Speaking Where the Bible Does: Taking on Befuddling Doctrines

By Charles Davis

I have embarked on a quest to extricate Christianity from the pernicious effects of bad theology. Christianity has taken a cognitive beating particularly since the eighteenth century's "Age of Reason." Christianity has been pummeled because its cosmology and its ethics has come to be regarded as woefully primitive. The conclusion to which the new Humanism had arrived was that Christianity was so primitive that no man of letters could accept any provision beyond the conclusion that if there were a God, such a God may have designed a wonderful Newtonian machine and that having designed it so wonderfully, it needed Him no longer. Only Reason and never Revelation was necessary to comprehend the mind of God. Incarnation was silly and miracles are as impossible as they are unnecessary. This is the unfortunate legacy of traditional dogma. The penalty science has imposed on it for its sins of irrational dogmatism is life in exile. Unfortunately, the Reformation in its revulsion of the crass practices of Catholicism, did not repair the cognitive fissures in the foundation. The Rock was not so solid notwithstanding the sadistic tyrannies of multiple inquisitions. Copernicus and Galileo were right although labeled with the moniker "heretic". The ancients through to the scholastics universally presupposed that some form of normativism in ethics was essential to preserve some notion of justice. Even the Stoics maintained a normative theory of ethics notwithstanding Stoicism's reliance on the metaphysics of Democritean atomistic determinism. Once Newtonian cosmology was accepted, the notion of normative ethics had to be compatibilized with the closed and fixed model of the universe. Ethics was no longer objective, and, so, could only be reduced to the subjective. The True, Right and Good resided, as did Beauty, in the eye of the beholder. This is anathema to a Biblical ethics for which sin is objective and sinners are morally responsible for whether or not they sin. It was the mistake of the Reformers to accept original sin and double down on it with the dogma of total depravity. Such a pernicious anthropology would be replaced with the secular doctrine of the ultimate perfectibility of man. Of course, this dogma is neutered in virtue of the metaphysical determinism of Newton. If man cannot be otherwise than what natural law dictates, the whole notion of "perfectible" is rendered objectively vapid. It is troublesome that the legacy of Newton taints the paradigm of both scientific naturalism and secular non-cognitivism. The former circumstance feeds the latter. If determinism is true, then all decisions are merely "maya". Feelings are merely naturally caused mental states. They are neither right nor wrong in any objective sense. This seems to be altogether harmless in purely interpersonal matters. However, the aggregation of such decisions reaches critical masses that become institutionalized in social, economic and political theories. In the present state of affairs, science has produced prodigious capacities to destroy humanity along with animal species as well as the environment. This surely must be more than merely aggregations of personal emotive states. If it is some such thing, then the universe is such that it is programmed for self-destruction. From a Biblical point of view, this is anticipated and God will decide on those humans who have decided to repent, to become as holy as He is and to populate another universe which is not subject to the vicissitudes of evil and allow others to populate a parallel universe with those who are also self-destructive. We have yet to see how this plays out. But, just as Pascal cautions, it is better to make a wager in the interest of a holy God who expects people to choose to become holy, than to wager that no such God exists.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B08J5HFWNG
• ISBN13: 9798621028206
• Release Date: July 2020
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 330 Pages
• Weight: 1.07 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"