Semi-Random Musings (48)

A Christian man looking for a wife thought his Facebook connections might help, so he inquired on the social media site recently about churches in his area where he might find higher than average numbers of single women. As he put it, “Same faith is a priority.” No kidding.

Much to this poor fellow’s surprise, the response to his query was most unfavorable. “Church isn’t for dating!” was the most common reaction.

Really? That’s a new one on me.

It turns out this man’s experience is far from unique. Justin Campbell writes, “Here’s the reality. In our church culture, the church can be one of the least safe places to ask someone out.” He goes on to list all the ways approaching a woman can go wrong even with best intentions — all the ways a man’s interest in a woman may be misinterpreted, his reputation ruined, all the potential social awkwardness around church lobby etiquette and so on. As a result, Campbell says, it’s actually easier for a man to approach women in a bar than at church.

No doubt. For one, most men (and women) are sober in church. One hopes.

I haven’t tried to score a date for decades either in church lobbies or in bars, so I won’t claim the authority of experience one way or another. Nevertheless, it seems to me that even with all the potential drawbacks, the ONLY good place to meet a potential partner is among fellow believers, either at church or in some other Christian venue (summer camps, conferences, Bible Schools, parachurch organizations, etc.), or perhaps through mutual Christian friends. Where else than among likeminded believers would a serious follower of Christ look? Where else will he see evidence of the character qualities he is seeking in a wife? Certainly not on a barstool, and definitely not falling off one.

The quickest and most common way for a Christian teen or twenty-something to destroy his or her fellowship with the Lord, testimony and potential for service to Christ is to start dating (or worse, to marry) an unbeliever. It’s absolutely fatal. Looking for a partner at work, school or, heaven forfend, in a bar is tempting fate. Invariably, people who cast a wider net of that type end up locked into lifetime commitments with unbelievers (for as long as the other party continues to find them mildly amusing). Moreover, if the results I’ve seen from friends who use Christian Mingle and other social media sites are any indication, they are almost as bad: nominal or immature Christians side by side with some very unusual and undesirable characters.

Don’t get me wrong, a man who makes dating potential his top priority in choosing a church has gotten the wrong end of the stick. Like parents who pick a church they think might be a source of friends for their children, things rarely work out the way we expect. Moreover, a church may be a good place to scope out possibilities, but between services over coffee might not always be the best time and place to ask somebody out. That’s what phones are for. Nevertheless, if “church isn’t for dating” in any sense at all, then nowhere is.

Furthermore, absolutely everything that can go wrong when a man shows interest in a woman from his local church can more easily go wrong in a secular venue. At very least, girls who don’t return a man’s interest at church are hardly the types to go running to Human Resources with stories about harassment.

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You knew it would happen eventually. Somebody decided to run a Christian doctrine through an AI model to test the soundness of its logic. The first one they chose? Total Depravity.

While the entire Reformed theological package rated a logical composite score of 25/100, Total Depravity on its own scored almost 95%. Quoting scripture, the Church Fathers and the Westminster Confession, the AI concluded a sinless human life is mathematically impossible. I tend to agree. AI also prefers Augustine to Pelagius on the subject with, as one commenter put it, “the certainty of the Higgs boson”.

Of course, to evaluate that result objectively, we’d have to know exactly how the user described the Total Depravity doctrine in the first place and what sources the AI trained on. If, for example, you are trying to prove that all men are sinners and estranged from God, you can find evidence of that from one end of scripture to the other, and AI is as good a way as any other to gather it all in one place. No reasonable person from any denominational background is likely to dispute the truth of that assertion. If you are an exception to that, first read Romans 3, where Paul cobbles together an extensive series of quotations from the Psalms (5, 10, 36 and 140) and Prophets (Isaiah 59) on the subject all men being “under sin”.

But the sticking point for me in the modern understanding of the Total Depravity doctrine, as more fully described here, is not that all men are born under sin; of course they are. The issue is whether human beings are capable of learning to despise our own sinful condition and of desiring relief from it in any measure at all prior to the moment of divine regeneration.

The claim that this is never the case is somewhat more difficult to establish convincingly from scripture, and somehow I doubt the LLM model considered that aspect of the modern Total Depravity doctrine. None of the responses I saw hinted that human “response-ability” had been evaluated, and any description that doesn’t make that aspect of the TD teaching (the comprehensive denial thereof) crystal clear has bypassed the major bone of contention between determinists and non-determinists.

Proving all men are sinners does not begin to address the issue. It’s only Step One.