You are invited to a Thinking Matters Auckland event:

What: Dr Steve Kumar speaking on Faith and Reason
When: Tuesday 17th March – 7:00pm
Where: Lecture Room 2, Laidlaw College, 80 Central Park Drive, Henderson, West Auckland
Format: Talk followed by questions, answers and discussion
Cost: Free!

Don’t miss hearing New Zealand’s most prominent Christian Apologist.

For almost thirty years Dr Kumar has been actively involved in speaking and writing about apologetics, philosophy and faith. As a New Zealand Christian apologist, he is a sought-after speaker in academic and church settings around the world. He is a frequent guest on television, radio, and news media programs and is an influential voice on issues that relate to the credibility of the Christian truth claims.

Following on from the interest Dr William Lane Craig generated when he visited New Zealand last year, Thinking Matters Auckland (TMA) announce the launch of their Apologetics seminars.

At the seminars, TMA will showcase New Zealand’s best Apologetic talents and screen DVDs of the world’s top Apologists defending the Christian Faith.

Opportunity for analysis, discussion and questions will follow each event.

Thinking Matters is a community of professional and lay apologists dedicated to offering credible reasons to believe and rationally answering objections to the Christian faith.

Seminars will be held at West Auckland’s Laidlaw College in LR2 fortnightly on Tuesdays from 7-9pm starting Tuesday 17 March 2009.

TMA seminars are free events, accessible to all and open to anyone, Christian and non-Christian alike.

I believe my vocation as a Christian Philosopher and Theologian is to provoke people to wrestle with the existential questions they face regarding themselves and God and to challenge them to take Christian answers to these questions seriously.

I was thinking about metaphors for the conversation my vocation requires me to engage in and I came up with the idea of Christian philosophy as Necromancy; Necromancy is the practice of communicating with the dead. In the religious or quasi-religious traditions of some societies it is believed that a person’s soul or spirit continues to exist after they die. The departed spirits can communicate with those still living and those still living can consult their knowledge and advice on matters of importance to them provided that the communication is done through a medium known as a necromancer. The necromancer is a person who is believed to have a special skill of discerning and interpreting what the departed spirits are saying and making this accessible to the enquirers. Similarly, the necromancer is able to put the questions of the enquirer to the departed. Necromancy is a two way conversation; the enquirers putting questions to the departed and the departed giving their answers through the necromancer.

I believe in my own field at least (and in more other fields than is often realised) that what I do is analogous to Necromancy. In the analogy, the enquirers are my audience, the Necromancer is the Christian philosopher and messages of the departed spirits are the subjects under discussion. The departed spirits are the great scholars and thinkers who have gone before us.

Let me elucidate this a bit more fully. In philosophy many of the most significant writings are by people who are dead, people like Plato, Hume and Descartes. The same is true in religious education where one is trying to encourage people to understand and inculcate a theological tradition.

A tradition is a body of purported knowledge (in religious traditions often revealed knowledge) handed down to the current generation from its ancestors. The point of studying tradition is to appropriate the wisdom (and to winnow out the folly) of the past and apply it to a contemporary context.

While these people are dead, the issues they faced are of relevance to us today because many of the questions they addressed are questions we still encounter and want answers to; we want to know what is truth? What is the purpose for existence? What is knowledge? Who are we? What is God’s will? Etc. These people provided, often, carefully reasoned answers to these questions and the point of studying them is to try to appropriate their insights in our own context. Studying these people’s writings, if done properly, is not just to read these people but to enter into dialogue with them.

Why did Plato hold the views he did? What were his reasons - are they cogent? If I offered a particular objection to his position how could it be responded to? When one reads the differing views of Plato and Aristotle who was correct? Why? In the debate between them, which arguments are sound and which are not? Can Plato’s position be modified to stand up to the criticism of Aristotle? And so on. To engage this subject properly it is not enough to just passively read; one must enter the debate and contribute to the discussion oneself. We do this because we have a stake in the questions involved and because the answers to these questions are important.

So in a very real sense, religious education and philosophy are conversations with the dead. We have existential and philosophical questions we want answered and we “consult” the teachings of our dead ancestors to help us answer these questions; in doing so we enter into dialogue between us and them.

As I noted, a necromancer is a person skilled at interpreting the teachings of the dead. This means the Christian philosopher must also be a scholar; he or she must understand these teachings and be in a constant two-way conversation with the dead him or herself. Her or she must also be able to articulate this conversation to others. His or her job is to try and take what he or she learns about what the dead have to say and then make it accessible to contemporary people and show them how it addresses the issues and answers they are asking.

The Christian philosopher also functions as a medium of two-way conservation with the dead. He or she is to pose questions to his or her audience on behalf of the dead. She or he is to take what they have said and place it squarely in front of the audience, demonstrating the challenges this information raises to their lives. The Christian philosopher must also defend the teachings of the dead against misunderstanding and misrepresentation, to a degree he or she plays “devils advocate,” so to speak, by taking the side of the dead, for the sake of argument, against the questions and scepticism of his audience to get them to take what is said seriously and to not just flippantly reject it as the ideas of non-modern people.

At the same time, the Christian philosopher should pose questions to the dead on behalf of the audience; he or she should offer the objections and questions that modern people raise to the dead and ponder their writings, critically evaluating what they have said.

There is some weakness in this analogy; not all Theologians and Philosophers are dead. Even so, they usually write standing in a tradition or their writings are informed by their own reflections on the past. Hence, it must be stressed that a Christian Philosopher is not the only necromancer that exists. She or he is part of a community of necromancers, thus it is a communal project of discernment. This means that the teacher’s discernment and interpretation of the departed messages are not just based on his or her own insights but the shared insight of the necromancer’s guild. This may involve appropriation of other necromancer’s insights as well as critical commentary and interpretation of other necromancers; the conversation with the dead has horizontal as well as vertical elements.

Others may object that my account here is too conservative, that it sees Christian philosophy as the inculculation of tradition. This is something of a caricature; what I am talking about is not mere inculculation but also a critical appropriation of tradition. I would add that the negative stance towards tradition expressed is such sentiments is based on certain enlightenment views of epistemology that I think are mistaken. The thinkers of the middle ages were much wiser than we are here in that they did not disparage everything from the past.

Finally, necromancy is considered, in those societies where it is practiced, as a sacred vocation and I believe this equally applies for the Christian Philosopher and Theologian; we are assisting people to wrestle with and find answers to the deep questions they face about God and this is something that must not be undertaken lightly.

MandM have just one thing to say on the David Bain trial:

Innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.

Do not expect any commentary or speculation on the trial at MandM until the verdict is in.

Just a reminder that Matt is speaking in Auckland on Apologetics tonight.

The Attorney General has identified an "apparent inconsistency" with the proposed "3 strikes bill" and the New Zealand Bill of Rights. This inconsistency is around whether the punishment inflicted by the 3rd strike would be "disproportionately severe."

There have been various reactions to this; the most extreme I have heard came from the bill's proponent David Garrett "So what? Alter the Bill of Rights Act. We've got too hung up on people's rights."

Discussions on talkback and on the blogosphere tend to include the suggestion that criminals don't deserve the same rights as others while others seem to be getting hung up on the apparent disproportionality the bill might cause in some instances and following Garrett's line, suggest amending the Bill of Rights which, in turn, causes some to state that a bill that requires you to amend the Bill of Rights is evidence of a flawed bill.

The clarity many had towards the concept of a 3-strikes bill is now muddied and confused but I don't think it has to be.

First, Garrett is wrong. One cannot get "too hung up on human rights", the first generation type that is, [he has a point on second and third generation rights but then these are not rights and that's probably a discussion for another post] and they apply equally to all including criminals.

Second, no Bill of Rights is beyond question. This means that if the Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill does, in fact, require an amendment of the Bill of Rights to be passed this is not, in and of itself, necessarily evidence that it violates human rights. It could be evidence that the Bill of Rights itself is wrong.

I don’t see why that, in a conflict between a proposed piece of legislation and the Bill of Rights, we should always assume, a priori, that the Bill of Rights is correct. What if a piece of legislation is proposed that conflicts with the Bill of Rights and yet there are good reasons for believing the proposed legislation is just, and in fact, the fault lies with the Bill of Rights?

Suppose that a Bill of Rights authored in one generation was legally interpreted in such a manner that it permitted slavery. A new piece of legislation was then later introduced banning slavery and this was deemed contrary to the Bill of Rights as it affronts the property rights of slave owners. One response could be that previous legal interpretations of the Bill of Rights were incorrect but it could have actually been the case that there was no interpretation error, that Bill of Rights authors and society at the time it was enacted, had no difficulty with slave ownership.

In such a situation surely the clash between proposed legislation and the constitution cannot be dismissed simply by appealing to the fact that the new bill might conflict with the Bill of Rights? Perhaps it would be appropriate to question the action the Bill of Rights was protecting.

That said, I am not convinced the 3-strikes bill does, in fact, conflict so badly with the Bill of Rights that the Bill of Rights would need amending for it to be passed because I don't think that the proportionality doctrine applies to situations such as the ones identified by the Attorney General in his report on the Sentencing and Parole Reform Bill. I think appropriate force for punishment is being confused with defensive force.

The proportionality doctrine is linked to retributivist understandings of punishment. A person is punished because he or she deserves it and to a degree no more than he or she deserves. However, there are times when we incarcerate those we know via due process to be innocent yet are a threat to society. For example, those found not guilty by reason of insanity are commonly deprived of their liberty despite the lack of culpability and therefore lack of dessert because of their future threat to others. This is also true of self-defence. We can use lethal force against another even if they lack culpability for their crime providing the threat is sufficiently serious and immediate etc. The force used in self-defence must be proportionate but not to the past actions but rather to the future threat (this is how self-defence differs from retributive punishment). Quarantine laws would be another example, there are others too.

Clearly, then, there are accepted instances where it would be mistaken to apply the proportionality doctrine. Such cases seem to have common to them the fact that if the person’s liberty were not restrained then a serious and real future threat to life, liberty and the bodily integrity of others from the person being restrained exists.

In the case of the 3-strikes policy the advocates are not claiming that a person who has committed a third crime deserves a harsher punishment, they are claiming that an habitual offender of particular serious violent crimes has shown him or herself to be a credible threat to others and should be incarcerated for this reason. If they are correct, then the proportionality doctrine does not apply.

There is a great exchange on KiwiBlog in the comments section here where Madeleine takes to task some of the other commenters on biblical interpretation. Her ability to render the arguments to stupidity with ease and a nice dose of dry humour thrown in is very amusing and worth a look. She has a gift.

I particularly liked her "Bill killed Jane" analogy and intend to use it in a talk or article sometime though she says I have to footnote her. Madeleine writes:

Just as, if you picked up a murder mystery, randomly flicked it open and read the line “Bob killed Jane” it would be wrong to conclude bob did in fact kill Jane without reading the whole book and seeing the context the statement occurred in. The statement could have been made in the context of a question: “did Bob kill Jane?” It could have been “I had a nightmare last night that bob killed Jane”, it could have been gossip “I head Mary say that Bob killed Jane.” Of course, it could have in fact been the case that Bob killed Jane or it could be a false conclusion the author wants you to think because in fact Peter killed Jane as revealed in chapter 10 - you don’t know and you shouldn’t assume without looking at the context. You cannot just say “what’s your problem, 'Bob killed Jane' is plane English."

The context that words in a text occur in is not a fall-back position, it is a legitimate point and a key component of interpreting any language including an English translation of an Aramaic sermon written using Semitic idioms thousands of years ago.

This one was also good:

..your ability to exegete scripture is about as strong as my ability as a non-surgeon to tell you how to conduct a coronary bypass (without googling).

I could give you a rough idea based on my lay-person’s knowledge of anatomy and of course the number of episodes of Gray’s Anatomy, ER and other medical dramas I watch on TV but I would look like a complete dickhead if I asserted my theory to a cardiothoracic surgeon.

You have no idea how many times I have felt this way, it is an occupational hazard of being a theologian though I am sure many professionals have similar frustrations when lay people tell them what's what in their specialty.

In The Autonomy of Ethics David Brink complains that “tradition and scripture may speak but in conflicting ways”;[1] in a endnote he cites a single example,

Inconsistency is at stake, for example, when we juxtapose the Old Testament doctrine of an “eye for an eye” (Exodus 21:23, 24; Leviticus 24:19, 20; and Deuteronomy 19:21) and the New Testament doctrine of “turning the other cheek” (Matthew 5:38-42; Luke 6:27-31).[2]

Brink contends that the “doctrine of an ‘eye for an eye’” (commonly called the lex talionis) and the New Testament teaching of “turning the other cheek” are contradictory. I will argue that this claim is mistaken; first I will respectively outline what the “doctrine of an ‘eye for an eye’” and the teaching of “turning the other cheek” are then I will ask whether Christ’s expounding of the latter is inconsistent with the former.

What is the Lex Tallonis?
Brink refers to Exodus 21:23-25.

If there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot,25 burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.

This passage is repeated in several other passages.[3] The Phrase expresses a legal formula which is expounded in proverbial form. The principle is that whatever punishment is imposed (in the immediate case the punishment is a fine) must be proportionate to the harm inflicted on the victim.

Sarna notes, “[r]abbinic tradition understood the biblical formulation to mean monetary payment and not physical retaliation”[4] and he defends this interpretation. Drazin notes that the Halacah in b. B.K 84a and Sanhedrin 79a and Mek each understand the phrase to refer to a principle of commensurate compensation.[5] Plaut states that “few passages in the Torah have been so thoroughly misunderstood” and suggests the text is best understood as requiring “the value of an eye for the loss of an eye”, “the value of a limb for its loss and so on”.

I have defended this way of interpreting talionic formulae in the Torah in a previous post, here I will add that the context makes this evident. Verses 26-27 apply the principle expounded in v 23-25 to an assault upon an ebed (ebed is often incorrectly translated with the English word slave, it actually refers to a form of indentured servitude).

If a man hits a manservant or maidservant in the eye and destroys it, he must let the servant go free to compensate for the eye. And if he knocks out the tooth of a manservant or maidservant, he must let the servant go free to compensate for the tooth.

An ebed is a person working off a debt. The requirement to release his servant forces the assailant to write off the debt his/her victim owes him/her. The context clearly understands the lex talionis as the payment of commensurate monetary compensation.

What is Turning the Other Cheek?
Christ expounds the “teaching of turning the other cheek” as follows, “If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.” Contrary to common misconceptions, this is not referring to a serious assault. David Daube notes that in the rabbinic law of the period, a slap on the cheek was viewed as a paradigm case of an insult where there was no actual harm or damage to the victim. Moreover, the rabbinic exegesis of the period ruled that one could sue a person who insulted him or her in this fashion for damages proportionate to the shame or damage done to their pride. Something that appears borne out by Christ’s observations a few verses earlier where he states that a person who insults his brother (a fellow Jew) “is answerable to the Sanhedrin.”

Turning the other cheek, then, means refusing to demand compensation for mere insults that do not do any serious damage. Christ is not talking about serious assaults here, as Daube notes, if he did “would the case of a slap in the face not have been an excessively weak illustration of his new position? [Would it not have been necessary] to give a far more serious example”?[6]

It is also clear that “turning the other cheek” is not incompatible with standing up for oneself. In John 18:23-24 when Jesus himself is struck in the face he does not lash back and demand compensation but he does rebuke the person in question. “If I said something wrong, … testify as to what is wrong. But if I spoke the truth, why did you strike me?”

Juxtaposing the Two Teachings
Brink suggests that “when one juxtaposes the Old Testament doctrine of an ‘eye for an eye’” and “the New Testament doctrine of ‘turning the other cheek’” there is an inconsistency. Ironically Christ himself juxtaposes both doctrines in Matt 5:38-39, a passage Brink himself cites; Christ states,

You have heard that it was said, 'Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I tell you do not retaliate against an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also.”

Brink apparently believes that Christ is here citing the Old Testament teaching and then in uttering “but I say to you” contradicting it with his own teaching.

The problem is that this goes against the context and genre of the text. At the beginning of the sermon, in which the above juxtaposition occurs, Christ tells his readers not to interpret his comments as a rejection of Old Testament commands, he states emphatically

Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them[7] … Anyone who breaks one of the least of these commandments and teaches others to do the same will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, but whoever practices and teaches these commands will be called great in the kingdom of heaven”[8]

The contrast Christ draws in v 20 is not between the torah and his own teaching but between faithful obedience and the obedience of the scribes and Pharisees. This suggests that Christ is contradicting, not the torah per se, but a particular interpretation.

Daube provides confirmation of this. Daube notes the contrast in this pericope between “you have heard it said” and “I say to you”. This, Daube points out, was a common way of setting out rabbinic teaching. The rabbi would contrast an excessively formalistic interpretation of the torah that people had “heard” with a fuller correct one that the rabbi himself expounded. This observation fits precisely other parts of the Sermon on the Mount where the same formula is used.

In v 20 Christ contrasts “You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, 'Do not murder’” with his own teaching (“but I say to you”) to avoid unjustified angry feuds and insults. In v27 he contrasts “You have heard that it was said, 'Do not commit adultery’” with his own teaching to not look at another person’s spouse lustfully. In both cases it is evident that Christ is not rejecting the Old Testament teaching; he is clearly not saying that it is permissible to murder or commit adultery; rather he is rejecting an excessively formalistic interpretation of these commandments.

When these factors are taken into account it is clear, I think, that Christ is not offering a teaching antithetical to the Old Testament. The original law in the Old Testament permitted a victim of assault to gain compensation from his assailant. The lex talionis existed to limit the damages that could be taken to only that which was proportional to the harm done and no more. Some rabbinic teaching of Christ’s time applied this very strictly so that even a person who had suffered an insult, but no actual tangible damage, could sue his insulter. Christ’s response was to reject this as petty and prideful and as such, a wrong application of this law; in cases of insults it was better to simply let it go rather than seeking exact recompense. Nothing in the passage whatsoever suggests that victims of serious harm are not entitled to proportionate compensation from their assailants.

When one examines the teachings of the Old and New Testaments carefully, taking into account such things as literary and historical context of the relevant passages, it is far from obvious that the Old Testament doctrine of an ‘eye for an eye’ and the New Testament doctrine of ‘turning the other cheek’ are inconsistent. Here, as elsewhere, Brink’s objection to theological ethics is based on a superficial exegesis of the traditions he is objecting to.


[1] David O Brink “The Autonomy of Ethics” The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) 159.
[2] Ibid, 164.
[3] Exodus 21:23, 24; Leviticus 24:19, 20; and Deuteronomy 19:21 as cited by Brink.
[4] Nahum Sarna J P S Commentary: Exodus (New York: Jewish Publication Society, 1991) 126.
[5] Israel Drazin, Targum Onkelos to Exodus (New York: KTAV Publishing House, 1990) 215.
[6] David Daube The New Testament and Rabbinic Judaism (London: Athlone Press, 1956) 256.
[7] Matt 5:17.
[8] Matt 5:19.

Here are the top 10 NZ Christian blogs based on HalfDone's NZ blog stats for February; these stats are used in the calculations for the MandM top 10 NZ Christian Blog rankings for February 09:

1. NZ Conservative 10
2. Something Should Go Here, Maybe Later (HalfDone) 12
3. MandM 26
4. Keeping Stock 28
5. Samuel Dennis 30
6. The Briefing Room 35
7. Being Frank 40
8. Kiwi Polemicist 51
9. Put up Thy Sword 55
10. Say Hello to my Little Friend (Beretta Blog) 68

Top 10 Half Done. name of blog Half Done rank

Of Note:

• The top 12 made the top 100!
• The gaps are closing and each month more Christian blogs are emerging and climbing the rankings (don't forget to make sure you are being ranked by Tumeke as well as HalfDone)
• Welcome to the top 10 Being Frank!

Other Christian blogs making the top 200 NZ blogs on Public Discourse but outside the top 10:

Contra Celsum 74
Christian News 97
The Humanitarian Chronicle 101
Gavin Knight 105
Semper Vita 118
Blessed Economist 129
Section 59 Blog 162
Courage to tremble 168
NZ Debate 171
Stu's a-Musings (Definitive) 184
The Voice of Reason NZ N/A

Note: This list only includes Christian blogs that are openly identified as Christian blogs on HalfDone's and Tumeke's rankings. If you think your blog should be on the MandM top 10 NZ Christian Blogs rankings get on Tumeke's rankings and ask Tim to ensure your blog description includes something identifiably Christian. More here.

Once Tumeke's February stats are out we will compare and average the two sets of results and publish the MandM top 10 NZ Christian Blog rankings for February 09.

Consider linking to the NZ Christian Blog rankings to help people find quality Christian blogs.

It's meme time (again). This time it's a name game - it's kinda fun.

1. YOUR REAL NAME:

Madeleine Flannagan

2. WITNESS PROTECTION NAME: (mother's middle name and the name of the person who tagged you)

Caroline Scalia

3. NASCAR NAME: (first name of your mother’s dad, father’s dad)

Dennis Mark

4. STAR WARS NAME: (the first 3 letters of your last name, first 2 letters of your first name)

Flama

5. DETECTIVE NAME: (favorite color, favorite animal)

Red Horse

6. SOAP OPERA NAME: (middle name, town where you were born)

Jane Auckland

7. SUPERHERO NAME: (2nd fav color, fav drink, add “THE” to the beginning)

The Black Latte

8. FLY NAME: (first 2 letters of 1st name, last 2 letters of your last name)

Maan

9. GAMER NAME: (1st pet’s name, street you grew up on)

Paddlesa Marina

10. YOUR GANGSTA NAME: (first 3 letters of last name plus "izzle")

Flaizzle

11. YOUR EMO NAME: (black, the name of one of your pets, then add any word that means "crying" to the end)

Black Noise Weeping

12. ROMANCE NOVELIST PSEUDONYM: (name of your fav perfume/cologne, fav candy)

Lacroix Glow Hearts

13. INDIAN NAME: (what is the wind doing?+ what time of day is it?)

Still Evening

14. NAME OF THE BLOG THAT TAGGED YOU (don't forget the link luv)

Scalia

15. NAMES OF 5 BLOGGERS YOU TAG (pick people you haven't picked for any meme before and tag them)

Whale Oil Beef Hooked
No Minister
Kiwipolitico
MacDoctor Moments
Oswald Bastable's Ranting

You can play in the comments section.