Understanding Divine Transcendence

In March 2017, I heard an interview with Justin Brierley, who at that time was the presenter of the Unbelievable? programme associated with Premier Christian Radio, chairing debates between theists and sceptics, but also between theists with different opinions, interpretations of scripture, and so on, not only between theists showing appreciation for the Christian faith but having differing views about how it should be understood and expressed, but also between those identifying as Christians, Muslims or Jews (in the religious as well as ethnic sense). His guests were drawn from a wide range of educational backgrounds, including the natural and social sciences, theology, apologetics, education, and so on, the most famous among them being towering figures such as Roger Penrose, Richard Dawkins and Jordan Peterson. I started listening to the podcast eagerly, including many back episodes originally aired prior to the time that I first became aware of the programme. Eventually, two years later, over the course of several weeks, I wrote a lengthy letter to Justin which I finished a couple of months prior to the lockdown announced in March 2020 due to the Coronavirus pandemic.

Before delving into that further, I will backtrack to April 2017, a month after I started listening to Unbelievable? podcasts. On Good Friday I received news from someone I had been close friends with at university and after that, when he left London and went back to live with his parents before relocating to the county of Devon in southwest England, that he had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer and that his condition was terminal. He died just a few months after I received the news, in August of that year, a day before what would have been his 51st birthday. From the time that he left London and I remained there (he completed his undergraduate degree a year before I did, at the same university), we started exchanging not only long letters but also mixtapes, and later burnt-to-CDs, of ‘alternative’, outside-of-the-commercial-mainstream, music that we were both drawn to. By the time he left university, Peter had lost the religious faith he had when at school and still had when he started his undergraduate studies, whereas I somehow managed to retain mine, although at the time it wasn’t particularly well thought out. 

As it turned out, the final letter that I wrote to Peter ended up being the longest. Given his condition, I wondered whether he would even get to read it at all (perhaps he would tire of it because of its length), much less be able to reply to it. I was on holiday when I received news of his death, via a Facebook group that had been set up by close friends of his called ‘Friends of the Harris’. However, when I returned home, in my mailbox was a postcard that he had sent, thanking me for the letter. I have kept it in a box among other memorabilia, including those mixtapes he had sent me over the years. The postcard is a picture of fourteenth-century St. Nicholas Chapel, situated atop Lantern Hill in Ilfracombe, near where Peter was based and had died. It conveyed thanks for the letter that he had evidently read in its entirety. The picture itself looked like it had come from a bygone age, the image of the solitary chapel against an overcast sky especially resonant given the circumstances in which it had been sent, by someone now deceased. 

My letter took its cue from philosopher Bertrand Russell’s ‘Why I am Not a Christian’ 1927 essay[1], explaining many of the things Russell had misunderstood about the Christian faith mainly because of misunderstanding words attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. Peter had a certain admiration for Russell, although we had never discussed his philosophy. The real literary love of his life though was Samuel Beckett, who he once said (in one of his letters to me) expressed the futility of the human condition with unflinching honesty, more so than any other writer whose work he had encountered. After studying a ‘Theatre Studies’ module as part of his Humanities course at Greenwich University (then Thames Polytechnic), coming into contact with Beckett’s most famous plays Waiting for Godot and Endgame, both written in French and translated into his native language English by Beckett himself, Peter’s love for Beckett’s work grew and grew, while he himself became involved in numerous theatre community projects, putting on many productions which involved actors with learning disabilities, later using drama as a way of resolving conflicts in places ravaged by sectarian violence, first of all Northern Ireland, later in the Western Balkans and further afield.[2]

As a young pre-university teen who had not yet lost his faith, Peter was especially drawn to the book of Ecclesiastes, whose opening refrain, attributed to “the words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem”, will resonate with those familiar with the King James version: “Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity” (Ecclesiastes 1:2). I endeavoured to make multiple connections between Beckett’s own descriptions of the futility of the human condition and those of the ‘Preacher’ of Ecclesiastes.[3] The opening lines of Beckett’s Murphy, his third novel originally published in 1938: “The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new” are clearly inspired by the words of Ecclesiastes 1:9, whose last part reads: “Nothing new under the sun.”[4]

As his faith dissipated, Peter came to believe that there was nothing after death (as well as nothing new under the sun). On one level, at least if we take to heart the words of Ecclesiastes 9:5, that “the dead know not any thing” (KJV), he was absolutely right. The question of whether such nothingness was irreversible or not though is a different matter altogether. If you believe in the resurrection hope (Acts 24:15) then it is possible for this state of post-mortem nothingness to be reversed and for a person to become alive again. It is often misunderstood by those professing Christianity that there exists an immaterial soul alongside a physical body that survives the death of the latter, but this idea is inconsistent with the ancient Jewish expectation of an eschatological resurrection which simply means the restoration of a person’s life, that which has simply ceased to exist when the person dies and his spirit, or ‘breath of life’, goes out (Genesis 7:22, Psalm 146:4).

The purpose of this website is primarily threefold:

1) As a philosopher as well as an apologist, I try to show that it is perfectly rational to believe in the resurrection as a future hope as well as a past reality in the case of Jesus of Nazareth if you accept the existence of a transcendent, supernatural agent who is not only responsible for the existence of the cosmos and terrestrial life but is capable of intervening in the created order of that cosmos in order to bring about extraordinary effects (e.g. the resurrection of billions of people no matter how long they have been dead) that would appear to defy the laws of nature.[5]

2) To call into question some so-called ‘hallowed’ doctrines of Christendom throughout its history such as the immortality of the soul, the Trinity, the conception of hell as a place of everlasting fiery torment, etc. by demonstrating that there is no solid scriptural basis for believing in them. I have no doubt that apologists would totally agree that the resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth as the promised Messiah was Christianity’s launchpad: if Jesus really wasn’t resurrected from the dead, then his death understood as an atoning sacrifice would have served no purpose. If the rocket turns out to have no fuel, there can be no lift-off, Christianity’s dead in the water, which means there can be no future resurrection hope either. Paul’s oft-quoted statement at 1 Corinthians 15:19 makes perfect sense: “If in this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are to be pitied more than anyone.”

Here, though, I must add an important qualification with some rhetorical questions: if Jesus himself wasn’t fully God and fully man (the Incarnation), does that nullify the atoning effects of his sacrifice? How so? If Jesus really were a created Son rather than an uncreated Son who is co-eternal with his Father according to the Trinity doctrine, why would his sacrificial death have no atoning value? How would the words of John 3:16, that God loved the world so much that he sent his only-begotten Son so that those believing (or showing faith) in him would not be destroyed but receive everlasting life, be obliterated if Jesus, as a created being, is subordinate to his Father (as Arius argued)?[6a] Could it not be rather that if the second person of a triune God himself had incarnated as a human being and died a sacrificial death, such a death could not have served as an atoning sacrifice?

3) Aside from the traditional (cosmological, teleological) arguments for God, I formulate an additional argument which I call the anthropological argument (similar to the idea of human exceptionialism that has been especially promoted by proponents of Intelligent Design). This argues that the difference between humans and animals is an absolute difference of kind rather than there being relative differences of degree between them (e.g. humans are more cognitively advanced than nonhuman animals, etc.). This absolute difference of kind is expressible in two ways: (a) that human beings alone communicate through language understood as a complex semiotic system, both orally as well as in writing; (b) that human beings alone possess reflective consciousness: we are able to reflect on decisions we make, to think counterfactually, e.g. perhaps I should have made a different decision other than the one I did in fact make. We can also imagine what-might-have-been alternative scenarios with respect to the path(s) our life has taken, as well as future scenarios with respect to possible future projects. Even in making the claim that we have, for example, evolved from ape-like ancestors, we are engaging in both language and reflective consciousness, indeed synthesising the two characteristics. There is no evidence that animals apart from human beings have access to either of these two characteristics, let alone being able to synthesize the two.  

Such an absolute difference of kind is inexplicable in naturalistic evolutionary terms. Indeed, evolutionary accounts that try to account for religious belief-systems among the human species already presuppose an ineluctable difference between humans and nonhuman animals (including our supposed nearest cousins, chimpanzees as well as other simians), since religious belief-systems, as far as the human eye can observe, are not to be found among nonhuman animals. However, any thoroughgoing naturalistic evolutionary account of religious belief must seek to explain how this difference arises at all rather than assume the difference when describing how religious belief was deemed necessary for the survival of the human species. How is it that a basic concept of the divine, without which theism or atheism would be impossible, arises at all? I don’t see that there is any naturalistic answer to this question, whereas the first book of the Bible gives a concise, cogent answer: because God created humans in His image (Genesis 1:26). It is not that Genesis 1:26 constitutes the best explanation for this ineluctable difference between humans and nonhuman animals; as far as I can see, it constitutes the only explanation.

My letter to Peter covers a range of topics: a defence of Jesus’ resurrection as a historical reality; why Jesus wasn’t a ‘god-man’; the condition of the dead and how the soul is to be understood; and, what is almost certainly the biggest stumbling block to belief in God, why he allows suffering, and huge amounts of it at that given how long the human race has been in existence.[6b] It also, though not in great detail, defends the so-called ‘terror texts’ of the Bible described especially in the book of Joshua (as well as the following book Judges) during the time that Israel subdued and conquered the various Canaanite tribes. If you read that letter it will quickly become apparent what kind of Unitarian Christian I am, but please don’t be blinded (or vision-blurred) by prejudice; consider the arguments carefully without a “rafter in your eye” (Matthew 7:3).

Most of the other letters included on this site are written to those who have appeared as guests on the Unbelievable! website, following that aforementioned letter to former presenter Justin Brierley himself which questions the validity of the Incarnation, the idea that God manifested himself personally in the form of Jesus Christ, and explains why it was necessary for Messiah to die a sacrificial death. I have reiterated the theme of Jesus’ identity several times in letters to several different Unbelievable? guests, although my letter to Eric Metaxas was written in response to his insinuation that those not adhering to the central tenet of the Nicene Creed – that the Son, as well as being consubstantial with the Father, is begotten although not created – cannot be considered genuine Christians.[7] My argument is that scripture shows that the Son, as well as being only-begotten, is created, but is a direct creation of God, whereas all other beings, both spiritual and physical, are created through the Son. In other words, the mistake of the Nicene Creed is to suppose that being begotten and being created are mutually exclusive.

Other letters, such as my letter to Stephen Law, argue that the difference between the ‘minimal’ God of deism and the ‘maximal’ God of Judaeo-Christian monotheism is not such a great difference as many might suppose; indeed, the difference between ‘no-god’ atheism and ‘minimal god’ deism is a much wider, unbridgeable gulf. In a similar fashion to the status of the Son (Jesus Christ, both begotten and created), why can’t the ‘Providential’ God that Charles Darwin believed in also be an interventionist God, one that he didn’t – or perhaps couldn’t – believe in?[8]

Aside from letters to those who have appeared as Unbelievable? guests as well as to the late Peter Harris, there are letters written to people I know personally, although for the sake of not revealing their identity, I have invented one-name pseudonyms, in a manner not dissimilar to C. S. Lewis’ strategy in The Abolition of Man.[9] One of these, Eamonn, has written to me a number of times, so naturally in my letters to him I address specific points in those letters although I am of course not at liberty to publish them.

Letters are divided into various categories, which precede the letters themselves. Some letters appear more than once under different categories, since several themes may be treated in a letter which means that it does not necessarily belong to only one category.

Finally, a few words on the name of this website: ‘Divine Transcendence’. In philosophical terms, transcendence is distinct from immanence: whereas transcendence signifies the state of lying beyond, immanence signifies the state of lying within: ‘beyondness’ verses ‘withinness’. The seventeenth-century philosopher Spinoza, who regarded ‘God’ as natura naturans, ‘naturing nature’, and the physical cosmos as natura naturata, ‘natured nature’, understood God and nature as essentially synonymous, two sides of the same coin. In his pantheism, the physical cosmos emanates from God as its active expression (natura naturans), whilst that which is so emanated, natura naturata, is the ‘passive’ consequence.[10] However, there is a necessary ontological co-dependence between the active and acted-upon, distinct from traditional monotheism that views God as transcendent and hence ontologically distinct from his creation. In Spinoza’s view they are one and the same substance: just as God is wholly within, or immanent to, the universe, then the universe is wholly within, or immanent to God, as if the two forms of immanence mirror each other.

In his excellent philosophical work Miracles, C. S. Lewis surely had Spinoza as well as the ancient Stoics in mind when he wrote the following:

The Supernaturalist believes that one thing exists on its own and has produced the framework of space and time and the procession of systematically connected events which fill them. This framework, and this filling, he calls Nature.[11]

The transcendent “one thing on its own”, in producing the framework of space and time and everything else connected in-between, necessarily exists beyond that which ‘it’ has produced, in other words, it is super-natural. In a recent conversation with Alex O’Connor (a recipient of two letters posted on this website), Jordan Peterson alluded to the God who appears before Elijah on the mountain of Horeb by demonstrating his mastery over the elements: a strong wind splits mountains and breaks crags, but the One who causes these momentous events is not to be found in the wind; neither is he within the earthquake or fire which he causes to occur after the powerful wind (1 Kings 19:11,12)[12] This description of the Almighty God is decidedly non-pantheistic. In transcending the totality of interlocking events Lewis describes as “Nature”, God thus logically transcends any element of Nature that he ‘tampers’ with in order to bring about extraordinary events, whether a wind strong enough to split mountains and break crags, or earthquakes or fires.

Although God can interact with elements of his creation, he is not ontologically dependent on it as in the philosophy of pantheism. God is ‘ab-solute’ in the sense that he is absolved from being entirely absorbed (or even partially absorbed, as in the philosophy of panentheism) into the immanence of the cosmos itself. If there is an essential underlying argument of this website, it is that God as the absolute, transcendent creator, synonymous with the God of Biblical monotheism, is the only type of God that makes logical sense both as a concept in itself as well as accounting for a range of cosmological, teleological and anthropological data, namely the contingency and fine-tuning of the universe, the complexity of goal-directed biochemical systems, as well as the ineluctable difference between human beings as the bearers of the Imago Dei and all other non-human organisms. This personal God, in sending his only-begotten Son, a distinct individual, as a ransom sacrifice, has taken the initiative to make it possible for us to be set free from sin and death. Not only is he providential, as Darwin believed, but he is also interventionist; the two need not be mutually exclusive.    

If your curiosity has been piqued, please read on. Hail divine transcendence.

Endnotes

[1] The essay can be accessed here: https://users.drew.edu/~jlenz/whynot.html

[2] You can read Peter Harris’s obituary in the Other Lives section of the Guardian newspaper: https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2017/nov/05/peter-harris-obituary

[3] The original Hebrew term Qo·he’leth is better translated as ‘congregator’ or ‘assembler’ rather than ‘preacher’. The Greek translation of Qo·he’leth found in the Septuagint, Ek·kle·si·a·stes’ (Ecclesiastes) means, literally, a member of an ecclesia, i.e. congregation or assembly (see https://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/1101990082?q=congregator&p=par, par. 2).

[4] Samuel Beckett, Murphy, p. 5 in the Picador edition that can be read here: https://archive.org/details/dli.ernet.242511/page/4/mode/2up

[5] In section 10 of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), David Hume defines a miracle as “a violation of the laws of nature”, such that “the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can be imagined” (see https://davidhume.org/texts/e/10, 10.12). This suggests that, in Hume’s view, given that the laws of nature at the very least appear to be unalterably fixed, they must be inviolable. This raises questions about the nature of violation. Theist Richard Swinburne has suggested that, rather than constituting an irreversible violation of natural law, a miracle might be defined as a non-repeatable counter-instance to a law of nature. For more information, see “Concepts and Definitions” under the “Miracles” entry in The Stanford Encylopedia Dictionary of Philosophy (https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/miracles/#MiraViolLawsNatu).

[6a] For information on Arius, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arius, especially the opening paragraph.

[6b] Many atheists would also point to the reality of animal suffering, both predating human existence as well as during it, as an effective counterargument against God’s putative goodness. However, my contention is that if one claims that sentient creatures who by definition feel pain can also suffer, the primacy of human suffering remains the central problem; that is to say, the problem of animal suffering is secondary to, hence presupposes, human suffering.

[7] Metaxas was interviewed in 2007 by the online newspaper Greek News where, with reference to C. S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity, he is reported as describing himself as a “mere Christian”, one of those “who believe in the historic Christian faith, who believe in the Nicene Creed.” Although I was able to access the interview online in 2020, it no longer appears to be available.

[8] In his article “Theological Insights from Charles Darwin”, Denis O. Lamoureux draws a theological distinction between divine interventionism and divine providentialism, the former referring to God’s “dramatic supernatural activity”, the latter referring to “God’s subtle activity”. When, in his 1844 letter to J. D. Hooker, Darwin states his conviction that species are not immutable, he adds parenthetically that such a statement is “like confessing a murder”. Lamoureux argues that the murder is not the murder of God per se but rather “his slaying the interventionistic God of progressive creation, which at the time was accepted by the scientific community.” In other words, Darwin never came to embrace atheism even when his earlier religious beliefs faltered, but still held on to a residual Providential God who created life by means of natural laws, a philosophy equivalent to deism rather than traditional monotheism. Denis Lamoureux, “Theological Insights from Charles Darwin”, p. 10 n. 23. The article can be downloaded here: https://www.asa3.org/ASA/PSCF/2004/PSCF3-04Lamoureux.pdf

[9] C.S, Lewis, The Abolition of Man, first published in 1943, republished in the compendium The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics (HarperCollins, 2017), pp. 689-738. On the first page of the first chapter, Lewis comments that his essay is a response to an elementary textbook written by two schoolmasters whom he pseudonymously refers to as Gaius and Titius, and to their book as The Green Book (The C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, p. 693).

[10] See under the heading “Benedict Spinoza (1632-1677)” (3bi), The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://iep.utm.edu/spinoza/#SSH3b.i).

[11] C.S. Lewis, Miracles: A Preliminary Study, first published in 1947. These quotations are taken from the compendium The C.S. Lewis Signature Classics, pp. 308, 309. The idea of an “indwelling God” is the bedrock of pantheistic thought, and in Lewis’ comparison of this idea with the emergence of Mind, we see similarities to the philosophy of panpsychism, that things have a mind-like quality, or to put it another way, when surveying the cosmos, it’s Mind “all the way down” (see under the heading “Panpsychism”, Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy (https://iep.utm.edu/panpsych/#H5)).

[12] See Jordan B. Peterson, Navigating Belief, Scepticism and the After-Life, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0KgLWQn5Ts