I encountered a quote on Alan Jacob's blog from the ending of Adams Roberts' novel The This. I haven't read the novel, but I deeply connected with the quote. The quote is about the particularity of love, how we don't love in general or in the abstract. We love the specific and particular. 

Here's the quote:

You see, love is not an abstraction. It’s not a theory or a cosmic force or a slogan or any kind of diffuseness spread across the world. Love is particular. You do not love in general, you love this person, this thing, this life, you love this, this, this, this, this, and this, and this, and this loves you back. This is the only thing in the world, and it is precise and specific and real, and it is everything and infinitude.

What I'd add to this quote, from a Christian perspective, is the theme of Stranger God: Love is hard. Loving the specific and particular brings us into intimate, difficult contact with the demands of love. Consequently, we try to avoid these demands by escaping into the abstract, universal and general. We recoil from the demands of love and back up. 

This is the point Dostoevsky makes in The Brother's Karamazov in Chapter 4, of Book Two, in Part 1, entitled "A Lady of Little Faith." 

In this chapter, a lady of "little faith" is in conversation with the spiritual elder Zosima. The lady of "little faith" is a wealthy Russian woman who petitions the elder to bless and heal her daughter. In making that petition the lady describes her spiritual predicament, her struggles to love people. More specifically, the lady loves people in the abstract. Her struggle boils down to loving the specific, particular people in her life. Hearing these struggles, the elder responds by telling of a man he once knew:

He was an old man, and unquestioningly intelligent. He spoke just as frankly as you, humorously, but with a sorrowful humor. "I love mankind," he said, "but am amazed at myself: the more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular, that is, individually, as separate persons. In my dreams," he said, "I often went so far as to think passionately of serving mankind, and, it may be, would really have gone to the cross for people if it were somehow suddenly necessary, and yet I am incapable of living in the same room with anyone even for two days, this I know from experience. As soon as someone is there, close to me, his personality oppresses my self-esteem and restricts my freedom. In twenty-four hours I can begin to hate even the best of men: one because he takes too long eating his dinner, another because he has a cold and keeps blowing his nose. I become the enemy of people the moment they touch me," he said. "On the other hand, it has always happened that the more I hate people individually, the more ardent becomes my love for humanity as a whole." 

"The more I love mankind in general, the less I love people in particular." As the elder Zosima will go on to observe, real love is "a harsh and dreadful thing." And what makes it difficult are the concrete and particular demands of concrete and particular people. 

This is why, as I describe in Stranger God, the Little Way of Thérèse of Lisieux is so potent and powerful as a spiritual discipline. As I describe it, the Little Way is a practice of loving the specific and particular, especially when the specific and particular is hard, difficult and demanding. This is hugely important, as the demands of love require a good degree of virtue. Warm aspirations are not enough to get us through the trials of love. Love demands grit, and the practices of the Little Way help form this toughness.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan has long been admired for its surprising twist, how the hero of the story is a despised outsider. But another distinctive aspect of the parable concerns how it universalizes the demand to become a neighbor. The parable does this by emphasizing the "situationalistic" aspect of extending care and help toward others.

When the expert in the law questioned Jesus about his neighborly obligations, that question was coming from a worldview where familial and social webs of obligation were deeply embedded in society. People had duties to kin and clan. These set pieces of duty and obligation were, and remain, the glue that binds collectivistic societies together.

The Parable of the Good Samaritan blows that up. The Samaritan on the road just happens upon the wounded man. No bond of moral obligation connects them. No social duty is at stake. Their encounter is random happenstance. The Samaritan simply finds himself in a situation.

And for Jesus, the situation is enough. That's what is striking about the story. In a world where morality was tightly controlled by familial and community obligations, Jesus tells a story that emphasizes a chance encounter between two strangers. Who is my neighbor? The situation will tell you. 

As many have observed, the situationalistic vision of neighborliness illustrated in the Parable of the Good Samaritan universalizes the duty to care. The thing I'm meditating on today is the situationalistic aspect. Specifically, if love has a situational aspect it demands vigilance, watchfulness, and quick responsiveness. 

There is an episodic, improvisational, and interruptive aspect highlighted by the Parable of the Good Samaritan. To be sure, love continues to make its demands within networks of familial obligations. But after the Parable of the Good Samaritan the duty of love assumes a wider and surprising character. The call of love arrives out of nowhere and when you least expect it. Suddenly, you find yourself, as they say, "in a situation." What will you do? In that moment, will you be a neighbor?

One more post this week from Chapter 7 "People Are Not Products" from Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.

In the last two posts we reflected upon the connection between poverty and sex work, domestically and globally. A point we didn't explore very much was the issue of criminalization. If liberals do have a concern about the stigma of sex work, it's here where that concern has impact upon the material conditions of sex workers. That is, because sex work is stigmatized, it's also criminal. Which causes thousands upon thousands of women to be arrested for sex work every year. Historically, it was the woman who was arrested (the seller) rather than the John (the buyer). And while this has begun to change, with many police departments arresting the Johns and helping the women, this is by no means a consistent practice.

The point here is that the decriminalization of sex work, at least for the sellers, would go a long way to easing the lives of many women forced into sex work. Prostitution is unpleasant and dangerous, largely because it is criminal, and I don't know how humane or just it is to throw women into jail or have them pay fines on top of everything else they are facing on the streets. And that we don't pass legislation to ease this burden is, yes, due to cultural stigma. 

To be clear, I don't claim any expertise in the areas of law, public policy, or public health when it comes to sex work. I'll let the experts share the pros and cons concerning the decriminalization of sex work. My only point is that I do want to recognize that a liberal concern over stigma does affect the criminalization of sex work, and that the criminalization of sex work materially affects the fortunes of women caught up in prostitution. Prostitution, as they say, is the oldest profession. I expect it will be with us forever. How best to protect the women involved in prostitution should be a moral and social concern. And the stigmas surrounding sex work does affect what policies and laws we deem appropriate or inappropriate. 

That said, I do think the the larger argument from the last two posts still holds. That is, even if we decriminalize sex work there remains the larger economic forces that force women into prostitution, let alone the women who are caught up in domestic and global sex trafficking.

Back to Chapter 7 of The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.   

Having discussed prostitution, Perry ends the chapter by talking about the various ways our culture has turned sex into a product to buy and sell. She returns to the issue of online pornography. She discusses how many women have monetized themselves through sites like OnlyFans. The progression is predictable. Sexy selfies posted to social media generate views, likes, and followers. It only makes sense to monetize that attention by selling more explicit content to viewers willing to pay. Perry also discusses dating and hookup apps like Tinder. 

I don't want to get into a moralizing debate about online pornography, OnlyFans, or Tinder. Again, I think a lot of secular liberals would say keep your Christian values out of my bedroom. If I want to make money selling videos of myself in the safety of my own home, who are you to object? And who I hookup with on Tinder is none of your damn business.

Fair enough.

But I think a point Perry is making that is worth considering concerns the commodification of sex, treating sex as something to be bought and sold and approached transactionally. Making this argument, Perry goes back to a point made earlier in this series concerning the "disenchantment of sex." Capitalism, we know, has a perverse power to disenchant. A forest is disenchanted when it is reduced to lumber, its sacred magic stripped away to become a commodity that is bought and sold. Something similar has happened to sex in the modern world. Sex is something we buy and sell. Sex is a product we consume. Sex is something we monetize. 

Sex has been disenchanted, stripped (literally and metaphorically) of its sacred, startling, special and surprising magic. So it's worth asking ourselves: Is that magic something you might like to remember, recover, experience, or find?   

In Hunting Magic Eels I explore the paradox of how if God is everywhere then God is nowhere. 

Specifically, within Protestantism, especially low-church, non-liturgical, non-sacramental expressions of Protestantism, there is a wariness in declaring anything in the world as a particular location of the holy. Buildings are not sacred spaces, buildings are utilitarian and functional. Nor does any object possess sacred potency, like holy water in the Catholic tradition. 

As I recount in Hunting Magic Eels, there are good reasons for why many Protestants drifted in this direction. As I was told repeatedly growing up in the Churches of Christ, "We don't 'go' to church. We are the church. God doesn't live in a building." And that is certainly true. Church buildings are not temples. God is everywhere. We don't need to go anywhere to encounter God. God is right where you are standing. 

And yet, in an increasingly post-Christian world, if we don't have visible reminders of God's presence in the world we can miss seeing God anywhere in the world. God is everywhere, true enough, but God is also invisible. Thus, one of the recommendations in Hunting Magic Eels, if you are dealing with disenchantment and God's invisibility in your life, is to be intentional in making God materially visible in your spaces. 

C.S. Lewis once reflected on these tensions in his book Letters to Malcolm:

It is well to have specifically holy places, and things, and days, for, without these focal points or reminders, the belief that all is holy and "big with God" will soon dwindle into a mere sentiment. But if these holy places, things, and days cease to remind us, if they obliterate our awareness that all ground is holy and every bush (could we but perceive it) a Burning Bush, then the hallows begin to do harm.

It is good to have specifically holy places, things, and days. We have to make God visible, or we'll miss seeing God at all. But at the same time, we need to remember that all ground is holy and that every bush is the Burning Bush. This is a balancing act. 

You can also habituate to the hallowing, grow numb through repetition to the rituals and holy days. This is why, for example, so many evangelicals thrill to liturgy upon encountering it. The hallows are new to them. But for those who grew up in these traditions, where the magic becomes routinized, you can see how the "hallows begin to do harm." For example, a recent survey has shown that the majority of Catholics no longer believe in the real presence of Christ in the Mass. A lot of Protestants think you can run off to the Catholic and Orthodox traditions to escape the perils of modern disenchantment. Liturgy is the silver bullet. But you're just trading one set of problems for a different set of problems.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the start of Lent, and I wanted to revisit a reflection I shared two years ago.

Nowadays, you see a lot of low-church Protestant congregations observing both Ash Wednesday and Lent. For example, my church, a Church of Christ, will host an Ash Wednesday service this evening where there will be the imposition of ashes. 

As you listen to churches (like my church) who are embracing traditions like Ash Wednesday, your attention is drawn to how these congregations describe the purpose of these liturgical practices and seasons. A common reason you'll hear today is that Ash Wednesday is a practice of "contemplating our mortality." I expect you've seen, or will see, this existential sentiment expressed online many times today. With the words "Dust you are and to dust you shall return," Ash Wednesday is a memento mori, a time to confront and face our eventual death.

The point I'd like to make today, a point I've made before, is that this existential framing of Ash Wednesday tends to miss the penitential aspect of Lenten observance. The words of Genesis 3--"Dust you are and to dust you shall return"--are not props for existential philosophy, they are communicating the curse that enters the world due to Adam's sin. A curse we still groan under. We aren't confronting death in Ash Wednesday so much as facing the consequences of our sin. 

To be clear, I think contemplating your mortality has salutary effects. I do it all the time. There's a skull (not a real one) in my office for just such purposes. But Ash Wednesday isn't intended to be a bit of existential therapy that helps us on our journey toward self-actualization. Ash Wednesday is the start of a penitential season of self-mortification. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church describes:

The seasons and days of penance in the course of the liturgical year (Lent, and each Friday in memory of the death of the Lord) are intense moments of the Church's penitential practice. These times are particularly appropriate for spiritual exercises, penitential liturgies, pilgrimages as signs of penance, voluntary self-denial such as fasting and almsgiving, and fraternal sharing (charitable and missionary works).

If "intense moments of penitential practice" seems a bit too archaic and medieval to you, well, maybe Lent isn't going to be your thing. 

My deeper worry, though, is how Ash Wednesday is becoming disenchanted via existentialism.  

An existential Ash Wednesday is a disenchanted Ash Wednesday because you don't need God to have an "existential moment" on Ash Wednesday as you "contemplate your mortality." You don't need to think about sin, judgment, penance, and atonement, because such things assume metaphysical realities outside of your own subjective experience. You don't have to believe a single thing in order to celebrate an existential Ash Wednesday. Which is why, I think, the existential move is in vogue right now. You can thrill to the aesthetics of the ritual and liturgy with minimal (or zero) metaphysical commitments. An existential Ash Wednesday is an emotional experience you curate to feel moody, angsty, and deep, perfect for cultivating a sophisticated and sagacious self-image and its associated social media persona: "Look at me, I enjoy contemplating death! I am deep!"

Do you really want to know who you are on Ash Wednesday? You're a sinner. And there's nothing hip, cool, or sophisticated about that. Surely nothing you'd want to hashtag about yourself on social media. The ashes today remind us that we are petty, selfish, vain, and mean. And if that's too triggering for you, well, like I said, perhaps "intense moments of penitential practice" aren't your cup of tea. 

I am not "contemplating my mortality" on Ash Wednesday. I am confronting the trainwreck that is my soul, covering myself in ashes and tears.

So, for all the penitent, welcome to this season of intense penitential practice. 

Today is Ash Wednesday. 

I expect many of you have been following the Asbury Revival. Wikipedia already has a page up about the revival if you need to catch up. Interestingly, Asbury has a long history with revivals. You can read about that history on the university website.

Not surprisingly, the news and social media commentary about the Asbury Revival has been all over the place. Over the weekend, I shared some texts with my good friend Sean Palmer, observing that how you see the Asbury Revival will depend a great deal upon your epistemological assumptions. Revivals are either social psychological phenomena, or outpourings of the Holy Spirit. Your view is either enchanted or disenchanted.

Beyond epistemology, there's also your degree of cynicism about church and evangelicalism. Some of us look upon revivals with hurt, jaded, or suspicious perspectives. 

But the initial fruits of the Asbury Revival have been, to many observers, both happy and healthy. The revival hasn't been bombastic or filled with dramatic faith healings. Nor are there charismatic leaders running the show or dominating the stage. The Asbury Revival has simply been young people engaged in continual prayer and praise. What many people have seen at Asbury are young people longing for God. And that is a very hopeful thing.

I bring up the Asbury Revival to return to a point I make in Hunting Magic Eels.

Much of Hunting Magic Eels can feel "Catholic," as it recommends a variety of things by way of re-enchantment from the liturgical, contemplative, and Celtic streams of the Christian tradition. And yet, I also devote a chapter in the book to "Charismatic Enchantments." In that chapter I point to the power of contemporary praise music and the role of emotions in our journey toward re-enchantment, along with an open posture of receptivity to the work of the Holy Spirit. This is the enchantment we've observed at the Asbury Revival.

Many readers of Hunting Magic Eels didn't like my chapter on Charismatic enchantments, having had some bad experiences with Pentecostalism and the Prosperity Gospel. But I think the Asbury Revival has shown some of the good fruit that can come from charismatic expressions of faith as routes toward re-enchantment. 

Even in this jaded, cynical, and skeptical world, the Holy Spirit still blows where she wills.

Another way to describe the enchanted imagination comes from the work of the Jewish theologian Martin Buber. (Many thanks to my friend Ron Wright for making this connection between Buber's work and Hunting Magic Eels.)

In Buber's seminal work I and Thou he argues that our experience of the world can come in one of two basic forms, "I-It" encounters and "I-Thou" encounters. Buber describes the difference in a famous passage regarding how we might relate to a tree:

I consider a tree.

I can look on it as a picture: stiff column in a shock of light, or splash of green shot with the delicate blue and silver of the background.

I can perceive it as movement: flowing veins on clinging, pressing pith, suck of the roots, breathing of the leaves, ceaseless commerce with earth and air—and the obscure growth itself.

I can classify it in a species and study it as a type in its structure and mode of life.

I can subdue its actual presence and form so sternly that I recognise it only as an expression of law — of the laws in accordance with which a constant opposition of forces is continually adjusted, or of those in accordance with which the component substances mingle and separate.

I can dissipate it and perpetuate it in number, in pure numerical relation.

In all this the tree remains my object, occupies space and time, and has its nature and constitution.

It can, however, also come about, if I have both will and grace, that in considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is now no longer It. I have been seized by the power of exclusiveness.

To effect this it is not necessary for me to give up any of the ways in which I consider the tree. There is nothing from which I would have to turn my eyes away in order to see, and no knowledge that I would have to forget. Rather is everything, picture and movement, species and type, law and number, indivisibly united in this event.

Everything belonging to the tree is in this: its form and structure, its colours and chemical composition, its intercourse with the elements and with the stars, are all present in a single whole.

The tree is no impression, no play of my imagination, no value depending on my mood; but it is bodied over against me and has to do with me, as I with it — only in a different way.

Let no attempt be made to sap the strength from the meaning of the relation: relation is mutual.

We can approach the tree as an inert object, as an "it." A purely materialistic and scientific description of the tree "subdues" and "dissipates" the sacred aspect of the tree and reduces it to an "it." This "I-It" relation to the world is the disenchanted imagination. In the disenchanted imagination our relation to the world is no relation at all as the encounter is asymmetrical: a subjective "I" encounters an inert, mute, and lifeless object, an "it." In the language of the Psalms, the world has no "voice."

In an "I-Thou" encounter with the world we hear a voice and experience a true relation, a relation that is "mutual." Instead of an "it" I encounter a sacred presence, a "Thou." In this enchanted experience, the tree interrupts me and pulls me into a relationship with itself. As Buber says, if I have "both will and grace" to see the tree as a Thou "I become bound up in relation to it."

Importantly for Buber, in the I-Thou encounter I don't have to give up my scientific understanding of the tree. There is "no knowledge that I would have to forget" about the tree. Organic chemistry still applies. It's just that this scientific understanding of the tree is only a small part of "a single whole."

Lastly, and this is key, this sacred, enchanted encounter with the tree isn't a figment of my superstitious imagination. In an I-Thou encounter I'm making contact with a reality that exists outside of and independently of my own private subjectivity. In the I-Thou encounter there is no "play of my imagination" and the experience isn't "depending upon my mood." The Thou-encounter is, rather, "bodied over against me and has to do with me." Something is "there" that addresses me and pushes back against me. So a key practice in cultivating an enchanted imagination is not trying to diminish or question this experience, the temptation to "sap the strength of the meaning of the relation." Enchantment keeps the relationship there as relationship. The "relation is mutual."

Using Buber's work, then, we can describe the rise of modern disenchantment as a movement away from an enchanted I-Thou experience of the world into an increasingly I-It experience of the world. 

We remain in Chapter 7 of Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution entitled "People are Not Products," Perry's chapter about the harms and oppressions associated with the sex trade.

In last week's post we discussed how many liberals tend to misdiagnosis the problems associated with prostitution. Specifically, there is a very well-intentioned desire to reduce the stigma surrounding sex work. I fully support that effort, and I think I'm following the example of Jesus in doing so.

And yet, reducing stigma does little to address the economic realities that drive women toward prostitution. As we discussed last week, most women involved in sex work are driven to it out of economic desperation. Middle class and wealthy women, by and large, tend avoid sex work as a career move. Poor women face a more grim and dire choice. And these economic disparities conform to a global pattern. As Perry writes,

In the global sex industry, it is the poor countries that provide the 'product' and rich countries that provide the demand. The brothels of the UK, Netherlands and Germany are filled with women from poor parts of the European Union, in particular Romania, as well as some women from West Africa and Southeast Asia, some of whom have been forcibly trafficked, while the rest are there as a result of varying degrees of poverty. Meanwhile, the brothels of Bangkok that cater for tourists are filled with sex buyers from Europe, Australia, and North America. The buyers tend to have lighter coloured skins than the sellers because sex is sold in only one direction along the economic gradient. 

Concerning the economic gradient of the global sex trade, I wish liberals, and I say this as a Christian, were a little more Marxist in their analysis of sex work. Stigma is a concern, but I wish liberals would pay more attention to the material conditions affecting women, and do something about those material conditions. It's a sad situation. Liberals used to care about class issues. They don't much anymore.

Summing up the posts so far, the enchanted imagination directs its attention toward ontology, teleology, transcendentals, and value. That is to say, the enchanted imagination ponders the mystery of being, the purposes of life, the true, the beautiful, and the good.

The disenchanted imagination, by contrast, directs its attention toward epistemology, causality, and empirical facts. 

Stepping back, we might summarize the difference between an enchanted versus disenchanted attentional frame as a sacramental-to-material shift. 

As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, the enchanted imagination is characterized by what is called a "sacramental ontology." Sacrament here means a material sign of a spiritual reality. A sacramental ontology speaks to how all of created existence (ontology) sacramentally points to--or is imbued with--sacred, spiritual realities. Basically, a sacramental ontology views material reality as both meaningful and meaning-full. 

The disenchanted imagination, by contrast, evacuates material reality of meaning. A brute, dumb materiality replaces sacramental fullness. The universe becomes cold and silent. Reality is experienced as "dead," as indifferent and uncommunicative. 

In the language of Hartmut Rosa, a sacramental experience with the world possesses "resonance." With a sacramental ontology the meaning of the world "speaks" to us. Enchantment stands in a relational posture with the world. We hear the music of the spheres.

Disenchantment lacks this resonance. The inert material stuff of the cosmos communicates no meaning, points to nothing beyond itself. There is no music.

All this description can be pretty abstract, so in Hunting Magic Eels I use poetry to illustrate a sacramental ontology. By attending to the meanings of experience and the created world, poetry practices a sacramental gaze. Poetry isn't concerned with a brute material description of the world, like the listing of the Periodic Table. Poetry listens for the music. Poetry seeks resonance. Consider one of my favorite poems by the late Mary Oliver entitled "Messenger":

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird—
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young, and still half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be
astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all the ingredients are here,

which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

This is the experience of a sacramental ontology. Reality, from old boots to flowers to clams in the sand, is filled with meaning, and sacramentally directs our attention toward deeper spiritual realities. Experience resonates. The music plays. 

In the enchanted imagination we keep our mind on what matters, which is our work, which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.  

In this post about the enchanted imagination, I want to swing back to Part 2 and revisit an implication of our shift from teleology to causality.

Recall, the enchanted imagination of the past was teleological. The created order reflected divine plans and purposes. Humanity existed for a reason, a goal, a telos. As did every created thing. 

This teleological imagination was a glue that bound facts to values. As I've shared before, consider a watch. If you know what a watch is for you can tell if a watch is good. Values (judgments of goodness) flow from facts (observations of material reality) and teleology makes the connection. The telos of a watch is to tell time. That's what a watch is for, its purpose. So if the watch fails to keep time we call it a "bad" watch. By contrast, a watch that keeps time is a "good" watch. The point is clear: If you know what something is for, you can tell if something is good. 

When we turned away from teleology facts became divorced from values. This is called "the fact/value split." Consider a human life. What is the purpose, the telos, of human life? What are we here for?

The enchantment imagination, rooted as it was in teleology, had an answer to that question. You existed for a reason, a purpose. Your life had a telos. But when we turned away from teleology toward causality we lost our ability to say if our lives were good or bad. Since we don't know what life is for anymore, it's hard to say if our lives are worth living. How do you judge a good life? Opinions are all over the map. And the reason for this is because we have no clear answer about life is for, and lacking that telos we can't tell if the watch is broken or not.

The point to be observed is that the disenchanted imagination focuses upon facts, the material description of reality. The enchanted imagination, by contrast, is focused upon values, haunted by questions concerning the goodness of life. 

What makes life good? 

To answer that question, you have to know what life is for.

The shift away from ontology and teleology toward epistemology and causality was associated with another imaginative change that moved us from enchantment to disenchantment. Specifically, we turned our attention away from the transcendentals.

Ancient philosophy and religion was focused upon the contemplation of the transcendentals we call the True, the Beautiful and the Good. You'll recall your Plato here. 

Going back to the first post, contemplation about ontology wasn't just about the nature of being and existence. Ontological contemplation also concerned the reality of the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, the reality of the transcendentals. More, ontological contemplation concerned how Being, Truth, Beauty and Goodness were One. And how that One--the Unity of Being, Truth, Beauty and Goodness--is what we call God. This is both Greek philosophy and Christian mystical theology.

The point of this series is to describe how our attention shifted in ways that facilitated modern disenchantment. What does the mind attend to? Contemplation of the transcendentals facilitates enchantment by directing our gaze beyond empirical reductionism and scientific materialism. An excellent discussion of this can be found in David Bentley Hart's The Experience of God. Or you could read Plato and the church fathers.

By contrast, if you turn your eyes away from the True, the Beautiful, and the Good you become trapped in an attentional framework where all becomes empirical and "factual." This attentional bias leads to disenchantment. 

Dostoevsky famously said, "Beauty will save the world." Beauty can do this because, as a transcendental, Beauty mystically pulls the factual mind into enchantment and the contemplation of God.

Another attentional change that facilitated Western disenchantment is a shift from teleology to causality. The story here is well told by scholars like Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue and Charles Taylor in A Secular Age. But let me offer a quick sketch.

Prior to the scientific revolution in the West, our understanding of the world was teleological. ("Teleology" refers to purposes and ends.) This view of the world was largely rooted in Aristotelian thinking, the idea that you could understand how a thing in the world worked if you understood its telos, its purpose and goal. Borrowing from Aristotle, the Christian imagination saw God as creating the world with a grand telos, with each thing in creation given its own unique telos that fit into the grander design.

The thing to note here is that this teleological vision of the cosmos was filled with purpose. Things existed--you existed--for a reason, for a purpose. More, teleology pointed you toward the future. You were going somewhere. That purposeful future was where your attention was focused.

With the rise of Newtonian Mechanics and Darwinian evolution this changed. Causality came to replace teleology. To understand something in the world we no longer asked about its purpose but looked, rather, at the long chain of prior cause and effect that brought that thing into existence. A future-orientation (teleology) gave way to a past-orientation (causality). And as we looked into the past, we came to see either a long, twisting history of chance and contingency (for example, Darwinian evolution) or the inevitability of a causal determinacy (for example, Newtonian Mechanics). 

Our turn toward causality via the scientific method has born great fruits. We are grateful for the benefits of technology in staving off disease, privation, want, and hunger. And yet, our Causal Turn has left us with an existential void. Aristotelian science may have been bad science, but its teleological framework provided us answers about the meaning and purpose of life. You existed for a reason, and your life had a purpose. Causality, by turning away from future purposes toward the accidents and contingencies of the past, gives us no answers about why we exist or where we might be going. Simply, the shift from teleology to causality rendered life meaningless and purposeless. As I shared in Hunting Magic Eels, Jean-Paul Sartre summed it up nicely when he said, "Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance." That's the existential fruit of the teleology to causality shift. Causality gave us technological power at the cost of existential despair. 

Disenchantment, then, results from an attentional bias toward causality. As attention obsessively fixates upon cause and effect the cosmos is increasingly evacuated of meaning and purpose. The music of the spheres goes silent. Life is experienced as random and directionless. Or devoid of meaning because of casual determinism. I once counseled a student for an entire year who was suicidal because he believed he had no free will. His attentional bias was so obsessively fixated upon causality he could no longer see any purpose or meaning in life. 

The enchanted imagination, by contrast, pays attention to purposes, reasons and ends. The enchanted imagination looks toward the future, the goal of your existence and life. Instead of chance and accident, you are here for a reason and a purpose. Your life is going somewhere.

We now reach Chapter 7 of Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution entitled "People Are Not Products." This chapter concerns the oppressions and harms related to prostitution. 

To start, a comment about human nature.

Many liberal feminists push back on any claim that intrinsic psychological differences exist between males and females. The assumption is that our brains come to us as empty "blank slates" that are wholly shaped by culture. Consequently, any differences we observe between men and women have to be due to environment, culture, and childrearing. 

Now, it is true that we observe statistical variability among men and women. Each person needs to be treated as an individual. But when we step back and look at population-level statistics, we do observe differences between the sexes. Many of these differences are slight, and often get overplayed as "differences." But some of the clearest psychological contrasts we observe between men and women concern sexuality. (The other area of big contrast is aggression.) And the best data point we have about gender differences in sexuality involves the oldest profession.

Simply put, men seek out casual sex to a scale we just don't observe among women. This creates a supply and demand problem, with more men seeking sex than there are women willing to have sex. Throughout human history this sexual asymmetry was handled through prostitution, with the burden falling largely upon women in vulnerable economic situations. From time out of mind, poor women have been forced to satisfy the demands of male sexual desire.

This is the basic injustice at the heart of the oldest profession, the economic oppression. By and large, liberal feminists ignore this fact, believing that the gender asymmetries we observe between sexual buyers and sellers in simply the result of stigma. But stigma has nothing to do with the fact that the overwhelming majority of women forced into prostitution do so as a grim act of survival rather than as a path toward self-actualization. Perry writes:

[Male desire for causal sex and sexual variety] produces a mismatch between male and female desire at the population level. There are a lot more straight men than there are straight women looking for casual sex...As we have seen, in the post-sexual revolution era, the solution to this mismatch has often been to encourage women (ideally young, attractive ones) to overcome their reticence and have sex 'like a man', imitating male sexuality en masse. The thesis of this book is that this solution has been falsely presented as a form of sexual liberation for women, when in fact it is nothing of the sort, since it serves male, not female interests...

Our modern solution is to encourage all women, from every class, to meet the male demand for casual sex. In contrast, the solution adopted by most societies in the period before the invention of reliable contraception was for the majority of women to have sex only within marriage (whether that be monogamous or polygynous), while a minority of poor women were tasked with absorbing all that excess male sexual desire. Aside from a handful of high-class courtesans and call girls who might attain some degree of social status--usually having come from poor backgrounds originally--the prostituted class has historically been composed of women with no other options: the destitute, those abandoned by their partners, those addicted to drugs or alcohol, and those captured in warfare or tricked by traffickers. Prostitution is an ancient solution to the sexuality gap, and it is not a pleasant one.

It's very difficult to explain the wretchedness of the prostituted class if you believe the modern liberal feminist claims about the sex industry...

The whole point of paid sex is that it must be paid for. It is not mutually desired by both parties--one party is there unwillingly, in exchange for money, or sometimes other goods such as drugs, food or shelter. The person being paid must ignore her own lack of sexual desire, or even her bone-deep revulsion. She must suppress her most self-protective instincts in the service of another person's sexual pleasure. This is why the sex industry typically attracts only the poorest and the most desperate women--these are the people who don't have the means to resist it.

I think it is deeply compassionate to want to reduce the stigma associated with sex work. In this, we follow the example of Jesus himself. But liberal feminism is confused about the proper focus of our empathy. The point isn't to reduce the stigma because it is sex work, that our problem with prostitution is a prudish and puritanical attitude toward sex. Sex isn't the issue here. The problem isn't stigma. The problem is economic oppression.

Since the publication of Hunting Magic Eels I've continued to ponder the contrasts between enchantment and disenchantment. 

Specifically, how does enchantment perceive and approach the world differently from a disenchanted perspective? In Hunting Magic Eels I argue that much of the contrast is due to attention. If so, where is attention being directed in the enchanted versus disenchanted experience? In this series I'd like to set out some of those contrasts.

To start, let me describe today what I'll call the "ontological-to-epistemological shift." 

The common story you hear about the scientific revolution is that it ended the era of enchantment. And while that's true, at least for many modern people, it leaves a huge question unanswered. Specifically, why did science have this effect?

Many things can be talked about here. Perhaps the most discussed issue is how science disputed literal readings of the Bible, calling its sacred infallibility into question. Once a hole was poked in the Bible a Pandora's box of unbelief and skepticism was opened. All the effort put into "Creation science" by fundamentalist Christians is an attempt to close that Pandora's box.

A related issue, which I'll talk more about in this series, is the one I highlight in Hunting Magic Eels, how science, especially Newtonian mechanics, changed the way we perceived the cosmos. Discovering the inviolate and universal "laws of nature" caused us to imagine the cosmos as a deterministic machine, ticking along like a mechanical watch. The "laws of nature" made the universe seem sufficient unto itself, putting the intimate providence of God at a remove. Theism gave way to Deism, which opened the path to atheism.

All this is true and has been widely discussed. But today I'd like to highlight a different sort of attentional shift caused by science that facilitated disenchantment.

Prior to the scientific revolution, ontology was a source of philosophical and theological contemplation. Being itself was a question to ponder. Existence itself was a source of wonderment and awe. The fundamental question of ontology--Why is there something rather than nothing?--kept philosophers and theologians busy.

But with the onset of the scientific revolution, philosophy turned away from ontology to epistemology, turned away from being to knowledge. The mystery of existence was set aside to consider issues of justification and proof. Plato declared that philosophy begins with wonder. And much of that wonder was the shock of existence itself. No longer! Modern philosophy doesn't concern itself with ontological wonder. The question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" is marginalized, too child-like, a non-starter, beyond the bounds of serious modern scholarship. Modern philosophy is concerned with epistemology: What can we prove, know, justify and verify?

Science turned our attention away from the mystery of being--and Being itself--to the issues of justification, knowledge and proof. Science caused philosophy to become empirical, concerned with justifying claims about beings (material objects within the universe) than about the Source of Being Itself. And in doing so, philosophy turned away from ontological wonder. 

Disenchantment flows out of an attentional focus upon the justification of empirical claims about objects within the universe. That is to say, disenchantment brackets questions of ontology to focus upon epistemology, mostly the claims of science. 

Enchantment, by contrast, is ontological wonder, experiencing the halo of awe and the corona of mystery that crackles around the dark shadow of science. Enchantment is ontological attention to the Source of Being.  

Below is a beautiful passage from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite in his treatise The Divine Names. 

Pseudo-Dionysius starts by pointing out that God cannot be named. Because God "transcends all things" God cannot be praised as "word or power or mind or life or being." God is "at total remove" from the "totality of existence."  Thus, God is "the Nameless One."

And yet, since God is the Source of all existence, "the cause of everything" and "at the center of everything," we must "turn to all of creation" to find names for God. 

So, in the second paragraph, Pseudo-Dionysius turns to enumerate names, names rooted in created existence, that Scripture uses for God. Names like "God," "life," and "truth." Names like "wisdom," "word," and "power." Names like "fire," "wind," "water," "rock," and "dew." 

Thus, the conclusion: God is "nameless yet has the names of all that is."

Pseudo-Dionysius from The Divine Names:

Truly and supernaturally enlightened after this blessed union, they discover that although it is the cause of everything, it is not a thing since it transcends all things in a manner beyond being. Hence, with regard to the supra-essential being of God—transcendent Goodness transcendently there—no lover of the truth which is above all truth will seek to praise it as word or power or mind or life or being. No. It is at a total remove from every condition, movement, life, imagination, conjecture, name, discourse, thought, conception, being, rest, dwelling, unity, limit, infinity, the totality of existence. And yet, since it is the underpinning of goodness, and by merely being there is the cause of everything, to praise this divinely beneficent Providence you must turn to all of creation. It is there at the center of everything and everything has it for a destiny. It is there “before all things and in it all things hold together” (Col. 1:17). Because it is there the world has come to be and exists. All things long for it. The intelligent and rational long for it by way of knowledge, the lower strata by way of perception, the remainder by way of the stirrings of being alive and in whatever fashion befits their condition.

Realizing all this, the theologians praise it by every name—and as the Nameless One...

And yet on the other hand they give it many names, such as “I am being” (Ex. 3:14; Rev. 1:4), “life” (Jn. 11:25, 14:6), “light” (Jn. 8:12), “God” (Gn. 28:13; Ex. 3:6, 15; Is. 40.:28), the “truth” (Jn. 14:6). These same wise writers, when praising the Cause of everything that is, use names drawn from all the things caused: good (Mt. 19:17; Lk. 18:19), beautiful (Sg. 1:16), wise (Job 9:4; Rom. 16:27), beloved (Is. 5:1), God of gods (Deut. 10:17; Ps. 50:1 LXX; Ps. 136:2), Lord of Lords (Deut. 10:17; Ps. 136:3; 1 Tim. 6:15; Rev. 17:14, 19:16), Holy of Holies (Dan. 9:24 LXX) eternal (Is. 40:28, Bar. 4:8), existent (Ex. 3:14), Cause of the ages (Heb. 1:2). They call him source of life (2 Mac. 1:25), wisdom (Prov. 8:22-31; 1 Cor. 1:30), mind (Is. 40:13; cited in Rom. 11:34 and 1 Cor. 2:16), word (Jn. 1:1; Heb. 4:12), knower (Sus. 42), possessor beforehand of all the treasures of knowledge (Col. 2:3), power (Rev. 19:1; 1 Cor. 1:18; Ps. 24:8), powerful, and King of Kings (1 Tim. 6:15; Rev. 17:14, 19:16), ancient of days (Dan. 7:9, 13, 22), the unaging and unchanging (Mal. 3:6), salvation (Ex. 15:2; Rev. 19:1), righteousness (1 Cor. 1:30) and sanctification (1 Cor. 1:30), redemption (1 Cor. 1:30), greatest of all and yet the one in the still breeze (1 Kgs. 19:12 LXX). They say he is in our minds, in our souls (Wis. 7:27), and in our bodies (1 Cor. 6:19), in heaven and on earth (Ps. 115:3; Is. 66:1; Jer. 23:24), that while remaining ever within himself (Ps. 102:27) he is also in (Jn. 1:10) and around and above the world, that he is above heaven (Ps. 113:4) and above all being, that he is sun (Mal. 4:2), star (2 Pet. 1:19; Rev. 22:16), and fire (Ex. 3:2), water (Jn. 7:38), wind (Jn. 3:5-8, 4:24), and dew (Is. 18:4; Hos. 14:5), cloud (Ex. 13:21f., 24:16, 33:9; Job 36:27f.; Is. 4:5, 18:4; 1 Cor. 10:1f.), archetypal stone (Ps. 118:22, cited in Mt. 21:42; Mk. 12:10; Acts 4:11 and 1 Pet. 2:4, 7; Is. 8:14, cited in Rom. 9:33 and 1 Pet. 2:8; Is. 28:16, cited in Rom. 9:33; Eph. 2:20, 1 Pet. 2:4, 6), and rock (Ex. 17:6 and Num. 20:7-11, cited in 1 Cor. 10:4; 2 Sam. 22:2; Is. 8:14, cited in Rom. 9:33 and 1 Pet. 2:8), that he is all, that he is no thing.

And so it is the Cause of all and as transcending all, he is rightly nameless and yet has the names of everything that is. Truly he has dominion over all and all things revolve around him, for he is their cause, their source, and their destiny.

Out at the prison we've been in the book of 2 Corinthians. 

If 1 Corinthians is about conflict within the church, 2 Corinthians is about a conflict between Paul and the church. In much of 2 Corinthians Paul is defending both himself and his ministry in contrast to people whom he describes as "super-apostles." Paul is being sarcastic with the label "super," but his cutting description is pointing to a contrast many within the church seemed to be making. The super-apostles appeared stylish and successful, whereas Paul seemed weak and ineffectual. 

Knowing he was coming out on the short end of a contrast with the super-apostles, Paul takes aim at the metric being used. How should one evaluate a ministry? By what criteria do we judge success? You see Paul making this point in a pivotal text:

So from now on we regard no one from a worldly point of view. Though we once regarded Christ in this way, we do so no longer. Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, the new creation has come: The old has gone, the new is here! (2 Cor 5.16-17)

Paul was suffering in the comparison with the super-apostles because the Corinthian church was viewing their respective ministries from "a worldly point of view." And from a worldly point of view, Paul's ministry seemed the poorer. Paul didn't seem as successful, talented, attractive, spectacular, polished or charismatic. But as Paul points out, Jesus hanging on the cross didn't look much like a winner. Seen from a worldly point of view, Jesus on the cross doesn't appear successful, talented, attractive, spectacular, polished or charismatic. 

Paul's key insight is that you can't see the kingdom if you're using the wrong metrics, if your perception is skewed. My favorite example of this comes early in the letter, where Paul uses a metaphor of smelling. This is a favorite of mine because most of the sensory and perceptual metaphors used to describe the kingdom of God tend to be visual or auditory metaphors, images of sight or hearing. But in 2 Corinthians 2, Paul describes the perceptual contrast as being between perfume and stench:

But thanks be to God, who always leads us as captives in Christ’s triumphal procession and uses us to spread the aroma of the knowledge of him everywhere. For we are to God the pleasing aroma of Christ among those who are being saved and those who are perishing. To the one we are an aroma that brings death; to the other, an aroma that brings life. (2 Cor 2.14-16)

Compared to the super-apostles, Paul's person and ministry smelled like trash. He was an offensive odor. Paul stank, and the Corinthians were holding their noses. But Paul's offensive smell, to return back to the visual metaphor, was due to how the church was looking at him from "a worldly point of view." How Paul smelled had less to do with Paul than with the perceptual filters being used by the church.

For those with cruciform perception, Paul and his ministry would have smelled like roses. But for those using worldly perception, Paul was an offensive stink. The sensory contrast--smelling like roses or trash--hinges completely upon one's perceptual filters. 

And so, I told the men out at the prison, we enter the world with our noses. We will smell the smells. The question is, are we able to smell our way into the kingdom of God? When Christ appears unexpectedly before us, will we smell roses or trash? Will be be drawn to the perfume of God or recoil in disgust?

So let me give Jesus's "for the one who as ears, let them hear" a little Pauline tweak:

For the one who has a nose, let them smell.

I recently finished the very interesting book Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C.S. Lewis by Michael Ward. 

In Planet Narnia, Ward makes the argument that Lewis uses the archetypes of the "seven heavens"--Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Saturn, Mercury, the Moon, and the Sun--to create a distinctive imaginative world for each of the seven books in The Chronicles of Narnia. You can read Planet Narnia to see which planets go with which books in The Chronicles. I went into Planet Narnia as a skeptic that Ward had cracked "the Narnia Code," but he makes a strong case. And even if Ward is wrong, his close reading of The Chronicles, along with the Ransom space trilogy and Lewis' entire corpus, popular and scholarly, is very illuminating.

Ward also makes the argument in Planet Narnia that The Chronicles of Narnia was written to advance Lewis' argument from his apologetical book Miracles. 

The popular consensus is that Miracles is Lewis' least effective apologetical work. When I read it, many years ago, I didn't find it overly persuasive. Ward argues that Lewis also felt a dissatisfaction with the book, and that the The Chronicles of Narnia was his attempt at a better approach. 

Scholars of Lewis have long been interested in his seemingly abrupt switch from popular apologetical works to the writing of children's fantasy stories. What caused this change? Was Lewis withdrawing from the fight for the faith?

Ward argues, no, Lewis didn't withdraw. He simply changed tactics. According to Ward, Lewis recognized the limits of rational argumentation in apologetical debate. You see that rationalism on display in Miracles. Such logical arguments really only go so far, and they generally fail to persuade. What was needed, rather, was a conversion and a baptism of the imagination. This is what happened to Lewis himself when, as a young atheist, he encountered George MacDonald's fairy story Phantastes. MacDonald converted Lewis' imagination.

Lewis knew that the rational arguments of books like Miracles could only get you so far. You struggle to "get" faith by standing aloof and objective, analyzing it from the outside. What was needed, rather, was imaginatively inhabiting faith, getting "inside" the story. Only there, from the inside, could the "logic" of faith be appreciated and understood. Lewis wrote The Chronicles of Narnia to create that imaginative world and opportunity.

Lewis described this strategy of imaginative inhabitation in a short essay titled "Meditations in a Toolshed":

I was standing today in the dark toolshed. The sun was shining outside and through the crack at the top of the door there came a sunbeam. From where I stood that beam of light, with the specks of dust floating in it, was the most striking thing in the place. Everything else was almost pitch-black. I was seeing the beam, not seeing things by it.

Then I moved, so that the beam fell on my eyes. Instantly the whole previous picture vanished. I saw no toolshed, and (above all) no beam. Instead I saw, framed in the irregular cranny at the top of the door, green leaves moving on the branches of a tree outside and beyond that, 90 odd million miles away, the sun. Looking along the beam, and looking at the beam are very different experiences.

The book Miracles was looking "at" the sunbeam of faith. Detached, rational, objective, argumentative. Miracles examined enchantment from the outside.

The Chronicles of Narnia, by contrast, looks "along" the sunbeam, imaginatively inhabiting the world of faith. Enchantment is experienced from the inside. Looking "along" the sunbeam is a participatory form of knowing and understanding as you live within the story. 

We remain in Chapter 6 of Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution entitled "Violence is Not Love." 

Last week I discussed the troubling rise of choking during sex among the younger generations, a trend associated with widespread pornography consumption and one that is adversely affecting the mental health of young women.

And yet, it could be argued that both Perry and I are moralizing here. Maybe young women like being choked? Maybe we're just prudes who are opposed to kink? 

One bit of evidence here for that argument is/was the popularity of the BDSM erotica of the book and movie Fifty Shades of Grey. Hundreds of thousands of women, if not millions, read the book and watched the movie. Clearly there is a widespread desire out there among women for BDSM kink. Some women do like being tied down, spanked, whipped, and choked during sex. Some women do have rape fantasies. Consequently, aren't we, as moralizing prudes, stigmatizing these desires and the women who have them? Again, let people do what they want in the bedroom!

How does Perry address this argument? 

Perry puts much of the appeal of Fifty Shades of Grey upon male possessiveness, and how this hits the erotic buttons of female sexual psychology. Recall, from earlier in this series, the impact of evolution upon female mate choice. Specifically, given the reproductive challenges women faced in Stone Age contexts, women evolved to identify "high investment" mates. Male focus and exclusive attention were therefore erotic cues. In modern language, a male being "really into you" was arousing. Exclusive and focused attention signals care, investment, and love. In fantasy, these attentional cues can be pushed to become superstimuli, where male attention become obsessive, his entire world now orbiting you. This obsessive attention from a desired male hits female sexual psychology in its sweet spot. It's the exact opposite of that dud of a husband who never listens to you, barely notices you, and only watches sports on TV. In contrast to that, wouldn't it be arousing to have a gorgeous, rich man be obsessed with you?

That's the erotic appeal in Fifty Shades of Grey. Importantly, beyond obsession, there are other erotic cues involved here. As I mentioned, we want this obsessed man to be both handsome and rich, exactly like Christian Grey. This is critical to the erotic fantasy. If Christian Grey was a poor and ugly man he's not becoming an object of erotic desire, no matter how obsessed he is. In fact, that dude would be a stalker and we'd call the police on him. This erotic desire for good looks and wealth also goes back to an evolutionary logic. The "high investment" mate you're looking for isn't just investing attention, but also resources, both genetic and material. Stepping back, Christian Grey has all of these: He's gorgeous. He's rich. And he's obsessed with Anastasia. All the ingredients for an erotic fantasy are there. Here's Perry describing this:

Christian Grey is a violent, controlling brute, but his obsessive behavior towards Anastasia does at least demonstrate his unwavering commitment to her. Fifty Shades adds a whips-and-chains aesthetic, but many older romance novels are centered on much the same dynamic: the strong handsome man who falls head over heels in love with the heroine and will do anything to have her, up to and including being violent.

...There is variation within the romance genre, and heroes may be more or less aggressive depending upon the particular book, but one theme remains consistent: the consumers of women's erotic fiction have never been turned on by a man who plays hard to get, wavers in his interest, or is distracted by the attentions of other women. Long before Fifty Shades came along, what these readers were aroused by is the fantasy of a man who is really into them, often obsessively so.

As Perry goes on to note, while obsessive, violent men might be erotically attractive in fantasy, violent and obsessive men are not the best partners in real life. We know, for instance, that the number one cause of domestic violence is male jealousy. And this creates one of the saddest and most tragic aspects of domestic violence, how abused women interpret violence as obsessive and exclusive interest in her, that abuse is a sign of love. According to Perry, this confusion is also behind why many young women are now consenting to being choked during sex. Perry writes:

Sadly, images of strangulation shared or liked by women on social media...and testimony that I've heard directly from many young women all suggest that many of the women who seek out strangulation have a very particular--and very misguided--understanding of what strangulation means when men do it to them during sex. 

To put it bluntly, many of these women are as deluded as the victim of domestic violence...who 'imagines--falsely--that a punch in the face or a hand around the throat is at least a sign of his continued interest in her.' They think strangulation indicates a man's love, passion and desire for them. More often than not, it indicates none of these things, but, in a culture in which the differences between male and female sexuality are routinely denied, particularly by liberal feminists, it shouldn't surprise us that many of these young women take the lead from erotic fiction such as Fifty Shades and misinterpret aggression from their male partners as a sign of passion...

I'm floating an argument. Experimental theology as advertised. Feel free to kick the tires.

This is a two part argument. The first argument is for the existence of God based upon the problem of evil. The second, related argument is for the moral obligation to believe in God.

The first argument:

1. The problem of evil exists only if God exists. Phrased negatively, if God doesn't exist then the universe exists exactly as it must and cannot be described with moral terms such as either "good" or "evil." As the atheist Richard Dawkins has said, 

In a universe of blind physical forces and genetic replication, some people are going to get hurt, other people are going to get lucky, and you won't find any rhyme or reason in it, nor any justice. The universe we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil and no good, nothing but blind, pitiless indifference.

2. Evil is a problem. We judge that the world ought and should be otherwise.

3. Therefore, God exists.

The second argument:

1. We are morally obligated to believe that evil is a problem. To look upon evil and say that it is neither good or evil is sociopathic and wicked. We must believe that evil is a problem and name it accordingly.

2. Being morally obligated to believe that the problem of evil exists, we are, therefore, morally obligated to believe that God exists.

The provocation of these arguments is to make the point that the problem of evil is often taken to be the best argument for atheism. Logically, though, as I try to illustrate above, the problem of evil presupposes theism. We can only make the judgment--either rationally or emotionally--that the world ought to be otherwise if it indeed can be otherwise. This is precisely what Christians believe in the face of evil, that the world ought to be otherwise because it can and will be otherwise. This is a call to moral exertion in the face of evil. By contrast, the position of atheistic materialism is that the world can't be otherwise. The world exists exactly as it must exist, and no configuration of it can be morally judged as either good or evil. The problem of evil simply doesn't exist. 

But what about the problem of pain and horrific suffering? Well, again, from the position of materialism consciousness is epiphenomenological, a mere by-product of particular material arrangements with no causal power upon those material constituents. That some material configurations are associated with conscious pain and torment is the unproblematic way the universe just happens to exist, and can't really be otherwise. Horrific pain is as morally unproblematic as a rock or the law of gravity. As Dawkins points out, according to materialism suffering is "precisely" what "we should expect." So, resign yourself. Can't be otherwise. Move along, there is no problem here. 

Of course, though, we can't move along. No caring person could. We judge that a universal moral obligation is involved here. Indifference isn't an option. Which moves us decisively from an atheistic to theistic framework and the moral obligation to believe in God.

Stated simply, because Christians judge that the world ought and can be otherwise, yes, we have a problem of evil. But this is much better, morally speaking, than thinking evil is not a problem, which is the metaphysical implication of materialistic atheism. 

I've recently written about some of the issues associated with penal substitutionary atonement. Again, you know the basic idea: Because of sin we stand under God's judgment and wrath. However, Jesus stands in our place, taking that judgment and wrath upon himself. Jesus substitutes himself and dies for you and I.

The main criticism of penal substitutionary atonement, as I and others have described, is the view of God that sits behind it. God's baseline stance is wrath, a default position that has to be changed. Consequently, the leading edge of the gospel proclamation is The Big Angry Guy in the Sky. Salvation is being rescued from That Guy.

This criticism is well known. And yet, there is a substitutionary logic in the New Testament regarding the life, death and resurrection of Jesus. And many of us feel queasy about those passages and tend to ignore them. So, how are we to read texts that have a substitutionary logic?

To start, we all can see the point that love often involves suffering for each other and for the sake of each other. Love often accepts suffering and pain intended for others. Love involves protecting and shielding others, even when those others might be "getting what they deserve." If something bad were going to happen to my children I'd rush to "substitute" myself. That's what love does. So it's not surprising that God does the same thing.

The sticking point has to do with where the suffering is coming from. That's where substitutionary logic gets weird. The "bad thing" coming down on us is God's wrath. God ends up saving us from God. That's the paradox introduced by the crime-and-punishment metaphor.

But as scholars like N.T. Wright and others have noted, the better frame here isn't penal but covenantal. YHWH and Israel form a covenant, with God's plan being to bless the world through Israel. But Israel cannot keep its end of deal, bringing upon itself all the punishments that befall those who break covenants in the ancient Semitic mind. Israel breaks its promise with the result, per the covenantal agreement, being exile. And at that point, God's plan to bless the world through Israel gets stuck.

So, God enters history in Jesus to be Israel's representative, Israel's Messiah. And as the faithful Israelite Jesus takes up the covenantal burden--both in fulfilling the Torah and in bearing Israel's punishment in breaking the covenant. In Jesus God does what Israel could not do, stepping in to help Israel fulfill its side of the covenant, which, per ancient Semitic covenantal logic, does include punishments for breaking promises. In all this Jesus substitutes himself for Israel. Jesus protects Israel from itself, carries a burden it cannot carry, and takes on its exile so that Israel can be set free.

The point in all this is that we can read the substitutionary logic of the New Testament through a covenantal rather than penal frame. In short, I've suggested that we speak of a "covenantal substitutionary atonement" rather than a "penal substitutionary atonement."

Of course, this raises other sorts questions, but these are different questions from those thrown up by penal substitutionary atonement. The substitution in this covenantal context has less to do with you and your particular relationship with God than with the narrative of God's relationship with Israel and God's overcoming the curse of the Law to push Israel's vocation forward, through the Messiah, to its universal objective where all can be saved.