Yale Logos - Spring 2017

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Yale’s Journal of Christian Thought

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Editor’s Note

Dear Reader,

I

n this issue, we turn our attention not only to the question of truth, but the ways in which truth is passed down in Christian traditions, specifically in the form of theology, doctrine, and orthodoxy. And the history here is rich— what is orthodoxy, and on what grounds is the orthodox set apart from the heretical? Can claims of truth, whether based on faith or reason alone, be taken seriously? Why bother searching for truth at all?

When Jesus was arrested and brought before Pontius Pilate for judgement, Jesus testified that He was brought into this world to bear witness to the truth. In response, Pilate famously asked, “What is truth?”

The echoes of this question can still be heard reverberating even today. Indeed, this cry of the postmodern is as relevant as ever.

And so we ask again: What is truth? We invite you to join as we take up this ageless question and continue the search for the truth.

Sincerely,

Nicholas da Costa Editor-in-Chief

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MISSION Named for the Greek term meaning “word,” “reason,” “principle,” and “logic,” the Logos seeks to stimulate discussion of a Christian worldview in a way that is relevant and engaging to the Yale community.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This issue of the Logos has been made possible in part by the generous contributions and continuing support of the Cecil B. Day Foundation and Christian Union.

INVOLVEMENT Interested in writing an article for the Logos or responding to one of the articles in this issue? Contact Pedro Enamorado, Executive Director, at pedro.enamorado@yale.edu.

DISCLAIMER The Logos is published by Yale College students; neither Yale University nor its affiliates are responsible for the material herein.

EXECUTIVE BOARD Nicholas Dacosta, Editor-in-Chief Pedro Enamorado, Executive Director Yanna Lee, Art Editor Keniel Yao, Business Manager Jessica Lee, Communications Manager

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CONTENTS

06 08 10 14 17 20 22 24 26

Editorial: What Is Orthodoxy?

Beyond Orthodoxy

The Doctrine of Sin

Point: Orthodoxy Reconsidered Counterpoint: The Dangers of Reviving Heresy

On the Absolute

On Scripture

The Faith of Reason Reflection: Why Search for Truth?

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L

Editorial: What Is Orthodoxy?

ong ago, man was with God, and the will of man was likewise with the will of God. Man walked with God in the cool of the garden and did not at all stray from His way. Man only willed what his Creator willed, and went about in the sublime joy of an unknowing child. In his foolishness, however, man chose transgression over tranquility. As a consequence, humanity gained the knowledge of good and evil--a convoluted consciousness that destroyed man’s simple, unbroken, and childlike union with the divine. Thus, in not knowing, man knew, and in knowing, man no longer knew.

Because of this fall, the will of man fell away from the the will of God. The body and the soul both became chained to the elementary forces of the world, being torn in a thousand different directions away from the Lord. Human volition therefore became opposed to the divine will, urging man to lust after the surface appearance of created things rather than to see into the sublime spirit that lead us to eternity through these ephemeral objects. Our will remains one of resistance rather than surrender. We fan the flames of self-love as we draw things to ourselves for the purpose of thrusting ourselves out before others in a theatrical manner.

We adorn ourselves with bright ornaments and utter rousing things to garner the attention and envy of the world, not knowing that this self-will only pushes us further away from the truly-existent Good. In truth, we can never apprehend beauty through our own will to beautify, but only through surrender to the overwhelming ontological beauty. When we forfeit ourselves to such a beauty, we sink into the depths of goodness and behold a sort a kind of loveliness that surpasses anything that we could have imagined when we labored by our own beautifying volition day by day for meager measures. Therefore, our own will must be reduced to nothing so that we may once again become one with God. God may only dwell in man when man is empty.

In like manner, heresy comes forth from our own will to beautify the truth of God while orthodoxy necessitates surrender onto the overwhelming ontological truth. Man has tried to enhance the timeless account of God through their own volition in many ways. In all of such attempts, man seeks to append alien ideas onto the word of faith taught by Christ and the apostles since the beginning.

Sometimes, such additions stem from the heretic’s adoration for a certain culture and the schools of thought associated with it. The Gnostics grafted the esoteric teachings of the pagan sages onto the faith in order to accommodate to their own taste for Hellenistic intellectualist esotericism. The Arians taught that Christ is lesser than God the Father, influenced by their propensity for dialectical philosophy1; they maintain a conception of the Father influenced by the vision of God held by the Greek thinkers-God is so utterly other and unapproachable that not even Christ could be of the same substance as Him. During the 13th century, the University of Paris was an unrivaled name in theological education. Some scholars there during that time became helplessly enamored with the writings of the Muslim Neoplatonist Avicenna. Because Avicennian doctrine many a times contradicted Christian scripture, those theologians went as far as to posit a theory of double-truth-that there could exist two contradictory truths at the same time and that a doctrine can simultaneously be both true and false.

“

We adorn ourselves with

bright ornaments and utter

rousing things… not knowing

that this self-will only pushes us further away from the truly-existent

Good.

Other times, man may try to embetter the unchanging truth for the sake of practicality. Pelagius visited Rome during the latter decades of the fourth century Constantine’s edicts brought peace to the Church and found that the congregation there had become rather lax in discipline in the absence of persecution and rigorous ascetic norms. In response, Pelagius attempted to stress the importance of works by modifying doctrine; he taught that human beings were able to attain heaven by their own works and merit without the aid of divine grace.

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Sometimes, pride and impulse can drive man to append the most ghastly falsehoods to the faith. The Circumcelliones, for one, began as a group of Christian charitable workers in North Africa. In time, however, took the side of the Donatists-the heretics who sought to maintain a “pure church” exclusively comprised saints and martyrs. The Circumcelliones sought the crown of martyrdom by the active striving of their own will rather than by surrender to the will of God. Indeed, they sought to exalt themselves rather than God in death. They would ambush unsuspecting travellers and beat them with wooden clubs after letting out the cry, Laudate Deum- praise God! These zealots would stop short of killing the travellers, so that their panicked victims would kill them in retaliation and make them “martyrs.”

Clearly, then, man’s beautifying will is capable of altering even the faith of God- the primal account of the good- into something absurd, arrogant, or downright grim. We ought, then, to forgo our own volition and surrender wholly to the One who is greater than us. Orthodoxy, then, is that existent truth onto which we must yield ourselves. This truth holds all of our own truth-making in derision. It exposes our own attempts at embetterment as small, misshapen copies before the perfectly-formed and infinitely immense original.

When all things come to be, our volition will once again lock into seamless alignment with the will of God. As for the present age, however, we must relinquish every last strand of our own will because it has gone wayward beyond repair. Let us never suppose that the hollow and cold whims of our volition could add any good to the truth that extends directly from the divine essence.

After all, it is written: “... to all who did receive him, who believed in his name, he gave the right to become children of God, who were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God” (John 1:12-13).

1Dialectic philosophy is the notion that arriving at truth is the aim of discourse between different parties, rather than simply persuasion or appreciation of eloquence.

He Li is a senior in Timothy Dwight College. He is majoring in History.

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Beyond Orthodoxy

W

e have been afflicted by a particular hysteria with regards to truth lately, here in the United States. In December a man with a gun walked into a pizza restaurant in Washington D.C. and opened fire.

He later told police that he had meant to investigate the theory that Hillary Clinton and her campaign chief were running a child sex ring from the backrooms of the establishment. It was a turning point in the recent rise of ‘fake news,’ the first clear-cut instance, this past election season, of a completely fictional story provoking real violence in the real world.

Journalists in the mainstream media have been working overtime to address what they see as a blatant disregard for facts. Live fact-checking is now a given for most presidential speeches, as seen regularly on NPR and CNN. Dozens, or perhaps hundreds, of articles are published every day on some falsehood that the president managed to utter in the last twenty-four hours. A search for “Trump Tweet” on Google News yields over 23 million results. In these first few months of 2017 alone the Washington Post, CNBC, NYT, National Review, CNN, The Guardian, BBC, and scores of other sites have published articles on the President’s tweets, many of them picking them apart for facts (or lack thereof).

Ironically, mainstream left-wing media has somehow managed to respond to the new “threat” – that is, the threat of facts (which is what news deals in) ceasing to become facts – by becoming what they are opposing; that is, by becoming opinions. I said earlier that news organizations were busy trying to fact check Trump’s speeches and tweets. And they are. But that work has almost been drowned by the volume of opinion pieces which the homepages of Fox, CNN, MSNBC, and even NPR are plastered with. In fact, even attempts to factcheck Trump’s tweets usually turn into opinion pieces themselves, because by engaging with 144-character rants on an hourly basis journalists find themselves

unable to say anything profound in return. It is similar to the way adults sometimes find themselves speaking to children. Nobody explains atmospheric astrophysics to their child in response to “Why is the sky blue?” and similarly responses to Trump seem to have the same kind of superficial contact with reality that he does.

“

The important things are done, not thought – they are verbs: to love, to feed, to clothe, to help, to sing, to build, to create.

Not that anyone should be surprised. We live in a century which, after all, has given up on truth; a century in which a young man in my class at Yale University, of all places, can say “Yeah, I kind of think that everything is relative, and it’s all just opinions,” and no one in the room opposes him, not one thinking person in the room feels a need to stand up for morality and truth and say “Hey, murder is wrong and I don’t care what your opinion on it is.” Our century is the one in which truth has been diminished to a string of facts, a century in which science is the only source of truth, the only thing which we permit to prove the validity of a fact. We live in a century in which the most powerful critique of Trump is not that he is a reprehensible person, but, rather, that his Tweets are often factually inaccurate.

Eastern Orthodoxy, my faith, literally means “right-belief.” But the term is somewhat misleading because what Eastern Orthodoxy actually teaches is the

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right way to live. Belief is to a certain degree secondary. Unlike the Catholics, who emphasize dogma and theology and philosophy, Orthodox Christians have very little dogma; most of the intricacies of our beliefs are held in tradition and is therefore malleable, and the emphasis is on the correct way to live, not think.

The important things are done, not thought -- they are verbs: to love, to feed, to clothe, to help, to sing, to build, to create. Many saints doubted in God, but kept going, because you can do the good things even if you aren’t sure what’s really going on in the world. Having an Orthodox set of beliefs about how to act mean that what’s happening outside can’t change how you operate on the inside, where it matters. You can be kind,

you can be caring, you can be compassionate: you can be all this even if you aren’t sure about the intricacies of faith, or -- for example -- what the guy in the White House is up to.

What could have stopped the man with the gun, regardless of what he had been told about Hillary Clinton, was another, stronger belief -- that shooting people in cold blood is wrong. That is all it would have taken.

Stephan Sveshnikov is a junior in Saybrok College.

He is majoring in History.

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The Doctrine of Sin T

he word ‘sin’ has multiple connotations today.

Some may understand it as causing offense to another person, thinking ill thoughts, or even indulging in certain delectables. But, it may also carry with it a sense of thrill, right? There is something exciting about committing sin or doing something we know we should not do. The hint of danger that comes with it which makes us feel alive; it makes us feel like we are in control.

Whatever one may think about when thinking about sin, there is a host of definitions, ideas, and emotions which it invokes.

In contrast to these, Christianity holds a radically different account of sin. It understands sin as an utterly destructive force, ravaging all creation, caused by humanity’s rejection of God’s will. Sin thereby fundamentally corrupts human nature and thwarts creation.

To appreciate the Christian gospel rightly, therefore, we need to acknowledge sin in this manner in order to perceive that this broken world was not the way God intended it to be. Indeed, we need to see the depth of human depravity, an effect of sin, to understand just what it is we need saving from and why only God in Christ can be our Savior.

Here, I will attempt to provide a theological framework of sin and will look to the aid of prior theologians, spanning across the Christian tradition, to do so. We will first consider the nature of sin, and then the relation between sin and God. The Nature of Sin Nothing preexists God; He just is. Whereas you and I came into being at a certain point in time, there never was a time when God was not. Therefore, insofar as

things exist and have being, they are good because they find their subsistence in God who is goodness. In turn, this means that “evil has not existed from the beginning…but it was [human beings] who later began to conceive of it and imagine it in their own likeness.”1 Genesis 3 is the story of the fall of humankind. It is when sin entered into the good world that God had made. But, to understand the devastating effects of sin, we need to first take a step back and see what human beings were originally meant to be in their relationship to God. Athanasius held that human beings were not originally created as immortal beings.2 Typically, modern Christians think that if Adam and Eve had not sinned then human beings would have gone on to live forever since death is an effect of sin. However, Athanasius did not exactly see it that way. For him, immortality was not something inherent to human beings; rather, Adam and Eve were immortal by virtue of their participation in God’s grace by living in a rightly ordered relationship with him in keeping his commands. Thus, God created human beings as mortal beings who were immortal in that he gave them the gift of grace to live as such.3 What this means succinctly is that “humanity was both naturally mortal and immortal by grace, with this immortality connected to living a divine life.”4 Human beings, therefore, are contingent creatures who are utterly dependent on God, and this is our proper relationship to him.

In Genesis 3, we witness Eve eat the fruit of the forbidden tree with Adam following suit. However, what takes place even before the physical action of eating the fruit is a conscious decision. Adam and Eve had to will to eat it, which brought sin into the world. Thus, their

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sin precedes the physical action since that thought stems from their disobedient wills, which turns away from God and into themselves.5 In effect, their relationship with God is broken whereby they return to natural mortality and become susceptible to death and corruption. What Athanasius wants us to see in Genesis 3 is the consequence of Adam and Eve’s disobedience, which is a disorientation of our relationship with God. What began as human beings living in communion with God ended up with human beings rejecting God, turning to the false idol of self instead.

Athanasius goes a step further and posits that when we choose to live in sin, we are essentially choosing to live in a false reality since “we imagine a world in which we are, or something else is, the center of the universe.”6 However, as Karl Barth notes, the history of Jesus Christ discloses to us what actual reality is, viz. that Jesus Christ is Lord, and we are not.7 He is the beginning and end of all things; the fulfillment of all our desires; and the meaning and purpose of our lives as we become caught up in the triune life of God in Christ by the power of the Spirit.

This is true reality; it is the only reality. Thus, anything apart from this is a non-existent, parallel universe.8 Sinful beings that we are, we conjure up imaginary worlds that do not exist, and, within our non-existent worlds, we create idols for ourselves – the most prominent idol of our day being humankind itself which says the human is the measure of all things.

When we choose to live into this reality – the non-reality – we sever ourselves from God’s gift of grace i.e. the divine life.

“

The most important idol of our day is humankind itself, which says that the human is the measure of all things.

This, however, still does not address the question as to why we need a Savior. If sin is merely human production of evil that then suggests that all that human beings need to do in order to restore their relationship with God is to quit sinning. This is not the case, though.

John Calvin, one of the great Protestant reformers, gave his famous doctrine of total depravity, which says

human nature is now thoroughly corrupt and sinful.

Commenting on Calvin’s conception of sin, Randall Zachman, a Reformation Historian at the University of Notre Dame, writes: [T]he unfaithfulness of Adam and Eve plunged all of humanity into a catastrophe from which only God in Christ by the Holy Spirit can rescue them. Their disobedience not only changed human nature, but it also changed the cosmos itself, spreading the curse of God throughout the universe, and subjecting innocent creatures to corruption and death simply due to human sin.9

Thus, the effect of sin goes beyond just doing bad things. In choosing to live lives apart from God, corruption and death are inevitable outcomes because we can only live and flourish in relation to God since God is life itself. All it takes is one iota of sin to destroy our relationship with God, and when that happens we become less than human. Because this is now the condition for all of humanity, we are without hope if left to our own devices since sinful human beings cannot save sinful human beings. Therefore, we need a perfect, sinless Savior. We need hope.

God’s Relation to Sin We have examined the nature of sin and its effects for human life. We now briefly turn to see how God deals with sin. Although human sin warrants God to destroy us, God, being the strange God that He is, does not destroy us. Instead, “He comes…towards us in His love for human beings…” in the person of Jesus Christ (despite not being obligated to do so).10 Nevertheless, in His divine freedom, He chooses to be God for us rather than God against us.11 When we encounter God, He finds us living in isolated, non-existent worlds, headed towards destruction.

It is precisely in that place where God by His grace reveals Himself to us in Jesus Christ. Christ then unveils the reality that we are sinners who have ultimately sinned against God and God alone. He shows us the total depravity of our human nature, and our inability to rescue ourselves from death and corruption.

Unwilling to abandon His creation to the destruction of sin, stirred by love and pity, God came down from the heights of heaven and took upon himself the flesh of sinful humanity by way of the hypostatic union in Jesus.12 Here, it is important to note that Jesus did not sin nor did He know sin. To say that Jesus took upon himself sinful humanity is meant that God became the

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sin that we caused! In other words, “He assumed the corruption of human nature that was a consequence of… my free choice.”13

“

In God’s divine freedom, He chooses to be God for us rather than God against us.

Thus, by virtue of Christ’s divine nature, He begins to overturn and undo the effects of sin.14 On this point, Maximus the Confessor offers us clarity: “In turn, just as through one man, [Adam], who turned voluntarily from the good, the human nature was changed from incorruption to corruption to the detriment of all humanity, so too through one man, Jesus Christ, who did not voluntarily turn from the good, human nature underwent a restoration from corruption to incorruption for the benefit of all humanity.”15 Whereas human beings rejected life in the Garden of Eden, God rejected sin and death once and for all at the cross of Jesus Christ, making it possible for human beings to once again live in right relationship with him.

However, the advantage that we have, which Adam and Eve did not, is that our communion with God is now one of deeper intimacy and strength since we are elevated in Christ by the power of the Spirit to partake in divinity. Thus, nothing we do can separate us from God’s love because it is not by our own merits in which we are made right before God but by God’s own merits in the life, death, and resurrection of His Son. Conclusion To think of sin in this way is no doubt uncomfortable and at times embarrassing. That is why the gospel is offensive since it exposes us of our own sin. Like a mirror, it reveals our true human nature as ugly and warped. It shows us how we are living less than fully human lives when we choose to live apart from God’s grace in Christ Jesus. As we have seen, though, to live this way is to live in a false, non-existent reality, which leads to death and corruption. But, the good news of the gospel is that God does not hand over sinful human beings to death – although He has every right to do so. Instead, He responds in love by becoming human so that through faith in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection, the sinner

might receive divine life. The sinner who finds this life in Christ is overcome by an overwhelming sense of gratitude, knowing that she deserved death but got grace instead. Thus, for the Christian, sin is anything but trivial or inconsequential.

1 Athanasius, Contra Gentes and De Incarnatione, ed. Robert W. Thomson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 4-5.

2 Athanasius of Alexandria was a fourth century bishop and theologian, known for combatting Arianism and upholding the full divinity of Jesus Christ.

3 Donald Fairbairn, “Athanasius,” in T & T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin, ed. Keith L. Johnson et al. (New York: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2016), 168.

4 Fairbairn, “Athanasius,” 169.

5 Fairbairn, “Athanasius,” 170-171.

6 Fairbairn, “Athanasius,” 172.

7 Karl Barth, CD IV.1, 458. Karl Barth was a Swiss Reformed theologian who taught at the University of Basel and was arguably the most important theologian of the twentieth century.

8 Fairbairn, “Athanasius,” 172.

9 Randall C. Zachman, “John Calvin,” in T & T Clark Companion to the Doctrine of Sin, ed. Keith L. Johnson et al. (New York: Bloomsbury T & T Clark, 2016), 240-241.

10 Athanasius, On the Incarnation, trans. John Behr (Yonkers, N.Y.: St Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2011), 57.

11 Karl Barth, CD II.1, 440-441.

12 The doctrine of hypostatic union, established at the Council of Chalcedon in A.D. 451, describes the joining together of humanity and divinity in the one person of Jesus Christ whereby he is both fully divine and fully human.

13 Maximus the Confessor, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, trans. Paul M. Blowers et al. (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2003), 120.

14 Athanasius, On the Incarnation, 58. On this point, Tanner offers clarification: “God is not changing God’s relation to us in Christ but changing our relation to God. In the old language of the ancient church, God is not going anywhere when God becomes human; we are being brought to God, assumed into the divine trinitarian life” (Kathryn Tanner, Jesus, Humanity, and the Trinity (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 15).

15 Maximus, On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ, 120.

David M. Choi is a first-year cadidate for a Master’s of Arts in Religion.

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Point: Orthodoxy, Reconsidered

W

hat’s commonly called orthodoxy in Christianity is, to put it bluntly, really alienating. It’s an unruly collection of convoluted, unintuitive claims, many based on philosophical language games, and its claims to truth are often nitpicky and rarely comprehensible to an outsider. There’s hypocrisy in it too: the followers of an itinerant rabbi whose main feud was with the legalists of his day have themselves gained a reputation for internecine fights over bafflingly particular articles of faith. It’s the sort of thing that scares people away, and probably for good reason.

I should know, because what’s commonly understood as Christian orthodoxy repels me. It frustrates me in part because it seems to create conflict where none needs to be, in part because the parallels between orthodox legalism and the pompous speechifying of the Pharisees are so obvious, and in part because I simply have little interest in it. But the largest part of my problem with so-called Christian orthodoxy is that, for the sake of splitting hairs about Christ’s nature, it ignores Christ’s moral commandments of love and nonjudgment entirely. If you’re like me — if you’re someone, Christian or otherwise, who sees little value in the squabbles of orthodoxy — then this is an essay of good news.

I will argue that Christian orthodoxy, broadly understood, is so much more than councils and heresies and the dual humanity and divinity of Christ. Simply put, Christian orthodoxy is who Jesus was, why He came to Earth, and what He taught. In this view, orthodoxy is no longer an amoral set of philosophical ramblings. It has a moral dimension, and it can be put into practice.

And that moral dimension is a difficult one, but one that matters when weighed against Christ’s teachings, so much more than the epistemic nature of the Trinity: to be a morally orthodox Christian is to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, harbor the refugee, house the homeless, and care for the lonesome.

There is nothing simpler and nothing harder than to be in this sense an orthodox Christian, because moral orthodoxy in Christianity is, in its entirety, love.

Orthodoxy is a Greek term that means, literally, “correct beliefs.” Now, this isn’t going to be a

turgid essay with endless Greek etymologies, but this one is important: orthodoxy, definitionally, refers to the beliefs in Christianity that are held to be true by Christendom. Today, Christianity is deeply fractured between hundreds of sects, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that what we today think of as orthodoxy — arcane points of doctrine — was first written millennia ago, when the Church was somewhat closer to being unified.

The first major event where Christian orthodoxy was established was the Council of Nicea, convened by Constantine, Emperor of Rome, in the early fourth century.

The council’s attendees developed together the most prominent work of orthodoxy in modern Christian liturgy — the Nicene Creed. If you’re not of a faith where the creed is recited frequently, it’s definitely worth a look-over for curiosity’s sake1: it’s a document of pure orthodoxy, where each word has been so carefully chosen that any deviation from it is probably a heresy.

From there, six more councils — together referred to, intuitively, as the First Seven Ecumenical Councils — were held over the next four hundred years. The councils followed a predictable pattern: a possible heresy emerged within the church. The maybe-heresy touched on some unresolved questions. The Church convened a council. The church considered the merits of the quasi-heresy. And every single time, the church chose to condemn the freethinkers, who were then called heretics, full-stop, and made to them recant their beliefs or be excommunicated. Among the doctrines hashed out at these councils: Jesus is “of one being” with the Father; Jesus was fully divine and fully human; there was never a time before Jesus was begotten of the father; Easter is set according to a schedule that never has made sense and never will make sense; Mary was literally the Mother of God and deserves to be venerated as such; Jesus had both divine and human wills; and there is no issue with praying to images of holy figures.

All of which is well and good, of course, if you buy into these ideas (none of which, it should be noted, are explicit in the Gospels). But, well, where’s the morality?

To try and get a sort of moral sense out of orthodoxy, a first instinct, naturally, is to try and see whether these orthodox beliefs coalesce into any kind of moral system on their own. It’s not hard to see why this is a plan with basically no chance of success: morality, in the most basic sense, has to do with how you treat others, and having opinions about the precise nature of Jesus’ wills tells you not a thing about how you should act towards

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your neighbors. The actual teachings of orthodoxy, taken literally, are meaningful when making philosophical arguments about Christ, for sure, but they tell us nothing about how to act towards others, so they mean nothing morally.

Well, then, maybe there’s a hint at morality in the way that these beliefs were codified? As discussed above, they were drafted by councils in order to condemn others as heretics. Maybe this is the path to orthodox morality, then: constantly seeking correct ideas in yourself and others, looking to be ever more perfect in belief, and correcting the beliefs of others when they fall short of your perfection. From Constantine on, this is a moral path well trod by generations of Christians.

It’s also explicitly forbidden in the Gospels. “Judge not, that ye be not judged,” Jesus commands in Matthew 7:1. To be sure, we all judge others on a daily basis. It’s instinctual, and it’s a defense mechanism, and we all fall short of God’s perfection. But the point is: the Gospels say very clearly that Christians should be constantly trying to fight that urge to judge and condemn. Think what you’d like to about the teachings of orthodoxy, but emulating the behavior of the people who created them isn’t consistent with Jesus’ teachings.

At this point, we’re sort of stuck.There may be a way to interpret Christian orthodox teachings so as to make them moral, but if there is, it isn’t a readily apparent one. All of which leaves the faithful Christian in a kind of morass. Orthodoxy is rigid and unyielding by nature; speak against the conciliar truth and you’re a heretic, damned for your insufficiently nuanced view of Christ’s nature or the place of iconography. And yet its rigidity applies only to the most abstract philosophical concerns, not the actions of our lives.

It’s at this moment that the etymology of the term orthodoxy comes in handy. The term is, as noted above, pretty rigidly defined in the Christian context to refer to the findings of the first seven Church councils. That definition, though, admits little morality. No amount of reckoning can wring timeless moral truth out of such strictly-defined legalism. Thankfully, though, the word is eminently flexible. Orthodoxy commonly refers only to the first seven councils, but all its definition requires is that orthodoxy be correct belief, which encompasses much, much more than just obscure Christological doctrine. It is the whole body of things accepted as true in the Christian religion.

Orthodoxy in practice — or, to use a convenient term, orthopraxy — is then a simple matter of identi-

fying those beliefs in Christianity that are moral precepts for correct action. And this is where the good news — or the good news for people like me who have issues with the practice of orthodoxy — really begins to kick in. Christianity is a faith in which moral precepts for correct action abound. Reading the Gospels will tell you as much: Christ, as he’s represented in the Bible, never actually spent much time discussing the epistemic nature of His own existence the way bishops did in their councils. Rather, he mostly spent his time on Earth casting out demons, healing the crippled and sick, feeding the hungry, warning the haughty and pretentious of the Earth with dark invocations of a reckoning to come, and, more than anything, giving his followers clear moral instructions on how to live their lives.

These instructions give the truth to Søren Kirkegaard’s famous line about Christianity: “The Bible is very easy to understand,” Kirkegaard writes. “But we Christians are a bunch of scheming swindlers. We pretend to be unable to understand it because we know very well that the minute we understand, we are obliged to act accordingly.”2 Or, in other words: we argue about the admixture of divinity and humanity within Christ so that we don’t have to pay quite so much attention to what Christ explicitly said Christians are supposed to do.

And what is it we’re supposed to do? Christ’s true followers are those of whom he will be able to say: “I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me” (Matthew 25:35-36). Upon seeing a rich young ruler who wanted to reach the Kingdom of Heaven, “Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own, and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me’” (Mark 10:21). Jesus was, at one point, asked point-blank what the greatest of the laws was. To this, he responded: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the greatest and first commandment. And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments hang all the law and the prophets” (Matthew 22:37-40).

Orthodoxy, in this broad sense, is simple: love the Lord your God. Orthopraxy is like unto it: love your neighbor as yourself. This is moral orthodoxy. It is

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immensely difficult, and it’s only natural to wonder whether it would actually be easier if the whole complicated mess of Seven Councils Orthodoxy was what the law hung on instead. But this is what Jesus said, and that is the fact of the matter, biblically speaking.

A morally orthodox Christian is one who gives to the poor and visits prisoners and cares for the sick and welcomes refugees and wanderers and loves her neighbor.

There is one particular character in the parables of Jesus who exemplifies this moral orthodoxy above all else: the good Samaritan. After two other men pass by a wounded traveler without a thought, a Samaritan comes by and cares for him, pays for his recuperation, and treats the man the way he would want to be treated.

Many Christians probably learned in Sunday School that Samaritans were looked down upon in Judean society of Jesus’ day. This is true, but it is not the whole story. The Samaritans were heretics. They believed, and today believe, in a different Torah, one very similar in substance but with just enough difference that they were made to be pariahs by the legalists of Christ’s day. And yet it is a Samaritan who is the truest hero of the parables.

God is good, and He works through heretic and orthodox alike. He works especially through (and for the benefit of) the shunned in society, the shouted-down, those on the margins. Debate the nature of Christ’s two wills to your heart’s content, so long as it hurts no one. But Christianity hangs not the slightest bit upon this legalism, this hair-splitting creation of heretics where once there were none. On selfless, irresponsible, self-effacing love hang all the laws and prophets, and that is all that moral orthodoxy is: love, strong and unconditional, for friend and enemy, weak and strong, for the other human beings of the world.

1 For the interested, the Nicene Creed can be found printed on the final page of this issue of Logos.

2 Søren Kirkegaard. Provocations: Spiritual Writings of Kierkegaard.

Micah Osler is a junior in Pierson College. He is majoring in History.

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Counterpoint: The Dangers of Reviving Heresy

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crowd of children gathers around a colorful, paper maché horse hanging on a rope, waiting to whack it open and feed on its candied contents. Yet, part of the joy of this dark experience is the glee that comes with beating the mutilated carcass even after it has fallen and spilled its treasures. Similarly, people over time have been fascinated with uncovering “alternative gospels,” or have “rediscovered” Christian truths through private interpretation that contradict historic doctrines, such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ denial of Christ’s deity.1 But these ideas are recycled “dead horses,” they have been examined thoroughly and roundly rejected, and they litter the history of the Church. Their proponents insisted that they contained sweet truths, but when broken open, these heresies held falsehoods that blurred Christians’ perception of God. The word “heresy” reveals one of its distinguishing marks: it’s the Greek haeresis, which means faction or sect, because they are attempts by individuals that claim special understanding, that try to redefine a teaching for the entire church. Heretics gain their followers by promising that their teachings reveal treasures of knowledge about the nature of Christ, the Father, or the Holy Spirit. They may resolve a paradoxical tension (or perceived contradiction), or spiritually satisfy people more than accepted teachings.2 But there are reasons why the consensus of the global church leaves certain tensions in place. Sometimes, it is to maintain a posture of humility and not grasp for the hidden knowledge of God, and other times it is because alternative ideas do not mesh with the tried-and-true teachings of the apostles who personally knew Jesus. If we believe an “alternative fact” about the life and work of Jesus, the incarnation of truth, it may threaten our eternal soul.

Every heresy, compared to its orthodox counterpart,

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fails to have the same logical consistency and, worse, fails to offer the same picture of God’s character. The character of God is at stake when heresies about Jesus’ life and work arise, and they threaten to distort our picture of God beyond recognition. Jesus taught that to know the true God is eternal life when He prayed, “And this is eternal life, that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent” (John 17:3). A proper vision of God, one submitting to what He has revealed to us, applies a corrective to what clouds human’s vision of God-- sin-- and lets us experience God and contemplate His beauty and fullness.

This truth came from the Holy Spirit, who makes God known to us and guides His church toward truth.

Yet, heretical lenses for seeing God and Christ make Him less grand and less understandable. For instance, if Christ was not truly man, as the Gnostics posit, then His suffering is less impressive (any god can remain sinless, but no man can). And if Christ was not God, as the Arians believe, it is perplexing how it is not blasphemy when He forgives sins committed against God. Most importantly, a Gnostic version of God that does not empathize with humanity by assuming full human nature is not the Christian God. And today, Christians and historically-minded scholars need only read the christological debates of the 2nd and 3rd century Church councils and see precisely why the bishops of the Church vehemently opposed the redefinition of its teaching on Jesus. For instance, the Council of Nicaea (325 A.D.) ruled that Christ was fully God, and the Second Council of Constantinople (381 A.D.) affirmed that Christ was fully man, and, therefore, had a human mind. And while the debates sometimes entered needlessly polemic territory about how Jesus was God and man, they showed us the depth of God’s love in Jesus’ sacrifice and incarnation, and the lengths to which He went to reconcile wicked sinners to Himself.

Christians cannot stray from the true vision of Christ handed down by the apostles who knew Him and spoke with Him because only that Jesus can apply His sacrifice to erase the sins of repentant souls. The Nicene Creed definition of Christianity, in particular, epitomizes the basic understanding of Christ agreed upon by nearly all the representatives of all corners of the Christian world.3 It affirms that He is God, as John wrote in His gospel, “the Word was God” (John 1:1); that He took on flesh to save humanity, was crucified, died, and rose again; and that He will judge the world.

The creed adopts a similar structure and vocabulary as Paul’s proto-creed in 1 Corinthians 15, which historical

and linguistic scholars believe was created and transmitted within a decade of Christ’s crucifixion.4 The Nicene Creed is recited today in most churches and its themes are celebrated in hymns and Christian literature. Furthermore, to adopt heretical positions that the Church has rejected today would be an act of rebellion against the true Christ, and His servants the bishops who attended the councils.

Let me explain in depth how one specific heresy, Docetism, undermines the message of the apostles that the bishops of the church fought hard to preserve.

Gnostic Docetism denied Christ’s physical, and historical incarnation and resurrection. The roots of this idea began as early as the the epistle of 1 John (written between 85-95 A.D.), where he writes that whosoever “confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist,” (1 John 4:2). The rejection of bodily resurrection diametrically opposes the words of Jesus and the eyewitness accounts of the authors of the gospels. Furthermore, early Christians and contemporary scholars overwhelmingly agree that the tone and style of the gospels indicate that the authors understand Jesus’ death and resurrection quite literally. But Docetists believed that matter is evil (from the Greek Dokesis, meaning “appearance”) and that Jesus, a good being, could not possibly assume an inherently evil nature. The implication would be to discredit Jesus when He offers His physical body as proof of His resurrection saying, “touch me,” and the agreement by all four authors of the gospels to have been convinced, to the point of martyrdom, that Christ was resurrected in human flesh (Luke 24:39). In effect, the Docetist view sought to overturn centuries the idea of bodily resurrection that permeated the Jewish and Christian scriptures and promised a restoration of paradise on earth for the faithful.

Apart from the historical and logical problems, this heresy makes the Docetist God dramatically different in character than the God of orthodox Christianity. A divine Christ descending physically to experience life as a human, suffer lashes, torn flesh, and a thorny crown, and overcome all temptation reveals a unique God of infinite, empathetic, and sacrificial love; all of this would be absent in the Docetist worldview. And the orthodox Father God willingly sends His beloved Son to do this to break the infinite wall of sin between Him and sinful human beings. Further, Christianity teaches that Christ must be fully human to exchange His perfect humanness for our sinful humanness. That is why seemingly trivial matters like whether Jesus had

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a human and divine mind, or just a divine one, were brought before councils: because sin resides in the human will, and if Christ did not assume a human mind, He has not redeemed it, leaving the barrier between God and men in place (Second Council of Constantinople). In mind, speech, and deed, the reality of the fully-human, orthodox Christ’s life, death and resurrection offer an unparalleled example for humans to follow.

“

Truth is transformative;

it’s a corrective reality that heals and restores when applied to minds and hearts.

As a result of the vision of God presented by orthodox teachings, they have withstood the test of time and of adherence to apostolic teaching. The defenders of orthodoxies were not writing and circulating letters to refute heresies as philosophers, but as pastors who cared for the well-being of the present and future Church. Ignatius of Antioch (35- 108 A.D.), for instance, wrote letters making textual arguments and historical arguments, that “they touched him and believed, being closely united with his flesh and blood.

For this reason they too despised death; indeed, they proved to be greater than death.”5 He reads the text literally, affirming what St. Paul said that Christianity hinges on the literal death and resurrection of Christ, and logically concludes that the apostles “despised death” in martyrdom. He reminded the Smyrnaeans of the beauty of physical resurrection and crucifixion for offering them hope of complete restoration, mind, soul and spirit.

Irenaeus of Lyons (died 202 A.D.) went further to solidify a “rule of faith,” or standard, by which to measure whether something is Christian. So moved by the power of Christ’s real suffering, and how it had conquered hearts and minds all over the known world with the same message, the message being the rule of faith.

He wrote to uphold the public nature of Christian truth in Against Heresies against Valentinian Gnostics who claimed hidden knowledge about Jesus. This heresy

made God the Father the author of evil for creating matter, and made Jesus one of many “saviors,” along with “the Christ,” “the Word,” “the One,” and other titles associated with Jesus as if they were distinct entities. With a sense of humor, he applied the Valentinian’s method of reading the bible to Greek literature, that is, reading it without the assumption of a common theme, the equivalent to the rule of faith, and came up with absurd conclusions attributing random verses to Hercules that applied to Ulysses and Agamemnon. The idea of testing doctrines by the rule of faith became standard in every council, and encouraged the thoughtful creation of creeds that all Christians could agree to, from all corners of the known world.

The battles over heretical ideas were already fought tooth and nail, thoroughly exposited from both sides, and publicly rejected by the consensus of the Church.

While a studious individual would do well to know this history and the arguments for heresy, to seriously adopt such ideas about God would be tantamount to rejecting modern medicine to treat people with snake oil. Truth is transformative; it’s a corrective reality that heals and restores when applied to hearts and minds.

But the arrogance of dogmatically denying the life-giving truths of man and God’s nature, especially when reviving dead ideas, threatens to poison one’s spirit to pursue a distorted God through ineffective methods.

Yet, the Spirit of Jesus leads the church during the crises of heresy that unfolded to show the bankruptcy of these ideas. Let us stop beating dead horses of heresy and remember that what God “shall shut… none shall open” (Isaiah 22:22).

1 Jehovah’s Witnesses believe Christ is a created being and an incarnation of the archangel Michael, similar to the Arian heresy. “Who is Michael the Archangel?” JW.org.

2 By “spiritually satisfying,” I mean they offer commentary about human nature or God that offers the soul hope or comfort.

3 These creeds are and have been universally affirmed by Christians as definitions of Christianity. See Athanasius’ Against Heresies.

4 Neufeld, Vernon. The Earliest Christian Confessions (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1964). 47 5

Ignatius of Antioch. “Letter to the Smyrnaeans.” Apostolic Fathers in English

ed. Michael W. Holmes. 121

Pedro Enamorado is a senior in Ezra Stiles College.

He is majoring in History.

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On the Absolute

he idea of absoluteness petrifies most – and quite understandably so. The decisions that are the hardest to make are those with a certain permanence: Where should I go to college? Should I go to Medical School?

Should I take that job offer? We fear these sorts of questions, for we know how hard it is to undo whatever choice we make. Our fear of finality causes us to shy away from anything deemed absolute. Besides such fear, the notion of absoluteness can also conjure images of oppression, a sort of militant intolerance.

Absolutism, after all, was the title granted to describe the tyrannical rule of certain European monarchs in the 17th and 18th centuries, who were subject to no law but their own will. In this context, absolutism and despotism are proffered as synonyms. With such a history, no wonder we are suspicious of anything considered fixed. In reference to the realm of ideas, this suspicion of the absolute is typically amplified. A claim of absolute truth seems like an archaic annunciation, an arbitrary sentence received without due process.

Shouldn’t we continually question what is regarded as true? When deeming something as absolute truth, are we not improperly locking away something that ought not to be out of our reach?

Religion is often pointed to as one of the greatest culprits of intellectual despotism, caricatured as an unfounded empire over body, mind, and soul. When a Christian proclaims her faith with assurance, one might conclude that she thus subscribes to some form of intolerance of ideas – that, by believing in the existence of such external immutable truth, she has prematurely negated engagement with other ideas. Such logic, however, lacks the distinction between believing in the existence of absolute truth and presuming that one knows such truth absolutely. To believe that a loving God exists – a fundamental doctrine of Christianity – is to believe in an absolute truth, a truth that is foundational to all others. However, this is not to say that one assumes to understand the nature of God absolutely. Quite fundamentally in the Christian faith, there is the notion that we cannot know such absolute truths in their totality – as the Lord says to the prophet Isaiah, “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” (Isaiah 55:9 NIV).

With the acknowledgment that there might be something about our existence that is wholly true, however, an entirely new mode of inquiry is opened. With the un-

derstanding that complete knowledge of the truth does not follow from belief in its existence, “absolutists”, or those who do believe in the reality of absolute truth, would have even greater reason and motivation for seeking after knowledge ardently. Rather than rejecting certain ideas outright, absolutists should be motivated to find truth and meaning in every idea with an ever greater fervor. If learning was a sort of intellectual treasure hunt, would not those who believe that there is a chest of gold to be found be all the more willing to search in every nook and cranny in order to find it?

Thus, the question remains whether we are able to truly know anything at all, whether there is any real merit in our faculty of reason, or if we are ultimately constrained from truth by our own prejudices and desires.

The Christian understanding of the capability of human reason provides a unique perspective, for it is a sort of midpoint between an Aristotelian understanding of the rational faculty as endowed with near infallibility, and the fiercely skeptic view that reason cannot accomplish anything, but only serves as a tool to rationalize our more primitive desires. In a fiercely skeptic view, essentially all hope is lost for finding any substance with which to build up a worldview. Such an argument only provides tools to hollow out, raze, and obliterate anything regarded as true, leaving only an empty meaninglessness in its place.

The Christian understanding provides a nuanced understanding of human nature – for, in believing that we were created in the Divine Image (Genesis 1:27), we believe that our distinctly human ability to reason and to understand maintains a certain sanctity. Fundamental to the Christian faith, however, is the notion that we are a fallen people who cannot get very far on our own merit. Even with the best of intentions, we can harm one another, and even when something looks to be completely true, we can be utterly wrong. As such, the Christian understanding of our ability to seek truth is simultaneously one of hope in certainty and one of healthy skepticism and self-doubt.

Belief in some form of external, absolute truth, therefore, is not a means to cause fear or an instrument to rule over others instead, nor is it the assertion of the supremacy of human reason. Rather, the Christian perspective provides one with even greater motivation to sift through every idea, every account, and every text to find the truth they contain.

Kayla Bartsch is a freshman in Hopper College. She is majoring in Philosophy.

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On Scripture

rom where do the scriptures get their authority?

Some claim that the scriptures are true because they are “inspired by God,” as the apostle Paul states in 1 Timothy. But the reasoning behind this low-church, evangelical view is circular1. A confident assertion about oneself does not a truthful statement make. The

view held by the Catholic and the Orthodox is more nuanced, though still circular. Christ established his Church, which has been on earth since his resurrection.

The true Church has the authority to declare what the canon is. If the Church establishes the authority of the scriptures, from where does the Church get its authority? To claim that the Church has authority because the Church says that it has authority is just as vapid as the low evangelical view about the scriptures.

Christianity is in a conundrum. How can a supernatural authority be established by an earthly means?

From the outside looking in, the Bible is a book and

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the Church is a human institution. The answer can be found in Protestant orthodoxy.

John Calvin writes: Nothing therefore can be more absurd than the fiction, that the power of judging Scripture is in the Church, and that on her nod its certainty depends.

When the Church receives it, and gives it the stamp of her authority, she does not make that authentic which was otherwise doubtful or controverted but, acknowledging it as the truth of God, she, as in duty bounds shows her reverence by an unhesitating assent. As to the question, How shall we be persuaded that it came from God without recurring to a decree of the Church? it is just the same as if it were asked, How shall we learn to distinguish light from darkness, white from black, sweet from bitter? Scripture bears upon the face of it as clear evidence of its truth, as white and black do of their colour, sweet and bitter of their taste. (ICR 1.7.2) The answer is that supernatural truth cannot be accessed except through revelation. The Scriptures are revealed to be true.

“

The Scriptures need no

Church to give them authority.

Rather, they give the Church all of the authority that it has.

Put another way, how can people know of God? The answer seems to be imperfectly through the created world and more perfectly through the Scriptures. One could call this the Psalm 19 method. The well-loved 19th Psalm consists of two parts. The first six verses declare the glory of God in his created world, specifically the firmament: “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.”

When alone with nature, it is hard not to look up and feel a sense of otherworldly awe. Throughout history, the fingerprints of God have led to a belief in the supernatural. These signs, however, can only point to the existence of God. They cannot tell of His nature.

The second section of Psalm 19 confidently asserts a method for knowing of God in specificity.

It lists a series of effects of the word of God: The word

revives the soul, makes the simple wise, rejoices the heart, and enlightens the eyes. The reader is forced to reckon for himself. Does this ancient text actually affect him in this way? For many of us, it does. Once one is forced to accept Psalm 19 as truthful, the rest of the canon becomes obvious.

Of course, most Christians do not use a test like this to define the canon. Rather, they grow up with the Bible or are exposed to the Bible over a period of time.

Without even thinking of canonicity, they find that the 66 individual books affect them in peculiar ways. As these 66 individual books are tested in the crucible of their lives, they are day after day proven to be true.

They see that these 66 individual books written over hundreds of years in many different circumstances work together to tell a timeless story: God loves humanity, and to bring humanity back to Himself became human and suffered all the punishment humanity was condemned to suffer.

God communicates with His people. John begins his gospel by calling Jesus the Logos: the Word, the Narrative, the Story. Fundamentally, God desires for us to be in communion with Him. This is the narrative of the Scriptures. The last three verses of Psalm 19 illustrate the culmination of God’s communication with us: right standing and then relationship with Him. The Scriptures need no Church to give them authority. Rather, they give the Church all of the authority that it has. As Calvin points out, the Church is built upon the foundation of the apostles and the prophets (Ephesians 1:22). These holy men delivered the revelation of God to people, and did not need the Church to help them do so. The agent of God’s revelation is the Holy Spirit, and He needs no human stamp of approval.

1 “Low” here is used in reference to traditions which place less emphasis on ritual, sacraments, and the authority of clergy. The typically Protestant “low church” is often referenced in contrast to the “high church” of Anglo-Catholicism.

Eli Westerman is a junior in Trumbull College. He is majoring in Classics and Chemical Engineering.

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The Faith of Reason

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ost of the time the concept of orthodoxy is talked about, it’s in relation to religious truth. But religion isn’t the only place where orthodoxy shows up. In fact, everyone has their own orthodoxies. These are the assumptions we bring with us into our lives; they are the glasses by which we view the world. Some people refer to them as worldviews or lifeviews. The presence of prejudices and biases in personal worldviews might not come as a groundbreaking revelation, but these orthodoxies extend past the personal and into some of the more “objective” areas of life. Even the area generally viewed as the most impartial and secure – that is, scientific thought – is, in reality, one of the areas with the most dramatic and ever-shifting orthodoxies.

Take, for example, the concept of matter. What is

matter? It is the “stuff” the universe is made out of. It’s what we interact with day-to-day. It’s what we bump into, pick up, eat, drink, sit on, and do everything else with. However, the objects that we interact with are mostly empty space. As the Physicist Arthur Eddington explained, “The atom is as porous as the solar system.

If we eliminated all the unfilled space in a man’s body and collected his protons and electrons into one mass, the man would be reduced to a speck just visible with a magnifying glass.”1 Matter isn’t as abundant as we might have thought. Still, the concept of matter hasn’t been eliminated altogether. There might be less of it than we first thought, but the protons and neutrons and electrons are all still there. So what is it?

Newton thought matter was discrete, indivisible particles that collect to form masses. He built his whole theory of mechanics off of this assumption. Then Albert Einstein came along. By the time Einstein arrived at his major conclusions about General Relativity, his conception of matter was completely different from Newton’s. No longer was it a collection of discrete

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point-masses. Now, matter was the concentration of energy. This was a bold insight which followed from the familiar equation E=mc2. Matter could be converted into energy because matter seemed to be merely the storehouse of energy. Energy was now the fundamental concept in scientists’ theories, and everything in physics could be boiled down to energy and its interactions.

Did Einstein disprove Newton’s conception of matter? No, he reimagined it. But this reimagining did lead to more powerful equations, more straightforward equations, and even more beautiful equations. It’s no wonder why people jumped on the bandwagon.

This is only one among many scientific orthodoxies.

They all posit an entity (e.g. energy) as the most fundamental part of reality. It acts as the starting point for all further scientific investigation. Some numerically-minded thinkers – such as the Pythagoreans in Ancient Greece – saw numbers as the most fundamental part of reality. This even occurs in the social sciences, such as when a professor boils all social interactions down to class conflict, or a battle between the sexes, or any other type power dynamics.

The thing is that all of these lines of reasoning are completely coherent, at least in their frame of reference. To a paranoid person who thinks that the CIA is spying on him, everything around him proves that belief. The man he sees walk home from work every day at the same time is really there to spy on him. The satellites he sees in the sky are there to listen to what he says. And if anything has another unrelated explanation behind it, then he’d say: “That’s exactly what they want you to think!” And the fact is, he’d be completely sound in his thought process. That is probably what would happen if the CIA wanted to covertly spy on him.

His assumptions fit the facts. Or, to put it more appropriately, he has fit the facts to his assumptions.

Philosophers of Science have been analyzing the effects assumptions have on one’s scientific worldview since the mid-20th century when Thomas Kuhn published his book Structure of Scientific Revolutions.2 Kuhn referred to fundamental scientific concepts and assumptions as paradigms. When a shift occurs from one paradigm to another – such as the one from Newtonian matter to Einsteinian matter – a scientific revolution commences. This doesn’t come about through rigorous argumentation but, like with Einstein, comes about through a reimagining. People are not convinced by a paradigm, they are converted to one.3 If this sounds overtly religious to you, then you’d be right.

It seemed Kuhn liked disturbing our well-worn paths

of thought – such as the quick connection we make between “science” and “impartiality.” The key to any conversion - scientific or religious - is faith. As Kuhn says, “[The scientist] must…have faith that the new paradigm will succeed with the many large problems that confront it, knowing only that the older paradigm has failed with a few. A decision of that kind can only be made on faith.”4 This is not to say that all of our attempts at truth are irrational. Rather, the claim is that rationality itself is a bit more faith-based than we might have thought at first. In order to reason, we start off with a number of axioms (aka assumptions) and go on from there.

The axioms could seem completely intuitive and undeniable to us. But they cannot be proven by reason.

Instead, they are the means by which reason proves everything else. In the words of St. Augustine, “We believe in order to understand.” Far from saying that truth is merely relative, this statement asserts that the important part to arriving at real understanding is believing in the right thing. In other words, the fact that we believe in something is a given, but what we believe in is the deciding factor. Faith is a key part of any rational system simply because any rational system needs solid ground to start from.

What does all of this mean for how we view science?

And, even more importantly, how does the Christian worldview or orthodoxy see the physical reality around us? These questions would need many more paragraphs than I am able to come up with. Some of the articles in this journal delve a bit into this topic, and there is plenty of literature out there which addresses these issues. Instead of resolving it all, I’d like to give you a challenge. Next time you sit down for a science lecture, listen to the assumptions made. Ask yourself what the professor is taking to be fundamental or intuitive or absolutely obvious. It’s a fruitful exercise in discovering the orthodoxies of the university.

1 The Natures of the Physical World, 1.

2 Ironically, theologians had been talking about this idea for a century prior to Kuhn (most notably Abraham Kuyper and Cornelius Van Til), making the same points he would make but doing it on a grander scale. Not only science but all of life is affected by the assumptions we have in our worldviews.

3 Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 150 4 Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 158

Max Graham is a junior in Morse College. He is majoring in Physics and Philosophy.

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Reflection: Why Search for Truth?

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he question regarding our human tendency to search for truth can be found in the curious cases we find ourselves facing almost every day. What is the nature of consciousness? Why is time relative, and what does it mean that we are aware of the passage of time?

Can we know absolute truths about the external world?

These psychological, philosophical, and scientific phenomena never fail to keep our brains active as we constantly search for answers. But why do we feel as if we can leave nothing unanswered – that our search for truth is the thing most worthy of pursuit?

Perhaps it’s because doubt, unlike grief, pain, and regret, overcomes our human experience by creating a void between what is and what may be; this void cannot be satiated by anything other than fact. Action requires a definitive cause and effect. There is no room for a life that may be worth living, breaths that may be worth taking, and love that may be worth sharing, and because of this, there is no Lux without Veritas.

Paul Kalanithi, in his New York Times bestselling memoir When Breath Becomes Air, beautifully personifies this search for truth in all of our lives. Kalanithi, a successful neurosurgeon, a graduate of Yale Medical School, and husband to a beautiful wife, seemed to have his life set on course until he was diagnosed with lung cancer without having ever smoked a cigarette in his life. What do you do when you are faced with a darkness that requires you to stare into the face of eternity when you thought there was so much more time

left to search for answers? When the line between life and death blurs by the second and every breath seems to postpone the inevitable, how do you react?

Dr. Kalanithi decided to search - to begin his own odyssey in pursuit of Veritas. In the midst of this journey, he wrote, “There is a moment, a cusp, when the sum of gathered experience is worn down by the details of living.” Kalanithi believed that when we reach the finish line of our lives, we will realize that the beauty of this terminus pales in comparison to the beauty we find if we live in the moment. He believed that living by the second, for the second, is how we can find meaning, or Lux, in our lives.

But what if truth can be experienced both in and outside of time?

I believe in an absolute, definite, spiritual truth which says that we have a God who transcends time. I believe that every truth comes back to the central truth which states that it is through Him that all things flow – now, and until the end of time. There is no set point in our lives when the truth is better sought out and the light shines brighter. Ecclesiastes 3:11 states that, “He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done beginning to end.” The truth behind God’s existence, power, and might, has, is, and will always be fact. And because of this truth, I am sure that when the icy hands of darkness are around my neck and over my eyes, I worship a God in whom there is only Lux. Christian Olivier is a freshman. He is majoring in History of Science, Medicine, and Public Health.

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THE NICENE CREED We believe in one God, the Father almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.

We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages.

God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father; through him all things were made.

For us men and for our salvation He came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary, and became man.

For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate, He suffered death and was buried, and rose again on the third day in accordance with the Scriptures.

He ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.

He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and His kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, who proceeds from the Father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.

We believe in one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church.

We confess one Baptism for the forgiveness of sins and we look forward to the resurrection of the dead and the life of the world to come.

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Amen.

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