There are some key premises in their thought about God’s love and goodness: God essentially is both loving and good, and love is essential to good relationships. However, violence (e.g., with punishment of sin) is incompatible with these qualities of God and good relationships. So, how does God deal with injustice, and evil? It seems it is by His absorbing it into Himself, then forgiving and forgetting it.[1] God overcomes evil creatively by His goodness.

Now, McLaren and our other authors are deeply, and rightly, concerned about God’s goodness and justice being realized on earth as it is in heaven. They realize justice needs to be lived out now, and not just after we are with the Lord in heaven.

Yet, if God is truly good, just, and holy (i.e., utterly pure, righteous, and undefiled by sin), it seems He would hate evil and must exact punishment for it. This fits with God’s self-description in Exodus 34:6-7, where He discloses He is not only loving, compassionate, faithful, and more, but also that He will not leave the guilty unpunished. We can relate to this, for if a human judge did not punish evil actions, we would recognize that judge’s action to be unjust.

Nevertheless, this view is not an option for McLaren, or even Jones, for it treats His holiness as absolute, and it requires that God act retributively in justice. Evidently, then, on their views, God can choose not to punish sin. However, this implication leaves us with two disastrous results. First, God would be defective in terms of being truly holy, just, and even good because He would not necessarily be repulsed by evil.

Second, if God can choose not to punish sin, then He would punish it simply based upon His willing something to be wrong, and not due to His character of being just and holy. Yet, if so, then it seems God is arbitrary in His ethical requirements and even His character, the latter of which McLaren seems to presuppose is not arbitrary. This result makes McLaren’s view of God vulnerable to the Euthyphro objection, that whatever God wills is right, simply because He willed it. But that raises the prospects that on McLaren’s view, God could will all sorts of things we clearly know are immoral. Thus, if God can be arbitrary, He would not inspire “fear” in the sense of reverence, awe, and love, but instead deep terror. For on McLaren’s view of God, He could blow up in rage, the very kind of God McLaren and others reject as unacceptable. Even though McLaren wants to affirm God is good, and His character does not evolve (while our interpretations do), his view cannot sustain God’s goodness. For, to be truly good, a person must be not only truly loving, but also truly just. Yet, God’s justice is arbitrary on McLaren’s and others’ views, and therefore they cannot preserve God’s justice. Sadly, this leaves us with a God who is not truly good – and thus not worthy of worship.


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[1] E.g., see McLaren, The Story We Find Ourselves In (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2003), 153.

In a previous post about the nature of sin on the newer views of Brian McLaren, Tony Jones, Rob Bell, and Doug Pagitt, I observed that they have rejected the doctrine of original sin due in part to their embrace of physicalism. Yet, I also argued that sin is a soulish, not physical, kind of thing. For as Jesus explained, “the things that proceed out of the mouth come from the heart, and those defile the man. For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, slanders” (Matt 15:18-19, NASB). There I also contended that things like attitudes and thoughts are not physical things, and so their view deeply misses the nature and depths of our sin.

This observation helps explain why even ordinary humans are capable of the most evil acts. My colleague at Biola’s Christian Apologetics MA program, Dr. Clay Jones, has researched genocide for many years, culminating in his book, Why Does God Allow Evil? There he gives numerous examples of the murderous hatred involved in genocides. What is very revealing, however, is that genocides do not require super villains or insane people. Rather, researchers consistently have found ordinary people committed them.

For instance, “If one keeps at the Holocaust long enough, then sooner or later the ultimate truth begins to reveal itself: one knows, finally, that one might either do it, or be done to. If it could happen on such a massive scale elsewhere, then it can happen anywhere; it is all within the range of human possibility…”[1] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn reaches a similar conclusion:

Where did this wolf-tribe {i.e., officials who torture and murder} appear from among our people? Does it really stem from our own roots? Our own blood? It is our own. And just so we don’t go around flaunting too proudly the white mantle of the just, let everyone ask himself: “If my life had turned out differently, might I myself not have become just such an executioner?’” It is a dreadful question if one answers it honestly.[2]

And, Langdon Gilkey used to think that “nothing indicates so clearly the fixed belief in the innate goodness of humans as does this confidence that when the chips are down, and we are revealed for what we ‘really are,’ we will all be good to each other.”[3] Yet, after his time as a POW in a Japanese prison camp in China, he realized that “nothing could be so totally in error.”[4]

Yet, McLaren, Jones, Bell, and Pagitt reach a very different conclusion. For them, we do not need a Savior to atone for our sins by His penal, substitutionary death on the cross. Nor do we need a new heart, which is born of the Spirit. Rather, we mainly seem to need a conceptual and moral transformation, to see life in the light of the gospel story and live it out.

However, I am afraid this view seriously underestimates the depths of our sinfulness, which these quotes above help illustrate. Deep down, if we are honest with ourselves, I think we can see that our heart’s desire is to be autonomous from God. We thereby want to usurp God’s rightful place and define what is good and evil (cf. Gen 3:5 and the serpent’s claims to Eve). Moreover, as I noted above, if we are physical beings, then our sinfulness does not really make sense. Neither does evil, or even good for that matter. Physical stuff is something that can be described exhaustively. But, moral qualities are prescriptive. Therefore, by embracing a physical view of humans and creation, McLaren and others really have no basis for sin and evil, or even good. But that is an obviously and deeply mistaken conclusion.

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[1] George Kren and Leon Rappoport, Holocaust and the Crisis of Human Behavior (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1980), 126.

[2] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: 1918–1956, Vol. 1 (Boulder: Westview, 1974), 160 (bracketed insert mine).

[3] Langdon Gilkey, Shantung Compound: The Story of Men and Women Under Pressure (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1966), 92.

[4] Ibid. (emphasis mine).

In my last post, I explored how their views of humans as just physical beings undermines any hope of eternal life, including the resurrection from the dead. Nevertheless, there are more implications of their view, which will threaten our ability to have relationships with God or any other person.

What is needed to have interpersonal relationships? At the least, it seems we need to have things like experiences, thoughts, and beliefs of one another. For instance, when Debbie (my wife) and I were dating, we worked at communicating our wants and thoughts with one another. We tried to learn and respect each other’s wishes and desires. Over time, we could develop beliefs about what we each liked and what we didn’t.

These sorts of qualities (experiences used to observe, thoughts, interpretations, desires, intentions, and beliefs) traditionally have been called mental states, being qualities of minds, not brains, which instead are biological, chemical, and physical kinds of things. Notice something special about these states. They all seem to be of or about things. Typically, people have called this quality intentionality. Some even have suggested intentionality is the hallmark of the mental (versus physical).

However, if we were just physical beings, intentionality would have to be reducible to something physical. Can that work? There have been some suggestions. First is one by philosopher Michael Tye, who claims intentionality is just a matter of “causal covariation” under optimal conditions. For him, mental states are reducible to particular brain states, which we are describing in a certain way (e.g., using mentalistic terms). Such terms don’t change the underlying, physical reality, but they might help us to conceive of a brain state as being of or about something. So, for Tye, my thought of a ball is for that state to stand in a causal relation to that ball – the ball causes that state by light waves bouncing off the ball, impinging on my retina, traveling to my brain, and causing that state.

However, there are problems with this account. We can have thoughts about things that do not obtain; e.g., I can think of what would be the case if Hillary Clinton were president in 2019. However, there’s nothing in reality to cause that (brain) state. Moreover, between the ball and my thought is a potentially infinite series of causal states. It seems I cannot traverse this series and arrive at the originating source.

Second, Daniel Dennett suggests that mental states and intentionality aren’t real. There are just brains that process sensory inputs. Yet, he adopts a useful strategy, the intentional stance, to predict behavior of things that apparently have intentionality, including frogs, chess-playing computers, and humans. Suppose Star Trek’s Mr. Spock is playing 3-D chess with the computer. For Dennett, there are no real thoughts, beliefs, or desires about what moves each could make in order to checkmate the opponent, because natural selection is a completely blind process. Yet, we can attribute to the computer such “mental” states to predict its moves in light of Spock’s moves, and vice versa. We make interpretations based on behaviors.

These are the best options I know of for physicalists for intentionality. Yet, Tye’s won’t suffice, and Dennett presupposes we can make observations and interpretations to predict behavior. However, these very qualities seem to require the very intentionality he denies is real.

Therefore, it seems that on physicalism, there is no way to preserve intentionality. Yet, that has ripple effects – without it, there are no thoughts, beliefs, or experiences used to make observations, for these states must have intentionality (e.g., try having a thought that isn’t about anything). Yet, those states seem necessary for interpersonal communication. Without them, how can an interpersonal relationship occur?

In conclusion, I am very sympathetic with Doug Pagitt’s desire for a God who will be “down and in” with us, versus distant. Ironically, however, the physicalism he and other emergents have embraced will distance God and others from us, for we cannot be in interpersonal relationships.

Going further, if there’s no intentionality, there are no beliefs. However, having beliefs seem necessary for knowledge. Therefore, without beliefs, there will not be any knowledge …

In my last post, I began my assessment of some of their updated views. This time, I will begin to look at implications of their views of what is real.

McLaren and these “emergents” have rejected the view that we have souls; instead, we are physical beings. Not only have they rejected Descartes’ dualism of body and soul, they also have rejected all forms. I think Descartes’ view is untenable, for body and soul are so radically different, it is hard to see how they could interact. But Aristotle’s view was different. For him, the soul is the “form” of the body; all our capacities, including to form a human body, are rooted in the soul, which directs the body’s formation. His view is much more holistic in that there is a deep unity between body and soul.

Now, McLaren is concerned that souls are static, and so they would inhibit relationships. How could a story be told of someone who is static and cannot grow and develop? But, as I noted last time, Aristotle’s views provide for this ability; yet, we still remain the same person throughout. How?

Aristotle’s answer lies in two kinds of change: essential, and accidental (or, contingent). For him, the soul is our set of essential capacities and properties; without them, we would not be human. Moreover, if we lose something essential, we’d no longer exist.

But, Aristotle also distinguished contingent kinds of change, which depends upon various factors. While we all have capacities for (say) reasoning, not everyone will develop those qualities. For some, they may be blocked due to disease; for others, they may not want to apply themselves to keep developing in that way. Still others might develop quite advanced reasoning abilities, yet later they suffer a traumatic brain injury and lose that quality.

For me, I had a head full of brown hair at 19. But, now at 61, my hair is thinning out and is turning more and more gray. Additionally, at 26, I married my wife, and I graduated with my PhD when I was 42. At age 44, I became a father.

All these kinds of changes Aristotle would call accidental, or contingent – they are not essential changes, lest I cease to exist. For him, then, it is my essence, or what he calls my soul, that enables me to be literally the same, identical person through time and various [accidental] changes. Now, for two things to be identical, they have to have all their properties in common. If so, there are not really two separate things, but just one and the same thing. On Aristotle’s view, our personal identity through time and change is grounded in our essential set of properties, for they do not change, but our contingent ones can and do. That crucial distinction is what makes it possible for a story to be told about me as I grow and change.

But, what happens then if we do not have souls, as McLaren and these other emergents hold? Then it seems that we basically are identical to the set of properties that constitute “us” at any given time. But, if anything changes, the set of properties that is identical to me would no longer be the same. In that case, since there would not be any essential properties to me (since I do not have a soul on their view), I would cease to exist, and someone else would replace me.

So, consider again my example. Scott at age 18 “had” certain properties; but they were not the same as the set of properties that constituted “Scott” at age 26 (or 44, or 61). Instead of growing through time and change, I would exist at one time, but then I’d be replaced by someone else (still called “Scott”) at another time, who would be replaced once again when another property changes, etc. The implications of this finding are many, such as for the prospects of eternal life, which I’ll survey next time.