Modernity was a period in philosophy, and more generally in western culture, marked by the search for and belief in a universal and objective perspective on reality. This wasn’t entirely new to Modernity. Many had claimed to have achieved such views before, aided, usually, by some form of divine revelation or mystical vision. Modernity wanted none of this. From Descartes to the second World War, the goal was an entirely human grounding for such a perspective. People were highly confident that REASON would provide such, if only it could be worked out exactly what REASON was. And so, people spent over three hundred years on this project.

Postmodernity started when people began to give up on this project. It turned out, after much searching, no one could find this REASON that was supposed to transcend culture. In fact, in the three hundred plus years of the modern period, the main upshot was a further development of division within western society. By the end you just had different people (Kantians, Utilitarians, Hegelians, and so on) who each had their own versions of REASON. (Much as Christians had previously ended up with their own versions of Revelation, and for similar reasons, but that is another story).

Postmodernity then gave up on the search for a universal, objective perspective. There are, broadly, two different ways this could go. One was in the direction of communitarianism. This option held onto the idea that one’s own community had the correct view of the world, but abandoned the idea that this could be shown to those outside the community. The other direction was toward a kind of paradoxical humility. Here, one accepted that they could not prove their conclusions through any objective mechanism. So, it was held that the individual ought to appreciate the limitations of her or his own worldview. This was to give rise to a new set of values which could be shared, namely a respect for difference.

These different visions of postmodernism have had significant upshots in contemporary religion and politics. Communitarians could return to uncritical endorsement of divine revelation, always as interpreted by their communities. They could further cut off critique from outside the community by means of arguments about identity. Those who disagreed were not REAL Christians, they lacked the spirit, or a true relationship with God. In politics the upshot of all of this was a growing disdain for democracy.

Democracy went hand in glove with modernity. If all people shared in some common REASON, then disagreements among humans should always be resolvable via public debate. So long as there was a free marketplace of ideas, a society would be able to reach concord. Though this never worked out in practice, this was the ideal that lay behind so many of the hopes in modern democracy.

In communitarian postmodernism, such hope is abandoned. If truth rests in one’s own community, and there is no possibility of convincing others, then the only option left is to force others to go along with the truth. This has been the program of Christian Nationalism.

The relation of the other form of postmodernism to religion and politics is more complicated. On the one hand it leads to the tendency to celebrate diversity, a wish to address past imbalances of power, and an effort to promote a new form of agonistic democracy. That is a form of democracy that does not aim at any final resolution to political conflict, but instead sees political conflict as a good which holds all members of society accountable to one another.

The paradox is that these efforts are, of course, embraced as values that should be binding on all participants in the society. It is a metaethics that transcends particular cultures, not unlike the way that REASON was supposed to in more subtle versions of modern theory, such as in the political liberalism of John Rawls.

In this context it is an irony, though not an unusual one, that evangelicals remain ignorant of what their own position entails. They often rail against postmodernity, blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are one of the most powerful postmodern factions in contemporary society.

It would not take much for any critical participant therein to realize the truth. It is, after all, evangelicals who have supported politicians who advocate for “alternative facts” and who regularly deny the reality of scientific and scholarly consensus. These are the signs of a community that has abandoned belief in any shared perspective with other humans. It is the sign of a community that has given up on a shared reality and has decided to enforce adherence to its own worldview on others rather than compete in a marketplace of ideas.

The fact that evangelicals don’t know their own position often muddies the waters. But, again somewhat ironically, the ignorance of their own community doesn’t change the fact about their own situation.

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Christian theology is an ongoing conversation among people divided by time and culture, but united by the conversation itself. In this conversation, the contemporary theologian receives from the past. But even if the theologian tried only to repeat what had come before, they would inevitably contribute some of themselves. In this conversation, there are more and less stable themes, questions, and conclusions. There is, doubtless, a kerygma without which the conversation would cease to be Christian theology. The constructive theology in this book, for instance, presupposes Nicene orthodoxy. But there is also a liveliness and openness to novelty as the theologian attempts to make sense of the world through the conversation.

Scripture does not stand outside this conversation. Rather, it represents some of the first contributors to the dialogue. Today, these contributors are designated by their names, letters (J, E, P, and D) and pseudonyms (Matthew and Mark, Isaiah two and three). Many are lost to history. Each has placed their mark on the exchange, often leaving dialogical friction in their wake. Genesis 1 is in tension with Genesis 2 and 3. Chronicles rehearses and reinterprets Kings, at times quite liberally. In intra-Biblical interpretation, the text did not simply dictate to the reader. The interpreter was an active participant in picking, choosing, contesting, correcting, and reinterpreting. They contributed meanings which, over generations, came to layer the text.

In this process, the most recent interlocutor was never free of the text. Earlier authors imposed some boundaries which could not be crossed. The final editors of the Pentateuch did not feel qualified to harmonize all the divergent versions of ancient stories, nor could they reconcile themselves with rejecting one or the other narrative, even if they were apparently contradictory. But they never merely maintained what had come before. Even in offering the most conservative restatement of ancient stories in new contexts, the interpreter became a new author of the text. Biblical theology has always been dialogical theology.

This has not always been recognized within Christianity. Following the Jewish tradition of the previous three hundred years, most early Christians posited a kind of univocality to scripture. Origen, the early Church theologian, taught that the scripture was uniformly authored by the Holy Spirit. This doctrine, however, did not stop Christians from continued participation in dialogue which drew upon, contributed to, and directed the growing tradition. It opened spaces in which the dialogue continued. “God’s intended” meaning for the text could go beyond, and in quite different directions from the meaning intended by historical authors. Through allegory, typology, and moral readings of the text, Christians continued to both receive from the tradition and to donate their own voices to the growing cacophony.

As Christianity perdured, the dialogue enlarged, branched out, and diverged. Even, or perhaps especially when theologians thought of themselves as repeating earlier themes, they contributed innovative additions to the conversation. Where Paul claimed that “sin entered the world through one man … with the result that (ἐφ’ ᾧ) all have sinned,” (Rom. 5:12) Augustine could extend the claim that it was Adam “in whom (in quo)” all have sin.⁷ Where Paul was concerned with “works of the law (ἔργων νόμου)” (Gal. 2:16), i.e. circumcision, dietary laws, and sabbath obedience, Martin Luther could read concern about “works righteousness”, i.e. a belief that one could achieve righteousness independent of God.⁸ Much of the dialogical nature of this work remained hidden, certainly from the public, but also often from the interpreters themselves. Christianity maintained both connection across the tradition and dialogical flexibility to articulate doctrine in new and helpful, or even provocative, ways.

In the aftermath of the Reformation this approach to the Bible became more difficult to uphold. The increased pressure on the text to sort out disagreements (a task once left primarily to the institutional Church), the need for a meaning accessible to a more general public, and the development of modern hermeneutics, often influenced by scientific constructions of literalism, led to significant shifts in what was possible when approaching the text. More important than any other development, however, modernity (and even more postmodernity) brought an appreciation of historicism – the extent to which original authors and their intentions are necessarily culturally distanced from contemporary readers.

Today, it is impossible to read scripture in the same ways that pre-modern Christians did. But this hardly requires an end to theology as dialogue with the scripture and tradition. Indeed, it allows the dialogical nature of theology to be more self-conscious and explicit. It further requires that we recognize the Biblical authors as some among the many partners that join us in the long tradition of Christian theology. Self-critical Christians must take seriously their own role as dialogue partners with the Biblical text and the following tradition. As Kathryn Tanner writes: when doing theology, one must accept that one is in “a constructive dialogue and intellectual contest with all those other Christians, past and present, who have been similarly concerned …” For present purposes, we can expand this statement to include those many Jewish contributors without whom the Christian tradition would never have come to be.

A few opening notes then are necessary. I would never claim to know why evil and suffering exist, or why God would choose (if that is even the right word) to create a world like the one we live in. I take it the versions of the problem of evil are the most significant challenges to belief in any conception of a loving God. And they are high among the reasons why I would not claim to know that any such God exists, even while I believe that one does. My thoughts here are not offered as speculative philosophy, not as therapy, and certainly not as an answer to someone currently suffering. The proper response to suffering is the alleviation of the cause of that suffering or solidarity in suffering, not theodicy.

This said, I don’t think that this is all that should be the only reaction to suffering from the theist. If theism is to be intellectually viable, it must have something to say about why evil and suffering might exist, even if it never claims to have THE answer to such questions.

In particular, here I am interested in gratuitous suffering. That is, suffering that does not have an immediate offsetting good. An immediate offsetting good would be something like the allowance of free will. It may be that allowing for free will requires allowing bad decisions. But bad decisions may cause evil and suffering. That evil and suffering would not, then, be gratuitous.

For this reason, in order to isolate gratuitous suffering, philosophers often point to the problem of animal suffering. Say, a doe that dies in agony in a naturally caused forest fire. No one else ever knows that this particular event happened. So, there is no cause or effect that can immediately justify the suffering. Nothing hangs on this particular example. But it does get us to a bit of clarity on this particularly horrible kind of problem of evil.

In responding to this problem of evil, I want to make a few claims about the kind of God I am trying to understand. First, it is not a God of meticulous providence. That is, this is not a God that controls or causes every particular event in the world. Rather, I assume that God is responsible for creating the and sustaining the world. But that the world exhibits a significant amount of freedom from God in its particular formation at any given time. This might be the case for multiple reasons. Perhaps God imbues the world with this kind of freedom in order to allow for the realization of particular kinds of goods. Perhaps God is not the kind of being that can exert meticulous providence. The first would be a more classical theistic claim, the later is more associated with modern process theology. For current purposes, I have no interest in sorting them out or selecting between them. I am only interested in the conclusion both reach, that God is not in the business of regularly determining particular events.

This makes the problem of evil I am interested in one that is not concerned with why some particular evil occurred, but why God would have created a world in which that kind of evil could or would occur. God may “allow” particular instances of evil in the sense that God sustains a world in which such evils occur. But that is quite different from deciding that, say, this particular evil should occur.

The question then is whether God would ever create a world in which genuine gratuitous evils occur. Or to put the issue rather differently, would God create a world with absurdity in it? Here, by absurdity I mean things—events, objects, realities—that lack reason for their existence. These absurdities would include absurd evils.

It is here that we run upon a kind of paradox. Because God might create such a world if there were goods that could be realized in such a world that could not be realized in a world without absurdity. Imagine, for instance, that there is significant good in standing against the absurdity of the world. This is the kind of good that is often trumpeted by existentialist leaning atheists. They appreciate a kind of heroism found in embracing meaning despite the fact that the world does not guarantee that meaning. It is exactly the absurdity of the world that allows for the possibility of the existence of such a good. If we lived in a world in which there were no absurdity, there would be no standing against it.

But what if this, or something like it, were quite important to the very kind of being that we exhibit, such that God could not create that kind of being without also creating the kind of world in which such absurdity existed. In such a world gratuitous evils, while lacking immediate offsetting goods, would be necessary features of the possibility for many of the kinds of goods that we find in this world.

This, of course, leaves several questions. I have not argued that any of this is account is true. It’s all a set of claims that “might be” or “could plausibly be.” But, as noted at the beginning, I am not aiming for anything so comprehensive as an account of why gratuitous evils DO occur. I don’t think that is a realistic bar for the discussion. More importantly, we leave untouched the broader question, to which I suspect all theodicy returns. Even if we accept that God had to accept such limitations in creating, should God have created at all. Perhaps one would wish to argue that existence of the kind that we enjoy just isn’t worth the suffering inherent in the kind of world in which we exist. It is clearly beyond my ability to engage such a topic here, and I doubt there is any one definitive conclusion to the dispute.

I rest here, having suggested that there is a way in which it is possible to make sense of why God might have allowed absurd evil in some world. That, I think, is about the best we can do in such a context.

Such engagement is needed with the doctrine of Original Sin for multiple reasons. Many moderns would like to abandon the doctrine all together. Modernity has been generally optimistic about the possibilities of banishing evil from humanity altogether. Usually, evil is located as a problem of some particular system or institution: capitalism, racism, the coercive state, etc. It is assumed that if we could get rid of the system or institution humanity could return to some idealized natural state of harmony.

Such efforts, I judge, have underestimated the depth of the problem. There is some deeper structure at work in human evil. Something that would take advantage of any system or institution in which we came to live. Our evil, it turns out, is magnificently creative in its ability to corrupt any particular society or set of institutions. As Reinhold Niebuhr once quipped, sin is the one empirically verifiable Christian doctrine. For this reason, I break with the modern optimism about abandoning the notion of sin.

But there is no doubt that the doctrine of Original Sin has problems. For one, there is the idea that we inherit moral status. We are born with a tendency to sin and with the guilt of sin. The idea of inherited guilt was already a problem before the end of the period in which the Hebrew scriptures were written. And it has only become more so with the rise of modern individualism. It doesn’t make sense to us how we could inherit moral status, much less how such inheritance could be just.

Second, and related is the problem that sin just seems insufficient to make sense of human evil. Many evils of human society and action are not the product of ill intent. They are products of our inability to grasp the state of things around us at any given time and to foresee the outcomes of our actions. In short, they are the outcome of our finitude. If we had greater knowledge or prescience, we might avoid many of the harms that we impose on one another.

Both of these problems with the doctrine of Original Sin tend to lead to an overly negative view of humanity in forms of Christianity that emphasize Original Sin. We are destined for hell from our birth and we are morally responsible for all of the evil of the world. Unfortunately, the depth of such imagined depravity is then usually yoked to a transcendent sense of the freedom of the saved. Those who have found their way into the Christian fold are imagined as having been conscripted into God’s army opposing sin. This paves the way for uncritical participation in some “purifying movement” such as Christian nationalism (a manifestation of human sin if there ever was one).

Is there a way to solve for these problems? Not perfectly, I suspect. Humans are, after all, able to corrupt any system of thought or action they are given. That is part of the problem. But I do think that an Irenaean revision to the doctrine of Original Sin may be helpful.

The doctrine of Original Sin as we have inherited it comes primarily from St. Augustine. He saw Adam and Eve as having a choice about whether to sin. They failed that test. And ever since then humans have been born with the irresistible tendency to sin and with guilt.

This is not the only doctrine of sin in human history however. St. Irenaeus, who preceded Augustine, had told a story with rather different emphases. Adam and Eve were, he said, were created immature. This, it seems, is necessary of any created thing. God alone is perfect, and creation is not God. Thus creation must be born in imperfection. Adam and Eve were meant eventually to eat of the tree. The problem was that they partook to quickly. They did not wait for maturity, and they ate of the tree too early.

This narrative seems more to maintain the problem of finitude (immaturity/imperfection) and sin. Our failing is not simply a matter of our wills, it is a matter of our being other than God. This makes our sin more comprehensible. Sin is born of our immaturity. It opens the way to a more realistic account of inheritance. We inherit the immaturity of humanity. It is certainly the case that in that immaturity, inevitably all do sin. But this is not something we are born with. Nor should we say that we are all born with guilt, such that we are rightly destined for hell from our birth. We are all born imperfect. We will all inevitably fail morally in small and large ways. But our moral failings are not the full story of evil in the world.

On this account, our full maturity and exemption from sin must wait upon the eschaton. There is, perhaps an infinite process of maturing that we must undergo to come always closer to God. We can become relatively more mature in this life, and in correlation become relatively less sinful. But we certainly never escape from the tragedies of finitude in this world. And we will never align our will so perfectly with God to avoid some level of sin in navigating these tragedies.

This, it seems to me, is a more sufficient account of sin. One that does justice to both our finitude and our sinfulness.

Since World War II, international relations has been dominated by two schools of thought: Liberal Internationalism and Realism. Liberal Internationalism starts from the assumption that the states of the world are citizens in a broader global society, and that this society functions something like a liberal democracy. Thus, international relations are governed by international law and moral strictures. States are treated as due equal respect, and this is formalized in the doctrine of state autonomy. So long as a state does not violate the standards of international law, it is inviolable. Its territory is safe from invasion or infringement. Disputes within this community are to be adjudicated by the community, ideally through institutions of shared global governance.

The traditional alternative to Liberal internationalism is usually considered to be Realism. Realism assumes that what is really driving international relations at any given time is not adherence to a legal or moral code, but power. Every state wishes to maximize its own power vis-a-vis other states, but all states are hemmed in to some extent by other states. Thus, what is really effective in changing state behavior has nothing to do with morality or law. States will do whatever they can get away with.

Since the 1940s, the United States has cast itself in the role of being the guarantor of Liberal Internationalism. In early days it cast the Soviet Union as the imperial threat to this order, and the cold war was seen as a defense of the freedom of western nations against the consuming dictatorial power of the USSR. After this period it attempted to incorporate former soviet states into the liberal international order while dispatching “rogue states” where ethnic strife, power hungry autocrats, or failed governments threatened the order.

By framing things in this way I don’t mean to suggest that the United States succeeded in living up to the ideals of liberal internationalism. It often undertook imperial projects under the guise of defending the broader order, and it justified the violation of its own ideals as defenses of those ideals. But throughout, even when the United States did act as an imperial hegemon, it always sought to provide some fig leaf of justification that appealed to the standards of liberal internationalism.

It is that fig leaf that Trump has cast aside. Trump’s view of international order is starkly realist. Morality and law make no difference. The only relevant feature of the world is raw power.

This perspective has been on vivid display in Trump’s approach to Russia and Ukraine. Russia is, in terms of liberal internationalism, clearly the problem. While the US had attempted to incorporate Russia into the scheme of Liberal International order after the cold war, in the early 2000s, Vladimir Putin turned the country in the opposite direction. To Putin, becoming one autonomous state among others was beneath Russia’s dignity. Russia was meant to be an imperial power, and it would not accept a stature of equality with others. The invasions of Georgia in 2008, annexing of Crimea in 2014, and the invasion of Ukraine in 2022 are all a part of a new imperial vision that Putin has brought forth as an explicit challenge to Liberal Internationalism.

This is why the opposition to Russian activity has seemed so obvious to many in America. Russia is attacking the very moral order that the United States has sworn to uphold. But clearly Trump took no such oath.

Trump does not believe in moral or legal limits. He believes only in the limits of power. This can be seen in his approach to Ukraine. To him it makes no difference that Russia began the conflict by violating Ukrainian sovereignty. He himself has felt free to claim exactly the opposite. But as is often the case with Trump, at the root of this lie is not a direct opposition to the truth so much as a lack of concern about whether or not his statements are true. What really matters to Trump is power. If Russia has the power to defeat Ukraine then Ukraine is ripe for the picking.

Within such a worldview one does not lend aid to a country because their cause is just. One would only aid another country in exchange for some good. In the present case, Trump has pressured Ukraine to exchange its mineral rights for continued aid and support.

Of course, Trump is not a hard nosed realist like the figures of Hans Morgenthau, or John Mearsheimer. He is, at the end of the day, a naïve imperial realist. His realism is couched within an assumption of American exceptionalism in which he, as the President, is immune from the realities of power play. Thus, he does not see any way in which Russia could ever be a threat to his own position in the world or his own nation. He can see no realist case for aiding Ukraine, or even maintaining good relations with America’s allies in Europe.

This is the same facet of his approach to international politics that explains the other end of his exchange with Ukraine’s president. Trump demanded “respect.” By this he appears to have meant subservience. If Trump is the head of an imperial power, and if he owes nothing to others on moral grounds, one could yet supplicate themselves before him in an effort to eat from his scraps.

The upshot of this is morally monstrous. Trump thinks of himself as the leviathan above all other leviathans. He sees the world of international conflict as a state of nature, a state of war of all against all which he can look down upon from his high loft as King of America. That is the kind of view that not only destroys the possibility of international community, but ultimately gets the King and his country toppled. Hubris is ultimately the bane of both Liberal Internationalism and Realism. It is also the most significant defining characteristic of America’s foreign policy under Trump.

According to the classical formula, the Trinity is one in ousia (substantia) and three in hypostases (persona). I purposely leave these terms in what are to me foreign languages so as not to assume to much about their meanings, as I take these meanings to be intentionally vague in the classical doctrine. It was, after all, a doctrine created by a committee with the goal of satisfying what were doubtless varying different interpretations.

At this point, there is no logical problem. The Trinity is three in one sense, and one in another sense. There are many things that are both plural and unitary in some way. A committee is both a singular entity and composed of multiple members. An egg may be yolk, white, and shell, and yet still one egg.

Yet, this does not seem to say quite enough. The doctrine of the trinity attempts to avoid the claim that there could be three separate gods. What does this add to the problem? Well, it depends how we construe “god.” What is essential to being a god, and what separation would make one god separate from another? Unfortunately, there is very little agreement on this. The Christian can retort that whatever it is that is essential to being a god is what is captured by the term “ousia,” while what is not is captured by the term “hypostases.” Then, they could sort qualities between the two as needed to arrive at their desired conclusion. There is, at least no necessary logical problem in doing so.

I tend to hold a rather minimal doctrine of the Trinity. So, this kind of solution seems fine to me. But some wish to go further. Some, with the Athanasian creed like to add some further apparently relevant grammar, saying that one must be able to claim that (1) The Father is God, (2) The Son is God, (3) The Holy Spirit is God. Is it possible to square this with the claim that God is the Trinity?

Well, if taken as referring to “God” in exactly the same sense in each clause, the answer seems clearly to be “No.” The Father is not the Trinity. The Son is not the Trinity. The Holy Spirit is not the Trinity. God is not dependent on anything outside of God. But the persons of the Trinity are dependent on one another.

At this point, the Christian might take one of two routes. First, they might throw their hands up and claim that the trinity is what I will call a “logical mystery.”* That is to say that the trinity is logically incoherent and yet true. This appears to be a position taken by some, for instance, Lutherans who are not terribly impressed by logic in any case.

There are, however, very good reasons not to take this route. For one, if we throw out logic, it hardly seems that claims about God can be meaningful. If God can be logically incoherent God might be both good and evil. So, claiming that God is good would be emptied of all cognitive content. This seems to me far too high a cost for discourse about God.

Another route would be to claim that the way “God” is used to describe the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is not the same as the way that it is used to describe the Trinity. This would not be without precedent. If I have three glasses of water, I might say that what is in glass 1 is water, what is in glass 2 is water, what is in glass three is water. Yet I would not at any point be claiming that any one of these has exhausted the category “water” in a way that excludes the others. This analogy has the benefit of working with colloquial meanings of the English equivalent of “substantia” the three glasses are filled with the same substance. But they are yet differentiated by other qualities.

But let us add another qualification. What if we add that the Trinity must be in some sense one “self” as some wish to stipulate. Is it yet possible to have three hypostases (Father, Son and Holy Spirit) and yet one self? Again, we would need a robust account of selfhood to sort the question out in the abstract. But the philosopher Brian Leftow has provided us with an analogy that suggests that there is at least one sense on which the situation does not lead to any necessary logical conflict.

Imagine that Marty McFly has a time machine and wants to start a band. He has no friends. So Marty decides to constitute the band himself. He picks up a guitar and plays. Then hops in the time machine and comes back to play the drums along with himself. Finally, he comes back to sing vocals. There is a sense in which, watching the stage, we would say that there is Marty 1, Marty 2, and Marty 3. Yet, there is another sense in which we would say that there is only one “self” Marty. Assuming we can avoid bootstrap paradoxes and the like, there is no logical incoherence in the scenario.

Of course, no one is claiming that God is a time traveling McFly. We need not posit that this is how God is constituted. The point was only to point out that there is no necessary logical contradiction in the set of claims put forward. If there is at least one scenario where the claims can cohere, it must be possible for the claims to cohere. Beyond that, we are free to claim that the trinity is an epistemic mystery* without facing any necessary logical problem.

In short, my own position is that there is no Logical Problem of the Trinity writ large. The doctrine is just to vague for that kind of thing. There certainly are logical problems for particular models of the Trinity advocated by particular theologians. But those are separate from the broader doctrine all by itself.

* Being logically mysterious is different from being epistemically mysterious. A logical mystery is logically incoherent yet true. An epistemic mystery is something that is unknown. The nature of the trinity may be epistemically mysterious without being logically mysterious. I.e. It may just be that we acknowledge that don’t know how the trinity is constituted in a logically consistent way without accepting that it is necessarily not constituted in a logically consistent way.

That, it turns out, is probably not true. In fact, over time we have rewritten the very boundaries between ourselves and the world.

If you go and read ancient accounts of people—Homeric, Biblical, etc.—you will find a lot of activity, but very little about the inner lives of the characters. Take for instance the story of Abraham and the sacrifice of Isaac:

In the story of the testing of a person, one might expect some sign of inner struggle. Some account of how Abraham thought about the challenge, weighed his options, and so on. But no. God commands. Abraham gets up early.

This is not a quirk of this story, nor a sign of Abraham’s unique obedience. It is a universal characteristic of ancient narratives. We just don’t find accounts of what we would think about as internal monologue, the kind of talking to oneself that we take to be so basic to our lives.

Of course, absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of an absence. It could be that something in the style of ancient writing prohibited the recording of such intimate details, or that ancient authors took one’s inner life to be so obvious that they never saw fit to mention it.

But we do know somethings about what we would consider the inner lives of ancients that should give us further pause. In particular, much of what we consider our inner lives was not conceived to be “inner” in the ancient world.

Sometimes today we speak of “intrusive thoughts.” These are thoughts that, metaphorically, seem to come from outside the self. They intrude on our mind. We might follow them or not. But something about their absurdity makes us squirm rather than attribute them to our own mental lives.

For us, as suggested, this is a kind of metaphor. Intrusive thoughts, we think, are really ideas thrown up by our subconscious. But if we suspend this belief for a moment we may come closer to how ancient people experienced the world.

Ancient people would likely have experienced intrusive thoughts as literally intruding on them. As coming from some outside source, a demon or a god. But not just intrusive thoughts. Upswells of emotion, motivation, and so on were frequently attributed to sources outside the self. If you feel yourself suddenly amorous, it may be that you have been struck by the arrow of cupid. If you are heroic, the spirit of the lord may have fallen upon you. If you write a brilliant blog, it may be the work of the muses.

The philosopher Charles Taylor has written of the “porous self” in the premodern world, which he contrasts with the “buffered self” of modernity. The ancient self was open to the external world, indeed could not exist independent of that world.

But, to return to our original question, if this is correct, what is left for the inner life? When we speak of an inner monologue, we often actually mean an inner dialogue. The self interacts with the ideas, perceptions, and emotions of the self. And we conceive of this all happening within our inner lives. Our inner lives are thus dynamic. Within us is a multitude. But if the above is right, this cannot be how ancient people experienced life.

The ancient person doubtless had a kind of stream of consciousness, but they likely would have perceived the self as much more pushed around by outside forces rather than under self-control. Less deliberative, more reactive.

This, notably, fits with what we see of Abraham in the above story. God commands. Abraham doesn’t contemplate. He responds.

This may explain why ancient systems of ethics tended not to emphasize inner states (intentions, virtues) but outward acts. The inner states may just not have been as developed or viewed as of overriding importance in the ancient world.

In the end, I am left to conclude that if ancient people had an inner monologue, it must have been something quite different from our own. This is a reminder of the plasticity of human being which ought to leave us (our very selves) humbled by the limited perspectives we are able to achieve in any age.

* For our purposes here, when thinking of ancient people, I am thinking of people at the time of the composition of the Torah and Iliad. There is a long and complicated debate about the point (or points) at which the “self” emerges, and it was doubtless an extremely slow process with many points of advance and retreat.

Despite this grand achievement in humanity (by Neanderthals no less) some of us struggle with even more basic standards of empathy today. Last week as arctic temperatures expanded down into the United States my own city had to make decisions about whether school should be in session. One MAGA parent shared his opinion on social media that closing schools was “a DEI move.” If some students parents were too poor to be able to drive their students to school or to dress them appropriately to wait for the bus, then they should not have the benefit of attending school on such a day. But why should this stop his family from having this benefit?

This isn’t even the question of our elder Neanderthal. Providing equal access to schools for students regardless of economic class is clearly in the interest of the entire society. Students who fall behind classwork due to inability to attend are left at a permanent disadvantage. And if they are the same students who lack other resources to aid in education the situation is all the worse. To leave them behind is to create a perpetual underclass which suffers from true learned helplessness. Thus, such decisions are not even really about whether to make special concessions for members of the society that cannot contribute. They are about how to insure that all members of the society are able to contribute at their highest levels.

In other words, all that is really needed to overcome the perspective embraced by this MAGA parent is enlightened egoism: a selfishness that takes account of long term consequences. This parent fell short of even that. Imagine the effort that it would take for them to understand the kind of altruism of those Neanderthals 40,000 years ago.

Human beings may have advanced significantly in terms of technology since the time of the Neanderthals. But in terms of our moral development, we still struggle to overcome the worst tendencies in our nature.

Brunner wrote of the orders of creation or preservation: family, economy, politics, and culture. These separate spheres provided contexts in which human beings learned responsibility. They provided a structure in which individuals could find their callings. Bonhoeffer later adopted a version of this which he called the divine mandates: family, work, government, and church.

The differences across these various schemes concerned how stable these institutions were seen to be. As it turns out “family” has been a remarkably plastic notion across human history, at times representing tribal units, at times units like the modern nuclear family. Similar shifts apply to each of the other categories.

But regardless of how one cashes out the particulars of this scheme, one of its insights was particularly modern. Bonhoeffer noted that the relative independence of the institutions was one of the marks of a modern liberal society. Authoritarian society, in contrast, tended to create a hierarchy which made government dominant over all the other institutions. This, Bonhoeffer saw, was one of the developments under Nazism in Germany. The government took over the Church, set the standards for the family, and controlled work. It was this reduction of independent institutions that Bonhoeffer came to see as one of the primary evils of 1930’s Germany, and one of the developments that laid the foundation for the holocaust. In a society without independent institutions, there were not any homes for protest.

Ironically, exactly what Bonhoeffer saw as one of the structural causes of anti-Christian authoritarianism eventually became the calling card for American Christian Nationalism. In the early 2000s, as a new Pentecostal version of Christian nationalism was flowering, it became popular in conservative Christianity to speak of the 7 Mountains Mandate. The idea was that Christian nationalists needed to take dominion over the “Seven Mountains” of culture: family, religion, education, media, arts and entertainment, business, and government.

The plan was almost exactly what Bonhoeffer had warned against, it was the demolition of the relative independence of social institutions in pursuit of the imposition of a single ideology.

The advocates of the Seven Mountains Mandate included many of those evangelicals who first fell in line in support of Donald Trump even before his first administration. Figures like Paula White and Charlie Kirk. Of course, Trump’s first administration was largely unable to fulfill on its promises of delivering on this transformation of American society. The institutions Trump was trying to dominate were too strong. And Trump was hampered by the expectations of normal politics in the United States, which resisted authoritarian tendencies. Even Trump’s own employees balked at his efforts to consolidate power in a unitary executive office.

Not so in Trump’s second term. While the institutions of our society have been progressively weakened, Trump’s strategy and his power have only risen. He is no longer cowed by the rule of law. Congress is subservient to his whim. And the court system has thus far proven to have either no teeth or no power to stop him.

In the meantime, Trump shoots off executive orders that are designed to undermine every independent sphere of society. He has launched a broadside at the independence of education in the United States, threatening defunding of any school that resists his ideological curriculum. He has sought to impose his own reductive definitions of gender on medical services and families. Media companies have bowed to him rather than standing for freedom of speech. He has attacked the very idea of diversity as a social good. The administration has challenged the idea that any part of government should be independent of the power and prerogatives of the President, and all leaders in the government are being asked to pledge their loyalty not to the constitution or the republic, but to Trump himself.

What we are seeing is the same collapse of society that Dietrich Bonhoeffer witnessed in 1930s Germany. The goals of the authoritarian ideology may not be as disgusting as its Nazi antecedents, but the basic structure is the same. The government is seeking to place every social institutions under the power of the dictator.

According to Bonhoeffer such conditions are deeply morally fraught, because exactly those institutions which are supposed to provide us with the moral structure of our lives are turned to demonic purposes and become morally untrustworthy. It is under such circumstances that individuals are called to acts of responsibility which may even run directly against the responsibilities laid out in these institutions in their corrupted forms.

Exactly what this might look like cannot be specified in the abstract. Each individual is called to acts of resistance as they have the capability to enact. For many of us, this may look like participation in public protest, or changes in our economic participation in society. For politicians, it may look like voting against the regular functioning of our society and economy. Regardless, to cite a quote often attributed to Bonhoeffer “We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

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Give that passage 2000 years and readers would likely be bewildered by it. People might even try to take it and apply it to their own setting because they find it simultaneously vague and universal. But, of course, that would be a silly thing to do. Its meaning is utterly clear in context. The prose is hardly even really obscuring anything. This is very much what it would have been like to read much of the book of Revelation, or any other similar apocalyptic work in the ancient world.

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In a functional democracy this kind of thing would not be allowed. After all, the whole point of our constitutional structure is that it was set up to include checks and balances that would prevent any executive power from attempting to become a king. But it has been a long time since the United States constituted a functional democracy, if it ever did.

The 2024 election brought us not only this double-headed dictatorship, but also a mewling and sycophantic Republican majority in both the House and Senate. Despite nominating conspiracy theorists, nut cases, domestic abusers, drunkards, and zealots to his cabinet, the Republican majority in the Senate has not batted an eye at any of Trump’s offerings. Nor has a single soul from the party stood to condemn the usurpation of the power of the purse from the legislative branch. Thus there is no solace to be sought in the virtue of any of that bunch.

But perhaps where virtue fails, vice may leave a life-line. The same anti-government insanity that rules the executive branch has deep roots in the House. So much so that it has become impossible to pass budget resolution or raises to the debt ceiling without votes from the Democratic minority. And such legislative action is the only thing keeping even a semblance of our federal government functioning.

Here's the thing. The Republicans, as the majority party in all branches, needs that semblance to keep functioning. Without that, the rape of our government that they have perpetrated and are perpetrating will become an immediate reality to all citizens of the nation.

So here is what the Democratic minority must do: Let the Republicans govern. Let them try to stand on their own and keep that semblance of government going. Let the Republicans try without any Democratic votes, to pass their own budget resolutions and debt ceiling increases. And if and when the Republicans cannot, only engage with the Republican leadership if it is willing to take back up its democratic responsibilities, enforcing limitations on the executive branch.

To be clear, this is a last-ditch strategy. If the Republicans are not willing to change, Democrats must have the fortitude to stick to their resolve. And in this case there will be costs. Without new budget resolutions and raises to the debt ceiling, there will be significant impacts for the US economy and even the nations ability to maintain its full faith and credit. But if the Republican Party is so resigned to abandon its responsibility in governing, it must be allowed to fail. Even if it means that the country as a whole must fail with them.

So long as the Democratic minority votes to support budget resolutions and debt ceiling increases without definitive changes in the status quo, the Democratic minority is de facto underwriting the continued destruction of our democracy. This is the only realistic power they have left, and it is time to use it.

On February 6^th, Donald Trump signed an executive order titled “Eradicating Anti-Christian Bias.” The order is constructed to allow conservative Christians to coercively force their beliefs on others while eradicating the rights of minorities that conservative Christians don’t wish to recognize.

In America, a society that is two-thirds Christian, there is no Anti-Christian bias. Schools are all off for Christmas, and the holiday’s decorations festoon our stores from late October through early January. Christians have the right to advocate for their beliefs and even to advocate for their preferred political policies on religious grounds. The only “right” that they lack is the right to force others to behave in accord with their beliefs when these beliefs have not been approved by a democratic majority, or when these beliefs violate the rights of someone else.

So, what does Trump cite as the evidence for Anti-Christian bias? The fact that the previous administration enforced laws against protestors who attempted to shut down abortion clinics. And the fact that the Biden administration “declared March 31, 2024—Easter Sunday—as ‘Transgender Day of Visibility.’”

March 31, of course, is Transgender Day of Visibility every year, regardless of what other holiday might or might not land on that day. It is Easter that moves around the calendar. The Biden administration simply recognized the day as what it was. Nor is the recognition of the Transgender Day of Visibility anti-Christian. Not all Christians are ignorant transphobes. In fact, it is rather insulting of the Trump administration to suggest that they are.

Nor is it a sign of bias that a nation enforces its laws protecting those seeking abortions from coercion. This would be true even if it were the case that Christians generally opposed abortion. The whole idea of minority rights is that they protect the minority regardless of whether others disagree.

But one need not even go this far to recognize that enforcing laws against coercive abortion protesters is not anti-Christian. The idea that Christians oppose abortion is laughably ignorant. According to Pew Research, 54% of white non-evangelical protestants believe that abortion should be legal in all or almost all cases. 71% of black protestants agree. And even 59% of Catholics hold this position. Only among white evangelicals is there a majority that hold that abortion should be illegal in most cases. Thus, those who oppose abortion make up only a minority even within Christianity.

The failure of this minority to enshrine its anti-abortion position in law through democratic means is well documented. In 2022, the Supreme Court gutted the national protection of a right to abortion, opening the opportunity for states to limit or eliminate access to abortions. Yet, since then, almost every state that has taken up the issue has voted to protect abortion rights. There is no majority Christian, much less a majority American will to eliminate access.

Allowing a minority of Christians to have the ability, free from law, to blockade abortion clinics is not a defense of religious freedom. It is the empowerment of a tyrannical minority to infringe upon the rights of their fellow citizens.

This is yet one more way in which the Trump administration can kow-tow to its white Christian nationalist minority base. The result is a creeping apartheid in America wherein the majority are subjugated to the minority of Christian fundamentalists. When the right to freedom of religion is interpreted as a right for one minority to coerce others into conformity, the result can only be an abuse of the entire system of liberal democracy.

In the end this executive order is as anti-democratic a use of power as it is cruel. But it is yet only the beginning of the long period of injustice which we are just beginning. May God save our nation’s soul.

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So, it is perhaps not surprising that many people across time have manufactured claims to have one or another source that grants immediate access to God, and thus a God’s eye view of reality. Sociologically these claims have probably grown out of a need for group cohesion. What begins as the source that you have to agree to in order to be a member of our group slowly ascends to take its place as the source that cannot be wrong in any detail.

This is certainly how it happened within Christianity. Early Christians built canons (literally lists) of things that people had to agree to in order to be part of the community. The point was not to establish how you knew the canons to be true, or that they had to be agreed to with absolute certainty. But over time these canons morphed from lists of things that had to be agreed to into foundational sources of knowledge that could not be questioned.

Of course, humans aren’t really so agreeable as all that, so eventually disputes arose about how to interpret those canons. And one group (those who would become Roman Catholics) doubled down epistemically claiming that not only were the canons infallible, but they also had a potentially infallible interpreter of the canons: the Pope.

Of course, humans aren’t really so agreeable as all that, so eventually disputes arose about the Pope’s conclusions. And one group (the Protestants) tripled down epistemically claiming that the Bible alone was an infallible source, but that all believers (if rightly guided by the Holy Spirit) could interpret the Bible for themselves.

Of course, humans aren’t really so agreeable as all that. As soon as the Protestants said anyone can interpret the Bible for themselves, everyone tried to and came to conflicting interpretations.

The upshot of this search for certainty was not one agreed upon infallible source that united humanity. It was a whole bunch of disagreeable human beings each self-righteously convinced that their interpretation of the infallible source was the correct one. The whole history is really rather sad, both in the sense of being depressing and in the sense of being pathetic.

I don’t believe in any infallible source of knowledge, but in what remains of this post I want to point out why such a result was inevitable and why the human search for certainty is always going to be self-defeating.

Imagine that an infallible source did exist. What good would it be for us? We are, after all fallible beings. This fact about us would inevitably have two upshots. First, we could only ever have fallible confidence that the source was infallible. Second, we could only ever have fallible interpretations of the infallible source. Let’s take each point in turn.

All of my claims about the world must start from my own perspective. This truth is almost tautological. I can’t view the world from anywhere other than where I am. And where I am, indeed who I am, is indelibly marked by fallibility. I could be wrong about just about anything. So what if I did come across an infallible source? And what if I came to believe that it was infallible? My claim that it was infallible would always be a fallible claim. Even if God placed in me a special epistemic sense that allowed me to know that the source was infallible (a sensus infallibilis as it were), my claim to have this special epistemic sense would always remain a fallible claim. As such, in order to maintain my justification in the belief that the source was infallible, I would need to continuously check to see if it was accurate in the claims that it made and defend each claim from the source against reasonable critiques. In short, I would be required to treat it just as I would any other very good, but still fallible source.

Second, if we had an infallible source, we would still only ever have fallible interpretations of that source. Even if this source were a person, one does not need to go very far into any relationship to know that people misinterpret one another. Communication via any means is fraught. And if we are talking about a source that cannot literally speak for itself, correcting misinterpretations as they happen, it becomes truly absurd to even talk about it being infallible.

Of course, all of this is rather a silly discussion because no claimed infallible source has passed any significant scrutiny that supports the claim. As such, we are left to conclude that not only are there no infallible sources, but even if we did have one, we would inevitably have to treat it like a fallible source.

It would be better if we all just stopped pretending, and learned to live as actual fallible human beings. Because that, after all, is what we are.

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Here’s the problem. Jesus doesn’t seem to have lived on one or the other side of this dichotomy. Rather he lived his concrete historical life as a character in a story he at least partly knew beforehand.

First century Judaism lent itself to this kind of thing. The tendency was to read the historical texts of the tradition as veiled, mysterious messages to or about the present. Thus, there was a huge repository of literature that might be taken to be about what was going on in the world at any time. And this repository itself was full of stories that had been told long ago, and reinterpreted many times leading to the present moment.

There are many reasons to think that Jesus was aware of and engrossed in this history of retelling. To the point that he interpreted himself to be a character in this ongoing narrative. Take a couple of possible examples.

Daniel 7 tells of “one like a son of man” who would come upon the clouds. This being would receive authority and dominion from the Ancient of Days. This story was collected in the book of Daniel by the end of the second century BCE, though it’s roots probably go back all the way to Canaanite mythology. Clearly by the turn of the millennia it was being interpreted in multiple directions. The author of Daniel interprets it so that the “son of man” is representative of the people of Israel, who would eventually be given dominion over all nations. Other authors, like the author of Similitudes, a non-canonical Enochic work of the first century BCE or CE, thought it referred to the coming of a messianic figure who would bring divine righteousness to the world.

The author of the Gospel of Mark represents Jesus as claiming to be the son of man. But here is the thing, it is entirely possible that this is something the historical Jesus actually did. It would not have been unique for an historical figure to see themselves as the fulfillment of prophecy, a hinge upon which history turned. Today there is even a name for the condition where people come to believe that they are significant religious figures upon their visit to the capital of ancient Israel: Jerusalem syndrome. Thus one need not accept that Jesus was the messiah or son of man to recognize that he might very much have thought of himself as such a figure.

And, to whatever extent Jesus did think of himself as a character in this ongoing story, it would not be strange if he lived out his life as he saw the story going. In Mark 11, the Gospel tells the story of Jesus’ approach to Jerusalem at the end of his life. On his way he tells his disciples to find a colt and bring it to him, so that he might enter into the city on its back. The event recalls a scenario from Zechariah, where the prophet had foreseen a king entering into the city, restoring its greatness:

Lo, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey (Zechariah 9:9).

One need not read this as the fulfillment of some ancient prophecy or as a later fabrication. Jesus could easily have been aware of the passage from Zechariah and intentionally arranged for himself to dramatize the verse as he came into the holy city.

In this way, Jesus could be located not either as a literary character or as a historical figure, but as an historical figure who lived out his life (or at least the relevant portion of his life) as a retelling of a narrative that was available to him in his own time.

Of course, if this construction of Jesus’ life is correct, his living of that story was only the beginning. (Or rather only a midpoint, as the story had begun being written long before). Jesus lived his life as a retelling of earlier narratives, then later Christians retold Jesus’ life again and again as retellings of these earlier tales.

It seems likely, for instance, that Jesus did not see the rather tragic ending of his ministry coming prior to his last days. All evidence, at the very least, shows that his disciples did not foresee the crucifixion coming at the end of Jesus’ ministry. But once that had become a part of Jesus story, the early followers of Jesus had no problem in finding narratives, like the story of the suffering servant in Isaiah, that allowed them to make sense of how that was a possible ending (or way point) in the broader narrative.

This highlights one of the deep problems in attempting to unravel what is historical about the figure of Jesus. Too often we tend to think that there are stories of Jesus, and then there is the historical figure. But it seems far more likely that there was an historical figure who already was a character in a story. To accept this requires no faith or confession whatsoever, only a realization that the ways we usually think of ourselves are not the ways that Jesus or his followers likely thought of themselves.

Its for this kind of reason that, although I am skeptical of the historicity of much of the information in the Gospels, I do not tend to think that scholars like Bart Ehrman and J.D. Crossan are right in thinking that early Christianity must have gone from a “low” Christology to a “high” Christology. That is, I don’t think that it is likely that the earliest Christians thought Jesus was just a common human, and only later Christians came to think of Jesus as in some sense divine. It seems rather more likely to me that claims to grand historical significance, if not claims to outright divine status, go all the way back to Jesus himself.*

*One should not confuse claims to divine status with claims to be the one God, or claims to be one hypostasis in the Godhead. As the category “son of man” suggests, there were many other options available at the time for claiming divine status, and the hypostasis option wouldn’t emerge for another several hundred years.

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There’s this old school — and I think it’s a very Christian concept, by the way — that you love your family and then you love your neighbor and then you love your community and then you love your fellow citizens and your own country, and then after that you can focus and prioritize the rest of the world.

As will be unsurprising to anyone familiar with Vance, his claims here get just about everything backward.

Let’s start from the beginning. Jesus was a celibate, itinerant, anti-imperial preacher. His teachings on the family were anything but “family first.” In Matthew 10, Jesus is represented as teaching:

For I have come to set a man against his father,
and a daughter against her mother,
and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law;
and one’s foes will be members of one’s own household. (Matthew 10:35-36).

Here, and consistently elsewhere Jesus contrasts primary loyalty to one’s family with primary loyalty to him and his movement.

The idea that Jesus preached love of the citizen before the non-citizen is laughably ignorant. Jesus was not of such a status that he could even be a citizen of the Roman empire in which he lived. And he certainly was not preaching loyalty to that empire.

Jesus did teach love of neighbor, but when asked to specify what that meant in the Gospel of Luke, Jesus is represented as telling the story of the Good Samaritan. This is a story which exactly subverts any notion that your “neighbor” is simply a person local to you or a person like you. The Samaritan is a person defined by his foreignness, an outsider, one who is alien. And yet, he is the one who becomes a neighbor by extending mercy. ‘Go and do likewise’ says Jesus (Luke 10:37).

In Matthew 25, Jesus speaks of the judgment of the nations. But he does not prioritize family and nation. He prioritizes and identifies himself with the poor, the hungry, the homeless, and the stranger.

No doubt, the church eventually moderated the radical nature of Jesus’ early ministry movement, but it never entirely rejected Jesus’ prioritization of the universal over the particular in its morality or its spirituality.

In his discussion of the priorities of love, St. Augustine assigns the highest place to God. But God is not, in Augustine’s thought, some being that competes with others for our love and attention. God is the all-encompassing creator and end of all things. God is the broadest category one could imagine. All particular loves find their place in God, but what comes first is the whole, or rather, that which even transcends the whole: God.

The continuing emphasis on celibacy among clergy, monks and nuns is another way that institutionally, the Church continued to push back against the dangers of reducing love to one’s family or one’s immediate community. While the Church eventually accepted that people do have legitimate ends found in institutions like the family, Christians were always reminded that their ultimate end lay beyond these institutions and the loves they represented. To prioritize the family or the nation was, after all, a form of idolatry.

And, when the culture fell too far in the direction of love of these imminent goods, it could face rebellion from the most devout of Christian quarters. The Franciscan revolution of the 13^th century and following was exactly such a movement. Drawing on the idea of the imitatio Christi (the imitation of Christ) St. Francis and his followers chose itinerant, propertyless lives of service over those imminent priorities that Vance seems to think so central to Christianity.

Even the parts of the medieval church that embraced natural law more fully never fell into the kind of prioritizing that Vance imagines. Figures like Thomas Aquinas certainly recognized that as natural beings, humans all do love their families and local communities. But he always saw such loves as imperfect, and only perfected by their extension beyond such boundaries. This was an extension that came with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, infused into the person by the grace of God.

Even with the Reformation, which had a tendency to sacralize institutions of mundane life, one does not find Vance’s prioritization of family and nation as an ideal within Christianity. Calvin praised such institutions, but not as priorities. They were what he called “common graces.” They were beginning points for the expansion of love to larger and larger circles of humanity. They were good first and foremost because they broke the individual out of the smallest of circles: love of self.

In short, while Christianity has often accepted that family, local community, and nation play some proper role in the list of Christian loves, Christianity has always seen challenged the primacy of such goods as potential idols that get in the way of the universalizing scope of Christian love properly considered.

When Vance cites this “old school,” and “Christian” concept of prioritizing love of family, nation and fellow citizen, he is not thinking of anything old or Christian. He is thinking of modern fascism masquerading as a form of Christianity. It is shameful that this kind of thing has ever been passed off as something worthy of the followers of a God who transcends even the universe, and that many will believe him is a sign of the complete failure of Christianity to ever take root in American evangelicalism.

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This is the situation with arguments about the existence of God. As philosophers of religion generally recognize, there are no proofs for God, nor are there any proofs that God does not exist. Proofs are arguments that would be convincing to any rational participant. And, these just don’t exist when it comes to God. Nor is this a unique situation. Similar impasses are found in arguments about philosophy of mind, arguments between materialists and idealists, arguments about absolute motion, and so on. It is actually a fairly common situation in metaphysics generally that there will be multiple rationally possible conclusions.

So it is that theists and atheists often try to make the case that their position is the one all rational people must accept unless it can be proven false. Since it is already established that no position can be proven false, this is a quick way to win the argument without having even to engage with other positions. Here I will focus on some rhetorical strategies by atheists to achieve this goal.

1. We all start out as atheists. The claim here is that atheism isn’t just a default position in the argument, but that atheism is our natural default state as a species. The argument usually runs something like this. (1) Atheism is by definition a lack of belief in God. (2) We are born without beliefs in God. (3) Therefore we are born as atheists.

One problem with this argument is that it produces absurd conclusions. If atheism is simply a lack of belief in God, then anything lacking a belief in God is an atheist. But if this is right, then rocks, doorknobs, and so on, would be atheists. This should bring us up short. If one is willing to accept that rocks are atheists, you should just stop talking to them. They have proven that they aren’t serious participants in the use of language.

To save the definition of atheism, one would at least have to qualify that atheism is lack of belief in God by a being capable of holding such a belief. But once the qualification is made, it’s clear that this will not get one to atheism being a default position. For many people, by the time that they were capable of believing in God, they did in fact believe in God. As such, the atheist’s attempted end run around the field of argument fails.

2. The asserter bears the burden of proof. This argument runs on the basis of standards of argument internal to formal debate or internal to courts of law. The idea is that the person supporting an assertion of fact bears a burden of proof, whereas the person denying the assertion does not.

There are multiple problems here. First, in courts of law and in debates what counts as an assertion is specified in the rules of the game. The statement “the defendant is guilty” counts as an assertion. The statement “the defendant is not guilty” does not. Why? Because that is how the game is constructed so that we protect against false prosecutions. In a debate, the assertion is usually established by the moderators and agreed to by the participants beforehand. Debaters will be given, or select an assertion.

The problem is that arguments about God’s existence don’t usually take place inside formal debating rules, and the participants have not agreed to what counts as an assertion. If I want to claim “God exists” that is an assertion. But if my opponent wants to claim “God does not exist.” That is also an assertion. As are the claims “belief in God is not justified,” “there is not sufficient evidence to ground belief in God,” etc. In short, in disagreements beyond formal debates, everyone is making assertions.

Second, it is often the case that outside of debate frameworks assertions do not bear any burden of proof. If I tell my wife that it is sunny outside, she does not regularly respond: “Why would I believe that without supporting evidence?” The only reason that we end up arguing over assertions is if some participant already has reasons not to believe those assertions or not to trust the person making the assertion. But that means that, far from starting from a tabula rasa to which an assertion is added, we are always already starting from a dialogical space in which multiple claims are on the table. Again, the result is that each person in the argument inevitably starts from their own perspective. The theist from belief that God exists. The atheist from, at the very least, the belief that they have not been given sufficient reason to believe that God exists.

3. Skepticism is the default position in all arguments. This kind of claim arises from a long history of modern epistemology, stretching back to Descartes’ effort to doubt all things, then rebuild knowledge only on the basis of absolute certainty. And this history reaches its absurdist conclusion in early 20^th century logical positivism. There it was claimed that if one could not prove what they believed on the basis of immediate empirical evidence or analytic certitude then not only were they wrong, their claims were not even meaningful.

Logical positivism collapsed between the 1940s and 1960s because it was fundamentally broken. It turned out that no one was sure what “immediate empirical evidence” was, or why it should be trusted. And analytical certitude without any extra-analytical content produced no significant knowledge. In addition, the basic rules proposed in the system did not end up being supported by either analytic certitude or empirical evidence. As such, the position collapsed upon itself.

To put this more accessibly, if we make skepticism a default position, we never escape skepticism. We just end up unable to claim that we know anything. If anyone claims to be a skeptic and to know things, you can know that they are not a consistent skeptic. By the latter half of the 1900s, epistemologists recognized that we must start out knowing some things. And if we are going to come up with adequate accounts of how we know things, we have to start out by acknowledging what we know at the front end.

But this leads exactly where the rest of the arguments treated here have. Some people claim to know that God exists. Some claim to know God does not exist. Some claim not to know. There is no default position amongst these alternatives.

The overall rhetorical strategy discussed here is deeply woven into the positions of anti-theists and new atheists today. But the reasoning behind it is just as bad as that offered by Christian presuppositional apologists who claim that in order to believe in knowledge at all, one must believe in God. Both are trying to cast debates where there are multiple potentially rational conclusions as debates in which they are the only rational participants. These are inevitably bad arguments. It would be better if everyone took some time to learn the developments in epistemology in the last sixty to eighty years, and if we stopped pretending that there was a way to banish one’s rational opponent in arguments about the existence of God.

So here is a question about a common association. Is Satan ever identified with the serpent from Genesis in the Bible? The relationship is so well established in our minds that the question might at first seem obtuse. But it turns out that the answer is not entirely clear. Dan McClellan has recently claimed that “There’s no connection between the snake from the Garden of Eden and Satan anywhere in the Bible.”

I believe Dan is wrong in this claim. But making the case will take some argument. There are only three different passages that may make the connection, but each requires some interpretation to get there.

First, some background. We know that the connection between Satan and the serpent was being made in the first century CE. We find the connection in multiple extra Biblical texts which are from the period. For instance in some versions of The Life of Adam and Eve, a noncanonical text, Satan strikes a bargain with the serpent to bring Adam to sin. Here, Satan is said to use the serpent like an instrument, speaking through the animal to entrap the first humans. In other versions, the characters are more completely collapsed into one another.

In other early texts we find a narrative that expands on the Genesis story. In this version of the tale, Eve is not only deceived by the serpent, she is bedded by the snake. This seems to have been made possible by the Septuagint translation of Genesis where the Hebrew word for “deceived” ( הִשִּׁיאַנִי) was switched out for a Greek term (ἠπάτησέ/epátisé) with a broader semantic range. This translation allowed for the possibility that the serpent had “seduced” Eve. As the connection between the serpent and Satan was made, this was used to explain how it was that Eve’s first child, Cain, had gone on to become a murderer. He was literally a child of Satan.

But was this background informing anything in the Biblical texts? We do not find any explicit connection between the serpent and Satan in the New Testament. But our three passages give us good reason to think that many of the authors assumed the connection in what they wrote.

Take first some comments by Paul in 2 Corinthians 11:2-3:

Paul is drawing here on the Septuagint translation of the story of Eve. The word he uses for “deceived” has the same root as the word used in the LXX translation. And, his comments suggest that what is at stake is something more than being intellectually misled. He wanted to present his followers as “chaste virgins to Christ.” The parallel here would be the way in which Eve was supposed to be a chaste virgin to be married to Adam. But it appears that the serpent deceiving/seducing Eve got in the way of her chaste virginity. This suggests that Paul is aware of and drawing upon those early stories in which Eve was not just tricked by the serpent, but sexually violated by the serpent who was Satan. As such, the connection between Satan and the serpent is assumed in the text.

The second passage appears to draw upon the same background story. In the Gospel of John Jesus is pictured as responding to an audience that has rejected him. To them he says:

The references here to the Genesis narrative are not as direct as they were in Paul’s comments, but they are plentiful. We have a reference to some people being the descendants of Satan. This was a common idea amongst Gnostics who adopted the theory that Cain was progeny of the devil. They posited that the world was divided between the demonic descendants of Cain and the savable descendants of Seth, Adam and Eve’s later son. We also find here reference to murder, which is associated with Satan in the narrative through the actions of Cain, who murders his first brother. And we find the idea that Satan is the great deceiver, thus tying back to the original idea that Satan deceived Eve in order to take advantage of her. While this is not an explicit connection, it seems clear that the connection is being assumed in the text.

Finally we come to Revelation, which was Dan’s target in his comments noted above. At stake is the presentation of the “great dragon … that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Revelation 12:9). McClellan properly notes that we find here a reference to the ancient mythological monster, Leviathan. Leviathan is identified as a serpent and a dragon, and is regularly pictured with multiple heads.

But the fact that this is a reference to Leviathan does not mean that this is the only reference in the passage. We are, after all, dealing with the book of Revelation in which symbol is built upon symbol in dizzying array. So, we should ask whether there is any reason to think that the author is tying Satan, to the Devil, to Leviathan, and also to the serpent in Genesis.

It turns out that there is quite good reason. If we skim back to the introduction of the dragon a few verses before, we find that the dragon is paired with a woman. “She was pregnant and was crying out in birth pangs, in the agony of giving birth. Then another portent appeared in heaven: a great red dragon …” (Revelation 12:2-3). There has been much argument about who the woman is supposed to be, and she (like the dragon) is probably a victim of bearing too much symbolism. But here we can note that she is pictured as suffering in the midst of giving birth. This is the punishment given to Eve in the Garden: “I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children.” (Genesis 3:16).

Following this first appearance, although the details are obscured by the apocalyptic haze of the text, the dragon/serpent falls into a conflict with the woman’s child. This is reflective of an early Christian reading of Genesis 3:15.

In the original text, this passage had merely been an etiology about the origins of human’s disdain for snakes. But early on Christians started to read it as a foreshadowing of the conflict between Eve’s offspring, Jesus, and the serpent, Satan.

Following this, we finally get the description of the dragon/serpent with which we started: the “great dragon … that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world” (Revelation 12:9). As noted, the term “serpent” here is not definitive. It certainly refers to Leviathan, but could be doing double duty symbolically to tie Leviathan to the serpent of Genesis. But what is notable is the description of the serpent as “the deceiver (πλανῶν/planon) of the whole world.” The Greek term here is not exactly the same as that found in the Septuagint’s translation of Genesis 3. But the semantic overlap is remarkable. The serpent here is a deceiver, thus calling us back to the Genesis narrative.

This all provides a circumstantial case, but I think a strong circumstantial case, that the author of Revelation was symbolically identifying Leviathan, Satan, the Devil, and the serpent from Genesis in this passage.

In the passages listed here, we do not find explicit claims that the serpent from Genesis is Satan. But what we see suggests that this connection was being made in the broader culture, and that many of the authors of the New Testament presumed it in their writings, and thus implicitly assert it in what they write.

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By noon the next day, the app was working again, now with a message thanking Trump for having saved the social media giant. The problem? Not only had Donald Trump not saved TikTok, he hadn’t even been inaugurated. Nothing had changed during the hours when TikTok was shut down. Absolutely nothing. Yet, TikTok had taken this opportunity to turn the entire fiasco into an advertisement for the incoming president. Why?

Ironically, the reasons for which TikTok was originally banned probably point in the right direction. TikTok is a subsidiary of Bytedance, which is housed in China. US politicians were ostensibly concerned that Bytedance had access to American’s user data, and that the company could use the power of its hold over users to manipulate their politics. The public case for these charges was remarkably weak. All social media platforms collect user data, TikTok is hardly the worst of the bunch in doing so. And, while there is always the possibility that media companies could manipulate their audiences, no advocate of the ban ever claimed publicly, much less provided evidence, that TikTok had been used to do so.

Indeed, the first time one could make the case that TikTok had directly manipulated its users for political purposes, was when it shut itself down and restarted. And this case is open and shut. It isn’t even pretending to have done anything other than manipulated the politics of its users. This, however, tells us more about American politics than it does about TikTok.

In a well functioning democracy, shutting down and restarting while sycophantically playing to the ego of a president would make no sense in this context. It would only have proven the point of those who oppose TikTok. In a society where the rule of law was above all other standards, it would have made no sense to pretend that TikTok’s situation had changed when its legal situation from one day to the next was entirely stable.

But we clearly don’t live in a well functioning democracy which elevates the rule of law. Or at least TikTok is betting we don’t. TikTok assumes that the United States is now functionally a dictatorship, with power emanating from the contingent will of the president/king.

The sociologist Max Weber once contrasted bureaucratic and charismatic structures of leadership. In a bureaucratic structure, power is vested in rules. Thus, achievement is gained by accommodating to the rules. In a charismatic structure, power is vested in the subjective preferences of the leader. Rules and laws are irrelevant as the established order may be changed at any time by the ruler’s fiat. As such, achievements are often realized only for those with the ear of the leader. Weber thought that with modernity would come greater and greater bureaucracy. He was clearly wrong.

Donald Trump has organized his second administration as an oligarchic kakistocracy. He has no respect for law, precedent, or procedural limitation. In his first term he was limited by the fact that his advisers and appointees respected political institutions more than he did. His generals balked at violating the constitution and human rights. His attorneys general refused to allow Trump to make the entirety of the justice system into a mechanism for persecuting Trump’s opponents. His Vice President would not ignore the outcome of the election that ousted Trump from power.

This time, Trump is doing his best to appoint people who share his disdain for the law, and TikTok has clearly bet that he will succeed in gutting the legal boundaries of his power. Thus, instead of actually trying to bring about a change in the law, or changing its position under the law, TikTok has decided to massage Trump’s ego. Those who are on the right side of the dictator benefit. Those on the wrong side suffer. The law is irrelevant. Perhaps this is a lesson TikTok has brought to America from Chinese politics.

What is most remarkable in this case is the brazenness of TikTok’s maneuvering. The app didn’t even wait until Trump was inaugurated, giving its move some fig leaf of legitimacy. TikTok went ahead and claimed that “President Trump” had taken some significant legal action that would save the company when he had no legal power to do so. This provides a significant sign of just how little respect companies and politicians are expecting the law to have in the Trump administration, and how little they expect people to care.

For the sake of the country, I hope they are wrong. But we can add TikTok to the kowtowing of all of America’s greatest oligarchs. Jeff Bezos quashed a Washington Post endorsement of Harris in anticipation of Trump’s victory, clearly not believing that freedom of speech would be protected under Trump. Mark Zuckerberg has eliminated Facebook’s fact checking to allow more freedom for Trump’s online minions in spreading misinformation. And Elon Musk literally tried to pay people who were likely to vote for Trump to vote.

These are dark times not just because we have a lawless administration incoming, but also because so many of the powerful in American society have clearly accepted that lawlessness has become the order of the day. It is unclear if there will be any left to resist.

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Evangelical Christians often say that they oppose homosexuality because it is contrary to the Bible. This is a deeply ironic statement given that the Bible doesn’t say anything about homosexuality. In fact, it doesn’t say anything about sexuality at all. Both sexuality, as a stable natural disposition of sexual attraction, and homosexuality, as a stable natural disposition of sexual attraction to people of the same sex, are concepts that did not exist at the time that the various pieces of the Bible were being written. There were many other ways of thinking about sex, but sexuality wasn’t one of them.

We can see this by looking at the handful of verses that are frequently, but wrongly, taken to be about homosexuality in the Bible and breaking them down. Let’s go one by one.

Sodom and Gomorrah (Genesis 19:1-25). Perhaps no story is more associated with homosexuality in modernity than the story of Sodom. And yet, it has nothing to do with the topic. In the story, two angels come to the town of Sodom, and a crowd asks for the angels to be handed over to them, so that they can gang-rape them. It takes a mind fascinatingly fixated on same-sex issues to think that this is a story where the problem is that the crowd and the angels are both ostensibly male (if we should even be in the business of sexing angels). This is a tale about hospitality and it’s complete opposite. In the story, Lot has welcomed the Angels into his home and offered them security. He is a symbol of hospitality. The men of the city represent not only the absence of hospitality, but the unbridled force of hostility. That the angels might be sexed male is really irrelevant. And this should be obvious. Who, if they witnessed a gang-rape would first judge those involved because of whom they chose to rape?

Leviticus 18:22, 20:13. Often taken as a direct judgment against homosexuality, these verses are not only irrelevant to any contemporary consideration of homosexuality, they are not even the kind of law that Christians pay attention to in any other context. First, what is condemned is certainly not “homosexuality.” It is playing the active (penetrating) role in an act of male/male anal sex. No other form of sexual interaction is in view. Not male/male oral sex. Not male/male manual genital manipulation. Not friction-based male/male relations, which were common at points in the ancient world. Nor is there any condemnation of any kind of sexual interaction between women. This should be enough to get even the most homophobic reader to wonder what is going on here, because it is clearly not a condemnation of “homosexual sex.” Too many versions are left out. What is happening is most likely a concern about sexual purity. Jewish law was often concerned about the mixing of things across boundaries. The mixing of different kinds of seeds is condemned, as is the mixture of different kinds of cloth in a garment (See Leviticus 19:19). What is at stake in Leviticus 18 and 20 then is the crossing of a purity boundary. This is, of course, exactly the kind of concern that Christianity has relegated to the dustbin of pre-Christ law in every other context. Anyone who insists on both enforcing it in the present, and broadening the condemnation to cover a range of activities never pictured in the original can hardly be said to be following the Bible. Quite the opposite, they are manipulating the Bible to get it to follow them.

1 Corinthians 6:9-11. In these verses, Paul condemns two groups that some wrongly think are relevant to discussions of homosexuality: the μαλακοὶ (literally “soft ones”) and the ἀρσενοκοῖται (something like “male-bed-layers”). Both terms are chronically mistranslated, and unsurprisingly so. Our culture has no parallel categories. That’s because none of us live in ancient Greece or Rome. In those cultures, there were a set of assumptions around sex that just don’t make sense to us anymore. It was assumed that sex was always between one powerful party and one submissive party. The act was for the pleasure, or sheer joy of dominance experienced by the powerful party. The powerful partner was the one who penetrated the other, thus manifesting his (it was always his) freedom from penetration and domination. The submissive was the penetrated. This arrangement was not primarily about what we would consider sexual pleasure. At times, a conquering army would penetrate those they had defeated simply to show their dominance. It was a common slur to claim that some powerful politician (like Julius Caesar) was on the receiving end of his relations. This act was a relationship that was primarily about power.

The “soft ones” to whom Paul refers are likely pubescent males who were penetrated by more powerful members of society. In ancient Greece this took the form of pederasty, and could be advantageous to both parties. The older, more powerful male would mentor the younger, less powerful. But the Roman’s came to see this as problematic, as it suggested that the noble male citizens of their empire might properly be seen as the less powerful, penetrated parties in some relationship. So, the Romans largely left the role of the penetrated to slaves and male prostitutes. It is participation in male/male sexual relations in these contexts that Paul condemns with his complaints about the “soft ones.”

But if this is his complaint about the soft ones, his reservations about the “male-bed-layers” must be understood in a similar context. The word itself is certainly an homage to the condemnation pictured in Leviticus 18 and 20, but the context is no longer that of the purity laws. Paul is condemning those males who penetrate others as a sign of their power over the other. Certainly, this contains no direct commentary on sex in an equal and loving partnership, such as we might find in contemporary homosexual pairings.

Romans 1:26-27. The final verse often used to try to clobber homosexuals is found in Romans. But again, it is utterly clear that Paul has nothing like homosexuality in view. Here is (what at first appears to be) the relevant passage:

“For this reason God gave them up to degrading passions. Their women exchanged natural intercourse for unnatural, and in the same way also the men, giving up natural intercourse with women, were consumed with passion for one another. Men committed shameless acts with men and received in their own persons the due penalty for their error.”

If taken out of context in this way, the passage could look like a condemnation of having passions for others of the same sex, and thus of something like homosexuality.

Of course, the problem is that one shouldn’t take parts of a text out of context. As anyone who is capable of reading critically will note, the passage begins with “For this reason …” This should lead the reader to go back to find the reason.

It turns out that the passage isn’t actually about condemning anything having to do with sex or sexuality. It is a passage about what happens to people who worship idols. And we aren’t being metaphorical here, Paul is thinking of gentiles who literally worship statues: “they exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling a mortal human being or birds or four-footed animals or reptiles.” (Romans 1:23).

In verses 26-27 Paul is claiming that there were people who naturally desired people of the opposite sex, had then worshiped idols, and then God handed them over to unnatural desires for people of the same sex as a punishment for their idolatry. That is not what anyone means by homosexuality today. Absent is the unnaturalness of the desire, the idea that it is a punishment, and, oh yeah, the worship of reptile statues.

To make this into a condemnation of homosexuality or homosexual relationships in the present is to violently rip the passage from its actual context and pretend that you were its new author. That’s what we call eisegesis, reading your own views into the text.

Of course, this is what evangelicals have to do in order to claim the Bible condemns homosexuality. And the only reason that its not obvious to them that this is what they have to do is that they are so well practiced in doing it. Reading the Bible out of context is necessary for anyone who takes the Bible to be infallible, literal, and univocal.

But all of this is just to say that the kind of delusions that lead to the conclusion that “the Bible condemns homosexuality” are built into evangelicalism. It is not to say that their reading gains any more plausibility for the fact that it is built into a broader set of wrongheaded presuppositions that lead them to distort all of scripture.

So, no, the Bible does not condemn homosexuality. Saying that it does so is kind of like saying it diagnoses autism. The Bible doesn’t even know anything about homosexuality. The claim isn’t even about something that the Bible could have done. So you don’t need to know much to know that it does not, in fact, do it.

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