Riding the Tiger

You might wonder what all that messing about with tigers, definitions thereof, and considerations of the greatest, or most tigerish tiger, was all about. A fair question. The answer is that, at least in my mind, it was all to do with the ontological argument for the existence of God. This might tell you more about my mind and its organisation than you really wanted to know.

The point here is that the greatest, most tiger-like tiger possible is analogous to God, at least insofar as anything is. To be the greatest tiger, or the most tiger-like tiger, the tiger in question has to exist. The greatest tiger cannot be the greatest tiger if the tiger does not exist – existing is part of what we mean by being the greatest, after all. Mohammed Ali could not have claimed to be the greatest boxer if he had not existed. Similarly, we cannot claim that a given tiger is the greatest if that tiger does not (or has not) exist.

With respect to God, of course, we have a slight problem. By many definitions of God God is the greatest. Anselm’s argument, now named the ontological argument, is roughly speaking that given ‘the Fool has said in his heart, there is no God’ (Ps 4:1), the said Fool will know what the word God means. If I say ‘God exists’ then, by the normal rules of language, you will know at least roughly what I mean.

Anselm argues that the Fool knows what the Psalmist is talking about: ‘something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought’. God, here, is simply the greatest thing (in a very loose use of the word ‘thing’) that we can think of, and then some. In fact, the then some is that this great being has to exist, otherwise it would be missing a bit of being the greatest being. Part of the meaning of the word God is that it refers to the supreme being, after all. I suspect that most western people, at least, would agree to that, whether they are atheists of theist or somewhere in between.

Here we have a few links to the greatest tiger post. Firstly, there is the problem of existence. Does the greatest tiger exist? If the greatest tiger does not exist, then it is not the greatest tiger. The question is more pointed with respect to God, of course. If we can imagine the supreme being, something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought, then by the same token as the tiger, He must exist, otherwise something is missing from the greatness.

We also have a definition problem: God is defined as the supreme being and part of that definition is surely ‘something-than-which-nothing-greater-can-be-thought’. In which case the ontological argument proves nothing; it is simply a convoluted but circular argument revolving around the definition of God. We cannot define the greatest tiger and thereby make that tiger exist. Can we, therefore, define God and thereby make Him exist?

Of course, we cannot. If God could be caused to exist by human word definition, we would automatically rule that being out as a candidate for God. The question seems to turn upon our definition and use of words, however. We use the word God in a certain way, and in public discourse we agree on what the word means. Most words we use describe things in the world, whether those are objects, actions, activities or emotions. They may be more or less abstract, granted, we may understand the meaning of words to a greater or lesser extent, but nevertheless, ultimately they are pinned to things in the world.

It is not quite the same with God, of course. Here the analogy with tigers fails. Tigers, whatever they are, are creatures in the world. If I wanted to I could go and observe a tiger, and abstract from that tiger the features of the species. I could then journey on and view a variety of tigers and take their common features. That would be my ‘type’ of a tiger, against which other creatures are judged. A few would match, and I would call them tigers, perhaps of different colours. Many would not and I would have to call them ‘not-a-tiger’ or invent a different type for them.

I cannot do a similar exercise with God, however. The definition of God, after all, is that He is unique and invisible – a spiritual being not a material being. Therefore I cannot go and observe a number of God and abstract the common factors to form an ideal God. The definition of God simply does not work like that.

That does not seem to mean that the definition is unique, however. For example, I can go to a country and say ‘show me the economy’. The locals would probably look at me as if I were mad. The economy is a thing that we cannot actually see. It is something we can see the effects of, and describe in metaphor and analogy: economies slow down, or overheat, or whatever. But the economy as such is not something I can examine. I might see the effects of an economic slow-down, but not see the slowing itself.

Perhaps this is a better analogy than the tiger for God. I can see tigers, I cannot see God, but nor can I see the economy. I can see the effects of the economy, and of course, people differ about whether those effects are good or bad for people. Similarly, I can see the effects of God, at least from certain perspectives. I can believe that the trees I see in the garden, or the tigers in the world, were created by God – not necessarily directly, of course, but by setting initial conditions and processes. I can also not believe that and be an atheist. Both sides can produce evidence for their point of view, as Marxist and capitalist economists can disagree over that their data means for an economy.

But that seems to make the existence of God a personal choice, which, probably, neither theists or atheists would be particularly happy with. Analogies, by definition, fail eventually, and we have found the limits of tiger and economic analogies for God.

The Greatest Tiger

Let us suppose that tigers exist. That is, of course, a fairly unprovable assertion, at least without running the risk of getting mauled, but let us grant that tigers are tigers. Thus there must be something with defines the state of being a tiger: teeth, claws, carnivorous appetites, stipes, a cat-like appearance and so on.

Now, let us suppose that there are two types of tiger, characterized by orange and black stripes (the ‘orange tiger’) and by black and white stripes (the ‘white tiger’). We are now left with the question as to which type (species) of tiger is most ‘tigerish’, that is, most like the ideal type of tiger that we have in our minds.

Both species of tiger show, of course, most of the characteristics of ‘being a tiger’ – the teeth, claws, appetite, and stripes. So only the colour of the tiger is at issue. Is orange or white more distinctive of a tiger?

Most people would probably opt for an orange tiger as being the typical sort of tiger, the sort that most humans when thinking of the word tiger would conjure up. Thus, we can say that the orange tiger is the most tigerish or tigers, while the white is not quite as tigerish, due to its colour.

Suppose there was a supporter of the primacy of the white tiger, or even a white tiger of philosophical bent. They could argue that, in fact, as white contains all other colours, the tigerishness of the white tiger includes the tigerishness of all other tigers, including orange tigers and every other hue of potential tiger – red, green and blue and all points in between. We can, for the moment at least, discard the possibility of ultra-violet and infra-red tigers.

We have now generalized one of our assumptions, that there are only two sorts of tiger. The white tiger, it is now claimed, displays the tigerishness of all possible tigers, as the white tiger contains all possible colours of tiger, as well as the other characteristics of the animal.

The orange tiger can reply to this arguing that the white tiger is a white tiger, and not all tiger colours. White is a distinctive colour, a pigmentation, not a conglomeration of all possible colours. That might work with white light, the argument could go, but does not work with fur. White light when beamed through a prism may refract into all the possible colours, but white tigers do not.

A response to this might be that while white tigers do not, admittedly, refract, observing a white tiger through an orange filter would make the white tiger’s fur orange, while observing an orange tiger through a white filer would leave the perception of the orange tiger as being orange. Thus, in some sense, the perception at least of a white tiger contains all possible tigers.

The argument might develop along a number of lines at this point. For example, the orange tiger could suggest that the perception of a tiger and its reality are not the same thing. While someone could perceive a white tiger as being orange, and hence deduce that they were perceiving an orange tiger, this does not mean that the tiger is orange. In fact, the perceiver could well identify the white tiger seen through and orange filter as a tiger because they then perceive the tiger as being of a normal colour (orange) for a tiger. This, therefore, is further evidence for orange tigers being the most tiger-like tigers, not the contrary.

Another development could be along idealist lines. We believe that there is a form of tiger, call it Tiger, in some higher dimension. All tigers participate in this form, through some unknown mechanism. The Tiger gives tigers of all hues their tigerishness. This works (except for the mystical ‘participation’ bit) but does not solve our problem. Is the Tiger orange or white? We have only moved the problem into a higher dimension, not solved it.

We can argue, perhaps, that the problem here is one of definition. Are we defining ‘tiger’ as being white or orange? If we decide to call one a ‘tiger’ and the other a ‘snow tiger’ then we can resolve the problem. Tigers are tigers and snow tigers are snow tigers. That partially defines away our dilemma, but only partially. A snow tiger is still a recognizable tiger; we have just defined away its potential equivalence to an orange tiger. We could equally define a white tiger as a tiger and an orange tiger as an orange tiger, and we would still have to same problem.

The question then arises as to whether we can think of a ‘tiger more tigerish than can be thought’, the ultimate tiger, or, perhaps, the Tiger of the ideal form. Perhaps we can, although we still run into the problem of the colour of the specific tigers in front of us. We could have the form of a white tiger, and the form of an orange tiger, but that, again, merely seems to move the problem to a different dimension, that of the relationship between the forms of the tigers – are they both derived from a higher form of ‘tiger’, or are they independent?

I am really not sure there is an answer to this problem, and many people would probably argue that it is a pseudo-problem anyway. Tigers come in both white and orange forms. One is not more of a tiger than another, they are both tigers, just different tigers. Do we really need to relate one tiger to another and find out which epitomizes the tiger? After all, if we meet a tiger in the jungle, we are unlikely to question whether it is a proper tiger or not – running away or climbing a tree would seem to be a sensible option rather than quizzing it as to its tigerishness.

And yet it does not seem that the problem is quite so simple to dismiss. There are tigers both orange and white. But how do we know they are both tigers without having some higher conceptual Tiger’ to compare them with?

Our Daily Bread

Bread is, of course, the staff of life. And bread, the sort of bread we eat, is peculiar to a country. Many Europeans, for example, find British bread soft and fluffy. Many Britons like French bread and there is an increasing taste for artisan bread. Perhaps, after decades of quickly produced manufactured bread, bread is back.

Bread also means things to us. As a basic component of a meal, breaking bread, eating together, is a major social event. One of the things that people want to do after Covid lockdowns is eating together, and often that will include bread. Bread also is a major component of religious events, such as Holy Communion. We share bread, consecrated for us, broken for us as the body of Christ was.

Bread has been a major consideration since it was discovered, an event now unknown. Some roasted grain to eat, but others must have ground it and, perhaps, wild yeasts landed on it and the bread rose. Baking bread is a fascinating and consuming business – how can a few grains of yeast create such transformation?

The constituents of bread are fairly basic: flour, water, yeast and salt. You can, I think, do without the salt, but that does not improve the flavour. Salt is also an inhibitor of the yeast; the aim is balance between the two. The flour gives the gluten which provides the food for the yeast to grow. It also provides most of the flavour.

Without yeast the bread is unleavened. This too is famous and well known: the Israelites took unleavened bread in the Exodus. Allowing bread to rise takes time. Modern methods add sugar to speed the process, but this does not permit the flavour to develop as much. A rising can take up to three hours; the yeast growth is exponential and so is faster in the latter stages. With sugar, the rise can be limited to about fifteen minutes.

But bread is so much more than just food:

Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through you goodness we have received the bread we offer you; fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.

The Earth, from which the wheat comes, is God’s. The human hands which make the bread are also God’s.

This relates back to a sort of joke about God and humanity. Man challenges God to a contest to create life. They toss a coin to see who goes first and Man wins. He stoops and picks up some soil. ‘Ah,’ says God, ‘No, make your own earth.’

‘All things come from God, and of His own do we give Him.’

Bread means things to us beyond food. Fellowship and sharing for one thing. This has been a problem during lock-down of course. The availability of the Eucharist has been limited (much more so for wine when shared in a common cup, of course). The fellowship meal is much less available than it was. On the other hand, the making of bread may have become more popular. Bread making takes time, and some people have had time because of the Covid virus and lockdowns.

The sorts of bread people ate meant things as well. The nobility ate wheat bread, the most expensive and hardest to grow grain. Indeed, some argue that the Norman nobility refused to take land in highland England because they would have to eat oat or rye bread. In the Bible the boy has barley loaves – the food of the Middle Eastern poor at the time. Jesus takes and breaks it, and all eat and are satisfied. The hungry have no space of the niceties of what sort of bread it is.

If bread, if eating simply becomes a mechanical occupation - we eat because we have to – then bread becomes a poor substitute for itself. As a child, I read a book called, I think, Fattipuffs and Thinifers. The Fattipuffs were gourmands, for whom eating was a pleasure and a meal took half a day. Thinifers had a motto: ‘We eat to live not live to eat’. Eventually, for reasons I do not recall, they went to war over the matter. Perhaps both sides learnt that food is both eating to live and living to eat.

The Thinifers ate standing up, in a hurry. But nice food is to be taken slowly, and the nicest food takes time to prepare. Bread can take from fifteen minutes to three hours to rise, and the flavour depends on the time. There is a movement towards ‘slow food’ as opposed to fast food. Food that is made carefully, to allow flavour, and which is savoured with friends or family. Fast food is stuffed down at your desk between meetings. Perhaps we have to decide which we prefer and try it out.

Similar reflections apply to other things, of course. When we consider God, or pray, do we just mutter a quick petition and rush on, or do we slow down and reflect. How much thought do we put in to considering God and what he does for us? Do we just think that the bread before us is the work of human hands and forget the rest?

Singing the Ethos of God

What place does Scripture have in Christian ethics? After all, the Bible is hardly a dictionary of modern ethical dilemmas and their solutions. We cannot, say, look up ‘nuclear weapons’ in the Bible and decide whether they are a good or a bad thing. Scripture does not work like that.

We can, of course, attempt to proof text our ethics. When the Bible says ‘you shall not kill’ that is fairly clear. Applied to nuclear weaponry, however, it might clearly state we should not use the bomb, but what about possessing it to stop the other side using theirs? Even then, ‘thou shalt not kill’ has, over the years, accumulated a number of caveats, such as self-defence and the defence of the weak.

So, for example, if a poor and demilitarised state were threatened by a neighbour with invasion or, if there were any resistance, nuclear annihilation, would another state be justified in threatening the neighbour with annihilation if they crossed the border? As far as I can tell, the Bible is not going to give us direct answers to these questions.

How, then, is Scripture used in Christian ethics? Alternatively, we can ask what is the place of Christian ethics in Scripture? As the foregoing might have suggested, the answer is not as straightforward as some people, both Christian and not, might suppose.

One view of the place of ethics in Scripture is put forward by Brian Brock:

Brock, B. (2007). Singing the Ethos of God: On the Place of Christian Ethics in Scripture. Cambridge: Eerdmans.

The first question that arises is why on earth ‘singing’? What is the difference between singing and saying, speaking or reading? Brock’s point is that in singing of God we involve ourselves. That is, by singing the ethos of God, we form ourselves in using Scripture to praise God. The paradigm case of doing this in Scripture is, of course, the use of the Psalms.

The book is divided into three parts. In the first part, Brock discusses various views of Christian ethics and the relation thereof with Scripture. For those of us who have not read the other views, this is interesting but a bit off-putting. I suppose that is the price of reading academic texts without being an academic in the specific subject. After that, and a discussion of Bonhoeffer's ethics as related to Psalm 119. Brock describes the use of the Psalms by Augustine and Luther. He focusses on the exegesis of a few Psalms that they wrote; not the same Psalms for comparison, but the focus is on how those Psalms are related to the rest of Scripture and, most importantly, to the formation of the Christian mind and hence conscience.

The overall effect is that by reading the Psalms carefully, as Christian believers, we can relate the formation which Scripture gives to our thinking to the world around us. Both, after all, are given by God and therefore should be relatable. Just because the Bible says nothing about nuclear weapons does not mean that the formation given by Scripture should not, or cannot, form our thoughts about their use and possession.

Brock notes that a constant theme in the Psalms, particularly Psalm 119 is the idea of te ‘way’. The way of the Lord, Torah, the Law and a variety of other synonyms. How do we learn the way of the Lord? The answer is by truly engaging with Scripture, wrestling with it, if you like, singing it. We learn the way of the Lord by doing the way of the Lord. That doing is, of course, usually done in a community of people trying to do the same thing. As Brock says, we know what the goal of the Way is, but we cannot see the path to get there. We have to rely on God to show us the next step on the way towards the heavenly city.

The third part tries to move the discussion forward. There is a discussion of language and metaphor in the Bible. Metaphors orient us towards the reality that the metaphor indicates: ‘...from now on you will be catching men' (Luke 5:10 NRSV). The Way is itself a metaphor: we are not called to walk along a specific concrete path, but to form ourselves according to Scripture, our interaction with the world, other Christian voices and in the light of our calling towards the city of God.

One point that Brock makes is that the metaphors of the Bible have become a bit over-familiar to us. They have lost their shock value, the capability to surprise us and prompt a rethinking of our views, values, attitudes and thinking. Hence, Brock argues, when we truly immerse ourselves in Scripture, when we become (to use Luther’s expression) ‘chatterers about God’, when we sing about God, engaging with Scripture not only intellectually but affectively, by allowing it to shape our thinking, our lives, our emotional responses to the call of God as well as to the charge to serve the world, then we find the place of ethics in Scripture and Scripture in ethics.

God, famously, reorientates our hearts as well as our minds. The Apostle’s lives were turned upside down by Jesus call to them. The prophets too had their lives changed by God and his calling, often to extremely uncomfortable places. But it is only engagement at an affective level, not just as an intellectual exercise that will permit us to find answers to our questions of ethics that arise in the world.

The role of Christian ethics in Scripture, then, is to be formed by it. Once the minds seeking a Christian ethical answer have been formed by Scripture, the shape of answers to ethical problems should be discernable, even if considerable effort is still required to articulate them. The problem is the first step, of course, which requires engagement, a hermeneutic of the whole of Scripture and, ultimately, some serious hard work and openness to being changed.