It is also possible to list hundreds of areas of confusion within Christianity
1. The Bible does not supply any answer that is clear and authoritative about
issue x.
2. Issue x is an important one in that it is necessary, and/or sufficient; once
understood, to have the sort of relationship with the Christian God that
the Christian God would want.
3. Thus, we would expect the Christian God to clearly and authoritatively
reveal His perfect will for issue x in order to prevent confusion and
conflict amongst Christians.
4. Christians, as a group, are confused and conflicted with regard to the
issue x.
5. Therefore, it is unlikely that the Christian God exists.
A GENERAL RESPONSE: First, we need to get clear on what knowledge is required for
salvation, which is the ultimate perennial matter that God would desire human beings to
understand. Well, it turns out that there are such things called creeds that outline what all
Christians believe, and belief in which is sufficient for salvation, although not necessary. God
will judge people on the basis of the revelation they have, and God can so providentially arrange
the world such that those who would freely come into a saving love relationship with him,
receive sufficient revelation. God isn't obligated to provide a clearer revelation of Himself if He
knew that it wasn't necessary for salvation, and as we will see, there are overriding benefits (and
even obstacles to divine revelation) to permit some confusion and lack of clarity. What God
would make sufficiently clear are those G-beliefs necessary and/or sufficient to enter into a
relationship with Him, but it doesn't follow from this that God would or even ought to inform
people about such secondary and tertiary doctrines such as Calvinism, immersion baptism,
eschatology, etc. and I think the types of disagreement we see in the world between believers is
in these areas that aren’t necessary and/or sufficient for having a personal relationship with
God. So then, what the argument from biblical confusion would have to show is that there are
people who are confused about what it takes to be saved, and upon resolving that confusion
such persons would be saved who otherwise wouldn't have been saved. But, there is no
widespread disagreement amongst Christians believers about what it takes to be saved, and how
in the world can an atheist show that there are any such persons anyway; it is pure conjecture on
their parts. Or, in other words, this argument conflates the nature and number of G-beliefs
required for a RELATIONSHIP with God with the nature and number of G-beliefs that would
merely add PROPOSITIONAL CONTENT ABOUT God to someone's set of beliefs who
already has a relationship with God that themselves aren't required to have a relationship with
God. Moreover, revealing too much information can sometimes have the opposite effect desired
of enhancing and/or maintaining a relationship. For example, two people can have a genuine and
intimate relationship with one another without knowing every detail about one another. Indeed,
revealing to much information can actually harm, or place needless obstacles to the
relationship. For example, consider something like the claim that there is a distinction between
the universe we see with our senses and the 'divine' realm. Well, this claim was probably so
revolutionary for human beings (esp. during the era of the OT) that it would take them a
significant chunk of time before they could even begin to fathom it (See John Walton's
book). Or consider a girl who reveals too much information about her sexual past to her husband
which ends up harming their relationship.
This would be the typical ‘evangelical’ response spruced up with some philosophical
reflection. However, although this response goes some way in undercutting this argument, it
alone seems insufficient since there are in fact disagreements amongst Christians about the
requirements of salvation (i.e. http://www.infidels.org/kiosk/article192.html).
A SPECIFIC RESPONSE:
Premise 1: The Bible is open to more than one interpretation on a number of issues and is
not perfectly clear. If it is not perfectly clear, and if there is no way to adjudicate between
conflicting positions, then although the Bible may be authoritative [A person (or group) may be
considered an "authority" on a subject matter if their expertise is well established; or it is within
the scope of an entity’s legitimate power to affect my rights, beliefs, privileges, and actions] we
do not know in what respect and what the contents of its authority actually turns out to be. So,
clarity and authority are not the same because even if something is unclear it can still in principle
have authority (we may just lack the ability to discern what that authority is). Indeed, if we are
able to identify where authority resides, this may in turn help us reach clarity; for example,
suppose two freshman physics students reaching conflicting conclusions in calculating the
rotational velocity of a planet with no way to move past their conflict. Then suppose that
Stephen Hawking happens to be visiting the class that day, steps into the conflict, performs his
own calculations, and decides which student was right and which was wrong, or even reached a
different conclusion than either student. In such a case, authority via reason and expertise ended
up resolving the conflict. Though there is a lack of perfect clarity between the students in one
context, in another context a means was provided to resolve the lack of clarity. Similarly, I think
it is evident that we have also been given a tool by God, if God exists, that allows us to find the
authority amidst the diversity, and even clear up the lack of clarity, namely, our reason. But first,
we must say what that authority would even amount to. I will say something about this in my
discussion of premise 4. Suffice it to say, that this premise creates a false dichotomy since
something can be unclear and still have authority whereas the premise above presupposes that
something that is not clear cannot have authority.
Premise 2: This premise envisions God as requiring too much from us, namely, in order to
have a personal relationship with God we must have an explicit, highly confident belief and
perfectly clear understanding of issue x at all times. This is clearly not true because we all have
many meaningful, deep, and personal relationships with people without have an explicit, highly
confident, and perfectly clear understanding of everything that a person expects from us.
Moreover, it seems that this premise confuses a de facto belief with a de re belief. Belief de
dicto is the endorsement of some proposition that is preceded by a that-clause. Belief de re is
belief of a thing or individual that it has some feature even if the de re believer does not
recognize the subject under some specific description. For example, if I believe de dicto that
Mark Twain is a great author, but am unaware that Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens, then I would
also believe de re of Sam Clemens that he is a great author. So I would have the de re belief
Sam Clemens is a great author.
Then the question becomes whether having a personal
relationship with God requires a de dicto belief about all the requirements of salvation, or if a
certain degree of de re belief is sufficient. For example, if baptism is necessary in order to be
saved, but I lack the de dicto belief in this requirement in the sense that I believe x,y, and z are
necessary for salvation, but I am unaware that baptism is also necessary (either because of
ignorance, or bad exegesis, or false beliefs) then can’t I still have the de re belief that baptism is
necessary for salvation. Wouldn’t it be sufficient if I displayed the dispositions that accompany
belief in baptism, experience emotions appropriate to it, and draw inferences and beliefs as if I
had a de dicto belief in it? What is the purpose of baptism anyway if not but a means to such
ends as this? This may be second best, but still a great good indeed, and a sufficient one at that
for appropriating salvation. The same points would apply to the person who does have a de facto
belief that baptism is necessary when in fact they are wrong. Thus, in the context of thought the
distinction between a de facto belief and a de re belief helps us understand how it is that a person
can hold seemingly contradictory beliefs. Since a person would presumably not be culpable for
being unaware that something was necessary for salvation given the diversity in the Bible on the
topic, then all things considered, God would not hold them culpable for their error; especially if
they had the proper de re belief. Indeed salvation may be based on something else entirely that
is objectively true whereas these other disagreements are relativized or relegated to matters of
taste in God’s eyes such that neither person is objectively right or wrong, but merely right ‘for
you’ and wrong ‘for me.’
This brings us to the all important question of just what kind of relationship God would
want, and how it is that something like a belief in the necessity of baptism goes about
accomplishing what God wants. So, if we can spell out those goods, and then decide whether a
de re belief is sufficient to achieve those goods, then it seems that God is neither unloving nor
unjust in permitting such ‘confusion’. It seems to me that there are two kinds of goods God
wants realized in a personal relationship with Himself: relationship goods, and personal goods.
So long as the same relationship goods are appropriated; that is, the right kinds of affections and
dispositions in individuals and towards God, then it seems that a de re belief in the requirements
of salvation is sufficient to obtain the true end of those requirements even if their de facto belief
is in error, or better yet, if their de facto belief is a matter of taste at the relevant level.
Moreover, so long as the personal goods; the goods that help shape what kind of person an
individual becomes are appropriated then it seems that de re belief would again be good enough.
So then, it is important to distinguish between the appropriation of salvation, and theories of
appropriations of salvation. A child can appropriate her parent’s inheritance by the declaration
of the law even if that child doesn’t fully understand how the legal rules and regulations
determine her inheritance. She can know that she has her parent’s inheritance even if she doesn’t
fully understand how. The implicit assumption in this premise is that salvation is something we
take from God by performing steps, x,y, and z when in fact, salvation is given to us by God once
we are ready to receive it, and in order to receive it I strongly doubt that it is necessary to have a
systematic theology of salvation worked out (indeed, this plays out in reality where conflicting
denominations are full of members who have received assurance of salvation from the Holy
Spirit). So, it seems that God would be fickle indeed if He didn’t set things up so that somebody
couldn’t appropriate salvation for themselves apart from having an explicit, perfectly correct, and
highly confident theory of how to appropriate that salvation. The two are not the same, and I
believe the Bible teaches and experience confirms that salvation can be appropriated even if one
never develops a complete, and perfectly correct theory of salvation. Indeed, it seems that God
had three options in setting up our appropriation of salvation: 1) a clear list of do’s and don’ts
that must be explicitly, coherently, and fully understood before appropriating salvation; 2) a
somewhat diverse list of do’s and don’ts that must be explicitly, fully, and coherently understood
before salvation can be appropriated, or 3) a somewhat diverse list of do’s and don’ts that need
not themselves be explicitly, fully, and coherently understood, but in virtue of this lack of clarity,
God would provide an external means of assurance of the appropriation of our salvation (via the
Holy Spirit) without first developing a coherent systematic theology before appropriating
salvation. It seems that the ‘real world’ situation is option 3 which provides a sufficiently clear
and ACCESIBLE means to having a personal relationship with God for anybody who desires;
including those who do not have access to the Bible, who cannot read the Bible, who do not have
the time, leisure, or education to first develop a systematic theology of salvation, and for those
who are mentally disabled.
We will later discuss some of the potential reasons God has
permitted the diversity we see about issue x in the Bible later, but suffice it to say, that since we
are assuming the authority of the Bible in this argument, we can appeal to the Bible for
justification for option 3 above which rebuts premise 2 since via the Holy Spirit we receive
assurance of salvation (apart from a worked out theology of salvation) which entails certain other
truths as well such as I am a child of God, God forgives me, I am reconciled to God, etc. So, in
agreement with Drange, I would raise the plausible defeater that God is not very concerned with
giving us a completed, perfectly correct, systematic theology for appropriating salvation ‘up
front’ because it is neither necessary nor perhaps would it be accessible to everybody in such a
case (i.e. those who never get to read the entire Bible but who instead respond to hearing the
Gospel from a missionary). So, if this is correct, Drange’s argument actually makes God out to
be immoral since he wants to raise the bar so high to not only appropriate salvation but to have a
personal relationship with God that not all those who are willing will be able to obtain it! Surely
any argument that forces a perfectly loving God to behave immorally is fallacious.
Premise 3--Autonomy of Reason: If God clearly makes known His will with respect to
issue x, and if we then obey the divine will because God’s perfect will commands what we
objectively ought to do or believe about issue x, then though it is possible that God’s will may
REST upon good reasons, without such reasons, the fundamental justification for why we should
do or believe p about some issue x falls prey to a Divine Revelation Version of the Euthyphro
Dilemma: Either God has good reasons for commanding us to do or believe p about issue x, or
He does not. If He does, then it is those reasons and not God’s revealed will per se that provides
justification for doing or believing p about some issue x. If He does not, then His revealed will
is arbitrary, or accidentally coincident with good reasons for Christians to do or believe p about
some issue x. In either case, there is an autonomy of reason inherent in any revelation from God,
and also in our evaluation of the justification behind that revelation such that the kinds of reason
God should have for commanding us to do or believe p about some issue x are the very same
reasons we are capable of understanding, developing, and offering as justification ourselves. So,
what I am suggesting is that the lack of ‘clarity’ in the Bible about issue x can be resolved by
appeal to the authority of reason as in my example in my discussion of premise 1. In other
words, even if a ‘clear’ revelation was contained in the Bible about issue x, it would have to
cohere with reason in order to be authoritative. Clarity is not enough by itself, and in fact, even
if there is a lack of clarity, the authority of reason can bring clarity to an issue. This further
implies that the kinds of reasons offered by humans are in principle the same reasons that God
would offer which means that a clear revelation based on reasons would not guarantee any kind
of unanimous range of beliefs across the board on every issue amongst Christians! That’s right,
there are OBSTACLES to divine revelation and Christians would still disagree with each other
because our God given reason that is in use today and which we employ to reach our varied
conclusions, is the very same reason that our God would use to justify His revelation to us. True,
we might well imagine a booming voice telling us that we should believe p about issue x but
without good reason, and without agreeing with those reasons we would not assent internally
despite a fearful external confession of assent with our mouths in the face of such a terrifying
prospect. Convincing people is no easy task, even when God was incarnate not everybody
agreed with him.
Premise 4: Though our revelation is not without diversity, and though our Christian
communities are not without disagreement, a clear revelation would not be authoritative unless it
cohered with reason, and God has given us the ability to reason and therefore, the ability to
derive the authority from our revelation with the use of our God given reason which functions as
the unity amidst the diversity, a canon within the canon, a structure for our temporary ignorance
and disagreement that undergirds and circumscribes; that canonizes the acceptable measure of
diversity within Christianity, a boundary marker that can cross any cultural boundary thereby
building bridges (as the diversity in the NT itself performs) and which we are in the process of
growing and developing in the now: namely, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. This is the
structure for our ignorance that apparently God has left every successive generation and culture
to develop and apply to the ever dynamic and changing world. Thus, this premise fails to
distinguish between what we might call ‘thin Christianity’ and ‘thick Christianity.’ The ‘thin’
level is what all forms of Christianities share in common, but when we move to the ‘thick’ level;
the level of concrete particulars and application, the diversity surfaces in the NT canon as well as
in the present. Thus, it seems that the message God is sending is that the requirements of
salvation at the ‘thick’ level are an extension of the ‘thin’ level and that though the thin level is
objective and universal in truth, the ‘thick’ level is a disjunction rather than a conjunction of
necessary and sufficient conditions which is culturally inevitable and hence, a wise policy once
we realize that when we 'descend into the details’ (particular actions, situations, individuals,
cultures, states of affairs, etc.), the more relative to different cultures the realization or
particularization the ‘thick’ level of Christianity becomes. Conceptual schemes, like languages,
hang together as whole structures, and we should realize, too, that a change in any single element
is likely to have implications for the system as a whole. But these two facts do not imply, as
some relativists in literary theory and in anthropology tend to assume, that all world
interpretations are equally valid and altogether non-comparable, that there are no good standards
of assessment and "anything goes." The rejection of the idea of religious truth as correspondence
to an altogether uninterpreted reality does not imply that the whole idea of searching for the truth
is an old-fashioned error. Certain ways in which people see the world can still be criticized
exactly as people since the time of Aristotle criticized them: as stupid, pernicious, and false. The
"grounding experience" of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus will not, as Christians today
and the NT itself concedes, provide precisely a single language-neutral bedrock on which an
account of Christianity at the thick level can be straightforwardly and unproblematically based.
This further implies that the general answer to the "What is X?" question in any sphere may well
be susceptible to several concrete specifications, in connection with other local practices and
local conditions. For example, the normative account where friendship and hospitality are
concerned is likely to be extremely general, admitting of many concrete "fillings". Friends in
England will have different customs, where regular social visiting is concerned, from friends in
ancient Athens. And yet both sets of customs can count as further specifications of a general
account of friendship that mentions, for example, the Aristotelian criteria of mutual benefit and
well-wishing, mutual enjoyment, mutual awareness, a shared conception of the good, and some
form of "living together". Sometimes we may want to view such concrete accounts as optional
alternative specifications, to be chosen by a society on the basis of reasons of ease and
convenience. Sometimes, on the other hand, we may want to insist that this account gives the
only legitimate specification of the virtue in question for that concrete context; in that case, the
concrete account could be viewed as a part of a longer or fuller version of the single normative
account. The decision between these two ways of regarding it will depend upon our assessment
of its degree of non-arbitrariness for its context (both physical and historical), its relationship to
other non-arbitrary features of the moral conception of that context, and so forth. What I want to
stress here is that Aristotelian particularism is fully compatible with Aristotelian objectivity. The
fact that a good and virtuous decision is context-sensitive does not imply that it is right only
relative to, or inside, a limited context, any more than the fact that a good navigational judgment
is sensitive to particular weather conditions shows that it is correct only in a local or relational
sense. It is right absolutely, objectively, from anywhere in the human world, to attend to the
particular features of one's context; and the person who so attends and who chooses accordingly
is making, according to Aristotle, the humanly correct decision, period. If another situation ever
should arise with all the same morally relevant features, including contextual features, the same
decision would again be absolutely right. Thus the virtue based morality can capture a great deal
of what the relativist is after, and still lay claim to objectivity. Applying this insight into virtue
ethics to the NT canon and its attending diversity the following principles can be derived:
-It canonizes the unity of Christianity.
-It canonizes the acceptable range of diversity within Christianity.
-It limits the range of acceptable diversity.
-It canonizes the development of Christianity and provides the norm for the ‘how’ of
development.
-Through it alone do we have access to the events which determined the character of
Christianity.
-It shows the function and good of bridge building between diverse communities and how
the diverse component parts hold the whole together in the unity of a diversity.
AN ARGUMENT TO PREFER THIS DIVERSITY OVER ‘THICK’ UNITY:
(1) The free expression of diverse cultural imagination, creativity, and devotion to ‘thin’
Christianity at the ‘thick’ level is at least as great a good as the good God would sacrifice by
allowing no diversity to occur.
(2) The expression of creative religiousness with respect to ‘thin’ Christianity would be
greatly inhibited if our epistemic situation in relation to ‘issue x’ in the Bible was totally lacking
in cultural diversity.
(3) Therefore, it is plausible to suppose that God would allow the current state of Christian
diversity to obtain in the world that we find.
William Hogarth said the defining feature of beauty or elegance is ‘simplicity with variety.’
The fundamental simplicity of ‘thin’ Christianity gives rise and provides the skeleton as it were
to build, sustain, and reform the enormous complexity and diversity it encounters across all
human cultures. What has ‘thick’ Christianity (or Christianities) accomplished; according to
Kenneth Scott Latourette , that great Yale historian who wrote the History of Christianity, “We
have had much to say about the effects of Christianity upon mankind as a whole, here has been
the most potent force which mankind has known for the dispelling of illiteracy, for the creation
of schools, for the emergence of new types of education, from Christianity have issued impulses
for intellectual and geographic adventure, the universities were largely Christian creations,
music, architecture, painting, poetry, philosophy, owe some of their greatest achievements to
Christianity, democracy as it was known in the 19th and 20th century was in large part the
outgrowth of Christian teaching, the abolition of slavery was chiefly due to Christianity, so were
the measures taken to protect the Indians against the exploitation by the whites, the most helpful
movements for the regulation of war, for the mitigation of suffering entailed by war, for the
eventual abolition of war owe their inception to Christian faith, the nursing profession had the
same origin, the extension of western methods of surgery was chiefly due to Christian
missionary enterprise, and the elevation of the status of woman as a whole.”