval scholasticism in my strongest mode, and wrote a ~470 word micro-essay on the matter. It is this that I felt like sharing, mostly for an example of how scholastic concepts are still useful even today, and maybe to entertain you with how I DESTROYED my opponent with FACTS and LOGIC.1

So, below I present the oversized tweet reply in which I argue fetal personhood and the ethics of killing people. As a brief note, the footnote in the blockquote is part of the actual tweet. (I know.) But I also have attached other explanatory footnotes for you, my dear readers, in case they are useful.

The definition of a person is: an individual substance of a rational nature.2 Human nature is rational. Therefore an individual substance of human nature is a person. Therefore every human organism is a person.

The point is that whether reason is in potency or act3 makes no difference to the question quid est?4, does not what kind of being we are dealing with. And it is the kind of being that is the question here, not the state of development.

Thus, we have two questions, the ontological and then the ethical:
- Is a fetus a person? Per the argument above, yes, for it is an individual substance of a rational nature.
- Can one have the right to kill an innocent person?

I am assuming the answer to the latter is "no," (though maybe you will want to dispute this) in which case the only question is the first.

But let's say you don't like this concept of "person." Maybe you will prefer to redefine "person" such as only to cover beings whose reason and/or will are in act rather than in potency. If you take this route, the moral question changes.

Then, I would simply deny your claim that it matters where someone is a "person" by your definition, instead asserting that killing innocent human organisms is wrong whether they are "persons" in your sense of the term or not. For example, people sleeping, in a coma, or with certain mental disabilities don't have reason in act, but only mostly or entirely in potency.[^1]

You might respond to that by invoking the qualification you added before that in these cases reason has been in act and will be in act again. But an accidental fact of the past or future is a stupid criterion for determining what is in the present, as it reflects nothing inhering in the being in question.

For that matter, there are few humans whose reason is fully in act or fully in potency, so your definition opens the way to grading and ranking the moral value of human organisms according to their intellectual competence, which perhaps you would be willing to do, but it brings your view into the same territory as the kinds of racism and Nazism5 that produced things most people consider great atrocities. This is not a proof that your view is false, but it would require you to either affirm the views behind those acts or else produce an extended argument showing whether and to what extent and in what way(s) your view differs from them.

[^1] For that matter, this take on personhood renders a fetus at 8 months equal in every respect to a newborn, and you have not yet clarified whether you support infanticide or oppose late-term abortions, as your argument demands you treat the two as equivalent.

A couple weeks back on Twitter, there was a great kerfuffle which I cannot quite pinpoint the beginning of, but which stood out as mostly circling around Larry Sanger, the former Wikipedia co-founder recently converted to Christianity about/to whom I have written once before. The dispute was over the use of the term “gods” with respect to the pagan deities that actually exist, e.g. the evil spirits whom pagans have often worshiped. Simply put, the question was: is there more than one god? Personally, I found the debate in the shape it actually took fairly silly on almost all sides, as it seemed to be all words and no substance. But rather than argue with anyone in particular about it, I just figured it would be best to classify the senses of the term “god” and how it might be predicated or not of different beings, and then classify the senses of the whole statement accordingly.

Quid Significet “Deus”?

The Latin deus, the Greek theos, the Hebrew el, and the English “god” all have a variety of senses, but there is something of a common set among them all in traditional theological discourse, which can also be ranked in roughly the same priority among them all. However, the traditional map of these senses differs from what some people in Heiser’s circles suggest.

Primary Traditional Sense

Proper Sense

The main and most distinctive/unique sense of “god” as used in Western history is that of the First Cause. The terms in various languages and their etymologies all suggest this, whether their roots are in transcendent brightness (deus), universal providence (theos), supreme power (el),1 or absolute goodness (“god”). “God” uniquely signifies the Cause of the world, the source of all its light, beauty, order, goodness, and power. This can truly be applied in its proper sense only to the one true God, and no one else.

Improper Senses

By Similitude

Sometimes people are called “gods” by some resemblance to the attributes of God properly. So, for example, as God is almighty, so very powerful men are sometimes called “gods” by resemblance: “That man is a wood-cutting god.” Or, as God has all dominion, so men with authority are sometimes called “gods” by resemblance: “I said, ‘You are gods, And all of you are children of the Most High.’” In general, those who excel others in some particular perfection are called “gods” improperly by resemblance to God, who is most perfect in every respect.

By Opinion

Sometimes people or beings are called “gods” not to impute deity to them, but rather because other people impute deity to them. So, for example, sometimes we refer to “gods” such as Allah or Thor or Zeus or the like, not because we consider any of them to be the highest power or even necessarily to exist at all, but because they are or were believed to be the highest powers by those who worship them.

By Office

Sometimes people are called “gods” not because they are believed to be a god in a proper sense, but only because they represent a god functionally, e.g. when Moses was “god” to Aaron. This may overlap with the use by resemblance for authority figures.

Alternative “Heiserite” Sense

It may or may not always be the case that Heiser and his followers mean the same things by the same terms, and it does not necessarily seem to be the case that Heiser’s camp would grant our primary modern English use of “gods” maps directly onto elohim. In any case, the el-terms make up the focal point of their arguments.

Heiser himself defines elohim thus in The Unseen Realm:

The biblical use of elohim is not hard to understand once we know that it isn’t about attributes. What all the figures on the list have in common is that they are inhabitants of the spiritual world. In that realm there is hierarchy. For example, Yahweh possesses superior attributes with respect to all elohim. But God’s attributes aren’t what makes him an elohim, since inferior beings are members of that same group. The Old Testament writers understood that Yahweh was an elohim—but no other elohim was Yahweh. He was species-unique among all residents of the spiritual world.

Under this definition, we can either imagine elohim, and perhaps “gods,” as equivalent to “heavenites” or something. But the raw location data, despite Heiser’s wording here and elsewhere, is clearly not the actual point, for presumably they would not call Enoch or Elijah elohim. Rather, to be more precise and metaphysical, since the classification as used and applied has far more to do with the nature of the beings in the spiritual realm, we might gloss the definition simply as “spirit.” We could get even more scholastic, and we might read it specifically as a logical category for all beings from which we divide the predicate “visible” or maybe “corporeal.” Notice that while Heiser’s “species-unique” language suggests that Yahweh and the other elohim are in a genus together, which is unacceptable, I think we can charitably read the point not as a genus of being but as a logical category.

So, if we reduce a Heiserite definite of elohim to its raw logical content under the most charitable reading, elohim signifies beings who do have reason but are not essentially or naturally physical. Basically, elohim means spirits, not spirits divided from their bodies (like the human soul postmortem), but “native spirits.” One might think this is almost exactly the same thing that the Christian tradition has almost always grouped under the term “angels,” but there is one key difference. “Angels” as a category includes finitude, and thus the status of being a creature, whereas elohim in the Heiserite sense includes no such implication and can thus extend to apply to God.2

Now, whether or not this or something like it is what elohim really meant in ancient Hebrew is a matter for historical and linguistic debate. Whether it is the historical usage of the term or not has no actual bearing on whether we should speak of a plurality of gods today, since the English “gods” does not have to have an identical semantic range or identical primary sense to elohim. Plenty of scholars of the Ancient Near East seem to think elohim was used in this way, and if so, cool beans.

Comparison of Claims

With these definitions properly understood, we can proceed to what is actually being claimed.

The Heiserites are, in essence, at the level of pure logical content, saying the following:

There are many spiritual beings.

Sanger is, in essence, at the level of pure logical content, saying the following:

There is one Highest Cause for the world.

Obviously, these two claims have no disagreement, and all Christians have always held both. Sanger, however, seems to add another claim, which as best as I can steelman it seems to be:

The term “gods” ought not to be applied in an unqualified way to spiritual beings in general, but reserved for the First Cause.

This claim is not unreasonable, at least if we stick to conventional English usage. The argument would be something like this:

1. The term “god” in English primarily and distinctly conventionally refers to divine nature in the proper sense, i.e. that of the First Cause.

2. Unless qualified to elucidate an improper sense of “god,” the statement “There are many gods” will generally appear to signify3 that there are many First Causes/that the First Cause is plural.

3. That the First Cause is plural is an error.

4. Statements that will appear to signify errors ought to be avoided.

5. Therefore the statement “There are many gods” ought to be avoided.

I will judge that this is probably true so far as it goes.

However, I think it is also true that Heiser himself, along with some of his followers, have in fact done an adequate job qualifying themselves so that the affirmation “There are many gods” comes through to most probable audiences in the true sense “There are many spiritual beings” rather than in the false sense “There are many First Causes.”

Conclusion

My motto is, “Divide senses lest you divide people.”4 The Sanger/Heiserites debate has been, I think, largely over words, hardly at all over sense, and in some proportion over prudential judgments about how one ought to speak. There is certainly no need for either accusations of stupidity or heresy against most of the people on either side, and my goal here really was just to show why and how that is the case.

The Bible itself speaks of “gods” in the plural often enough, and it makes little difference practically speaking whether we interpret this in the classical sense, as an improper use of “god” by opinion, or in the Heiserite sense, as a proper use of a logical category of beings that includes rationality but excludes natural corporeality. (And, of course, in some verses there is a debate as to whether it refers to human authorities or spiritual beings, but, again, this amounts to relatively little for this debate or in theology more broadly.)

So, chill, guys. And always distinguish.

[Continuing my Apologia de CREC. Previous parts: I, II, III, IV, V, VI]

In this final entry into my series on being a Reformed scholaticism guy within the CREC, I turn to foundations of ecclesiology. Here the differences between the Reformed Orthodox approach and the Federal Vision streams often present in or connected to the CREC are most visible, and here I intend to explain my own sort of asymmetrical synthesis. To start with, I will introduce the radical (in the old sense of from the root) distinctive of FV dark ecclesiology and highlight wherein it differs from the ecclesiology of the Reformed Orthodox.

Also, if you are interested in this series but are not a paid subscriber, I decided to offer a discount for a time to accommodate you. It’s pretty cheap, though perhaps you get what you pay for.

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Federal Vision Emphases

When it comes to ecclesiology and soteriology, almost everything I think needs to be said about the Federal Vision touches on this quote from Leithart’s The Baptized Body, which is probably the most concise and potent FV dark manifesto:

Without qualification or hedging, the church is the body of Christ. Everything the Federal Vision says about baptism, about soteriology, about apostasy flows from that affirmation.

This may sound like an obvious point, but the FV distinctives begin with how “the church” is being discussed here. Leithart begins to unpack this a bit later in the book as he discusses the common Reformed claim that baptism admits one to the visible Church:

What does a baptized person become a member of when he becomes a member of the church? What kind of bond to Christ, and through Him to the Father and Spirit, is forged when one enters the visible church by baptism? Can we say that a member of the church is, necessarily, a member of Christ? Answers to these questions depend on ecclesiological assumptions, on the answer to our question, Is the visible church the body of Christ? If the visible church is the body of Christ, and if the body of Christ is the community united to the humanity of the Son of God by the Spirit, then baptism joins the baptized to Christ the Son.

Note that here, to be a member of the “visible Church” is to be a member of Christ, i.e. united to Christ. Given the ordinary sense of “union with Christ” in Reformed theology as that saving way of being connected to Christ by the Spirit out of which all spiritual blessings flow, the point of this construction is to say, absolutely speaking, that baptism puts one into a state of saving union with Christ, that is, that baptism transfers a person from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of light, bringing justification, sanctification, regeneration, etc.

Salvation and Sociology

After the above passage, Leithart proceeds to explain how the simple path from baptism to being savingly united to Christ via the visible Church simply doesn’t match any traditional Reformed understanding of the Church. He concludes his survey of such views by noting the most they can give you is this:

1. Baptism admits the baptized to the visible church.

2. The visible church involves an external, conditional, and legal covenant relationship with God.

3. Therefore, baptism admits the baptized into an external, conditional, legal relationship with God.

Leithart identifies this conclusion as in no way similar to the language of the New Testament. This brings him to a proposed solution: salvation as sociology. Thus recounts the history of the biblical story in terms of God’s purpose to form a worshiping race that would obediently fill and rule the earth. Sin interfered with this, God worked through the patriarchs, Moses, the kings, and the rest to prepare Jesus to fix this, and now in Christ a new race has been formed and filled with the Spirit to rightly worship and obey God.

The emphasis on a race, a renewed Israel, is critical to his point. Leithart highlights the role of relationships to human life:

We are created as social beings, entangled with the lives of others and with the things of the world in such profound ways that it’s often difficult to know where one ends and another begins. A woman loses her husband of fifty years and feels that she's lost part of herself.…

Because of the way human beings are made, sin damages our relations with each other and the world as much as it damages our relationship with God. Like Adam, we blame other people to assuage our guilt…

Having drawn attention to how deeply human life and indeed human sin are affected by our relationships, Leithart proceeds:

Given the way God created us, salvation for the human race must take a social form… If He delivered us from individual sins without delivering us from the sinful ways we treat one another and the world, He would not be saving us from sin at all. If God is going to restore the human race to right order, He must form a society of the saved. If God were to delay the formation of this race until the end of time, then salvation would be delayed until the end of time. If there is no society of the saved in history, then there simply is no salvation in history. Salvation is still a distant, longed-for possibility. If salvation doesn’t take form in history, a social form in history, the gospel is untrue. If there is no community of the saved, salvation has not actually occurred at all.

From this as a turning point, Leithart makes extended argument that the vast majority of the New Testament’s language about the Church and the Body of Christ—including the many statements about being holy, united to Christ, full of the Spirit, elect, and more—clearly refers to the actual, flesh-and-blood community of Christ on earth, the visible Church with all its righteous, all its godly, all its hypocrites, and all its short-lived members who flee back to the world. If you are part of the earthly community, you are part of Christ.

Moreover, Leithart works to extend our usual array of benefits attributed to salvation. Many of the benefits are social and even political: we receive a shared mission, a new family to enjoy and rely on, gifts with which to edify each other, promises for a glorious future that include the Church’s influence over the nations. These are gifts, graces, from a loving God for His people in Christ.

Thus Leithart turns back to elements of the traditional ordo salutis to frame them sociologically as well. Justification means to be part of the community God counts as just for Christ’s sake. Sanctification is being part of the communion of the saints. Adoption is being part of the actual community of God, all the real flesh-and-blood people in the Church. Even regeneration is simply coming to share in the new life God has given this community. We are social beings, so, Leithart argues, “If our being is communion, then extraction from one communion and insertion into another is a change in our being. It is a new birth.”

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Happy Easter to all! Christ is, if you haven’t heard yet, risen from the dead, which is very good news. As you contemplate this most glorious of feast days, I want to pass on a couple of healthy thoughts that my students have brought to mind about Christ’s Resurrection in the last few weeks.

The first student contribution comes from a recent test on 1 Peter. We had noted while reading that Peter applies “through the resurrection of Christ” both to our being born again and to the sentence about baptism now saving you. On the test, I asked both to what event Peter had connected these things and, more speculatively, why he made that specific connection. There were several generic answers, a few that simply tied them together by appeal to Christ’s death as something connected with the resurrection, and a couple more decent answers that connected rising from the water with rising from the dead. But one was slightly more interesting and complete: she went further than the rest to speak of the necessity of Christ conquering death to our salvation, while also making the link that rising from the dead is itself like a new birth.

As ChatGPT would say, “You’re exactly right!”

To her first point, Easter reminds us that death itself needed to be conquered. A salvation that was purely forgiveness of sins without also a conquest of death would be, besides flatly absurd, deeply incomplete and inconsistent with how God made us. God formed our bodies from the dust, breathed into them the breath of life, and intends to immortalize them with the glory of the stars. God did not provide only pardon; on the basis of that pardon, He gave us a new life, not only metaphorically, but also literally as our inheritance, first in Christ our Head, and one day in our own bodies.

Beyond this, as the Apostle Paul reminds us, Christ was raised from the dead by the power of the Holy Spirit, who now lives within us and fills our mortal bodies with that same resurrection power. Per Romans 8:11, “But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit who dwells in you.” Furthermore, as the dear child said, rising from the dead is itself like a new birth, thus Christ is called the firstborn from the dead.1 Our own regeneration is, as it were, the incorruptible2 seed in us of the new life that will one day mature into a whole incorruptible existence.3

I do wonder if this child even knew how well she nailed this question. Probably not, TBH.

The second observation, of a rather different sort, comes from the interrogations of another and rather insatiable mind in my class. As we read Hebrews and reached chapter 2, I tried to draw the class’s attention the importance to its argument that Christ ascended as a man to the throne of the universe: a real human being ruling the world with a real and immortal human body. Fortunately and delightfully, this almost immediately provoked a beautiful question: if Jesus ascended into heaven with His human body, does this mean heaven must be a kind of a “physical place?” And, of course, I had to tell them that the answer must be a kind of “yes,” however little we know about the details. This led to a very fun opportunity to discuss Lewis and The Discarded Image, but I digress.

The real and fascinating point is precisely this: that Jesus still bears an actual body, the self-same body that was pierced in hands, feet, and side, with scars to prove it. It was this crucified flesh and bones that God raised to new life on Easter Sunday, and in the same manner, we shall rise with the same bodies in which we die in the Lord. The future is bodily, and our eternal home will not be intangible and ethereal but a suitable home for bodies. Though they will be changed, and gloriously so, bodies they will remain, and the human form in all its oddness and limitation forever dignified and exalted. In the meantime, Jesus is somewhere in His glorified flesh, standing or walking or sitting or whatever He is doing with a head and hands like ours, actually being tangible. He is not a phantom or pure spirit or invisible but remains one of us with a concrete field of view, set of sensations, auditory landscape, etc. What it is like for Him we shan’t know until our own resurrections follow His, but in the meantime, it is a jolt to the imagination to comprehend exactly how much it means that He in His crucified flesh conquered death and lives, never to die again.

So, the next time you said, “He is risen indeed!” perhaps stop and give a thought to these sixth grade observations, let them fortify your imagination for the love of Christ, and perhaps give thanks for God’s ongoing kindness to a teacher and his students in one little classroom of 12-year-olds.

I’ve probably watched Camp Rock half a dozen times, at the very least.1 This belongs to a funny period in my life. As a teenager, especially in the early days, I spent a great deal of time thoroughly enjoying the music and characters on the Disney channel while engaged in a totalizing ideological war with almost everything it produced. Nowhere, perhaps, is this dynamic more clearly represented than in my relationship to Camp Rock.2

My problems with Disney at the level of moral philosophy and worldview were among my first adult blogging topics. The easiest way to summarize the problem is perhaps with the horrifically overused term “expressive individualism.” To quote my 18-year-old self, 2010s Disney seemed to focus on these values more than any:

Master, which is the greatest commandment in the law? Disney said unto him, Thou shalt believe in and express thyself with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt help thy neighbor believe in and express himself as thou dost thyself.

Even as a teenager, I knew perfectly well the idea of moral value lying chiefly in authenticity and self-expression was absolutely bonkers, but I still enjoyed the Disney music and those silly actors. Camp Rock was a special case. As reviews noted at the time, its relatively understated music was already slightly passé when it came out, but that only suited me all the more as the perennial reverse-hipster. The simple and earnest acoustic sounds appealed easily to my tastes.

Yet what the songs actually expressed was often highly objectionable. The opening song, “Who Will I Be?”, is the second worst example of that, and for some inexplicable reason it has been running through my head now for half the past week.3 Thus I have also spent the past few days in rather vigorous criticism and argument with it, noting its complete moral and philosophical absurdity. This is the matter to which I wish to turn.

In order to understand everything amiss in this song, you should probably peruse the first verse, bridge, and chorus:

How to choose
Who to be?
Well, let’s see:
There are so many choices now:
Play guitar, be a movie star.
In my head, a voice says,

“Why not, try everything?
Why stop, reach for any dream?
I can rock, cause it’s my life
And now’s the time.”

Who will I be?
It’s up to me—
All the never-ending possibilities
That I can see.
There’s nothing that I can’t do.
Who will I be?
Yes, I believe
I get to make the future what I want to.
If I can become anyone and know the choice is up to me,
Who will I be?

There is hardly any limit to what one could say about the ethical and philosophical problems of the above verses. But two particular issues have claimed my own attention:

First, there is the practical absurdity. The idea that we have before us an endless buffet of things we can do or become, and it is simply up to us individually to select among them, is in no way true to life. The reality of creatureliness and finitude is utterly lacking here. Stephen Hawking did not have the option to become an Olympic swimmer. A man, however much the executives at Disney may not be willing to admit this, does not have motherhood as a viable path before him. Children with developmental delays or neurological disorders are often cut off from innumerable vocations or stations. A once-in-a-millennium genius born into the wrong time or place will never the chance to revolutionize mathematics, physics, or computer engineering.

While I have highlighted here mostly only extreme or obvious cases, the same is true of more simple or subtle ones. A series of unfortunate events can render it nearly impossible for many an ordinary person to even get a certain ordinary job or accomplish some fairly ordinary task, or, even if it does not eliminate the possibilities, may render them such that only an extraordinary person would be able to realize them. Our possibilities are often quite narrow, and there are in almost no respect equal for everyone.The only truly universal possibility is to cultivate virtue, a theme about which the song has basically nothing to say.

This leads to the second point, namely the moral absurdity. Here Demi Lovato sings as though the future is entirely a matter between herself and the future. There are no outside obligations, accountability, loyalties, limits, or restraints. The goal is to find, as the song elsewhere states, “who I am inside” and to let that shine before men, that they may see your expressive works and glorify your self inside. But this is stupid, and even the movie knows it. Though the stories moral turns are often framed in terms of people being true to themselves, the parts that actually work, to the extent that they do work at all, are better understood in terms of loyalty, justice, integrity, honesty, and participation in universal order.4 In real life, our choices to be and do other things are limited not only by practical possibility but moral obligations. As a husband and father, for example, I am not at all free to simply pursue a new career in Twitch streaming: even if I were to do so5 I would have to count the cost and reckon it against the obligations I already have.

When you consider what we owe to other people, our options are often quite limited indeed. We have posts—stations and vocations God has assigned us—and we do not have the freedom to enter the identity closet and come out with whatever we feel like, even if what we feel like presses us with deep inward compulsion. “Who will I be?” is a question we cannot answer on our own in a vacuum, but instead the answer can only take its proper shape from our givenness, our existing relations, our responsibilities and duties, our families, our constitution, our location in time and space, our characters as they currently exist, and ultimately our submission to God.

Anyway, this may all sound obvious, but I’ve been arguing with Demi Lovato’s voice about it in my head for several days, so now that I’ve written it down, hopefully she will shut up.

Two Modes of Knowing

God is known in two fundamentally distinct ways.

Knowing from Nature

The “first” way of knowing is by logical inference from things God made in general. Per Romans 1, for example, God’s deity and power can be clearly seen from creatures. There is a great deal to be said about exactly how this can and does work, but simple sketches may be as follows:

1. The world is not able to account for itself.

2. What does not account for itself requires some higher explanation.

3. Therefore the world requires some higher explanation.

So, a higher explanation for the whole universe must exist. Then more details can be demonstrated.

1. Great power is required to cause a great effect.

2. The universe as a whole is a greater effect than anything within the universe.

3. Therefore the cause of the universe has greater power than anything within the universe.

These are only the simplest pieces; by further reasoning we can infer that the cause of the universe is one (as opposed to many causes), wise, good, spiritual, immutable, and many other things. To prove all this here is not my intent; if you object, go read the Summa or something.1

It is critical to flag that this method has limits. Not only is God, as Bob the Tomato reminds us, bigger than the bogeyman, Godzilla, and the monsters on TV, but He is bigger than the entire universe, which is to Him far smaller than a single drop of water in the ocean. Since both the universe as a whole and all individual creatures within it are finite, they simply can’t say everything about God any more than a single photograph can tell you the entire story of a person’s life.

Indeed, using this method, much of the time must be spent on the question of what God is not like. God is not, like we are, visible. God was not, like we were, made by something or someone. God does not, like we do, change. A great deal of the work here is showing that in some way everything God made is a little like Him while in another way God is nothing like anything else.

Knowing from Supernature

The second way to know of God is by understanding the special signs, particularly verbal ones, He uses to directly communicate about Himself to a particular audience. In this mode, God produces distinct symbols, whether miracles or timings of providence or sound waves in the air or dreams/visions or ideas in the minds of prophets, that represent truths to be known about Him to particular people. So, for example, God appears to Moses in the burning bush and produces audible sounds that tell Moses God’s name and special instructions.

The ultimate form of this second way of knowing comes with the Incarnation, in which God forms a human body and soul for Himself, assumed to the Son’s own person, and uses it to speak directly to men about His character, nature, and will.

Now, this method of knowing about God is fascinating compared to the other for two reasons. First, it is “easier” than learning from creation, or at least it can be. You have to do a lot of logic to find out from the structure of the universe that God is love; meanwhile, the Apostle John just tells you it straight-up because God put it clear as day into his mind. It takes some serious thinking to figure out whether or not the source of the universe knows what you will do tomorrow just by thinking about How Stuff Works, but in the prophets God clearly declares “the end from the beginning, and from ancient times things that are not yet done.”2

This method also has a very different relationship to limits. When God is speaking to you in words, He can tell you things about Himself that the design of the universe may not be able to prove or show clearly. For example, nothing in the universe is one essence existing in three subsistent relations, nor even remotely close to that kind of life. Similarly, nothing in the basic makeup of reality really proves that God will one day raise us from the dead and glorify our bodies with immortality, even if there are hints. But when God tells us He is going to do this, well, we can know something we couldn’t know any other way.

On the other hand, this method still has limits. It cannot be otherwise, because we have limits. Our minds have limits. And our language, which God uses to speak to us, has limits. All the ways we think and speak come originally from our experiences with created things. So, we cannot know any truth about God that has no parallels at all inside the things He made. Our minds don’t have that capacity. Even when God tells us truths beyond what we can know by observing the world, e.g. the Trinity, God has to use language that does come from the world, for that’s the only way we can think at all.

To put the point grammatically, through special revelation, God can tell us that a certain subject goes with a certain predicate even if we could not have figured that out on our own. But we can still only learn this way if we can understand the subject and the predicate. This rules out us knowing anything where the hypothetical subject or predicate is just too different from anything in creation to even express in any human thought.

An Overlap of Content

There are many truths that can be known equally by either of these modes of knowing. For a particularly simple example, it is possible to know by inferring from the order of the universe that some intelligent cause created it, but God also used Moses to teach us, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” For a slightly more complex example, since the dawn of time people have inferred just by observing earthly events that some kind of just wisdom is in control behind the scenes, while the Bible clearly teaches about God’s providence.

At the moment, it is not particularly important what all truths fall into this category, but it is important to note that the category exists. A great number of true propositions about God can be proved either by listening to His word or by reverse engineering the order of creation.

Two Corresponding Modes of Apologetics

Apologetics is, of course, the defense of the faith. The right image is the courtroom, in which someone has been put on trial and they must argue their innocence. The application of this image, however, takes a very different form depending on whether we are looking at truths known by examining created things or truths only known from God’s direct speech.

Arguing from Nature

Christian doctrine assumes, builds on, and perhaps takes for granted certain truths that can be known by observing creation. For example, it is clear from observing the world that someone must have made it. Christian theology takes this point for granted and then elaborates upon it. However, in taking this point for granted, Christian theology must first take it from somewhere. The proper origin is reasoning from the way God made the universe. The very character of creation demands that Someone created it; the alternative is impossible.

The truths about God that can be inferred from creation, then, are capable of proper logical proofs. These start with premises that every human mind implicitly grasps on some level, and, when fully worked out, demonstrate infallibly certain facts about God. This is why Paul can say that God’s eternal power and divine nature are so clearly revealed that men are without excuse. Indeed, he probably had in mind Greek philosophers as empirical proof that people reasoning from the structure of creation can infer the kinds of theological truths that make idol worship foolish and wicked, while they nonetheless continued to support it and participate in it.

However, these philosophers illustrate the problem with this mode of argument: it is very hard. They were not the masses, but a pretty small group of intellectuals. There are two sides to this difficulty. First, such argumentation is difficult because the actual logic of moving from facts about created things to facts about God is complicated and takes a great deal of time and effort to work out. Second, even once one has undertaken this difficult journey for themselves, it is often at least as difficult, if not sometimes more so, to carry other people through the same chain of reasoning.

The other qualification about this is, of course, that it doesn’t prove Christianity, nor does it even come close to doing so. As we established above, nothing about God’s being as Father, Son, and Spirit can be truly shown this way, nor can the plan of redemption or its accomplishment in Christ or the gift of the Spirit or the future of glorification. Certainly this is not a method of argument adequate to salvation. In an important sense, therefore, making such arguments is not quite even Christian apologetics. It is simply philosophy refuting possible errors, analogous to proving to someone that 2 + 2 does in fact equal 4 rather than 5.

Is there then no value in such arguments? By no means! As said above, Christian theology makes use of these truths. “God is Triune” cannot be a true proposition if “There is no God” is a true proposition, for example, and arguments from the structure of creation, while they can never prove God is Triune, can certainly prove Someone made the world and disprove the opposing claim that no one did. So these arguments can serve as a kind of ground-clearing operation. They remove false views about the fundamental nature of reality so that, when Christian theology begins to tell what the Author of reality has to say for Himself, people can recognize and make sense of the things He says. In this sense, we can count such reasoning as part of Christian apologetics, but this is more of a preparatory sense, in the same way we might count loosely teaching a child their colors as part of the study of interior design. This defends the faith not by defending the distinctive claims of Christianity, but rather by defending the things Christianity takes for granted at the start.

Arguing from Supernature

So, if the structure of creation is not by itself adequate to demonstrate the truth of Christian faith, we must turn to God’s direct speech about Himself. God has spoken to and through the Prophets and Apostles, and ultimately in His own appearance in the flesh, to unveil properly Christian truths. These are known, not by inference from how the world is, but solely from God saying so.

For the matter of defending the faith, then, there are hard limits on how this can work. These truths cannot be known or shown in any way other than God telling us. So how does one verify things God has said?

Simply put, we do not.

It is impossible for us as part of the created order to prove things that go beyond what the conditions of created things can represent to us. The only way to know them is to believe God when He says them. This is faith. For example, we know that salvation is available in Christ for no other ultimate reason than that God said so. This we must simply believe when He says it.

Defending Faith

So how does one defend such truths? Well, it is clear simply by framing the matter as we just did that one might ask, “How can we know that God said these things? How do we know they were not just human invention?” To this question there are two sides, the negative and the positive.

Negatively So Doing

Negatively, we can respond to possible objections to Christian theology. For example, a Muslim might claim it is a contradiction in terms to say that God is both one and three. We can defend this claim by clarifying our terms and making distinctions about substance and person, essence and relation, etc. This kind of argument doesn’t prove that God is really a Trinity, but it can prove that it is not impossible for it to be true that God is a Trinity. Similarly, some moral philosopher might claim it is impossible for a substitutionary atonement to be just. Here we can give arguments such as those of Ursinus to remove the objection, showing that the Christian doctrine of the atonement is not incoherent.

So, we can demonstrate by arguments that God’s words passed down in Christian theology are not impossible. It remains to be seen if we can prove they are in fact true. Here, we must make another distinction. Unbelievers come in multiple forms: some of them deny all the doctrines God has revealed to us (e.g. atheists, many ordinary secular people, etc.), while others deny only some of those doctrines while accepting others (e.g. Jews, Muslims, heretics, etc.).

Positively So Doing

In the latter case, it is possible through rational argument to prove some doctrines of Christian revelation from other doctrines. This, for example, is often what Jesus did with His Jewish opponents. He proved the resurrection of the dead, which the Sadducees did not believe, from God’s self-identification to Moses, which they did accept. Likewise, when Paul was arguing against false teachers in Corinth, he proved the future resurrection of all believers, which these teachers denied, from the resurrection of Christ, which all the Corinthians believed, and he proved justification sola fide from the Old Testament teachings about Abraham, David, and the like.

This leaves only the case of those who do not accept any Christian doctrines at all. Is it possible to prove to them positively that these doctrines are not just possible but true?

No.

As was seen above, these doctrines have no reference point for their truth inside creation. The order of the universe isn’t enough to prove them. Our only source for them is God’s own words about the matter, and there is no way to prove that these words came from God by anything less than God. It is a matter of trusting the authority who spoke them, namely God Himself. In a full-fledged sense, this can only happen by the illumination of the Holy Spirit working faith in the heart, giving the soul certainty that it is indeed God speaking, though no outside evidence proves it.

However, here we must make yet another distinction. To prove, properly speaking, is to show certainly that one thing is true using something else known to be true. This is impossible when the question is about whether certain teachings came from God, since nothing else outside God’s own words can actually verify their divine origin. This does not mean, though, that arguments have no place of any kind here. For though proof is not possible, arguments can be made to show that the claims of Christian theology are plausible and serve as strong explanations, even if not the only possible explanation, of other things known to be true in the world.

Case Study: God Raised Jesus from the Dead for Our Justification

For an example, we can take the resurrection of Christ. This event was a miracle, and its source was divine power. However, no amount of external investigation could ever demonstrate the theological claim, “God raised Jesus from the dead for our justification.” We can, perhaps, show that Jesus was almost certainly dead by the end of a given Friday and was almost certainly seen alive again a few days later. If video cameras had existed in the first century A.D., we could even perhaps demonstrate with proof that Jesus was definitely dead on Friday and walking around on Sunday. With a hidden camera and some vital sensors in the tomb, we could even perhaps prove that His body was lying there dead all Saturday long, and suddenly its vital operations resumed on Sunday morning.

None of this, however, is proof strictly that “God raised Jesus from the dead for our justification.” It could be proof that Jesus came back from the dead, but how would one demonstrate that the Creator of the universe was the immediate efficient cause of this return? God does not leave an energy signature, and, for that matter, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Could it not have been aliens, or a fluke of nature, or a new and unexplained biological phenomenon? Further still, could it not have been the work of some other spiritual powers besides the Creator? Or, for that matter, even if it were the Creator, might not the meaning of the act be different than the Christian interpretation? Was it really for our justification? Perhaps He was testing everyone, or maybe He had some other inscrutable reason that has nothing to do with the Christian account of redemption. How could one even know?

We might indeed establish by the surrounding context of Israel’s history and Jesus’ life that God’s action in redemption would be the most reasonable and fitting explanation of what happened, but this is to move from certain proof to probability or something of the sort. It cannot make you see the truth directly, nor can it force you to believe God’s words because no other option is possible. Rather, it simply opens the door which, in the end, requires the willing act of faith to pass through.

On the other hand, to say that this door-opening is not proof is also not to strip it of value. Removing obstacles, giving people frameworks for understanding, highlighting the coherence and ordered beauty of divine truth: these are useful tools that God can and often does employ in preparing people for faith or strengthening existing faith or removing stumbling blocks for the weak in faith or bringing public honor to God’s truthfulness. This is a true means of defending the faith, but it remains, in the end, a matter of playing defense. There is no offense of the faith; we’ve no way to force upon anyone a proof that says to any objective thinker, “I see now; Christianity must needs be true.” Nor, for that matter, are there any objective thinkers to begin with, since everyone is either unregenerate and therefore resistant in some degree to the truth or else regenerate and positively attracted to it.

On this last point, I should speak briefly about the role of all this in the life of believers. While many of the arguments we have discussed assume a context of persuading unbelievers, often the more important and effective role is removing doubts and confusion from the lives of believers. Those who believe seek to understand better, and over half the value of any kind of apologetics is in providing this understanding. Per the old maxim from Anselm, “I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but rather, I believe in order that I may understand.”3

Conclusion

I have up until this point intentionally been avoiding almost all labels, names, and many technical terms. The goal, if it is not obvious, in doing so is to foreground the actual claims and arguments without getting lost in tribal baggage, preexisting assumptions about different sides and positions, or similar roadblocks to meaningful discourse. But now it is time to turn attention to the ramifications of all this to the discourses that in fact exist.

Broadly speaking, this understanding of knowing and defending the faith fits within the stream of classical apologetics. To the best of my own understanding, everything I have said here is consistent equally with Thomas and Turretin (you know, the only figures whose opinions really matter). One can prove scientifically4 that God exists, that miracles are possible, etc. Then one may proceed to marshal other reasons that Christianity is plausible, indeed the most plausible possible account of reality, and objections against it do not hold up to scrutiny.

That said, I have attempted, and honestly think I have succeeded in so doing, to carve out clear space for the best concerns and moves of evidentialist and presuppositionalist approaches. Under what I have said above, most of the evidentialist work out there would fit into either the negative category of removing objections grounded in the real conditions of the world to the truths of Christian doctrines (e.g. debunking the view that Jesus was made up) or sometimes the positive category of giving plausible reasons to think Christian doctrine accounts for the real conditions of the world better than other views, even if it cannot rationally force your hand to say, “Therefore Christianity must be true.”

As for presuppositionalism, I grant here the necessary role of the Holy Spirit and, though I raised it only briefly, the impossibility of certain kinds of neutrality in evaluating the claims of Christianity. I will grant to them, for example, (1) that the only world that exists is God’s world, (2) that truth is therefore “biased” toward Christianity, (3) that unbelievers “borrow” from Christian truth,5 (4) that Christian doctrine cannot be proved by some outside standard besides God’s words, and (5) that ethical rebellion against God is the root cause of professed unbelief. I cannot grant the claims that sometimes come up about all reasoning being circular, natural reason being unable to prove and know true propositions about God, the Trinity solving the one-and-many problem, or presupposing the Bible playing any role whatsoever in how we are certain that trees exist. The weirdness in extremities aside, I think the classical account above provides for everything that presuppositionalists are actually justified in caring about, which is more stuff than I would sometimes be willing to admit, especially when I’ve spent too much time on Twitter.

So, TL;DR, we know God in two different ways: by working backward from created things to the Creator and by listening to the Creator when He directly speaks. We can prove things in this first way, but not enough for Christian theology. In the second way, we need faith, and no amount of attempts at proof in the world can make up for this gap. Even so, with both ways we can use rational arguments to clear the ground and arrange the mental furniture so that, when God’s word enters the room, it may take its proper throne and force the matter to the real point: do you believe God by the illumination of the Holy Spirit, or do you reject Him of your own stubbornness?

A Claim to Righteousness

Last week at faculty devotions we read through Psalm 18 for the purpose of a kind of a fortiori application. If David being hunted and surrounded by betrayal relied on God in such and such a way, surely we in our slightly less difficult and dangerous lives at school can do so as well.

A little ways into the text, we ran into the series of verses that cannot help but make us, particularly as Protestants, slightly uncomfortable or uncertain:

The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness;
According to the cleanness of my hands
He has recompensed me.
For I have kept the ways of the Lord,
And have not wickedly departed from my God.
For all His judgments were before me,
And I did not put away His statutes from me.
I was also blameless before Him,
And I kept myself from my iniquity.
Therefore the Lord has recompensed me according to my righteousness,
According to the cleanness of my hands in His sight.

— Psalm 18:18-24

If you have spent enough time in the Psalms, you have probably been struck by statements of this sort at some point. David claims that God has rescued and aided him as a reward for his righteousness.

This seems strange. We are generally accustomed to think nothing of our own righteousness, to regard it as filthy rags and judge ourselves purely as “dirty rotten sinners” who, rather than deserving God to repay us by saving us from great dangers, deserve nothing whatsoever beyond death and hell. Indeed, even later in the Psalms, Psalm 130 (which perhaps maybe even David could have written though there is no superscript) says, “If You, Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?”1

So what is David saying?

Quid Sit Iustitia?

We could be tempted to suggest that “David’s” righteousness is simply the righteousness he has as a justified man in Christ, the alien righteousness outside of himself, that is, Christ’s righteousness received by faith. This perfect righteousness would surely be an excellent ground for any possible work of salvation God might perform, whether from physical enemies or from spiritual death and hell.

Unfortunately, the verses almost seem to go out of their way to rule out this interpretation. David doesn’t just refer to his righteousness: he describes it in detail with respect to his own intentions and actions. He elaborates by referring to the cleanness of his hands, saying he has kept the ways of the Lord, never put away God’s statutes, kept himself from iniquity, etc. These are his own actions and attitudes: the righteousness David is referring is clearly in David, and not alien or extrinsic.

Therefore in some respect David claims he was rewarded with favor in battlefield salvation because of how he himself acted righteously. How are we to understand this?

There remain basically two possibilities for how David’s acts could make him righteous here.

1. This could be the moral righteousness of his person, i.e. his possession of virtues and good works.

2. This could be the judicial righteousness/justice2 of his cause, i.e. his innocence and legal right over and against unjust persecution from Saul.

Now, of these, the second is probably the most easily palatable, and the first the more difficult to swallow, but in fact, here as in many things, making the right distinctions allows us to work with either safely. Let us take the easier case first.

A Just Cause

The simplest way to account for David’s righteousness here and in similar passages is through the justice of his cause. Regardless of David’s general status before God as a sinner, he is not under attack because of any wrong he has done. Instead, Saul attacks him without cause. It is not true absolutely speaking by the time of Psalm 18 that David has never done anything wrong in his life, but he certainly has never done anything wrong to Saul. Nor has he broken any Israelite laws or even violated God’s laws in visible ways Saul or anyone ruler could justly punish him for.

In such a case, it was perfectly reasonable for David to plead his innocence to God in vigorous terms. He had done nothing to deserve a manhunt from Saul. He was innocent, with clean hands. There was never a time when he had personally sinned against Saul or clearly rebelled against the Torah.

This brings us to a key distinction that we often gloss over in Sunday school. It is not rare to teach our children the reality that we are all sinners, that all sin is in a certain respect infinitely wicked, and that we therefore deserve nothing better than death and hell. This is true, but to strictly deserve something is always from someone. Our infinite guilt and infinite liability is entirely between ourselves and God. Other human beings are not entitled or qualified to punish us for any and every sin or sinful condition.

Instead, justice at human hands is limited in scope. Ordinarily, people aren’t authorized to punish anything and everything, but only tangible offenses against certain persons. In that realm it is possible for us to be genuinely and truly innocent with respect to someone’s area of responsibility. Perhaps I, out of gluttony and selfishness, seriously considered stealing a cookie from the cookie jar. This may indeed incur guilt before God, but this does not mean I deserve any punishment at all from the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Should he come hunting for me, I can genuinely protest my innocence of any and all charges that would justify his attack. I can say with a straight face that I don’t deserve whatever he may do to me, not because I am so pure that I deserve better than death and hell before God, but because I am entirely innocent of any wrongdoing in his own realm.

This explanation, then, is entirely adequate to handle many of the texts in the Psalms in which David proclaims his righteousness and God rewarding it. God protects people from being punished for crimes they did not commit. David committed no crimes against Saul. Therefore God protected David from being punished by Saul. David was innocent of the crime, so God spared him from doing the time.

That said, there may be more going on in Psalm 18. So we must turn to the second possible explanation of David’s righteousness.

A True Sanctifying Righteousness

We might think, looking back over the text, that even the justice of David’s cause is not a complete explanation for what all he says about himself. He does not merely claim clean hands, after all. Instead, he speaks of keeping God’s ways, not departing from Him, being blameless, and keeping himself from iniquity. While it is not impossible to suggest all this is about his innocence of any just reason for Saul to persecute him, it seems to suggest something more. The phrasing implies something deeper than outward acts, but also character and devotion.

But, as we already noted above, no man can stand truly innocent before God. How can David, whom we know well to be imperfect, make claims based on his own cleanness and righteousness, his devotion to God and His law?

Here we have some profitable distinctions to employ. First, it must be acknowledged that God only receives us into His fatherly favor on account of an alien righteousness, namely Christ’s. Our own righteousness in this life, even when at its best and enlivened by the Holy Spirit, cannot possibly hold up before God. We are God’s children solely for Christ’s sake by faith, regardless of how much righteousness is within us.

That said, even children in an unshakable and inalienable relationship of love with their parents can still experience pleasure and displeasure depending on their character and how they generally behave.

The same applies between us and God.

We may belong the household of God through faith alone, based purely on the external righteousness we have from Christ, but we also do have a righteousness righteousness of our own within ourselves, granted in sanctification. This righteousness is real but imperfect, indeed often painfully defective. Because of its ineradicable defects, it could never be the grounds on which we stand safely in God’s saving favor. Yet because of God’s mercy in Christ, God forgives itself sins and accepts this righteousness as the obedience of sons. This much I discussed not long ago with the help of Hooker and Zanchi, if you’d like to refer back to it. What I did not cover at that point, though, is how God also crowns and rewards even such righteousness in this life, while chastising and exercising painful discipline on its lack and imperfections.

To put it simply, heartfelt obedience does please God. Disobedience does not. And He sends rewards and punishments accordingly in this life, even while our next life remains unalterably secured by Christ’s perfect righteousness.

This is not to say there is a strict system of merit and desserts going on here. David could never just obey enough so that God would owe him a rescue from Saul. Even so, he could obey God sincerely enough that it would make sense for him to ask for God’s aid. In a more low and contemporary register, we might translate things to say it would be reasonable for David to pray, “God, I have been trying hard to obey You and have never given up or decided to run away from You. You see that I really want to please You. So please rescue me!” Then, once God saved him, David might really sensibly say, “I kept on trusting in God and sticking to His ways and refusing to turn away from Him, and God saw this! He rewarded me by rescuing me from Saul!”

The point, once again, is not that David did these things perfectly. The imperfections are covered in love and grace, something God can “afford” to do on account of Christ’s righteousness and death. Once those imperfections are covered, David is, in the end, not unlike a child asking his father to help him with a big ask or for a special privilege, pointing out how he’s been trying hard and doing his chores. The father might chuckle and observe to himself how many blemishes are really in the poor kid’s record, but this is no obstacle to his love or even to the kid’s argument. He might just say, “Yes; you’ve earned it.” At the same time, there will be no question of any ultimate debts or obligations here. No one can be fooled into believing the kid strictly deserves for his father to do this favor, when everything he has came from his parents to begin with, and indeed his own behavior has never been perfect. There is a certain freedom and flexibility here, allowing love, grace, mercy, and discretion on the father’s side, while nonetheless allowing the kid to point to his completed chore chart without saying it counts for nothing.

Conclusion

There is much more that could be said on this topic. Indeed, there are controversies galore, and some of what I said is such that not everyone will agree with it, and some people who haven’t done the reading might even think it’s not Reformed.3 Nonetheless, I wanted to at least sketch out what I have done above for two reasons:

1. I’ve found these distinctions simply useful for parsing biblical language and understanding how it relates to key doctrines. I like to be able to read the Bible without flinching while I also recite confessions without flinching, and learning about the topics I’ve discussed here has helped me with that.

2. To focus especially on the justice of a cause, there is a certain room for encouragement here. To know that we can invoke God for the justice of our causes even when we are imperfect is liberating. To return to the original discussion of faculty devotions, we as teachers praying for our students and school can say to God, “Lord, help us as we minister to these children, for we are doing what is right. We are obeying Your precepts and doing Your will. Aid us because we are on the right side!” We do not need to fret overmuch about our own sins, negligences, and ignorances, for we can sweep all of these aside to beg God to uphold a righteous cause and a blameless mission that we know is good and just regardless of how good we are ourselves.

To end, I want to quote an extremely cut and abbreviated excerpt from Calvin’s commentary on this Psalm, in which he makes these same two points, but better (though perhaps harder to read). If you want to read the entire passage unmutilated, go here.

If God rendered to David a just recompense... does it not seem... that he is so in proportion as each of them has deserved? I answer, When the Scripture uses the word reward... it is not to show that God owes us any thing... [H]e does it in such a manner, as to show that all men are indebted to him... The reason is... because, forgiving the blemishes... which cleave to our works, he imputes to us for righteousness that which he might justly reject... [T]he recompense... proceeds not from our merit, but from his free and undeserved grace.

We ought... to attend to the special reason why David... speaks of God rewarding him according to his righteousness. He does not presumptuously thrust himself into the presence of God... as the ground of his justification; but... wishing to defend and acquit himself from the false... calumnies of his enemies, he makes God himself the judge of his cause. [H]e presents and defends himself before the judgment-seat of God against his enemies... [T]he question is not concerning the whole course of his life, but only respecting one certain cause... [H]e had acted uprightly... in this matter... [I]t would be absurd to draw from this the inference that God is merciful to men according as he judges them to be worthy of his favor. [T]he object in view is only to show the goodness of a particular cause... In short, David concludes from the effect... that his cause was approved of by God....

Bear with me as we take a trip back to November 2, 2004. George Bush is about to take a second term as President, Spider-Man 2 has just raised the bar for superhero movies, Lost is new and actually good, Gmail and Facebook are only a few months old, and Relient K drops their fourth album, Mmhmm.1

Now we skip ahead almost 10 years to when I start listening to Relient K, because I am the reverse hipster who only gets into things long after they’ve stopped being cool.

The third hit single on this album was “High of 75,” famously catchy for anyone who passed through a youth group or listened to the right radio stations for the next few years. Anyone afflicted would no doubt hear “Lately the weather has been so bipolar” and mentally (or verbally) finish “And consequently so have I!”

So, why do I bring up this song, about twice as old as my sixth grade students, in 2026?

As it happens, the weather in the Florida panhandle lately has in fact been pretty bipolar, shifting between cold and warm-ish, dry and wet, still and breezy, and with it things like air quality and allergy ailments have been all over the place. This latter point is especially prominent in my daily experience. How I (or my wife) will wake up feeling every day is almost a coin flip. One day I have all the energy I need, and the next it takes 20 minutes to get all the way up while I still need a good load of caffeine, creatine, and cetirizine to feel fully alive.

This phenomenon seems to have produced a lease agreement that authorizes “High of 75” to live rent-free in my head. Out of curiosity I found myself looking up the song’s origins, and while I could not find any interview texts or other official information, the small number of disussions online seemed to agree that the point of the song was to use the vicissitudes of weather as a metaphor for constant changes of emotional state or else about a major change in life (perhaps even referring to conversion) from gloom to gladness.

I do not think I agree with this interpretation.

My own experience with weather and its affects, combined with the actual lyrics of the song and my general vibe-compatibility with Matt Thiessen’s mind during this period of his career, suggests the more obvious interpretation is that it’s reflecting on the direct effects of weather upon mood. As it actually states:

We were talking together
I said, “What’s up with this weather?”
Don’t know whether or not
How sad I just got
Was on my own volition
Or if I’m just missing
The sun

The same note comes in the aforementioned bit, “lately the weather has been so bipolar / And consequently so have I,” and the later case “and we might break up / If I don’t wake up to the sun.” These invoke weather as an explanation for moods, indeed as among their efficient causes. While it’s not impossible to take all this as various metaphors for other things, I think Hooker’s maxim about Scripture works just as well for the basic matter of this song: “where a literal construction will stand, the farthest from the letter is commonly the worst.”

This brings Thiessen into conversation with C. S. Lewis and Thomas Aquinas, both of whom have impressed upon me deeply the raw physicality of our emotional lives. For example, Lewis when discussing faith makes this point:

Unless you teach your moods ‘where they get off,’ you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.

Here Lewis’ main point is the need to understand faith as a kind of rational conviction that persists even when moods changes, but along the way he notes how moods work: they are largely dependent factors such as weather and digestion. Those pesky allergies are as likely to drag on the soul as on the body. Lewis speaks similarly through the mouth of Screwtape:

Humans are amphibians—half spirit and half animal… As spirits they belong to the eternal world, but as animals they inhabit time. This means that while their spirit can be directed to an eternal object, their bodies, passions, and imaginations are in continual change, for to be in time means to change. Their nearest approach to constancy, therefore, is undulation—the repeated return to a level from which they repeatedly fall back, a series of troughs and peaks. If you had watched your patient carefully you would have seen this undulation in every department of his life—his interest in his work, his affection for his friends, his physical appetites, all go up and down. As long as he lives on earth periods of emotional and bodily richness and liveliness will alternate with periods of numbness and poverty.

Here again Lewis operates on an implicit understanding of our emotional lives as bound up intimately with our animal natures, our temporal and bodily existence. We go through emotional cycles alongside and for many of the same reasons that we go through cycles of wanting or not wanting seasonings, sleep, or sex.2

I mentioned Thomas Aquinas as well on this, for from him I saw a more detailed account of what passions are, and the definitions indeed require a state of the body. For example, in ST.I.Q20.A1.Rep2,3 Thomas says:

In the passions of the sentient appetite there is, as it were, something material to consider, viz., the bodily change, and also, as it were, something formal, i.e., something on the part of the appetite. For instance, as De Anima I says, in the case of anger the material element is the heating of the blood around the heart or something of that sort, whereas the formal element is the desire for vindication.

Regardless of what we make of any technical details in Thomas’ medieval physiology, his point remains. Anger is formed as a desire for revenge or vindication, but that desire of your will all by its lonesome self doesn’t quite rise to the level of anger. It only becomes anger when that desire starts gearing your body up into a matching state, perhaps with pulse quickening, heart beating faster, face reddening, muscles tensing, breathing getting harder, etc. Thus, a formula for feelings:

Feeling = Desire + corresponding bodily disposition

Often, of course, when we feel things, the desire shows itself first, and then our bodies snap into shape to match it. This is not the only order, though. Sometimes our bodies are already disposed toward the matching feeling. For example, sadness tends to express itself as a slowing down, low energy, pressure within the tear ducts, tension at the throat. But when the weather turns and pollen fills the air, our allergies are likely to produce those same effects. When that happens, we are in a sense halfway to sadness already: we just need the right foiled desire to activate the full feeling. I have sometimes described this to myself as “a sadness in search of a sorrow.”

The same applies as much to other feelings, of course. Starting the day feeling excellent in body often sets you up to feel great about life. Famously, smiling for any reason can still improve your mood. When your skin is irritated, others will often report you yourself are irritable. And our culture has not coined the term “hangry” in vain.

So why bother drawing attention to this fairly basic and almost unremarkable fact of life? Chiefly, my interest is perspective. We may know perfectly well that people get hangry and that feeling bad flows into feeling sad. Yet when we are actually feeling things, we tend to forget that’s how this works. Far too easily we get sucked into the feeling and begin viewing it as some objective commentary on reality. “Today is just awful, the worst day ever,” said the man who slept for only three hours, never stopping to consider that maybe the day isn’t the main problem, and he might not see it in the same light if he took a nap. For this reason, in the midst of the Summa Theologiae, Thomas writes an affirmative answer to the question, “Do sleeping and bathing lessen sadness?”,4 explaining as follows:

As was explained above (q. 37, a. 4), in its species sadness is opposed to the body’s vital motion. And so the things that restore corporeal nature to the normal state of its vital motion are opposed to sadness and lessen it. Moreover, by the fact remedies of the sort in question bring the nature back to its normal condition, they are a cause of pleasure; for, as was explained above (q. 31, a. 3), this is something that gives pleasure. Hence, since every instance of pleasure lessens sadness, sadness is lessened by corporeal remedies of this sort.

Therefore the Angelic Doctor says you should take a bath when you’re sad.

More seriously, I simply want us to remember to take the body into account. Our amphibious selves need to remain aware of the fickle and fleshy nature of our feelings lest we blow them out of proportion. Sometimes we need to attend to bodily remedies when the feelings get in the way.

That said, as Thomas reminded us above, the bodily state is only half the matter. Our feelings also come from desires that give form to the body’s transitions. To turn our attentions to the right realities can also help keep our emotions in a healthy balance, at least to an extent. And whatever may naturally grab our attention, there is a fullness of joy to be found if we focus on the goodness of God, the love of Christ, and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. Precisely at this point I think Thiessen does invoke a metaphor:

But now I’m
Sunny with a high of 75
Since You took my heavy heart
And made it light
And its funny how you find you enjoy your life
When you’re happy to be alive

To set out minds on the things that are above, where Christ is, is the other half of the perspective we need about feelings. No matter what the weather does to us, God in His kindness can and not infrequently will grant to us that splendid summer day pleasure when we count our blessings and remember by what (and by Whose) great mercy is it that we are even alive.

Gratia Non Tollit Naturam, Sed Perficit

“Grace does not destroy nature, but perfects it.”

This saying is at the root of many a controversy. The point is that the same God who made the world and everything in it, who designed us and our natures, is the God who redeems us and glorifies us to eternal life, so the two things are not in conflict with each other. God will not obliterate in redemption and re-creation what He established in creation. Instead, in grace and glory God heals and elevates the original features of human life. For example, God gave us bodies, and thus the body is for resurrection and glorification, not something God will dispose of in the end. God made the household and the biological family, so in the Church, even though it takes precedence over our natural families, it does not ordinarily eliminate or replace them, but invites them to join in. Or, from a different angle, God gave us rational minds; therefore, when He reveals truth to us, it cannot run against the rules of reason, even when the truth is beyond our full comprehension. In every case, the way God originally designed us sets the tracks on which His work in saving and perfecting us will run.

Abusus Non Tollit Usum

“Abuse does not remove use.”

This principle is simple: whether people abuse things, whether sometimes or often, has no relevance whatsoever as to whether those things have a right use and is not an argument against their goodness or validity. Examples abound in every sphere of human life: gun crime doesn’t remove legitimate uses for guns, sexual immorality doesn’t mean sex is intrinsically evil, drunkenness is no argument against a temperate use of alcohol, the fact that liberals make subversive arguments from cultural context for biblical commands doesn’t mean such arguments are never legitimate, the erroneous use of metaphorical and allegorical interpretation in Scripture is no reason to ignore such things altogether, etc., etc., etc.

This is one of those principles that people have a tendency to apply in very biased and inconsistent ways, TBH. Rare is the mind that judges abusus and usus fairly in all cases.

Corruptio Optimi Pessima

“The corruption of the best is the worst.”

This is an especially fascinating principle that, I think, runs directly contrary to many of our modern instincts, beset as they often are by grand anxieties about power. Often, the modern mind ranks, either fully and intentionally or by an implicit temptation, the most dangerous things as the worst things. Intense political power perennially produces problems (big ones), so we tend to view it with suspicion, preferring to reduce or minimize government power (even “big government” liberals and commies do this in a number of ways compared to the mindset of ancient societies). Guns kill more efficiently than many older technologies, so people get freaked out by them. The Internet enables an intensification of almost all humanity’s worst social behaviors, so it becomes the target of suspicion and complaint and even outright rejection (Luddism).

The principle corruptio optimi pessima approaches things from the opposite angle. Things are first ranked as better or inferior based on their power to effect things, their potency and range of uses. The best things are those that can do the maximum good. But, generally speaking, the same powers that amplify good can also amplify bad. So the great things at their best fall to become the most terrible things at their worst. Thus Aristotle ranked a good monarchy as the best government and a bad monarchy (to wit, a tyranny) as the worst. Meanwhile, good and bad democracies both sit near the middle, capable of effecting the least good but also the least evil. As another famous example, Satan is reckoned perhaps the highest and most excellent of God’s creatures in the beginning, but becomes from his fall the most horrible of all.

Non Affectu, Sed Effectu

“Not from affect, but from effect”

This saying is a little more narrow in its application than the previous ones. This is a formula from medieval theology proper. It specifies how passions (emotions, feelings; it’s complicated) are to be attributed to God. As I have discussed in previous posts, it is simply impossible to say that God actually has passions. This was a commonplace point in medieval theology, but since the Bible does speak of divine passions, there had to be an explanation for why.

The short answer: passions are said not from affect (i.e. God being affected, either His will being steered by creatures or Him having any bodily alterations) but from effect (i.e. what God makes happen). So, for example, the characteristic act of an angry man is to punish the person he is angry with. Thus punishment is the effect of anger. When God is called angry in Scripture, non affectu, sed effectu clarifies that it does not mean God has some emotional upheaval, but rather He does the same thing that an angry man does, namely punish. The shorthand shows up time and again as a quick reminder of this basic principle.

There are, I should say, far more fascinating slogans, sayings, maxims, and formulae from classical theology and philosophy that are useful even to this very day, but these four are among my favorites (and the easiest to introduce), so I hope you’ll enjoy and deploy them.

1. Cur Deus Homo - Anselm of Canterbury
   Brilliant, necessary, classic on incarnation and atonement, though hard for modern-brain to follow without extra effort.

2. Northanger Abbey - Jane Austen
   Fun enough, though not as good as Austen’s later work.

3. On the Law of Nature: A Demonstrative Method - Niels Hemmingsen
   Excellent how-to guide on natural law reasoning through syllogisms: you need it in your life.

4. The Four Loves - C.S. Lewis
   Better every time I read it; the storge chapter meant more to me than usual as I have been reflecting for the last year and a half about the strange effects of my students on my former illusions of impassibility.

5. Sacred Dissertations on the Lord’s Prayer - Herman Witsius
   Lots of excellent stuff here both on the meaning of the Lord’s Prayer and on praying in general: I highly recommend it.

6. Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë
   Miserable, of course, but the kind of misery one cannot help but almost enjoy.

7. Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone - J.K. Rowling
   It’s Harry Potter.

8. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets - J.K. Rowling
   It’s Harry Potter.

9. The Hiding Place - Corrie ten Boom
   Always thought-provoking; I read this in school with my sixth-graders.

10. Theodore Roosevelt: An American Original - Janet Benge
    Love Teddy, and this is a fun read.

11. A Learned Discourse on Justification in Modern English - Richard Hooker
    A phenomenal treatment of the difference on justification between Rome and the Reformed, including that great triple distinction of righteousness and an general discussion of how to handle matters of theological disagreement.

12. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban - J.K. Rowling
    It’s Harry Potter.

13. Exodus: Myth or History? - David Rohl
    A great summary of the archaeological case that everything from Joseph to the conquest of Canaan actually happened, but it requires a paradigm shift in the chronology of the ancient world to see it.

14. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire - J.K. Rowling
    It’s Harry Potter.

15. On the Incarnation - Athanasius of Alexandria
    Another great classic, easier to read than Anselm.

16. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix - J.K. Rowling
    It’s Harry Potter.

17. Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince - J.K. Rowling
    It’s Harry Potter.

18. Recovering the Lost Tools of Learning - Douglas Wilson
    Read this as part of my ACCS teacher certification, and as usual with Wilson, it’s full of things I strongly agree with, a bunch of arguments I don’t at all agree with even often when I agree with the conclusions of the arguments, practical prescriptions I agree with while my theoretical backing differs, and presuppositionalist reasoning that drives me bonkers.

19. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows - J.K. Rowling
    The best Harry Potter book and infinitely better than the corresponding movies.

20. The History of the Church: From Christ to Constantine - Eusebius
    Big, sometimes boring, but an excellent window into the ancient church and the very different ways Christians often thought at the time.

21. Shepherding a Child’s Heart - Tedd Tripp
    Also a teacher certification read: has a number of good ideas and reasonable advise, but also distorted by a lack of virtue ethics and a denigration of the natural powers of the conscience.

22. J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography - Humphrey Carpenter
    There’s a reason this is the standard, and there’s a reason Tolkien is my role model.

23. An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us - Ed Yong
    Fascinating book, easily one of the most interesting reads I’ve had in a while.

24. The Christian Education of Youth - Huldrych Zwingli
    Zwingli gets a bad rap, and this book shows him something like his best as he describes how a young man should look at and approach his education.

25. The Great Divorce - C.S. Lewis
    What does one say about The Great Divorce other than that it shows Lewis at his best as a moralist and in the process makes it clear how “normal people” might indeed be fit subjects for everlasting misery?

26. The Abolition of Man - C.S. Lewis
    I read this every couple of years, and it grows more relevant all the time, but I’m not saying anything else, because if you’ve read it, I don’t need to, and if you haven’t, you should just go do it now.

27. Religion and Republic: Christian America from the Founding to the Civil War - Miles Smith
    Very interesting look at the extensive role Christianity played in America’s early social and political life without proper establishment by the federal government.

28. Life on the Silent Planet: Essays on Christian Living from C.S. Lewis’s Ransom Trilogy - Rhys Laverty
    Mostly a great batch of essays, though I don’t feel like going back to remember something more specific to say at the moment.

29. The Four Loves - C.S. Lewis
    What does it say about my headspace that I read this twice this year, both times for probably the same reason?

30. The Wonderful Works of God - Herman Bavinck
    Worked through this as part of a men’s study at church, and it’s obviously very good; while Bavinck does have some weaknesses, he remains an excellent resource, and this book especially so for just dudes at church who want to learn more theology.

31. Thoroughness & Charm: Cultivating the Habits of a Classical Classroom - Mandi Gerth
    Faculty read at school: was filled with good examples, stories, advice, and reminders, though at times a little carried away in vibes.

32. A House for the Word: A Treatise on Public Worship from Hooker’s Laws - Richard Hooker
    Every volume of Hooker’s Laws is gold.

33. Around the World in Eighty Days - Jules Verne
    I love this book more every year, it being another of my sixth-grade literature reads.

34. Jurassic Park - Michael Crichton
    Goodness gracious the book is phenomenal, though I ended up modifying the ebook to cut down on the language.

35. The Judgment of Martin Bucer Concerning Divorce - Martin Bucer
    This was fascinating, as Bucer’s divorce policy is sort of “liberal,” for lack of a better way of putting it, and I can’t decide what I think of his argument.

36. Out of the Silent Planet - C.S. Lewis
    I enjoy revisiting Malacandra, and the final speeches of Weston to the Oyarsa remain eminently delightful.

37. The Demonstration of the Apostolic Preaching - Irenaeus of Lyons
    This was good stuff, though little stands out in my memory.

38. Baptismal Regeneration and the Final Perseverance of the Saints - John Davenant
    Rereading this after a few years, I understood it much better this time around, and though I am not quite sure if I hold to Davenant’s view (at least unmodified), I do find it quite viable.

39. Journey to the Center of the Earth - Jules Verne
    This was fun, but the pace is imbalanced, as it takes a really long time to get down into the earth, and then it ends fairly abruptly.

40. Antinomianism: Reformed Theology’s Unwelcome Guest? - Mark Jones
    Oh, this was good.

41. Ecclesiastical History of the English People - Bede
    This kept me thinking a lot about miracle stories.

42. The Federal Vision - Steve Wilkins
    I have lots of disagreements with many of the essays in this book, and yet it’s self-evident to me that none of it even approaches the kinds of dangers people like R. Scott Clark attribute to FV.

43. Holly Jolly Christmas Tales - E.R. Smith
    My dad’s stories are always fun, so go buy it.

44. Wise Words: Family Stories that Bring Proverbs to Life - Peter J. Leithart
    Leithart is pretty good at this, I have to say.

45. Perelandra - C.S. Lewis
    The best book of the Space Trilogy and a brilliant exploration of the Fall, sin, etc.

46. Reforming Classical Education: Toward A New Paradigm - Rhys Laverty
    Most of the essays in this book are excellent, and they meant far more to me this year than they did when it was first published, before I started teaching.

47. A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
    Another sixth-grade literature read, I enjoyed it far more this year than I have before.

48. Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
    This was good, with a pretty based moral, and in some ways very funny.

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It seems that Jesus is literally a door.

Objection: Our Lord says in John 10:9, “I am the door.” Meanwhile, the Judicious Divine says of interpretation, “I hold it as a most infallible rule in expounding Sacred Scripture, that where a literal construction will stand, the farthest from the letter is commonly the worst.”1

Now, the primary signification of “door” is of “[a]n opening or passage into a house, or other building, or into any room, apartment or closet, by which persons enter.”2 According to this definition it is impossible that Christ, by either His divine or His human nature, be truly a door, since He is not an opening into a building or anything of the sort. However, this is not the only signification of “door.” For “door” can also refer to any “avenue; passage; means of approach or access.”3

Under this signification, Christ is indeed literally the door to salvation, for He is the means by which men access salvation as an end. Since, again, where a literal construction will stand, anything further from the letter is worse, the words of our Lord should be interpreted as a literal saying.

But contrary to this, our Lord also said, “If anyone enters by Me, he…will go in and out and find pasture.” But those who make use of Christ as a means of access to salvation will not literally find pasture. Therefore neither is Christ literally said to be their door.

I respond that the true meaning of a saying must be judged according to the intention of him who spoke it. But our Lord said of being a door, “I am the door of the sheep” and also that, while He was preceded by thieves and robbers, the sheep through Him go in and out and find pasture. But “sheep,” “thieves,” and “pasture” are all said figuratively. Therefore “I am the door” was also said in a figurative mode. So the sense of the text is, “Just as sheep travel through a gate (or door) as a means to find pasture as an end, so also men make use of Christ as a means to salvation as an end.”

Reply to objection: It must granted that, where a literal construction of a saying of Scripture will stand, the further from the letter of the text is commonly the worst. It may also be granted that “door” signifies secondarily the abstracted notion of a “means,” apart from any spatial or material doorway. This, however, appears to be transferred by analogy from the primary signification. For just as one must use a door in order to enter or exit an enclosed room, so also one must make use of a means to achieve an end. Thus the extended sense of “door” as a means in general is more fittingly deemed to be a conventional metaphorical predication of the primary signification.

Even if we hold, however, that a means of access in general may be a proper signification of “door,” it does not follow that a literal construction stands for the Lord’s saying, “I am the door.” For the interpretation of a saying stands, not by how it fits the letter of the words alone, but also by how it fits the use of the saying in a particular discourse. For example, while perhaps in general “I am blue” could stand literally, for a man might from some cause actually have blue skin, it would not stand if he said prior to this, “I have been not been feeling myself lately and am unhappy.” In such a case, it is clear from what else was said that “blue” is said metaphorically, even though “I am blue” simply might be able to stand literally.

In our Lord’s discourse in John 10, what He said prior to this and following it makes certain that He says “door” metaphorically, for the reasons that have already been said.

In Psalm 143:2, David claims that no one is righteous before God: “Do not enter into judgment with Your servant, For in Your sight no one living is righteous.”

Meanwhile, in Psalm 18:20, David claims that God has rewarded him for being righteous: “The Lord rewarded me according to my righteousness; According to the cleanness of my hands He has recompensed me.”

In Genesis 15:6, famously, Abraham believes God’s promise, and this is “counted to him for righteousness.”

Moses states, in a rather different claim, in Deuteronomy 6:25 that, if Israel diligently maintains all God’s commandments, “it will be righteousness for us.”

Arriving at the New Testament, Romans 1-3 brights up the “righteousness of God” as a major theme, which is manifested in Christ, is said to be from faith to faith, and is for all who believe.

To add one more piece of diversity to this mix, in 2 Corinthians 5:21 says, “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

With all these texts in mind, it should be clear that the term “righteousness” does a lot work with a number of different senses and applications. Can people in general be righteous? In what way is this different between believers and unbelievers? What is the relationship between a believer being righteous on account of faith in Christ and doing righteous things or having righteous qualities?

I am not here interested in giving a comprehensive account of “righteousness” language in Scripture, I do want to highlight one particular set of helpful distinctions that I have run into several times in older Reformed writers, namely on the three kinds of righteousness which God grants in saving individual men.

The three kinds of righteousness in this context map onto the three major components of the traditional ordo salutis, namely justification, sanctification, and glorification. In each of these benefits, God bestows a kind of righteousness upon us, but they are not all the same. They are distinguished by location and by perfection. Since the first source I ever saw make this distinction clearly and succinctly is Richard Hooker,1 I will allow him to explain:

There is a glorifying righteousness for men in the world to come; and there is a justifying and a sanctifying righteousness here and now. The righteousness with which we shall be clothed in the world to come is both perfect and inherent. That righteousness by which we are now justified is perfect, but not inherent. That righteousness by which we are sanctified is inherent, but not perfect.2

Notice the distinction: our righteousness in justification is perfect, but not inherent, that is to say, it is not in us, but rather in Christ. When we are justified by faith, nothing in us (not even the faith) makes us righteous, but rather we share legally in the perfect righteousness of Christ. (For Hooker, much of the rest of the argument is about this point, contra Rome.)

At the same time we are justified, though, we also receive the first beginnings of a sanctifying righteousness. This is the case of God actually improving and transforming us by the Holy Spirit that we become truly righteous in our own acts and virtues, but it is a slow process afflicted continually with our own imperfections. This righteousness in this life is only ever partial and often quite inadequate. Nonetheless, it is worth noting that it is ours, it is actually righteousness, and it begins immediately upon conversion. I will here highlight a great paragraph from Zanchi on the matter:

We believe furthermore, that he who now on account of Christ into whom through the Holy Spirit he is engrafted is reckoned righteous, and truly righteous has obtained now in Christ the remission of sins and the imputation of His righteousness, the same immediately also is affected by the gift of inherent righteousness; so that not only in Christ the Head he may be most perfectly and most fully righteous, but also in himself he may have a true righteousness, by which he may be made in very deed conformable to Christ.3

After noting this, however, Zanchi reminds us that this inherent righteousness we receive in sanctification can never be or become the grounds of our justification:

We confess meanwhile this inherent righteousness to be so imperfect by our own fault, that by that righteousness of Christ alone, by which sins are not imputed to us, not only in the beginning of conversion when from impious we are made pious, but truly even unto the end of life we are truly justified before God and are able to be held as righteous.

In fact, Zanchi covers the whole relationship between justifying righteousness and sanctifying righteousness so excellently that I must heartily encourage you to go read the chapters on justification, free choice in the regenerate, and good works in De Religione Christiana Fides right now if you can.4

The final sort of righteousness of interest here is the righteousness of glorification, that which we will possess after our flesh has died and we join the ranks of the spirits made perfect, and when we are raised again to incorruptible life. At this time, we will have a new righteousness. Finally, we shall have righteousness which is both truly our own/in us―consisting in our own acts and feelings and habits―and also perfect and without spot.

So, to recap the difference:

• Justifying righteousness - Perfect/extrinsic: This is not a righteousness that is within us, but that is located in Christ and His own perfection, in which we share by faith alone. It is perfect and complete, lacking nothing to put us in God’s favor.

• Sanctifying righteousness - Imperfect/intrinsic: This is a righteousness we receive in this life, beginning at conversion, that is truly within us, in our own hearts and minds, which is built up and animated by the Holy Spirit. On account of our remaining sin dwelling within us, it is never made wholly perfect, and the depths of its imperfection may indeed horrify us at times. Nonetheless, it is a real righteousness, and one which, despite its imperfection, God accepts and enjoys as our filial obedience for the sake of Christ our elder Brother, whose perfect righteousness we share.

• Glorifying righteousness - Perfect/intrinsic: This is a righteousness we receive in the life to come that is truly within us, in our own hearts and minds, and is granted and animated by the Holy Spirit. This righteousness will have no room or place or negotiations with sin, but will be perfect and complete, lacking nothing, and itself worthy (in a limited and relative way for a creature who receives everything by grace) of God’s approbation.

Now, this distinction may not be one of those that changes your life or causes a “Eureka!” moment in theology. It’s also not, so far as I have yet seen a matter of major controversy, at least within Protestantism. Nonetheless, I find it a helpful, healthy, and hearty one that is just useful to have on hand.

That said, there is one part here that I think can be a helpful corrective to some erroneous drifts that occasionally occur in Protestant circles. While most Protestants will happily grant the existence of sanctification, some would avoid speaking of us having any intrinsic righteousness. It is not uncommon to hear people refer to even the good works of believers as but filthy rags and/or to deny that there is anything truly good or righteous in us at all in this life.

The Reformed tradition, on the other hand, historically recognizes and affirms the reality of a real but imperfect righteousness in sanctification: small but ever-growing, deformed but truly pleasing to God as He forgives its impurities for Christ’s sake, at times halting or reverting course but on the whole providing actual growth in virtue and improvement in acts. Zanchi and many others recognize that the Bible actually calls people “righteous” with respect to this sanctifying righteousness and not only about their being righteous in Christ, e.g. Noah and Joseph, and that “the righteous” in Scripture signifies persons not only as being forgiven of their sins for Christ’s sake but also as possessing righteous deeds. Obviously, all of this comes with the recognition that our sanctifying righteousness comes from the Holy Spirit, rather than being something we produce in our own power, but it does take shape in our choices and attitudes. The Holy Spirit acts upon us so that we ourselves act more righteously. On this final note I will cite Zanchi once more:

VI. A regenerate man is not only acted upon, but also acts by the Holy Spirit.

Taught by these same Apostolic sayings and other testimonies of Holy Scripture, we confess that regenerate men are so acted upon by the Holy Spirit that they themselves also act. Furthermore, God so works in them “to will and to do” that they are the very ones who will and perform. For they are not mere wooden stocks or beasts, but men endowed with reason by which they understand and a will by which they choose, and by which they command the other powers of soul and body so that those things which are good may be carried into execution.

Ask me to sit down and write a 700-word blog post, and I may do it, but it will take me far too long and I’ll fret about what to say.

Raise the right question or argument on Twitter, and I’ll have you 700 words at 6:30 AM.

Yesterday, I saw a tweet asking for the best arguments for a natural law perspective over theonomy, and in the replies I ran across this complaint:

My main issue is that compared to theonomy it [natural law] seems like a rather vague and blurry concept where whichever of God’s laws someone likes they count it natural law.

Since natural law is one of my favorite hobbyhorses, I replied with the following wall of text (slightly edited now),1 which I hope will prove perhaps generally useful for other people thinking through Christian ethics and the merits or demerits of natural law theory:

It is true that people do just pick whatever laws in the Old Testament they like as part of “natural law” (though I think there are ways theonomists pull off the same basic thing at times).

That said, even the wording “God's laws” here begs the question in favor of theonomy, insofar as it implicitly treats the Torah as simply God’s laws without qualification, rather than as a set of laws God gave to a particular people for particular reasons.

That said, the “vague and blurry” appearance to natural law argument derives only from the fact of the vagueness and blurriness of life under the sun itself, insofar as it is not always clear what is good for man. The basic idea has nothing ambiguous about it:

• God made man with a given design for given purposes.

• Man's universal moral obligations consist in working with that design for those purposes.

• Except for things pertaining to the supernatural economy beyond any possible human power (e.g. redemption and glorification), we can perceive the design and purposes of man as we do other natural things, e.g. that birds are meant to fly, or that the sun is meant to warm the earth, or that reproductive systems are meant to produce offspring, or that hearts that don't beat aren't doing what they're made for.

Since man is a rational and social animal, we can also identify the main areas in which we can follow the design:

• Physical: Most people agree easily enough we can identify what is good for the body by natural reason, as most humans historically have done easily (though there are here and there movements of wackos who throw this off).

• Social: While there are many disagreements between people about what the perfect society would look like, all can easily perceive that man's social design is best fulfilled when people are happy with each other and not in conflict, but are rather able to unite for each other's benefit.

• Rational: While there are many disagreements about what a perfect mind would think, all men easily perceive that a perfected mind will think the truth, reason correctly, remember accurately, etc., etc.

The “vague and blurry” parts begin once we start asking what actually helps us get to the things everyone knows we are made for in each of those categories.

For physical health, what lifestyles are best, and do we want seed oils or GMO stuff or a carnivore diet or something else?

For social life, will people be happiest and least in conflict and best at helping each other in a society with more or less diversity, with more or less equality, with or without money and industrialism, etc.?

For the rational life, what things are actually true? How we train minds to reason correctly and remember accurately?

Natural law theories are willing to grant that you can figure out the answers to many of these questions by paying attention to How Stuff Works, by watching people and societies, by studying history and biology and the lives of your good, bad, or ugly neighbors. Not everyone will be equally good at doing it, and in some areas it will be hard work to fish out the truth and even harder work to prove it, but the information is there to discover by such means.

But you can also answer some of these questions by looking at the Torah, since God knows all the answers and certainly gave the Jews laws agreeable to how He designed mankind. Yet what the natural law theorists (and basically the entire Church) reject is that these laws were given as law to anyone but the Old Testament Jews directly, and further that every single law contained within necessarily implements man's good in a way that is best for any human at any time in any set of circumstances, rather than simply being the best possible laws for the Jews at that time given their social, political, redemptive-historical, technological, and other conditions.

To answer your original question about best arguments, there are two good books I like to recommend on the matter:

Hooker is good for the theory and principles of law in a concise and easy-to-follow argument, while Hemmingsen is good for showing how the nuts and bolts of natural law argument should operate, ideally as actual logical demonstrations rather than loosey goosey vibes.

A Preface

Before I get into the topic of the Federal Vision, I should add a qualification. There is no straightforward equation to be made of the CREC with the Federal Vision. While of course for many reasons, historical and otherwise, the CREC is almost the only home for people who do identify with FV, this is not because the two necessarily go hand-in-hand. On this point, I will simply quote the Joint Federal Vision Profession from 2007:

This statement represents the views of those who drafted it, contributed to it, and signed it. It should not be taken as a confessional statement by any ecclesiastical assembly or body, particularly the CREC. There are things stated here which do not represent the views of the CREC as a whole, or of certain CREC ministers in particular. The CREC is not an FV denomination, but is rather a confederation which welcomes convictions like these as being “within the Reformed pale.” This statement therefore represents the views of the CREC men who signed it, and it represents what CREC men who could not sign it believe to be within the realm of acceptable differences. It should further be noted that not all the signatures are from the CREC.

I believe this is a correct way of putting things. Being in the CREC is neither necessary nor sufficient for being FV, nor is being FV at all necessary for being in the CREC. For my part, I do not at all identify with FV as a label or movement, though, as will be seen below, I do agree with many of the FV figures on a few distinctive (or distinctive-ish) points. Thus, to the context for this point I must now turn.

To Be Deep in FV History…

Almost everything that can or should be rightly said about the Federal Vision “movement” (or brand, or controversy, or whatever else we may call it) in anything like a summary form was said by Steven Wedgeworth on The Calvinist International a few years ago. In 2019, after another of the many rounds of R. Scott Clark fussing about the lurking dangers of a reanimated Federal Vision, Wedgeworth wrote a six-part series on the FV’s history and theology that nails basically everything with a reasonable number of receipts. I reread this series in preparation for writing this post, and indeed it is more useful than I even remembered. It covers so much so well that I have decided there is far less I need to say on my own than I originally planned on. Instead, I will outline what Wedgeworth’s posts are up to and then add some final thoughts and assessments of my own.

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I was a really awkward teenager.1

While for the most part I was, I think, fairly well-intentioned, I made enough dumb social decisions that there are people I really enjoyed talking to but eventually wound up outside speaking terms with. So goes life.

As an adult, for the first several years of marriage, my wife and I often felt like any new people we met and liked would vanish almost immediately upon our getting to know them. So also goes life.

Since becoming a teacher, I have become acutely aware of the vaporous nature of even this role. Students come and go, even the best and most beloved. Many will, indeed, hardly remember me. Still, so goes life.

Amid the many persons and families I see at church and school, there are a number of people I might like to talk to, but there’s no telling if we will ever really know each other before our paths diverge. Even here, so goes life.

I don’t mention all these things to whine or lament. Don’t take them too melodramatically. Rather, my point is that life in a fallen world is full of partings, and often far too early or far too unpleasant. Many potential relationships in this life―whether of friendship, love, or anything else―fall apart, fade away, or never even get going. The opportunity is gone, and there remains but a rift.

This can be sad, frustrating, or disappointing, but sometimes I go back and think about the ramifications of heaven here. Those relations which decline, deteriorate, or are even destroyed in this life, when they are with people in Christ (or who will be in the end), are simply not over, even if you never speak again until you die.

Instead, after the end,2 we will be cleansed of our sins all the way through, leaving none of our guilt, nor shame, nor ongoing vices, nor even our weaknesses and fears and foibles. Our darkness will be replaced by light, and we will each become the clear and shining prisms of God’s glory to our full potential. The past will truly be the past, and an infinite future of nothing but goodness and light will open up to us.

In this infinite future, it seems we will have infinite occasions to redress any of these missed, broken, or incomplete relationships. That person you never got a chance to really talk to: you could spend 10,000 years getting to know them and God’s goodness in them without taking away from any of your other opportunities. The friend you moved away from need never be more than a twinkling of an eye apart again, and you have an endless holiday on which to reestablish your acquaintance. If you have alienated people, whether by sin or awkwardness or both (on your side or theirs), bygones will be bygones, and nothing will be left between you but love and a boundless opportunity to develop such a rich gladness together that all your old separation will seem nothing more than a quick stub of the toe before setting off on the real journey. All the while, in all these cases, filled with the vision of God and His unrestrained love, each pleasure we find in these glorified image bearers will only redound all the more to His own glory and our ever-unfolding delight in the Source Himself.

As I write this, I am somewhat struck by how simple and perhaps unremarkable of an insight it really is. Perhaps for some of you it will strike no particular chord at all in your heart or imagination. Be that as it may, I find it a blessed note of hope in the shifting social shadows of this life. May we all be reunited in the heavenly life, evermore to grow in love and delight in our Father’s house.