Jacob Sullum on the Tyranny of Public Health

Last year, when the tobacco companies said they would no longer cooperate with the effort to pass a federal anti-smoking bill, the Clinton administration said it didn't really matter. "We will get bipartisan legislation this year," Secretary of Health and Human Services Donna Shalala told NBC. "There's no question about it, because it's about public health."

As it turned out, Shalala was a bit overconfident. But her prediction was certainly plausible, given the way politicians usually behave when the term public health is bandied about. The incantation of that phrase is supposed to preempt all questions and erase all doubts. It tells us to turn off our brains and trust experts like Shalala to think for us....

In short, there is no end to the interventions that could be justified in the name of public health, as that concept is currently understood. Although this sweeping approach is a relatively recent development, we can find intimations of it in the public health rhetoric of the 19th century.

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Letham on the Filioque

"The filioque clause is misleading for two possible reasons. First, if in the Augustinian sense (the way the West has consistently understood it) the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son as a single source, the distinction of the Father and the Son is blurred. The Son is not the same as the Father – he is begotten, and the Father is not. The Son is forever the Son, and the Father is forever the Father. Thus, the Son does not have the identical relation to the Holy Spirit that the Father has. The doctrine of the procession of the Holy Spirit must take this distinction into account. Second, there appears some evidence of a tendency to the subordination of the Holy Spirit if the filioque is needed to support the consubstantiality of the Son. If the deity of the Son requires him to be the spirating source of the Holy Spirit, where does that leave the Spirit, who is the source of no other hypostasis?" Letham, p. 238.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer on Marriage

In May 1943, when Dietrich Bonhoeffer was in prison in Nazi Germany for his involvement in the German resistance, he wrote a wedding sermon for two good friends who were getting married. In that sermon he noted that, "Just as it is the crown, and not merely the will to rule, that makes the king, so it is marriage, and not merely your love for each other, that joins you together in the sight of God and man. As you ifrst gave the ring to one another and have nor received it a second time from the hand of the pastor, so love comes from you, but marriage from above, from God. As high as God is above man, so high are the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of marriage above the sanctity, the rights, and the promise of love. It is not your love that sustains the marriage, but from now on, the marriage that sustains your love." Letters & Papers From Prison, p. 43.

Click HERE to read my brief biography of Deitrich Bonhoeffer.

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God's Partners in Life and Death

After recently warning America (HERE and HERE) that nationalized health service is a blueprint for government to play God in micro-managing how we live our lives, it is more than a little ironic that the Government's campaign has now taken on religious overtones, with Obama explicitly claiming that "We are God's partners in matters of life and death."

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Sex and Secrecy

“…literal-mindedness is not honesty or fidelity to truth—far from it. For it is the whole experience of mankind that sexual life is always, and must always be, hidden by veils of varying degrees of opacity, if it is to be humanized into something beyond a mere animal function. What is inherently secretive, that is to say self-conscious and human, cannot be spoken of directly: the attempt leads only to crudity, not to truth. Bawdy is the tribute that our instinct pays to secrecy. If you go beyond bawdy and tear all the veils away, you get pornography and nothing else. In essence, therefore, [D.H.] Lawrence was a pornographer, though a dull one even in that dull genre…” Theodore Dalrymple, Our Culture, What’s Left of It, (Ivan R. Dee, 2005), p. 55.

Yikes!

THIS story from lifesitenews reports that the British government will force thousands of the "worst" families in the country to live with 24-hour CCTV surveillance in a bid to cut back on child abuse and neglect. In the next two years the government plans to expand an existing family monitoring program from 2000 families to 20,000 at a total estimated cost of £400million. Yikes!

  

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Letham on Private Interpretation of Scripture

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"It needs to be restated forcefully that the idea of 'the right of private interpretation' is not a Reformed principle. This alien notion supposes that any individual Christian has the right, privilege, and duty to interpret the Bible as he or she sees fit.... The Bible was not given by God to private persons but to the church of Jesus Christ, his Son.... To categorize Reformed theology as individualistic, with no doctrine of the church, is an error of monumental proportions.
The error of equating the classic Protestant and Reformed doctrine of Scripture the later [private interpretation] is committed repeatedly by the Orthodox in discussing Protestantism. Evidently they are best acquainted with fundamentalist and evangelical sects with their highly individualistic and non-ecclesial slant. Stylianopoulos makes this mistake many times. They need to come to terms with the fact that the Reformed faith is an ecclesial faith, as the plethora of confessions published in the century and a half after the Reformation attest. There is simply no excuse for ignoring the strong stress the Reformers had on the Fathers.” Robert Letham

Scripture and Heresy

"An Orthodox person may argue that the Reformed doctrine of Scripture has not been a safeguard against the emergence of heresy. This is sadly true. On the other hand, neither has the Orthodox view of Scripture and tradition prevented heresy - it was in the Eastern church that most of the major early heresies arose. All this shows is that a correct grasp of doctrine, in its proper context, must be wedded to prayer and faithfulness, in dependence on the grace of God." Letham, p. 198
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List of my Anti-Racism Articles

Following is a complete list of all my articles on racism. And by the way, I define racism as any attitude or viewpoint that makes Biblically unlawful distinctions or judgments on the basis of race. This definition emphasises that there are plenty of Biblically lawful distinctions between the races that need to be preserved.

The Judiasers and Miscegenation

North Idaho Racism

North Idaho Racism Again

Miscegenation


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Question about the Great Schism

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I am reading Robert Letham's book Through Western Eyes: Eastern Orthodoxy: A Reformed Perspective right now and it is has raised a few questions in my mind. I'll post my questions here so that those more knowledgable than I can hopefully point the way forward to some answers.

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I am uneasy about the presence of such a large and ancient portion of Christendom that I am out of communion with. But this raises an important question: in what sense can we even meaningfully speak about Eastern Orthodoxy being out of communion with the Western Church? After all, there have been significant ecumenical meetings between Popes and Patriarchs of Constantinople which have included a lifting of previous excommunications. The most recent meeting was between Benedict XVI and Bartholomew I, who signed the Common Declaration which stated that "We give thanks to the Author of all that is good, who allows us once again, in prayer and in dialogue, to express the joy we feel as brothers and to renew our commitment to move towards full communion".

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When I asked an Eastern Orthodox brother about this he said that Constantinople was acting as an aberrant congregation when they did this. However, given that the various Pentarchy in the East have a relationship that is primus inter pares rather than hierarchical, and that each main Orthodox communion is autocephalous, by what criteria can we claim that Constantinople did not represent Orthodoxy? If they were violating the decrees of an ecumenical council it would be a different matter, but there never has (to my knowledge) been a formal severing of communion with the West on the part of the East. The altercation of 1054 (known subsequently and somewhat anachronistically as the "Great Schism") was largely personal and did not, at the time, represent a full scale separation of the Western and Eastern branches of Christendom. The two branches remained in intermittent communion after that and only fell out of communion gradually. As far as I can make out, there never was a point when the East and West corporately and officially stopped being in communion. Now this is crucial because it raises the question: if the separation between the East and the West was gradual, non-corporate and never formalized, then re-assuming communion could also be gradual, non-corporate and non-formalized. But if so, then on what basis can we claim that the liberal ecumenical strains of Orthodoxy are anachronistic?

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The Totalitarianism of Nationalized Health

I have just written an article for the Examiner exploring the totalitarian implications of nationalized health. Click HERE to read the article.
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Fabian Socialism

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Barack Obama is a Fabian socialist. I should know; I was raised by one. My Grandfather worked as a union machinist for Ingersoll Rand during the day. In the evenings he tended bar and read books. After his funeral, I went back home and started working my way through his library, starting with T.W. Arnold’s The Folklore of Capitalism. This was my introduction to the Fabian socialists.
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Fabians believed in gradual nationalization of the economy through manipulation of the democratic process. Breaking away from the violent revolutionary socialists of their day, they thought that the only real way to effect “fundamental change” and “social justice” was through a mass movement of the working classes presided over by intellectual and cultural elites. Before TV it was stage plays, written by George Bernard Shaw and thousands of inferior “realist” playwrights dedicated to social change. John Cusack’s character in Woody Allen’s “Bullets Over Broadway” captures the movement rather well.
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Arnold taught me to question everyone–my president, my priest and my parents. Well, almost everyone. I wasn’t supposed to question the Fabian intellectuals themselves. That’s the Fabian MO, relentless cultural and journalistic attacks on everything that is, and then a hard pitch for the hope of what might be.

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That’s Obama’s world.

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Augustine and Hell

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Earlier in the year I read St. Augustine's Enchiridion on Faith, Hope, and Love together with some of the men in our church. The book blessed me in many ways, not least through solidifying the impression that Augustine’s theology had more in common with the Protestant reformers than the medieval Catholics, especially in areas of soteriology.

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The book also serves as a good answer, not only to the heretics of Augustine’s day, against which the Enchiridion was written, but to the heretics of our own day. I often say that the history of heresy is so boring, because no one comes up with anything new - it is always the same old heresies repackaged in contemporary dress.

The book is dry and archaic to modern sensibilities and is best taken and digested in small doses.

Having been edified by the blessed brother Augustine, it is only fair to say that the book is not without what seems to be a glaring inconsistency. The problem concerns his doctrine of hell. (And I am writing this to solicit feedback. During our discussion of the book, none of my friends acknowledged any inconsistency, so I may be completely barking up the wrong tree but I would like to be shown how.)

In describing the nature of evil, Augustine develops his famous argument - which was later taken up by everyone from Aquinas to C.S. Lewis and more recently by Norman Geisler - that evil is privation. I won’t rehash the argument here (and beginners would do best to consult Lewis’s more accessible treatment, not Augustine’s), although suffice to say I am convinced that anything less than the privation view of evil leads necessarily to some form of unbiblical dualism. What interests me is the problems this perspective creates for Augustine’s doctrine of the afterlife.

In chapter 12, the blessed brother argued that because evil is not a thing in itself but parasitic on what is good (as rottenness is parasitic on an original substance rather than something which exists on its own), all evil must necessarily be terminus. Evil, by its very nature (Augustine argues) tends towards non-being. This is the implication of his having written as follows, in chapter 12:

"Therefore, so long as a being is in process of corruption, there is in it some good of which it is being deprived; and if a part of the being should remain which cannot be corrupted, this will certainly be an incorruptible being, and accordingly the process of corruption will result in the manifestation of this great good. But if it do not cease to be corrupted, neither can it cease to possess good of which corruption may deprive it. But if it should be thoroughly and completely consumed by corruption, there will then be no good left, because there will be no being. Wherefore corruption can consume the good only by consuming the being. Every being, therefore, is a good; a great good, if it cannot be corrupted; a little good, if it cam: but in any case, only the foolish or ignorant will deny that it is a good. And if it be wholly consumed by corruption, then the corruption itself must cease to exist, as there is no being left in which it can dwell."

This is heavy going, but what the blessed brother seems to be saying is that evil tends towards non-being in the same way that all parasitical substances do since they depend, for their continuation, on the host they are in the process of destroying. This was a popular theme in Augustine because in order to defend Christianity against the heresy of Manichaeism, he must establish that goodness and evil are not equally substantive and that they are not co-eternal. With regard to the latter, in numerous other places in his writings Augustine asserts the eventual abolition of evil, arguing that "evil consists in this very thing, namely in a defection from being, and a tendency to non-being."

The problem that arises is that towards the end of the Enchiridion Augustine asserts the unending existence of evil, saying that “the devil’s [citizen’s]...shall drag a miserable existence in eternal death without the power of dying... This perpetual death of the wicked, then...shall abide for ever, and shall be common to them all...” Augustine’s argument against the universalists rests on a very questionable interpretation of Jesus’s parable of the sheep and the goats, but what is of interests at the moment is that this idea of perpetual death and perpetual wickedness seems at odds with Augustine’s conviction that evil tends towards non-being.

Augustine seems to be on the horns of a dilemma. His attack of Manichaeism compels him to argue that goodness and evil are not of equal duration (since evil, by its nature, tends towards non-being and will eventually be destroyed), while his critique of universalism compels him to imply the unending existence of evil (death, wicked beings, pain, etc.,) as a corollary of eternal hell.

Augustine seems to have realized this problem, and so he tried to resolve it by suggesting (elsewhere) that sin is only evil when it goes unpunished, whereas sin properly punished ceases to be evil but actually becomes good. Augustine was thus able to maintain, as one commentator puts it, a "bland assurance that the universe is no less admirable and beautiful a place for having a chamber of horrors eternally present within it, so long only as each horror of pain perfectly matches and balances each horror of sin". The obvious problem here is that such an idea of evil (that it can be neutralized of its negative moral quality by appropriate punishment) contradicts the privation view set forth in the Enchiridion. This is because the idea that evil is privation leads to the broadest possible understanding of evil which certainly includes any agent that is sinning, regardless of whether that sin is being equally matched with punishment. Moreover, in order for ongoing sin to cease being evil it would have to cease being in opposition to the nature and will of God, which sin by definition is not. Suffice to say that sin is always evil, even if it is punished, and that those sinful souls in hell are evil and that is why they are there. But if they are evil, and if they exist eternally without ever being destroyed, then evil is not tending towards non-being.

The problem is very practical for those who advocate the endless punishment of the wicked. I have known teachers who confidently asserted that rebellion to God would be destroyed, only to turn around the next minute to say that the unrepentant souls in hell will forever persist in rebellion against their maker (which is true by definition of an unrepentant agent). The logic seems hard to escape that in order for rebellion to be destroyed, sinners must stop being sinners (the other solution, to assert that sin against God is not rebellion, creates even more problems and leads to antinomianism). But the only way someone can stop being a sinner is for (A) some form of redemption to occur (B) the person ceases to exist as a moral agent. Option A is
universalism and option B veers towards some form of annihilationism. Both of these were not options for the blessed brother Augustine.

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Health and Safety Causes Death

THIS article from a British paper shows just how extreme "health and safety" concerns can become in a nation that has socialized health.