Are Women Reliable?

When we come to Luke 24 we find an interesting bit of insight into the historical veracity of the empty tomb account. Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and some other women present told the apostles of the things which they had just seen (i.e. the vacant tomb, the absent body, the two men, etc.). However, the apostles did not accept what they had to say concerning these things. But why not? Well, it seems that it is because the testimony of women was not held in high regard in their culture. Are there any extra-biblical sources that attest to this?

Sooner let the words of the Law be burnt than delivered to women. (Talmud, Sotah 19a)

The world cannot exist without males and without females-happy is he whose children are males, and woe to him whose children are females. (Talmud, Kiddushin 82b)

But let not the testimony of women be admitted, on account of the levity and boldness of their sex, nor let servants be admitted to give testimony on account of the ignobility of their soul; since it is probable that they may not speak truth, either out of hope of gain, or fear of punishment. (Josephus, Antiquities 4.8.15)

Any evidence which a woman [gives] is not valid (to offer), also they are not valid to offer. This is the equivalent to saying that one who is Rabbinically accounted a robber is qualified to give the same evidence as a woman. (Talmud, Rosh Hashannah 1.8)

So Clint, what is the big point? Well, I am glad you asked! If the disciples were trying to create a resurrection account why would they use women as the primary witnesses? After all, women are the primary witnesses in all four gospels as opposed to men in only two gospels. Further, if legend creeps in over time, why was the text not redacted to show that men, a more reliable source, were in fact the first and primary witnesses to the empty tomb? Why even include the women at all? The scholar Gary Habermas found that about 75% of all critical and skeptical scholars accept the fact of the empty tomb (see The Case for the Resurrection of Jesus). However, there are those who refuse to let the evidence convince them. Their reasons? William Wand, former Oxford Church Historian addresses this matter in a concise manner stating that “all the strictly historical evidence we have is in favor of [the empty tomb], and those who reject it ought to recognize that they do so on some other ground than that of scientific history.”

N. T. Wright

For those of you who enjoy reading this old chaps works, you should check out his newest work Simply Christian. From what I have heard it is going to be the Mere Christianity of this generation.

Jon Kvanvig to Join Baylor Faculty

Thanks to Matt Mullins’ post at Prosblogion it looks like Jonathan Kvanvig will be joining the philosophy department at Baylor University as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy. I raise my glass.

Stupid Reasoning and Beckwith’s Tenure Denial

MikeGene at Telic Thoughts has posted a response to one example of stupid reasoning regarding Beckwith’s tenure denail.

Update: scordova at Uncommon Descent has discovered MikeGene’s post as well. See here.
Update 2: MikeGene is all over it. See here.

I Sometimes Wonder…

…Are the three major branches of Christianity–Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Protestant–meant to tell us anything about the three divine Persons: the Father, the Son and the Spirit?

Presentism and Truthmakers

According to Presentism, whatever exists, exists now, in the present. The past has flowed away and the future is yet to come. Only the present exits. But what of things like abstract objects? This view appears to rule out in one swift stroke, any view of abstract entities, for such things do not exists at times, present, past, or future. Many presentists would want qualify a bit. According to this qualified view, for any x, x exists if and only if x obtains in the present, and x is non-abstract. This way room is made for the existence of atemporal objects—objects like properties or numbers which exist but do not exist in the present since they do not exist at any time.

But as attractive Presentism is, it faces a serious objection: How exactly are truths about the past grounded? This question of the grounding past truths is a consequence of the truthmaker thesis:

TM: Every truth has a truthmaker—that in virtue of which a proposition or sentence is true.

Traditionally, facts or states of affairs are taken to be the sort of things that qualify as truthmakers, so that for any true proposition P, there exists a corresponding fact or state of affairs S such that P if and only if S. But perhaps this definition is too strong. There are some truths, e.g. analytic ones, which seem to require no truthmakers. For example the proposition

1) All bachelors in are unmarried,

is just true by definition. Similarly, contingent negative existential propositions like

2) Cerberus does not exist,

are also thought to not require truthmakers since they do not posit the existence of anything and, so, do not require the existence of anything in order to be true. But save for the likes of 1) or 2), truthmakers are apparently needed for all other propositions. If it is true that I am now writing this post, then necessarily, it is the case that I am now writing this post. But what about the post I wrote last Saturday? What is it that grounds a proposition like:

3) Xavier wrote a post last Saturday.

Given Presentism, apparently, nothing in the past could, since past events do not exist. Further, nothing in the present does either, for my typing last Saturday’s post occurred last Saturday. How then does Presentism account for the truth of something like 3)?

New Contributor

I’d like to hoist a pint in welcoming our newest contributor, Matt Woodard. Matt is currently completing his Master’s in Theology, while (rightly) promoting disinterest in anything Duke related. His specializations and interests include Scriptural background studies, textual issues, historical Jesus, NT exegesis, theology and so forth. We’re excited to have Matt as part of our team, and I trust you will not be disappointed by anything he writes.

Exposing a Presupposition

While engaged in a discussion of middle-knowledge with a dear friend recently, I noticed a presupposition. The objection was something in the neighborhood of this:

“Middle-knowledge sounds nice philosophically, and has great theological potential if true, but, there’s something I can’t picture: When Paul was writing on election and predestination in Romans (for example), was he thinking ‘middle-knowledge is how God effected this’? I think it was not.”

Here’s the objector’s presupposition: Scriptural authors completely understood, philosophically, how the truth of what the Holy Spirit told them works. This is, I think, something Christian’s should not feel compelled to hold. I totally affirm that Paul, for example, understood that God predestines us– but I don’t affirm that he necessarily understood just how that works. Similarly, I doubt any of the authors of Scripture could philosophically explain the Trinity, though at least most of them would explicitly affirm it. Now, I’ve written this in a hurry, so my explanation has not been polished, but the point is clear, I think. Any thoughts?

Augustine and The Spirit as “Love”

I recently quoted Augustine in De Trinitate VIII at length where he sees in the very act of love, a trace of the Trinity itself. Augustine ponders on the Jesus’ words in Matt. 22:40. There, Christ tells us that the whole of the Law and the prophets can be summed up by loving God and loving your neighbor. Yet we are often instructed in Scripture to love God in one instance and to love our neighbor in another, but not both simultaneously. What then? Are the biblical writers contradicting what Christ has said? Not so, Augustine remarks. For God Himself is love (I John 4:7-8), and the man who loves his neighbor loves love itself (much as the man who loves good things loves the good itself), and thus the one who loves love actually loves God. In Augustine’s words: because God is love, the man who loves love certainly loves God; and the man who loves his brother must love love.

So then this loving act of the mind itself is Trinitarian for there you have three equally necessary things in the act of loving—the one who is the lover, the one being loved, and the love itself. For the mind to love, it must love something, and for it to love something, it must love love. “There you are with three, the lover, what is being loved, and love.” Now Augustine does not immediately attempt to identify which member of the Godhead is the Lover, the Beloved, or the Loving. However, he will later return to this and give some hints of his insights. It seems clear that Augustine, while emphasizing the unity and equality of all three members of the Godhead, wants to carry on the tradition he inherited from the East of the Father being Fons Divinitas—or the “fountainhead of deity.” So then, the Father is the Lover. The Son is the Beloved as the Scriptures often presents Him, e.g. Eph. 1:6: which he freely bestowed upon us in the beloved one. The Spirit then is the Love, or the gift of mutual love that ties the both together. And the mutual love between the Father and the Son is actually a love of Love itself, and this Love is the Holy Spirit. (Parenthetically centuries later, Richard of St. Victor will elaborate even more holding that for mutual love to be perfect, there must be love shared with a third person. So then perfect love is not in the I-thou relationship but instead when there is a “co-beloved” as the Holy Spirit is to the Father and the Son. So the Trinity is a communion of love: The Father loves the Son and the Son loves the Father, but for either to love the other, each must love Love Itself, which is the Holy Spirit).

Now Augustine’s analogy is just that. An analogy. And he himself after stating it, promptly sets it aside to find something better. But this analogy doesn’t sit well with many contemporary theologians. According to some of my professors, the doctrine of the Trinity is in dire straights in the West. The Holy Spirit, it is said, has been so depersonalized that He is hardly ever considered in Christian scholarship, and has nearly vanished into irrelevance in the religious life of believers. But what has brought this about? Why is the Holy Spirit so often depersonalized? Was it one of the ill effects of the Enlightenment? The net result of the “every man for himself” approach to Scripture interpretation practiced by Protestants? The work of the Enemy? Bad hermeneutics? The tendency among evangelicals to emphasize the work and person of Christ to the neglect of the other divine Persons?

“Nay,” I was told. It was none of these things. Rather, the problem of depersonalizing the Spirit that is so prevalent in the West actually finds its root cause in that dreaded analogy of Love that Augustine propounded in De Trinitate VIII. And for a long time I parroted this notion. After all, in the analogy, the Father is personalized as a Lover. The Son, moreover, is personalized, being called “the Beloved One.” But the Spirit is referred to as the impersonal Love that is shared with the Father and the Son. This notion of the Spirit as an impersonal seems to be reflected in Western art where the Father and Son are often depicted in the form of persons, while the Spirit is depicted using impersonal objects like doves, and even inanimate entities like fire. What choice then, did Christians in the West have, but to think of the Holy Spirit as non-personal.

I sometimes wonder whether these theologians are secretly suspicious of the biblical writers themselves, what with all those neuter names given to the Holy Spirit like רוּחַ and πνεύματος, “breath” or “wind” (well at least it’s neuter in Greek since Hebrew has only masculine and feminine). While the Father and Son are expressly objectified for us (the Father in His miraculous works, the Son in His incarnation), the Spirit is often elusive, frequently seen as an agent of power—the means by which the Father accomplishes great acts, or the saints endure suffering; He is experienced subjectively. Even more, we are regularly reminded in the Gospels that the Son came to do naught but to glorify the Father. We are also told that the Spirit comes to do naught but to glorify the Son. But nowhere are we told that the Father or the Son comes to glorify the Spirit. And why is it that the Spirit is so often imaged as non-personal objects? In the baptismal scene of Luke 3:21-22, the Son comes to the water as a man. The Father speaks with a voice from heaven, “You are my beloved Son…” But the Spirit comes as a mere dove. And again, when in Acts 2:1-4 the Spirit came upon the believers gathered at Pentecost, he did not come with a human-like voice from heaven as the Father does, nor was He incarnate as a man like the Son. Instead, He came as a wind and as tongues of fire.

So do contemporary theologians fault the writers of Scripture for de-personalizing the Spirit too? It seems to me that there is a certain hiddeness to the Person of the Spirit and perhaps it is intended to be just so in the economic Trinity. It is this hiddeness, I think, that Augustine is trying to capture by giving the Spirit the name “Love” (he also uses “Gift”).

Ongoing at Culture Watch

There is a terrific exchange taking place at Doug Groothuis’s blog, Culture Watch, in the comments of “Reporting on an Evening with Atheists.” Up to 72 comments already, it is a lengthy but worthwhile read– especially if you’re interested in apologetics/phil of religion. Enjoy!

UPDATE– The discussion continues, though it is (as one may expect) fizzling out. It seems as though Luke (atheist) is running out of back-peddling room; Tim has quite capably defended his position. Still worth a read, the thread is far more interesting (in my opinion) early on.