Book Review: The Word of God and the Mind of Man (Nash)

Nash, Ronald.  The Word of God and the Mind of Man. Zondervan: 1982. Reprint by Presbyterian and Reformed.

The possibility of our having cognitive knowledge about God was denied on three grounds:  God is too transcendent; 2) human knowledge is de jure problematic; 3) human language was de jure problematic.

Question of the book: Can the human logos know the Logos of God (Nash 14)?

Hume’s Gap: our pivotal beliefs must rest on something besides knowledge.

Kant’s wall: there is a wall between the world as it is and the sense world.

For the Neo-Orthodox, revelation is always an event.  It is never cognitive knowledge about God.

Defense of Propositional Revelation

(A)  All S is P                                             (E) No  S is P

(I)  Some S is P                                         (O) Some S is not P.

(A) All revelation is propositional       (E) No revelation is propositional

(I) Some revelation is propositional    (O) Some rev. Is not propositional

We can rule out O as irrelevant to the discussion.  The Neo-Orthodox thinks that all evangelicals hold to A, but that’s false.  We hold to I.  Further, holding to I doesn’t entail the claim that all revelation is propositional.

In short God reveals knowledge to his creation and some of this knowledge about himself is contained in the form of propositions (45). And even if one wants to claim that revelation is personal, saving faith still presupposes saving faith about something.

The Christian Logos

This is the heart of Nash’s project. Key idea: “Jesus Christ, the eternal Logos of god, mediates all divine revelation and grounds the correspondence between the divine and human minds” (59).

The Christian Rationalism of St Augustine

Augustine has some sort of interplay between the uncreated Light of God and the mutable light of the human mind (81). How can the human mind understand the eternal Forms within God’s mind?  Nash suggests three ways:

(1) The human intellect is both passive and active with respect to the forms (85). It is passive, pace Kant, in that it doesn’t create the conditions for knowledge. It is active in the sense that it judges and receives.

(2) The forms are and are not separate from the divine mind.

(3) The human mind is and is not a light that makes knowledge possible.

While Nash had a fine discussion on how Augustine modified Plato’s essentialism, and I don’t necessarily disagree, the chapter just feels “short.” I know he wrote a book on the topic and it is worth pursuing there.

In Defense of Logic

When Nash wrote this book, the Dooyeweerdian school in Toronto was a force to be reckoned with (one sees something similar in John Frame’s works).  Nash gives a fine rebuttal to the Dooyeweerdians: if human reason is valid only one one side of the cosmonomic boundary, “then any inference that God is transcendent must be an illegitimate application of human reason” (99). In other words, if God is transcendent, you are in error for saying he is transcendent!

Conclusion

The Logos of God has created the logos of the human mind in such a way that that it can receive cognitive, propositional knowledge about a transcendent God.

 

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Is the Holy Spirit a product?

I don’t want to get into Filioquist metaphysics.  Confessionally, I am a Protestant and that means I am in the Filioque tradition.  So let’s get this out of the way up front:  do I hold to the Filioque?  I think later Protestant thinkers, in terms of seeing it in Speech-Act format, perhaps have the resources to constructively engage this debate.  But if we are asking do I hold to the Filioque in terms of Augustine, Thomas, and the 4th Lateran Council, the answer is absolutely not.  It is dialectics.

I want to thank Jay Dyer for doing the leg work on this.  Here is the problem: if you say that the Holy Spirit is from the Father’s (and Son’s) will, you are an Arian. Or so St Athanasius says:

Hence the Son, not being (for He existed at the will of the Father), is God Only-begotten , and He is alien from either. Wisdom existed as Wisdom by the will of the Wise God. (De Synodis).

That’s straightfoward enough.  Arian theology says that the Son is a product of the Father’s will (and presumably, the Holy Spirit is a product of the Son’s).    But here is what Western theology states:

Ludwig Ott: “The Holy Ghost proceeds from the will or the mutual love of the Father and Son.” (Sent. certa.). 

Augustine:  “But if any person in the Trinity is also to be specially called the will of God, this name, like love, is better suited to the Holy Spirit; for what else is love, except will?” (De Trinitate, Schaff edition, p.234).

Here a person of the Trinity is identified with the operation or attribute of God.  The Filioquist can get out of this by saying Augustine is saying that the Holy Spirit *is* (=?) the will of the Father, not a product of the will of the Father.   True, that is a different claim.  But if will is a faculty (or operation or function) of essence, then the Holy Spirit is an operation of the essence–and now we are right back at saying he is a product of the essence.

We Believe in One God (Ancient Christian Doctrines)

Bray, Gerald. ed. We Believe in One God (Ancient Christian Doctrines). Intervarsity Press, 2009.

I think I have found the best primary source intro to the Fathers. The only drawback is the somewhat steep price. Gerald Bray (in this volume) gives a running commentary on the Nicene Creed using only the writings of the Fathers. He examines each clause of the Creed up to “things visible and invisible.” He alerts us to the hermeneutical sensitivities of the Fathers while pointing to areas where they were either lacking or refused to pursue the logical development. For example, the Fathers, unlike moderns today, be they conservative or liberal, were very interested in the role of Angels and demons. Their cosmology, untainted by post-Kantian gnosticism, allowed for such a role. Further, the fathers did not develop the doctrine of God’s foreknowledge and predestination in any real sense. Augustine did the most.

My main problem with the book is the lack of Maximus the Confessor. In this review I will post an extended outline. I am doing that because the reader needs to see the logical and narratival development of the Fathers’ use of the Creed (or pre-creedal formulae). Finally, the reader should note that the Fathers had values that we do not necessarily pursue today, such as apostolic succession. But it should also be noted that the situation then is different than now.

Bray begins each section with a brief contextual introduction, then summarizes roughly each Father, and then gives a litany of Patristic quotations. It is truly grand.

Movement of the Creed

We believe (which covers the gamut from knowledge of God, Scripture as the basis of knowledge [Clement Strom. 7.16], to the canon of Scripture, to the interpretation of Scripture.

Apostolic Tradition:

• “found in the Scriptures” (Irenaeus Adv. Haer. 3.5.1) and passed down by bishops.
• “Unwritten traditions.” Some were passed down, like the sign of the cross (Basil, On The Holy Spirit, 27.66).

In One God.

1. Who God Is.
   1. God’s unbegottenness is not the same as his essence (Basil 39).
   2. God is one in nature, not in number. My guess is that Basil says this because number implies distinction (Letter 8.2).
   3. Basil distinguishes between God’s energies and his essence (Letter 234).
   4. Yet Augustine says God’s being and his attributes are the same (“In God to be is the same as to be strong/just/wise; Trinity 6.4.6).
   5. God is not a substance but an essence. Substances subsist. This would mean God subsists in Goodness, rather than is goodness itself (7.5.10).
2. The Unity of God’s Being
   1. God’s unity is beyond essence (Ps. Dionys. Divine Names 2.4).
3. The Freedom of God
   1. God knows future events (Iren. Adv. Haer. 4.21.2).
4. The Divine Will
5. God’s Attributes
   1. God is above both space and time (Clement. Strom. 2.2

1. Father-Son relationship
   1. Athanasius: the Son is in the Father because his whole being is proper to the Father’s essence (Contra Ar. 3.23.3).
   2. Cyril of Alexandria: Christ is eternal because the Father is not mind-less.
2. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit
   1. Ephrem: affirms the Filioque (Hymn on the Dead and the Trinity). Father = Mind; Son = Word; Spirit = voice.
   2. Basil: Community of essence (Letter 38.4). Identity of operation proves they have the same nature (Letter 189.7).
   3. Basil: ousia = general; hypostasis = particular. The Godhead is common, the hypostatic characteristics are particular (Letter 236.6).
   4. Basil: True knowledge of God moves from the Spirit through the Son to the Father (Holy Spirit 18.47).
   5. Hilary: Difference between beginning and birth. A thing that begins to exist comes from nothing. A thing that is begotten comes from the same nature (De Trin. 7.14).
   6. Augustine: the substance of God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (De Trin. 3.11.21).
   7. Augustine: Person is a convenient description. We use the term “person” because we have no other way of describing them (De Trin.7.4.8).
      8. Cyril of Alexandria: the nature is modulated through the properties of the hypostases. In each person the entire nature is understood along with its hypostatic property (Dialogue on the Trinity 7).

The Almighty

1. Augustine: “Almighty” means God can do what he wills (City of God, 5.10.1).

Maker

Heaven and earth

1. Cyril of Alexandria: No Limits to God. “There is no place that holds divinity, yet it is absent from nothing at all, for it fills all things, goes through all things, is beyond all things and yet within all things” (Commentary on John 11.9).
2. John of Damascus: God is the Cause of all, the essence of all that have essence (Orthodox Faith 1.12)./
3. Space and Time:
   1. God’s works are external, unlike the begetting of His Son, which is internal to his being (Athanasius Contra Ar. 1.29).

Of all that is, Seen

1. Ephrem the Syrian: Threefold nature of Adam’s creation.
   1. Eve took Adam’s body, but not his soul (Comm. on Genesis 1-2).
2. Augustine’s trichotomism: body, soul, and spirit (On Faith and the Creed 10.23).
3. Cyril of Alexandria: The soul did not exist before the body (Comm. on John 1.9).

And Unseen

1. Angels
   1. Shepherd of Hermas: Angel of punishment belongs in the class of righteous angels.
   2. Clement of Alexandria: Spiritual people pray with angels (Strom. 7.12).
   3. Hilary of Poitiers: Angels intercede for us (Homily on the Psalms 129 (130)).
   4. Gregory the Great: Nine different orders of angels: angels, archangels, rulers, powers, principalities, dominions, thrones, cherubim, and seraphim (Forty Gospel Homilies 2.34.7).
2. Nephilim:
   1. Athenagoras–some angels fell into sexual lust. Their offspring were the Giants (Plea Regarding Christians 24).
   2. Tertullian: sometimes angels assume corporeal form, as when the men of Sodom sought them (On the Flesh of Christ 3).
   3. Yet Chrysostom says the angels cannot have sexual relations (Homilies on Genesis 22.2).
   4. On the other hand, John Cassian says some angels have their own type of body (Conferences 7.13).
3. Guardian Angels
   1. Shepherd of Hermas: each person has two angels, one evil and one good (Mandate 2.6.2).
   2. Origen: churches, apostles, and individuals each have angels (On First Principles 1.8.1). Nations also have their own angels (cf. Greece and Persia in Daniel; Tyre in Ezekiel; On First Principles 3.3.2).
   3. Jerome: each person has a guardian angel from the moment of birth (Commentary on Matthew 3.18.10).
   4. Theodoret of Cyr: Individuals have angels; nations have archangels (Comm. Daniel 10.13).
4. Demons
   1. Exorcism still takes place today–Theophilus of Antioch (To Autoclys 2.8).
   2. Fallen angels invented magic and astrology (Tertullian).
   3. Demons only harm those who fear them: Lactantius, Institutes 2.16.

Self-Love and Augustine: Analytical Outline

This is an outline of Oliver O’Donovan’s The Problem of Self-Love in St Augustine.
Thomas Aquinas identified three different froms of self-love: friendly, hostile, neutral.

1. Augustine’s own use of it identifies with the eudaimonist tradition (O’Donovan 2).
1. Four Aspects of Love
   1. Dilectio and caritas are words better-suited than amor.
      1. There is no caritas about evil things; only cupiditas.
   2. The loving subject stands in a complex relation to the reality he confronts.
      1. “Order” is a teleological notion.
      2. The subject discovers this order.
   3. The final good.
      1. Augustine initially thought this meant happiness.
      2. The supreme Good can’t be below or equal to man; it is above him.
      3. Using language like finis bonum introduces a positivist note (17).
   4. Cosmic love
      1. Metaphysical/ethical realism.
      2. The love of God is a metaphysical movement of the human will towards its final cause.
         1. But this doesn’t really account for deviations.
         2. Augustine then said that the movement of each thing is “proper” in that it occurs without any exterior force as an intervening cause.
      3. Augustine’s “Neo-Platonism.”
         1. The good of each degree is identified with the degree above it.
         2. Yet Augustine the metaphysician had to admit that only one object of love was permissible.
   5. Positive Love
      1. For the early Augustine “use” was opposite of love.
      2. Distinction between things and signs
         1. Things are subdivided
            1. Objects of enjoyment: you cleave to something for its own sake.
            2. Objects of use: not all use of temporal things is love.
      3. This is classical eudaimonism: the end is something one posits (28).
   6. Rational Love
      1. Love is estimation, appreciation, approval, not appetite or movement.
      2. The lover’s response to the object of his admiration is dilectatio.
         1. The basis of this delight is rational.
         2. Love’s order is given by its comprehending conformity to the order of reality.

 

• Self-Love and the Love of God

 

1. The pyramidal ordo amoris supposes that every subordinate good derives its value from its final orientation to God.
2. Knowledge: We require God’s merciful self-communication
   1. The human mind
      1. We also need subjective criteria: the mind loves itself.

 

• Self-Love and Self-Knowledge

 

1. Love follows knowledge.
2. Matter and Mind
   1. To be in matter is to be in space.
   2. The intelligible realm is “in itself.”
3. Soul and Presence
   1. Self-presence: the soul detached from the world of matter
   2. Distance-from-self: the soul in matter.
   3. Augustine identifies the inner self with conscience (71).
4. There is a gulf between self-knowledge and knowledge of God.
5. Commentary on De Trinitate
   1. First three-fold division
   2. Amans, amata, amor
      1. This was the Trinity of external love.
      2. The subject-object-copula only yielded two terms.
      3. New triad can yield three: mens, notitia, amor.
   3. Memoria, intelligentia, voluntas

 

• The Primal Destruction

 

1. Self-love is to reject the good common to all, God himself, in favor of some limited personal good.
2. Platonic echoes: Augustine sees the soul of man occupied in the middle place of the universe.
   1. We must view the soul as expanding (reaching towards God) and contracting (sin).
3. Your private interests should not clash with another’s, for the only true interests have to be communal because the only true goodness was God, who gives himself freely to all (103).
   1. Neglecting the common good is neglecting the transcendent good common to all.

 

• Suum has become an ontological category (104).

 

Thesis: Self-love is notorious to define, be it pagan or Christian.  And it isn’t always clear what Augustine means by it.  O’Donovan, however, does point the way through the morass and gives us something like the following: Augustine takes classical eudaimonianism and gives a “communal” and eschatological cast to it:  self-love finds its true expression in love to God, which orders my love to others (138).

O’Donovan ends with an outstanding presentation of Christian Eudaimonism.  Such a view will have to take a positivist view of the finis bonum.

But in some ways more important than the above is O’Donovan’s wise, judicious handling of the history of ethics in the ancient world.  Among other things, he gives us an outstanding commentary on the latter half of De Trinitate.

Rejoinder to Goldberg/National Review

I normally despise anything National Review writes, but every now and then they can be very helpful even if very wrong.  In “Denationalizing Politics” Jonah Goldberg notes,

Donald Trump almost never uses the language of traditional American conservatism, with its emphasis on classically liberal notions of limited government, constitutionalism, individualism, and free trade.

Well, yes. Though given National Review’s support for neocon wars, one wonders how committed to constitutionalism they are.

Still, these visions leave millions of traditional conservatives and committed libertarians without a natural home in either major political party

Welcome to my world for the past two decades. Not fun, is it?  

No one simply lives in the United States of America. We live in Peoria, Harlem, and Seattle. The virtues built close to home, Levin argues, are those that make us good citizens and ultimately draw us together.

This is almost true.  I like the “go local” part of it.  The problem is that the United States as a singular entity was never supposed to exist.  We are supposed to be a collection of federal republics.

What would be so terrible about letting diverse communities decide how they want to live and spend their tax dollars?

Didn’t you guys call for the mass suicide of white communities?

As a whole much of Goldberg’s post sounds like something I would write.  The problem is the neocon agenda.  How can we empower local communities (“not cede power to Washington”) when the federal government expanded under his hero George W. Bush?

But isn’t “nationalism” dangerous?  Depends on what you mean by that term.  I think “nationalism” as used today is an empty term that serves only to link the enemy with Hitler. Of course, those who studied philosophical romanticism and the development of cultural cohesion know that no proponent uses the term like that.  

So what is nationalism?  Goldberg doesn’t actually define it but I think he means something like state centralization of power at the expense of local and international communities.  In doing so he makes a classic error in defining the state in modern, post-Enlightenment terms as some sort of bureaucratic apparatus. Goldberg sees the state as synonymous with the nation. Earlier Romantics (and the middle ages) did not use such a definition.  “Nation” for them was the cohesion of a number of unifying factors: culture, religion, language. Oh yeah, see Augustine’s City of God 19.24-26, “common bonds of love.”  State as a modern bureaucratic invention did not happen until much later.

Thus, we can define nationalism–no doubt as Herder defined it–as promoting the cultural cohesion of different groups who are defined and bound together by their shared objects of love.  Far from being “xenophobic” or “wacist,” this is the most loving and culturally enriching thing one can do.

Tell me what is better:  Ethiopian Orthodox art or some watered down white-boy band pop music?  Tell me what is better: the mosque at Timbuktu or Bauhaus architecture?  Tell me what is better: the Tao te Ching or 50 Shades of Grey?

I wonder if the loss of a culture is the reason for much of the mental illness in America today.

But moving on:  without nationalism and a strong identity, we are simply Lockean atoms bouncing in the Void.  Uprooted communities who live in fear and angst will not be able to stop the Internal Bankster Regime.

 

Organic Communities

I have several goals in this post:

1. Rebut extreme racism
2. Rebut multiculturalism
3. Show that the promoters of (2) secretly believe in (1).
4. Point towards how all races and communities can flourish

What does the word racism mean?  Who invented it?  Are you scared when a Marxist calls you a racist?

Don’t lie.

I also want to mention the quasi-irrational fear that some “Trad Ox” have at being labeled “phyletist” or “racist.” Guys, you will not win an argument against Cultural Marxists. Own up to the term.

Let’s begin with a discussion of race, per Starbucks and Drug Lord Eric Holder. Multiculturalists will say “There is no such thing as race.”  If that’s true, then how can we have a discussion on race?  It’s like discussing unicorns.  Interesting, no doubt, but utterly pointless.

However, I don’t think race is a good lowest common denominator for how a community should be organized.  I was thinking last night, “I have far more in common with a middle class or rural black man than I do with a LGBTYQ university professor in New England.  Whom would I rather have as a neighbor?”   It’s kind of a self-explanatory question.  

Therefore, I reject the idea of one-race-only communities.   I reject it because it fails on the above two counts.

Multiculturalism is trickier.  Just what does one mean by the word?  It’s bandied about but rarely defined.  And some well-meaning Christians, armed with facile interpretations of Galatians 3:28, support multiculturalism.  Again what does it mean?

Df. (1) = different ethnic groups can live in the same geographic locale

Is that all that multiculturalism means?  If so, then the militantly nationalist Byzantine Empire is multicultural.   Before we begin, let’s look at a statement from St Augustine’s City of God Bk. 19.24.

[We] say that a people is an assemblage of rational beings bound together by a common agreement as to the objects of their love, then, in order to discover the character of any people, we have only to observe what they love.

Can different groups within one society hold to Augustine’s principle?  I think so, though it becomes harder and without some form of transcendental “grounding” it is borderline impossible.

For example, the Jihadi “migrant” wants to practice female circumcision.  I want to kill anyone who does that.  We have two different “loves.” Therefore, we cannot be a society.

Note, however, the above paragraph has nothing to do with “race.”  

So, we’ve concluded that modern uses of “multiculturalism” have little to do with df.(1).  We need to search for other definitions.

Df.(1*) = different ethnic groups must live in the same geographic locale.

I think this is close to the correct definition.  It explains the suicidal policies in Europe.  Fortunately, it’s easy to refute.  Whenever someone says this, just ask “Why?”  And keep asking that question.  Apart from some transcendental norm–which the modern world rejects–it’s difficult to answer.  You’ll probably get some answer like “Because it’s the current year. LOL.”

Point (3) is fun.  Trick question:  what’s the difference in the KKK’s neighborhood and that of a white liberal?  Tough, isn’t it? You are correct.  There is no difference.  They both live in all-white neighborhoods.  

Some in the black community have suggested that what black youth need are black male role models and mentors and teachers.  Specifically, they don’t need the liberal white savior (LWS).  So where does the idea of LWS arise?  Probably from liberal white politicians.  Proponents of (2) are actually endorsing (1).  By endorsing the LWS myth, proponents of (2) are saying that black males can’t do the job.  Liberal whites hold to a particularly nasty form of racism and one which I condemn in the strongest terms.

Of course, the elites who endorse multiculturalism have no intention of moving to inner-city Detroit.

How can different races live in harmony with each other?  This is where localism is just common sense.  The question we should actually be asking is this, “How can we best promote the flourishing of each neighborhood?”

Of course, no neighborhood is going to analyze its values in the abstract.  In fact, it probably won’t think of that at all.  Neighborhoods, while acknowledging that people plan to move into a neighboorhood, often just “happen.”  And they seem to “happen” along organic patterns.

Theses on community and politics

I’ve had these ideas for about 6 years now but felt I should publish them after reading the execrable article from National Review on how white communities should go ahead and die.

1. Neo-Cons, exemplified by National Review, are interested in commerce, not culture.
2. As such, they cannot hold to Augustine’s definition of a community: an assemblage of rational beings bound together by agreement in the common objects of their love (Civ. Dei. 19.24).  The problem for National Review is that these “common objects” for Augustine are immaterial, not spiritual.

   (2*) Shucks, they no doubt reject Augustine, too.

3. Unrestrained commercialism erodes the virtues.

   (3*) This doesn’t mean commercialism or technology is bad, per se.

   Rather, it’s current champions, who are also the harshest critics of traditional communities, who are also labeling themselves conservatives, do not have the virtues necessary to keep commercialism from eroding its traditional communities.

   (3′) Which is probably why they don’t give a damn about communities, anyway.

4. Can one have knowledge of immaterial concepts like “virtue” if one holds to empiricist and commercialist epistemologies?

   (4*)  Commercialist epistemologies: anything that isn’t quantifiable in market-terms does not count as knowledge.

   (4′) As such, it can’t be a “common object of love.”

These will be running theses, for which I will set up a page.

The felicity of Christian Emperors

City of God, Book V.

But we say that they are happy if they rule justly; if they are not lifted up amid the praises of those who pay them sublime honors, and the obsequiousness of those who salute them with an excessive humility, but remember that they are men; if they make their power the handmaid of His majesty by using it for the greatest possible extension of His worship; if they fear, love, worship God; if more than their own they love that kingdom in which they are not afraid to have partners; if they are slow to punish, ready to pardon; if they apply that punishment as necessary to government and defence of the republic, and not in order

to gratify their own enmity; if they grant pardon, not that iniquity may go unpunished, but with the hope that the transgressor may amend his ways; if they compensate with the lenity of mercy and the liberality of benevolence for whatever severity they may be compelled to decree; if their luxury is as much restrained as it might have been unrestrained; if they prefer to govern depraved desires rather than any nation whatever; and if they do all these things, not through ardent desire of empty glory, but through love of eternal felicity, not neglecting to offer to the true God, who is their God, for their sins, the sacrifices ofhumility, contrition, and prayer. Such Christian emperors, we say, are happy in the present time by hope, and are destined to be so in the enjoyment of the reality itself, when that which we wait for shall have arrived.

Outline of Resurrection Moral Order

Labour of love a long time in the making.

O’Donovan, Oliver.  Resurrection and Moral Order: An Outline for Evangelical Ethics.  Eerdmans, [reprint 1994].

                                                                                                                                  Prologue

Easter Principle

In Christ’s resurrection creation is restored and fulfilment promised; ethics had a foundation (xv).

Difference with Hauerwas:  OO begins ethics with the Christ-event and resurrection; hauerwas with the practices of the Church.

Ethics and final redemption:  Jesus sits at God’s right hand and gives the spirit as a guarantee.  We can be confident about reconciliation because of Christ’s work on the cross.

Sub-thesis: “Love is the principle that confers unifying order both upon the moral field and the character of the moral subject” (226).

The Gospel and Christian Ethics

Resurrection and Creation

“The raising of Christ is representative, not in the way a symbol is representative, expressing a reality what has independent and prior standing, but in the way that a national leader is representative when he brings about for the whole of his people, whatever it is, war or peace, that he effects on their behalf.” (15)

Kingdom ethics/creation ethics:  no dichotomy.   God ushers in the kingdom in the raising of Jesus, which also reaffirms creation.

Natural Ethic

There is an objective reference to the God-made order.

The Spirit and Christian Freedom

The resurrection focuses our participation forward.  It allows me to respond as a moral agent to God’s order (23).   The gift of subjective freedom must be an aspect of our being-in-Christ. The coming of Christ throws off the law as pedagaigos. It makes us adults in God’s order.

OBJECTIVE REALITY

Created Order

creation:  the order and coherence in which the world is composed (31).  It generates an ethical terminology:

• end–A is ordered to serve B;
• Creation’s being for Christ is related to being in Christ
• kind: creates which have generic equivalence in Christ can be ordered to one another teleologically (here O’Donovan avoids the scale of being, but allows at the same time that man is probably more important than rocks).
• Here OO (34-36) tries to navigate the problems of how creation’s subordinate ends are ordered to each other (per Hegel, Hume, etc).

St Basil’s Two Kinds of Order:  natural and deliberative (37ff).  

The attack upon kinds: the freedom of God

We must not assume a uniform pattern of God’s activity in all ages, for example before and after the coming of Christ (42ff).  

The attack upon ends: the polarity of will and nature

reality without “kinds” is nominalism.  Reality without ends is voluntarism.  Abstracting man from teleological concerns opens the danger to a mechanization of man (52).

ESCHATOLOGY AND HISTORY

Created order cannot be itself while it lacks the Christ-redeemed rule of man that was intended to it (55).  Eschatology answers the question of what creation’s temporal extensions mean.  The ascension is an unfolding of the significance of the resurrection (57).  This means Christian ethics looks both backwards and forwards.  

Natural Ends and History

historicism:  all teleology is time-bound, historical teleology.  It implies that the fulfillment of history is generated from within history (64). The Reformers’ insistence on sola fide/gratia cut this move off at the pass.  “Grace alone” means God is at work from the outside.   

• Platonic form: per Pannenberg it incorporates not only the Parmenidean arche, but the Socratic arete.   The notion of the good contains an element of futurity.  
• criticism:  when history is made the categorical matrix for understanding reality, then it can no longer be history.  For a story to be a story, it has to be a story about something (and not just a story about the idea of story).
• The patristic response:  if creation is extended infinitely in time, then it has infinite possibilities.   By speaking of creation ex nihilo, as finite, they could say the possibilities in history were defined in terms of creation’s being God’s gift (63).  

Historicist Ethics

strong tendency to manipulate and intervene.  Nature does not have meaning from some transhistorical given, but arises from within history by natural forces.  

Western political theology was able to keep a distance from historicist conclusions (for a while, anyway).  It starts from the assertion that the kingdoms of this world are not yet the kingdoms of the Christ, since they do not reflect his judgments.  This allows the believer, who is absolutely subject to Christ, to be relatively subject to earthly powers.  This relative subjectivity opens a “space” between the believer and the powers.  Further, since politics does not have to reconcile the world, it can get along with its own God-ordained business (72).  

If there is no locus of value outside of history, then history will supply its own.  In this case the kingdom of God becomes a form without content.  

KNOWLEDGE IN CHRIST

Knowledge has subjective/objective aspects.  

• knowledge of things in their relation to the totality of things (77).  Grasping the shape of the whole.
• The NT contrasts faith/sight, not faith/reason.  
• subjective aspect: the more encompassing an object is, the harder it is to transcend it and remain neutral.  
• universals:  our conception of “kinds” (genera) is always open to new particulars. However, the knowledge of the created order from within avoids the empiricist’s dilemma opposed to a knowledge of universals from above.  
• knowledge is a human way of participating in the created order (81).  
• knowledge is therefore tied to man’s faithful performance of a task.
• In summary, knowledge is a knowledge-of-things from within the created order and is vindicated by the resurrection of Christ, who vindicates the created order and gives it back.  Knowledge is a knowledge hidden in Christ.  

Exclusive Knowledge

This knowledge of things in Christ is not of an ethereal Logos, but a particular human.  It is a particular knowledge of the whole order of things created and transformed (85).  

• Natural Law: how to avoid the ambiguity which attributes universality, not only to knowledge, but to being.  First principles, for Thomas, are self-evident (ST II.I.94.2)
• It is moral knowledge of the natural order co-ordinated with obedience (87).  It is known by participation, not transcendence.  

Moral Learning

Moral understanding is a grasp of the whole shape of things (90).   Moral learning is all the time “thinking,” the intellectual exploration of a reality (92).

Conflict and Compromise

THE SUBJECTIVE REALITY

Freedom and Reality

Goal of chapter: to show that the redeemed creation does not merely confront us as moral agents, but enables us to participate in it (101).

1. The Spirit makes the reality of redemption present to us (102)
   1. Any doctrine of the Spirit must first be a doctrine of the Spirit in Christ if it is to avoid the problem of Montanism.  
   2. The Spirit makes the reality of redemption authoritative to us.
2. The Holy Spirit in John 16:8-11 (105); each of these three moments of judgment is included in the one act of God’s redeeming and fulfilling creation.
   1. crucifixion: the world’s judgment on Christ
   2. resurrection/ascension: The Father’s judgment on Christ
   3. Parousia: Christ’s judgment on the ruler of the world.
3. The Spirit evokes our free response.
   1. he restores us as moral agents, as the subjects of our actions (106).
   2. freedom is the character of one who participates in the order of creation by knowledge and action (107).  
   3. Freedom is potency, not possibility.This rejects existentialism’s “absence of limits” and libertarianism’s “infinite possibilities.”
   4. Freedom is teleological (Gal. 5.13).
   5. The Holy Spirit restores our access to reality (112).

Alienation and Conversion

1. Augustine: knowing and willing must be entirely proportionate and coextensive.  The corrupted mind knows something without loving it, or without loving it proportionately (110).  It does not know it in order to justify its love (De Trin. Book 9). The mind in perfect possession of truth loves and wills–reason and will are one.  
2. The problem of the relationship between reason and will: springs from a disjunction between hearing and doing
3. Repentance cannot simply realign our will to its continuity with the past.  Something must break that continuity.

Conscience and Autonomy

1. Guilt: a dividedness of the will with itself.
2. Conscience:
   1. Thomas Aquinas:  it is bad for the will to be at variance with reason. If you have a mistaken conscience, anything your will does will be sin. Thomas’s larger point, even if we don’t like how he got there, is to caution against an autonomous conscience.
   2. Later 18th century moralists set up conscience as an arbitrary tyrant.

Authority

authority:  something, which by virtue of its kind, constitutes an immediate ground for acting (122).

Christian neo-Platonism: every movement of the human soul is inspired by God; mediated through a diversity of created objects

Natural Authority and the Authority of Truth (cf Ways of Judgment, pp. 131-132).

Political Authority

concurrence of natural authorities of might and tradition (128).  Political authority searches for a compromise while bearing full witness to the truth.

Divine Authority

“What is the relation of the divine command to the created order” (132)?

• theological rationalism: God speaks through the order reason perceives.  Ps. 104:5; emphasizes the security of the created order.  Emphasizes ontological continuity, tends towards neo-Platonism.
• theological voluntarism:  God’s command cuts across the rational order.  These psalms emphasize destability (Ps 97.5).  Tended toward immediate contingency of morality upon the revealed will of God.  

Deontic and Teleological Language

Deontic: morality is a matter of command and obedience.  The moral claim is encountered apart from any consideration of the subject’s wish or fulfillment.  

The Authority of Christ

The spirit bears witness to the Resurrected Christ’s authority.  Spontainety and tradition are dual aspects of the same error: failure to critically evaluate the Spirits.  What is tradition but spontaneity in slow motion?  They are not necessarily wrong; just not self-evident.  

The authority of God is located in the public realm (Resurrection).  Moral authority is the authority of the renewed created order where ends and kinds participate.  

Evangelical Authority

*  “When the apostle contrasted law and gospel, he was pointing to the dialectical tension in Israel’s history between the experience of God through promise and the experience of God through command” (151).

• to experience moral command as “law” is to encounter as from a point in the history of salvation in which God has not yet given the total blessing to his people.
• “mediated through angels” = the created authority of the community.

Jesus’s authority

• It is “evangelical” because the moral order he proclaims is the Kingdom of God.
• Abba prayer:  disciples are invited to share Jesus’s relationship with his father.
• criticism of externalized morality and religion

Law is command through reciprocal bargain.

Historical Authority

The coming of Christ is the word that re-shapes the events of history (and their teloi).

The Freedom of the Church and the Believer

thesis:  Christ evokes the freedom of the Kingdom of God within us (163).  

• however, our humanity is destined for the shared life of a city.

The difficulty in classical ethics:

1. The call of the good, per Plato, meant a solitary and tragic opposition to society.
2. Aristotle saw that human good always presupposed a social context.
3. Augustine tries to solve this in City of God: eschatological transcends the tensions between individual and society.

The church isn’t simply a community that speaks to mankind, but is the community that is spoken to.

The Roman view of command and counsel:

1. it suggested (contra Lk 17:7ff) that God’s demand was limited and less than the total claim of the Good (170).
2. dangerous wedge between divine command and ultimate realities of good.
3. Metaphysical ethics must be unitary.  If an act is obligatory, it is so by virtue of its relation to the good, and by virtue of that same relation the performance of it is free.
4. Therefore, this distinction destroys the very ideas of both freedom and obligation.

Part Three: The Form of the Moral Life

The Moral Field

The form of the moral life is love, the bond of perfection (Col. 3:14).  This section deals with what St Paul calls “The fruit of the Spirit” (182).  

Thesis: The gospel tells us of agents rendered free before the reality of a redeemed universe.  The form their agency assumes will correspond both to the intelligible order which they confront and the freedom in which they act (183).

• their moral life will be an ordered moral field of action (i.e., human acts)
• moral ordered subject of action (I.e., human character)

An ordered moral field

Different options

• to see the moral life as human acts is to see it broken down into a series of discrete and distinct events of human agency, a plurality of responses to the world rather than a single response (183).
• Fletcher and situation ethics: no matter how problematic Fletcher’s proposal is, it did show the true colors of historicism.  Historicism needs a transhistorical mediation and Fletcher tries to show that doesn’t work.
• anticipation: divorced from Christian reflection, this is a consequentialist ethic.
  • evaluate acts solely by the consequences they produce
• Wisdom ethic: “the perception that every novelty, in its own way, manifests the permanence and stability of the created order, so that, however astonishing and undreamt it may be, it is not uttlery incommensurate with what has gone before” (189).
  • Wisdom’s re-presentation as law: declares the central point of Israel’s faith as the meeting of life-in-the-world with life-before-God.

 

indirect voluntary acts: similar to foresight.

direct voluntary acts: intention

the above distinction  advises us that there is a difference between directly intending  an evil effect of one’s action and merely foreesing that it will follow; b) that one may foresee an evil effect of one’s action without desiring it, and c) that one may licitly act in such a way as will foreseeably produce an evil effect (192).

This should be reframed, O’Donovan suggests: it originally arose as a way to understand the differences beween murder and other kinds of killing.  It cannot be used as an ‘analytic a priori” (194).

 

Aquinas’s approach: good and evil in human acts in general

1. act-as-such
2. object
3. circumstance
4. morality

This demands insight into the craeted order

 

The Moral Subject

Thesis: “Human morality is a series of disclosures in which reality (the heart) forces itself into the realm of appearances (deeds and words) and declares itself, tearing apart the veil of pretense” (206).

 

The Epistemological Priority of Act

1. The character is known through the acts.
2. Knowledge of an agent’s character contributes to evaluative moral thought, not deliberative.

The Plurality and Unity of the Virtues

Aristotle: all activities strive for some perceived good, happiness (eudaimion). What is the unifying virtue?  Love.  “True virtue is love for God” (223). The four cardinal virtues are manifestations of this love in typical social relations.

The Double Aspect of the Moral Life

Main point, glossing love your God/neighbor: the love by which we love reality must be twofold in the same way that the reality which we love is twofold: the secondary object derives from the primary object (227).

• We are to love the neighbor because the neighbor is ordered to the love of God.
• Yet, love of the neighbor is love of something that is not God (it is also affirming the genuine otherness of creation).

The Ordering of Love

The love to God is not merely one claim among many, but the claim that orders other claims.

Two loves: love to God and love to neighbor

1. The relation of the two loves is an ordering of means to ends.
   1. Augustine’s “use” and “enjoyment.”
   2. “Res”
      1. Proper objects of “use” (utenda) and proper objects of enjoyment (fruenda)
      2. But Augustine’s reading seems to say that we “use” our neighbor, and O’Donovan rejects this proposal. 235
2. What is a “person?”
   1. Originally classical Christian thought said that “individuality” resided in reason (nous) or soul (psyche).  When applied to Christ, this was disastrous (238). This either made him two individuals or one individual without a whole range of human attributes.
   2. The solution was to draw a sharp divide between person (hypostasis, individual existence) and nature (a set of attributes).
   3. Modern Kantianism and Hegelianism, in reducing person to “will” and self-consciousness is actually a reversion back to pre-Christian categories.

The End of the Moral Life

The Christian moral life looks to the divine disclosure of God-in-Christ through the Spirit.

Love and its Reward

The idea of reward must always be clarified by something like ipse praemium.  God himself is the gift.  The present hiddenness of God’s new creation demands the public manifestation of the Son of Man in the cosmos.

Love demands that the good be actualized.

Kant downplayed the object of affections/desires/etc in favor of an inner disposition (251).

Various Terminology:

created order: “the structure of the world in its objectivity…its authority to evoke our action” (191).

moral field: “the world as it presents itself to us at any one moment as the context and occasion of our next action.”

Wisdom: “knowledge of the created order.”

casuistry: application of the moral law to action in particular cases.

historicism: the history of an idea is its reality (34). The problem is that the end of a thing is no longer a given ordering-to, which allows free response, but merely historical necessity.

universal in Christ:  his particularity belongs to his divine nature, universal to his human nature (143).  A universe of meaning

 

Augustine, Spirit and the Letter

Initial argument: to respond to Pelagius’s claim that one can live a sinless life.

Other topics addressed: justification by free grace, spiritual interpretation, the nature of human willing and choosing.

Observations:  There are many important topics in this book, yet it is neither an easy nor a pleasant read.  Augustine jumps from point to point, only to return without warning to an earlier point.

1. The Law as Letter that Killeth
   1. Without the Spirit, the Letter (law) inflames concupiscence.
   2. Whoever obeyed the law without the Spirit, did only because of reward/fear (c.14).
2. Justification by free grace
   1. Our soul wants to attribute to itself that which it freely received from God (c. 18).
   2. Law: what we do, not simply “external ritual markers” (c.23).
   3. Works do not precede justification, otherwise it is pointless to say we are justified freely by his grace (c. 45).
3. Human nature and grace
   1. Grace restores nature (c. 47).
   2. Grace establishes free will
      1. When we say we do something “in our power,” we presuppose two things:
         1. Will: the assenting to of something
         2. Ability: the capacity to do it.
      2. The Free Will of man is an intermediate power–it can incline towards faith or unbelief.
      3. The very will comes from God but that is not the same thing as saying, “God made me will it.”
      4. The will probably follows the intellect.  Augustine isn’t clear on this point (c. 60) but it seems to be his argument.