Podcast Episode 1: What is Faith? (Machen)

The first episode of TheSanctifiedMind podcast can be listened to here as well as a variety of other platforms. In it, myself and two friends discuss "What is Faith" by J. Gresham Machen.

For the first time recording ourselves having a discussion, I think it went well. There was audio drift at some points, and I think we all have a whole new appreciation for the work that has to be put in to various ministries that do this full time. But I consider it a good and enjoyable work in progress that I'm really looking forward to continuing.

Our next episode will be posted by the first of the new year and will cover Chris Strevel's "The Lord of Glory," which you can find on the home page if you would like to follow along or have questions we could put up for discussion.

The Words of the Wise

To conclude his book, the author of Ecclesiastes self-evaluated himself to be wise, having uprightly taught, weighed, studied, arranged, and written delightful words of truth that he then connects to practical obligations:

· The words of the wise are like goads. (truth)

· The collected sayings are like nails firmly fixed. (truth)

· One Shepherd gives these words and/or collected sayings. (truth)

     My son, beware of anything beyond these. (obligation)

· Of making many books, there is no end. (truth)

· Much study is a weariness of the flesh. (truth)

· This is the end of the matter. (truth)

     Fear God and keep his commandments. (obligation)

        This is the whole duty of man. (truth)

        For God will bring every deed into judgment, with every secret thing, whether good or evil. (truth)

The author analogizes wise words to goads, sharp points used to prod things such as cattle. Wise words are truths that spur those who listen to them into action. In time, these truths fix in listeners’ minds just as the truths of them are firmly fixed in the mind of the Shepherd who is ultimately responsible for revealing them.

One action the author expects of his listeners is to heed his following advice: “beware of anything beyond these [wise words given by the Shepherd].” There are endless books that could weary one who writes, reads, or studies too much of them. Whereas wise words can refresh a person, prolonged focus on unwise words can depress him. Whether one writes, reads, or studies, then, he should constantly keep in mind wise words given by the Shepherd.

To summarize his life’s investigations, the author states man’s sole duties as encompassed by fearing God and keeping His commandments. The practical reason for this conclusion is he believed God would bring every deed into judgment. Fear of God and His judgment is wise in that it encourages men to keep His commands.

The author warns man against anything beyond the words of the Shepherd yet also expresses that man’s duty is to fear God and keep His commandments. Clearly, then, the Shepherd must Himself be God. As the author is the son of David (Ecclesiastes 1:1), it is possible he drew inspiration from David himself in describing God as a Shepherd (Psalm 23).

This same author of Ecclesiastes may also have been the Solomon who opened his book of Proverbs in the same way as the former opened his book: each described himself as the son of David. The author of Ecclesiastes describes from what the fear of God comes: His enduring work (Ecclesiastes 3:14). Correspondingly, the author of Proverbs describes to what the fear of God leads: refreshment (Proverbs 3:8), confidence and life (14:26-27), riches and honor (22:4), moral character (16:6), and the beginning of knowledge (1:7) and wisdom (9:10). For both authors, understanding the fear of God and the treasuring of His commandments comes from receiving the wise words of Him and His messengers (Ecclesiastes 12:11-12; Proverbs 2:1-6). Both books and author[s] agree there is one ultimate source, God, from whom man receives any wisdom, so it is to His words we must listen if we are to be and live wisely. Two reactions to this are possible.

Firstly, for those who do not believe in God or do not believe these authors were wise, it may be understandable how they could find it puzzling that fear could lead to wisdom, knowledge, refreshment, confidence, life, riches, or honor. Further, perhaps fear of worldly punishment prevents worldly ideas of wrongdoing. In this case, however, it is also uncertain whether having right behaviors with dubious motivations amounts to improvement in moral character. Regardless, where such a person could think wisdom, knowledge, refreshment, et al. otherwise comes from, if not God, is questionable.

Secondly, for those who do believe these authors were wise and, therefore, do believe in God, they must think God will justly judge us all. Any reader who accepts this has obvious reason to be fearful of this God and try to live a life of obedience. As Jesus put it, “fear him who, after he has killed, has authority to cast into hell” (Luke 12:5). This too is God’s enduring work, and why fear of God would stem from facts such as these is, in this case, understandable.

Yet there is more to God’s enduring works than that. Fear of divine punishment is not something that should necessarily persist. Just as Solomon [and the author of Ecclesiastes] built on the word of God given to ancestors like David, future messengers of God built on divine revelation: “there is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love” (1 John 4:18). Certainly, fear does have to do with punishment. To the extent sinners will be justly punished by God, it can awaken people into the fearful awareness of the consequences for disobedience. This is a fruitful understanding that leads to knowledge and wisdom.

However, the reality and fearfulness of God’s justice is accompanied by His love for those who listen to His word. Realization of the need to obey God comes too late for sinners to do anything about their past sins. Resultant fear would lead to hopelessness rather than confidence, despair rather than refreshment, disgrace rather than honor, death rather than life… were it not for divine love.

Whereas the fear of God is the beginning of knowledge and wisdom, Paul, another messenger of God, wrote, “Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to everyone who believes” (Romans 10:4), and in Him “are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Colossians 2:3). It is Christ and His loving work for His people communicated in God’s word that men must believe to be saved, confident, refreshed, and alive. He is our Shepherd, our Savior, and He told His people how they would recognize His words:

I am the good shepherd. I know my own and my own know me, just as the Father knows me and I know the Father; and I lay down my life for the sheep. And I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them also, and they will listen to my voice. So there will be one flock, one shepherd…you do not believe because you are not among my sheep. My sheep hear my voice, and I know them, and they follow me. I give them eternal life, and they will never perish, and no one will snatch them out of my hand. (John 10:14-15, 26-28)

Many men have written many words, made many speeches, and influenced many lives. Philosophers, scientists, historians, linguists, sociologists, doctors, politicians, psychologists, clergymen… have lived and died, their work eventually fading. Even as you read this, be constantly mindful of in whose words and work you look to find enduring wisdom. Many men can speak wise words, but these words come from one Shepherd. He is our God. There can be no clearer foundation for believing His words as Creator and Redeemer than the fact they are His words, and there can be no better foundation for loving others than to reflect His love for us:

We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error. Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God, and whoever loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, because God is love. In this the love of God was made manifest among us, that God sent his only Son into the world, so that we might live through him. In this is love, not that we have loved God but that he loved us and sent his Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Beloved, if God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. (1 John 4:6-11)

The Sanctified Mind

I will be joining two friends I have known (and put up with!) for half of my life to begin a monthly podcast in December. The website for this podcast is a work in progress but can be found here. The podcast itself will involve a discussion of a book one of us has chosen, and articles will be coming shortly as well.

For anyone interested in following along, the first book we will talk about will be Machen's "What is Faith?"

Rhetorical criticism

Recently, Steve Matthews wrote a series of articles on his time at Knox Seminary (link), a follow-up to his 2008 book, "Imagining a Vain Thing." The subject of his book is a controversy surrounding then professor Warren Gage. I've recently been reading through Warren Gage's works which I find, on the whole, to be quite insightful. I can see some of the points Matthews makes in his criticisms here and elsewhere (link), but I also think he is, for whatever reason, harsh in his conclusions. Mainly, while Matthews does not believe that Gage is a Christian, from what I have read, Gage consistently aims to defend Reformed soteriology.

What I do want to do in this post is note a potentially useful apologetic method when arguing about textual variants and canonicity. Gage refers to this method as "rhetorical criticism." Rhetorical criticism involves considering structural or thematic issues within a text when attempting to argue for or against given variants. In this post, I'll just be dealing with the former. It is for this reason I bring up the aforementioned criticisms by Matthews. Consider one of Matthews' remarks:

...even if Gage were to establish his case for the existence of chiastic structure in John and Revelation and for intertextuality between these two books, precisely no logically valid doctrinal conclusions could be drawn from it. One can imagine and intuit anything he wants from a literary pattern. If Gage claims to divine a particular meaning from the use of chiastic structure in the Biblical text, a thousand others can draw a thousand different conclusions, and all of them will be just as legitimate as those intuited by Gage. For that reason, literary patterns do not and cannot furnish us with knowledge... nothing valid can be inferred from literary patterns... (link)

Maybe Matthews did not intend his statements to be read this way, but if he did, a blanket statement to the effect that a structure or order embedded in a book or books isn't meaningful or useful strikes me as narrow-minded. It's also quite interesting when compared with statements made by other TrinityFoundation authors about the meaningfulness or usefulness of logical principles being embedded throughout Scripture. Although it's possible Matthews would not agree with these authors, I doubt it, especially given that Matthews seems to contradict himself when he later writes, "chiastic structure is simply a technique ancient authors used to organize their material." I could be wrong about what Matthews is getting at in his article and book, but is that not an inference he thinks would be valid?

In any case, at the very least, surely Christians ought to at least be able to appreciate the beauty in a design or pattern. Noting a particular example of a pattern and being a bit awe-struck isn't an inappropriate reaction. Frankly, the patterns Gage recognizes have the potential to be just as convicting as, say, Clark's ability to reduce non-Christian views to absurdity. Both are plausible in their intention to provide a gracious occasion for belief in redemptive, revealed truths.

Structural order in particular has the plausible effect of drawing one's attention in a certain way. For instance, when I see the chiastic structure inherent in the Flood narrative (link), my attention is drawn to the truth that God remembered Noah and the creatures in the ark. That's the pivot point of the specified structure. Is that an invalid inference? No. There is a structure. The structure "ascends" to a certain point and, upon reaching that point, it correspondingly "descends." Is this to say that the pivot point is any more true than the bookends of it? Of course not. That was never in question. But a literary as well as logical structure underlies the narrative.

Yet another consideration is that a belief needn't be validly derived in order to be useful - indeed, to even be known, as in the case of foundational or externally justified beliefs. Anyone who agrees with Clark's philosophy of science can at least agree with the first half of the above. If I think a baseball is flying towards my face, I'm not going to take my time to reason out whether or not I should duck or block it with my glove. I'm going to do one or the other! I didn't need to carefully lay out a number of premises in order for my quickly formed belief that "I really, really would prefer to duck or block this baseball to avoid being hit in the face" to be highly useful towards a self-preserving course of action.

Now, keeping these and preliminary points in my post on textual criticism in mind (link), let's turn to consideration of how rhetorical criticism in the form of a biblical text's structure might be able to provide a Christian apologist with an alternative avenue by which he can argue for or against certain textual variants. A case study can be found in Gage's book, "A Literary Guide to the Life of Christ in Matthew, Mark, and Luke-Acts," in which Gage argues that the "longer" ending of Mark is canonically authentic.

To begin, I don't see anything in Mark 16:9-20 which is logically incoherent with the rest of the canon of special divine revelation. So it passes the " logical coherence test," if you can call it that (since there is no live possibility of divine revelation actually failing any rigid "test" like that). Yet there seemingly are no preconditions for knowledge given in Mark 16:9-20 which are not given elsewhere, so from an apologetic standpoint, both positions are defensible in that respect.

Next, Gage defines what he calls "deltaforms" throughout Mark. Basically, these are pivot points in Mark around which a truth is exemplified or expounded in different contexts roughly equidistant from the pivot point. It's very complex and very beautiful. I will give a short example to clarify what he means:

Mark 1:24 I (the demon) know who You are, the Holy One of God!
Mark 8:27 He asked His disciples, "Whom do men say that I am?"
Mark 14:61 Again the high priest asked Him, "Are You the Christ, the Son of the Blessed?"

The pivot point is the middle verse, both other verses being 288 verses away from it. The bookends both inform or relate to the pivot point. Another example:

Mark 1:10-11 And immediately as He came up out of the water, the heavens were rent, and the Spirit descended upon Him like a dove. And there was a voice from heaven, ‘You are My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased'
Mark 9:7 And there was a cloud that overshadowed them: and a voice came out of the cloud, saying, ‘This is My beloved Son. Hear Him!’
Mark 15:37-39 And Jesus cried out with a loud voice, and gave up the spirit. And the veil of the temple was rent in two from top to bottom. And the centurion … said, ‘Truly this Man was the Son of God’

Approximately 320 verses from the pivot point (Mark 9:7), in which the Father's voice expresses that Christ is His Son, we find bookends. These bookends express the same truth, a truth also expressed by voices which speak that Jesus is the Son whose baptism rent heaven and whose baptism-crucifixion rent the temple veil.

The structural argument for the "longer" ending of Mark, then, is that their are pivot verses or deltaforms which extend to this longer ending. We can suspect that there is such a pivot or deltaform when we see textual echoes. Mark 16:17-18 echoes Mark 6:13-14. Mark 11:15 lies roughly between those verses:

Mark 6:13-14 And they were casting out many demons and were anointing with oil many sick and healing them. And King Herod heard of it, for His name had become well known
Mark 11:15 And they came to Jerusalem. And he entered the temple and began to cast out those who were buying and selling in the temple, and overturned the tables of the moneychangers and seats of those who were selling doves
Mark 16:17-18 [I]n My name they will cast out demons … they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover

Demons are cast out and the sick are healed by Jesus' name in both the front and back side bookend passages. Gage notes that in driving out the moneychangers at the pivot point, Jesus also "performed a sort of exorcism on the temple." He further notes that Mark 11:15 can function as a pivot point for other "bookend" passages in Mark, like 6:12 and 16:20, 10:17-18 and 12:32, and a dozen or so others.

Gage finishes his structural discussion by observing "23 separate deltaform structures that include correspondences extending into the longer Markan ending." In other words, sections in the longer ending of Mark are at least 23 times anchored to earlier bookend passages by means of a pivot point, as in the above examples. In fact, some of these sections in the longer ending are found to be "back" side bookends for more than one pivot point in Mark, meaning that these sections are anchored to multiple earlier, "front" side bookend passages, depending upon which pivot point one wishes to consider.

Now, given this information, I can anticipate a few replies. Matthews or others could argue that while a logical structure must necessarily be embedded in the text of Scripture in order for it to qualify as divine revelation, an ordered structure of a different variety - chiastic, deltaformic, etc. - is not. Therefore, an argument might be given that Scripture does not explicitly identify any such order of the latter variety, so they cannot be known.

But I believe would miss the point. Yes, for all we know, God could have revealed Himself in any number of ways. But this would equally apply to the actual content of divine revelation as well as its structure. To be saved, to know anything, it is not necessary that I know Jesus wept and was deeply moved by Lazarus' death. Yet because this contingent truth has been revealed, I can know it. Likewise, while an ordered structure of a text may not be necessary for me to be saved or know anything, if there is a structure, I can know it. Contingent divine revelation is just as knowable as necessary divine revelation; anything being divinely revealed is sufficient for us to know it.

The other reply I can anticipate is that one could argue that just because an ordered structure can appear to extend to the longer ending of Mark, such does not prove that the longer ending of Mark is divinely revealed. While true, this would also miss the point. As I mentioned in a post on textual criticism (link):

...while I think the goal of the textual critic shouldn't be to collect texts, compare and contrast them, and use that as an evidentiary basis to infer or reason to what has been specially divinely revealed, there certainly would be use in disposing ourselves and others to a causal process which tracks truth about what has been specially divinely revealed and codified in physical media - in this case, texts. So one function of textual criticism could lie in its capability to cause externalist knowledge of special divine revelation. In any case, there is certainly some apologetic role textual criticism may play within one's worldview, so long as it is remembered that apologetics is subservient to and in fact derives from one's epistemology.

True, rhetorical criticism cannot prove something has been divinely revealed. Then again, nothing can prove that, so such a criticism is fundamentally flawed and fails to acknowledge the practical means and purpose of apologetics.