Greetings!
Peace, mercy, and grace be with you from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.
Happy May! We pray for peace and for cooler heads to prevail in all things locally, nationally, and abroad.
Sunday, May 05, 2024
The Voice 14.18: The Strawman Argument
The next article in our explorations into logical fallacies involves the strawman argument. This is especially pernicious in political discourse but also is prevalent when discussing matters of the faith.
It’s always easier to argue against the argument you set up to tear down than what people actually believe. We must be careful about building up straw men and tearing them down.
Lesson: Called to Freedom | Galatians 5:1-26 | Paul’s Letter to the Galatians
Outline | Podcast | Conversation
We return to Paul’s Letter to the Galatians with his summary conclusions and the beginning of the practical outworking of what he has taught. Galatians is pretty tight in terms of both: for liberation Christ set us free. Thus, we should not re-enslave ourselves to the basic principles of this world, whether it be the works of the Law of Moses or the works of the flesh. Instead, we should serve one another in love, living by the Spirit and manifesting the results of His work within us.
In preaching through Galatians I was very much impressed with the coherence of Paul’s argumentation, the shocking statements he was willing to make about the Law of Moses, and the prevalence of and reliance upon the Spirit throughout. It is lamentable how so many have neglected the role and work of the Spirit in the life of the Christian.
In honor of Julianna’s return stateside, this week’s picture is one of many which I took of the University of Glasgow campus. Despite the medieval look, most of the buildings were built in the 18th and 19th centuries. It still remains aesthetically pleasing.
Book Reviews
Mythology is easily able to develop in all things history and religion, especially when history meets religion. And you generally need systematic and thorough presentations of evidence to overcome those myths.
Nicholas Elder thus confronts a lot of myths regarding the nature of reading, writing, and distributing literature in the ancient Greco-Roman world as it relates to the Gospel narratives in Gospel Media: Reading, Writing, and Circulating Jesus Traditions (affiliate link; galley received as part of early review program).
Elder identified the scholarly sources of these myths and their easy propagation and worked diligently to explore Greco-Roman reading and writing practices. He well demonstrates a variety of reading and writing practices and explores personal, quiet reading; having texts read to oneself; performances of texts; personal writing; writing by dictation via amanuensis; writing in different contexts and situations. He also considers what “publication” looked like in the Greco-Roman world and the various possibilities and trajectories which might be involved. Throughout the author provides abundant evidence from Greek and Roman authors and from papyri letters to build a very strong case.
Personal confession: I have made much regarding the need to speak out Hebrew and Greek texts in order for proper understanding and to give life to the text. I am appropriately chastened in regards to the reading of Greek texts: Elder’s evidence to suggest how many Greek and Latin readers read silently to themselves is abundant and incontrovertible. He would suggest similar things for Hebrew, etc., but I would want to see much more evidence in regards to such claims for the Semitic languages.
The author was not interested in Greek and Roman reading and writing practices for their own sake; he applied such things specifically to the four Gospel accounts. He marshals evidence from the Greco-Roman cultural environment, patristic testimony about the Gospels, and internal evidence from the Gospels themselves to suggest how all four Gospels were composed in slightly different ways for different purposes in different contexts. He understood Mark as “orally proclaimed news,” maintaining many features of orality, as if one person recounted stories and another person wrote them down, written for utilitarian purposes rather than polished for publication. He understands Matthew according to the text itself as a biblios, “book” (Matthew 1:1), and not just a record of notes from teaching and preaching. Matthew showed evidence of polishing and cleaning up narratives preserved by Mark and aspired to Scripture. Luke likewise presents a more polished treatise and has a preface indicating he directed it toward an individual to be read by an individual with a view it would be published and read by other individuals, thus reckoning what he wrote as an account of all which had transpired. John sets forth a document, aware of the Synoptics, and presenting itself as additional information about Jesus, because the more the merrier, likely read in community before spreading further.
Although one may quibble here or there, the author has generally done well at leveraging Greco-Roman and early Christian resources to help the reader come to a better understanding of how texts were read, written, and published in the ancient world, and what that means for the Gospel accounts. His presentation of the Gospels never denies the work of the Spirit or their value while presenting evidence from their structure to suggest what the evangelists were attempting to accomplish in terms of how they structured and wrote their narratives. This will definitely become one of those textual resources which is reckoned an authority on the subject, and with which one will need to grapple when exploring reading, writing, and publishing the Gospels and early Christian texts.
James the Lord’s brother warned about the futility of faith without works and used the example of telling a brother or sister in need of daily necessities to go, be warmed and filled, but not giving them the things they need (James 2:14-26). One could make a similar argument regarding online activism: of what benefit is it to write posts, make tweets, and even #UsetheCorrectHashtag, but not actually do any substantive thing to advance justice and righteousness in the world?
Mae Elise Cannon appreciates at least the sentiment of much of online activism, but would encourage people to go further in Beyond Hashtag Activism: Comprehensive Justice in a Complicated Age (affiliate link; galley received through early review program, but actual book read).
She lays down a framework for Christians to consider in terms of what God has made known about justice and how we should strive to advance justice in the world. She also discusses politics and the Gospel with the limitations and the possibilities therein.
Most of the book focuses on various areas of activism to discuss and describe the issues at hand and possible ways forward to help advance justice: global and domestic poverty; race and prejudice in America and around the world, unjust incarceral and immigration policy and practice, matters of gender and discrimination, and those areas on which significant disagreement exists: marriage and sexuality, Israel and Palestine, and the expression of religious freedom.
The work is a little dated, even though it is only around 4 years old, but such is the nature of a work like this. It was definitely formulated in that moment at the end of the 2010s and into 2020 when #hashtagactivism was a bigger thing.
Almost everyone will find something uncomfortable or disagreeable in the various aspects of the matters which the author considers. Yet hopefully everyone should be willing to recognize the importance of doing what we can to uphold and affirm the justice of God and to maintain concern for the least of those among us, the exploited, marginalized, and oppressed, or risk hearing unpleasant things on the judgment day.
American culture remains quite bipolar about alcohol, with most trending either toward teetotaling abstinence or freewheeling excess. But however much one does or does not drink, very strong feelings and opinions abound regarding alcoholic beverages and their consumption.
Yet whether one abstains or partakes, the question which Edward Slingerland raises in Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization (affiliate link) remains relevant: why is it that almost every human culture has put a lot of effort into developing and consuming alcoholic beverages when they represent a poison to the body?
The author began the work with this question and conundrum. He explored the archaeological, historical, and scientific evidence: it would seem beer consumption preceded agriculture, and therefore it remains quite plausible that humans began the agricultural life in the pursuit of beer and wine. Other cultures in other places figured out how to concoct alcoholic beverages from some kind of accessible native plant.
But why? Slingerland approached the question from an evolutionary/scientific point of view. He delved into the science and research behind the effects of alcohol and what might lead people to want to enjoy such effects. He focuses on the role of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in our functioning: it develops over time and has an important organizing and disciplining effect, but comes at the cost of out of the box and creative thinking, social coherence, greater guardedness, and some other consequences.
There are various ways one can turn down the PFC, but few have proven more effective and efficient than the consumption of alcohol. And so the author suggests the consumption of alcohol would help inspire creativity and serve as a social lubricant, facilitating greater communication in a group setting. And this has proven the case historically: cultures throughout time and place have used consumption of alcohol in various rituals and events to foster creativity and group cohesion. It allowed natural skepticism and suspicion to be sufficiently allayed between rivals and rival groups to facilitate treaties or other forms of joint participation. It provided a bit more confidence in trying to foster a relationship.
And so the author ultimately attempts to make his case for drinking, independent of the standard scientific matters of health, but in terms of fostering group creativity and cohesion.
Yet the author is able to soberly assess many of the challenges which attend to the consumption of alcohol. He recognizes the addiction tendency in a proportion of the population, and would want to respect their abstinence. He maintains great concern regarding distilled spirits: they have only been around for a few hundred years, prove quite potent, and often short-circuits whatever social benefits might come from shared alcoholic consumption and leads to sheer drunkenness. He also maintains concern regarding drinking alone and the tendency toward isolation in drinking in modern society, pointing out how drinking was a social construct and worked best as a social construct but proves dangerous when done alone as a coping mechanism and/or an addiction, and all the more so when it involves distilled spirits. The author recognizes the challenge of prejudice and discrimination: what do you do with those who decide not to drink in environments where drinking is serving as a social lubricant and catalyst for creativity? Or, for that matter, the exclusion which would attend to those who have other responsibilities and cannot drop in to the pub after class or work?
I definitely appreciated the concerns about distilled spirits and isolation, and can recognize the merits of his arguments in anthropological and historical frameworks. Those who lived in the worlds of the Old and New Testaments consumed at least wine if not beer and/or cider. Abstinence was not condemned, but drunkenness consistently was condemned, with plenty of examples of the problems involved set forth.
This is definitely an interesting historical and scientific exploration into human consumption of alcohol, and has important information for us to consider in terms of how societies function. Yet one’s decisions regarding alcoholic consumption should not be informed merely by historical or scientific analysis, and drunkenness should never be commended. But it does help to understand what alcohol is doing in the body, and why people in societies have found at least some virtue in what can also quite quickly become a vice.
As always, thanks for your interest and support! It is not taken for granted.
May the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with you.
Ethan