Hell: temporary punishment?

In the wake of the controversy over Love Wins, someone recently suggested to me that perhaps hell is not eternal after all and that those sent there might one day complete their sentences, much as a prisoner serves for a certain period and is then released. It’s an intriguing and hopeful thought, but it raises two difficulties, as I see it.

First, my understanding, following that of the historic church, is that Jesus Christ paid the penalty for sin for all those who are in Christ. Mere human beings could never pay the price for their own transgressions. To suggest that they could — by, in effect, serving time — would seem to imply that there is a second path to salvation other than through the only begotten Son of God. But, as the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, “no mere creature can bear the weight of God’s eternal anger against sin” (Q&A, 14), and “Only those are saved who by true faith are grafted into Christ and accept all his blessings” (Q&A, 20).

Second, would not a non-eternal, temporary hell be tantamount to purgatory? Article XXII of the Thirty-Nine Articles of Religion definitively condemns belief in purgatory, but if one conceives of the possibility of completing one’s sentence in hell, then it seems to me that the distinction between purgatory and hell fades away.

Incidentally, the Rev. Wes Bredenhof has discovered something interesting about the author of the Belgic Confession: Guido De Bres and His Belief in Purgatory.

Why I am not a ‘red-letter Christian’

Having come across the Red Letter Christians blog of Tony Campolo and others, I am reminded again of why I am not a red-letter Christian. There are two basic reasons:

1. It effectively and improperly privileges a canon within the biblical canon, implicitly elevating Jesus’ words above the rest of inspired scripture.

2. As I age my eyes have difficulty reading red letters against a white page. I prefer to read the Bible without straining my vision.

I suppose this makes me a black-letter Christian. So be it. Case closed.

A church in decline

The fading of the mainline protestant churches over the past two generations has not been limited to the United States. North of the border, in the True North Strong and Free, a similar phenomenon has occurred. Canada’s National Post carries this article in its weekend edition: The split in the United Church. One of my Redeemer University colleagues, Dr. Kevin Flatt, is quoted here, as is Michael Van Pelt, head of the Hamilton, Ontario, think tank, Cardus, for whose publication, Comment, I write on occasion.

The United Church of Canada was formed in 1925 with the union of the former Congregationalist, Presbyterian and Methodist churches into a single national body. (A third of the Presbyterian churches, including our family’s congregation, remained out of the union, retaining the name, Presbyterian Church in Canada.) Since its high water mark in the mid-1960s, the United Church has gone into a precipitous decline in membership and attendance. However, the title of the article is not quite accurate: there has been no “split” as such, only a haemorrhage of members away from the United Church.

Incidentally, while we’re on the subject of Flatt, I would strongly recommend his Comment article, Cross-Border Evangelicals: Americans and Canadians, an astute analysis of the differences between evangelicals on each side of the 49th parallel.

Smith takes on 'new universalism'

I have not thus far weighed in on the controversy surrounding the publication of Rob Bell's Love Wins. But I will call attention to an astute analysis of the "new universalism" by Calvin College's James K. A. Smith: Can hope be wrong? On the new universalism. I was especially struck by the following paragraph, addressed to those who persist in believing that "I-can't-imagine-a-God-who-[fill in the blank]" is a persuasive argument:

The "I-can't-imagine" strategy is fundamentally Feuerbachian: it is a hermeneutic of projection which begins from what I can conceive and then projects "upwards," as it were, to a conception of God. While this "imagining" might have absorbed some biblical themes of love and mercy, this absorption seems selective. More importantly, the "I-can't-imagine" argument seems inattentive to how much my imagination is shaped and limited by all kinds of cultural factors and sensibilities--including how I "imagine" the nature of love, etc. The "I-can't-imagine" argument makes man the measure of God, or at least seems to let the limits and constraints of "my" imagination trump the authority of Scripture and interpretation. I take it that discipleship means submitting even my imagination to the discipline of Scripture. (Indeed, could anything be more countercultural right now than Jonathan Edwards' radical theocentrism, with all its attendant scandals for our modern sensibilities?)

He is risen indeed!

Χριστός ανέστη εκ νεκρών,
θανάτω θάνατον πατήσας,
και τοις εν τοις μνήμασι,
ζωὴν χαρισάμενος!

Christ is risen from the dead,
by death trampling down death,
and giving life to those within the grave!

Hearing the Word, seeking justice

Notre Dame’s Calvinist philosopher Alvin Plantinga published an insightful essay more than a dozen years ago: Two (or More) Kinds of Scripture Scholarship, which found its way into his book, Warranted Christian Belief. Here Plantinga distinguishes between two ways of approaching the Bible: (1) Traditional Christian Biblical Commentary (TCBC) and (2) Historical Biblical Criticism (HBC). The former has the following three characteristics:

First, Scripture itself is taken to be a wholly authoritative and trustworthy guide to faith and morals; it is authoritative and trustworthy, because it is a revelation from God, a matter of God speaking to us. . . . Secondly, an assumption of the enterprise is that the principal author of the Bible — the entire Bible — is God himself. . . . Thirdly . . . the fact that the principal author of the Bible is God himself means that one cannot always determine the meaning of a given passage by discovering what the human author had in mind.

HBC differs from TCBC in that the former “is fundamentally an enlightenment project; it is an effort to try to determine from the standpoint of reason alone what the Scriptural teachings are and whether they are true. Thus HBC eschews the authority and guidance of tradition, magisterium, creed, or any kind of ecclesial or ‘external’ epistemic authority.” HBC requires, among other things, that “faith commitments should play no role” and that a hermeneutic of suspicion should govern our reading of the text. We cannot simply affirm that the biblical text is true but must apply empirical scientific methods to discover, if possible, whether, e.g., the picture of Jesus painted in the gospels is historically accurate. This approach is obviously at variance with TCBC, which comes to Scripture believing it is indeed the Word of God and thus a reliable witness to Jesus Christ.

Plantinga is not wholly dismissive of HBC, which he admits has broadened our knowledge of the Bible and especially of the historical contexts in which it was written. However, HBC tends to view the Bible, not as a canonical whole, but as a collection of disparate texts with different human authors and thus conflicting emphases and teachings. Harmonizing these teachings is not the business of the biblical scholar, according to HBC, but to the theologian who is more evidently tethered to the church’s confession. What this means is that the practitioner of HBC “tends to deal especially with questions of composition and authorship, these being the questions most easily addressed by the methods employed.” Furthermore, he at least tacitly excludes the very question of most interest to believing Christians coming to the text, viz., what God is trying to tell us in his Word. There is thus some tension within the academy between the practitioners of biblical scholarship and theology, with the former often believing the latter to be naïvely precritical and thus unscientific.

I myself am neither a biblical scholar nor a theologian. Nevertheless, as a political scientist reading and pondering Plantinga’s essay, I cannot help but observe a similar cleavage within the discipline of political science, viz., that between the empirical political scientist and the political theorist or philosopher. Having taught political science at the undergraduate level for a quarter of a century, I can testify that students take an interest in it when they are either captivated by a vision of justice or scandalized by the reality of injustice. This was my own experience as a student, when I changed my major from music to political science after the Watergate scandal and the Turkish invasion of my father’s native island of Cyprus. Because virtually all my paternal relatives became refugees overnight, I sought desperately to understand why injustice seems to be such a persistent feature of human life. This is what animated my passion for politics.

However, the empirical political scientist would tell us that such concerns as the nature of justice should play no role in political science. Political philosophy, with its ongoing, millennia-old quest to discover the meanings of justice, statesmanship, good citizenship and civic friendship, is a subdiscipline of philosophy, or perhaps even of religion, and not of political science, which must necessarily limit itself to exploring those questions amenable to empirical methods. Political science can treat only political behaviour and must refrain from making normative statements about the good political order or the virtues conducive to it. Processing and analyzing voting statistics is political science. Exploring the relationship between electoral and party systems is political science. Debating the justice of proposed public policies or of a particular approach to the state is definitely not political science.

I have no intrinsic quarrel with either HBC or empirical political science, properly understood. There is much indeed to be said both for studying the Synoptic Problem and for analyzing how, e.g., different sociological groups voted in the 2008 presidential election. Nevertheless I strongly disagree with those who believe that these types of empirical academic pursuits by themselves constitute the disciplines of biblical scholarship and political science respectively. There is little to be said for the assumption that reason functions apart from basic worldview convictions. The belief that Scripture is not much more than a collection of literary texts with no overall meaning or message is itself borne of a conviction that it — or rather, they — are not essentially different from any other texts. The notion that we should bracket our faith commitments in studying the Bible is rooted in a (nonfalsifiable) belief that it is possible for human beings to reason apart from these commitments and to obtain some form of religiously neutral objectivity.

Something similar could be said of empirical political science as well. The claim of those following the behavioural methods is that they are simply observing the facts of political behaviour. Nevertheless they fail to recognize that this very term presupposes general agreement on what is political and what is not. This general agreement implicitly presupposes a normative order in which the distinction between political and nonpolitical makes sense. What is it that makes setting a country’s foreign policy political while a mother reading to her child before bed is nonpolitical? I would suggest that it has something to do with the jural aspect of the former. By its very nature, the state is called to balance legitimate interests within its jurisdictional sphere. It is, of course, all too common for states in the real world to get this balance wrong, sometimes spectacularly so, as in the Soviet Union and Germany between 1933 and 1945. Yet this entails, not an absence of justice as such, but its distortion or miscarriage. Justice, in short, is central to the very definition of politics, which behavioural political scientists cannot adequately grasp with their methods, however useful they might otherwise be.

In the same way, the canonical status of Scripture and its authority are precisely what give this ancient collection of writings scriptural status. The existence of a Society of Biblical Literature already in some fashion presupposes recognition of at least their historical unity, even if not all its members acknowledge the authority of the whole.

If the very things that draw students to biblical scholarship and to the study of politics are excluded from the two disciplines, then something is seriously amiss in the way both are conceptualized by their mainstream practitioners. If so, then our christian universities may be in the best position to bridge the cleavages between biblical studies and theology, on the one hand, and empirical political science and normative political theory, on the other.

Nevertheless, this will come about only if faculty in the relevant departments take the time to become aware of the historical forces – along with their spiritual roots – that have artificially driven apart the two sides of these disciplines. This requires recognition that the academic enterprise, normatively understood, is not only about specializing in a particular field or subfield, but also about seeing clearly – and with great delight – the interconnections among the disciplines and their respective modest places within the coherent whole that is God’s multifaceted creation.

Cyprus and Greece

Cyprus Updates poses an intriguing question to its readers: What would an Enosis referendum results be today [sic]? Those favouring enosis wanted to annex the island to Greece.

In December 1949, the Cypriot Orthodox Church challenged the British colonial government to put the Enosis question to a referendum. As was expected, the colonial government refused, and the Church proceeded to organize its own referendum which would take place in churches and be supervised by priests. The referendum took place on the two consecutive Sundays of January 15 and 22, 1950, with an overwhelming majority 95.7% of the people, including Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, voted in favor of extricating the island from the British Empire and annexing it to the Kingdom of Greece. It should be borne in mind that unlike modern elections and referendums which are decided by secret ballot, the 1950 referendum amounted to a public collection of signatures, not unlike a petition.

If Cyprus had been united with Greece, for ever after Cypriots would be complaining that they were being bled dry by the political élites in distant Athens for the latter's benefit. Cyprus is more prosperous than Greece, which is now on the verge of bankruptcy. Even dedicated enotists would be unhappy with Cyprus being no more than a far-away province of an economic basket case. Cyprus' independence has been a troubled one from the outset, but enosis would have been worse.

More trouble from Qaddafi?

Canada's contrarian historian, Jack Granatstein, asks a troubling question: What happens if Gadhafi survives?

As for Gadhafi, if he survives as now seems likely, we can expect him to pay hard cash to import the arms he needs from countries such as Syria, Pakistan, and North Korea, to resume terrorist operations against western targets, and to kill every one of the rebels he can. (The rebels, a motley crew, will slaughter captured Gadhafi loyalists.) And if the world is distracted by a conflict elsewhere (another Israeli-Hamas-Hezbollah war, for example), Gadhafi will likely send his re-supplied and better trained troops against the pro-democracy enclaves in eastern Libya.

Muammar Qaddafi was a source of trouble for much of the world during the 1980s, as he exported terrorism from his home base of Libya. Over the past two decades, however, he had been conspicuously quiet, minding his own country's business and largely refraining from antagonizing the west. However, if the Libyan leader survives the current civil conflict, will he return to his old ways? If Granatstein is right, this is a definite possibility. However unsavoury a ruler Qaddafi is, the current international effort to oust him could end up backfiring on everyone.

The death of hypocrisy?

Have you ever noticed that accusations of hypocrisy are almost always levelled by those desiring to loosen rather than to tighten standards of behaviour? If all standards were suddenly to evaporate, it would save accusers the trouble of identifying people as hypocrites because there would be no norms to hold them to. Of course it would also deprive them of the pleasure of assuming a position of moral superiority while likely changing many people’s behaviour for the worse. This suggests that, one way or another, too quickly charging others with being hypocrites carries a certain long-term risk for the accuser as well as for the larger society.

Libya and the Dilemmas of Overseas Intervention

There is longstanding disagreement over when, where and whether the United States is justified in intervening in trouble spots overseas. Clearly we cannot police the whole globe, as that would ultimately exhaust our limited resources. Some would prefer that the US withdraw from any and all foreign ventures and focus instead on domestic matters. This policy was followed between the two world wars but failed due to the aggressive ambitions of Nazi Germany and imperial Japan.

Read more here.

Joustra on Canada's defence

Today's Globe and Mail carries an eloquent and cogently argued op-ed piece by a certain Mr. Robert Joustra: The F-35: Not whether to buy it, but why. Here's an excerpt:

Our debate over buying 65 F-35 fighter jets has stalled at hardware, taking a quintessentially Canadian turn in the worst sense: narcissistic, navel-gazing, insecure and bureaucratic. The national debate, both on and off the Hill, has obsessed over technical minutiae. Is the F-35 too slow? Is stealth necessary? Is it expensive or unreliable technology? Should the process have been open to competitive tender?

These are bureaucratic debates for a nation of soulless penny-pinchers, not a deep moral vision for Canada’s role in the world. Debates over tools don’t come before you set the project. Are we building a car or a barn? Then we’ll know whether we need hammers.

If you want to send a message to our country's leaders, by all means do it in Canada's national newspaper, on the off chance that somebody in Ottawa will be in the mood to hear some sensible advice during an election campaign.

Defending Constantine

I first read John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus when I was 20 years old, and at the time I simply took it for granted that he was right that the Roman Emperor Constantine's conversion to Christianity represented the corrupting alliance of the church with the state. Then Peter Leithart wrote Defending Constantine, which my friend and colleague Rob Joustra has reviewed for Comment: The Embarrassment of Power: Does Constantine Need Defending? Take a look and see what you think.

The Politics of the Psalms

Perhaps it has something to do with my first name, but I have always been fascinated by the biblical book of the Psalms. I grew up singing from a hymn book in which the Psalms set to meter were given a prominent place. The liturgical practice of singing the Psalms has ancient roots going back to temple and synagogue worship, finding its way also into Christian churches. It is thus not surprising that, until the end of the 18^th century, the majority of Protestants sang from metrical psalters containing all 150 Psalms. Most Protestants since then have abandoned this practice, but many in the Reformed tradition have held to it, glorifying God, as it is often said, in his own words.

Read more here.

Food prices and global unrest: a vicious cycle

This post in The Mail from Accra, Ghana, carries the following report: "The Global food prices rose for the eighth straight month in February, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) reported today, while also warning that unexpected spikes in oil prices could exacerbate an already precarious situation in food markets."

According to Chuck Colson's latest Breakpoint commentary:

If you ask the average American what lay behind the recent revolts in Tunisia and Egypt, you are likely to hear words like freedom, democracy, and even Facebook and Twitter. A word you probably won’t hear is food. But just as much as social media, what brought people onto the streets of Tunis and Cairo was food: too little of it at too high a price.

This apparently causal relationship between food prices and unrest works both ways. The uprisings in the middle east and north Africa are themselves driving up the price of oil. Gas here in Hamilton is up to $1.22 (CDN) a litre, with the Canadian dollar, which is a petro-dollar, worth slightly more than its US counterpart.

This rise in the price of oil will in turn lead to a further rise in food prices, as the cost of transporting food goes up. We wealthy westerners can generally afford to bear these prices by cutting back our discretionary household spending, but people elsewhere in the world cannot do this as easily. If food prices rise further, we could be in for more political turmoil around the globe.

Can we do anything about it? Colson believes we might transfer valuable agricultural land away from ethanol production to the production of foodstuffs. This could put more food on the market and lower costs for everyone. On the other hand, would a drop in ethanol production lead to more demand for oil, thereby driving up the cost of gasoline at the pump and further increasing transportation costs for food? Either scenario appears to have its downside. Our economists obviously have their work cut out for them.

On Wisconsin: Budget Battles and Adversarial Politics

Just as historic popular uprisings have swept across the Middle East and North Africa, a similar, if less violent, wave of discontent has engulfed the state of Wisconsin, where Republican Governor Scott Walker has moved to rein in public spending by trimming public employee benefits and removing them from the collective bargaining process. Massive protests have been held in the state capital of Madison. The nearby state of Indiana looks set to experience similar turmoil.

Read more here.

Celebrating the Kimyal New Testament

Those of us who have grown up knowing and loving God's word in its plethora of English translations cannot but be moved by the following video. Praise God that the Kimyal people of West Papua at last have the complete New Testament in their own language. We share in their joy.

Kimyal New Testament launch in Indonesia
from United Bible Societies on Vimeo.

Senate reform . . . again?

Canadians have argued about our Parliament's upper chamber for nearly as long as it has existed. What place does an unelected Senate have in a constitutional democracy? New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton has made his own proposal: Layton proposes referendum on Senate. He wants to see it abolished. However, Lorne Gunter strongly disagrees: Disbanding the Senate would outrage the west. Canada is nearly unique amongst the world's federal systems in lacking an upper chamber effectively representing its component members, which makes our system rather unbalanced. By contrast, the United States Senate represents the individual states by giving each of them two members. The Australian Senate give each of the 6 states 12 members serving six-year terms.

However, if we were to abolish our Senate, our system would be even more unbalanced than it is at present. Over the decades our governments have attempted to compensate for this flaw by holding first ministers conferences, which are typically held annually but whose frequency has declined over the past ten years. Due to this lack of frequency and other factors, the first ministers conference has not adequately filled the gap in our constitutional framework. Rather than abolish the Senate, which would only exacerbate the historic tensions between central Canada and the rest of the country, we would do better to reform the Senate to make it more genuinely representative, especially of those living outside Ontario and Québec.

Setback in Pakistan for religious freedom

This is a tragic development in a context already fraught with difficulties for believers in this troubled south Asian country: Pakistan's only Christian cabinet member assassinated. Last December our family met Shahbaz Bhatti's brother Peter and a colleague at a Presbyterian-sponsored breakfast here in Hamilton. They are leaders of a group called International Christian Voice, which "recognizes the suffering of Christians and other religious minorities of Pakistan and is dedicated to being the voice of the oppressed and work for their basic human rights which are suppressed." Please pray for our brothers and sisters in Pakistan and support the efforts of International Christian Voice to publicize their plight.

From Fort Lauderdale to the Isle of Lewis: Singing God’s praises

There would seem to be no obvious connection between Missionary Baptists in Florida and Psalm-singers in the Western Isles of Scotland. But hear for yourselves the striking similarities between the way two communities of Christians worship God.

Israel and the new Middle East

Writing for the National Post, veteran Canadian journalist Robert Fulford has noticed something interesting about the uprisings sweeping the Arab world: "In this widespread Arab movement, the most surprising role has been played by Israel, which has played no role at all. That’s the reverse of what the world media, the academics and the diplomats have taught us to anticipate." Time will tell whether this conspicuous lack of a role for the Jewish state is of broad significance for the region.