Imagine a world where God is . . .

From my childhood I have been trained to understand the world in two different ways.  My parents taught me about the God who created the world, saved Noah, chose Abraham, used Moses, raised up David, and sent a Savior.  That far away world of the Bible was somehow relevant to the world in which I lived.  I learned about my own sinfulness and my need for salvation.  This worldview was instilled into me as much as any twentieth century parents could manage by every means they had.  We went to church regularly, prayed together and learned the Scriptures.  Many of the most fervent believers I know never had the advantages of a good Christian upbringing that I had.  Nevertheless, while I was learning all this about God and His world, I was also learning how to view all that goes on around me without reference to Him.  In the next few paragraphs, I would like to explain how western society is teaching us all to ignore God, pretend He is not there, and live our lives independently of Him.

In ancient and medieval society such a life beyond the eye of deity was unthinkable.  Contracts were honored because people feared the gods in whose name they had pledged themselves.  Temples were built and adorned in the hopes that due reverence to the proper deities would ensure their gracious protection in the aversion of calamities like, plague, drought, storm, war, and many other ills.  People greeted one another in the name of the gods.  When Christianity replaced paganism in and beyond the Roman world, reverence for one God replaced reverence for many gods.  Until the Enlightenment, virtually all literature and official documents, as well as informal writing repeatedly acknowledge one or more gods.  Until recently in world history everything that happened was attributed to the will, pleasure or anger of the gods,  the fates, Fortune, Providence, Divine justice, or similar influences from heaven. 
When an apple fell from a tree, God was known to be the Unmoved Mover whose will it was that the tree should no longer support its fruit.  Every wind that blew was from God.

Something has changed.  It is not important whether we assign a date to that change, such as the publication of Newton's Principia or Descartes' Discourse on Method, or of any other work by Bacon, Machiavelli, or Voltaire. It is not even needful to pin down that change to a particular decade or century.  What is important is that a change has taken place; a new philosophy has hijacked the western way of thinking, and kicked God out of the plane.  And locked the door.

Nevertheless, we see the marks of spirituality all around us.  After all, we no longer live in the modern world, but the postmodern one, in which we allow for all creeds and beliefs equally.  We have recognized that failures of the preceding scientific age which produced two World Wars and a Holocaust, and no longer follow in step with the "assured results of objective scientific investigation."  According to the current popular philosophy, no one has a monopoly on truth, even the scientist.  We still wave the banner of religious freedom (toleration is the current word).  Religious books of all kinds are available everywhere from Walmart to truck stops.  But whereas the spirituality of ancient times permeated to the very core of society, so that people could hardly think without reference to their deities, whoever they may have been, nowadays, spirituality is only one of many components of an otherwise totally godless world.  Let me explain what I mean, and test it against your experience.  When we go to ballgames (which sport is irrelevant), we sing praise to our governmental system together, cheer our local heroes together with an alacrity that exists in our lives, and bury deep in our memories that touchdown run, shoestring catch, or last second goal for the rest of our lives, but we never pray, praise, or sing a hymn.  No one mentions God in advertising (at least in a reverent way).  When was the last time you saw thanks to God for a bountiful harvest written on anything in a grocery store?  Remember when secular city newspapers ran a Religion section every week?  Everyone in every occupation other than clergy is expected to perform his work as if there were no God.  Even ordinary conversations are seldom spiced with phrases like, "God be with you," or "Lord willing."  We are permitted to attribute to God only those things that society acknowledges to belong to Him, that is, private religion and the public worship that takes place within the walls of a church.  God must be kept within these limits.

After having said all this, it may surprise you to hear that the way society has kicked God out the door is not the what I am driving at in this short essay.  Rather, I want to call attention to the way that the Satan is using this godless world around us to teach us how to imagine a world in which there is no God.  It is not the godlessness of the world that I see as the main danger (this world has been godless as long as it has been under the rule of the prince of the power of the air), but the way that it educates the mind to attribute all happenings to some other cause than God's sovereign pleasure.  Whether he likes it or not, even the most godly American Christian in the twenty-first century has learned to think this way.

How did we learn this?  My parents made every effort to teach me the one system, as have my teachers in church.  I went to a Christian school from fourth grade on, then to a Christian college.  No one has spent so many hours teaching me the other system, but I came to know it, and I know it well.  I ask myself, from where did this strange ability come?  Perhaps I learned it from many sources, but I know of two, and I will mention only one here.  Perhaps you can identify more.

We do not learn all that we know by listening to truth in the form of propositions.  We learn far more from the experiences of daily life.   Just as most manual skills come from watching imitating and practicing, so also our way of seeing the world comes in part from how we see others interpret it, by our imitation of those exemplars, and by our repeatedly interpreting our experiences in the same way.  Unfortunately, we do not learn only from experience of others in the real world, but by those who exist only in the imagination.  I do not mean the imaginary friends in the mind of a child who spends his time daydreaming about happy things, but the well-known characters shared by our whole society, that is the people of literature, the stage, and the screen. They have taught me how to imagine anything, from the deepest ocean recess to the surface of the moon.  I have been in king's palace and enjoyed their hospitality and trembled under their ire.  I have sailed with Drake around the horn, died with Scott in Antarctica, blazed jungle trails with Livingstone, travelled the land righting wrongs with Ivanhoe and Don Quixote, escaped Nazi prison camps, and discovered the source of the Nile (both of them).  From television I have learned to be a paramedic, a police officer, a detective, a cowboy, a sheriff, and a soldier.  I may not remember all the verses to Amazing Grace, but "just sit right back and you'll hear a tale, tale of a fateful trip that started from this tropic port aboard this tiny ship," and five more verses.  What I share with the society in which I live is not a common set of propositional truths, but a common set of experiences vicariously shared through our common entertainment. We no longer quote the Bible in ordinary conversation, as did the Puritans, for example, but we draw from our shared pool of emotions and experiences from TV, movies, and occasionally, books.  A line from The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca or a popular sitcom is always in season.

I am convinced that Satan and his demons use our imaginations to tempt us (see Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections).  What more effective means could he have to reach our imaginations than by that gate which we open wide to let in all the stories of fiction, farce, romance or reenactment.  As we suspend our unbelief so as to allow ourselves into a story which we know fully well cannot happen, we open the way into our imaginations.  I do not mean that we would ever condone sex violence an bad language in our entertainment.  I do mean that we are in danger of a subtler form of Satan's attack.  The stories we read and watch have a single element in common: they all portray a universe in which the Main Character is missing, and is not missed.  We learn to see the world without God.

Now imagine a world in which God is.  Whether an apple falls from a tree or the rain falls at my window, all is by divine decree.  Imagine the same dramas and comedies with that Main Character present and felt by every other character in every scene, though unseen. 

Now imagine a history book written the same way.  God is always present and felt, though not always seen.  The Main Character is the protagonist of every plot in every real life drama, the righter of wrongs, the ordainer of kings, the dispenser of justice, and even the director of every war.  We do not know his purposes, even after they are accomplished, and God's mind in history is rarely understood, outside of salvation history.  But He is there.  I want to read this kind of history.

Next blog:
Safety and probability

The Advice of Cervantes' Friend

I just read Saturday's post and noticed that I exceeded the limits of decorum in the number of names I dropped.  It appears that heeded the advice of Cervantes' friend in the preface to Don Quixote:

"To which he made answer, "Your first difficulty about the sonnets, epigrams, or complimentary verses which you want for the beginning, and which ought to be by persons of importance and rank, can be removed if you yourself take a little trouble to make them; you can afterwards baptise them, and put any name you like to them, fathering them on Prester John of the Indies or the Emperor of Trebizond, who, to my knowledge, were said to have been famous poets: and even if they were not, and any pedants or bachelors should attack you and question the fact, never care two maravedis for that, for even if they prove a lie against you they cannot cut off the hand you wrote it with.

"As to references in the margin to the books and authors from whom you take the aphorisms and sayings you put into your story, it is only contriving to fit in nicely any sentences or scraps of Latin you may happen to have by heart, or at any rate that will not give you much trouble to look up; so as, when you speak of freedom and captivity, to insert

Non bene pro toto libertas venditur auro;

and then refer in the margin to Horace, or whoever said it; or, if you allude to the power of death, to come in with—

Pallida mors Aequo pulsat pede pauperum tabernas,
Regumque turres.

"If it be friendship and the love God bids us bear to our enemy, go at once to the Holy Scriptures, which you can do with a very small amount of research, and quote no less than the words of God himself: Ego autem dico vobis: diligite inimicos vestros. If you speak of evil thoughts, turn to the Gospel: De corde exeunt cogitationes malae. If of the fickleness of friends, there is Cato, who will give you his distich:

Donec eris felix multos numerabis amicos,
Tempora si fuerint nubila, solus eris.

"With these and such like bits of Latin they will take you for a grammarian at all events, and that now-a-days is no small honour and profit.

"With regard to adding annotations at the end of the book, you may safely do it in this way. If you mention any giant in your book contrive that it shall be the giant Goliath, and with this alone, which will cost you almost nothing, you have a grand note, for you can put—The giant Golias or Goliath was a Philistine whom the shepherd David slew by a mighty stone-cast in the Terebinth valley, as is related in the Book of Kings—in the chapter where you find it written.

"Next, to prove yourself a man of erudition in polite literature and cosmography, manage that the river Tagus shall be named in your story, and there you are at once with another famous annotation, setting forth—The river Tagus was so called after a King of Spain: it has its source in such and such a place and falls into the ocean, kissing the walls of the famous city of Lisbon, and it is a common belief that it has golden sands, etc. If you should have anything to do with robbers, I will give you the story of Cacus, for I have it by heart; if with loose women, there is the Bishop of Mondonedo, who will give you the loan of Lamia, Laida, and Flora, any reference to whom will bring you great credit; if with hard-hearted ones, Ovid will furnish you with Medea; if with witches or enchantresses, Homer has Calypso, and Virgil Circe; if with valiant captains, Julius Caesar himself will lend you himself in his own 'Commentaries,' and Plutarch will give you a thousand Alexanders. If you should deal with love, with two ounces you may know of Tuscan you can go to Leon the Hebrew, who will supply you to your heart's content; or if you should not care to go to foreign countries you have at home Fonseca's 'Of the Love of God,' in which is condensed all that you or the most imaginative mind can want on the subject. In short, all you have to do is to manage to quote these names, or refer to these stories I have mentioned, and leave it to me to insert the annotations and quotations, and I swear by all that's good to fill your margins and use up four sheets at the end of the book."  Public domain. trans. John Ormsby

Notes

Notes
Scripture passages pertinent to philosophy and theology of history, historiography, etc.:
Prov. 21:1, 30, 31
Isaiah 10:5-19
Gen. 50:19-21
Hab. 1:1-2:3
Ps. 50:7-15
Acts 1:6,7
Numerous texts relating to the restoration of God's perfect rule on earth, once destroyed by Adam's sin.
Texts dealing with God's sovereignty in general.
Isa. 46:10, etc.
I plan to add to this list and categorize the entries as I have time.

Christian history writing

Essay

When I began driving a truck to support my family eight years ago I found that I no longer had time to read theological and Biblical materials like I used to do. Instead the world of my reading became confined to those books which had been recorded as audiobooks, of which precious few had anything to do with theology. I decided that rather than wasting my time reading fiction all the time, I ought to read whatever I could find that bore even remotely on Biblical studies. It was not too hard to find books of history recorded on audiobooks, even from the period that interested me most, the first century Roman world of the New Testament, as well as the centuries just before and after it. I read Josephus' Wars and Herodotus early on, and they became my favorites. My fascination with ancient history grew quickly as I read Livy, Books I-V, Tacitus' Annals, Caesar's Commentaries, Sallust, Eusebius, and Socrates Scholasticus, though not in that order. I read nearly every audiobook in the history section of our local library, covering periods ranging from fourteenth century France to biographies of Mao and Stalin. I read about two World Wars, the American Civil War, the Punic Wars, the Revolutionary War, the Napoleonic Wars, Alexander's conquests, the Holocaust and the Rwandan genocide. I read about the discovery of Antarctica, the sources of the Nile, and the New World. I read sea adventures of Magellan, Drake, Nelson, Frobisher, Cook and a dozen others. Some books were written by the participants of the events they describe, others by contemporary chroniclers, and still others by modern historians. All this reading has done nothing to quench my thirst for an understanding of history.



I have been seeking more and more to understand the connections that tie the events together and unite them to a wider framework which will give them meaning. These connections between historical events and their meaning are interesting, but seldom discussed in histories. Historians almost never inform their readers of the basis of their jumps from the particulars of history to an absolute interpretation of the events, or else they avoid giving interpretations. As long as the reader and the writer share the same philosophy, there is really no need to put it on paper. Most readers today share a common secular worldview which includes elements such as a mechanistic universe, pure chance without the interference of spiritual forces, and aimlessness. Since both reader and writer do not believer that any particular world event moves history forward toward a predetermined goal, ther is no need for the author to say anything about it in his book. I, however, am not one of those readers. Even when writers make absolute statements about history, I can seldom agree with them because they cannot fit into my Christian interpretive framework. For example, when Tolstoy said, "A king is history's slave," he left out the most important party in the relationship, the Author of history, the Lord Himself.



God's hand moves history along according to his good pleasure toward a goal which He has predetermined before the world began. Few historians, especially modern ones, have acknowledged this in their interpretation of events. Sometimes I run across a writer who gives lipservice to Providence, while recording events as if there were no Hand guiding them. Other times I read old Christian authors who attribute all events to God without admitting the possibility of intermediate causes, or who subtily identify God's causes with his own, or fail to recognize the role of man's sinfulness in the outworking of His plan. Many of the Christian writers of whom I speak do not appear to be genuine believers. Some Christian writers simply mimic the methods of their secular exemplars, and then polish their work with a Christian varnish. Still other Christian writers have sound theology and aim at true Christian edification, but are just plain lousy historians. Some Christian biographies are really just hagiographies in Protestant disguise; they sift out all the historical data that do not glorify their subjects.



This failure to understand how God moves in this world both by means of and in spite of man's rebellion against Him has led historians into several common errors. 1) God is on the winning side. God was pro-American and anti-British in the Revolutionary War, but pro-British and anti-French in the Napoleonic Wars. God was on Alexander's side. However, Isaiah 10 says that God was not on Assyria's side, even He gave them victory over the ten northern tribes. 2) Religious factors are always less important in societal conflicts than political, cultural, and economic ones. The Reformation was only a power struggle betweeen the church and the growing power of the secular establishments of Europe. The settlement of New England was prompted by economic and political forces, not religious ones. 3) Great men make history. The opposite mistake is just as pernicious. 4) No one makes history; all alike are the pawns of chance.



I am tired of reading erudite histories written on the basis of extensive research, elegant in style, delightful to read, and in a narrative form that keeps the reader in suspense until the last chapter ties together every loose thread, but histories which exclude the Main Character of every story that has ever taken place. I am thankful for the work of many unbelievers who have brought history within my reach, despite their unreligious, and sometimes openly atheistic beliefs. I am indebted to Barbara W. Tuchman for my interest in fourteenth century Europe and the causes which led to World War I. Gibbon is not only the greatest historian in the English language, but holds my vote for the best prose writer. I owe him exclusively for what I know about long stretches of Byzantine history. I tip my hat other writers for their work in American history. Stephen E. Ambrose and David McCullough come to mind first. Respectful as they all may have been to religion in their respective time periods, none of these authors has written a Christian history.



What will a distinctively Christian history book look like? How will a Christian writer's output differ from that of his secular colleagues? How will his faith in Providence affect his interpretation of the evils of war? Many similar questions oppress me. The only way I can see to find answers to these questions is to answer even more basic questions, not about history writing, but about the very nature of history itself. The first step to writing a Christian history is a Christian philosophy of history.



Next blog:

Imagine a world in which God is . . .

Next next blog:

Safety and probability

Postscript

Did I actually leave out Kant? Also Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.  Presuppositional in my apologetics, and holding to the bondage of the will and to total depravity, Kuhn made me respond as I read it, "Yeah, that's what I thought before I picked up the book.

A preliminary plan

Before looking at some of the issues that will need attention, I would first like to record a few of the authors and books of the past that have sparked my interest further in this subject.  Augustine, in his City of God, attributes the putative deeds of pagan gods to demons.  A couple of other ancient Christian authors I have read (the apologists perhaps?) have done the same, but I do not recall who.  He even assigns to those demons the same names as the pagans gave their gods.  Although the influence of the spirit world upon historical events may be completely outside the domain of historical writing, it is not outside the field of the philosopher of history.  Augustine also spills copious ink maligning individual deities and daemons, including Fate and Fortune. 

In the opening chapter of Leviathan, Hobbes presents his view of the constitution of man and prepares the way for his epistemology to follow.  Although this source will probably not be very fruitful in further study, it did open my eyes to some ways that epistemology and anthropology bear on my subject.

Boethius provides an excellent bridge between the pagan and the Christian way of thinking.  The pagan worldview was being displaced in his day by the Christian worldview.  His treatment of fate and fortune give him the guise of a pagan, but the work was conceived in the heart of a Christian.

I need to go back and read Book 2 of Aristotle's Politics.  At the time I read it, I recognized something important to my subject, but I cannot remember what it was.  I need a place to record ideas like this as they come to me.  Likewise, there I have lost memory of pertinent passages in Descartes, Pascal, and even Hume. 

An investigation of the relationship between cause and effect will inevitably lead along the trail begun by Aristotle and continued through Lucretius, Augustine, Aquinas (whom I have not yet read) and Berkely.  Long ago I purposed the work through the index entries "Fate," "Cause," and "Chance" in Great Books of the Western World for other old authors whom I have missed.

Second, I will need to collect the issues that will need to be addressed in one place.  Since this investigation could easily become the starting point for a rambling discourse into almost any field of study, there must be some kind of boundary to mark off its territory.  Rather than using a definition as a boundary marker, perhaps I can just list similar fields which bear upon the subject, being careful as I feel my way through not to go too far afield.  Such a method would not suit a dissertation prospectus, but here, I can set my own rules.  A simple list will have to do. It is getting late.

Epistemology. There are several points of contact here.
Historiography.  What is the historian's role in interpreting and recording history?  What are his methods?
Ontology.  This is at the heart of the relation between cause and effect.
Theology.  The real starting point for this study.
Sociology.  How does each worldview affect the way we live in this world?  This is the field which I know least.
History of the philosophy of history.  What others have thought and written through time.  I need a less unwieldy name for this.

I will update this list as I think of more.

Next blog . . .
I would like to disclose my burden for Christian historians who will employ a historical method derived from a distinctively Christian philosophy of history to reinterpret history.  We believers have been following conservative mainstream historians too long.  I want to know what God was doing  in the history of eighteenth century France, for example, without my having to strain my imagination to perceive it as a world in which the God I know was active.

Next next blog . . .
Imagine a world in which God is . . .

The Story

Herodotus, that clever old storyteller, recounts one of his most colorful tales as the correspondence written between Polycrates, the ever-victorious tyrant of Samos, and his friend Amasis, Pharaoh of Egypt.  Amasis found the persistent success of Polycrates' exploits disconcerting.  How could any man go through life with only good luck, unbalanced by any measure of bad luck?  If you want to avoid the inevitable turn of fortune's wheel, advised Amasis, bring it upon yourself first.  Discard your most valuable possession into the sea, and discharge your debt to bad luck with it.   Polycrates agreed, chose to part with an expensive ring, and threw it to the waves.  Later that day a fisherman  caught an enormous fish worthy of a king's table, and presented it to Polycrates.  When his cook gutted the fish, he discovered the very same ring inside, and returned it to the king.  Herodotus puts the moral of the story in the response of Amasis, who breaks off his friendship for fear lest he also be dragged down with Polycrates when his inevitable ruin came (Hdt. 3.39-43).

When I first read this story I began wondering how someone would do such a reckless act as to throw away something dear to him just to avoid something worse, when nothing worse was yet foreseen.  Why did Polycrates think he was facing a dilemma between assured future disaster and self-imposed loss?  The answer was simple, although it took me a while to understand it.  Herodotus and I have different worldviews; different ways of seeing the relation between cause and effect.  To him, the course of events is guided by a force personified as Fortune, whose method of distributing welfare and calamity were arbitrary, unplanned, and inconstant.  Fortune has no ultimate destination toward which she is driving history forward, only a pair of scales with which she apportions good and evil to all men in roughly equal measure.  Hence, Judgment Day to Polycrates was not a remote escahological event before the throne of a god, but a time in this life when Fortune would balance the scales.

I believe in the God of the Bible, who dispenses justice in this life, but leaves the ledgers unbalanced until He rectifies the imbalance at the Great White Throne judgment.  Today, there are still other views.  I propose that yesterday's mighty duo of Fate and Fortune has been replaced by today's Chance and Choice as the predominant forces.

From the day I first read this story, I have been looking for a name for the category of ways of perceiving the relation between cause and effect.  Perhaps we can call this "the philosophy of cause and effect," or "causality,"or "eventuality," or more pedantically, "the telic nature of history."  I have still not decided on a name.  Since then I have done some reading on the philosophy of history, specifically, the speculative philosophy of history, and discovered that my quest had brought me to other related issues, which I hope to record here in the future. Not much has been written in this area since Hegel's Introduction to the Philosophy of History.  I have not yet found a Christian treatment of this subject.  Perhaps it is time that someone write a Christian philosophy of history (not a Christian theology of history, about which much has been written).

This blog will become my notepad of ideas as I try to develop  my own Christian philosophy of history from a Protestant Calvinist perspective.  It will also provide for me a chance to exercise my rusty writing skills.  I do not expect that anyone will read or comment on this blog, but all are welcome to do so.