Prayer and Silence (Prayer Life)

Weed in my backyard

When he opened the seventh seal, 

there was silence in heaven for about half an hour.

- Revelation 8:1

To find a moment of silence in life is to find a pause. In a musical score a beat of silence is called a "rest."

The heavenly silence of the book of Revelation is dramatic and anticipatory. Something is about to happen. First incense, then seven announcing trumpets. Silence provides the necessary background to the heralds of God.

In prayer it is good to have a silent heart. A silent heart is an uncluttered heart. In the noiseless unclutter one can more clearly hear the voice of God. When it comes to hearing and understanding silence is good, noise is bad. 

But I have calmed and quieted myself...

- Psalm 131:2

See an artcile in the New York Times - "I'm Thinking. Please. Be Quiet." What happens to a person who lives with constant noise, such as living by an airport? A 2009 study looked at the effect of airport noise on sleeping subjects. We read:

"The findings were clear: even when people stayed asleep, the noise of planes taking off and landing caused blood pressure spikes, increased pulse rates and set off vasoconstriction and the release of stress hormones. Worse, these harmful cardiovascular responses continued to affect individuals for many hours after they had awakened and gone on with their days."

Audible assaults affect us psychologically. "A recent World Health Organization report on the burden of disease from environmental noise conservatively estimates that Western Europeans lose more than one million healthy life years annually as a consequence of noise-related disability and disease. Among environmental hazards, only air pollution causes more damage."

An incessantly noisy soul is a diseased soul. Constant noise hinders sustained thinking. For this reason the makers of our Constitution had "the street outside Independence Hall covered with earth so that their deliberations might not be disturbed by passing traffic.” 

Silence is needed to think well, and to be able to hear ourselves think. This is why libraries are silent. Silence helps us focus. 

The quiet words of the wise are more to be heeded 

than the shouts of a ruler of fools.

- Ecclesiastes 9:17

Noise wars against hearing. Listening requires the soul to pause, to rest. Silence, therefore, is needed to pray well. 

Anselm's Ontological Argument for God's Existence (Philosophy of Religion)

Monroe County Community College

I'm beginning the semester, in my MCCC Philosophy of Religion class, by presenting Anselm's famous ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT FOR GOD'S EXISTENCE.

Here's what I am looking for students to be able to say and, even better, understand, when I question them in their 1-on-1 oral examinations.







I. State the Ontological Argument:

1. I have an idea of a being a greater than which cannot be conceived.
2. Therefore, God exists.

Or:

1. I have an idea of a greatest possible being.
2. Therefore, God exists.

II. in order to understand this argument you need to know what it means to have an idea. Every time you have an idea of something, that "something" in your mind has essential attriubutes and contingent attributes. An essential attribute is what makes that 'something" just what it is; a contingent attribute is not needed for that "something" to be just what it is.

For example: I have an idea of a triangle. This means I have, in my understanding, a 3-sided figure whose angels equal 180 degrees. Whether or not my triangle is pink or blue is irrelevant to it being a triangle. If i say, "My triangle has four sides," then I am not thinking of a triangle.

III. I have an idea of a greatest possible being. This means my idea of "greatest possible being" has essential attributes, which include: omnipotence (is able to do anything that can logically or possibly be done); omniscience (knows everything that can logically or possibly be known); and omnibenevolence (is all-good or all-loving).

Another essential attribute of "greatest possible being," for Anselm, is actual existence. Anselm believes actual existence is a great-making property; that is, it is greater to exist in reality than only in the mind.

Therefore if someone says, "I am thinking of a greatest possible being, but it does not actually exist," Anselm would respond that you are not thinking of a greatest possible being because we can think of an even greater being than the one you are thinking of; viz., one that actually exists.

IV. Anselm believes that the person who says "God does not exist" is a fool. Because in order to deny the existence of God they must be able to conceive (have an idea) of God. Once they acknowledge that they have an idea of God they are forced, on Anselm's reasoning, to affirm God's actual existence. 

The Idea of God

Downtown Detroit, by the river

In my MCCC philosophy of religion classes I begin with Anselm's Ontological Argument for God's existence. This proves to be a cool exercise in logic and a priori reasoning, and an introduction to the idea of God. For the most part theistic and atheistic philosophers share the same view of God, the former arguing for this God's existence, the latter arguing against it.

What do we mean when we say "God?" University of Notre Dame philosopher Peter van Inwagen's "The Idea of God" is a good place to begin. (In The Problem of Evil)

We are interested in the essential attributes of the idea of God. Note we're talking about the idea of God, and not assuming the reality of God. Every idea, every mental concept, has essential attributes. As does "God."

A person

Van Inwagen writes: "By a person, I mean a being who may be, in the most straightforward and literal sense, addressed - a being whom one may call 'thou'." (20)

Jews, Christians, and Muslims think of God this way. God "cannot possibly be thought of as impersonal, like Brahman or the Tao or the Absolute Idea or the Dialectic of History or, to descend to a more popular level, the Force." (Ib.)

Everyone who prays to God understands God as a person.

God is neither a 'he' or a 'she' since God is understood to not occupy physical space. More of this to come.

Omnipotent (or all-powerful or almighty)

An omnipotent being can do anything that is metaphysically possible. Note, philosophy of religion students, that I describe the attribute of omnipotence as the ability to do anything that is logically possible. Van Inwagen has difficulties with this, and uses metaphysical impossibility instead.

This still creates some difficulties, since it is generally agreed that God cannot lie, and lying is metaphysically possible. Van Inwagen devotes a good deal of attention to this.

'Omnipotence' concerns something like this: "The proposition that God cannot do X is consistent with the proposition that God is omnipotent of X is metaphysically impossible." (25) I take this to mean that God cannot, e.g., create 'square circles' or 'married bachelors' because such things are metaphysical nonsense. As is a stone so heavy that God cannot lift, or a burrito so hot that God cannot hold.

With these last two examples van Inwagen mentions Descartes' "strong omnipotence" view. "According to this conception, God is able to do anything, including (Descartes tells us) creating two mountains that touch at their bases and have no valley between them." (Ib.) Van Inwagen rightly rejects this because it is "incoherent because ability (the concept that is expressed by sentences of the form 'x is able to do y') is no more or less the power to choose among possible states of affairs, to determine which of various incompatible possible states of affairs are to be actual." (Ib.)

Omniscient (all-knowing)

"Here is the standard definition of omniscience: A being is omniscient if and only if that being knows the truth-value of every proposition." (26)

Van Inwagen prefers this definition of 'omniscience': "A being is omniscient if, for every proposition, that being believes either that proposition or its denial, and it is metaphysically impossible for that being to have false beliefs." (Ib.) [By 'proposition' Van Inwagen means what in logic is also called a 'statement'; viz., a sentence that is true or false, a statement that claims that a particular state of affairs obtains.]

Morally perfect (perfectly good)

"That is to say, God has no moral defect whatever. It follows that he is in no way a subject of possible oral criticism." (26)

Eternal

God has always existed and always will exist. And, God is outside time altogether.

If there is a God (which, of course, I believe true) then the Internet question "If God made the universe than who or what made God?" is a logically nonsensical question, since God did not begin to exist.

On God's relation to time, a very good book to read is: God and Time: Four Views.

Immutable

"That is, his attributes and other important properties do not and cannot change." (28)

"To speak the language of metaphysics, [God's] intrinsic or non-relational properties do not and cannot change with time... nothing in God's nature corresponds to the mutability that characterizes human existence and the existence of all things present to the senses." (Ib.)

Omnipresent

"To say that God is omnipresent is, obviously, to say that God is everywhere." (28)

Also obvious is that, "whatever omnipresence may come to, it is incompatible with God's having any sort of spatial or physical structure (and hence with his being either male or female)." (29)


Theists like myself affirm the actual existence of God, with the above essential attributes defining 'God'. Western philosophical atheists affirm that by the term 'God' the above-stated attributes apply, while of course working to deny the existence of God.

Leif Hetland and Will Hart at Our Conference This Coming Summer

Our 2015 Holy Spirit Conference Is

Going to Be Awesome!!!

The dates are June 27-July 3 (sessions start Sunday morning June 28 and end Thursday night, July 2). Our Main Speakers are:

Leif Hetland

Will Hart

(REGISTER click here)

       

Praying for Love to Be Formed in Me (PrayerLife)

Self in a window,
Linden Avenue Baptist Church,
Dayton, Ohio

Dallas Willard, as his life was nearing its end, lamented the fact that God's agape-unconditional love was not fully formed in him. I feel the same way. I do not yet love like Christ loved. This is one of my great shortcomings. My constant prayer is "God, produce your love in me."

What God intends for me is not completed. I have not arrived, but press on to make this my own experience. Thomas Merton felt the same way about himself. He writes:

"The question of love: I have to face the fact that I have simply sidestepped it. Now it must be faced squarely. I cannot live without giving love back to a world that has given me so much. And of course it has to be the love of a man dedicated to God – and selfless, detached, free , completely open love. And I have not attained to such a level, hence the risk. But facing the risk – not after all great since I am out here in the woods!! – I will learn. And God deliver me from selfishness." (Merton, Learning To Love: Exploring Solitude and Freedom (The Journals of Thomas Merton), p. 42)

God, have your way in me. Your way is love. Be perfected in me.

One Can't Use the Ontological Argument to Prove an All-Evil Being Exists

One of my philosophy of religion students asked if one could use the Ontological Argument for God's existence to prove that a perfectly (maximally) evil being existed. If one could do that, it would seem that the OA fails as a proof for God.

Some philosophers have objected to the Ontological Argument for just this reason (Michael Martin, e.g.). I doubt this will work to defeat the OA. Here's what I'm now thinking.

The OA attempts to prove that a "greatest possible being" exists ("a being a greater than which cannot be conceived"). The OA does not attempt to prove that a "maximally good being" exists. What's the difference?

The difference is: It is not necessary that a maximally good being exist in order for it to be good. “Existence” won’t make the being any more good. But isn’t it better for a maximally good being to exist in reality than merely in the understanding? I would think so, just as it is - to me - better that a maximally good pizza exists in reality rather than just in my understanding. But – and here’s the point – it doesn’t make such a being any better in terms of its being good.

But actual existence does make “greatest possible being” greater than if it only existed in the understanding. So in the same way actual existence does not make a “maximally evil being” more evil. An actually existing "maximally (perfectly) evil being" would be more dangerous, but not more evil. A "being a greater than which cannot be conceived" would not be such a being if it did not actually exist.

I am wondering if Plantinga's criticism of Gaunilon's objection (it fails because "perfect island" has no intrinsic maximum) applies to "maximally evil being" (this term has no intrinsic maximum). "Maximally evil being" would then be incoherent, as would "Maximally red apple."

Another response might be that "evil" is ontologically posterior to "good." This is the idea of evil as the lack or privation of goodness. evil, therefore, has no real ontological status or being. If this is true than a perfectly evil being would have no being at all. 

Two Non-Discursive Moments that Changed Culture

       

Thomas Merton                                                            Martin Luther King, Jr.

I finished teaching another Spiritual Formation class last week at Payne Theological Seminary. Part of my instruction included the spirituality of Thomas Merton, Howard Thurman, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Merton, Thurman, and King are kindred spirits. I found myself wondering if they ever connected?

I googled the three of them and, to my delight, found this essay by the great African-American scholar Albert Raboteau - "A Hidden Wholeness: Thomas Merton and Martin Luther King, Jr." what a beautiful find!

It seems that, prior to King's death, plans were underway for King to have a retreat with Merton at Our Lady of Gethsemane Abbey. It didn't happen, as King was assassinated and Merton was accidentally electrocuted, both in 1968.

One of the similarities between Merton and King was that they both had paradigm-changing non-discursive encounters with God. (A non-discursive experience is one that is real but incapable of being discoursed about; a transcendent experience.) Raboteau quotes in entirety the famous passage where Merton describes what happened to him.

"In Louisville, at the corner of Fourth and Walnut, in the center of the shopping district, I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all these people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness, of spurious self-isolation in a special world, the world of renunciation and supposed holiness. The whole illusion of a separate holy existence is a dream. Not that I question the reality of my vocation, or of my monastic life: but the conception of "separation from the world" that we have in the monastery too easily presents itself as a complete illusion .... [W]e are in the same world as everybody else, the world of the bomb, the world of race hatred, the world of technology, the world of mass media, big business, revolution, and all the rest .... This sense of liberation from an illusory difference was such a relief and such a joy to me that I almost laughed out loud .... To think that for sixteen or seventeen years I have been taking seriously this pure illusion that is implicit in so much of our monastic thinking .... I have the immense joy of being man, a member of a race in which God Himself became incarnate. As if the sorrows and stupidities of the human condition could overwhelm me, now I realize what we all are. And if only everybody could realize this! But it cannot be explained. There is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun." (Ib., quoting from Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, pp. 140-141)

A result of this encounter was that Merton now saw his solitary times with God as "belonging to others" as well, and that he therefore had a great responsibility to spend much alone-time with God. It was all for God's sake, and for the loving of others. Raboteau writes: "Merton went on to assert that it was precisely the task of the monk to speak out of his silence and solitude with an independent voice in order to clarify for those who were "completely immersed in other cares" the true value of the human person, amidst the illusions with which mass society surrounds modern man at every turn." (Ib.)

When King participated in the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott he went as "a successful pastor of a moderately comfortable church" but emerged as "the leader of a national movement for racial justice." (Ib.) King writes: "When I went to Montgomery as a pastor, I had not the slightest idea that I would later become involved in a crisis .... I simply responded to the call of the people for a spokesman." (Ib., from  King, Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story, 101)

It was there that King had his famous "kitchen table experience." Raboteau writes: "Reaching the end of his endurance, King sat at his kitchen table one night over a cup of coffee, trying to figure out how to get out of the movement without appearing a coward." (Ib.) King describes what happened.

"I discovered then that religion had to become real to me, and I had to know God for myself. And I bowed over that cup of coffee. I never will forget it .... I prayed a prayer, and I prayed out loud that night. I said, "Lord, I'm down here trying to do what's right. I think the cause that we represent is right. But Lord, I must confess that I'm weak now. I'm faltering. I'm losing my courage. And I can't let the people see me like this because if they see me weak and losing my courage they will begin to get weak. And it seemed at that moment that I could hear an inner voice saying to me, "Martin Luther, stand up for righteousness. Stand up for justice. Stand up for truth. And to I will be with you, even until the end of the world." ...I heard the voice of Jesus saying still to fight on. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. No never alone. No never alone. He promised never to leave me, never to leave me alone. Almost at once my fears began to go. My uncertainty disappeared." (Quoted in Ib.) 

Merton had his "Fourth and Walnut vision." King had his "kitchen table experience." Both were breakthrough events in the lives of each man. The results were that:

"King committed himself to the movement completely despite his growing realization more certain as the years went by -- that it would cost him his life. Merton grasped with his heart a truth that he had only known with his head, the monk left the world for the sake of the world. These events confirmed each in the path he had already started.

Both paths converged on the issue of civil rights."

Note the power of the God-encounter to change the inside of a person so that the outside will respond as God desires. Such encounters are real, irreducible to linguistic description (they contain, as Ricoeur would say, a "surplus of meaning"), and transforming. Such things happen to people who pray with the desire to be wielded by God.

God Is Always Speaking to us (PrayerLife)

Linden Avenue Baptist Church, Dayton, Ohio

When I send seminary students out to pray I sometimes say, "God has much that he wants to say to you today." If only we would learn how to listen to God we would hear his voice among the many competing voices that vie for our attention.

How do you grow in hearing God's voice?

1. Spend much time with God.
2. Saturate yourself in the Scriptures.
3. Hang around people who do 1 and 2.

Henri Nouwen writes: "God is always speaking to us, but it requires spiritual discernment to hear God’s voice, see what God sees, and read the signs in daily life." (Nouwen, Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life, p. 42)

Spiritual Formation Class - Payne Theological Seminary - January 2015

Preaching on Release from Condemning Words This Morning in Dayton

I'm preaching on "Blessings and Cursings" and the power of words this morning at Linden Avenue Baptist Church in Dayton.

Tim Curry is preaching at Redeemer this morning out of 1 John 5:1-12. Thank you Tim!