Tag: church history

Augustine’s Commentary on John 13:1-5

~ Vincent

Augustine preached his way through the Gospel of John, which is such a treat. As a fellow pastor preaching his way through John, it’s awesome to be able to see the different ways that Augustine engaged with the same Scriptures that I’m working through. I don’t always agree with him, of course. At different points, patristic exegesis can be pretty weird by modern standards, but even when Augustine is weird, he’s never dull, and that’s worth something. Since it was kind of hard to read through Augustine’s Tractates on the Gospel of John as a reference document, I thought I’d break the specific verses I was looking at down into a commentary. The ideas are his, but the words are mine. Hopefully, it makes the gems of his wisdom a little more accessible.

Here are his thoughts on John 13:1-5. The Bible verses I mention are usually from the NIV, but sometimes Augustine’s insights require language from the translation that he’s working from. In those cases, I use the NIV for inspiration but tweak it to try to make it resemble what Augustine was obviously working from.

1It was just before the Passover Festival.  Jesus knew that the hour had come for him to leave this world and go to the Father. (Jn. 13:1 a)

Augustine dabbled in a lot of different languages, so in this first verse, he points out some of the subtle truths that get highlighted depending on which language you read it in. For example, in Greek, the word Pascha (Passover) sounds a lot like paschein, the word for suffering. And sure enough, this is a period where Christ is preparing to paschein for the whole world. This wasn’t lost on Ancient Greek Christians. They naturally associated this celebration of Passover with Christ’s suffering.

If, however, you read the passage in Hebrew, the word Pascha means (unsurprisingly to us today) “pass over,” referring to the angel of death passing over houses that had lamb’s blood above the door during the last of the Egyptian plagues before the exodus. The Hebrews were saved by the blood of a lamb, and here Jesus, the lamb of God, goes to the cross so that we can be saved from death by his blood.

Still further, in Augustine’s native Latin, the translation of “Passover” would be “transitus,” which would mean something like “passing through,” “crossing,” or “transit.” How appropriate! Jesus isn’t going to die. He will, however, pass through this world. The Vulgate even uses this same language to describe Jesus’s mission later in this verse: this is the “hora ut transeat ex hoc mundo,” or in English, “the hour for him to pass through the world.” Jesus is like Moses! Moses passed through the Red Sea to lead his people out of slavery in Egypt to the promised land. Jesus passed through the world to lead his people out of slavery to sin and death and into the Kingdom of God. As Paul wrote in 1 Corinthians 1:13: “For [Jesus] has rescued us from the dominion of darkness and brought us into the kingdom of the Son he loves.” Everyone will pass away from this world, but not everyone will pass through this world. Remember how Pharaoh’s soldiers sided against Moses and died in the middle of the waves because of God’s judgement? Those who follow Christ will pass through the world with him, but those who are against him will pass with the world into God’s judgement.

Having loved his own who were in the world, he loved them to the end. (Jn. 13:1 b)

What does it mean that Jesus “love them to the end?” What end? Did Jesus’s love end at the cross? No! Jesus loved us even after that. Jesus came back to life and loved us. Jesus ascended into Heaven and still loves us. There isn’t an end to Jesus’s life! So “loved them to the end” can’t refer to the end of his life. What might it refer to? In classical Christian terms, “the end” can refer to the telos, or reason that something was made. For example, the proper end of an acorn is to become an oak tree. The proper end of a heart is to pump blood. Teleologically, that’s their proper end. Romans 10:4 references this type of end when it calls Jesus the “end of the law.” Does it mean that Jesus ended the law? No. It means Jesus was the perfect culmination of the law. He was the proper end of the law. So if Jesus loved his disciples to the end, he wasn’t loving them with a partial love. This was a love that had achieved its proper end. This was a perfect love. This was the love that led him to the cross. As John 15:13 says, “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” Jesus loved his disciples with the greatest love.

2 The evening meal was in progress, and the devil had already prompted Judas, the son of Simon Iscariot, to betray Jesus. (Jn. 13:2)

At this point, the devil has already planted a spiritual suggestion in Judas’s heart: betray Jesus. This wasn’t a whisper in his ear so much as a spiritual influence that entered through his thoughts. Remember, not everything that’s spiritual is good! Paul knew all about the challenges that spiritual beings can bring.. He wrote in Ephesians 6:12, our struggle is against powers, principalities, and the spiritual forces of evil. Somehow, devils can mingle with our thoughts and encourage us to sin. But how do they do it? And how do we know which thoughts are from them and which are from us? And are there angels that introduce good spiritual thoughts to us? It seems reasonable to assume that there are, but since all of these things are happening beyond our ability to see them, there’s so much we can’t know. We may not know every detail, but we always know which of the thoughts in our mind we choose to act on. We can choose to be aided by God towards what is good, or go off on our own and choose what is wrong. Judas knew Jesus, but he didn’t accept him as his God. The instinct to betray Jesus didn’t come from the Devil. That belonged to Judas. The devil just placed that thought of betrayal in his heart and let him do the rest. He came to this meal to spy on the shepherd and sell the Savior. Judas may have planned to do evil, but God used his evil for good. Even Judas’s betrayal became a part of God’s receptive plan.

3 Jesus knew that the Father had put all things under his power, and that he had come from God and was returning to God; 4 so he got up from the meal, took off his outer clothing, and wrapped a towel around his waist. 5 After that, he poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet, drying them with the towel that was wrapped around him. (Jn. 13:3-5)

Judas showed up to that meal assuming that his betrayal was the perfect secret, but Jesus knew. Jesus knew everything that Judas was going to do, but he wasn’t worried. He trusted his Father completely. Everything was in His hands, including Judas. In the ultimate act of humility, he knelt down to wash the feet of his disciples including the feet of his betrayer. It didn’t matter how much a person had indulged in evil. There was nobody that Jesus wasn’t willing to kneel down and serve.

And the particulars of that act tell us so much. He took off his outer garment and wrapped towel around his waist to serve us. It’s an image of the incarnation! Jesus laid aside the grandeur of Heaven (the outer garment) and took on humanity (the towel) so that he could serve us. As Philippians 2:6-7 says, “

[Jesus], being in very nature God,
     did not consider equality with God something to be used to
     his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
     by taking the very nature of a servant,
     being made in human likeness.

Later, he’ll have his garments stripped from him at the cross and he’ll be wrapped in linen for burial. All of this humiliation was for our sake. Even here, as he goes to the cross, he stops to serve everyone including the lowest among us. As Luke wrote, “He came to seek and save the lost,” (Lk. 19:10).

We were lost at one point. We had that same pride that Judas had in our hearts, but God came to wash us with his grace. Don’t cling to that pride! Set it aside and serve others in love and humility until just like the one who saved you.

Conveniently Untranslatable: Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna

~ Vincent

One of my personal pet peeves is when pastors bust out the weird words for Hell. “You can see here that they’re talking about Gehenna, which is different than Hades and certainly much different than Hell.” Huh? Hades and Gehenna aren’t English words. You’re just leaving words in their original language and insisting that it’s somehow different and deeper for not having been translated. Can you imagine if any other theological subject took the same approach? Imagine talking about the Gospel and someone said, “well, let’s be sure to speak about the evangelion, which is different from the gospel or the devar YHWH.” Or imagine if we were talking about prophets and someone insisted that we needed to start talking about prophētēs and navi’im if we REALLY want to be serious about all of this. Not all of these conversations are wrong-headed. There absolutely is a place for learning more about cultural attachments to different words and the art of translation, but when a single theological subject (Hell) is the only one that people ever want to debate, I start to wonder if it’s out of a misled curiosity or a deep-seated need for the text to say something other than it does. Ironically, when I looked at the players involved in those translation decisions, both intellectual wanderlust and deep discomfort with Hell seem to be present in the Hades/Sheol/Gehenna conversation.

On one side, you have evangelical pastors that seem to see conversations about Hades and Sheol as the work of serious scholarship unburdened by the assumptions of previous tradition. The logic goes something like this: do you really want to know what the biblical author was trying to tell you? Then you need to get back to the source of the book itself! What did these words mean in the original Jewish setting? The authors didn’t even know the word “Hell,” and if you read passages about Sheol while thinking about a burning pit full of devils, you’re going to totally misunderstand what they were getting at. If you want to be accurate, you have to accept that there are no clean, accurate translations of these concepts into English. We need to leave these words in their original language and let people learn what Jews thought about the afterlife in those timeframes if we want people to understand what those passages mean.

To some extent, I respect the thought process. It’s sincere and genuinely focused on the Bible. It is, however, a little misled. It tosses out the contributions of historic Christians in the effort of uncovering something “more accurate,” but what’s uncovered is almost always much, much less so. After all, it implies that there is a reasonably simple, non-scholarly way for people to comprehend what Jewish religious thought was about the afterlife over thousands of years, and that’s totally unreasonable. Just look at the three-year stretch that Jesus spent in public ministry! Throughout the New Testament, we see the Saducees and the Pharisees. Were they on the same page about the afterlife? No! For a Sadducee, any talk about the afterlife would have been absurd. They believed there was no afterlife at all. The Pharisees, on the other hand, there was a bodily resurrection at the end of time after which some would go on to everlasting life and others would go on to eternal torment. That’s a pretty big difference in the way they thought about the afterlife! Do you think they agreed on the meaning of the word Sheol? And remember, we’re only looking at two groups that were active in the three years that Jesus was involved in public ministry. The Old Testament covers THOUSANDS of years of history. If we’re convinced that words like Sheol and Gehenna are so wildly unlike our modern words that we need to leave them untranslated, we also need to accept that we can’t offer up one explanation about what the afterlife REALLY was to Jews for thousands of years and claim that this is a penetrating work of scholarship that finally explains the concept. If Jewish religious scholars couldn’t agree during the life of Jesus, they certainly weren’t all miraculously on the same page before that. No, we would need a study that’s far deeper and wider than we’re really interested in to seriously embark down this road. In describing what Jews “really thought” about Sheol, you’re inevitably picking one interpretation and blanket applying it for a broad swath of history.

Beyond introducing a level of complexity that is both not scholarly enough to be taken seriously and too scholarly for the most people to understand, there’s a bigger, simpler concern that ought to disqualify the use of these terms in an evangelical setting: is Sheol a real place? It’s usually described as a a spooky, neutral realm of the dead, so is that an actual possible landing place for people that die? What about Hades? And is Hades a different place than Sheol? After all, it is similar, although the Greeks had some moral distinctions to their Hades. You could make it to Elysium or sink to the depths of Tartarus. Oh, but those aren’t explicitly mentioned in the New Testament, so do they count? Or was the New Testament Hades different from the Greek Hades? And how does Gehenna fit into all of this? And how does ANY of it fit in with Christian orthodoxy? The simple truth is that it doesn’t fit into Christian orthodoxy. These places, if imagined as anything other than Hell or Heaven, don’t fit within a cohesive Christian framework. Our Christian forebears recognized this. Bibles didn’t leave those words in their Greek and Hebrew forms until the 19th and 20th centuries and none of those words appears in any historic doctrinal standards (unlike Heaven and Hell, which are pretty standard fare). Leaving the words untranslated doesn’t just risk confusing people! It also risks adding non-existent places to Christian’s understanding of the cosmos. The hundreds of years of resources where our ancestors in the faith translated those words as “Hell” actually help us to understand how they contribute to a consistent worldview. In ditching them for a “more accurate understanding,” we’ve ditched a tremendous aid.

But let’s jump to the other side of the theological spectrum. What about more liberal theologians? Why are they in favor of Hades and Gehenna instead of Hell? This one doesn’t take a lot of explaining. Universalism in both it’s soft and hard forms, are much more common in mainline churches and expectations for doctrine tends to be more pluralistic. In the tradition of Schliermacher, the Bible is often seen as a compilation of ideas about God that are bound by a very different time and culture, rather than a singular authoritative voice illuminating any objective truth. Removing instances of the word Hell from the Bible is generally seen as a good thing, since eternal suffering is supposedly incompatible with the idea of a good God. To use terms about Hades and Gehenna instead helps establish the foreignness and pluralistic nature of the Bible. It becomes more of a cultural curiosity, rather than something serious that needs to be addressed.

My belief is simple enough: people deserve to have Bibles where EVERY word is translated into their language, not just the convenient ones. For over well over a thousand years, Hades, Gehenna, and Sheol were normatively translated to “Hell.” The Vulgate used the Latin word for Hell. The Wycliffe Bible used Hell. The King James used Hell. Hell is the best English rendering of those Greek and Hebrew words, and using them creates a theological consistency that’s necessary to have any honest understanding of the faith. At times, I see people blame the shortcomings of Latin and English for a translation as “shallow” as Hell. The Latin word for Hell, Infernum, is pretty close culturally to our understanding of Hell, so maybe that’s where things fell apart! They claim, “we just don’t have the same vocabulary available to us as the Greeks and the Hebrews did! The Latins mistranslated those word, and English kept those wrong connotations, but now we’re getting back to a purer understanding.” The argument sounds good on paper, until you realize that Latin and Greek were both spoken in the New Testament era and there were no ancient Greeks disgusted by the Latins use of their filthy word Infernum for being too far from their pure Hades. If similar translations were good enough for the Greeks, how they it be too poor for us? A mountain has been made out of a molehill. These words can be reasonably translated! We just don’t like the translation, either because it bores us or because it scares us.

By no means do I say any of this to imply that serious cultural and word studies ought to be off limits. Of course Christians should learn more and continually try to understand what the Scriptures say. But we ought to ask ourselves, why is Hell the single word subject to this intense modern scrutiny? Nobody is scrambling to know the cultural nuances behind ancient and modern understandings of Heaven or implying that a purer understanding of purgatory is just beyond our grasp if we stopped using English. Why are the words for Hell mysteriously the exact words we can’t translate? Why are some of the explanations for those words popularly offered up by detractors actively incorrect (no, Gehenna was not a garbage dump outside of town and not a shred of archaeological or historical evidence has ever implied that it was)? Why has an uptick in interest in universalism coincided with our unwillingness to use “Hell”? Why are the untranslated words mysteriously absent from all historical doctrinal standards? We could go on and on with pointed questions, but the point is that we’re being horribly inconsistent when we use Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna, and our inconsistency isn’t random. It’s the product of very particular thought processes, all of which are skeptical of historic Christian tradition. The evangelicals want to abandon tradition to get back to a “true sense” of the text, and the liberals want to abandon it because they just don’t like it, but they’re both missing out. The things we were handed down from our Christian forebears may not always be perfect, but in this particular instance, they’ve given us clear direction on how to reasonably translate words into our language, and their translations offer doctrinal clarity that you simply can’t find without it. Next time you come across a Sheol, Gehenna, or Hades, be a little spicy and just say “Hell.” The choice isn’t just defensible; it’s better.

The Seven Deadly Sins: Their Origins and Why to Love the List

~ Vincent

I just wrapped up a sermon series on the seven deadly sins, and I have to admit, I learned to appreciate that little list more than I expected.  I hadn’t seen it used all that much outside of tv shows (don’t tell me you’ve never seen a hero fight their way through a band of seven deadly sins themed goons), but it brings more to the table than schlocky action fodder.  It’s actually a really great reflective tool that can help draw our attention to the parts of our life that may not be as Christ-centric as we want them to be.

If your seven-deadlies knowledge falls somewhere near where mine was a few months back (zero), let me give you a brief overview.  The list of seven deadly sins is a tool that Christians have been using for well over a thousand years with its origin going all the way back into the fourth century.  The seven sins are pride, greed, lust, gluttony, envy, sloth, and wrath.  The theory here is that most of the sins that you’re engaged with on a daily basis have their roots in one of these seven big sins.  If you can focus on those seven things, your life will be much, much holier.  In short, it’s a contemplative tool for rooting out sin in your life.  You look at the list, you look at your life, and then you see where you have to make adjustments.  It’s been significantly more popular in Catholic circles than Protestant ones (we’ll get to why), but you can see why people use it.  It’s easy to apply.  It’s not hard to understand or wildly theoretical.  It’s pretty straightforward for devotional use or sermons or whatever else.

Not only was this a useful tool to add to my tool belt, but it was a delight learning about where it came from and how it was taught.  The people that developed this tool were big names in the ancient Christian world that all had a reputation for living holy lives.  Reading some of their works was a great opportunity to soak in some timeless wisdom.  But before I get to them, I want to talk about someone who comes up in a lot of articles about the seven deadly sins that wrongly gets credit for creating them: Tertullian.

The Red Herring: Tertullian’s List of Unforgivable Sins

Tertullian was a massive theological name in second century Christianity.  It’s not surprising that a lot of content can be traced to him.  That said, the list of the seven deadly sins isn’t from him.  He does have a list of seven sins, but relating them to the “seven deadly sins” as we know them today is such a wild stretch that I can’t imagine anyone who has actually read Tertullian’s work making that connection. His list of sins may happen to contain seven items, but the goal is wildly different.  He isn’t trying to tell you about some major sins so you can keep an eye open.  No, Tertullian is trying to tell you about sins that are literally unforgivable.

[T]here are some sins of daily committal, to which we all are liable… if there were no pardon for such sins as these, salvation would be unattainable to any. Of these, then, there will be pardon, through the successful Suppliant of the Father, Christ. But there are, too, the contraries of these; as the graver and destructive ones, such as are incapable of pardon — murder, idolatry, fraud, apostasy, blasphemy; (and), of course, too, adultery and fornication; and if there be any other violation of the temple of God. For these Christ will no more be the successful Pleader: these will not at all be incurred by one who has been born of God, who will cease to be the son of God if he do incur them. (On Modesty, Ch.19)

To consider this the origin of the seven deadly sins, we would have to ignore the fact that there’s not a single sin on the list that’s also on the list we know today AND ignore the fact that the function of the list is so wildly different from lists today AND we’d even have to ignore the fact that Tertullian’s list isn’t limited to seven items.  Notice that he ends his list with a catch-all for anything he missed: “and if there be any other violation of the temple of God.”  It’s not even really a list that’s intended to be limited to any given number of items.  It would be absurd to consider this a serious forerunner to the seven deadly sins, especially when you take a look at the next theologian with a claim to the title of originator:

Monkish Wisdom: Evagrius Ponticus and the Eight Evil Thoughts

Evagrius was a monk in fourth-century Egypt, which was the hotbed of Christian monasticism in its day.  He wrote a book called The Praktikos (The Practices) to help other monks live holy lives.  Sure enough, that book had a list of eight evil thoughts that was intended to be a list of big sins to root out in your life.  And when you think about it, doesn’t it make sense that a list like this began with monks?  The contemplative evaluation of your life combined with a fervent hope that hard work and effort can bring about virtue and holiness are exceedingly monkish.  It also helps explain why the list gets more traction in Catholic circles than in Protestant ones!  If you think that you need works and faith for salvation (as Catholics do), a list of major vices is obviously helpful.  If you think that faith alone brings about salvation (as Protestants do), the list’s focus on human action and its lack of references to Christ might be considered a little concerning.  Not that it’s unusable for Protestants, of course, but it certainly would be viewed as less helpful and maybe a little strange.

Evagrius’s “eight evil thoughts” (or the Ὀκτώ γενικώτατοι λογισμοὶ in his words, which actually translates to something like “eight general tempting thoughts,” but that’s much less catchy) is the first list that shows an obvious attempt to create something like what we know today, and it’s undeniable when you look at his writings:

There are eight principal kinds of tempting thoughts, that contain within themselves every tempting thought: first, that of gluttony; and with it, that of sexual immorality; third, that of love of money; fourth, that of sadness; fifth, that of anger; sixth that of acedia; seventh, that of vainglory; eighth, that of pride. We cannot control whether these tempting thoughts can agitate the soul or not; but whether they remain in us or not, and whether they move the passions or not – that we can control. (The Praktikos, 6)

You’ll notice that there’s still significant work to be done before we reach our final form.  At this point, we’re missing envy and sloth.  Instead, we have sadness, vainglory, and acedia (a Greek word that’s hard to translate that means something like “spiritual boredom” or “apathy”).  On the whole though, the list is really close.

Evagrius’s proceeding advice is pretty hit or miss.  Even in the selection above, you can see that he makes some connections that most of us today would just kind of scratch our heads at.  For example, why does he connect gluttony and sexual immorality?  To us, they’re totally different things.  To Evagrius and his immediate audience, it’s obvious that if you’re feeling lustful, you ate too much.  The weird parts are definitely there, but there’s some really relatable stuff too.  For example, his warnings about the challenges of acedia (boredom):

It makes the sun appear to slow down or stop , so the day seems to be fifty hours long.  Then it forces the monk to keep looking out the window and rush from his cell to observe the sun in order to see how much longer it is to the ninth [hour, i.e. 3 pm], and to look about in every direction in case any of the brothers are there. (Ibid. 12)

That is painfully relatable, and definitely helps me think about how much time I fritter away on the days that I’m not particularly diligent about my work.  Evagrius has created a great tool for monks, but it needs a pastoral touch to get it to a place where it’s applicable to the average person.  And luckily, it would make its way to the perfect person.  One of Evagrius’s students, John Cassian, compiled a lot of Egyptian monk wisdom into a wildly successful book called The Institutes and it helped lay the foundation for Western monasticism.  One of the monks that was formed by it’s wisdom happened to become pope, and that monk was named Gregory the Great.

A Pastoral Touch: Gregory the Great and the Seven Principal Sins

Yes, the guy who helped get the seven deadly sins to their (mostly) final form was a pope.  If you’re Protestant, don’t freak out.  John Calvin, one of the biggest Protestant names in history, insisted that Gregory the Great was the last good pope, and if a prominent reformer who was persecuted for Protestantism was cool with him, maybe we should be too.

Gregory’s work on the seven deadly sins appears in a wildly different context.  He wasn’t trying to make a list of sins for monks to think though.  Actually, Gregory ended up crafting his list while in a commentary on the book of Job.  Weirdly, he was exegeting Job 39:25, “At the blast of the trumpet it snorts, ‘Aha!’ It catches the scent of battle from afar, the shout of commanders and the battle cry,” which is actually God talking about how Job could never make an animal as amazing as a horse, which is a pretty far cry from something you’d expect to lead to a discussion on the seven deadly sins.  Medieval Christians thought that every Bible passage had several different layers of meaning, some of which could be pretty abstract.  In his section about the moral interpretation of the horse passage, Gregory argues that it’s actually about the life of a Christian and how they’re supposed to behave.  The line “The shout of commanders and the battle cry,” leads to discussion about spiritual warfare, and thus follows the seven deadly sins that we need to watch out for:

For when pride, the queen of sins, has fully possessed a conquered heart, she surrenders it immediately to seven principal sins, as if to some of her generals, to lay it waste. And an army in truth follows these generals, because, doubtless, there spring up from them importunate hosts of sins. Which we set forth the better, if we specially bring forward in enumeration, as we are able, the leaders themselves and their army. For pride is the root of all evil, of which it is said, as Scripture bears witness; Pride is the beginning of all sin. [Ecclus. 10, 1] But seven principal vices, as its first progeny, spring doubtless from this poisonous root, namely, vainglory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony, lust. For, because He grieved that we were held captive by these seven sins of pride, therefore our Redeemer came to the spiritual battle of our liberation, full of the spirit of sevenfold grace. (Morals on the Book of Job, Vol 3, Pt. 6, Book XXXI, 87)

At this point, I think we have what I’m comfortable calling the modern list of seven deadly sins.  Even here, there are a few noteworthy things that are a little different.  The name, obviously.  Just like the “eight evil thoughts” name got made up to describe what Evagrius was talking about because it was way cooler than the title that came up with, “seven deadly sins” got made up because the actual name that Gregory came up with, “the seven principal sins,” isn’t all that catchy.  That said, it’s actually a more accurate title.  These are the seven main sins you’re involved in, not the seven sins that will kill you.  When did “capital” become “deadly?”  Honestly, I can’t tell you.  It wasn’t Gregory’s doing, and most formal theological treatises call them the seven capital sins well through the middle ages and even into early modernity.  It looks like something that just kind of bubbled up in popular imagination over time.

A second difference that’s worth noting is that vainglory is still here!  A weird amount of sources say that Gregory removed vainglory and added pride, but I can’t find a shred of evidence that they’re right.  This list very much proves the opposite.  Pride is listed as “the queen” of the seven deadly sins, but not actually one of them itself.  Instead, pride is defined more closely as the willingness to step away from God, whereas the immoral act of exhibiting what we would call pridefulness in other circumstances is referred to as vainglory.  It’s actually a pretty clever solution.  Most modern explorations of the seven deadlies that I see simultaneously list pride as the root of all sins AND one of the seven, which is a little clunky.  It may as well be six deadly sins and their ringleader at that point.  Kudos to Gregory for solving the problem before it happened.  Pride is defying God; vainglory is glorifying yourself.

As weird as Gregory’s exegesis of Job may be, his section on the seven deadly sins is actually really applicable.  I used Gregory’s wisdom liberally in sermon preparation.  Sure, not everything he wrote is applicable today, but he clearly understands the trials of the human heart and that’s universal.  He’s also very clear about how each of these sins may be separate,but really, they all intertwined.  Lust leads to pride.  Pride leads to envy.  Envy leads to anger.  They’re all connected, and they’re all in our lives.  A mature Christian isn’t free of these problems; they should actively be involved in fighting them.  If we’re not fighting them, it’s not because they’re not there; it’s because we’re not paying attention.

It reminds me a little of a question I used to ask in confirmation classes.  These classes always have a mix of actually religious kids and kids that are just going through the motions.  After a lesson about sin, I would ask the kids to rate how close to perfect holiness they thought their daily lives really were.  From my perspective, it was an obvious opportunity for a little moment of repentance.  Of course you rank yourself low!  You’re a sinner!  You just saw what God’s standards are!  You’re not living up to them, right?  Surely, all the kids would admit that they weren’t really doing as well as they wanted to, and then we could pivot to talking about Jesus.  It didn’t really work out that way.  The less religious a kid was, the higher they would rank themselves on the holiness index.  Some kids unironically gave themselves a nine out of ten and said they were doing a pretty good job at keeping God’s law.  Try pivoting to Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross after a kid said they’re really actually pretty holy on their own.  It doesn’t work.  A person can be so blind that they can’t even see their situation clearly.  You have to be aware of sin if you want to fight it.  That’s one of the best things that this list brings us.  In Gregory’s strangely horse-themed words:

But the soldier of God, since he endeavors skillfully to pursue the contests with vices, smells the battle afar off; because while he considers, with anxious thought, what power the leading evils possess to persuade the mind, he detects, by the sagacity of his scent, the exhortation of the leaders. And because he beholds the confusion of subsequent iniquities by foreseeing them afar off, he finds out, as it were, by his scent the howling of the army. (Morals on the Book of Job, Vol 3, Pt. 6, Book XXXI, 91)

Ultimately, that awareness is what the list of seven deadly sins is intended to develop in us.  I know it felt convicting preaching my way through them.  It’s easy to see the sins of others, but it’s a little trickier to be aware of the sins in ourselves.  I hope that some of that conviction stays with me.

God in the Mountains: Moving from Bulgakov to Machen

~ Vincent

I’ve been doing this little series about thinkers and doctrine from the Eastern Orthodox world that I’m slowly moving away from since uncovering classical Protestantism, and today, I’m looking at Sergei Bulgakov.  Bulgakov is a towering figure in Eastern Orthodoxy, though not without controversy.  He was accused of heresy for his teachings on Sophiology (more on this to come).  Even still, he’s influential enough that his name is pervasive. As someone who spent a fair amount of time with his works, I wanted to appreciate the best of what he brought to the table while holding the more theoretical parts very loosely, but the further I’ve moved away from Eastern Orthodoxy, the more I can see that Bulgakov’s work just isn’t worth holding on to at all. Not only are his ideas overly-complicated and bizarre, but they really influence every other part of his work.

But what is this potentially-heretical Sophiology?  It’s an uncommon enough field that a lot of people have probably never heard of it.  I’m going to try to keep it simple (which is more than can be said about Bulgakov, whose books are both annoyingly long and unimaginably unintuitive).  The core of it can be found in Proverbs.  You know that female figure that’s supposed to be the embodiment wisdom?  In Greek, the word wisdom is “sophia,” so this female incarnation of wisdom is occasionally referred to as “Sophia,” (which is strange, given that Proverbs is written in Hebrew; her name should really be Chokhmah instead of anything in Greek, but what are you going to do?).  Sophiology starts here.  Rather than taking the traditional view that lady wisdom a metaphorical character intended to represent wisdom, she is fleshed out into a whole other divine being that is literally the wisdom of God.  And that comes with tremendous implications.  Is Sophia God?  Is she a fourth member of the Trinity?  Theologians know they can’t have a second god or a fourth trinity member and still consider themselves legitimately Christian, so they have to come up with elaborate explanations to avoid these problems. In Bulgakov’s case, he said that the trinity was three beings (hypostases) with one essence (ousia), but Sophia was one essence with no being. She was fully hypostasized by the Trinity (and I hate to use an abundance of Greek words, since it obscures more than it enlightens, but if I didn’t drop the Greek words, I don’t think I’d be properly representing his thoughts).  Despite Sophia being made of the essence of God, she was set apart by him in creation so that she could continually creatively grow to be more like Him and His holiness. In other words, she is creation, constantly growing and becoming more like God, which is what she’s really made of.

If the bar for good theology was creative thought, Bulgakov would be crushing it.  If the bar is accurately expressing the apostolic faith found in the Scriptures, we’re in trouble. Almost none of this stuff is clearly present in the Bible.  We’re taking some “made in the image of God” stuff from Genesis, a little of John 1, and some select chapters of Proverbs and running wild with it.  The divide between creator and creation is practically non-existent in this model.  Yes, humans are made to be like God, but nowhere in Scripture is creation said to be from the essence of God, eternally returning to Him.  That’s fanciful and completely made up.

To be fair to the Eastern Orthodox world, Bulgakov’s Sophiology was mostly rejected.  Probably the best quote about him comes from an untranslated Russian work of little snippets from Archbishop Nathaniel of the Eastern Orthodox Church. He recalls sitting with a group of people that were all hating on Bulgakov and Metropolitan Anthony said:

Unfortunate Father Sergius, unfortunate Father Sergius. After all, this is a very smart person, one of the smartest in the world. He understands many things that only very few understand. And this makes him terribly proud. It’s hard not to be proud if you know that something is clear and completely understandable to you, but no one around you can understand it.  
(Archbishop Nathaniel L’vov, https://azbyka.ru/otechnik/Nafanail_Lvov/krupitsy-pospominanij-o-vstrechah-s-velikim-avvoj-mitropolitom-antoniem/, trans. Google)

He isn’t wrong.  Bulgakov’s work and feels very much like the creation of someone who got bored and felt a need to invent a whole philosophical system to delight themselves. The fact that it’s almost impossible to explain his ideas to anyone without them making a confused face and saying, ‘Huh?” is a really, really bad sign. Ideas are generally supposed to solve problems. Here, Bulgakov has created a problem where there was none to introduce a solution that is nothing but a problem.  I have no doubt that he was smart.  I don’t know that he was interested in receiving the faith so much as he was creating one.

Despite his Sophiology never catching fire, Bulgakov still has a lot of clout in Eastern Orthodoxy.  He’s one of the big names.  His works have weight.  A lot of people are willing to ignore the worst to enjoy the best. As was I!  Until I started noticing just how much everything depends on his worst.  For example, Bugakov was an atheist and a communist before he converted.  One of his big conversion moments was a beautiful meditation on the mountains and God’s presence in them:

Evening was falling. We were travel-ling along the southern steppe, covered with the fragrance of honey-coloured and hay, gilded with the crimson of a sublime sunset. In the distance the fast-approaching Caucasus Mountains appeared blue. I was seeing them for the first time . . . My soul had become accustomed long ago to see with a dull silent pain only a dead wasteland in nature beneath the veil of beauty, as under a deceptive mask; without being aware of it, my soul was not reconciled with a nature without God. And suddenly in that hour my soul became agitated, started to rejoice and began to shiver: but what if . . . if it is not wasteland, not a lie, not a mask, not death but him, the blessed and loving Father, his raiment, his love? . . .God was knocking quietly in my heart and it heard that knocking, it wavered but did not open . . . And God departed. (Unfading Light, trans. Thomas Allen Smith, 8.)

Breathtaking!  But the more I looked, the more I saw trouble.  Notice that God isn’t just visible because of his work in nature.  No, God is in nature.  There’s an intimate unity between the two.   If it were anyone else, I would say I was reading into it, but isn’t it interesting that a man that insisted that creation was actually Sophia, the essence of God, becoming like Him and striving to return to Him, is the one that said that the oneness of God and nature were critically important to his conversion?  Uh oh.  That’s right.  The example in question is, at its core, an affirmation of his Sophiology.  The creation/creator divide is intentionally wibbly-wobbly.  And while it might be Eastern Orthodox, it’s certainly not orthodox in the traditional sense.  

I realized I had to move on from Bulgy, and luckily for me, there are plenty of examples of people seeing God’s hand in nature that are a lot more theologically-sound than Bulgakov’s.  For example, I stumbled across John Machen’s account of seeing God’s hand at work in creation when he looked out at the Alps.  Both men were looking at mountains, but you can see how Machen does a better job respecting that creature/creator line:

To me, nature speaks clearest in the majesty and beauty of the hills. One day in the summer of 1932, I stood on the summit of the Matterhorn in the Alps. Some people can stand there and see very little. Depreciating the Matterhorn is a recognized part of modern books on mountain-climbing. The great mountain, it is said, has been sadly spoiled. Why, you can even see sardine cans on those rocks that so tempted the ambition of climbers in Whymper’s day. Well, I can only say that when I stood on the Matterhorn, I do not remember seeing a single can. Perhaps that was partly because of the unusual masses of fresh snow which were then on the mountain, but I think it was also due to the fact that, unlike some people, I had eyes for something else. I saw the vastness of the Italian plain, which was like a symbol of infinity. I saw the snows of distant mountains. I saw the sweet green valleys far, far below at my feet. And as I see that whole glorious vision again before me now, I am thankful from the bottom of my heart that from my mother’s knee I have known to whom all that glory is due. (Machen, Things Unseen, 16)

Is the land God?  No.  It’s a symbol of infinity.  A symbol that has been ignored by so many that only see the dead stuff of humanity, but an effective one to those who are really looking.  The same core elements are all there, but the little details check out. I can share that account without having to wonder, “What weird stuff could that lead to if they ever google the guy I talked about?”  

As much time as I spent with Bulgakov, I don’t think there’s much (if anything) worth the effort in his work.  Even the little moments are too caught up in his bizarre theories.  I don’t care if he has clout.  I’m starting to take these tools out of my toolbox to replace them with more reliable ones.





The Desert Fathers and Works Righteousness? Say it ain’t so!

~ Vincent

In my last post, I mentioned that there were some theological tools I picked up from my mentor that I’m not sure I want to keep. For the most part, they’re Eastern Orthodox. Since I didn’t have classical Protestant thinkers at my fingertips when I connected with so many of these resources, they were great for that period of my life, but now that I’ve had some time to get a little more classical Protestant thinkers under my belt, I think it’s time to say goodbye to some of the things from my past that I have more disagreements with than I fully understood at the time.

And this first one is a hard one: the Desert Fathers. SAY IT AIN’T SO! If you haven’t read The Sayings of the Desert Fathers before, let me just affirm that it is one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read. Selections from this book were a part of my morning devotions for a long time. Here’s one of my favorites:

A brother came to see Abba Macarius the Egyptian, and said to him, ‘Abba, give me a word, that I may be saved.’ So the old man said, ‘Go to the cemetery and abuse the dead.’ The brother went there, abused them and threw stones at them; then he returned and told the old man about it. The latter said to him, ‘Didn’t they say anything to you?’ He replied, ‘No.’ The old man said, ‘Go back tomorrow and praise them.’ So the brother went away and praised them, calling them, ‘Apostles, saints and righteous men.’ He re- turned to the old man and said to him, ‘I have complimented them.’ And the old man said to him, ‘Did they not answer you?’ The brother said no. The old man said to him, ‘You know how you insulted them and they did not reply, and how you praised them and they did not speak; so you too if you wish to be saved must do the same and become a dead man. Like the dead, take no account of either the scorn of men or their praises, and you can be saved.’ (The Sayings of the Desert Fathers, trans. Benedict Ward, 132)

Isn’t that wonderful? Each of these sayings balance wittiness and wisdom, and they’re always focused on living Christianity, not just theorizing about it. I ran across this book for the first time while I was in seminary, studying abstract (and unorthodox) theories about how the Bible was written in my Bible class. I randomly plucked it off a shelf in the library, and when I opened it up? Boom. It felt like the Holy Spirit was right there next to me, encouraging me to live a Christian life, not just theorize about things that will never be edifying for real Christians.

As much as I love this collection of sayings, I’ve come to see its limitations. You can even see one of them in this piece. Did you catch what the man said when he asked for help? “Give me a word that I may be saved.” There’s only one word that can save you, dude, and that’s Jesus himself (Jn 1). And I know some would argue that I’m nitpicking here, since that little saying is just a standard part of the Desert Father’s story formula and there’s ways you can try to justify it, but on the whole, I think it’s pretty honest. A massive portion of the Desert Father’s stories are about how to develop a virtuous character, and they usually open with someone asking, “Father, give me a word that I might be saved.” A virtuous character is key to their understanding of salvation. And my logic here isn’t random or unfounded. The deadly edge of monasticism, as expressed by Luther so often and so clearly, is works righteousness. That’s incompatible with the Christian faith that you see in John 3:16 or Ephesians 2:8-9. There’s a big, glaring disagreement with most monastic literature and the Protestant battlecry of Sola Fide (by faith alone).

I may not have fully understood this when I picked up The Sayings, but it did rub off on me. I started reading more and more monastic literature, which pointed me towards Aristotle and his virtue-based ethics. His work is the philosophical underpinning of monastic thought. He argues that practicing good character traits consistently slowly molds you into a just person. I read up on that and thought it was pretty good! Just like the monks, really. So I decided to share my new leanings with my wife. I told her that Protestantism was probably a little wrong in parts. After all, it’s not just faith that makes you what you are! It’s what you do that molds you. It’s faith AND works that save you, when you think about it. Aristotle told me so.

While the monks would have approved of my thoughts, my wife certainly didn’t. She doesn’t often go all-out in arguments against me, but saying, “We might not be saved by faith alone,” was something she absolutely went all-out to defend. And I’m thankful that she did, because when your husband says, “I think Aristotle might be more right than the Bible,” you probably need to set him straight.

I’ve bounced back a lot since then. I’ve come to see that as much as I love the monks, they didn’t always focus on things in a way that reflects what the Bible clearly teaches. To use another Protestant phrase, I genuinely believe that Sola Scriptura (by Scripture alone) is true. Everything we need for salvation is in the Bible. Unfortunately, I can’t find anything that looks like what the Desert Fathers were doing. I think they have a logic to their actions that doesn’t reflect the heart of Scripture. Does that mean I think they’re all garbage? Absolutely not. But it does mean I think some of their emphases are a little off. If I want to read them, I have to be aware of the points where we diverge so I can get the best and leave out the worst.

So what to do with the Desert Fathers. Are they perfect? No, but here’s still a lot that I appreciate about them. I’ve just shifted my level of enthusiasm. Whereas historically, I would unapologetically have loved to do whole a sermon series that focuses on the Desert Fathers and their stories, now I’d rather keep Scripture at the center and maybe occasionally use them for a fun devotional or illustrative story. Am I throwing out these tools? Absolutely not. But they’ve gone from a core part of my toolbox that I used every day to some tools that stay up on their hooks until a special occasion comes out.

Still Orthodox, but Less Eastern

~ Vincent

Every worker needs good tools to do good work.  A carpenter needs a quality hammer.  A janitor needs a durable mop.  A politician needs a tailored suit.  Regardless of the specific profession, everyone needs good tools.  Theologians are no different.  We need good tools.  We need finely-tuned doctrines, illustrative metaphors, and relatable stories to communicate the faith.  And just as in other fields, the name attached to these tools matters.  A carpenter might prefer Craftsman tools and a janitor might prefer Clorox disinfectant.  Why?  Because those are reliable names in their field.  The name shows that the tool is trustworthy.  We should also prefer tools associated with trustworthy names.  A metaphor that we find on some random website might seem clever, but will it sound half as good when you say it out loud?  Who knows?  It might end up confusing someone more than it helps them understand.  But if you’re working with time-tested materials from trusted names, such as John Calvin or Augustine of Hippo, you know any given metaphor has been used time and time and time again.  Someone didn’t come up with it over their lunch break!  It’s good stuff.

I say all of this because I’m doing a little cleansing of my theological toolkit right now. When I was in seminary at Duke Divinity School, Eastern Orthodoxy was a huge influence on me.  And why?  Well, I was an evangelical Christian at a mainline seminary.  While I was still a long way from being “fully cooked,” there were certain doctrines common among my classmates that I couldn’t accept.  For example, a fair few thought that Scripture often reflected the biases of the author, including ignorance, sexism, and racism, rejecting the doctrine of plenary inspiration of Scripture.  Others were excited by “new” and “innovative” ways of thinking about faith, rejecting historic orthodoxy.  Still others would begin their theologizing by talking about a specific solution to a modern issue facing the world and then ask how that solution could be found in Scripture, which it struck me as a very backwards sort of process.  And far be it from me to suggest that every professor or every student that thought that way, but it was enough that the “norm” was definitively uncomfortable for me.  Edward Rommen, an adjunct professor and Eastern Orthodox priest, was someone that felt the weight of tradition and orthodoxy in a way that was very different than the norm.  I considered him my mentor and snapped up independent studies and classes with him as often as I could.

There are many things I’m grateful I learned from him.  I learned to love tradition.  I learned to listen to the voices of the saints before me by diving into classical Christian resources (which led to the creation of this little blog).  I learned to see Church history as a way to reveal the faith we practice, rather than as a burden to be shoved under the rug.  All good stuff.  I did, however, pick up some tools that haven’t served me as well as I’d hoped.  Father Rommen was DEEPLY Eastern Orthodox, and while it seemed cool at the time, I wasn’t as critical of some of it as I’ve come to be.  For example, both he and most of his Eastern Orthodox contemporaries were very enthusiastic about the “seven ecumenical councils.”  They were said to be binding for Christians everywhere and things that were agreed upon by the whole church before the Great Schism between Eastern and Western Christianity.  That sounded impressive to me.  Who was I to question it?  It wasn’t until I dug into the historical record that I saw that these seven councils weren’t as representative of all Christians as I had thought.  The seventh council was literally about why icons were great and should be used in worship.  And do you see any icons in Western Churches?  No!  So why would one of these seven all-inclusive, inarguable councils approve something that nearly all Western Christians don’t like?  Because that particular council was attended by and disproportionately controlled by Eastern Christians.  Western ones were mostly peeved at the council’s decision and saw it as a document full of “the errors of the Greeks” (see Libri Carolini by Theodulf of Orléans for a response from a prominent Western Christian to the seventh ecumenical council).  So these seven authoritative ecumenical councils weren’t particularly ecumenical in all cases and weren’t as authoritative as it seemed at the time.

And far be it from me to bash away at Eastern Orthodoxy for having their own perspective.  That’s what it really boils down to, I think.  If you like icons and think they’re great, OF COURSE you’re going to be excited about that one council that happened while you were still in communion with the Western Church where the result was favorable to you.  Fair enough.  I’m not mad.  But I have to ask myself, was the result of that council really inarguable?  Certainly not.  They argued about it while it was happening!  And is the practice of prayer to icons clearly represented in Scripture?  Certainly not.  It seems laughable to imagine Mary, Joseph, or Jesus, first century Jews that weren’t even comfortable having people’s faces on coins because of graven image laws, busting out an icon of Elijah during prayer time.  The historical record just doesn’t line up for that practice unless you’re only looking at very specific, secondary Eastern Orthodox sources.  And if I disagree on the legitimacy of these councils, which carry so much weight in the Eastern Orthodox world, what else needs thought through?  Are some of my tools stamped with a name that I may not trust as much as I used to?  Because while throwing everything out isn’t the answer, keeping tools that I’m not comfortable using benefits no one.

This is not some great, emotionally-laden process, by the way.  All of this discovery has happened a good deal back for me.  Which is for the best!  Trying to throw out tools that you were just using the other day would be a perilous prospect indeed!  But I know there are little arguments that I have sitting around in my head that don’t hold anymore.  There are stories that I enjoy that I’m no longer committed to.  There are people that I’d gladly cite for one purpose that I don’t actually agree with on a fair amount of other things.  And there are resources that better reflect where I’m at spiritually that I could be using now.  I’m thankful for some of the tools in my theological toolkit because of Eastern Orthodoxy, but I’m also curious about which ones are no longer as effective as I once perceived them to be.

Six Major Theories About Why Jesus Healed with Mud made of Spit (John 9)

~ Vincent

Why did Jesus heal the man in John 9 by making mud out of spit?!? I preached on John 9 recently and to make sure I had a good take, I looked up explanations from as many wise Christians as I could. People are all over the map on this one! There are so many explanations! I’ve sorted the theories into six major camps and added a quote from someone that I think is a great source for that explanation. Are there more theories out there? Absolutely, Feel free to do even more searching. I do, however, hope that this captures most of the breadth of the conversation. These ideas definitely aren’t mutually exclusive, so there are a lot of people that pick out several different reasons and agree with all of them.

(A lot of these quotes come from Christians throughout history, which means the primary sources can be tough to read. These are my paraphrases for ease of reading. Feel free to look up the original if something particularly. interests you.)

A Series of Symbols

The Lord came and what did He do? He unveiled a great mystery. He spat on the ground and He made clay out of His spit. Why? Because the Word was made flesh. Then, He anointed the eyes of the blind man. The man was anointed, but he still couldn’t see! Jesus sent him to the pool of Siloam. But notice that the evangelist pointed out the name of the pool: “sent.” And you know who was sent for us! If he hadn’t been sent, none of us would be free from sin! So he washed his eyes in that pool called sent — he was baptized in Christ!

-Augustine of Hippo, Tractate 44 on the Gospel of John

A Test of Faith

“The intention of Christ was, to restore sight to the blind man, but the way he went about it seemed absurd at first. By covering his eyes with mud, Jesus doubled his blindness! Who wouldn’t have thought that he was mocking that poor man or just doing some pointless nonsense? But Jesus intended to test the faith and obedience of the blind man so that he could be an example to everyone else. It wasn’t any ordinary test of faith! But the blind man relied on Jesus’s words alone. He was fully convinced that his sight would be restored to him. With that conviction, he hurried to follow Christ’s command. It speaks to his wonderful obedience that he simply obeyed Christ, even though there were so many excuses to do otherwise. When a devout mind, satisfied with the simple word of God, believes entirely in what seems incredible, that’s the true test of faith. Faith is followed by a readiness to obey, so that anyone who is convinced that God will be their faithful guide will naturally give their life over to God. Who could doubt that fear and suspicion crept into the man’s mind? He knew he might get mocked for what he was doing! But with hardly any effort, he broke through every barrier to faith and realized that it was safe to follow Christ.”

-John Calvin, Commentary on John

The Evangelistic Theory

“Maybe our Lord intended to draw even more attention to the miracle. A crowd of people would naturally gather to see something so odd, and the guide that helped the man get around the city would end up sharing the story as they went to the pool of Siloam.”

-John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the New Testament

The Gospel Comparison

“The man’s eyes were opened after a little clay was put in them and he washed them out in the pool of Siloam. God really does bless humble things during our process of conversion. It is incredibly humbling for a preacher who thinks, ‘I preached an amazing sermon on Sunday,’ to find God didn’t use that sermon to convert anyone! It was the random remark he made in town the other day that God worked with. He didn’t think it was worth anything! He didn’t plan it out or perfect it! But God did. What he thought was his best didn’t mean all that much to God, but when he wasn’t even trying, God blessed him. A lot of people had their eyes opened by little moments that had an incredible impact. The whole process of salvation is accomplished in simple, humble, everyday things. It’s so easy to compare it to the clay and spit that Jesus used. I don’t know many people that had their souls saved by formal, lofty processes. A lot of people join the church, but I haven’t met any that were converted because of a profound theological debate. It’s not common to hear that someone was saved because the pastor was so eloquent. Don’t get me wrong! We all appreciate eloquence. There’s nothing wrong with it! But eloquence has no spiritual power. It can’t transform our minds, and God prefers to use humbler things in His conversion. When Paul set aside human wisdom and decided not to use eloquent speech, he let go of things that weren’t going to be useful for him anyway. When David took of Saul’s elaborate armor and took up a sling and stone, he killed a giant! And the giants of today aren’t going to be conquered any better by people trying to put on the armor of Saul. We need to stick to simple things. We need to stick to the plain gospel and preach it plainly. The clay and the spit weren’t an artistic combination. It didn’t’ suit anyone’s taste! Nobody felt culturally gratified by that mud! But by that and a wash in Siloam, eyes were opened. It pleases God to use the foolish things to save those who believe in Him.”

-Charles Spurgeon, The Healing of One Born Blind

The Healing Spit Theory

The spittle of a human being is the best antidote for the poison of serpents, though, our daily lives attest to its efficacy and utility, in many other areas. We spit to keep ourselves safe from epilepsy and to avoid bad luck after meeting someone with a bad right leg. We apologize to the gods for having ridiculous expectations by spitting into our laps. In the same way, whenever medicine is employed, it’s good to spit three times on the ground to help it to take hold.

-Pliny the Elder, Natural History Book XXVIII, vii

A Meditation on Means

The Lord revealed his power more effectively by choosing this method of healing than if he had opened the blind man’s eyes with just a word. He used things that seem more likely to blind a man than to let him see! Who would believe that someone was about to heal the ears of a deaf man if they started filling his ears with mud? Clearing his ears might make sense, but putting mud in them? No. If Jesus wanted to use rational means to open this mans’ eyes, a surgical knife would have made more sense than mud. But Jesus chose to use this means for his power… it is supremely easy for him to heal by any means he wants. He can use laying on of hands or touching or a word or even spit and clay. If the word of Christ is added, any means he chooses will be effective, even if it seems more harmful than helpful to us.

-Wolfgang Musculus, Commentarii in Ioannem as found in Reformation Commentary on Scripture.

Augustine’s Apologetics and Contra Faustum

~ Vincent

Everyone has their favorites when it comes to theologians.

Augustine of Hippo is my guy.

I know, I know, he’s pretty mainstream as far as favorites go, but quality is quality, whether it’s loved by a million people or just one, and Augustine is quality. Is he smart? He was a genius.. Was he faithful? Absolutely. Did he bat 1000 when it came to hard questions and situations? Absolutely not. But that’s ok. Only Jesus did that, and expecting someone to nail it every time is pretty unfair. But even when Augustine is wrong, he’s wrong in an interesting way. He’s not going to leave you bored.

And he wasn’t just an idea guy; he was a people guy. There are some writers that are dry and dusty. Did they ever see the outside of their ivory tower? Probably not. And then there are the weird ones. I’m talking like Søren Kierkegaard weird. They’re brilliant and relatable when they write, but then you find out that they fumbled the love of their life by breaking up with them for no discernible reason and then they pined after them for the rest of their lives and wrote about it in several of their big works and you say, “Man, that guy had issues.” Did Augustine have issues? Yeah. But they were issues that are relatable. Anybody that’s read Confessions knows that even though Augustine was kicking over a thousand years ago, he had a life that is just like so many of our lives today.

At my church, I try to set aside a few Sundays every year to talk about big names in Christian history. I think it’s a fair critique of Protestants to say that too many of us imagine that there’s us and the Bible and that’s all there is, which is a shame because there’s thousands of years of people trying to live out the truth that’s contained in the Bible, and they’re really good examples to look up to. Augustine is one of the guys I set a day aside for every year in the hopes that someone learns about him and says, “Hey, I could be faithful like that!”

This past year, I wanted to highlight Augustine’s way of contending for the faith. He was a master at apologetics. People would come at him from every side, arguing about why orthodoxy was actually wrong and their weird heresy was secretly the real best religion and Augustine would just systematically destroy their arguments piece by piece by piece.

I was trying to pick out one of Augustine’s better arguments to highlight. I looked at Pelagius, the guy who famously said that God gave us the ability to know good from evil and a whole set of laws to help us choose good, so we don’t need extra help from God to do good! We just need to work hard and do it! It’s a bad take and skips over the damage that sin did to our will and our need for the Holy Spirit. It’s a great argument, but I prayed about it and just didn’t feel like it was the right choice. Then I looked at Augustine’s argument against Donatus Magnus, the leader of the Donatists. His clergy split off against the main Church because they endured during oppression when a lot of other Christian leaders had caved. They believed that anyone who betrayed the Church to Roman oppressors should be barred from leadership for life. Honestly, that’s one where Augustine was probably wrong about. I’m not gonna lie. The more you look into that one, the more you think to yourself, “I don’t know, it sounds like they’re the good guys and Augustine may be on the wrong side of this one…” I’m all for discussing someone’s mistakes, but it’s not exactly a great example of apologetics that can edify people. I kept looking and looking…

And then I found it. Augustine’s Contra Faustum (Against Faustus).

Why was this so exciting? Because Augustine writes about Faustus in Confessions. He talks about how he fell in with Faustus and his people (the Manichaeans) when he was trying to understand the point of life. He thought the Manichaeans were goofy, but they kept insisting that Faustus would explain everything when he got there. And then Faustus showed up! Augustine asked all his questions and Faustus responded, “I guess I never really thought about any of that. I don’t know.” Augustine didn’t hang out with the Manichaeans so much after that.

Augustine went on to become a Christian bishop, and lo and behold, years later he found out that the SAME FAUSTUS wrote a book on why Christianity is stupid and nobody should believe it. And because he’s a legend, Augustine literally reprinted Faustus’s book line by line with point-by-point disputations of every single idea that he had.

Contra Faustum isn’t one of Augustine’s more popular works, which makes sense. There aren’t a lot of Manichaeans around today to disagree with, and Augustine wrote over a hundred books, so not every one is going to become a legend. That said, there’s a lot to love here. In the sermon, I tried to pull out some of the arguments that were more relevant today. Does the Gospel have anything to do with Jesus being born of a virgin? Does the Old Testament conflict with the teachings of Jesus? Why don’t Christians keep the Old Testament law? I know I’ve heard each of these points brought up by people today to try to disprove orthodox Christianity, and these arguments aren’t new. Augustine took each one on hundreds of years ago, and most of his responses hold up really well. Here are my summaries/paraphrases of three chapters of Contra Faustum that I used for preaching. I hope they’re edifying for you!

Aquinas and Abortion

~ Vincent

Thomas Aquinas’s name gets dropped in quite a few pro-abortion arguments.  Roe v. Wade referenced Aquinas.  President Biden referenced Aquinas.  There’s even a popular undercurrent of pseudo-history you can find around the internet that appeals to Aquinas to portray the Middle Ages as this golden age of abortions where your local herbalist was always at the ready to sell the neighborhood abortion drugs at the drop of a hat.  But why is Aquinas referenced with such regularity?  

Aquinas didn’t believe that a fetus was genuinely human until one to three months after the pregnancy began.

And that’s true!  He didn’t.  We’ll get to why in just a minute.  But the strange thing about all of the Aquinas citations is that the people who reference Aquinas (on both sides of the aisle) don’t seem to know much about him.  They know he’s a famous Christian and philosopher and if they can convince people he’s on their side, boy, that would be a knockout punch in their favor.  But that’s the thing; they’re not curious about what he actually has to say for himself.  They want to explain their own position and drop his name in there when it’s convenient.  When they bother to give any citations, they tend to be from secondary sources (which is so lazy when when the person in question wrote as much as Aquinas did) and even when there are direct citations, his most famous works are usually referenced, rather than the most relevant to the actual topic at hand.  So, I wanted to give Aquinas a fair opportunity to speak on the matter.  What did Aquinas actually believe about abortion? 

It’s a big question, so I’m going to tackle it in three different pieces: Aquinas on the Beginning of Human Life, Aquinas on Sex, and Canon Law in the Day of Aquinas.

And if you’re looking for spoilers, here’s the big picture: working within the bounds of popular science in his day, Thomas did believe that human life starts to be genuinely human between one and three months into a pregnancy (depending on the child’s gender). This qualified early-term abortion as a crime other than murder. That said he still lists it as a crime against nature regardless of when it happens, and he worked within a system where it was legally punishable by law at any stage during the pregnancy. Aquinas’s question wasn’t “Is abortion a crime,” so much as it was, “How serious a crime is abortion at each stage?”

Let’s dig in.

Aquinas on the Origins of Life

If we want to talk about Aquinas and abortion, the first place to go is his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sentences.  It’s not as well known as his famous Summa Theologica, but it’s the only place where he goes from speaking in abstract terms about human development to a description that’ so concrete that it lists specific timeframes for that development.  The context here is a debate about Jesus’s development during Mary’s pregnancy. When was that little fetus Jesus? Was he the Son of God right from the moment of conception?  Or did he become the Son of God at a certain moment in the pregnancy?  Classic Aristotialian thought held that sperm grew into a person in the incubating space of the womb (indicated in the word’s derivation from the Greek σπέρμα sperma meaning “seed”). That process took 40 days for a male child and 90 days for females.  If you hold to that Aristotlian science (and Aquinas certainly did), you end up with a question: did Jesus have a proto-human phase in which he successively became a human from a sperm?  Or was he just instantaneously there in the womb as a person through the power of the Holy Spirit?  He answers as follows:

[A]ccording to the faith, Christ’s conception must be held to have happened instantaneously, for human nature was not assumed before it was perfected in its species, since its parts were not assumable except by reason of the whole, as is evident from what was said in Distinction 2. … For this reason we must consider that conception to have been instantaneous, so that these things existed in the same instant: the conversion of that material blood into flesh and the other parts of Christ’s body; the formation of the organic members and the soul being infused in the organ-bearing body; and the assumption of the ensouled body into the unity of the divine person.

Now, in others these things occur successively, such that a male child’s conception is not completed until the fortieth day, or a female’s until the ninetieth, as the Philosopher says in History of Animals, [book] 9. But in the completion of the male body Augustine seems to add six days, which are distinguished as follows, according to him in his Letter to Jerome. For the first six days the seed has a likeness resembling milk; in the next nine days it changes to blood; then in twelve days it solidifies; in eighteen days it is formed to the complete lines of the members; and from then on the rest of the time until the time of delivery it grows in size. Thus the verse: Six days as milk, three times three as blood, two times six forms the flesh, three times six the members. However, in Christ’s conception, the matter that the Virgin supplied immediately took the form and figure of the human body, as well as the soul, and was assumed into the unity of the divine person (Commentary on the Sentences, Book 3, Distinction 3, Question 5, Article 2).

You can see him reference some of his previous work (Book 3, Distinction 2, Article 3) in the quote there to try to establish that Jesus Christ was not just the soul, but the body.  In the incarnation, there was a perfect union of God and man, not a material body that developed separately and then a soul that came along after the fact. There had to be a legitimate, full union between the two natures. He admits that for normal humans, the Aristotelian norm of 40 and 90 days before you’re fully human is true, but Christ’s exceptional incarnation led to him just popping into being through the power of the Holy Spirit, rather than developing from a sperm.

All of this science is very strange to us and obviously wrong. He doesn’t even know that eggs exist; only sperm. Even so, you can see how this really clearly gives us the framework to determine when a fetus is a human child. In his words, it’s “ensouled” after the first few weeks. Before that, an organic creature is developing, but it’s not one that’s human just yet.

If we just look at this solitary piece, abortion feels like a pretty rational move for a Christian that’s following in his footsteps, right?  Ah, but we can’t just pluck out his pieces about human development (a proportionally small piece of his works) and ignore the lion’s share of what’s left and declare ourselves to be thinking in his tradition.  Let’s keep going to see why Aquinas actually did not support abortion.

Aquinas on Sex

Now that we know what Aquinas thinks about the development of a fetus, we need to understand what he thinks about the procreative act itself.  On this topic, Aquinas really is absolutely a man of the medieval Chrisitan world.  And what did medieval Christians think about sex?  Well, to them, it was absolutely intertwined with having babies.  You couldn’t rightly separate the sensual aspect from the procreative aspect without stumbling into sin.  Now, obviously I’m not saying that everyone in the middle ages acted according to that worldview and never cheated on their spouse or whatever other thing you can imagine.  Of course they did.  People don’t always live up to the ideals of their society, even if they claim to ascribe to them.  But when it comes to the ideals, doctrines, and philosophy of the time, there can’t be any doubt that any effort to enjoy sex without an openness to procreation was sinful.

And why?  Well, the medieval world, and especially Thomas Aquinas, thought in terms of natural law.They believed the world had a natural sort of logic to it that was built in by God.  As you went about living your life, you were expected to look at each object and each act to consider why it exists.  Why did God make this?  What was his purpose?  Are you acting in a way that’s consistent with the logic of God’s creation?  Or are you twisting things around to serve your own wants, rather than God’s intended purpose?

That’s really abstract, so let’s work through an example.  An obvious one is food.  What is the logic of food?  Food exists to give us nourishment.  The process of eating it might be pleasurable (and there’s nothing inherently wrong with that), but if we’re going to live by the logic of the thing, the process of eating should never be separated from its natural end: we eat to be nourished.  If we start to enjoy it without that end in sight, that’s when we start to sin.  Are you enjoying Doritos because you’re hungry?  That’s great!  Are you enjoying Doritos when you’re already full but you just want to keep munching because they’re delicious?  That’s sin.  You’re losing sight of why God gave us food and just enjoying it out of gluttony.

Now, take that logic and apply it to sex.  Why does sex exist?  To have kids.  That’s the natural, logical end of the process.  If you wanted to have sex righteously, you were expected to look towards the end (babies), rather than just indulging for the pleasure of the process itself.  That was lustful and a misuse of what God gave us.  Not only was this logic very popular throughout the medieval world, but it was very popular with Thomas Aquinas.  As a matter of fact, the argument and examples that I just gave (sans Doritos) are straight out of his magnum opus, Summa Theologica, when he’s rejecting the idea that all “venereal acts” are inherently sinful:

A sin, in human acts, is that which is against the order of reason. Now the order of reason consists in its ordering everything to its end in a fitting manner… Now just as the preservation of the bodily nature of one individual is a true good, so, too, is the preservation of the nature of the human species a very great good. And just as the use of food is directed to the preservation of life in the individual, so is the use of venereal acts directed to the preservation of the whole human race (Question 153, Article 2).

Also, notice that he felt the need to debate whether or not there can be non-sinful sex.  That should tell you something else about the medieval world verses our own!  While we debate, is there any sex that is morally wrong, they were debating whether there was any sex that is morally right!  A very different starting place

This alone helps us shift gears when we’re thinking about Aquinas and abortion.  Aquinas would not have wanted anyone to have sex if they weren’t open to having children.  That would be against the nature of the act and sinful sex, even for a married couple.  Aquinas says as much directly in his Commentary on the Sentences when he addresses one of Peter Lombard’s quotes about birth control:

As for those who procure poisons to induce sterility, they are not marriage partners, but fornicators. (Sent. IV, 31.3 (184). 1.

Although this sin is grave, and to be counted among wicked deeds, and against nature (for even beasts desire offspring), nevertheless it is less grave than murder, since a child conceived could be prevented in another way.  Nor is such a person to be judged irregular, unless he should now procure an abortion for the child about to be born  (Book 4, Distinction 31, Question 2, Article 3).

And in that quote, you can see how he starts to move from birth control to abortion in applying the same logic. We are given food to be nourished.  We are given sex to procreate.  Why is a person made pregnant?  Is it to end the pregnancy?  No.  That would qualify as going against the natural logic of pregnancy in the most direct way possible.  Natural law philosophy was one of Aquinas’s biggest emphases, so if we want to introduce him to conversations about abortion, we have to remember that background first and foremost before we can deal with any of the specifics.

Church Law in the Days of Aquinas

But now that we’ve set the stage on some of Aquinas’s basic convictions as an Aristotilian thinker and a natural law enthusiast, we need to acknowledge the actual law of the medieval church during the era that he was at work.  As famous as he was, he influenced the teachings, and the teachings most definitely influenced him, so what did the church actually hold during the eras in question?  And I do want to acknowledge that this is a really complicated thing to research.  A shocking amount is not readily accessible if you don’t speak Latin.  Luckily, Paul Harrington wrote an excellent summary of laws pertaining to abortion over time in church history in The Linacre Quarterly that makes the depths of medieval church law accessible to anyone. While we have a particular interest in church law during the lifetime of Aquinas (1225-1274), a broader picture of what was going on in the medieval and Roman Catholic church won’t hurt our understanding either.

Looking at church law over time, for a little over a thousand years, the church considered abortion to be legally identical to murder and the standard punishment was usually excommunication.  It’s hard for us to wrap our minds around something like excommunication, since there’s not really an equivalent today. If we get kicked out of our congregation, good riddance! We’ll just go to the church down the street! But if we want to really understand their mindset, it’s crucial to recognize just how serious a punishment like that was in that timeframe.  An excommunicated person was cut off from the church until they had fully repented, meaning they couldn’t go to worship with their family and community.  They couldn’t participate in the sacraments.  They couldn’t get married.  They couldn’t offer prayers for dead relatives.  They couldn’t get buried. And if they died while excommunicated, Hell was the destination.  Excommunication was the most severe punishment you could get from the church.  This was serious.

A little after the turn of the millennium, we do see that distinction between an animated and inanimate fetus make it’s way into law. It first appeared in 1116.  A bishop named Ivo of Chartres first introduced it, and that distinction was taken up by a legal scholar named Gratian and printed in the legal textbook that became the standard for decades moving forward, Decretum.  It continued in Roman Catholic law for 753 years until Pope Pius IX ended that distinction in 1869.  During this period, if you got an abortion outside of the 40 day limit for males or 90 day limit for females, you were a murderer.  If you got an abortion within the limit, you had committed quasi-murder or homicide (the language varied depending on specifics at the time).  As the name implies, the punishments were less severe for quasi-murder.  For example, in 1159, your punishment was 3 years of penance if you aborted an inanimate fetus, verses the 7 years of penance or more that you would receive for aborting an animated fetus (which was the punishment for murder). And that’s just one specific instance. Sometimes, the punishment was a lifetime of excommunication. Sometimes it was left up to regional leaders. You get the idea. The important thing to note is that there was a legal distinction that made one a greater sin and the other a lesser sin. Some of the other abortion-centric laws in this timeframe didn’t acknowledge the distinction. For example, a piece of legislation by Regino of Prum in 1211 introduced a law that anyone caught selling drugs to induce abortion (at any stage of development) was guilty of murder. On the whole though, the distinction stands (for those who are curious, the distinction never really seems to have made a meaningful appearance in the Protestant world).

Notice that Aquinas’s position was the dominant position of the church during this time.  Abortion was always sinful.  The distinction in church law was never used to imply otherwise.  The distinction came up because people wanted to know how severe the sin of abortion was. Was it murder? Was it quasi-murder? Was it grave sin? Is it a lifetime excommunication or a period of penance? What punishment fits the crime?

Conclusion

Whew!  That’s a lot to take in.  Honestly, every time I learned more about this topic, it genuinely pushed me to deeper levels of understanding.  It was wild to see how recent our modern understanding of biology is, how church law was enacted in different eras, and how philosophy and theology have influenced one another in so many different ways.  I didn’t come to this question knowing the answer.  I came because I wanted to see firsthand what the truth was, and after some sifting around, I found more of it than I started with.  And I got to rediscover that history is so weird!  People in different times had such different ideas that are hard to wrap our minds around.

Nevertheless, at the end of it all, I have to wonder whether pro-abortion appeals to Aquinas are a product of ignorance or if they’re knowingly made in bad faith.  The solitary point of agreement is that he did not think human life began instantaneously after sex.  After that point, it’s all downhill.  In spite of that agreement, he did agree to a relatively early date where the child was fully human.  He considered abortion a crime against nature at best and murder at worst (depending on the timing).  He upheld and helped to shape a system of philosophy and canon of law that literally included it as a punishable offense.  Is this really the best person to appeal to?

As humans, we have the unique privilege of looking at this world around us and trying to figure it all out.  That’s wild!  We get to learn and read and try our best to come to knowledge of the truth.  A basic part of wielding that privilege well is acknowledging when we disagree with others and why we do.  When we misrepresent the legacy of others to make our ideas more palatable to those who would otherwise disagree, we’re participating in a lie, and the truth is never uncovered by lying.

Other great recommendations for those who want more:
Summa Theologica Ch. 118
Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 2, Ch. 65 and up
Abortion: Part VIII, Paul V. Harrington
A Great Free Translation of All Things Aquinas by the Aquinas Institute

Christian Perfection and the King James Bible

~ Vincent

If you’re not in a church with Wesleyan heritage, you probably don’t know what Christian perfection is. Heck, even if you’re in a church with Wesleyan heritage, there’s a solid chance you haven’t heard about this particular doctrine. It’s not hard to see why. The name is pretty bad. Yes, fellow Wesleyan people, I said bad. Try to hang with me for a second. “Perfect” isn’t something most people see as either achievable or desirable in our era. Folk wisdom tells us that “nobody’s perfect.” Movies feature villains that want perfection in this world and are willing to fight, hurt, or kill people to find it (“The Lego Movie” and “Kubo and the Two Strings” both come to mind). Self-help books of all shades encourage us to accept the imperfections in this world, rather than lose our mind seeking perfection. Even a lot of contemporary church language is caught up in appreciating our “brokenness,” rather than hating ourselves for falling short. In the eyes of the average person, any doctrine including the word “perfection” is scary from the start.

To be fair, it’s pretty clear that Christian perfection was a controversial doctrine from its inception. When John Wesley (the founder of Methodism) started talking about it, a lot of his friends disagreed with it. His ministry partner and brother, Charles, seems to have had a different idea of what it was and how to achieve it. Even Wesley’s exhaustive explanation of the doctrine, A Plain Account of Christian Perfection, is a real challenge by anyone’s definition. It is a composite work that includes personal reflections, hymns, minutes from a conference that he attended, bits from sermons that he preached, journal entries from a person that he thinks may have achieved Christian perfection (right before they died), and arguments against people who claimed to have achieved Christian perfection that he didn’t think managed it (the most notable examples being Thomas Maxfield and George Bell). John went through seven different revisions of this booklet across his life as he added more and more content. It’s kinda like a scrapbook of his doctrine and how he’s come to understand it across his lifetime.

So, yeah, we’re dealing with something that’s challenging and difficult to articulate. To briefly summarize the doctrine, Wesley believed that, through the Holy Spirit, a mature Christian could reach a state where they would avoid willfully sinning. That was Christian perfection. These Christians could still sin through ignorance, mistake, or error, since their bodies and minds were still very much in this world, but their hearts would be so mature in the faith that God’s love would reside in them. THAT’S the core of the idea. If you want to know more about it in John’s words, I recommend his sermon “On Perfection” from the year 1740. It’s much more readable than Plain Account. If you don’t want to read more but think my explanation is way too generous for such a wildly-named doctrine, John’s words from one of his letters put it into words that suit modern people a little more readily:

Perfection is only another term for holiness, or the image of God in man

John Wesley (Letter to Rev. Mr. Dodd, The Works of John Wesley, 11:450-451)

Rather than argue about whether or not this particular doctrine is good or bad, I’d like to share a little revelation about why it takes the form that it does. I’ve always wondered, “Why did John choose that particular name? I mean, if the word “holiness” or “sanctification” accomplish the same thing, why not use one of them? That would have gone a long way with some of his detractors!” Well, reading through some of the sermons of Count Zinzendorf recently (a Wesley friend that, like many Wesley friends, had a falling out with John before the end of his life), and he cited Philippians 3:15 regarding a desire for Christians to become perfect. You can imagine my puzzlement. I flipped open my NIV Bible and checked the verse: “All of us, then, who are mature should take such a view of things. And if on some point you think differently, that too God will make clear to you.” Okay? What was Zinzendorf talking about? Was I reading a bad translation of his sermons? And then I realized that the NIV is hundreds of years away from the translations that were being used in the 1700s. Of course it doesn’t sound the same; it wasn’t what they were reading. I popped open what would have been more normative for the time, the KJV, and lo and behold: “Let us therefore, as many as be perfect, be thus minded: and if in any thing ye be otherwise minded, God shall reveal even this unto you.” There was a “perfect” there historically that was translated differently today!

By no means do I think that’s a bad thing. Language changes, and translations change to keep up with the way that we speak. It looks like the Greek word, teleioi, is translated in different instances as either perfect, mature, or fully grown. But think about that! The fact that the New Testament has 7 instances of that word that all moved from “perfect” to something else over time is wild! And that’s not the only word that was translated away from “perfect” to something else. The KJV has the word “perfect” in it 129 times, versus the NIV’s 45 times. That’s almost three times the number of perfects! Now, obviously you’re going to have a different number of “perfects” depending on your Bible translation (NRSV- 41, NLT- 47, CSB- 32, ESV- 94), but with very few exceptions, most of us see the word “perfect” in our Bibles far less than 18th century Christians like John Wesley would have.

As a side note, I totally acknowledge that even though I stumbled onto this little tidbit while reading Count Zinzendorf, he was a German speaker and wouldn’t have regularly engaged the KJV. I’m woefully under-equipped to manage wading through historic German Bibles to get that primary source verification, but I’m going to assume that the translator of Zinzendorf’s sermons was accurate, which would mean that even German translations from the 18th century were more likely to use words like “perfect” than their modern equivalents are.

Why did John Wesley stick with the name “Christian perfection?” Well, he says in his Plain Account, “There is such a thing as perfection; for it is again and again mentioned in Scripture.” To modern readers, that’s a pretty hollow claim. There’s a couple well-known verses that reference perfection, but it’s usually referencing God, not people. Why would Wesley stake his whole idea on a word that doesn’t appear in the Bible as much as he acts like it does? Because in the translation that he was familiar with, it DID come up again and again. He saw the epistles as packed with references to Christian perfection! Language changes and Bible translators adapt, but it was a joy to see why a doctrine with such an inflammatory name got it’s name.