Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

“Make a tree good and its fruit will be good, or make a tree bad and its fruit will be bad, for a tree is recognized by its fruit. You brood of vipers, how can you who are evil say anything good? For the mouth speaks what the heart is full of. A good man brings good things out of the good stored up in him, and an evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in him.

• Matthew 12:33-35

A certain ruler asked him, “Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?”
“Why do you call me good?” Jesus answered. “No one is good—except God alone. You know the commandments: ‘You shall not commit adultery, you shall not murder, you shall not steal, you shall not give false testimony, honor your father and mother.’”

• Luke 18:18-20

“Reason can show the rationality and inner coherence of Christian doctrine. Anselm follows Augustine’s method of ‘faith seeking understanding’.
Anselm pursued this method in three major writings. In the Monologion (1077), originally called An Example of Meditation on the Grounds of Faith, he offers a ‘proof’ for the existence of God. The fact that we can discern degrees of goodness means that there is an absolute Good, by which we measure it:
“ ‘All other goods [apart from the Good] are good through a being other than themselves, and this being [the Good] alone is good of itself. It is only this being, which is alone good of itself, that is supremely good. This being is supreme in that it surpasses all other beings. It is neither equalled nor excelled. But if it is supremely good, it is also supremely great. There is, therefore. some one being which is both supremely good and supremely great – i.e. the highest of all existing beings.’ (Monologion I)”

• Tony Lane, A Concise History of Christian Thought

Saint Anselm of Canterbury (1033-1109) is considered the greatest of the thinkers within the church bridging the gap between St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.  Some of my thoughts on Anselm can be found HERE.

As the first paragraph of the quote suggests, he used a logical argument to show that if good exists, then God must exist as the perfect good.  It used the philosophical tools that were used by St. Augustine and the ancient Greek philosophers.

We can take what the Bible says about God and derive Anselm’s argument, but Anselm starts with the concept, something within nature or man himself and argues, similar to Plato and his Ideals, that this glimpse of something tangible within mankind must have some source of origin, and that origin is the pure essence of that thing.  Plato’s arguments fell apart when thinking of the ideals for things like fingernail clippings.  In taking it to that extreme, we get some silly arguments, but in looking at things we might consider ideal within us, they really do not exist without God.

The argument that there is no such thing as a selfless good deed has been argued for centuries.  Note: if you look it up on most search engines, you have to go through a few pages of discussions on an episode of Friends, but the true philosophical argument existed prior to the television show, or the writers would not have used it.  The cynical person would jump on the question of “What are you getting out of this?” right away, and many Christians on mission trips talk about the wonderful feeling they got from helping other people (more a matter of the enzymes flowing through the body than it was being touched by the Holy Spirit, at least in many cases).

That does not mean we should quit helping the poor.  Jesus told us to help the poor and to love one another.  But, even in doing something for God’s glory and gaining no glory ourselves, we still get something for our troubles, even in addition to the endorphins.

Thus, even with much scrutiny, Saint Anselm’s arguments stand the test of time.  Yet, there is always that element of belief.  Saint Anselm may have created great volumes of arguments that the apologist can use, but that only gets the other person to consider that God might exist.  To get that person to belief and trust in Jesus Christ requires bridging from the intellectual realm to the spiritual, and for the person making Anselm’s argument, just more up to date, that person must shift from apologist to evangelist.

If you like these Tuesday morning essays about philosophy and other “heavy topics,” but you think you missed a few, you can use this LINK. I have set up a page off the home page for links to these Tuesday morning posts. I will continue to modify the page as I add more.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.