Are Evangelical “leaders” used as “useful idiots” by the political left?

Are Evangelical “leaders” used as “useful idiots” by the political left? Or do they take that role on without any prompting at all?

By one definition, “useful idiot is a pejorative term used to describe people perceived as propagandists for a cause whose goals they do not understand, who are used cynically by the leaders of the cause”.

The “twitterati” mob, with its characteristic speed and verbal violence, shows in a microcosm how such a thing happens, and Stephen Wolfe makes the case that Evangelical “thought leaders” certainly have been corrupted in this way:

A video that surfaced last weekend, showing teenage white boys in MAGA hats seemingly taunting an American Indian, set off a frenzy of vitriolic tweets condemning them for bigotry and even demanding that they’re punched in the face …

It was entirely unsurprising to me that evangelical leaders joined the mob. Thabiti Anyabwile, for example, tweeted that the boys demonstrated “racist incivility.” He retweeted (along with Alan Noble) a tweet implying that the boys’ actions manifested “white supremacy” and a video of Nathan Phillips lying that the boys chanted “build the wall.” Beth Moore tweeted, “To glee in dehumanizing any person is so utterly antichrist it reeks of the vomit of hell.” Karen Swallow Prior tweeted, “I’m sick to my stomach. Lord, help.” J. D. Greear, affirming with “Truly!” retweeted a now deleted tweet (though Greear’s remains visible) saying, “This is hate.” Duke Kwon called the incident “disturbing but not surprising.” I’d praise some for their silence, but it’s not clear at this point who has and hasn’t deleted tweets. Ed Stetzer, for example, suggests that he tweeted on the incident but later deleted them.

Later, more comprehensive videos showed “not only that the Indian, Nathan Phillips, lied about what occurred, but also that the boys were subjected to demeaning racial harassment from black supremacists for an hour prior to Phillips intentionally and without provocation walking up to the boys while beating a drum.”

After new videos surfaced, some of these evangelicals expressed regret. Greear tweeted that he’s “frustrated.” Karen Swallow Prior tweets that there are “lots of lessons in this whole mess.” Anyabwile seems to have doubled-down and then, with a tu quoque, claimed that “all” responses were ill-informed. I haven’t seen any hint of remorse from Beth Moore whose tweet was the most vilifying of them all.

Summarizing:

the evangelical elite use the same tactics as the world, rely on the same popular sentiment in rhetoric, and have arisen in relevance among evangelicals largely for two reasons: an engagement technique suitable for the new mediums of discourse (especially Twitter) and because they’ve merely Christianized the moral sentiments and ends of the Western ruling class. … they are the evangelical face of the upper-class interest. Being the court evangelicals to the ruling class, they take their cues from the world, and the world cued them on Saturday to join a mob of personal destruction. Their hasty reaction to the initial video was entirely predictable.

This response has harmful consequences for the rest of Christianity, which will tend to view these individuals as a kind of Christian “collective moral authority”. “[N]o collective failure can dislodge them from their eminent status as evangelicalism’s moral thought leaders. It’s quite remarkable, and since we’re all accustomed to elite dismal failures doing nothing to harm elite credibility, it’s almost imperceptible.”

“The Left” has gotten to where it is via a “long march through the institutions”. President Trump, in his own way, became God’s “useful idiot” insofar as he has espoused a largely conservative agenda, much of which serves as both a foil and an obstacle for these leftist elites. But Trump cannot last forever.

Here is the way out of this particular political mess:

The rest of us must realize that the resistance to the evangelical elite is a matter of deconstructing their rhetorical tricks and disclosing their delusions … we must challenge the rhetoric and deconstruct the sentiments and thereby point them to the true nature of things.

When the evangelical "vote" is conflated with Christian witness

Insofar as Christians conflate the causes of “the political left” with the witness of the Gospel, Christians are being manipulated into becoming “useful idiots”.

The evangelical support for Trump is a “sin [that] is collapsing the Evangelical moral witness,” says David French in a recently published open letter. “Moral witness” has become an important term in the evangelical NeverTrump rhetorical arsenal. Whatever it means, it has been lost or harmed since evangelicals chose to pursue “political expediency” at the expense of “moral principle,” as many have recently claimed. Evangelical politics ought to be witnessing faith and not have a lust for power.

Thomas Bradstreet has helpfully criticized some of the language of these evangelicals and has described the innovative theology that underpins it. Still, more needs to be said. In particular, this term, “moral witness” needs to be unpacked. What is the nature of “moral witness”? Who is the audience? Why is it so often juxtaposed with political ends and “political expediency”? What are its dangers and disadvantages? In this essay, I provide a theory on the meaning of “moral witness” in contemporary evangelicalism.

...

[Evangelical] political activity, ..., is ultimately a project of moral witness, calling for Christians to live up to a selected and particular set of moral principles/language intended for a particular audience as part of evangelism. Political activity itself is just another means of showcasing an other-worldly, Christian gospel-morality in order to demonstrate the winsomeness of Christianity.

So the governing principle of political action is not the necessities of civil order, but the necessities of witness; and those two – order and witness – are not entirely coextensive. In other words, the actions necessary to ensure order are not always the sort of actions that make for an effective witness. Consequently, the witnessing-purpose of Christian politics largely sidelines questions concerning civil order, for Christian politics just is evangelism by other means.

...

The evangelical moral platform then is highly constrained and partly dictated by secular moral posturing, since the winsomeness of Christianity is the ultimate end of the evangelical political platform. It seems inevitable then that the respectable evangelical moral platform will become and partly is already in conformity with the secular approved list of just social causes. In witnessing to them, evangelicals work for them, and in consequence become the unwitting advocates for and censors on behalf of secularist interests.

Read more at https://sovereignnations.com/2018/05/15/state-evangelical-moral-witness/

On abandoning moral principles for political power

by Stephen Wolfe:

https://reformation500.wordpress.com/2017/11/17/on-abandoning-moral-principles-for-political-power/

Exactly what power are evangelicals seeking by favoring Trump and Moore over others?

The answer is this: the power not to listen to the dictatorial moralizing of the East Coast liberal elite who claim hegemony over the general will of the nation.

This is what evangelicals like about the Trumps and the Moores of American politics. They are willing to challenge the hegemony of the elite and disregard their calumnies and moral denunciations. Instead of “witnessing” to the elites by public demonstrations of weakness (i.e., selective “humility”) and by caring about the same issues (and not caring about the same issues), evangelicals would treat them as opponents to be defeated...

So what power are evangelicals seeking? The countervailing power that disrupts the moral hegemony of the elite.

Stephen Wolfe, on “Women in the Military” (2)

From another Facebook post:

If you've spent anytime as either an officer or a senior NCO in the military you know what Robert Gates is talking about here:

"Men and women in the prime of their professional lives, who may have been responsible for the lives of scores or hundreds of troops, or millions of dollars in assistance, or engaging in reconciling warring tribes, they may find themselves in a cube all day re-formatting power point slides, preparing quarterly training briefs, or assigned an ever expanding array of clerical duties. The consequences of this terrify me." (from a 2011 speech at West Point)

This is what complicates the question of women in the military. I've seen women excel in the military because of this expanding array of clerical duties. Women are good at it. The modern military is very different than militaries of the past. Everything is bureaucratized, institutionalized, computerized, proceduralized, etc. Most officers at least in combat support positions spend their day either staring at a computer or in a briefing staring at a powerpoint slide. And usually the content is not about traditional military training, but some statistic on the completion of "sexual assault" training, or "suicide prevention," or something of that sort.

My point is that any position on women in the military has to deal with the fact that in some ways women actually contribute to the effectiveness of a modern military.

Stephen Wolfe, on “Women in the Military” (1)

Stephen Wolfe, who is a West Point grad and PhD (Political Philosophy) candidate, posted this on Facebook (reprinted here with permission):

1. They reduce unit cohesion.
2. They are usually the weakest link.
3. They are injury-prone.
4. They are often overweight.
5. They change unit dynamics.
6. They reduce training opportunities.
7. They require special accommodation in field exercises.
8. Male soldiers tend to have less respect for them.
9. They usually are less proficient in shooting and other warrior tasks.
10. They bring the need for institutionalized training on sexual harassment and sexual assault.
11. They create awkwardness and uncertainty in social relations.
12. The dynamics often bring questions of fairness.
13. Those that have kids are often constrained by picking up and dropping off kids at daycare.
14. They become "unavailable" due to pregnancy.

“Equality” and Social Hierarchy in Calvin’s “Two Kingdoms”

Calvin’s Social Agenda:

Calvin’s two-kingdom theology, though affirming spiritual equality in the (spiritual) kingdom of God, does not support the “flattening” of social distinctions (that is, the reforming of social hierarchy into social egalitarianism) in the civil realm; nor does it have much room for what we today call “equal opportunity.” At the same time, it does call for what today would be a rather radical social agenda….

According to Calvin, the spiritual, inward kingdom of God does not “disturb civil order or honorary distinctions.” … For Calvin, consistent with others in the Christian tradition, the hierarchical social order is natural and “it is not without reason that he has been pleased to join us together in this way.”

“Servants must also be cognizant of their rank and station; and everyone must apply himself in the thing which he has been called. It certainly accords well with Christianity that the rich man should enjoy his wealth (provided, of course, that he not devour everything without attending to the needs of his neighbors), and that the poor man should endure his station patiently, and beseech God, not desiring more than is proper.”

The Importance of Social Customs in the Christian Tradition

"Decently and in order: The Importance of Social Customs in the Christian Tradition:

Our modern age is an age of pseudo-authenticity, one in which authenticity is achieved by not being like the rest. Authenticity is not being something, but being not something. It is a negative endeavor. So we seek to be different and, by being different, we consider ourselves above everyone else. We are called upon to conform to the principle of eschewing conformity. All of this undermines public order and decency, according to Augustine, Aquinas and Calvin. It undermines the affections we have for our laws and society. As Augustine hinted at and Aquinas and Calvin affirm (as Burke does later), social customs and manners serve as the basis for our cherishing of society. As Christians seek to rebuild our failing legal and political institutions, we must remember that social customs are essential to making “power gentle and obedience liberal.” Without them, the law has no recourse but the terror of punishment.

Poo-poo on egalitarianism

Social Hierarchy in the Christian Tradition.

A Short Defense of Sola Scriptura

A Short Defense of Sola Scriptura

Stephen Wolfe has produced a blog post entitled “A Short Defense of Sola Scriptura” – a link to it has been posted on the front page of The Gospel Coalition (in case it leaves there soon, I’ve put a screen capture of it on the right).

He writes:

… the texts were received as scripture and later codified in the form of the canon. Sola Scriptura is simply the following: the sole rule of faith is contained in texts that have been received as scripture. It is only a consequence of this principle that one can say that all doctrine must come from the sixty-six book canon. The doctrine of sola scriptura is not about a list of books, but the principle that all doctrine must come from scripture. In other words, all doctrine must come from a certain type of revelation, namely, inscripturated divine communication. The codification of the canon as a list of books is subsequent to the receiving of texts as scripture, not prior to it; and saying that the rule of faith is contained in the sixty-six book canon of scripture presupposes this codification as subsequent.

Read the entire blogpost here.

See also: The Twenty-Seven-Book New Testament Before Athanasius.

See also: My series of articles on Michael Kruger’s “Canon Revisited”.

We live in a meaningful world; God gives it meaning.

Creation and Grace

Stephen Wolfe makes this argument:

If Protestants want to reject modernity, then they ought to reject the nominalist assumptions that go into religious observance outside of revelation. This means rediscovering the regulative principle of worship as the means of reconnecting oneself to God’s creation. Only through this principle will one properly join the choir of creation.

Think of C.S. Lewis’s “Great Dance”. Although Lewis is perhaps guilty of the thing that Stephen argues against here:

How the Regulative Principle of Worship Affirms, Supports, and Ensures a Meaningful World.

I think this is one of the most clear and important things he has written. In fact, this piece helps us to think through God’s program in this world, for man and creation, from beginning to end. He says:

This argument is directed at Protestants. For I can see how Roman Catholics can answer this. They would simply say that the Church has the divine authority to recognize and make certain ceremonies meaningful, and by this authority God becomes active in the event. So I think that Roman Catholics are consistent in this regard.

Of course, the idea that the [Roman Catholic] Church has such authority is false, but at least they are consistent. Protestants, on the other hand, do not have the [JB note: I would put the word “benefit” in quotes] benefit of such authority. We could form fuzzy notions of pursuing “catholicity,” but this suffers for want of clear criteria and it cannot legitimately be anything more than an attitude toward pre-reformational traditions.

In making this argument, I think Stephen is showing the difference as well between what we might call “God’s metaphysic” [my term] vs the “classical metaphysics” of Aristotle and Aquinas. Because in truth, “God’s metaphysic”, however that is characterized, is based on that which is given in his own special revelation, and not from the cobbled-together thoughts of human philosophers over time.

The principle is evident in what follows:

A Reformed Perspective on Natural Beauty

Stephen Wolfe has written a blog post entitled “A Reformed Perspective on Natural Beauty”. How does God reveal himself in nature? “For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. For his invisible attributes, namely, his eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly perceived, ever since the creation of the world, in the things that have been made.”

I admit that my attempt to describe the perception of eschatological beauty lacks clarity. But I’m in good company, because I find no place in Calvin where he made the attempt. He says, counterintuitively, that “faith is…looking at things that are invisible” (emphasis mine). How can one look at the invisible? “Looking,” of course, is used metaphorically for a form of perception. But that illustrates the problem: all descriptor are metaphors. It is difficult to get to the literal. I do not have a satisfactory answer to this problem. I will simply say, with Calvin, that the future glory can be perceived by faith.

This post is groundwork for what I hope becomes a discussion among Reformed Christians on the subject of beauty, especially on the perception of eschatological beauty. I welcome the reader’s thoughts.

Read more here.

Is the United States a “Christian Nation”?

From Stephen Wolfe:

In the next few weeks or months, I plan to review the book The Religious Beliefs of America’s Founders: Reason, Revelation, and Revolution, chapter-by-chapter. It is written by Gregg Frazer, a Master’s College professor of history and political science. The book has caused a stir among those who have an interest in the United States being a “Christian nation” and those on the other side who claim that it is a “secular nation.” His central thesis is that most of the Founders were religious yet unorthodox. The dominant view among the Founders was what he calls “theistic rationalism.” …

* * *

In my own study, I’ve noticed that the shift from Calvin’s more conservative understanding of social and political inequality, gave way in England to an emphasis on equality and social contract, leading ultimately to John Locke and Algernon Sidney. The shift, to my mind, concerns reason and revelation. Calvin, in his Institutes, argues that revelation, far from being opposed to reason, is a further accommodation to man’s fallenness. In other words, revelation is, in a sense, right reason. Revelation serves as spectacles to show what ought to have been in the world through reason alone. In this sense, revelation is not to be privatized in a secularized state. It is not to be relegated to personal, individual opinion. Revelation gives us principles for a pubic (or political) theology.

Part 1 is here.

More About “Knowing”

For those who are following along:

Warfield on Calvin on Special and General Revelation.

From Richard Muller:
Echoes of Scotus, Ockham, and Eck in the Reformed Orthodox discussion of faith and reason

“The mandate to create includes a mandate to display the glory of God”

Human beings have an aesthetic need built into their being…

Stephen Wolfe works to define a Groundwork for a Reformed Theology of Public Aesthetics.

How one ought to love one’s neighbor is the subject of much discussion in Christianity.... What is often left out in these discussions is the aesthetic demands of loving one’s neighbor. We always ask, what ought we do? or what ought we think? But why not the question, how ought things look? Following much modernist thought, Reformed Christians have separated the aesthetic from the ethical and, I submit, the Gospel. We have come to believe that only ideas are formative of character, virtue, and holiness in a community. My contention in this post is that human beings—as created beings meant to belong in creation—have an aesthetic need built into their being. I also argue that loving one’s neighbor includes seeking to fulfill this aesthetic need through proper community and town/city development. In addition, I argue that the modern view of nature as something other than and separate from man is problematic and must be rejected.

We should keep in mind that the Son of God did not come to earth simply to show the way of righteousness, or even just to bear the sins of humankind. He came to restore creation and finish the work that God set for Adam. To love God and to love man is not simply to fulfill a set of disconnected ethical demands, but to work toward the original intent of creation, namely, to build beautiful and harmonious communities that express a love for God and each other. The ultimate demand of God for humankind is a unity of the aesthetic and the ethical. We are not simply to love, but to love with beauty….

This is an important concept because, as he says, “Reformed theology rejects the nature/grace dualism of medieval theology. This theology, made explicit by Thomas Aquinas, states that even prior to sin, nature required a superadded feature, namely, grace in order to keep it from falling. In other words, nature did not have an original integrity; it required an addition supernatural category to remain away from corruption.”

On the contrary, Genesis relates in many places that God’s creation was “good”, “good”, and “very good”. As I’ve related earlier:

The typical Reformed understanding is that Adam was created upright, or righteous, and that God justified, or declared righteous, the initial creation as well as man in his declaration that everything was “very good” (Gen 1:31). We see the Westminster Larger Catechism (q. 17) echo this point when it states that God created man in “righteousness, and holiness, having the law of God written in their hearts, and the power to fulfill it” (John Fesko, in “Justification: Understanding the Classic Reformed Doctrine” Phillipsburg: P&R Publishing Company, pg 372).

Stephen argues that the goodness, righteousness, and holiness extend to all of creation. “Reformed theology rejected this [Medieval/Thomist] dualism by positing that nature has its own integrity, that it does not require a superadded supernatural category to be good.” Read the entire article here.

Historical Roman Catholicism is the cradle, enabler, and teacher of radical Islam today

About a week ago, I re-posted a comment on Facebook something that Stephen Wolfe had said. The gist of it is:

The Calvinist’s chief theological opponent should not be Arminianism; it should be Roman Catholicism. The “five points” debate is an Arminian construction, and while Arminianism can be reduced to its “five points,” Calvinism cannot be reduced to such a limited set of doctrinal points. Calvinism is ultimately a comprehensive view of living in the world, just as Roman Catholicism is a comprehensive view of living in the world. Calvinism (with Roman Catholicism) is a unique orientation toward God, one’s neighbor, and creation. Arminianism is just a narrow set of doctrine fitting for analytic philosophers. When Calvinists make Arminians their chief opponent they either elevate Arminianism to something it is not or they demote Calvinism to a pathetically limited set of doctrine. The Arminians should be known for their five points, not the Calvinists.

This led to a very long discussion, by a lot of people. Here’s the gist of why I see Roman Catholicism as the chief of evils to be opposed in our day:

And yet, if you look at the grand sweep of history, it is not hard to see that the Roman Catholic empire (the heir of the old Roman empire) was the cradle and teacher of Islam. Certainly we can go back farther than that, but I think the influence on the overall story-line is somewhat diminished.

But Roman Catholicism is the great influencer of the [western] world we have today. I will go further than the OP in saying that “Roman Catholicism is a comprehensive view of living in the world”, and I will say that Roman Catholicism, in its comprehensiveness, is a major source of evil in the world. [Certainly, some good Roman Catholics have done some good things, and it may even be said that Roman Catholicism helped to enable a world to follow-up with the sciences. But arguably it was the Reformation that was the great enabler of the advances in the world that we see.]

In Rome’s historical quest to dominate the world, it has perpetuated all kinds of falsehoods. Insofar as Rome disfigured the gospel (pursuing its own “authority” even back in the 5th and 6th centuries), it was an enabler of Mohammad. And through some of its machinations in the Middle Ages (such as the quest for world domination – domination of the east – and the Crusades, the Inquisition, and the opponent of Jews), it became a teacher of, a motivation for, and an example to, radical Islam today: that heretics must be tortured and killed.

Roman Catholicism is, quite frankly, the source of huge swaths of what is wrong in the world today.

By comparison, Arminianism is just a piker.

“What you choose to be your opposite says a lot about you”

From Stephen Wolfe

The Calvinist’s chief theological opponent should not be Arminianism; it should be Roman Catholicism. The “five points” debate is an Arminian construction, and while Arminianism can be reduced to its “five points,” Calvinism cannot be reduced to such a limited set of doctrinal points. Calvinism is ultimately a comprehensive view of living in the world, just as Roman Catholicism is a comprehensive view of living in the world. Calvinism (with Roman Catholicism) is a unique orientation toward God, one’s neighbor, and creation. Arminianism is just a narrow set of doctrine fitting for analytic philosophers. When Calvinists make Arminians their chief opponent they either elevate Arminianism to something it is not or they demote Calvinism to a pathetically limited set of doctrine. The Arminians should be known for their five points, not the Calvinists.

Two Roman Catholic Claims you’ll always see; one of them is always false

Maybe THE stock assumption that a Roman Catholic apologist makes is that “the Church that Christ Founded®” has anything at all to do with what the Roman Catholic religion has become today. Following up on his previous post, “Roman Catholicism on Trial: Evidence and Assumptions”, Stephen Wolfe challenges that claim and has outlined “Two Roman Catholic claims that cannot both be true”:

When engaging Roman Catholic apologists one often encounters two claims: 1) Roman Catholicism is publicly verifiable, meaning that one can provide sufficient reasons for a nonbeliever to convert to Roman Catholicism, and 2) that any conclusion concerning the type of church Christ founded that does not secure a means of certainty (as defined by Roman Catholicism) can be rejected prima facie. In this article I will examine whether or not one can consistently hold both of these claims.

Read more…

How Roman Catholicism Lacks Public Verifiability

From Stephen Wolfe: “Roman Catholicism on Trial: Evidence and Assumptions”

Protestants who engage Roman Catholics often end the discussion in frustration. It seems that Roman Catholic apologists have an answer for everything: nothing penetrates their system revealing inconsistency with the evidence. They are good at accounting for facts, even the facts that seem to contradict other claims. Though denied, Roman Catholicism at times appears to lack falsifiability. The idea of falsifiability will be in the background of this article, but my primary purpose will be to show that, given its theological system, Roman Catholicism lacks public verifiability. What I mean is that a Roman Catholic apologist, due to the parameters of his own theological system, cannot present sufficient reasons for a potential convert to believe the Roman Catholic Church’s claims for itself, namely that it is the one true visible church of Christ, such that one must, by good reason, assent to its authority. So, in other words, Roman Catholic apologists cannot publicly verify the authority-claims of the Roman Catholic Church.

Read more…

Christians as “image-bearers” of God: “To be fully human is to be an image of the divine glory in God’s creation”

Over the last 50 years, our culture has been aware of the notion that the medium is the message. First it was simply TV, then it became personal computers, then the Internet, and now, we hold the medium/message is in our pockets and in the palms of our hands.

But there is another, greater theater going on, and we are part of it:

The Art of Being Calvinist: Imitating God in the Divine Drama.

In this article, Stephen Wolfe argues that in the Kingdom of God, the true art is “the everyday life of a Christian”. But this is not a passive thing. “The Adamic human race perverts the cosmos; the Christian human race renews it.”

The Reformation ushered in a way of looking at the world that had profound implications for what constitutes art. My purpose here is to suggest that Calvinists did not reject religious art. Religious art remained just an important as before. However, religious art did not remain in the old forms, but became redeemed life itself. Everyday life became images of God. Art, in a sense, became hidden within the daily life of the community of faith. I am not referring to everyday objects, but everyday activity. And I am not referring to everyday activity as captured in paintings or the other mediums, but in the activity itself in the world. The activity itself is the medium. The ordinary lives of redeemed people are religious images.

“Creation as an epistemic source of God’s character”

First astronaut Yuri Gagarin:
“The Earth is blue [...] How wonderful. It is amazing.”

“Humans are meant for creation; creation is our home.”

Stephen Wolfe asks, “If creation is so glorious, how ‘full of glory’ God must be?” Citing Robert Daly, he says, “If the created world was a source of beauty and delight for the Puritan poet, it was also an a fortiori argument for the beauty and generosity of its Creator and the delights He had prepared for His people….Only when compared to God and heaven do the joys of the sensible world sink to nothingness.”

Creation as an epistemic source of God’s character was an important component of early Calvinist thought. The Belgic Confession states, the “universe is before our eyes like a beautiful book in which all creatures, great and small, are as letters to make us ponder the invisible things of God: God’s eternal power and divinity.” Calvin argued that “the world was founded for this purpose, that it should be the sphere of the divine glory” and that “the very beautiful fabric of the world [is the place] in which he wishes to be seen by us.” The knowledge imparted through creation was sufficient for pre-lapsarian man to have a complete creaturely knowledge of God. But this knowledge is knowledge of God not via negativa, but through analogy. Our knowledge of God’s beauty is not univocally God’s beauty; it is his beauty as analogized ‘into’ creation. And this beauty-as-symbol communicates sufficient knowledge of God. The sufficiency of creational knowledge is an important notion to understand. We often want something more than the sufficient: we want to know God’s essence, not just mere analogy. We want to climb some chain of being and experience the divine. In our fallenness, we want to become like God (italics is the author’s; the bold face is mine).