Christ in the Old Testament

This is a nice sketch of Christ as the Old Testament presented him to the Jewish people. I picked this up somewhere about ten years ago, though I made some improvements here and there. I have no doubt that I could improve it further as I grow in understanding.

In Luke 24, the resurrected Jesus walked along the road to Emmaus with two disciples, who did not recognize him at that point, and "expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning himself" (Luke 24:27). What he shared with them obviously went well beyond a few Messianic prophesies, such as in Genesis 3 and Psalm 110.

The Hebrew Scriptures continue to show us Christ and the gospel. Paul had the Old Testament in mind when he wrote to Timothy, "All Scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine for reproof. for correction, for instruction in righteousness" (II Tim. 3:16).

In Genesis, He is the Creator God, and the promised seed of the woman (3:15).

In Exodus, He is your exodus, your Passover, the bread which comes down from heaven.

In Leviticus, He is the Holy of holies & the mercy seat, your atoning sacrifice & your sanctification.

In Numbers, He is the water of cleansing & the bronze snake who was lifted up for healing.

In Deuteronomy, He is your legal righteousness.

In Joshua, He is the mighty conqueror.

In Judges, He gives victory over enemies.

In Ruth, He is your kinsman-redeemer.

In I Samuel, he is your champion. (ch. 17)

In 2 Samuel, He is great David’s greater son. (ch. 7)

In I & II Kings, He is the faithful & true King (I K. 2:2-4)

In I Chronicles, He is the one whose throne will be established forever. (17)

In II Chronicles, He is the one greater than Solomon

In Ezra, He is the Temple of God, the focus & center of your life.

In Nehemiah, He is your mighty wall of protection.

In Esther, He stands in the gap to deliver you from your enemies.

In Job, He is the arbitrator who removes God’s rod of judgment from you. (9:33-35)

In Psalms, He is the Holy One who will not see decay, the Shepherd who restores your soul.

In Proverbs, He is your wisdom for a disciplined & prudent life. (1:1-3)

In Ecclesiastes, He is the meaning of life, without whom all is vanity & a chasing after the wind.

In the Song of Solomon, He is your beloved, the Church’s bridegroom.

In Isaiah, He is the Prince of Peace, and the Suffering Servant.

In Jeremiah, He is the balm of Gilead (8), the Righteous Branch (23), the new covenant (31)

In Lamentations, He is the Lord’s great faithfulness (3:23).

In Ezekiel, He is life to dead bones, & the glorious new temple.

In Daniel, He is the Son of Man whose kingdom will last forever (7:13-14).

In Hosea, He is your faithful husband who forgives your adultery and redeems you from slavery to sin.

In Joel, He is the name of the Lord on which you call to be saved from judgment on the Day of the Lord.

In Amos, He plants his people and guards them in safety (9:15).

In Obadiah, He is vengeance on God’s enemies but deliverance for Zion.

In Jonah, He is the faithful prophet who brings the word of God’s compassion to the Gentiles.

In Micah, He is the shepherd of his flock & their peace.

In Nahum, He is a refuge to the faithful but an overwhelming flood to the wicked (1:8).

In Habakkuk, He is the Holy One.

In Zephaniah, He is the King of Israel who is with you & takes great delight in you (3:15-17).

In Haggai, He is the greater glory of the temple & the signet ring of God.

In Zechariah, He is the capstone, the plumb line, the gentle king riding on a donkey. 

In Malachi, He is the Lord you are seeking, the messenger of the covenant

The Christian Philosophico-Political Problem

Socrates on Trial

There is an interesting parallel between Peter in the Book of Acts and Socrates in the Apology. Both men are on trial, and they are on trial specifically for what they have been teaching. Socrates in put to death. Peter, at this point, is not, but one day he will be.

More substantively, however, each man explicitly recognizes himself as facing a fundamental and enduring political challenge.

In Acts 5, Peter is on trial for preaching Christ. The Jewish authorities led by the high priest, let's call them the city of Jerusalem to put a political face on them, told Peter to stop teaching in Jesus' name, or what the angel in v.20 called "the words of this Life." Peter of course was willing to bey in many things, but here he says, "We must obey God rather than men" (5:29). With this declaration he states what we call the theologico-political problem, one important aspect of which is the division of loyalty within the Christian between earthly civic authority and the higher authority of the King of kings.

In the Apology, the city of Athens, through the charges of his three accusers and the threat of death, tells Socrates to stop teaching what he does about the gods and to stop interrogating respectable citizens in front of the young. Socrates is also willing to obey the laws of the city in many ways, even to the point of submitting to death as he argues in the Crito, but on this point he says he must disobey. "I, men of Athens, salute you and love you, but I will obey the god rather than you; and as long as I breath and am able to, I will certainly not stop philosophizing..." (29d; West, transl.).

This appears to be a pagan form of the theologico-political problem, but it is a unique god that Socrates invokes. It is a god he alone recognizes. I suspect it is a god he has created for rhetorical purposes. Elsewhere, Socrates presents what drives him as being his philosophic nature, an erotic love for wisdom, for the truth, for the good. Thus, what we see here we may call the philosophico-political problem.

For a Christian, these problems converge. Devotion to Christ is not simply devotion to raw divine will. It is also devotion to the truth. The Lord is holy. He is not part of the cosmos, but the creator of the cosmos out of nothing. He is ground of all being and the author of all truth. Jesus says, "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (John 14:6; cf. John 1, Colossians 1). So devotion to Christ is inseparable from devotion to the truth in general. To be Christ centered in faith is to be truth driven in life.*

*Here, I paraphrase John Piper in A Godward Life (p.106): "Being God-centered in life means being truth-driven in ministry."

Philosophy is Your Calling

At the very opening of the Bible, in Genesis 1, we see the foundation for philosophy. In verse 2, God speaks, saying "Let there be light." Through a rational articulation, he creates light. Thus, the creation is intelligible. He then separates the light from the darkness. He doesn't just cut the undifferentiated porridge of created stuff into blocks. He creates order, distinguishing discernible parts with an intelligible relation to one another. He then names the parts. The light he calls day, and the darkness he calls night. He proceeds this way for six days, and calls it "good," again speaking. Our world is ordered, intelligible, and good.

God then made Adam in his image. He brought animals before him so Adam could name them. In other words, he called Adam to understand the creation, to distinguished between the creatures and understand the specific difference of each one. Naming is an articulation of that understanding. Adam's first task after he was created was philosophy.

Philosophy is a uniquely human activity. Beasts can't do it. It fulfils what is uniquely human in us: our rational and moral faculties. It is the fulfillment of our divine calling as human beings. (Philosophy per se is rare among us, but everyone does it somewhat. We all distinguish between things, and seek the truth at some level or another, just not honestly and rigorously.)

Through philosophical investigation, you glorify God as youy see the order in what he has created. The awe you experience when you see order and meaning where before you had not is, for those who know the Lord, a form of worship. When you see a deeper beauty or intelligibility than you had previously understood and your thoughts fly to the Creator, you magnify him.

Secondly, you take dominion in obedience to the creation mandate when you understand the nature of things created. We are accustomed to thinking of dominion in terms of technology, making the world do what you want by understanding the way it works. But what a thing is is more than just the way it works.

Lastly, through philosophy, you affirm yourself as human rather than bestial. If you live your life merely eating and passing what you eat, you are obviously not living a fully human life. Human being are made for than that. We are made for friendship, for worship, and for the rational understanding of our world in all its dimensions, viz. for philosophy. Understanding the world philosophically affirms the order and goodness of God's creation.

Remember, The Lord Loves This Man

The Lord saves the simple and passes over the wise.

For consider your calling, brothers: not many of you were wise according to worldly standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being might boast in the presence of God. And because of him you are in Christ Jesus, who became to us wisdom from God, righteousness and sanctification and redemption, so that, as it is written, "Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord."

          -- I Corinthians 1:26-31

A Little BP in All of Us?

No one disputes that BP did something terribly wrong--morally wrong--that resulted in eleven dead and the ensuing economic and environmental disaster. Some even see fault in the government restrictions on drilling that pushed the rigs so far out into deep water. But some are also pointing the finger at Americans in general, and the American way of life.

We're used to hearing this from Muslim jihadists and western leftists of all kinds. Even the American president himself, in his first Oval Office speech, accused us of being "addicted to fossil fuels." But here comes the Evangelical Christian mea cupla on behalf of us all: "Corporate Sin: We Wanted BP to Cut Corners." It's only a blog post from a Texas pastor at a happenin' church, but it doesn't surprise me either.

If we’ve ever complained about rising gas prices or the cost of air travel, we are participating in the world that drives companies like BP to cut costs. We want them to. We need them to. We don’t really want to know what BP is doing as long as it keeps our vehicles fueled and our computers powered. Not unlike Al Gore, who talks about the environment from the comfort of his personal jet, we love to talk about BP’s problems while consuming the product they provide at every opportunity.

In reality, more oil is spilled every year in Nigeria than what BP has spilled into the Gulf. We just don’t care because it doesn’t affect us. The BP oil spill, then, is not about the individual sins of a single, evil corporation bent on squeezing every last dollar out of the earth’s core. It is about the corporate sin of humanity bent toward selfishness at every turn.

A bit cynical. More than a bit.

Some Christians are never happy unless they are in the throes of conviction, preferably dragging everyone in with them, even if they have to invent the sin out of nothing. I understand that this man wants to alert is people and his readers to the idolatry that is throughout our culture. Good. But I think this spill is a poorly chosen lift off point.

Just because I drive a minivan and don't want to pay any more than I have to for gas does not make me in any way complicit in BP's wrongdoing. So too, my desire for inexpensive bread and clothes does not make me complicit in adulterated foods and illicit sweat shops. BP's motive not to mess up the Gulf should be good corporate citizenship if not enlightened self-interest. The same can be said of everyone. Bakers should not mix sawdust into their bread and textile manufacturers should not chain people to their looms. But because of the especially wicked among us, and also because of decent people who sometimes succumb to temptation, we add laws and regulations to supplement moral exhortation.


We all want a highly productive and efficient economy, and there's nothing wrong with that. In fact, it's godly! The Lord has set us in a potentially rich world, not a universal Chad. But we want that prosperity--and believe we can all achieve and enjoy that prosperity--justly.

When Science is in the Saddle

To be modern is to live in a world of man-made marvels that continually astound, that give us ever-growing power over space and time, and yet that leave us perhaps more subjugated than we realize at first.

In The New Atlantis, Francis Bacon's fictional account of a land in full possession of modern science (or vice versa), Salomon's House is the research institution that controls nature through practically applied experimentation and that supplies a grateful and happy population with the benefits of that control. TIME magazine gives us a couple of examples of how our modern, dispersed Salomon's House has been supplying those benefits. The politics of it, however, requires a bit more unveiling.

Researchers have developed a kind of corn-based plastic ("The Promise and Pitfalls of Bioplastic," May 3, 2010). Your descendants won't find it in landfills a thousand years for now because it turns into corn mush forty days after you bury it.

Regular, petroleum-based plastic doesn't biodegrade. But this year's crop of Earth Day-inspired ads shows plant-based plastics doing just that: an empty SunChips bag fading into the soil, a Paper Mate pen dissolving underground.... Bioplastics could be really good for the environment — the manufacturing process produces fewer greenhouse-gas emissions than that for petroleum-based plastics, and these biomaterials don't contain an allegedly hormone-disrupting chemical, bisphenol A (BPA), that some regular plastics do. ...

Of the two promising new varieties of bioplastic, one type — dubbed polylactic acid, or PLA — is clear in color and costs manufacturers about 20% more to use than petroleum-based plastic. The other — called polyhydroxyalkanoate, or PHA — biodegrades more easily but is more than double the price of regular plastic. Both bioplastics are made of fermented corn sugar, and both come with a major benefit: if disposed of properly, they won't stick around in landfills for thousands of years.

Making a plastic pen from corn is an impressive feat, but the human factor is not as easy to engineer. The environmental advantage depends on people composting their SunChips bag. We don't have much opportunity for that here in the Empire State Building. Even at home, few people have a composting crib. Unless municipalities send around a composting truck to empty out specially colored cans from the foot of people's driveways on designated days of the week, that SunChips bag is going in the regular kitchen trash. So to take fullest advantage of this technological advance, we need a further advance in the administrative state, the socially all-seeing eye that is the other side of Salomon's House.

The conquest of nature necessarily points us, and without pausing for a breath, to the conquest of human nature. If the one is problematic, the other is treacherous at the very least.

The very next story in the print edition of TIME reported on a Tulane University study published in Pediatrics that supposedly proves scientifically beyond any reasonable doubt that spanking children inclines them to violence in their later years ("The Long-term Effects of Spanking"). As this confirms every liberal instinct, the story has been picked up and proclaimed by major news outlets as though they were announcing VE Day (Newsweek, New York Times, CNN). But studying human beings where it involves moral issues is a lot trickier than studying the composition and industrial applications of corn.

The study, led by community-health-sciences professor Catherine Taylor, makes an effort to account for factors that may distort the findings: “a host of issues affecting the mother, such as depression, alcohol and drug use, spousal abuse and even whether she considered abortion while pregnant with the child." Nonetheless, the study compares the behavior of five-year-old children who were spanked from the age of three at least twice a month with children who were not. From what TIME reports, Taylor does not study children at the ages of, say, ten, fourteen, and eighteen who had been spanked throughout the age range when spanking is appropriate. Age 5 is hardly “the long run” for observing the fruit of discipline. Furthermore, she does not distinguish between wise and unwise spanking, i.e., spanking accompanied by age appropriate instruction, and other variables.


CBS gave a more thoughtful report on a 2002 study ("Spanking May Cause Long-Term Harm," June 26, 2002). It included this exposure to the other side of the issue.

Robert Larzelere, a psychology professor at the Nebraska Medical Center, was one of the three experts critiquing Gershoff's findings. He noted that while she found links between spanking and negative behaviors, she did not assert categorically that spanking caused those behaviors. Larzelere, in an interview, said he remains convinced that mild, non-abusive spanking can be an effective reinforcement of nonphysical disciplinary methods, particularly in dealing with defiant 2- to 6-year-olds. He shared concerns about spanking that is too severe or too frequent.

Lloyd de Vries, the CBS reporter, added that Elizabeth Gershoff, a researcher at Columbia University's National Center for Children in Poverty who authored the 2002 study, "cautioned that her findings do not imply that all children who are spanked turn out to be aggressive or delinquent. But she contended that corporal punishment, on its own, does not teach children right from wrong and may not deter them from misbehaving when their parents are absent." Obviously.

Here, scientific research is said to have proven that certain methods of nurturing are significantly more likely to produce people of a certain desirable sort (it's not yet an exact science), and other methods are more likely to produce violent, anti-social behavior. Yet the human factor in the process of studying matters of this sort still distorts the conclusions that researchers draw. This must account for the striking discrepancy between common sense and these grand scientific pronouncements. Everyone has observed the difference between the unspanked or cruelly spanked little wretches kicking up a fit in WalMart and the well-behaved, wisely paddled young homeschoolers in the same setting.

Then there's the politics. You know that once "the science is settled," the next step is public policy, i.e., European-style laws that make spanking a criminal offense and grounds for placing your children in government-regulated foster care. Science removes a question from the political realm of judgment to the objective realm of administration. It gets us, as President Obama has said, beyond left and right, Democratic and Republican, and the old disputes of the culture wars into the post-partisan happyland.

But politicians often appeal to science to justify a power grab under the guise of just doing what they're told by the high priests of general revelation whose word is, of course, beyond question. Here are some New York politicians (no surprise there) doing just that ("Zapping NY's Economy," New York Post, April 12, 2010).

At the onset of the Easter weekend -- i.e., when they thought no one would notice -- the eco-apparatchiks at the state Department of Environmental Conservation denied Westchester's Indian Point nuclear power plant a key permit it needs to operate past 2013. DEC decreed that it was using too much water from the Hudson River to cool its two reactors, to the detriment of fish eggs and stuff.

Fish eggs? Forgive us, but we don't care about fish eggs. We care about people -- and jobs. Fact is, Indian Point produces nearly one-third of the electricity consumed in New York City and Westchester. Without it, the entire metro-area economy goes belly-up. And without DEC approval, Indian Point's two reactors can't secure federal operating license renewals when their current ones expire in 2013 and 2015.

[Governor David] Paterson's response? The DEC decision came from "a non-political process" run by "scientists," a spokesman said. "The [executive chamber] isn't going to weigh in on science decisions by agencies." Not even when the "science decisions" imperil the state's economy? Really, doesn't Paterson understand that his job requires "weighing in on" -- indeed, directing -- the decisions taken by the executive branch?

Of course he understands that. And he weighs in and directs only when it's politically useful to do so. Other than that, there's no one here but us enlightened respecters of science.

In Bacon's New Atlantis, the relationship between Salomon's House and the "king" or "state," which are mentioned but never seen, is a murky one. Bacon leaves it that way because as technology enhances human power over the universe, political authority will be sure to use it to enhance its power over all things human, but will veil that power. When the pronouncement of scientific researchers puts a matter beyond discussion, beyond public deliberation, it leaves open the manipulation of such pronouncements for political advantage, either by politicians themselves or by politically motivated scientists.

As we have discovered in the global warming controversy, whenever people try to get quickly past public discussion to public policy with the conversation-stopping phrase "the science is settled," you can be sure that there is more than dispassionate science at issue.

Faith in Technology

The narrator in this video calls it "faith in technology," as indeed it is. Perhaps you know someone who has hit his thumb with a hammer, nailed his leg with a nail gun, or taken off a finger with a table saw. Perhaps that person is you!

Well this clever fellow has developed a table saw that stops in1/1,000th of a second when it senses conductivity in what it is about to tear through. Wood is a very poor conductor of electricity, whereas fingers...well, you can see it on the video that includes real fingers and high speed cameras.



Are they working on a hammer that avoids thumbs? Perhaps they're working on a thumb that repels hammers.

Sunday School Lesson on Taxes

 The Elders of Israel Confront Samuel

I Samuel 8:4

I try never to miss Sunday School in my church, Franklin Square Orthodox Presbyterian Church on Long Island. Our pastors have a way of engaging serious questions while elaborating the teaching of the Bible but in way that ordinary people can grasp. I always learn something of great value. Sometimes it shows up in my classes. Sometimes it shows up on my blog. Last Sunday, as part of a (blissfully) long series on The Westminster Confession of Faith, Pastor Ben Miller took us to I Samuel 8 to consider the relationship between the fifth commandment, pertaining to obeying authority, and the seventh commandment regarding stealing. This got me started. This is where I ended up. (I am to blame for all these thoughts, however.)

If you would like to read my thoughts on "all-volunteer war-funding," i.e., the way we pay for political campaigns, go to the full article at WORLDmag.com. This post is dual-posted at Principalities and Powers for obvious reasons.

*********************

"The Prophet Speaks for Low Taxes"

We are still in the shadow of Tax Day, perhaps still smarting from it. But even if you did not pay taxes or are getting a big tax refund, you would nonetheless be legitimately concerned about the trillion of dollars the present government is adding to our national debt, and the corresponding expansion of government involvement in the economy and in each of our lives.


Notice what the prophet Samuel says about taxes when—in describing the model of pagan kingship—he warns Israel against their desire to have a king “like all the nations”:

“So Samuel told all the words of the LORD to the people who were asking for a king from him. He said, ‘These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the LORD will not answer you in that day’” (1 Samuel 8:10-18).

This rapacious king will take a 10th of their grain and flocks. Samuel implies that 10 percent is more than enough for government to finance all its legitimate responsibilities. If it claims to need even that much, then either it is doing what it has no business doing, or government leaders are serving their selfish advantage with public funds as we see in the 1 Samuel passage. While it may be overburdening the passage to see an implicit prohibition from God against an average tax rate of 10 percent or more, it is instructive nonetheless.

One might object that modern life is vastly more complicated than Samuel’s nomadic social and economic state, and so a larger, more expensive administrative state is required. But a more complex economy is also a vastly more productive economy. A flat tax of 10 percent would be a generous sum of money to pay for good government in modern America.

Bear in mind that the presupposition of “the administrative state” is that there is no legitimate limit to its administrative reach. It has inherently totalitarian tendencies. Wherever there is a good to be done, it sees a need for at least government regulation, and perhaps also government service providing the good itself. By contrast, the Apostle Peter tells Christians that the purpose of government is to punish evildoers and praise those who do good:

“Be subject for the Lord’s sake to every human institution, whether it be to the emperor as supreme, or to governors as sent by him to punish those who do evil and to praise those who do good” (1 Peter 2:13-14).

Unlike the libertarian, Peter sees a moral relationship between government and the people it governs, and amongst the people themselves as a political community. Healthy civil society is a network of consciously benevolent relationships, and government has an important role in encouraging (certainly not hindering, as activist government does) that mutual well-doing. Government is not to grow impatient or cynical regarding private benevolence and substitute government services in its place. But the administrative state attempts to accomplish by public authority what is legitimately and most productively accomplished only by private means.

One might also suspect that restricting taxation levels to below 10 percent does not account for emergency situations such as war. But if a free people who believe in their country have an all-volunteer army precisely because they are free, why not also all-volunteer war funding?...


If government were limited to a flat tax, or an average tax, of no more than 10 percent, we would establish a moral principle concerning limited government and personal responsibility, and we would have serious public debates concerning spending priorities, living within limits, and the legitimate role of government among a free people.

Sojourners from the Start

As much as I disagreed with what Stanley Hauerwas said at this year's "Interregnum" at The King's College ("Entertaining Hauerwas"), he and the people who contend with him have been endlessly thought provoking.

In the May 2010 issue of First Things, Gilbert Meilaender reviews Hauerwas's autobiography in the form of a personal letter to his old friend Stan. Commenting on Hauerwas's journey from his working class home in Pleasant Grove, Texas, to the stately academic world of Duke University in South Carolina, he writes, "Of course, leaving home for a new world is in some ways a distinctly American theme. But it is also...the warp and woof of human life."

This set my wind to wandering.

Life is a sojourn from the start. We enter life torn from the warm and familiar, leaving the embrace of mother's protection and setting off in varying degrees of independence and loneliness, seeking friendship and communion from that time on. So Adam began the human journey as we know it cast out of the garden. A later Adam, Noah, preserved life as one cast upon the wilderness of waters. Abraham, the father of the faithful, left behind his life in Ur of the Chaldeans in pursuit of life and friendship with God. Christ left the divine fellowship to sojourn among us, and was even estranged from his Father in darkness of grief, for our life's sake in communion with God. For that life's sake we are called out of the world we called home. In birth and in second birth we are forced into exile, but with no desire to return, pressing on in hope of better comforts.

Wendy Goes to Church

Wendy was raised in a Christian home. She attended church with her family every Sunday morning, unless there was a gathering with extended family, a sports event, vacation, or people were just tired. During worship, once she outgrew the nursery, she she spent the hour in junior church, and then graduated into youth church. If on ocassion there were no youth church, she would join the main worship service, but of course she sat with her friends in the balcony.

College disrupted that pattern of life. She was on her own, an adult in a city and community of her own choosing. Many other choices confronted her immediately. Early rising or sleeping in? Fast meals or sit down? And worship? What would that look like? Would it have a place at all? At home, she was carried along by the current of family life. But now she had to steer her own boat, and perhaps even dig her own channels. For the first year, she just followed the new currents. Those were established by (she would later admit) laziness (she would sleep in on Sundays, having been up until 3 a.m. the night before) and the hurriedness of life at an academically demanding college.

As Wendy began her sophomore year, she decided she had to become more serious spiritually and, as she put it, "make time for God." She began reading the Bible each night before bed (something she had never done with any regularity), and she also began attending a Bible study in her dorm. A whole new dimension of life opened up. It was like emerging from the forest and seeing the sky for the first time. God was speaking to her through his word. They Holy Spirit would apply passages, illuminating circumstances and troubling her conscience in ways she had never experienced before. She started praying regularly. She realized that her Christianity had been like a new car sitting in the garage, owned but never operated. Now she found that a driving faith is what faith ought to be, and driving felt good.

By her junior year, Wendy was no longer "making time for God." That is, she saw that it was not good enough to give God a small guest room in the mansion of her life where she could drop in on him from time to time. She had grown beyond that. She had learned in her study of Paul's Letter to the Romans that Christ had redeemed all of her, that he had redeemed her from the life of self-focus and to the life of Christ-focus. People are either "slaves to sin, which leads to death, or to obedience, which leads to righteousness " (6:16). As someone put it, if Christ is not lord of all, he is not lord at all. She knew in her heart that this was true. That little room in her mansion was no good. The whole mansion had to house him.  "From him and through him and to him are all things. To him be the glory forever!" (11:36).

That year, all sorts of things changed in Wendy's life. Relationships. Language. Even eating habits. The Lord lifted burdens of bitterness from her heart because she asked him to. And she asked him to because she knew there is nothing that is not his business and his sphere of blessing. Wendy was changed, and people could see it the way they could see the sunrise.

But her senior year was a time of growth in yet another essential element of the Christian life. Her Bible study group had finished Romans and moved on to the Gospel of John. In chapter four, the Holy Spirit startled her with these words: "Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in spirit and in truth" (4:23-24). She worshiped in her personal devotions and also at a student praise event most Thursday nights. That must be good as far as it goes, she thought. But she had become very serious about bringing all of her life under the gracious lordship of her Savior, and she could see that she was offering worship strictly on her own terms: the day of her choosing in the form of her choosing and when she chose to give it. Has God commanded something that she is neglecting, however? Is there something he has told his people is pleasing to him and edifying to them?

At the Bible study, she addressed this concern to a friend, Charis, who lived on her hall and whom she knew to be godly. Charis was active in the church she had adopted for her college years, and, from things Wendy had picked up, she knew that Charis had attended church faithfully at home, morning and evening, and had carried that habit with her to college. She would disappear on Sunday mornings to what she called her "church family" and would not show up again until late evening. She seemed to enjoy it, and come back refreshed each Sunday. This girl surely would know something about what God wants in the worship life of his saints.

Charis did not disappoint. She took Wendy straight to Hebrews 10:25, "Let us not give up meeting together, as some are in the habit of doing, but let us encourage one another." She added that, in the Book of Acts, the believers gathered together as a church on Sunday, the first day of the week, the day on which Christ the Savior had risen. And Jesus appeared to them at more than one of those meetings to confirm his approval of that pattern of worshiping together. In this setting, Christians "spur one another on to love and good deeds"--not just college friends, but older saints, and Christians from other walks of life. She also mentioned the blessing that her pastor (who is a wise, older man) sumptuously laid before her each week in his sermons. She was always challenged, always blessed, always grew. She was also grateful for the elders of her church who were wise and took seriously the responsibility Christ had laid on them for the care of his sheep (1 Peter 5:1-5). Charis drew close and looked very intently into Wendy's eyes. She said, "If Christ has given preachers and elders in his church for the blessing of his people, then if I am one of his people I will seek and get that blessing!"

Again the Holy Spirit was pressing these words into her heart, and where the words sank in they seemed to find their natural settings. As usual, where Wendy had previously been quite self-satisfied she now saw a gaping hole that only joyful Christian obedience could fill. Was there anything she was doing on Sunday that was better for her and more delightful than worship with the body of Christ? Was she able to feed and shepherd herself, perhaps with the help of friends, without the contribution of pastor and elders? Apparently, God's answer to both of these questions is, "no."

That Sunday, Wendy went with Charis to church. It required a subway ride and a bit of a walk, but that didn't matter. After a month of this habit, a habit she would never abandon by the way (and she would one day refuse a marriage proposal over it), Wendy marveled at all she had been denying herself by overlooking this dimension of the Christian life. She also reflected on the pattern of church life in which she had been raised. Committed, yet not. Sometimes God, sometimes me, which was essentially always "me." Nonetheless, she thanked God for her parents and for the exposure to Christ and his church they gave her as a girl. But she thanked God all the more for his gracious patience with her meandering, her half-hearted, and distracted pursuit of him. And she thanked him, as she would with her last breath, for Jesus the Good Shepherd who laid down his life for her, and who sought her when she was not seeking him.

Francis Bacon on Climategate

The recent scandal at the University of East Anglia that blew the lid off of what many thought was the dispassionate objectivity of the science supporting global warming hysteria would come as no surprise to Francis Bacon, arguably the father of what we now call modern science. In the New Organon, his 1620 argument for a new kind of science based on the severe discipline of a patient and rigorous method, he warned against the unreliability of the human mind in investigating nature:

The human understanding is no dry light, but receives an infusion from the will and affections; whence proceed sciences which may be called “sciences as one would.” For what a man had rather were true he more readily believes. Therefore he rejects difficult things from impatience of research; sober things, because they narrow hope; the deeper things of nature, from superstition; the light of experience, from arrogance and pride, lest his mind should seem to be occupied with things mean and transitory; things not commonly believed, out of deference to the opinion of the vulgar. Numberless in short are the ways, and sometimes imperceptible, in which the affections colour and infect the understanding (Book I, aphorism 49).

Read my slightly larger reflection on this controversy at WORLDmag.com in "Political Climate Science."

The Novelty and Genius of Francis Bacon

 

The frontispiece to Sprat's History of the Royal Society

(Francis Bacon is on the right)

For over two hundred years, the scientific and philosophic cognoscente lauded Francis Bacon as the father of modern science of of our technological mastery over nature. It was not just Abraham Cowley of the Royal Society who compared Bacon to Moses and his vision of man enthroned over nature to the promised land. Rousseau considered him, along with Descartes, one of the "preceptors of the human race." John Dewey, in Reconstruction in Philosophy (1950), called him "the real founder of modern thought."

It has become common these days to withdraw such credit. Many take the position that Bacon was a mere popularizer of what many true scientists were doing before and during his time. Or they say that his method was insufficiently mathematical or that it simply bears little resemblance to what science has become.

Paolo Rossi, a great scholar of the late Renaissance and early Enlightenment period and of Francis Bacon in particular, offers this well-supported assessment of Bacon's importance as a founder in Philosophy, Technology and the Arts in the Early Modern Era (1962, 1970[tr.]).

The founders of the Royal Society, the authors of the great Enlightenment encyclopedias, and not a few positivist historians and philosophers of the nineteenth century, were fond of the portrait of Bacon as the "father of modern science" because of his discovery of the inductive method. But to consider Bacon still from this point of view would be tantamount, as Benjamin Farrington has trenchantly observed, to placing him on an inappropriate pedestal in an inappropriate part of the gallery.

Nevertheless, the facts remains that when Bacon turned to the mechanical arts, considering them capable of revealing the actual processes of nature, and saw in them that capacity to give rise to inventions and works absent in the traditional knowledge--when polemicising against the logic of the schools, he projected a history of the arts and of technics as an indispensable prerequisite to the reform of learning--he truly became the spokesman for the fundamental demands for the culture of his time. Bacon brought to full awareness some of the thematic ideas that had been making slow headway at the margins of the official science in that world of technicians, engineers, and builders to which men like Biringuccio and Agricola had belonged (pp.117f.).

Many of Bacon's published thoughts on science were not original to him, even some of his more penetrating formulations. But he brought together, perfected, and gave force to what had been developing for a couple of centuries. That goes far beyond being a mere "popularizer."

Rossi documents that many of Bacon's criticisms of the medieval bookish approach to science and his great esteem for the practical over the merely theoretical were circulating among artisans and men of practical inquiry in the generations leading up to his own. Late medieval Europeans were not people of democratic views. There were noble classes and vulgar classes. Accordingly, there were activities suited to the dignity of a gentleman and there were activities as well as objects of study that were beneath him. The mechanical arts were considered base.

The defense of the mechanical arts against the charge of baseness, and the rejection of the notions that culture coincides with the horizon of the liberal arts and that practical operations are tantamount to servile labor, in reality implied the rejection of a certain conception of science, namely, of science as a disinterested contemplation of the truth... (p.x).

Whereas as early as 1603 Bacon called people to put their hope in a new "commerce between the mind and things," Bernard Palissy, a distinguished French potter (N.B. practical, base), claimed in 1580 that the art of observing nature must be founded on a "cult of things" as opposed to bookish learning and philosophical speculation (p.2). Bacon was not the first to emphasize the importance of closing with things themselves if there was to be any great progress in multiplying inventions. On the other hand, Bacon had far more in mind that Palissy, a potter, ever could.

Robert Norman, an English sailor who manufactured magnetic compasses and wrote on magnetism, was already in 1581 attacking the Western philosophic tradition for it's indifference to the practical fruit of inventions. He condemned the "learned" for "promising much and performing little or nothing at all" (p.5). Bacon despised them as boys, who talk but cannot generate (NO I.lxxi). He took his place among many who expected far more than the ancients and their followers could deliver, but his place was not among equals. The others saw some of the problem, and, accordingly, only some of the solution.

In the writings of various artisans and philosophers between 1530 and 1580, Rossi notices,

(1) the procedures of artisans, engineers, and technicians have a value for the ends of the progress of knowledge; (2) such procedures are recognized as having the dignity of cultural facts; and (3) men of culture must give up their contempt for "operations" or "practice" and discard every conception of knowledge that is merely rhetorical or contemplative to turn to the observation and study of techniques and the arts (pp.10f.).

While this statement makes it seem as though the cultural battle that must precede the wide embrace and successful execution of science was won, it was not so, and Rossi does not mean to suggest it was. Bacon took up that fight to his dying day because it was far from over and it required his genius for victory to fall to scientific civilization. A century and half after Bacon's death, in 1680, Richelet's  Dictionnaire Français, in it's article on "Méchanique," says, "This term, speaking of particular arts, signifies that which is the opposite of liberal and honorable; it has the connotation of baseness and of being little worthy of an honest person." Much later still, Rossi tells us, "the French Jesuits were scanalized by what they thought was an excessive number of articles on technical subjects in Diderot's Encyclopédie" (p.12).

The great artists of the Renaissance helped eventually to dignify the practical arts with social respectability. But it took time. Again Rossi:

As Antal reminds us, in the fourteenth century art was still considered a manual skill. The artist was addressed with the familiar "thou" as were domestic servants. ... Almost all artists of the early fifteenth century came out of artisan, peasant, and petty-bourgeois melieus. Andrea del Castagno was the son of a peasant, Paolo Uccello of a barber, Filippo Lippi [1406-1469] of a butcher. ... The goldsmith's art was common to painters and sculptors. Brunelleschi, Donatello, Ghiberti, and Ghirlandaio were all goldsmiths at first (pp. 21f.).

Despite these facts, the Renaissance artist of the fifteenth century was rising socially. As Rossi puts it, "No affluent citizens and nobles would have considered the artist's status humiliating" (p.21). Rossi traces this change in people's estimate of art and artists to "the increasingly profane character of artistic production, to the ever greater weight of the opinion of lay persons, as well as to the social transition of artists from the status of artisans to that of bourgeois. Whereas Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) had been not only a painter and sculptor, but also an engineer, architect, and many other things, by the mid-sixteenth century, "commissions of an artisan character no longer appears in keeping with the dignity of the artists. This was the age when Charles V stopped to pick up the brush dropped by Titian [d. 1576]" (p.22).

We note from this, however, that artisans and engineers remained objects of disdain among the powerful and well born. Bacon labored not simply to defend the benefits and dignity of the mechanical arts. While the mechanic had been able to gain some insight into the workings of nature by his attention to "things" and had produced useful works, this field of activity was not the answer to the miserable condition of mankind.

In the New Organon (I.v), Bacon points us beyond this type of labor. "The study of nature with a view to works is engaged in by the mechanic, the mathematician, the physician, the alchemist, and the magician; but by all (as things now are) with slight endeavor and scanty success." Engineers have done good work with what they know, but a true attention to "things" will produce an understanding of nature's inner workings, formulated into "axioms." "The productions of the mind and hand seem very numerous in books and manufactures. But all this variety lies in an exquisite subtlety and derivations from a few things already known, not in the number of axioms" (NO I.vii). These can be derived only from what he called experiments of light, which are to be preferred over what were overhastily and exclusively pursued as experiments of fruit, and these would have to proceed by the disciplined method of investigation that he was proposing. "For axioms rightly discovered and established supply practice with its instruments, not one by one, but in clusters, and draw after them trains and troops of works" (NO I.lxx).

But to get to this point, people's approach to the world, one another, and all things had to be democratized. Bacon had to undermine and bury all notions of noble and base. We see that in New Organon Book I, aphorisms 119-121, where he calls serious searchers into the secrets of nature and all those who are ambitious to bring her under human dominion to overcome their indisposition to investigate things that are common, mean, or subtle.

And for things that are mean or even filthy — things which (as Pliny says) must be introduced with an apology — such things, no less than the most splendid and costly, must be admitted into natural history. Nor is natural history polluted thereby, for the sun enters the sewer no less than the palace, yet takes no pollution. And for myself, I am not raising a capitol or pyramid to the pride of man, but laying a foundation in the human understanding for a holy temple after the model of the world. That model therefore I follow. For whatever deserves to exist deserves also to be known, for knowledge is the image of existence; and things mean and splendid exist alike. Moreover, as from certain putrid substances — musk, for instance, and civet — the sweetest odors are sometimes generated, so, too, from mean and sordid instances there sometimes emanates excellent light and information (NO I.cxx).

Think of the many and various breathless investigations that had to be undertaken before we could come to the understanding that there was much useful information hidden within stool samples. The humor in the Scrubs number, "Check the Poo," is premised on the still common notion that looking into these things is beneath human dignity. But a scientist sets aside all such notions of dignity and nobility. Or at least he does today. Bacon had to argue for an attitudinal reorientation to get us here. Thus he entitled one of his major works defending his new science, Of the DIGNITY and Advancement of Learning. Learning had always been considered dignified...but not the sort of learning that Bacon argued was necessary to raise the dignity of the human race in power and comfort.

Howard White, in his seminal work Peace Among the Willows (1968), calls this new moral understanding that Bacon not only presents in argument but also insinuates with rhetoric his provisional morality. We see it largely in the Essays. "One has to see what kind of men are to take us from the world where politics controls science to the world where science is to control politics..." (p.43). The men of the future in whom Bacon's provisional morality has taken hold will be "the kind of men who are intended to take the voyage to the New Atlantis..." (p.32; also p.16). But once we all land on the shores of that blessed future and the regime of science takes charge, Bacon expects that we will transition to what White calls the "definitive morality" that Bacon pictures, albeit subtly in New Atlantis. The provisional is what we would call democratic, though not immediately and obviously, but the definitive is far more regimented than the mess that is individual liberty.

But I digress.

While many of these ideas were in the air that Bacon was breathing, and quite self-consciously, Bacon went far beyond them. Rossi points beyond these ideas to Bacon's novelty.

The appeal to "nature" and "experience" so widespread in the culture of the Renaissance (what type of knowledge and what culture, after all, do not appeal to a certain "nature and to a certain "experience"), the rejection of authority (Aristotle, Galen, Ptolemy), the "disputation" with the "ancients," and insistence upon the necessity of observation as such do not themselves imply acceptance of this ideal view of science.

This ideal has a public, democratic, and collaborative character, composed of individual contributions organized in the form of a scientific discourse and offered with the view of achieving a general success which becomes the patrimony of mankind. This conception of science, which found its first expression on a "philosophical" plane in the work of Francis Bacon, played a crucial role in the formation of the idea of progress...(p.64).

Tomasso Campanella, in his utopian work The City of the Sun (1602; published in Latin, 1623), expressed the hope people had in this notion of progress, linked as it was to the conquest of nature through an explosion of inventions, and that was buzzing among those who were at the forefront of learning. "Oh, if you knew what our astrologers say of the coming age, and of our age, that it has in it more history within a hundred years than all the world had in four thousand years before, of the wonderful invention of printing and guns and the use of the magnet..." (Rossi p.65). But he really had no way of getting there. It took Bacon to provide the instrument, the reliably effective organon.

Conviction of Sin

The Christian life begins with what the Bible calls "conviction of sin," the sense that one is indeed a sinner in God's sight, deserving of condemnation, and in need of being saved from a miserable condition and a justly deserved eternal fate.

We see this portrayed in the New Testament most dramatically in Jesus' account of the Pharisee and the tax collector: "the tax collector, standing far off, would not even lift up his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast, saying, 'God, be merciful to me, a sinner!'" Explaining this, Jesus said, "I tell you, this man went down to his house justified, rather than the other (the self-righteous Pharisee). For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted."

Ray Ortlund beautifully expresses the biblical teaching on conviction of sin in this passage.

What is conviction of sin? It is not an oppressive spirit of uncertainty or paralyzing guilt feelings.

Conviction of sin is the lance of the divine Surgeon piercing the infected soul, releasing the pressure, letting the infection pour out.

Conviction of sin is a health-giving injury.

Conviction of sin is the Holy Spirit being kind to us by confronting us with the light we don't want to see and the truth we're afraid to admit and the guilt we prefer to ignore.

Conviction of sin is the severe love of God over-ruling our compulsive dishonesty, our willful blindness, our favorite excuses.

Conviction of sin is the violent sweetness of God opposing the sins lying comfortably undisturbed in our lives.

Conviction of sin is the merciful God declaring war on the false peace we settle for.

Conviction of sin is our escape from malaise to joy, from attending church to worship, from faking it to authenticity.

Conviction of sin is, with the forgiveness of Jesus pouring over our wounds, is life.

I'm looking for the source of this passage in Ortlund's works.

Our Modern Dance with Technology

As I re-immerse myself in the thought of Francis Bacon, the problem of technology, and the crisis of modernity, I expect to be posting frequently on the subject.

In my last post, I made reference to Louis c.k., one of the most prominent popular thinkers of our day on the problem of technology (you must understand I have a dry sense of humor...but at least I have a complete name). He appeared to be suitably impressed by the advances of the last hundred years (flight, high speed internet access, and even the latter while flying) while at the same time understandably disturbed by what those amazing developments do to our hearts, becoming numbingly unamazing to us.

King's student, John, cited Wendell Berry as one who rebels against the computer and it's soul disfiguring effects by continuing to use a typewriter. ("Why I am not going to buy a computer," Harpers, 1987; reprinted in What Are People For?.) I responded that the use of that technology is now the privilege of the well to do because ribbons are rare and expensive if they are obtainable at all. A reader named Phillip corrected me, adding that they are now easy available on via the Internet (a word that MS Word insists that I capitalize). I added this:

Ahh! Though it would be Baconian but not wise to look to technology to solve all our problems, even the problems that technology itself introduces, it is interesting that whereas an advance in technology (and the economics of the marketplace) made typewriter ribbons difficult to obtain, a further advance in technology--the Internet--again along with the economics of the marketplace, has made them easily available once again and at what Phillip tells us is an easily affordable price, even for my old Underwood. Oh brave new world that has such wonders in it!

 (Yes, I know that I slightly misquoted Shakespeare. I'm allowed to do that.)

We see this ongoing dance with technology in something I read recently in Superfreakonomics by Leavitt and Dubner, a Christmas present (thanks, Steve!). Greenies, and perhaps people like Wendell Berry, look back wistfully on the days of the horse and buggy, the days of environmentally friendly transportation when the only emissions from our vehicles could be plowed back into the earth and enrich it for organic food production.

"New York City: Horse overcome by heat." Circa 1910. 

George Grantham Bain Collection.

But the economist and the journalist tell us this:

The horse, a versatile and powerful helpmate since the days of antiquity, was put to work in many ways as modern cities expanded: pulling streetcars and private coaches, hauling construction materials, unloading freight from ships and trains, even powering the machines that churned out furniture, rope, beer, and clothing. If your young daughter took gravely ill, the doctor rushed to your home on horseback. When a fire broke out, a team of horses charged through the streets with a pumping truck. At the turn of the twentieth century, some 200,000 horses lived and worked in New York City, or 1 for every 17 people.

But oh, the troubles they caused!

Horse drawn wagons clogged the streets terribly, and when a horse broke down, it was often put to death on the spot. This caused further delays. Many stable owners held life-insurance policies that, to guard against fraud, stipulated that an animal be euthanized by a third party. This meant waiting for the police, a veterinarian, or the ASPCA to arrive. Even death didn't end the gridlock. "Dead horses were extremely unwieldy," writes the transportation scholar Eric Morris. "As a result, street cleaners often waited for the corpses to putrefy so they could more easily be sawed into pieces and carted off."

The noise from iron wagon wheels and horseshoes was so disturbing--it purportedly caused widespread nervous disorders--that some cities banned horse traffic on the streets around hospitals and other sensitive areas. ... (I'm skipping the interesting paragraph on traffic fatalities. I want to get right to the dung.)

Worst of all was the dung. The average horse produced about 24 pounds of manure a day. With 200,000 horses, that's nearly 5 million pounds of horse manure. A day. Where did it all go?

Decades earlier, when horses were less plentiful in cities, there was a smooth functioning market for manure, with farmers [people, no doubt, like Wendell Berry--DCI] buying it to truck off (via horse, of course) to their fields. But as the urban equine population exploded, there was a massive glut. In vacant lots, manure was piled as high as sixty feet. It lined city streets like banks of snow. In the summertime, it stank to the heavens; when the rains came, a soupy stream of horse manure flooded the crosswalks and seeped into people's basements (pp. 8-10).

They then describes some other unhappy consequences: flies, diseases, rats, and worst of all...methane! Lots and lots of methane, "a powerful greenhouse gas." Urban planners were gravely concerned about this health crisis (even without the climate issue), but totally stumped as to what to do about it.

But the problem suddenly disappeared, and it was neither government regulation nor a political-cultural rebellion of people in large numbers returning to a simpler, rural, agrarian life out of disgust for what had become of cities.

The problem was solved by technological innovation. No, not the invention of a dung-less animal. The horse was kicked to the curb by the electric streetcar and the automobile, both of which were extravagantly cleaner and far more efficient. The automobile, cheaper to own and operate than the horse-drawn vehicle,  was proclaimed "an environmental savior."

Of course, the dance continues. But my point is that it's a dance, though a dance between two who are inextricably locked in embrace and in what will always be, on account of sin and until the Lord's return, a love-hate relationship. Our goal should be, wise in the study of these things, to "spread the love."

P.S. -- My 10 year old daughter, seeing the picture of the exhausted horse, invited me to explain it, so I told her all about New York's horse problems in that day. She immediately suggested that we could have horses today because we have better means of hauling away the waste and the carcasses. Great idea, I thought, and a good application of technology to incorporate the best of yesteryear into modern life. We have bicycle lanes. Why not horse lanes? Cars have to drive around pedicabs. Why not make way for horse drawn buggies? Indeed, New York does have a few of these around Central Park. We could license them so that the numbers do not become unmanageable. I doubt, however, that there will be sufficient real estate in Manhattan that people can affordably devote to stabling a great number of horses. Just a thought.

Progress and Its Discontents

This semester, beginning next week, I am leading six exceptional students at The King's College in a seminar on Francis Bacon's Invention of Modern Politics. We will be exploring Lord Verulam's plan to conquer nature for the relief of our estate, the benefits that have come of it, as well as the problems inherent in it. We will look closely and critically at Bacon's writings--The Great Instuaration, New Organon, New Atlantis, Essays--and then students will research the benefits and moral complications of subsequent technological developments.

Robert Faulkner, in his penetrating work on Bacon's artful and revolutionary project to reshape and redirect Western civilization, Francis Bacon and the Project of Progress, expresses this sober assessment nicely: "Now it seems that a thoughtful citizen of a modern country must be prepared to defend the benefits of progress, or at least to reconsider them while being aware of the defects as well as the advantages" (p.3).

For example, consider email. Most of us depend on it because we find it useful, and so we use it all the time. But we also sense a downside. What is that disturbing impulse we feel to be constantly checking our inboxes. That's not good. John Freeman explores the complexity of the technology in his book, The Tyranny of E-Mail: The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox. "E-mail might be cheaper, faster and more convenient, but its virtues also make us lazier, lonelier and less articulate."

Also have a look at "Louis c.k." claiming that Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy. Warning, this is very funny, and you may see yourself in one of the "spoiled idiots" he describes.

He's entertained by the fact that conservatives and Christians find his routine resonates with what they believe. What they like is clearly the call to moderation and contentment. Louis just despises them, but that's a sign that he doesn't understand either what he's saying or the conservatives and Christians. He himself is incoherent. He meant to condemn capitalism in this routine. He explains this to Opie and Anthony. (The second clip is better than the first, but blasphemous at points.) Yet capitalism is the economic system on which he depends for his lucrative career and high flying lifestyle. He also explains that he is not against technology. He just thinks we should chasten our expectations for it and have a little more peace while using it. This thought has clearly hit a nerve with people given the video's "viral" popularity. People are uncomfortably aware that while technology is good, it affects the way we see the world in ways that are morally unhealthy. And that is a subject worthy of study.

Francis Bacon's Very Political Life

As I expect to be posting more regularly on Francis Bacon in his relation to Christianity and modernity, I am reposting this reflection on Perez Zagorin's account of his life in chapter two of his 1998 book, Francis Bacon, the chapter entitled, "Bacon's Two Lives."


Lytton Strachey's question, "Who has ever explained Francis Bacon?," still hangs over Bacon scholarship (Elizabeth and Essex, A Tragic History. Butler Press, 2007; p.9). Perez Zagorin identified the puzzle at the very outset of his book, a study of Bacon's life and thought entitled simply Francis Bacon (Princeton, 1998) :

Francis Bacon lived two separate but interconnected lives. One was the meditative, reserved life of a philosopher, scientific inquirer, and writer of genius, a thinker of soaring ambition and vast range whose project for the reconstruction of philosophy contained a new vision of science and its place in society. The other was the troubled insecure life of a courtier, professional lawyer, politician, royal servant, adviser, and minister to two sovereigns, Elizabeth I and James I, who from early youth to old age never ceased his quest for high position and the favor of the great (p.3).

He could have practiced law, a profession for which he trained at Gray's Inn. Indeed, many suggested that he solve his financial difficulties by pursuing that option, but he simply refused. He could have sought an academic position, but that would not have satisfied him. He desired political office. Though he combined both scientist and politician in his soul, he was fundamentally a man of politics.

On the political side of Bacon's life and character, the puzzle has two aspects. On the one hand, Zagorin tells us that Bacon's political ambitions,

...absorbed a large part of his time and energy, pitting himself against rivals in a continual competition for office and power, diverting him from pursuing some of his most cherished intellectual goals, and forcing him to leave his main philosophical enterprise fragmentary and unfinished (ibid.).

This unceasing quest for ever higher political office raises the question, why would someone so committed to the benefit of the human race through a radical reorientation of the intellect, as Bacon was, concern himself so obsessively with political climbing for the whole of his adult life? While public service is honorable and requires people of ability and integrity for it to be done well, there were many others who were highly qualified to take up that task, whereas Bacon alone had the insight and learning to carry on what he called "the great instauration of man over the universe."

In Of The Interpretation of Nature Proemium, Bacon justifies his tireless pursuit of political power by the ability it would give him to support co-ordinated, publicly useful scientific inquiry with the requisite human and financial resources. He had in mind something like the National Science Foundation, or, better yet, Salomon's House as he describes it in New Atlantis. Thus, Bacon reconciles his two seemly incompatible and personally consuming goals, the scientific and the political, by interpreting the political enterprise in terms of the scientific one. Zagorin, by accepting this explanation, comes across like a woman who believes the sweetly spoken but not entirely plausible stories of her cheating husband (or vice versa; pp. 57f.). He produces no evidence that Bacon actually used what power he had at any given point to give significant support to the work of science as he was planning it out.

Bacon's explanation is unconvincing especially coming from a man who calculated his actions as carefully as he did. It was surely true that he could use the power of his political office to support his scientific project, but the effort that such a plan required was disproportionate to anything he could reasonably hope to obtain. The likelihood of his success not only in achieving a sufficiently powerful position in government, but also in holding that position long enough to accomplish his goals, and then also in actually using it to advance his grand project by arranging the cooperation of whoever else was necessary was uncertain at best, and unpromising at worst. As it turned out, he did not become Lord Chancellor until 1618 at the age of sixty, just eight years before his death, a position he held for only three years before his scandalous downfall. As a plan, it's comparable to betting your nest egg at the dog track. It is an unbaconian reliance on fortune.

Given his extraordinary learning and eloquence, it would have been a more efficient use of Bacon's time with a more promising outcome if he had pursued his projects from a position of academic and literary prominence, and used his powerful persuasive abilities to enlist the great in his cause. But Bacon had no interest in a life so far removed from the direct exercise of political power and its attendant honors. Zagorin himself notes that, "Bacon was irresistibly attracted to politics and would never willingly retire into a private existence" (p.4). Indeed, he never did. Even after he was deposed from power as a result of the bribery scandal, instead of turning his full attention to writing and publishing for a more lasting legacy, he continued to beg and claw for power, even if only the right to take his seat in the House of Lords.

(Bacon himself gives us reason not to take him at his word on this public spirited justification for his political ambition. Bacon scholars are remarkably credulous when it comes to Bacon's public affirmations of traditional morality and notions of virtue. But that is another investigation.)

The second aspect of the puzzle of Bacon's politics is the great difficulty he had in accomplishing his goals. He was frequently passed over, and accomplished what ranks he did only by constantly "asserviling" himself, as he lamented near the end of his life. His difficulties were not for lack of talent and intelligence, however. Zagorin's judgment is that people generally saw through his deceits and were repelled by them, earning him distrust rather than influence. Bacon was a great admirer of Machiavelli, but seemed to lack the virtu to be a successful Machiavellian. He was a notorious dissembler and manager of his own image for political purposes. "I had rather know than be known" (Promus of Formularies and Elegancies in Works XIV:13). Zagorin is also very clear on this point.

The subjects of secrecy, esoteric communication, and the techniques of managing people also came into his works. In his personal relationships with the great and powerful whose favor he desired, his preferred methods were dissimulation, subservience, and flattery... (p.14).

Like an orphan who is radically alone and vulnerable in a hostile world, Bacon saw only rivals (like Coke) and instruments (like Essex, the queen herself, and later the king). Zagorin sees this. Bacon, he says, "...regarded other persons purely as means he could exploit to attain his own ends. His object was to aggrandize himself by craft, flattery, and displaying himself in the best possible light" (p.20). One suspects that those who were neither obstacles nor of any use him politically, he used in some other way.

Zagorin identifies Bacon's two contradictory lives, but in fact he had three lives. Whereas his political life compromised his philosophic life, his sexual life compromised his political one. Zagorin spends more than two pages of his short biographical chapter exploring this issue. If Bacon wanted the safest path to high office, then--like Elizabeth, his queen--it would have been prudent of him to commit himself to chastity. He did not.

These contradictions are puzzling only if one accepts Bacon as a genuine philosophical philanthropist with an inscrutable political fixation. On the contrary, it is more reasonable to interpret his scientific project in light of his political ambitions. By this I mean not his politics narrowly conceived (Solomon, Martin, Leary?), but his highest political ambition. He did after all express his philosophic project in strikingly and consistently political language.

Zagorin sets aside his knowledge of Bacon's political obsessions, however, when he turns to consider him as a philosopher. "It is evident that in Bacon's mind the project of developing a philosophy capable of multiplying knowledge and discovery by a true interpretation of nature was his highest, most cherished aim and that to this enterprise other intellectual pursuits were secondary" (p.27). This does not account for his distracting political ambitions, however. If the philosopher is, as Plato says, the one who leaves the cave to pursue the truth, and who would rather remain above, disengaged from the city's concerns, especially the daily concerns, to pursue an understanding of the truth without distraction, then Bacon was no philosopher. He was obsessed with the cave, in particular with it's honors and privileges. He could not even enjoy a graceful retirement in quiet writing and study.

Bacon is tragic figure. He was a man of soaring personal ambition of the sort that would naturally benefit the human race, and indeed has. But he allowed himself to be distracted from his highest goals and most lasting glories by lesser and incompatible accomplishments and pleasures.