My own view is that third-way doctrines are none of these, and to the contrary, benefit solely from the politesse that is the sidestepping of contentious issues. If you stake no position on that which is contentious, your doctrine appears stronger insofar as it elicits less criticism. But this supposed strength comes at the expense of saying anything at all.
As a matter of discerning truth, as opposed to concerning oneself with “optics”, there’s no particular reason to believe that a synthesis of two contrary positions should yield a position more accurate than either. If a color-blind person perceives a green object as red, and another perceives it as green, we do not thereby conclude the object is really brown. If we were to do so, we would eliminate precisely the relevant difference between the persons, i.e., colorblindness.
For substantive doctrines, the situation is more dire in that each consists of mutually interdependent truth claims. Weakening one means that coherency of the whole is compromised. The mechanics of walking and driving are distinct, and averaging them does not produce jogging.
However, there is also a more basic objection that is available to opponents of thirdwayism, and that involves its own consistency. Does the third-way approach even survive itself?
Suppose we have two positions:
Now, if these are understood to be doctrines themselves, then we might propose as an instance of thirdwayism that:
How unusual it would be if that very practice being promoted demands its own immediate refinement. Are we making claims about truth and reality, or just saddling other people with our homework assignments?
A thirdwayist might object that these are over-simplified stances, and that the third-way isn’t merely a mechanical procedure. It may be said the third-way involves carefully choosing the best in opposing doctrines to produce a superior third. That is:
Contrary to supporting thirdwayism, this only strengthens the position of the anti-thirdwayist. It is a confession that thirdwayism doesn’t somehow produce a superior doctrine from doctrines A and B on its own, but that some specific standard is needed to pick the “best elements” from A and B.
This standard is really just unstated doctrine, or a set of unstated truth claims. But articulating where our doctrines are strong and weak, and where alternative views may improve or diminish these, is substantially what we’re all doing when we argue in the first place.
We are thus left with two groups in actuality: Those who are transparently in some contention, and those who conceal their prior ideological commitments to produce the appearance of equanimity.
]]>There’s something about this approach that frustrates me, and while keeping open the possibility that I simply cannot abide shades of gray, I will assume for our purposes that there is something to my frustration. Indeed, perhaps I cannot abide the shades of gray and there is some shady business going on in all this!
Let’s deal with the first claim and put it sharply: That two things are mutually exclusive. Logically, this looks something like the following. It may consist in two assertions: That A or B may the case, and further, that both cannot be true.
That is, when the first person is wrestling with two possibilities, they are making a second claim that is often unarticulated: That both A and B cannot be so. In fact, I think this is often the case, or else they might simply consider not wrestling at all!
When the second person responds Why not both? or Yes and, we assume they are simply saying that:
But if we take the first person to be implying mutual exclusivity, this means that we can understand the second person to be begging the question. To the first person, the second is taking a stronger stance than he admits. After all, what the neat and orderly statement above expresses is truly:
The posture of the second person is one towards agreeability and nuance, but they are in fact proposing something that is plainly incompatible with the first person’s position. They aren’t merely encouraging the first person to broaden his mind, but are making a substantive claim of their own.
To recapitulate, the first person presents with a struggle between A and B, a real contest of truth. The second person responds with what may justifiably be taken as a rather formulaic response, As you struggle to discern the truth between two possibilities, have you considered that it’s simpler to assert the truth of both? Why waste so much energy?
It is a very therapeutic intervention, seemingly conflict-averse in shifting a presumption of mutual exclusivity to one of mutual inclusivity. It is a substantive implication that the tension involved is some failure to imagine, i.e., a psychological tension, or otherwise simply illusory.
However, the tension can as easily point to a real fact about the world outside ourselves. Something cannot exist and also not exist. If we had reason to suppose something existed and did not exist, we would do well to ask ourselves whether we had the right grasp of that thing, or whether we might be mistaken about it.
It may be that the first person has a taste for absolute truth, while the second is content with something provisional. Both orientations have their uses: We often must act before we can know, and pragmatic truth is better than paralysis. But truth is not ultimately pragmatic. It is absolute. The provisional form is a concession to our limitations, not a permanent resting place, and sometimes it is too quick to concede.
The second stance seems perilously close to the view that broad agnosticism is pragmatic since we cannot know with certainty, while the first may be the more faithful one. They commit to a real and serious struggle in discerning between plausible facts, and a laudable unwillingness to compromise the ultimate. This means taking a real risk, while the second approach risks nothing.
So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.
–Revelation 3:16
Indeed the second person doesn’t seem to recognize that far from achieving real equanimity, he’s passed the buck. To show this, let us accept their Why not both? and their Yes, and. Let us accept all this purported agreeability so agreeably that we insist it upon itself:
The Curmudgeon: Which is better, a house made of brick or a house made of wood?
The Agreeable One: Why choose? A house of brick is good in some ways, a house of wood in others!
The Curmudgeon: You make an excellent, well-reasoned point. Now, why choose that a house of brick and a house of wood are each good in various ways? Perhaps one really is better than the other, or that neither is good, or that the very notion of something being better is dubious, or that things can be construed in ways or have aspects, or that there are such things as houses, wood, or brick? Why accept any of the words that I offer you at all, or even that they are not mere sounds? Perhaps you are hallucinating my very existence, and wouldn’t it be simpler, and less divisive really, to take a nap?
The demand for judgment cannot be indefinitely deferred by a posture of accommodation. At some point, someone has to say what they think is true. The curmudgeon already knows this. That’s why he’s a curmudgeon.
]]>This particular man was “profoundly convinced that every nationalism offers humanity only the greatest unhappiness”, and fervently believed that the broad use of his language was just the antidote. He promoted his linguistic cure-all in a textbook under the name, “Doctor Hope”, and it would be known to his followers as Unua libro or the “First Book”.
Not unrelatedly, he dabbled in inventing new religions. His Homaranismo, or “humanitism”, was in his words, “the object of my whole life. I would give up everything for it”. It is natural therefore to see both his language and his religion, both self-constructed, to be of a common cloth. His convictions were three-fold: “One should treat others as they wish to be treated” or the Golden Rule; a hostility toward the messy particular in contrast to a universal Utopia that would lead to “the spiritual unification of humanity”; and the belief his own creations would realize both. The connection between Zamenhof’s language and his worldview is uncontroversial, at least to himself. In his earlier years, Zamenhof had written a play about the Tower of Babel, and in his later years, he sought to reconstruct it in defiance of God.
The Tower of Babel, Esperanto, and Homaranismo each embody the laborious efforts by human beings to circumvent God’s power and plan in hubris and blasphemy. For the sake of communication, secularists may choose to construe this with some degree of accuracy as man choosing to worship himself and exert his supposed power over eternity. As it turns out, eternity includes other persons, and it is them that we often seek to dominate and control.
By these efforts, God’s commandment that we steward the world is thereby perverted to mean that we ought to steward others, and not to his end, but toward our own sense of goodness. It is a perversion because it is impossible to harmonize the commandment that we love others as ourselves with this level of control, unless we imagine ourselves to seek a life under the worldview and control of another man’s philosophy. To seek such a life is to seek slavery against God’s wishes.
For Zamenhof to love others as we love ourselves is foremost a commandment to other persons. It is not as a commandment to the reader, but a clever line to be propagated to others. This is to say, to the Utopian, love others as we love ourselves and as God loves us has the effect of others should love me as I wish to be loved for I am God. It is supposed that in so doing the others will also be loving themselves, but this is an optional rhetorical tack that may be dispensed with, or an excuse for the gentler-hearted.
C. S. Lewis is referring to this style when he writes that:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience. They may be more likely to go to Heaven yet at the same time likelier to make a Hell of earth. This very kindness stings with intolerable insult. To be “cured” against one’s will and cured of states which we may not regard as disease is to be put on a level of those who have not yet reached the age of reason or those who never will; to be classed with infants, imbeciles, and domestic animals.
The Esperanto man’s certainty of his own goodness, and therefore the fuel of his tyrannical impulses, cannot be diminished by our own efforts. To believe so is to make his error in the opposite direction. Rather, it is precisely that the Esperanto man, as all of us, is in desperate need of God and his ongoing loving correction and guidance.
It would be uncharitable to claim that this selfish inclination of the heart, even when self-servingly portrayed as selflessness, originated with Zamenhof or other progressives. Rather, it began in that Garden so long ago, when the serpent convinced Original Man that God’s loving commandments were negotiable and inspired to maintain His power rather than preserve goodness. Adam and Eve disobeyed God by heeding their own sense of the good, and by defying the Truth given to them. There was no cartoonish effort on their part to make war with God. Nevertheless, it is precisely what they willingly did under the influence of the serpent.
]]>“In him we have redemption through his blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of his grace, which he lavished upon us, in all wisdom and insight making known to us the mystery of his will, according to his purpose, which he set forth in Christ as a plan for the fullness of time, to unite all things in Christ, things in heaven and things on earth in him.”
We were chosen by him to bring him glory, and were given a holy helper to assure us, purify us, and seal our fate in him.
“In him we have obtained an inheritance, having been predestined according to the purpose of him who works all things according to the counsel of his will, so that we who were the first to hope in Christ might be to the praise of his glory. In him you also, when you heard the word of truth, the gospel of your salvation, and believed in him, were sealed with the promised Holy Spirit, who is the guarantee of our inheritance until we acquire possession of it, to the praise of his glory.”
St. Paul intercedes to pray that God grants us the ability to grasp the enormity of his power and grace. That power raised Christ from the dead and placed him alongside God the Father. That same power he used to raise us from our death in sin.
]]>“For this reason, because I have heard of your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love toward all the saints, I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers, that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and of revelation in the knowledge of him, having the eyes of your hearts enlightened, that you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance in the saints, and what is the immeasurable greatness of his power toward us who believe, according to the working of his great might that he worked in Christ when he raised him from the dead and seated him at his right hand in the heavenly places, far above all rule and authority and power and dominion, and above every name that is named, not only in this age but also in the one to come. And he put all things under his feet and gave him as head over all things to the church, which is his body, the fullness of him who fills all in all.”
“Now this I say and testify in the Lord, that you must no longer walk as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds. They are darkened in their understanding, alienated from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, due to their hardness of heart. They have become callous and have given themselves up to sensuality, greedy to practice every kind of impurity. But that is not the way you learned Christ! — assuming that you have heard about him and were taught in him, as the truth is in Jesus, to put off your old self, which belongs to your former manner of life and is corrupt through deceitful desires, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put on the new self, created after the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.
Therefore, having put away falsehood, let each one of you speak the truth with his neighbor, for we are members one of another. Be angry and do not sin; do not let the sun go down on your anger, and give no opportunity to the devil. Let the thief no longer steal, but rather let him labor, doing honest work with his own hands, so that he may have something to share with anyone in need. Let no corrupting talk come out of your mouths, but only such as is good for building up, as fits the occasion, that it may give grace to those who hear. And do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God, by whom you were sealed for the day of redemption. Let all bitterness and wrath and anger and clamor and slander be put away from you, along with all malice. Be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you.”
Before he called us, we were dead in our sin and without understanding. Our desires were wicked, not of Christ, and unpleasing to Christ. We were blind and gave ourselves up to the devil and his impulses.
As we are called to Christ, we are to put away this dead self, and put on the new self in Christ. We turn from our lying ways to speak truth in love. This is a love that does not seek to flatter or condone what is wicked, but that seeks what is best for the other according to Christ. We are free to be angry, but we are to turn it away before we sin. We are to use our words to build each other up in Christ, and not to harm or destroy. We are to forgive, and seek others’ forgiveness, as God forgives us in Christ.
We are to heed the Holy Spirit in us and to not let it despair. We will never deserve that holy gift, though we are to strive that it were not wasted on us.
]]>“Paul, an apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,
To the saints who are in Ephesus, and are faithful in Christ Jesus: Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavenly places, even as he chose us in him before the foundation of the world, that we should be holy and blameless before him. In love he predestined us for adoption to himself as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will, to the praise of his glorious grace, with which he has blessed us in the Beloved.”
That some are elect and others not, that some are saved by God’s grace from destruction and others are not, is often seen as a cosmic unfairness. This predestination is seen as arbitrary, and that it reveals an unjust God.
On the contrary, as the wages of sin are death, and we are dead in our sin, all are deserving of punishment. For God to elect none, and pass all of us into damnation, would be a perfectly just result. The remarkable fact is that he did not, and rather chose to save his own for his glory. Those who are justified inherit this saving gift of faith through no effort of their own, and for no inherent quality in them, but purely by the will of God for his own purposes. It is a grace, a gift, an undeserved delight.
A very imperfect analogy might consist in imagining a couple hikers who are drunk and fall down the hill, one of whom is rescued by a passerby. In such a scenario, do we ask why the passerby saved one and not the other? Is it not sufficient that one of the two was saved? Do survivors of the one who died have a claim against the passerby?
This is imperfect insofar as God is not limited as our passerby, though it illustrates something of the presumptuousness in these matters. Both the hikers in their drunkenness, and we in our sin, have no claim to God’s mercy. We have nothing to offer for our rescue, and there is nothing in us to merit such a kindness. That God could save both, and does not, is no strike against God. Rather, it is a strike against us to so question his grace, and to pretend ours would exceed his.
Whether it is we who are saved and others not, or others saved and we who are not, there can be no objection to the acts of God, and no court that dares to preside over Him. We may only place ourselves at his feet, and receive what he gives us. If we may do so in genuine faith, according to his word, we rejoice for his riches.
]]>There is a very simple reason for this. Both God and politics deal with matters of very broad relevance: Our vertical relation to the supernatural or transcendent order, and our horizontal relation to other persons or groups of people. If this is so, it seems very clear that our beliefs and our actions will invoke, however implicitly, our notions of one or both.
When people take reasonable umbrage to slogans like “the personal is the political”, I believe they mean to object specifically to the notion that all of their beliefs and actions are captured by a party doctrine, or that they are explainable in the realm of so-called political science. And this is natural, good, and true, and is a piece of a broader truth. We are not objects in a petri dish, subject to the whims of a purported scientist, nor mere clay effortlessly shaped by those with an agenda. Insofar as we seem such things, we are truly subject to the whims of one far holier, more powerful, and righteous than those I have in mind.
When we say that we can suspend God or politics, we are guilty of holding an impoverished view of each. The atheist imagines they can do something more than disobey Him, that they have the power to circumscribe his very presence, or keep Him out. Perhaps they believe they are a worthy opponent like Jacob, except that they will go away with their hip intact. The one who believes they may rid themselves of a political valence is guilty of a similar hubris: They believe themselves if not God, then a King. For is it not the case that those who claim to be above politics are the most ruthless enforcers of this purported neutrality upon others?
Anne Kennedy notes an exchange in Congress, between Senator Josh Hawley and an abortionist physician, that is emblematic of this:
Sen. Hawley: Let me just remind you — you testified a moment ago that science and evidence should control, not politics. So can men get pregnant? You’re a doctor, I think. Science and evidence should guide medicine. Do science and evidence tell us that men can get pregnant? Biological men — can they get pregnant?
Dr. Verma: I think yes/no questions like this are a political tool… I’m a person of science, and I’m also someone here to represent the complex experiences of my patients. I don’t think polarized language or questions serve that goal.
Dr. Verma’s response reveals the asymmetry I’m describing. When one adheres to the conventional understanding that only women can become pregnant, this is characterized as “political” and “polarized.” When one contests this understanding in the name of patients’ “complex experiences,” this is presented as neutral science. Her revolutionary view is beyond politics, while the conventional view is nakedly political.
Exchanges like these occur daily in our polity, between friends and foes, though they are not always so transparent. When we spar with others, we have an opportunity to learn, express, persuade, and share His Word, even heatedly, but we do all these at His feet.
]]>“All men dream; but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds awake to find that it was vanity; But the dreamers of day are dangerous men. That they may act their dreams with open eyes to make it possible.”
–T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph
]]>“Enemy-occupied territory—that is what this world is. Christianity is the story of how the rightful king has landed, you might say landed in disguise, and is calling us all to take part in a great campaign of sabotage.
When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from our friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.
I know someone will ask me, “Do you really mean, at this time of day, to re-introduce our old friend the devil—hoofs and horns and all?” Well, what the time of day has to do with it I do not know. And I am not particular about the hoofs and horns.”
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity ]]>“Above all, don’t lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to such a pass that he cannot distinguish the truth within him, or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others.
And having no respect he ceases to love, and in order to occupy and distract himself without love he gives way to passions and coarse pleasures, and sinks to bestiality in his vices, all from continual lying to other men and to himself.
The man who lies to himself can be more easily offended than any one. You know it is sometimes very pleasant to take offense, isn’t it? A man may know that nobody has insulted him, but that he has invented the insult for himself, has lied and exaggerated to make it picturesque, has caught at a word and made a mountain out of a molehill—he knows that himself, yet he will be the first to take offense, and will revel in his resentment till he feels great pleasure in it, and so pass to genuine vindictiveness.”
Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov ]]>