Did Jews Take the Knife to Their Dead?

There is a bizarre discussion taking place at Prosblogion upon which I feel compelled to spend some of my time amusing myself.  Why?  I cannot explain the source of the compulsion save that I have a penchant for philosophy of religion.  So if you want to hear me opine on theological matters in moderate philosophical detail, and don't think you become exceedingly bored in the process, by all means continue reading.  The subject?  Jeremy Pierce is attempting to argue that members of the Reformed faith (mostly Calvinistic Presbyterians  - see the Westminster Confession of Faith for the standard expression of Reformed doctrine) who accept paedobaptism and the causal efficacy of prayer for events which have already occured are committed to the plausibility of baptisms for the dead.  If you're not familiar with religious issues, this probably sounds like nonsense, but I'll attempt to explain.   After an explanation, which includes the mention of some theological and philosophical difficulties for the religious, I will partially refute Jeremy's contention on Reformed terms.

There are two main camps when it comes to baptising folks.  Your standard Baptists, for example, are credobaptists.  That is, Baptists believe that one must make a profession of faith in Christ before receiving the Sacrament of Baptism.  In contrast, most of the Reformed believe that infants should be baptized shortly after birth.  The short story is that the dispute hinges over differences in understanding of what the Sacrament of Baptism is supposed to accomplish.  The paedobaptists think that baptism has effectively replaced circumcision as the outward "sign of the covenant".  Infants are baptised as a sign of being placed in covenant with God, and, as they later choose to accept or reject God they respectively receive the further blessings or curses that go along with being a member or apostate of that covenant.  In contrast, credobaptists usually maintain that one enters the covenant only by receiving salvation (accepting Christ, being born again, etc...) and that baptism is supposed to happen after this, usually just for the purpose of "public commitment".    Matters become very amusing when a paedobaptist converts to credobaptism or a religious faith that accepts credobaptism, as this almost always results in rebaptism.  The Southern Baptists, for example, do not accept the baptism most Presbyterians give their children.  Further comedy results from the related dispute over whether or not sprinkling the water on the child is sufficient (infant baptisms rarely involve dunking!) or whether complete submersion is necessary.  Ah the amusements...

Next we turn to prayer.  Blaise Pascal thought that God "established prayer to communicate to His creatures the dignity of causality." (Pensees)  I'm not sure what that means, but there are serious problems for theists when it comes to the causal efficay of prayer.  According to the Bible, the "effectual, fervent prayer of the righteous man availeth much."  (James 5:16)  Of course, it is usually taken as part and parcel of the notion of God's omnisciense that He possesses foreknowledge.  In other words, God knows (and has known from all eternity) everything that will come to pass.  Jeremy Pierce grants God's foreknowledge when he appeals to the causal efficacy of prayer for past events, for God had to know that John Doe would pray for some event before that event occured in order to take John Doe's prayer into account.  Most theologians, likewise, have granted that God possesses foreknowledge.  Descartes is a famous example, and the problems Descartes ran into in his attempt to reconcile God's foreknowledge with the freedom of the will he claimed for man have sparked much debate in the philosophical literature.  I have a forthcoming paper on this subject, but we'll leave Descartes specific problems aside.

The general problem is simply this.  Before God created the world, He knew absolutely everything that would happen in the world-to-be-created.  If God knows that x will happen, then since knowledge entails truth, x must happen.  In other words, there is a maximally compossible set of states of affairs that fill out the world (the states of affairs that God knew would obtain) which must happen. But this is just to say that everything that happens had to have happened.  Yet since freedom of the will requires, among other things, the ability to refrain from performing at least one action one does perform, we are not free.  (Yes, I hold that compatibilism is false.) Furthermore, anything that we do happen to pray for is something that we had to have prayed for, since God knew before the creation of the world that we would pray for it.

What does this mean for the causal efficay of prayer?  Suppose that one prays for some outcome of some event that has not yet come about. On the account sketched above, the outcome of that event was determined before the world was created in accordance with God's foreknowledge. Furthermore, John Doe was determined to pray for that particular outcome before the world was created.  As Descartes puts it, God is the "total cause" of everything that comes to pass.  So how does John Doe's prayer have any effect on the outcome of the event he's praying for? As far as I can tell, John Doe's prayer can, at best, be part of the causal chain of events leading up to the outcome.   God has determined, before John Doe was born, what the outcome of that event will be.  We can allow that God has further determined that John Doe be part of the causal chain of events leading up to that outcome, but ultimately, God alone is the efficient cause.  Most of the Reformed accept this conclusion, and as a consequence, have attempted to sketch compatibilist accounts of freedom or else make appeal to even stranger views such as "middle knowledge".

The account is similar when we consider prayer for events that have already occured.  Consider the Battle of Waterloo.  Now it is a matter of historical fact that the French were defeated.   Suppose that shortly after the last of the fleeing French are being hunted down and driven through the night by the Prussians that a humble Prussian monk is imploring God for victory.   Now God, being concerned with the affairs of the French and Prussians since before the creation of the world has long since decreed that the Prussians will be victorious. Furthermore, He has also decreed that the humble Prussian monk would, after the outcome of the battle, begin his prayers for victory.  At best, it looks as if God could make the future fact that the Prussian monk will pray for victory a part of the casual chain leading to victory, but God is of course the efficient and total cause of both the prayer and the victory.

Jeremy Pierce takes retroactive prayer to be justified by appeal to divine foreknowledge, and I've attempted to sketch in detail just how foreknowledge could be compatible with "retroactive prayer".  Strictly speaking, of course, the prayer is not "retroactively efficacious" in any sense involving backwards causation.  Indeed, given divine foreknowledge, while the prayer had to be made, and could perhaps be derivatively considered part of the causal chain leading to the determined outcome, the prayer is not the efficient cause of the outcome.  Likewise, paedobaptism is not the efficient cause of a child becoming a member of the covenant.  At best, paedobaptism is part of a predetermined causal chain of events the efficient cause of which is God, and the ultimate effect of which is covenant membership.  (I'm still attempting to be very careful in remaining consistent with most expressions of Reformed theology.)

When it comes to baptisms for the dead, the same story will have to be told.  If there  is any sense in which a baptism for the dead (this would be, consistent with most paedobaptists' convictions, neatly performed by sprinkling) is causally efficacious in the introduction of a person into the covenant relationship, it is only because God has decreed from all eternity that the person would be baptised and that the future fact that the person would be baptised figures in the causal chain.  To be gracious, we're now going to overlook whether or not it's coherent for members of the Reformed faith to talk about making choices to perform any action or engaging in reasoned deliberation in a deterministic world.  We'll simply adopt Descartes appeal to mystery, something Christians are hardly unfamiliar with.  (It's common in Reformed circles to assent to God's predetermination of all events but insist, with Descartes, that this doesn't entail fatalism.)

As far as I can now tell, if one is a member of the Reformed faith, one has no basis for concluding whether or not God has decreed from all eternity to make a baptism for the dead part of the causal chain resulting in introduction into the covenant relationship.  There is, as cited earlier, a textual basis for considering prayer to be (in the strange fashion of "by divine fiat") efficacious.  But there is no textual basis for making the same judgment with respect to baptisms for the dead, unless one construes 1 Cor. 15:29 as such a basis, something the majority of Christian sects do not do.  At the very least, the Reformed certainly do not interpret the tenuous and difficult passage as condoning baptism for the dead.  (Let's recall that these folks believe in the infallibilty of the divinely inspired corpus.)  In addition, the Reformed practice of paedobaptism rests in part upon the belief that baptism is an outward sign of covenant membership much like circumcision was a physical sign by which one was "marked" as a member of the covenant community.  The Reformed might well then reason as follows: If the Jews did not circumcise their dead, neither should be baptise our dead.  Somehow, I don't think the Jews took the knife to their dead.

Jeremy's post at Prosblogion raises a more interesting issue.  Members of the intellectual Christian elite who manage, somehow, to resist the massive anti-intellectualism promoted by Christianity, often exhibit a propensity to combine philosophy and theology in curious ways.  Jeremy has pinpointed two Reformed positions, considered them in isolation, and argued that they jointly entail that "there will be cases of dead people whom it will be ok to baptise."  I suppose this is, for some people at least, either interesting or amusing.  It's hard to see how it could be harmful to sprinkle a little water on the dead.   And given the two positions, it's at least possible that (provided you accept the broader inconsistent framework) baptisms for the dead could be strangely causally efficacious.  Yet none of this provides any reason to think one should baptise the dead.  So what's the point?

But let's suppose that Jeremy hasn't only derived the uninteresting claim that two tenets of sectarian Christian doctrine jointly entail the possibility of a third doctrine.  Let's assume instead that he's shown that baptism for the dead is appropriate.  Now the intellectual situation becomes even more humorous when one considers that the explicit contradictions between some Christian tenets and the contradictions logically derivable from other Christian tenets aren't taken to pose any threat to the tenets in question.  Why then should the entailment of two (sectarian) Christian doctrines be deemed doctrinally legitimate?  Perhaps this isn't fair to the religious, who, after all, deny that there are any contradictions whatsoever within the Christian framework.  Jesus was both fully God and fully man, they say, and that isn't contradictory but rather merely paradoxical.  Well, fine.  Doctrine p and doctrine q entail doctrine r, but doctrine r is not part of  Christian doctrine.  How so?  It's paradoxical.

The general point, of course, is that rigorous analytic philosophy of the sort being approximated here and serious religious theology simply do not mix. This is an interesting and somewhat controversial conclusion, but given the widely acknowledged (in religious circles, that is) permissibility of this response, how could they?  I take the point of interest in philosophy of religion to be much the same as the points of interest raised by studying the history of philosophy.   What makes reading Aristotle, Plato, Hume, Kant, Leibniz, Locke, Descartes, and Mill exciting from the perspective of analytic philosophy is the opportunity afforded for detailed consideration of the consistency, cogency, and consequences of the positions in question.  It looks as if Descartes contradicted himself here!  Can this possibly be rendered consistent? Is there a way to understand Kant that makes the most sense of his work and still remains interesting?  Is this particular argument of Mill's for the desirability of pleasure a good argument, or does it depend upon an equivocation?  Likewise, does divine foreknowledge entail determinism?  If so, is this reconcilable with freedom of the will? Just as intriguing philosophical questions can spring from Plato and Hume, so they can spring from Paul, Q, and JEDP.

Serious religious theology, however, wants little to do with these questions qua questions. The theologian is concerned with these questions because he wants to know what religious doctrines the member of his faith must believe.  By and large, it's not philosophy, but the interpretation of divine revelation (whether the Bible or the Pope or both) that drives theology.  For the Reformed particularly, and most Protestants generally, the Bible is strictly authoritative on these matters: "The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life, is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture: unto which nothing at any time is to be added, whether by new revelations of the Spirit, or traditions of men." (WCF I:VI) Where "vain philosophies" suggests anything contrary to divine revelation, it must be rejected. Responsiveness to philosophy has never been, and will never be, a hallmark of the religious.  How could it be when, as the previously cited passage of the WCF points out, all we need is to be found in a book?