the-new-atheism-march-april-2008

THE HISTORY OF UNBELIEF ❘ ANSWERING THE ATHEISTS ❘ DETHRONING THE SELF

MODERN REFORMATION

The NewAtheism VOLUME

17, NUMBER 2, MARCH/APRIL 2008, $6.00

MODERN REFORMATION Editor-in-Chief Michael S. Horton Executive Editor Eric Landry Managing Editor Patricia Anders Department Editors Mollie Z. Hemingway, Between the Times William Edgar, Borrowed Capital Starr Meade, Big Thoughts for Little Minds MR Editors, Required Reading Diana Frazier, Reviews Michael Horton, Final Thoughts Staff | Editors Ann Henderson Hart, Staff Writer Alyson S. Platt, Copy Editor Lori A. Cook, Layout and Design Ben Conarroe, Proofreader Contributing Scholars Peter D. Anders S. M. Baugh Gerald Bray Jerry Bridges D. A. Carson Bryan Chapell R. Scott Clark Marva Dawn Mark Dever J. Ligon Duncan Adam S. Francisco W. Robert Godfrey T. David Gordon Donald A. Hagner Gillis Harp D. G. Hart Paul Helm Hywel R. Jones Ken Jones Peter Jones Richard Lints Korey Maas Keith Mathison Donald G. Matzat John Muether John Nunes Craig Parton John Piper Kim Riddlebarger Rod Rosenbladt Philip G. Ryken R. C. Sproul A. Craig Troxel Carl Trueman David VanDrunen Gene E. Veith William Willimon Todd Wilken Paul F. M. Zahl Modern Reformation © 2008 All rights reserved.

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2008

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The New Atheism 18 Skepticism, Agnosticism, and Atheism: A Brief History of Unbelief Is there anything new about atheism?

A journalist sketches out the background of unbelief over the centuries.

by M. Z. Hemingway

24 The Challenge of the New Atheism What are the particular arguments of the New Atheists, and what is ultimately the Christian’s answer?

by Adam S. Francisco Plus: The Empiricist Has No Clothes

30 God Does Not Believe in Atheists Are the new “Apostles in Atheism” taken seriously by traditional atheists?

A trial lawyer shows that neither provides a valid case against Christianity.

by Craig Parton Plus: Prologue to the “Great Story”: The Recalling of C. S. Lewis from Atheism

38 Arguing with Atheists: A Personal Reflection In the midst of the New Atheism debate, what are the most valuable lessons for the church in today’s world?

by David Robertson

42 Are Churches Secularizing America?

Is popular Christianity in America today in its own way short-circuiting our apologetics and evangelism?

by Michael Horton Plus: How Preaching Reveals This Secularizing Trend

12 In Season Meditations on reading, preaching, and using Scripture.

by Shane Lems COVER PHOTO BY ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE, NY. COMPOSITE: LORI COOK

S UBSCRIPTION I NFORMATION US US Student Canada Europe Other

TABLE OF CONTENTS march/april

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In This Issue page 2 | Letters page 3 | Between the Times page 4 Borrowed Capital page 8 | Big Thoughts for Little Minds page 10 Interview page 53 | Required Reading page 57 | Reviews page 58 | Final Thoughts page 64

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IN THIS ISSUE

In the Absence of God T

he Apostle Paul’s brilliance as a rhetorician shines in the early verses of his Epistle to the Romans. Three times he ties the downward spiral of human sin to the refusal to acknowledge the natural revelation of God’s existence and work:

“For although they knew God, they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their foolish hearts were darkened” (1:21).

“Because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever! Amen” (1:25).

“And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done” (1:28).

Paul’s point seems to be that in the absence of God any belief or behavior seems wise and well intentioned. Atheism, for its adherents, is the most logical and reasonable of belief systems precisely because they have suppressed the truth about God in unrighteousness (Rom. 1:18). As Christians, we certainly resonate with this explanation for atheism, but it does not prevent our brothers-in-law from reading Christopher Hitchens or our next-door neighbors from enjoying Richard Dawkins on The Colbert Report.

In this issue of Modern Reformation, we set out to give you the tools you need to understand and interact with the socalled “New Atheism” that is flexing its muscles in our post-Christian societies. First up, our resident journalist Mollie Z. Hemingway traces the contours of atheism through the history of philosophy and spirituality. Next, Lutheran theologian Adam Francisco brings us up to date by introducing us to the primary proponents of the New Atheism: Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Daniel Dennett. Then trial lawyer and apologist Craig Parton discusses the intellectual arguments atheists use to prove their point; Scottish Presbyterian pastor and apologist David Robertson takes us through his recent response to Richard Dawkins and shows us how to counter the arguments that they use against Christianity; and our editor-in-chief Michael Horton finishes up the issue by showing how our own versions of Christianity can short-circuit our apologetics and evangelism.

In addition to this strong line-up of feature articles, you won’t want to miss our interview with Richard Bauckham on the authenticity of the Gospels. You will also find our smaller sidebar articles especially useful: Korey Maas on the unhappy reactions to the New Atheism from ardent secularists and atheists; and Patricia Anders on the conversion of C. S. Lewis.

Each issue in 2008 will tackle these important, pressing problems in American Christianity. I’m grateful for your interest. If you have a friend or family member who needs to work through these matters, please let us know and we’ll be happy to send them a free trial subscription. Don’t forget to take advantage of over 15 years worth of resources on our website too. If you’re preparing for a study or just trying to get your mind around a perplexing issue, our website is sure to have the resources you need to answer your questions about God, this world, and your life in it.

Eric Landry Executive Editor NEXT ISSUES May/June 2008: The New Spiritualities July/August 2008: No Church, No Problem?

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LETTERS your

Author’s Reply I’d like to reply to James Deweerd’s letter in the November/ December issue regarding my article, “Ciudad Blanco” (“Diaries of a Postmodern Christian,” September/ October 2007). After first apologizing to your Spanish-speaking readers for the rather blatant grammatical slip (the actual name of the facility is “Ciudad Blanca”), I’d like to thank the editors of Modern Reformation for publishing the story, and for their comment that they believe my views to be consistent with biblical orthodoxy.

The story in question was originally written, as the theme of the department suggests, as an entry in my personal journal shortly after the incident in February 2007. In that entry, I wrote that I was angry at God—because, in fact, I was. I felt angry, as did not only Jonah (as Mr. Deweerd references), but also Job, Jeremiah, and other people in the Scriptures. My intent was not to suggest that my feelings were justifiable or “right,” but rather to acknowledge simply that they existed. I strongly believe that if we are to progress in our sanctification, we must be honest with ourselves about having such thoughts, proper or not. I dare to suggest that most, if not all, Christians have faced some similar tragedy and felt the same sort of anger at God for some time, however fleeting, and that it would be counterproductive to claim otherwise. I believe that there are times when, as Frederick Buechner might say, it is more beneficial to advancing the kingdom of God, and to our own spiritual health, that we “speak what we feel, not what we ought to say.” I believe that in telling this story, it was just such a time to do so. By way of comparison, if we accepted only accounts of human activity in our Scriptures that were entirely consistent with God’s holy ideal, our

Bibles would all be much slimmer, and we would be much poorer for not having those instances available to instruct us.

I want to assure Mr. Deweerd that I am in no way a universalist, arguing for universal salvation. I am nothing of the sort. However, I do not agree with his assertion that the term “child of God” is a term exclusively appropriate to the saved. I feel that it may also be used in a broader sense, in that all of humanity—saved and unsaved—is God’s creation and therefore all are his children. It is in that sense I used the term in the story. It was not meant as a statement regarding whether or not the boy was a Christian—a distinction that, in my opinion, is irrelevant to my compassion for him or to my charge from Christ to care for him. As I read Matthew 25:31-40, I do not find: “…for I was a hungry Christian and you gave me food, I was a thirsty Christian and you gave me something to drink, I was a Christian stranger and you welcomed me, I was a naked Christian and you gave me clothing….”

While I do not adhere to the concept of universal salvation, I do believe that the charge given us in this passage is one of universal love for and service to all who suffer and are in need—not only to born-again Christians, nor only to Jews as Mr. Deweerd writes. I couldn’t believe more strongly that such an interpretation is an error, and a dangerous one at that.

I do not believe that God works in this world through only Christians; I think that Scripture makes that point quite clearly. As such, I find no heresy in wondering if I were staring into the face of Christ while kneeling beside and servicing this boy, who admittedly could not “give any indication of conversion”—or, for that matter, much indication of anything else.

The actual point of the story is very much in keeping with God’s reply to Job, or to Jonah in the instance cited

by Mr. Deweerd. There will be questions and concerns in our lives of faith

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for which we will never find complete answers during our earthly existence.

In those times, all we can do is to try and live our lives of discipleship as Christ would have. Some days, that means swatting away flies, feeding a child a piece of cake, giving him a drink. In large part, it means caring for the children of God—all of them.

Dwain Lee Blacklick, Ohio

Correction Thabiti Anyabwile is the author (and not co-author as stated in the January/February 2008 issue of Modern Reformation) of The Decline of African American Theology and The Faithful Preacher. Our apologies to Pastor Anyabwile for this error.

Modern Reformation Letters to the Editor 1725 Bear Valley Parkway Escondido CA 92027 760.741.1045 fax Letters@modernreformation.org Letters under 200 words are more likely to be printed than longer letters. Letters may be edited for content and length.

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The Backlash Against Tithing Prosperity gospel preachers have long taught that God rewards those who give generously—or at least 10 percent of their income— to their church. But some American worshipers aren’t buying the message and have launched a backlash against tithing, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Tithing practices range from a requirement to a suggestion in these churches, but observers say they’ve noticed an uptick in the hard sell. Rev. Marty Baker, pastor of Stevens Creek Church in Augusta, Georgia, created “giving kiosks” to allow parishioners to tithe from their bank cards. He and his wife launched a for-profit company, which places the automatic teller machines in churches. Pastor Ed Young of Grapevine, Texas, not only preaches on tithing, he sells his sermons about tithing to online buyers. Some churches offer courses where parishioners can learn how to tithe while paying off debt.

“When they obey His word, that is to give, God creates opportunities supernaturally for them to save more and spend less,” the Rev. Rob Peters, who offers the classes at First Baptist in Weston, Florida, told the Journal.

Even Catholic parishes are increasingly pushing tithing, according to Paul Forbes, administrator of McKenna Stewardship Ministry. The Episcopal Church has said that since 1982 tithing is the “minimum standard,” but the average annual gift from its 2.3 million members in 2006 was only $1,718.

Some evangelical churches require new members to promise to tithe.

Those who refuse can’t serve in leadership roles or are denied membership.

Into this mix, a growing number of parishioners are rebelling against being told they must tithe. Theological forums on the Internet are

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springing up to fight enforced tithing— to mixed results. When Californian Kirk Cesaretti disagreed with his community church’s tithing message, he received a letter telling him to submit to his elders. Kevin Rohr, a church employee in Ohio, fought his pastor over his commandment to tithe 10 percent of gross income and lost. He now drives trucks to support his wife and four children. ■ The Lord Helps Values Voters Who Help Themselves After the 2004 elections, so-called “values voters” were credited with reelecting President George W. Bush and fighting gay marriage initiatives throughout the land. The fact is that for years the same percentage of vot-

ers have reported they are motivated by “moral issues,” but with The New York Times and other media outlets in shock after a divisive election, conserMike Huckabee vative Christians were singled out as bogeymen.

By 2007, the mainstream media were reporting a major crackup of the evangelical voting block.

Professional media hound Pat Robertson endorsed the presidential candidacy of former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, who supports abortion and gay rights. Other evangelicals, despite shared values, wondered whether they could support former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, a practicing Mormon. In

Notable Quotables “Talk about the secular press!”

— Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton after a reporter asked her if the cross bracelet she wears had religious significance.

“I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do, is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards.”

— Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee campaigning in Michigan for the Republican presidential nomination.

“Don’t believe in God? You are not alone.”

— Billboard from the American Humanist Association that greets southbound motorists driving on the Jersey Turnpike. It is the first of a series that will appear around the country to raise the public profile of humanists and freethinkers.

“You can’t be a rational person six days of the week…and on one day of the week go to a building and think you are drinking the blood of a 2,000-year-old space God….That makes you a schizophrenic.”

— Talk show host Bill Maher appearing on NBC’s Late Night with Conan O’Brien.

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an effort to secure their support, Romney gave a high-profile speech defending the right of religious minorities to participate in politics.

Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister and former Arkansas governor, peeled away some evangelical support with a campaign based on economic and religious populism.

And that was only the half of it.

Many young evangelicals told pollsters they care just as much about fighting global warming and poverty as they do abortion and other traditional social conservative issues.

Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party made concerted efforts to reach out to them. As conservative Christians watched some of the coalition realign with social justice liberals, leaders attempted to redefine what motivated their voters.

“The war against Islamofascism is, in many respects, a ‘values issue,’” Conservative Christian leader Gary Bauer said in an e-mail to supporters.

“Losing Western Civilization to this vicious enemy would be immoral.”

When Pat Robertson endorsed Giuliani he said the most important issue facing Americans is the defense of the population from “the bloodlust of Islamic terrorists.” In 2007, James Dobson spotlighted “militant Islam” over a dozen times on his radio program; and at the June 2007 Southern Baptist Convention meeting, evangelical Chuck Colson spoke of the “long war” against Islamofascists.

“Christian right activists are very concerned with order,” John Green, senior fellow with the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, told the Associated Press. “And radical Islam, in the same way Communism was, is a threat that would interfere with families, good government, and also the church and the spreading of the Gospel.”

But while the fight against Islamic terrorism energized some evangelical voters, others were swayed by an altogether different message. Huckabee—

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a William Jennings Bryan-style populist and brilliant campaigner— found that roughly 80 percent of the voters who awarded him victory in the Iowa caucuses identified themselves as evangelical or born-again Christians. Huckabee appealed to such voters through a carefully crafted message of identity politics.

“Many of us…have been Republicans out of conviction….The social conservatives were welcomed in the party as long as we sort of kept our place, but Lord help us if we ever stood forward and said we would actually like to lead the party,” Huckabee said about conservative opposition to his candidacy.

Only voters can answer whether or not it’s wise to run for a party’s nomination by encouraging resentment among one key part of a coalition against other key parts of a coalition, but Huckabee’s campaign tactic illustrated the changing direction of evangelical voters. Many felt the decades-long alliance with limited government advocates and foreign policy hawks was no longer politically expedient. Even when Huckabee’s liberal politics earned him the endorsements of teachers and machinist unions, many evangelicals stuck with him. ■ Scientists Hail Stem Cell Breakthrough In November, two separate groups of scientists reported that they turned human skin cells into what appear to be embryonic stem cells without having to create or destroy embryos. The feat was accomplished without using any human reproductive material at all, including eggs. By adding four genes, the skin cells’ chromosomes were reprogrammed, turning them into pluripotent stem cells. These cells have the ability to turn into any of 220 types, such as muscle cells, brain cells, or blood cells. Prior to the announcement, the only way to get such cells was by

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By the Numbers 89 percent. Americans who believe itshouldbelegalforapublicteacher to allow a “moment of silence” for contemplationorprayerduringclass time, according to Ellison Research. $2 million. Amount of the line of credit the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia took out to finance its property battle with 11 breakaway parishes.

44 percent. Unchurched Americans who agree with the statement, “Christians get on my nerves,” according to LifeWay Research, the research arm of the Southern Baptist Convention.

53 percent. Americans who believe that the Old Testament is the “word of God,” according to a Harris Interactive poll. Curiously, only 23 percent say the same about the Torah.

63 years. How long Monsignor Heliodore Mejak served the same Kansas City parish. The Roman Catholic priest was known for fighting liturgical innovation. He died on Christmas Day 2007 at the age of 98.

75 percent. Americans who believe Jesus was born of a virgin, according to a Barna Group survey. Oddly, 15 percent of selfdescribed atheists and agnostics agreed.

60 percent. Americans who say Oprah’s endorsement of Barack Obama will help his candidacy, according to the Pew Research Center.

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taking them from embryos, a process that destroyed them.

For the last decade, acrimonious political debate has pitted pro-lifers concerned with embryonic destruction against those who felt the promise of stem cell research—including a hoped-for cure for Alzheimer’s disease—outweighed such concerns. In 2006, a voter initiative in Missouri even enshrined the right to destroy embryos for stem cell research in the state constitution. The new technology, called Direct Cell Reprogramming or Induced Pluripotent State, has the potential to reshape the debate.

Dr. James Thomson—whose laboratory was not only one of the first to destroy embryos for stem cell research, but also one of the two that reported the new discovery—said he had ethical concerns from the outset.

“If human embryonic stem cell research does not make you at least a little bit uncomfortable, you have not thought about it enough,” he said in an interview with The New York Times. “I thought long and hard about whether I would do it.”

Still, many researchers insist it’s too early to abandon embryonicdestroying stem cell research; but advocates on both sides realize the new findings will make it much more difficult to encourage public support for embryonic-destroying stem cell research. ■ More Hindu Violence against Christians in India During the Christmas season, Hindu nationalists in the Indian state of Orissa killed six Christians, burned 400 homes, and destroyed 60 church buildings, according to the All India Christian Council.

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“Young and healthy Christians have left their villages to flee for their lives. Children, women, [the] old and sick, who could not flee for their lives, are in great danger,” said the council’s secretary general John Dayal. Hindus threatened withholding of food and medical attention to Christians who wouldn’t convert, he said.

India’s federal constitution guarantees freedom of religion. Hindu nationalists, however, have passed state anti-conversion laws targeting Christians and often persecute the country’s Muslim and Christian minorities. The Global Council of Indian Christians recorded over 300 violent acts against Christians in 2007 alone. The overall trend of violence is actually down since the brutality of the late 1990s when the murder of Christians and torching of churches was even more commonplace.

Still, in Orissa and other regions, people must obtain police permission before converting. Christians have made significant inroads among India’s tribal populations and lowercaste Hindus. Hindu nationalists claim such conversions undermine the social order.

Swami Lakshmananda Saraswati, Hindu leader of Orissa, was unapologetic about leading the anti-conversion efforts. Speaking of human rights groups’ regular warnings about anti-Christian violence in India, he said, “Christians in India must understand, and understand fast, that they cannot be protected by the US State Department writing its annual vituperative anti-Hindu reports on religious freedom and human rights. Christians can be protected only by the good will of the majority Hindus in whose midst they have to live. Christians have to earn the good will of the Hindus instead of demanding special protection and special rights.” ■

Anglican Wars Heat Up The Anglican Communion holds a “double standard” against the Episcopal Church, Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori said in an interview with BBC Radio. The U.S. church angered other provinces in the 77 million-member communion by consecrating an openly gay bishop to lead the New Hampshire diocese. She claimed that other provinces have gay bishops and blessing ceremonies for gay unions, but hide that fact. Bishop Gene Robinson “is certainly not alone in being a gay bishop; he’s certainly not alone in being a gay partnered bishop. He is alone in being the only gay partnered bishop who’s open about that status,” she said.

Jefferts Schori has also become more aggressive against dissidents within the U.S. When 11 Virginia parishes broke away from the Episcopal Church to join the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), a missionary branch of the Anglican Church of Nigeria, she forced the Diocese of Virginia to sue them. According to The Washington Times, she acted to prevent “incursions by foreign bishops.” Virginia bishop Peter J. Lee had been ready to accept buyouts from the departing churches, several of which sat on historic pieces of property.

The lawsuits are stretching the resources of the diocese, forcing them to take out a $2 million line of credit to finance the fight. The diocese also announced it would sell “non-strategic” properties to raise the funds needed for the lawsuits.

Jefferts Schori has also played hardball with bishops whose dioceses have left or are considering leaving the church en masse. In December, the Diocese of San Joaquin voted to leave the church and realign with the Anglican Province of Southern Cone, the first (continued on page 9)

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News Briefs The New New Orthodoxy Researchers are seeing a return to traditionalism and orthodoxy among Roman Catholics, evangelicals, Jews, and Muslims, according to U. S. News & World Report.

Characterized as more substantial than a trend but less organized than a movement, the new traditionalism encompasses a range of practices. Catholics are seeing more demand for the Tridentine Mass, nondenominational churches are offering weekly communion, and so-called emergent churches are reciting the ancient creeds during worship services that also include postmodern skits.

There Goes the (Islamic) Neighborhood Radical Muslims have created “no-go” areas across Britain where it is too dangerous for non-Muslims to enter, according to a senior Church of England bishop. In an essay in the Sunday Telegraph, the Right Reverend Michael Nazir-Ali voiced concern about the increasingly Islamic character of the country, citing the public call to prayer and wider use of sharia law. NazirAli said it is becoming increasingly difficult for Christianity to be the nation’s public religion in a multicultural society. His comments were made at the same time a survey of the Church of England’s parliament revealed that senior leaders worry the role of the church is being damaged by large-scale immigration.

Headstrong in Belief In an effort to emphasize their Islamic identity, more Egyptian men are developing zebibahs, according to The New York Times.

Arabic for “raisin,” a zebibah is a circle of callused skin—sometimes

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developing into a bump—that grows on the forehead when the men press into the ground during their daily prayers.

Only two decades ago, Egypt was considered secular. Now, Islam is being embraced and religious symbols are all the rage. Muhammad alBikali, a hairstylist in Cairo, said the zebibah is a way to show how important Islam is to the populace. “It shows how religious we are. It is a mark from God,” he told the Times.

Highway to Heaven Isaiah 35:8 says, in part, “A highway shall be there, and a road, and it shall be called the Highway of Holiness.” Some Christians believe this verse refers specifically to Interstate 35, which runs from northern Minnesota through six states to southern Texas.

They’ve launched a prayer campaign called “Light the Highway,” and believe that in order to fulfill the prophecy of I-35 being holy, they need to pray fervently, according to CNN. Texas minister Cindy Jacobs says she received a revelation to start the campaign, noting the link between the highway and tragedies. The bridge collapse in Minneapolis last August was on I35 and President John F. Kennedy was assassinated near the highway in Dallas, she said.

A Diploma by Any Other Name Southern Baptist Theological Seminary will not change the name on the diploma of a 1998 graduate who has had a sex change. The Rev. Ronnie Eugene Elrod, now going by the name Ronnie Elise Elrod, requested the change. The seminary doesn’t change names on diplomas for any reason, seminary president Albert Mohler told Religion News Service. “If you’re married, if you change your name, if you move to another planet—it

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“We’re not going to change the name on a diploma.”

Men Who Regret Their Abortion A burgeoning movement of post-abortive men is channeling grief into political activism, according to The Los Angeles Times. More than 150 pro-life activists attended a national conference on men and abortion in San Francisco, where participants heard lectures such as “Medicating the Pain of Lost Fatherhood” and “Forgiveness Therapy with Post-Abortion Men.” The Five Christians You Meet in Heaven To understand differences among American Christians, Christianity Today and Zondervan Publishers commissioned a study of the attitudes and behaviors of 1,000 selfidentified Christians. They categorized them into five groups: Active, Professing, Liturgical, Private, and Cultural Christians.

Active Christians (19 percent of the total) believe salvation comes through Jesus Christ, are committed churchgoers and Bible readers, and feel obligated to share their faith. Professing Christians (20 percent) focus on their personal relationship with God and Jesus, and are less involved in church and Bible reading. Liturgical Christians (16 percent) are predominantly Catholic and Lutheran, are regular churchgoers, and recognize the authority of the church. Private Christians (24 percent) are the largest and youngest segment, own Bibles but don’t read them, rarely attend church, and believe in doing good things. Finally, Cultural Christians (21 percent) display little outward religious behavior, affirm many paths to God, and favor universalism.

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BORROWED CAPITAL cul t ura l

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From Transhuman to Fully Human

T

he image of God! I checked this morning and the words had not changed: So God

have become identified an appropriate platform from created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he which to represent the gospel? Does a prophetic role created them. in the world mean that we must abandon our cultural They were in the first chapter of the book of Genesis. commission in order to actively remain a blessing to all people?

The very same words tell us about God and about ourWe can mutter that the pace of technological developselves. They are in the same sentence at the same time. ment with its surprises and trials is evidence that Jesus is So when I turned back to my browser, I wondered how not returning soon enough, yet the resources that God has to reconcile this picture from the Bible with the picture on given us to understand and interpret all human activity my computer screen. remains sufficient. The trick that we must both learn and I was looking at an image of a work in silicon by the practice is to use what he gives us to address this diversity Australian artist Patricia Piccinini. The subject of this work of challenges, ones that history shows no sign yet of reducwas transhuman. You can get a solid understanding of transing. Scripture gives us the story of why we people do what humanism history, theory, and practices by surfing over to we do, and through his Holy Spirit he gives us the tools to wikipedia.com, but an encyclopedia is unlikely to make love each other anyway, even people we don’t like. Better you squirm the way a competent artist can. Transhumanyet, he gives us a flesh-and-blood model of how to do so. ism is the active movement of people, international in Which brings us back to wrestling with the image of scope, who seek to become more human through techGod and transhumanity. Jesus, the exact imprint of God’s nologies: bioengineering, genetic manipulation, and comnature and the second Adam, is the only fully human puter science. human. Might he be what Patricia Piccinini is looking for, The particular being depicted in Ms. Piccinini work, through a glass however darkly? Might the people of God “Undivided,” is perhaps in form a pig/armadillo/marsupial recognize the common ground to come alongside her and hybrid. She has six pouches on the back, each gestating reflect something of the true man, past that dark glass? some species of young, each in a different stage of develWhat is the benefit of contemplating these things? As opment. Yikes! Yet what is remarkable about the work is we enter into a period of history when the promises of that the artist’s intention to represent this being as human technology are turning to reveal a second and disturbing is successful. Its personhood is portrayed not only with face, we find that the church is not in a very good position expressive hands and face, but in the behavior. She (he?) to influence our culture. A historian might be able to take is asleep in bed in a protective and mother-like embrace of note of numerous contributions that the church has made a “real” human child. Take a look yourself at to everyday living, but the average Joe who surfs the news http://www.patriciapiccinini.net/. websites would find it a challenge to name some positive Is such a vision worthy of attention or should it be influences of God’s people for today. Even the good that shrugged off as fantasy? It would be understandable to the church continues to do is not unique: many religious dismiss as sensational the possibility of a transhuman culand secular organizations do the same if not better and for ture emerging in the next few decades, but elective biomore altruistic reasons. Are we ourselves living on our engineering and genetic manipulations are not only hapown borrowed capital? pening today, they provided the focus for the President’s This is tragic, not because we have lost influence with Council on Bioethics in 2003. Patricia Piccinini means to respect to political power (with a sovereign God, do we lure us into this kind of thinking—and I think that we as even need power per se?), but because we have lost the Christians ought to bite. trust that had allowed us to serve. Truth is absolute, but is Historically, the evangelical church has voiced valid it not by scriptural definition also highly personal? Doesn’t concerns and appropriate questions, and then mobilized to it have the human face of Jesus Christ even as we read oppose new forays into better areas of applied life science. this? Ideas, statements of truth, and well-reasoned objecYet, is the indignation and condemnation with which we tions—while helpful tools—are not vehicles sufficient to

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carry the gospel. Its transforming power is apparent only in relationship.

So how can I encourage us to be talking about this to each other, building each other up for the sake of service?

It is worthwhile to ask ourselves whether all “defense” of the faith need be defensive. Does all expression of faith need to be merely verbal, or is there is precedent for unexpected expressions of tangible love? Jesus did not condone our sin by merely loving us; he redeemed us at great cost to himself. We are called to provide a reason for our hope in the gospel when we are asked (1 Pet. 3:15). Unexpected expressions of tangible love, particularly in the public sphere, provide an opportunity for someone to ask. We have the commandment to love, but do we allow each other the freedom to love unconditionally?

As God, Jesus is our Lord. As our brother, he is our ultimate apologetic (Heb. 2:11). He is the reason for our hope.

Given that we are in his image, I suppose that we ourselves are then the penultimate apologetic. What ramifications does this have for reconciling what we see in the Bible with what we are seeing not only in the lives around us, but in ourselves as well? In Christ, we have the opportunity to be fully human, and not simply transhuman. Let’s exhibit that for the world today, and let our light shine before men so that they may praise the Father in heaven (Matt. 5:16).

John Eddy is executive director of the Gospel and Culture Project at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia).

BIBLIOGRAPHY: “Spare Parts for the Brain,” The Economist, 19 June 2003; “Seeing The Light,” The Economist, 7 June 2007; see also, “Body Dysmorphic Disorder 300.7 of DSM-IV-TR,” Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition.

Fisher, Geoffrey F. “Canterbury Scores Test Tube Babies,” New York Times, 14 January 1958. The archbishop of Canterbury condemned artificial insemination by donors as “an offense against the social and legal implications of marriage.”

Kass, Leon R., M.D., Beyond Therapy; Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness, A Report by the President’s Council on Bioethics (New York: Dana Press, 2003).

Between the Times (continued from page 6) diocese to complete such a departure. In response, the presiding bishop inhibited San Joaquin bishop John-David Schofield from giving sermons, confirming catechumens, or performing any religious rites. The Pittsburgh diocese took only the first of two steps needed to leave the Episcopal Church, but Jefferts Schori also tried to inhibit Bishop Robert Duncan before such a departure was finalized.

Fort Worth bishop Jack Leo Iker said it was “tragic and deeply disturbing” that the presiding bishop would attempt canonical action against the Pittsburgh bishop before any final decision was made. “The Episcopal Church continually gives lip service to the need for ongoing conversation and dialogue to heal our divisions while at the same time closing off any possibility of continuing conversations by aggressive, punitive actions such as this,” Iker wrote in a January letter. Iker previously accused Jefferts Schori of “aggressive, dictatorial posturing” after she threatened him with disciplinary charges if he permitted his diocese to vote on whether to terminate its relationship with the national church body.

Though Jefferts Schori’s attempt to inhibit Duncan was unsuccessful, a committee did support her contention that he had “abandoned the communion of the church.” In announcing the decision, Jefferts Schori said Duncan had two months to prove he was subject to the doctrine, discipline, and worship of the church.

“Few bishops have been more loyal to the doctrine, discipline and worship of the Episcopal Church,” Duncan said in a brief response denying the charge. ■

Speaking Of…

I

have read in Plato and Cicero sayings that are very wise and very beautiful; but I never read in either of them: “Come unto me all ye that labour and are heavy laden.”

—St. Augustine

O

ur Lord has written the promise of the resurrection, not in books alone, but in every leaf in spring-time.

—Martin Luther

I

f I might comprehend Jesus Christ, I could not believe on Him. He would be no greater than myself. Such is my consciousness of sin and inability that I must have a superhuman Saviour.

—Daniel Webster

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 11

BIG THOUGHTS FOR LITTLE MINDS r e sou rces

fo r

homes

Explain It— Over and Over and Over

W

e have a goal in mind. We know where we want to end up in this mat-

the opportunity for us to correct any misunderter of teaching God’s truth to our children. Our goal is that they would standings.

A principle to keep in know basic Bible stories, certainly; that their personal character would mind as you define words is this: keep working with be formed by the teachings of Scripture, of course; but your definition until you are certain that every word in it more than that—and I would say, most importantly—we will be understood. Of course, the younger the children, want our children to understand the key doctrines of the the more concrete the definition needs to be. It often helps Christian faith. A proper fear of and a genuine love for to give children a “for example” illustration. If you are God presuppose an accurate knowledge of who God is. explaining to children the word “atonement,” you could Saving faith presupposes awareness of one’s sin and need, use an illustration like the following. Let’s say it’s your parand of Christ’s person and work. These are doctrinal issues ents’ wedding anniversary and your mother has prepared a very and require doctrinal teaching, so doctrinal teaching for special candlelight dinner for your dad. She’s arranged places for our children is our goal. How, though, do we get there? all her children to go for the evening, and she’s planning a What roads do we take to ensure that we do not ramble romantic evening alone with her husband. She gets everything aimlessly, but actually end up where we want to be? I’d ready and waits for your dad to come home—but he forgets it’s like you to think of this year’s Big Thoughts for Little Minds their anniversary, and he works late at the office. By the time he as one big road map, with each installment giving you specomes home, the dinner is ruined and your mom is very unhappy cific roads you should take as you journey toward your with him. He has offended her. He’s going to have to do somegoal of accurately teaching doctrine to children. A major thing to atone for that, to make up for it. Maybe he’ll get her flowdifference, of course, is that when you follow a map you ers or a nice gift; maybe he’ll take her someplace very special; certake first this road, then the next, then the one after that, tainly, he’s going to have to explain and apologize. Because he has all in sequence. The “roads” I’ll be pointing you toward offended her, he must find a way to get back into a good relationare methods you will use over and over again, never realship with her again. When we sin, we offend God deeply, much ly finishing with one in order to go on to the next. more than we could ever offend another human being. That is Sometimes you’ll use several “roads” simultaneously. But because God is absolutely holy and hates all sin. Before we can I am confident that the most complex biblical doctrines can have a good relationship with God, something must be done to be taught to children when these methodologies are conatone for our sin. sistently applied over long periods of time.

We can also explain a word by looking at its root or its 1. Give children clear, simple definitions. Effective commuoriginal use, using these as stepping stones to arrive at the nication of anything to anyone must always include defindefinition needed. For example, a worship service begins ing terms. Children grow up in Christian homes and regwith an invocation and ends with a benediction. “Invocation” ularly hear such words as “Trinity,” “justification,” “faith,” puts together the two Latin words “vocare” (to call) and “in” “redeem,” and “glory.” Maybe they know what these (in or into). Thus, a prayer of invocation is when we call words mean, but we should not assume that they do. In God into our worship service, to help us worship in a way our initial preparations for teaching a children’s class at that will honor him. “Benediction” comes from the Latin church or for teaching our children at home (and I do “bene” (well) and “dicere” (to speak). The minister speaks think home teaching should involve careful preparation), words of prayer that the people will be well in their lives we begin by asking ourselves what specifically doctrinal before God as they leave the service. words we will be using, and what would be the best way Focusing on how we use a word in ordinary conversato define those words for children. Even if we think the tion, and even pointing out the differences when it is used children know a word, we should still ask them to define doctrinally, can help clarify meanings. For instance, you it. Having to explain the term in their own words will might ask a group of children which person among them sharpen the definition in their own minds and will provide they would elect (or choose) if they needed someone to get

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dren to explain it. As parents and teachers, we seldom take into account how natural it each time you use it. Having taught a concept in a class is, to human beings of any age, to forget. We take in so so that children really seem to understand it, keep much information all day day, that our practical every going over that concept in future classes until it is brains push anything not used into the back recesses, almost second nature to the children to explain it. to make room for information frequently called for. If we as educators do not use a message to a neighbor down the street very quickly or if those most tedious methodologies of continual drill and they needed someone to reach the very highest shelf in a repetition, our children will not retain what we have room. The children will say they would elect or choose the taught. I have been teaching a unit to third through sixth fastest child among them, or the tallest child. You can then graders on the person and work of Christ, based on a secgo on to discuss how God elects people or chooses them from tion of J. I. Packer’s Concise Theology. The children have among everyone else to be his people. The difference is, of learned and understood a number of important doctrinal course, that when God chooses or elects someone, it is never ideas about the Lord Jesus, and I want them to retain because of something about that person that makes him or them. So I make sure that the last ten or fifteen minutes her a better choice. God chooses that person just because of every Sunday school hour is given over to a review he has chosen to love that person, and for no other reason. game. I keep using the same questions each week, adding We must not overlook those most excellent sources of new ones as we learn new concepts, because I want the definitions, the catechisms. For instance, see what a clear, children to be able to know those important ideas so well concise definition The Westminster Shorter Catechism in that they can rattle them off without hesitation. So, repeat Modern English (P&R Publishing, 1986) gives of “justificaand review, repeat and review, to the point that you feel tion”: “Justification is the act of God’s free grace by which absurdly redundant. It’s necessary! he pardons all our sins and declares us as righteous in his Clear definitions of words and constant repetition—you sight. He does so only because he counts the righteousness will find these two main roads will serve you well in your of Christ as ours. Justification is received by faith alone.” journey to the sound doctrinal instruction of children.

Certainly there are some things to be discussed in that definition, to be sure children understand them, but having our children memorize (and regularly review) a sound, Starr Meade is author of Training Hearts, Teaching Minds: biblical catechism provides them with a wealth of excellent Family Devotions Based on the Shorter Catechism (P&R, 2000). doctrinal definitions to carry around with them as long as they live. I recommend The Heidelberg Catechism and Catechism for Young Children, as well as The Westminster Shorter Catechism.

Special note to pastors and worship leaders: As you prepare sermons and choose hymns, please consider the people in your congregations who are under the age of twelve. It would be a simple thing to look through your sermon notes and your hymn choices for words that children need defined and then to choose two or three to explain in the morning’s service. My guess is that many adults in your audience would also find this helpful!

2. Repeat, repeat, repeat. The Jesuits, renowned for their ability as educators, had a phrase: Repetitio mater studiorum, or “repetition is the mother of learning.” Never assume that because you have explained something well once, your children or your class will remember it. They will not.

In fact, you will be amazed at how quickly they will forget it—unless you keep repeating it. Having defined a term well, go back over that definition each time you use it.

Having taught a concept in a class so that children really seem to understand it, keep going over that concept in future classes until it is almost second nature to the chil-

Having defined a term well, go back over that definition

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 13

Preaching to the Post/Modern Choir

by Shane Lems There is a dreadful ditch in Christianity, a wedge between propositional truth and personal practice. Kevin Vanhoozer calls it “a debilitating dichotomy between theory and practice.”1 Although we probably should not reduce this dichotomy to a battle between modern or postmodern Christians, it is helpful to see how each approaches doctrine, or for our purposes, preaching. The former generally emphasizes doctrinal—propositional—preaching while the latter emphasizes holistic, relevant sermons.

Modernist preaching says instruct while postmodernist says authenticate. If we look at both, we can better understand the emphases on propositional or practical.

So what are our options? Should we build up a fortress around our propositional dogma? Or should we destroy the propositional paradigm and seek to “encounter Jesus” rather than preach doctrinal truths about him?2 Perhaps preachers are tempted to approach these questions with an either/or mentality. I submit, however, that it is not that simple. My proposal is that Reformed preachers cannot simply preach propositions or practice: the content of Scripture must determine the method of preaching. Doctrine and preaching are so much more than divine dogmas or personal encounters. If we truly want the gospel to go forth to people in all cultures

and countries, we cannot do so by emphasizing propositional truths or authentic experience alone.

My approach is simple. Since this topic is one that could fill a book, I will be brief at times to allow for the main topic of preaching. When speaking of modernism or postmodernism, I am primarily thinking about Christians who fit into each “ism.” I realize that so much modernism shows up in postmodernism, but I do not have the space to outline that detail. We will first look at modernism, then postmodernism, specifically what each says about propositions and preaching. Finally, an apology will be made for biblical, Reformed preaching that cannot simply be labeled modern or postmodern. The apology will be for a dramatic (theory and practice) model of preaching.

Modernism Even if we do not mind being labeled a modernist, we cannot simply stick our fingers in our ears and hum an imprecatory psalm when a postmodernist says that Christianity is “to encounter the person of Jesus Christ rather than to adopt a doctrinal system.”3 I submit that before we can stick our fingers in our ears (or even think about it!) we must compare and contrast modernism and postmodernism. In this section, we will first note several generalizations of modernism.

Since we cannot speak about In Season: Meditations on all aspects of modernism and Reading, Preaching, and postmodernism, we will focus on one aspect of both—nameUsing Scripture ly, their outlooks on proposiWhat role does the Bible play in your life? Is it a resource for tional truth. As we discuss daily wisdom, a self-help manual extraordinaire, a doctrinal modernism and postmodrepository? Perhaps it doesn’t have a regular role in your life ernism, we will be mainly disbecause these other uses (and abuses) of Scripture have cussing the two as they appear overtaken its true purpose. Throughout this year, we are in the Christian church. Here featuring “In Season: Meditations on reading, preaching, and we speak about modernism because it historically predates using Scripture.” Each article will be written by various postmodernism. people (the laity, professional theologians, and ministers); and

each will be unique (a sermon, a hermeneutic, thoughts on application, and even concerns about the misuse of Scripture).

We want to continue the conversation on our website, so feel free to e-mail us at letters@modernreformation.org with your thoughts after reading each issue’s “In Season,” or send us an article you’ve written for possible publication.

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Modernism Briefly Stated According to Stanley Grenz, modernism exclaims, “Knowledge is certain, objective, and good.”4 The modern mind tends to seek and rely

on certain knowledge. That is, a modernist says that knowledge is valid, universal, and genuine. Modernism lays a foundation for knowledge, and upholds the fact that beliefs can be justified. “Modern intellect is an architect whose knowledge not only of foundations but of structures enables him to build the City of Man according to the principles of architectonic reason with a single rational blueprint.”5 Clear and distinct categories are helpful for modernists: Baptists believe in x, Presbyterians believe in y, and Episcopalians believe in z. In the conservative wing of modernism, systematic theology is understandable because it is logical; it is outlined under the various loci.

“The [modern] rationalist approach that typifies evangelical theology is characterized by a commitment to the Bible as the source book of information for systematic theology.”6 Modern Christians have no problem proposing certain things about God: he is omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent, and so forth. Doctrine tends to be reduced to “hard and fast epistemological and ontological categories.”7 Therefore, modernists are familiar and comfortable with sermons containing highly doctrinal themes.

Propositions, Propositions In modern Christianity, as we have just noted, Scripture has often been approached as a book of doctrine. Prooftexting has its heyday in modernist apologetics and systematic theologies. Modern evangelicals, even Reformed evangelicals, look at the inerrant Word as the “incontrovertible foundation” of theology.8 Modern Christian theologies emphasize the intellectual aspect of theology, viewing biblical doctrine as “informative propositions or truth claims about objective realities.”9 What can be said about modern theology can generally be said about modern preaching. A modern Christian sermon on conversion might be outlined with these three points: 1) the Author of Conversion, 2) the Nature of Conversion, and 3) the Necessity of Conversion. The sermon would be rather logical and easy to follow.

Furthermore, this sermon could be preached anywhere, at any time, with only a few modifications because the doctrine of conversion is a timeless truth found in Scripture.

One Reformed preacher said that the different parts, or headings, of a sermon should make a central “doctrine or proposition” clear.10 It is true that many Reformed preachers rail against moralistic preaching, the type of sermons that reduce Joseph fleeing from Potiphar’s wife as an excellent example of how Christians should flee temptation (Gen. 39). However, most of these same preachers approach Joseph’s story as a proof-text of God’s providence. “You meant it for evil against me, but God meant it for good” is indeed one of the pristine proofs for providence. We have to be sure that many preachers, because they are mindful of the power of the gospel, would point the congregation to the fact that Joseph’s story paved the way for Christ to come and save his people. Yet the emphasis on doctrine still denigrates the story of Scripture.

Our emphasis on “story” will resume after a look at the next “ism,” namely, postmodernism.

Postmodernism Postmodernism Briefly Stated Absolute knowledge or certainty is unattainable according to a postmodernist. A postmodernist gets quite nervous when he or she hears someone speak about ultimate truth.

Truth is not universal, but local, communal, cultural.

Nothing is superior or ultimate; there can be “new” things, but not better things. Unlike modernists, postmodernists do not try to put ideas into little box-like categories.11 The nasty little box-like compartments of modernism need to be deconstructed and finally destructed. Postmodernism assumes that there is “no common denominator…that guarantees either the One-ness of the world or the possibility of neutral or objective thought.”12 There is a passionate denial of absolute status to any ideology or reality in postmodernity.13 Rather than search for the truth, the postmodernist asks whose truth or what truth?

The postmodern architect, referring back to the above architectural model, is one who views the modernist skyscraper as devastated. We cannot have blueprints to build the City of Man, nor can we hope to find a solid foundation upon which we can build this great city. Actually, “why bother” building another city, since your ideal city might be different from mine?14 In postmodernism, there is a latte flavor for every person.

Anti-propositional We have noted that with modernism, propositional and foundational truths are acknowledged. Postmodernism, on the other hand, turns the deconstructive drill on the foundations. Foundational epistemology (how we know what we know) and truth are impossible to find, if they even exist. “All postmodern thinkers see the modernist quest for…laying foundations for our knowledge, as a dream for the impossible, a contemporary version of the quest for the Holy Grail.”15 A postmodernist says that a person cannot state a universal, propositional truth. If someone claims to have the truth, he or she is arrogant and is simply wrong.

In 1995, Christianity Today noted that “abandonment of dogmatism” was one of the top five characteristics of postmodernists.16 “A nonfoundationalist or antifoundationalist approach to knowledge” says “all beliefs are subject to critical scrutiny.”17 Although propositional truths are looked upon with a skeptical eye, postmodernity can make truth-statements. These truth-statements, however, are subject to critical examination and are open to “revision, reconstruction, or even rejection.”18 In postmodernity, there is certainly incredulity toward propositions.

What about postmodernist preaching? This is a little harder to evaluate since the reaction against propositionalism/foundationalism has been multifaceted. There has been a renewed emphasis on narrative, which provides some help for approaching Scripture as more than a tome M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 15

Edmund Clowney’s words are still true: “Preaching must be theological.” We must preach doctrinal indicatives! As J. G. Machen said so well, “Christianity” [and I would add preaching] cannot “live without theology.” of dogma. Yet a postmodern sermon “is not a declaration of absolute truth, but a mile marker along the congregation’s journey.”19 A postmodern preacher “needs to help the congregation have a good sense of what they can trust from God, the gospel, and Christian community.”20 Sermons deal with the authentic rather than the absolute.

What Christians need, preachers say, is “a spirit of love and respect…a spirit of acceptance…a spirit for today, here and now.”21 Yesterday’s truths are as stale as cold Folgers coffee; sermons can fit only one community for one time.

Most “good” postmodern preachers do preach from the Bible and acknowledge that people today are seeking the truth to some extent. Yet, “sermon” is often downplayed, and other senses besides hearing are utilized throughout the service. Propositions give way to interactive procedures. This is perhaps why we see a renewed interest in tradition; from lighting candles to burning incense, postmodern services are holistically interactive. I submit that this appreciation for the sensual is another way of avoiding foundationalism. Each individual can authentically experience worship in community by interaction rather than by simply hearing a propositional truth. Perhaps an episode can give us a general picture of postmodern preaching.

Then Pastor Dave, who had been sitting barefooted on the floor, quietly rose and began to comment earnestly on Paul’s Epistle to the Ephesians. It was neither a sermon nor a Bible lesson. It was…an impromptu but extended tête-à-tête between church members and its leadership, which compassed meditation, confession, exposition of relevant scriptural passages, and personal revelation. It was “church,” but not a “service.” It was neither sermon nor liturgy. The focus was on the intensity of interpersonal communication.22 Although this is but one example of what postmodern “preaching” looks like, the focus is on the practical, the interpersonal, and the authentic: anything but arrogant propositions! Of course, some postmodern “worship experiences” completely avoid sermons or preaching altogether.

Modernism embraces definite truth, absolutes, foundations, rationalistic thinking, and certainty, while postmodernism embraces emotions, authenticity, community, tolerance, and denies unquestionable foundations.23 1 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N . O R G

Modern preaching highlights the propositional, didactic, and intellectual while postmodern preaching stresses the narratival, communal, sensual, and authentic.

The question comes up once again: which shall we choose?

Preaching: Doctrine Embodied in Christians Propositions?

Is there a middle ground between the modern and postmodern conception of propositions? Should we preach propositional truths at all costs? Or, should we throw propositions into the wind and try to connect and communicate with Christians on an authentic, personal level? I submit that propositions are necessary and biblical. When God says, “I will have mercy upon whom I will have mercy,” it is a propositional truth (Rom. 9:15). Edmund Clowney’s words are still true: “Preaching must be theological.”24 We must preach doctrinal indicatives! As J. G. Machen said so well, “Christianity” [and I would add preaching] cannot “live without theology.”25 There is, however, a grave danger to propositional preaching: de-dramatization. De-dramatization happens when the sermon is reduced to a message on doctrine.26 The gospel is anything but mere proposition. It is not simply a dictionary entry, but an event, something that happened in history. The gospel was already foretold in the prima gratia of Scripture: the promise of one who would crush the head of the serpent. The gospel was pre-enacted by Yahweh, so to speak, as he passed between the animal halves (Gen. 15). The gospel was pictured in the dramatic cutting of the sacrificial animals and other cultic activities. The gospel is the drama of Christ’s life, death, resurrection, and ascension. To reduce the gospel to mere dogma is to de-dramatize salvation history. Along with proof-texts, pastors should cite proof-acts, the mighty deeds in which Yahweh has proven his covenant faithfulness.

Scripture contains propositions, but there is more to Scripture than propositions. Scripture was “not given at one time, nor in the form of a theological dictionary.”27 Below, we will compare the drama of redemption to the theater: God is the divine dramatist and he has called his people to take part in this wonderful production. As the playwright, God has revealed truths about himself, yet a play is much more than mere statements of fact—it includes things that God has done and the human response to him. Imagine a theater production in which the actors stood up and simply stated true facts!

Practice, Practical, and Purposeful?

“Pastor, we want sermons that are relevant to our lives, sermons that tell us how to live as Christians.” This plea should be heeded by Reformed preachers. A preacher is much more than a lecturer or teacher. Christians need direction, they need to hear the voice of Christ guide them.

So, yes, preaching should instruct, authenticate, be relevant, and include imperatives: ethical application “is an essential part of the preaching of the Word.”28 However, as with the propositional tendency to dedramatize Scripture, de-dramatization also happens when the sermon is reduced to a moral exhortation.29 Or, as in some emergent circles, true propositions are swallowed up by the tolerant communal aspect: what kind of Jesus should you be to your neighbor? The propositional truths are what got the church into trouble in the past, so let’s focus on the here and now, and what God’s love means right here, right now. Gone are the sermons on the dramatic, bloody sacrifice of animals by the priests. Gone are the fundamental truths like “shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?” (Gen. 18:25). The practical swallows up the propositional hook, line, and dogma.

Scripture contains relevant exhortations to followers of Christ. Sermons should be more than a doctrinal discourse or theological training. They must “authentically connect” with the listeners. Yet the dramatic aspect of Scripture quickly disappears when the relevant is overemphasized.

There is a better alternative than choosing either propositional or practical.

Both: Let the Curtain Rise!

A pastor who does not pray and work to help the congregation know (theory) and imitate (practice) Christ more and more is not doing his job! In a sense, perhaps the postmodern notion of authenticity is helpful: we want Christians who are authentically following Christ. We want Christians to love their neighbors; our preaching—let me say doctrinal preaching—should direct them how to love even their enemies. Simply preaching either indicative (proposition) or imperative (practical) will not do. “While we were enemies God loved us and saved us” is not just theoretical, it is immensely practical. The people of God need to know his Word and they need to know how to act it out. Preaching must do both, indoctrinate and exdoctrinate, as Vanhoozer suggests.30 I have mentioned the words drama and script. Michael Horton describes theology—perhaps we can also say doctrinal preaching—as “the church’s reflection on God’s performative action in word and deed and its own participation in the drama of redemption.”31 Vanhoozer uses the drama analogy as well, noting that the triune God writes (Father), acts out (Son), and brings us into (Spirit) the drama.32 Following confessional Reformed theology, we realize that the Spirit clothes us in the righteousness of Christ and helps us remember our lines: in a word, he equips us to play the part. What of the pastor and sermon?

The pastor is a sort of assistant director, if you will, a mediator between the script[ure] and the actors. He helps Christians understand the script[ure] and thus direct them to play their parts according to the script[ure].

No doubt we “actors” in this divine drama will stumble (break a leg!), forget our lines, and even at times refuse to come on stage. In our “poor acting”—the pastor reminds

the congregation that Jesus has already perfectly played the part, and by his flawless dramatic performance takes our filthy costumes and gives us his beautiful robe.

Furthermore, he comes to pick us up gently when we fall, reminds us of our lines by his Spirit, and encourages us to look ahead to the last act: the consummation.

We must approach Scripture like Scripture “is;” our preaching method must be determined by canonical content. Scripture is one grand covenantal drama, an unfolding story about the dramatist himself: the triune God. Therefore, when we preach, we must be sure that we never turn on the drama-Hoover, sucking the drama out of the drama. One probable and undesirable outcome of propositionalist preaching is a loss of the notion of what preaching really is. If we constantly preach “God says” or “God is,” our congregations will in time forget that “God does.” On the flip side, if we constantly preach “do unto others,” and “be Jesus to your neighbors,” our congregations will forget who God is and what Jesus did for us. We must understand that God does things even in preaching: preaching is a means of grace, the voice of the risen Christ doing things to and for his sheep, including comforting, sanctifying, uniting, strengthening, and so on.

“Doing things in preaching” brings us briefly to what some philosophers have called speech-act. This should be no strange fact to Reformed Christians—the fact that God’s Word is powerful and effective, accomplishing its purposes (cf. Gen. 1, Ezek. 37, and John 11). The elocutionary act is God speaking; the illocutionary act is God promising, comforting, warning, etc.; and the per-elocutionary act is what is accomplished in or by the hearer. While preaching today is not equivalent to God speaking to Abraham, it is still just as effective: “Faith comes by hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ” (Rom. 10:17; see also Isa. 55:11, Jer. 1:12, 23:29, 1 Pet. 1:23). Through the preaching of the gospel, the Holy Spirit goes forth, blazing his way into hearts and lives, creating and strengthening faith.

This too is so much more than just a propositional truth or personal encounter: the Holy Spirit through the preached gospel-word enables Christians to know and act out the script[ure].

As a side, preaching dramatically will also fence Zwingli from the table and font. That is, preaching more than propositional truths or authentic experience, preaching the grand story of salvation in all its different scenes will emphasize the participatory nature of the sacraments. Is not the celebration of the Holy Supper a “participation” in the blood and body of Christ (1 Cor. 10:16)? We see the water of baptism, we hear Christ’s Spirit saying let the little child come to me, and another person is placed on the covenantal stage of this great drama. To have a “baptized forehead” is not simply theoretical, but practical. To eat and drink the body and blood of Christ is a visible, dramatic declaration that we are not simply sitting in the stands, but that God is pulling us further into his great story.

Preaching dramatically is preaching covenantally.

Preaching covenantally is preaching Christ. Scripture has M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 17

everything to do with covenant: from a broken covenant in the garden to a gracious covenant in the midst of the curse, to the breaking of the covenant by God’s people, to the keeping of the covenant by God’s servant-Son. This covenant is played out dramatically: God reveals himself in language and deeds. The pinnacle of this revelation is Christ on the cross as covenant servant and covenant Lord where God was at work. The church takes part in this drama—not going back in time or by opening up the canon—but by realizing that the drama is the same one, only in the act that falls between Jesus’ incarnation and his parousia. Preaching dramatically will direct Christians how to act according to the script[ure]. God loves his enemies, gently picks them up, clothes them in glorious garments, and gives them the means to act on his stage. What will Christians do when they see their enemies broken and in need?

The Grand Finale Francis Turretin, although not often utilizing the theme of drama, spoke in terms of proper performance: “There is no mystery proposed to our contemplation as an object of faith…which is not prerequisite for its proper performance.”33 In other words, the wonderful truths of Scripture must be known so that we can perform well on the stage.

Godly performance is directed by God’s script[ure]. Godly performance is also pictured by God’s own performance: Jesus perfectly executing his role in the drama, where we failed along with Adam and Israel. Preaching teaches the script[ure] and how to act it out.

I confess that the exhortation to “preach dramatically” is more easily said than done. The propositional and authentic examples we have looked at, however, simply will not do in isolation or opposition. The method of preaching should reflect the content of Scripture: a covenantal drama that includes God’s words and deeds, and the church’s response in word and deed. If we truly want our preaching to be doctrinal and biblical, what better way is there than to reflect Scripture’s own content? There should be no modern or postmodern dichotomy between proposition and practice, between dogma and deed. A preacher explains what the script[ure] means—propositions included—and in turn directs the congregation how to live their lives according to the script[ure]. This includes knowledge and practice, indicative and imperative.

Shane Lems (M. Div., Westminster Seminary California, Escondido) is a church planter and United Reformed Church pastor. He lives with his wife and three boys in Sunnyside, Washington.

WORKS CITED: 1 Kevin Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), p. 3.

2 John Stackhouse, in D. A. Carson, Becoming Conversant with the Emerging Church (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2005), p. 66.

3 John Stackhouse in Carson, p. 66.

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Stanley Grenz, A Primer on Postmodernism (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1996), p. 4.

5 Kevin Vanhoozer, “Pilgrim’s Digress: Christian Thinking on and About the Post/Modern Way” in Christianity and the Postmodern Turn: Six Views, ed. Myron Penner (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005), p. 74.

6 Stanley Grenz and John Franke, Beyond Foundationalism (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), p. 13.

7 Michael Horton, Covenant and Eschatology (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2002), p. 246.

8 Grenz and Franke, pp. 23-24.

9 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1984), p. 16.

10 D. Martin Lloyd-Jones, Preaching and Preachers (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972), p. 76.

11 Brian McLaren, A New Kind of Christian (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2001), p. 47.

12 Elizabeth Ermarth, “Postmodernism” in Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig (New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 587.

13 Ermath, p. 589.

14 Vanhoozer, Christianity and the Postmodern Turn: Six Views, p. 75.

15 Wentzel van Huysseteen, quoted by Grenz and Franke, p. 38.

16 Mark Filiatreau, “‘Good News’ or ‘Old News,’” Regeneration Quarterly 1, no. 1 (1995), p. 15.

17 John Franke, “Christian Faith and Postmodern Theory,” Christianity and the Postmodern Turn: Six Views, ed.

Myron Penner (Grand Rapids: Brazos, 2005), p. 111.

18 Franke, p. 112.

19 Ronald Allen, “Preaching and Postmodernism,” Interpretation 55, no. 1 (2001), p. 37.

20 Allen, p. 47.

21 Rob Bell from a sermon, “How to Lose Your Life,” given on 4 December 2005.

22 Carl Raschke, The Next Reformation (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2005), p. 176.

23 Carson, p. 27.

24 Edmund Clowney, Preaching and Biblical Theology (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1961), p. 74.

25 J. Gresham Machen, The Origin of Paul’s Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1947), p. 20.

26 Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, p. 403.

27 Clowney, p. 15.

28 Clowney, p. 80.

29 Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, p. 403.

30 Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, p. 400. Turretin spoke along similar lines: “We consider theology to be neither simply theoretical nor simply practical…it is more practical than theoretical.” See Francis Turretin, Institutes of Elenctic Theology, trans. George Giger, ed. J. Dennison (Phillipsburg: P&R, 1992), pp. 1-21.

31 Turretin, pp. 4, 276.

32 Vanhoozer, The Drama of Doctrine, p. 448.

33 Turretin, p. 21.

4

Speaking Of…

CHRIST THE LORD IS RISEN TODAY

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little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to atheism, but depth in philosophy bringeth men’s minds about to religion.

—Francis Bacon

by Charles Wesley (1739) Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!

Earth and heaven in chorus say, Alleluia!

Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!

Sing, ye heavens, and earth reply, Alleluia!

Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!

Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!

Death in vain forbids him rise, Alleluia!

Christ has opened paradise, Alleluia!

Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!

Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!

Once he died our souls to save, Alleluia!

Where’s thy victory, boasting grave? Alleluia!

Soar we now where Christ has led, Alleluia!

Following our exalted Head, Alleluia!

Made like him, like him we rise, Alleluia!

Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!

Hail the Lord of earth and heaven, Alleluia!

Praise to thee by both be given, Alleluia!

Thee we greet triumphant now, Alleluia!

Hail the Resurrection, thou, Alleluia!

King of glory, soul of bliss, Alleluia!

Everlasting life is this, Alleluia!

Thee to know, thy power to prove, Alleluia!

Thus to sing, and thus to love, Alleluia!

I

f there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having, neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is. [So] you must wager. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that he is.

— Blaise Pascal

I

can see how it might be possible for a man to look down upon the earth and be an atheist, but I cannot conceive how he could look up into the heavens and say there is no God. —Abraham Lincoln

I

f there were no God, there would be no atheists.

—G. K. Chesterton

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god who let us prove his existence would be an idol.

—Dietrich Bonhoeffer

I

t amazes me to find an intelligent person who fights against something which he does not at all believe exists.

—Mohandas Gandhi

T

o sustain the belief that there is no God, atheism has to demonstrate infinite knowledge, which is tantamount to saying, “I have infinite knowledge that there is no being in existence with infinite knowledge.”

— Ravi Zacharias

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theism is a crutch for those who cannot bear the reality of God. — Tom Stoppard

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 19

T H E N E W AT H E I S M

Skepticism, Agnosticism, and Atheism A BRIEF HISTORY OF UNBELIEF

by M. Z. Hemingway

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he last two years have been good for atheism. A rash of books making the case for unbelief, including Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (2006) and Christopher Hitchens’ God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (2007), have sold millions of copies.

Strident atheist Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, one of his atheistic tomes designed to rescue children from belief in God, was made into a movie. Even pop star Elton John got into the act, calling for a ban on religion. Leaders of the so-called New Atheism are aggressive and proselytizing.

They don’t just condemn belief in God; they also condemn respect for belief in God. But how new is the New Atheism? It is said best in Ecclesiastes 1:9: “There is nothing new under the sun.” To be sure, explicit and public atheism is a somewhat new phenomenon. But atheism, agnosticism, and good oldfashioned doubt have strong and lengthy histories worth learning. Because atheism is parasitic on theism and even more on Christianity, to learn the history of atheism is to learn the history of the church.

Take the New Atheist creed of “no heaven, no hell, just science,” which articulates the widely held division in modern thought between faith and reason. To fully understand the story of that division, it is wise to consider the creation of the world as told in Genesis. We learn from Moses that the Creator is distinct and different from the created world. Where ancient mythologies saw gods as personifications of natural phenomena such as rain and fire, ancient Israel viewed nature as separate from God and man. God created nature and man was its steward. Nature is not to be worshiped, God alone is. Nature and the natural process in and of themselves are not divine. God, apart from a few notable exceptions, doesn’t speak to his people through nature but through historic events such as deliverance from Egypt. It is wise to remember as we proceed that this separation between nature and God is a biblical precept.

We know unbelief predates Christopher Hitchens because we read about it throughout the Old Testament—in the Book of Job, Psalms, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, and Isaiah. In Proverbs, for instance, a man questions whether anyone can know God—a charge that is refuted in the same chapter (Prov. 30:1-4); and from the psalmist we learn, “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’” (Ps. 53:1). Still, the Old Testament discussion of atheism is against an atheism that ignores God’s Law and punishment more than against an outright disbelief in God. M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 19

more difficult to incorporate as these looked at human life from a purely naturalistic firmly established in mainstream Christian thinking, point of view.

Muslim philosopher and created a situation where reason could tackle the polymath Averroes (11261198) wrote popular comnatural world without any input from faith. mentaries on Aristotle’s works arguing that there is no Disbelief and skepticism also have roots in ancient conflict between religion and philosophy, but that they are Greece and Rome, whose philosophers greatly influenced different ways of reaching truth. The view, later known as Western thinkers. Xenophanes of Colophon (570-480 the doctrine of twofold truth, had considerable influence B.C.), the Greek philosopher and poet, criticized the throughout the Middle Ages. He taught that religious truth mythological views of gods. He noticed that wherever he is based on faith, unable to be tested and didn’t require traveled, the gods resembled humans. If oxen could draw, formal education. Philosophical truth was reserved for the he theorized, their gods would look like oxen. elite who could study it.

Greek philosopher Epicurus (340-270 B.C.) taught that French theologian Amalric of Bena (died c. 1204-1207) pleasure and pain are the true measures of good and bad, developed Aristotle’s philosophy at the University of Paris. that death is the end of both body and soul, and that the He taught that God is all—including evil—and all things gods neither reward nor punish humans. His student are one, that every Christian must believe he is a member Lucretius (99-55 B.C.) furthered the view in a poem of the body of Christ to be saved, and that he who remains arguing against fear of death. Neither was atheistic per se, in the love of God commits no sin. Salvation in the but they believed gods weren’t interested in humans. Their Amalric sense was man’s fulfillment in this life alone.

Epicurean school lasted for 600 years and enjoyed a strong Because true believers could commit no sin, Amalric’s revival in Europe in the seventeenth century. followers indulged in a few excesses. After Amalric’s death, Roman statesman and philosopher Marcus Tullius some members of the sect became Brethren of the Free Cicero (106-43 B.C.), another atheist forbear, was moved Spirit, an antinomian and individualist movement that to doubt by despair over the death of his beloved daughter spread throughout northern Europe in the thirteenth and Tullia. He sought to argue that man was a free moral agent fourteenth centuries before being condemned as heretical. whose life was not controlled by gods, and wrote On Duties Amalric’s views were so controversial that his body was (44 B.C.) to provide citizens with a moral framework even exhumed four years after his death and burned for good if, as he contended, nothing in life was certain. measure. It didn’t work. German historian Friedrich Heer It was into this philosophical milieu that Christianity called him the father of all militant, non-Christian began to spread. Roman emperors engaged in widespread humanist thinking. persecution of the church. Christian teachers began So it was into this thirteenth-century fray that producing apologetic works defending the faith by A.D.150.

Dominican Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) integrated Christianity was legalized in the fourth century and by the Aristotle into Christian natural theology. Heavily sixth century paganism was actively suppressed. Eastern influenced by Averroes’ teachings, Aquinas believed that Roman Emperor Justinian I (482-565) placed the pagan truth is known through reason (natural revelation) and philosophical schools, which had been discussing the idea faith (supernatural revelation). The latter is revealed that theology might be too complex for humans to through Holy Scripture and the church, while the former understand, under state control in 529. is available to all people. There is no contradiction and Throughout the medieval period, whatever other issues some overlap between the two. He taught that witnessing Christianity was engaged in, unbelief was not a major the natural world can prove the existence of God and his theme. Beginning in the eleventh century, cathedral-based attributes, but other truths—such as the Trinity—require schools developed into universities. They slowly began revelation. As a result of Aquinas’s work, demand for adding medicine, philosophy, and law to their theological Aristotle’s writings grew exponentially. subjects. From the twelfth through fifteenth centuries, the This differentiation of theology from philosophy and study of logic became a main focus of philosophers as they science began in earnest during the tenure at Oxford of the engaged in critical analyses of philosophical arguments. influential theologian and logician Franciscan John Duns Platonic thought dominated Christianity from the time Scotus (c. 1266-1308). He argued that the theologian and the the second-century Church Fathers began producing their philosopher study separate subjects and that only theological works. In the twelfth century, Aristotle’s major theologians should study God since revelation was a matter writings were reintroduced to the West in waves. His of faith rather than natural experience. William of Ockham logical works were absorbed easily and avidly into (c. 1288-c. 1347), an English Franciscan friar and scholastic Christian thought. His more profound philosophical works philosopher, furthered the divide by arguing that if faith does and ethical, political, and literary treatises were a little not flow from reason, neither may it be destroyed by reason.

The separation of the supernatural and natural, now

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It was during this period that the dominant intellectual interest of the time was realigning faith and reason.

Certain teachings began to flourish, particularly, as Heer wrote in The Medieval World, that faith and knowledge must be kept severely apart; science is concerned only with nature and natural processes, and theology is not a science. The separation of the supernatural and natural, now firmly established in mainstream Christian thinking, created a situation where reason could tackle the natural world without any input from faith.

Throughout the Renaissance, the separation was strengthened. Scientists studied man and the natural world, and whether or not the scientists had proper theological views was considered irrelevant. The drama of man was less about his salvation than scientific discovery illuminating the world around him. Still, the Renaissance was hardly atheistic and, in fact, the church supported it.

Renaissance thinkers sought out more Latin and Greek texts, scouring church libraries for works from antiquity.

The study changed the way people viewed Christianity in two ways. It introduced doubt about distinctive truth claims by familiarizing students with a competitive culture, something further buttressed by exploration during that era, and it introduced an appealing skepticism.

Unbelief began to spread with the help of Italian political philosopher Niccolo Machiavelli (1469-1527), who wrote such gleeful attacks on traditional morality and the church that some contemporaries thought The Prince was inspired by the devil. In fact, the synonym “Old Nick” for Satan came from the era’s widespread condemnation of Machiavelli. Still, his writings were immensely popular and persuasive throughout Europe. French theologian Innocent Gentillet (1535-1588) warned that the era was so infected with atheists that people of no religion were the most esteemed.

Protestant reformer and martyr Hugh Latimer (c. 14851555) warned King Edward VI that many Englishmen had stopped believing in the immortality of their souls or the existence of heaven and hell. A survey of local English politicians’ religious beliefs conducted during the 1560s by Queen Elizabeth’s council of advisors found that nearly half were indifferent or adversarial to the Church of England. Elizabeth’s chief advisor Sir William Cecil received a document in 1572 that said, “The realm is divided into three parties, the Papist, the Atheist, and the Protestant. All three are alike favoured; the first and second because, being many, we dare not displease them.”1 Reformer John Calvin (1509-1564) denounced atheism in his seminal work on systematic theology, Institutes of the Christian Religion (1536): It is most absurd, therefore, to maintain, as some do, that religion was devised by the cunning and craft of a few individuals, as a means of keeping the body of the people in due subjection, while there was nothing which those very individuals, while teaching others to worship God, less believed than the

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existence of a God….For though in old times there were some, and in the present day not a few are found, who deny the being of a God, yet, whether they will or not, they occasionally feel the truth which they are desirous not to know.2 The religious conflicts arising from the Reformation itself, some argued, were a source of atheism. English philosopher Francis Bacon (1561-1626) argued in his early seventeenth-century essay “Of Atheism” that while one main religious division created zeal, many created atheism.3 Some of the Christian sects themselves helped spread agnosticism. One such group, the anti-Trinitarian Socinians, was quite prominent in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Philosopher Pierre Bayle (1647-1706), attempting to help the cause, argued that faith could not be justified by reason, since God is incomprehensible to man. To prove his conjecture, he said no reasonable person would have been able to determine why God picked King David—a lying, murdering thief and adulterer—to lead Israel. Bayle was so good at debunking religious coherency that readers began questioning their beliefs. Bayle also defended atheists, arguing that it was only superstition that led people to believe they were immoral. His disciples furthered his themes that religion and truth were irreconcilable and that religion and morality had no necessary relationship.

Science divorced from faith continued unabated during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Christian scientists didn’t necessarily help the matter, crediting God with any scientific uncertainties with which they struggled. So, for instance, English physicist Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) determined that gravity explained how the moon moves around the earth and the earth around the sun, but not how the earth spins on its axis.

Only God could rotate the earth, he wrote. When the conservation of angular momentum was discovered as the cause of the rotation, God was completely pushed out of the picture.

By the eighteenth century, the study of all nature, including human nature, was brought under the scientific model. Law, morality, art, and religion were all discussed in terms of science. Unbelievers were outright antagonistic toward Christianity in particular and all religion in general.

French historian Paul Hazard, author of European Thought in the Eighteenth Century, wrote that opponents of religion …openly preferred a charge the like of which for sheer audacity had never before been heard of. Now the culprit was dragged into court, and behold, the culprit was Christ! It was more than a reformation the eighteenth century demanded, it was the total overthrow of the Cross, the utter repudiation of the belief that man had ever received a direct communication from God, in other words, in M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 21

America just in time to take part in the revolution. His hugely influential Common in recent years would do well to know their history.

Sense (1776) advocated American independence, and Atheists, it seems, are like the poor—they have been Rights of Man (1791)—which served as a guide to the ideas and always will be with us. of the Enlightenment—was a major influence on the Revelation. What the critics were determined to French Revolution. Age of Reason (1793-1794), an assault destroy was the religious interpretation of life.4 on revealed religion, argued that man invented religion:

Christians who feel besieged by the atheist onslaught

The notion of two truths—one rational, one revealed—in coexistence was no longer tolerated. Here again the Christians did not help matters and were a major source of unbelief. Irish philosopher John Toland (1670-1722) and English author Matthew Tindal (1657-1733) sought to demystify Christianity and establish it on purely moral grounds divorced from revelation. Tindal’s Christianity as Old as the Creation came to be called the Bible of deism.

While not rejecting revelation, he argued that natural and supernatural revelation were the same thing with the same purpose: morality and human happiness. If revelation is necessary for human happiness, he theorized, it must be available to all people. Therefore, it must have been revealed in the natural order.

Paul-Henri Thiry, baron d’Holbach (1723-1789), became the first European to describe himself as an avowed atheist. A French author, philosopher, and encyclopedist, he wrote Christianity Unveiled (1761), an attack on Christianity where he argued that the religion hinders moral advancement; and that was subtle compared to System of Nature (1770), where he denied the existence of God and argued that religion arose from fear of the unknown.

Sensing a threat, the Catholic Church in France asked the civil government to censor the book and had theologians refute the work. Still, d’Holbach’s views spread through the salons of Paris.

The French Revolution of 1789 moved atheism into the public square. Attempts to enforce the law of the Civil Constitution of the Clergy—which subordinated the Roman Catholic Church in France to the civil government—led to anti-clerical violence. Earlier rulings confiscated the church’s holdings in France and banned monastic vows.

When militant atheists seized power there in 1793, launching the Reign of Terror, they attempted to deChristianize France by replacing the church with a Cult of Reason. Secularization was exported to Italy and, in the nineteenth century when atheists and other anti-religious adherents focused on political and social revolution, they helped spur the European revolutions of 1848, the revolutionary Italian Resurgence and unification, and the rise of the international socialist movement.

The movement was not limited to Europe. English pamphleteer Thomas Paine (1737-1809) came to Colonial 2 2 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

The opinions I have advanced…are the effect of the most clear and long-established conviction that the Bible and the Testament are impositions upon the world, that the fall of man, the account of Jesus Christ being the Son of God, and of his dying to appease the wrath of God, and of salvation by that strange means, are all fabulous inventions, dishonorable to the wisdom and power of the Almighty.5 Paine’s deism was shared by many Founding Fathers.

Throughout the nineteenth century, atheism was on the march. German philosopher Ludwig Feurbach, who initially began his studies intending a career in the church, fell into philosophy and wrote attacks on the notion of eternal life. His most famous work, The Essence of Christianity, argued that God is nothing more than the outward projection of man’s inward nature. Every aspect of God corresponded to some need of human nature—for love, for morality. His attacks made him a hero among revolutionaries of his time. Interestingly, he is buried in the same Nuremberg cemetery as Reformation-era artist Albrecht Dürer.

The prominent nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) wrote in his polemic The Antichrist that Christianity’s focus on the eternal was disgusting. Those who speak of eternal hopes are “despisers of life, atrophying and self-poisoned men of whom the earth is weary: so let them be gone!”6 He also penned the infamous line, “God is dead.” Unlike many other atheists, however, Nietzsche was concerned that the inevitable collapse of religion would lead to nihilism.

By the end of the nineteenth century, atheism was downright prominent and religion had been redefined to mean something foreign to the Christian understanding.

Religion was anthropological, a cluster of beliefs, symbols, and rites. With the scientific fervor to classify everything, religion became a genus in which Christianity was but a species. The scientific classification also settled the issue in favor of atheism. If religion was about human culture, the question of God’s existence had been answered.

With so many fashionable economists, philosophers and political theorists espousing atheism, it is perhaps not surprising how the twentieth century turned out.

Following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, religion was repressed throughout Russia. Karl Marx (1818-1883),

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who believed religion was manmade and served as an opiate for the masses, inspired the revolutionaries.

As Communism spread to more states, so did the state policy of opposition to organized religion and support of atheism. Communist Party leaders justified this by calling religion irrational and parasitical. Churches were occasionally permitted, but only under state control. In general, religion was opposed through unbelievably violent means. Attendance at worship jeopardized one’s livelihood or more. By the 1960s, nearly one in two people in the world lived under anti-religious governments. One, Albania, formally became atheistic in 1967, prohibiting all religious observance, closing all religious institutions and persecuting believers. The policy held until 1991. The brutal inhumanity of Communists didn’t do much to improve the image of atheists.

After the deadly Communist regimes were exposed, atheism took on a lower profile for a few years, but unbelief and rejection of religion have been present for millennia and popular for centuries. Christians who feel besieged by the atheist onslaught in recent years would do well to know their history. Atheists, it seems, are like the poor—they have been and always will be with us. ■

Mollie Ziegler Hemingway is a writer in Washington, D.C.

BIBLIOGRAPHY: Atheism: A Reader. Edited by S. T. Joshi. New York: Prometheus, 2000.

Buckley, George. Atheism in the English Renaissance. New York: Russell & Russell, 1965.

Converse, Raymond W. Atheism as a Positive Social Force.

New York: Algor, 2003.

Dark, Sidney and R. S. Essex. The War against God. New York: Abingdon, 1938.

The Impossibility of God. Edited by Michael Martin and Ricki Monnier. Amherst: Prometheus, 2003.

McGrath, Alister, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World. New York: Doubleday, 2004.

Neusch, Marcel. The Sources of Modern Atheism: One Hundred Years of Debate over God. Translated by Matthew J. O’Connell. New York: Paulist Press, 1982.

Ray, Matthew Alun. Subjectivity and Irreligion: Atheism and Agnosticism in Kant, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.

Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003.

Thrower, James. Western Atheism: A Short History.

Amherst: Prometheus, 2000.

Thrower, James. The Alternative Tradition: Religion and the Rejection of Religion in the Ancient World. The Hague: Mouton, 1980.

Warneke, Sara. Images of the Educational Traveller in Early Modern England. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995.

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WORKS CITED: 1 Sara Warneke, Images of the Educational Traveller in Early Modern England (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1995), p. 143.

2 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1989), p. 44.

3 Francis Bacon, “Of Atheism,” The Works of Sir Francis Bacon, James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Heath, eds. (London, 1868-1890), VI, p. 414.

4 Quoted in James Thrower, Western Atheism: A Short History (Amherst: Prometheus, 2000), p. 99.

5 Thomas Paine, “The New Testament,” Life and Writings of Thomas Paine (New York: Parke, 1908), p. 238.

6 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One (New York: Penguin, 1961), p. 42.

Speaking Of…

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he name Jesus defines an historical occurrence and marks the point where the unknown

world cuts the known world…as Christ Jesus is the plane which lies beyond our comprehension. The plane which is known to us, He intersects vertically, from above. Within history Jesus as the Christ can be understood only as Problem or Myth. As the Christ He brings the world of the Father. But we who stand in this concrete world know nothing, and are incapable of knowing anything, of that other world. The Resurrection from the dead is, however, the transformation: the establishing or declaration of that point from above, and the corresponding discerning of it below.

—Karl Barth

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New Atheism

by Adam S. Francisco Denial of the existence of God—or atheism—is by no means novel. There were atheists as far back as the first millennia B.C. King David referred to such people who, despite the manifest evidence in creation, acted like and even convinced themselves that there was no God as outright fools (Pss. 8:3, 10:4, 14:1). The Greeks had their share of atheists too. The Epicurean philosopher Philodemus (c. 110-35 B.C.) went so far as to identify three different types of atheism found in Hellenistic thought. There were those who were unsure whether any deity existed (we would call them agnostics), those who explicitly and publicly denied it, and those who, although keeping up appearances of religiosity, implicitly advocated atheism in their speeches or writings.

How many atheists there were in medieval and early modern Europe is uncertain as overt denial of God’s existence would not have been tolerated, but it wasn’t too long afterward that atheism became a viable modern worldview. With the so-called European Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the religious certainty of earlier ages was challenged by the cynical and seemingly sophisticated skepticism of 2 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

intellectual elites in the British Isles and throughout continental Europe.

Atheism reached its zenith when it was wedded to Communist politics and enforced east of the Iron Curtain; but as its political hegemony began to dwindle toward the end of the twentieth century, so too did its credibility. Now in the opening decade of the twenty-first century, Alister McGrath concludes in The Twilight of Atheism that atheism “finds itself in something of a twilight zone….But is this the twilight of a sun that has sunk beneath the horizon, to be followed by the darkness and cold of the night? Or is it the twilight of a rising sun, which will bring a new day of new hope, new possibilities—and new influence? We shall have to wait and see.”1 The answer, it seems, came sooner than expected.

Just as McGrath’s rather aloof historical survey of atheism was released, Sam Harris’s aggressive philosophical attack on religion, The End of Faith, hit the market. Before long it topped the sales charts. This was followed by several equally forceful scientific and literary assaults on theism accompanied by outright defenses of atheism. Richard

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Dawkins’ and Daniel Dennett’s works, The God Delusion and Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, were released in 2006; and Christopher Hitchens’ belligerent tirade, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, appeared in 2007. There were certainly others—such as Victor J. Stenger’s God: The Failed Hypothesis—but, in many ways, Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens are the spokesmen for this recent trend. Their popularity— evidenced by exceptional book sales, numerous media appearances, and widely publicized debates—indicates that atheism is far from slipping into obsolescence. In fact, it seems poised to present some of the most significant challenges to Christianity in the years to come.

There is something different about the Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens quartet in comparison to their atheist antecedents. Journalists and scholars have even taken to calling them the “New Atheists” (and their thought as the “New Atheism”). It does not differ markedly in content from the atheism born during the Enlightenment. Its hostility toward Christianity is equal to that of Marx and his intellectual kin. What makes the New Atheism so novel is its agenda: it aggressively seeks the conversion of those who would hear its arguments. Richard Dawkins says as much in the opening pages of The God Delusion: “If this book works as I intend, religious readers who open it will be atheists when they put it down.”2 What gave birth to this proselytizing zeal? In many ways, September 11 was its initial impetus. The New Atheists are certainly convinced of the malignancy of Islam and its preposterous but nevertheless very real vision of global domination. They contend, however, that such political aspirations and willingness to employ violence in order to achieve them are not endemic to Islam. “The evil that has reached our shores is not merely the evil of terrorism,” Harris claims. “It is the evil of religious faith at the moment of its political ascendancy.”3 Both Christianity and Judaism are also capable of legitimizing violence; and he sees them, alongside Islam, as a common enemy of reasonable men and women everywhere. By enemy he doesn’t just mean an intellectual adversary either; Islam, Christianity, and Judaism are political and military threats as well. Thus, with a sense of urgency he closes his book, appealing to the emotions of his readers, by claiming that unless we are convinced of this, “the days of civilization itself are numbered.”4 Such apocalyptic overtones are common in the literature of the New Atheists. They are all convinced that religion is the source of most of the world’s problems. It has “retarded the development of civilization,” says Hitchens.5 The only way to reverse this trend is to abandon religion and all its intellectual and scientific restraints.

To strike at the heart of religion, the New Atheists charge that there is no good reason to believe God exists. They do so by treating the question of God’s existence as a scientific hypothesis. If he can be said to exist, they argue, it must be demonstrated on the grounds of empirical observation.

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Dawkins anticipates the obvious objection to this criterion.

In what seems like a rare moment of humility, he concedes that ultimately one cannot prove the nonexistence of something. One can, however, evaluate the proposition of whether or not God exists on a scale of probability. In other words, the question is not one of proving that God does or does not exist, but whether God’s existence is more probable than not. Dawkins’ answer is clear. After a chapter-length (and superficial) survey of traditional proofs for God’s existence, he concludes with characteristic hubris: “There is almost certainly no God.”6 Harris’s hubris goes even further than Dawkins. He argues that because the assertion that God exists is a factual claim, it must be factually verifiable.

Since he assumes there is no unequivocal factual evidence for God’s existence, such a proposition is not just highly improbable; to even speak about the existence of a god in the first place is utterly meaningless.

Is this the case though? Is belief in God a mere intellectual leap of faith without any objective, factual evidence to support it? Christian philosopher and apologist William Lane Craig argues that the situation is quite the opposite of what the New Atheism proposes. He writes in a chapter of The Cambridge Companion to Atheism that even many university philosophy departments (typically the bastions of atheism) are reconsidering the question of God’s existence. He claims that “atheism…is a philosophy in retreat” and attributes it to a “renaissance in Christian philosophy” that has been responsible for rearticulating several well-established arguments for God’s existence.7 The cosmological argument is one, for example. In its classical formulation, it claims that whatever begins to exist has a cause. Because the universe began to exist, the universe must have a cause, and that cause was God. As perhaps expected, the New Atheists dismiss the argument on the basis of its first assertion: that whatever begins to exist has a cause. Such a claim, they argue, assumes the impossibility of an infinite regress. That is, it assumes there has to be a first cause or a beginning to everything. But this, Dawkins claims, is an “entirely unwarranted assumption.”8 An assumption it is, but is it unwarranted? What’s the alternative? Dawkins claims it is more logical to believe some stuff in the universe simply existed from all eternity, and it was merely a chance big bang—certainly not a creator—that just happened to set everything in motion.

While such reasoning is rather commonplace in atheistic thought, it still begs the question: is this not just as, if not more, presumptuous than suggesting there has to be a creator who caused the universe?

The cosmological argument is even more compelling when considered alongside what is typically termed the argument from design. In essence, it argues that the universe is fine-tuned to sustain life and that nature as a whole shows evidence of design. This is either due to mere chance or the work of a designer. That it is a result of chance is more improbable than if a designer created it; so, the argument concludes, there must be a designer and that designer is God. The New Atheists respond by simply M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 25

executed. Presumably, he has the Al-Qaeda fighter in mind, but he never does anything beyond the natural world, such as God, specify. Even so, the thought that it might be moral to kill before any empirical investigation. But this is precisely someone for believing a certain proposition seems to what the New Atheists do when faced with the rest on some rather dodgy moral ground. Where Harris’s particular claims of Christianity. proposition becomes even more dangerous is when one asserting that even if there is design in the universe, it is all considers what the result might be if his convictions were attributable to chance. fused with another of his ambitions, “a world Beneath the surface of these altogether briefly stated government.”10 According to Harris’s own standards, arguments are some enormously complex issues; and the wouldn’t this government—in order to eliminate the side that one takes—after weighing all the evidence and potential for violence fueled by religion (to protect sometimes regardless of where the evidence really civilization)—need to rid the world of religion as well as points—is still largely determined by the position one those who refuse to abandon such dangerous ideas? Who originally takes. But these arguments do demonstrate that would make such a call? He doesn’t say as much, but it belief in the existence of God is not just wishful thinking would probably be a safe bet to suggest that Harris would or an unwarranted assumption. They certainly leave much put himself, or one of his atheist comrades, forward as a to be desired. Even if they could demonstrate God’s good candidate. existence to be more probable than not, the God they At the end of the day, what the New Atheists are really suggest is not necessarily the God that Christians confess. calling for is a revolution in our thinking about the world.

In any case, Harris, Dawkins, Dennett, and Hitchens do They claim that worldviews informed by religion hamper not take these arguments for God’s existence very the progress of civilization; but thanks “to the telescope and seriously. They do, however, spend considerable time microscope,” Hitchens writes, religion “no longer offers an responding to allegations made from what is generally explanation of anything important. Where once it used to known as the moral argument. It claims that God’s be able, by its total command of a worldview, to prevent the existence is required for there to be objective, universal emergence of rivals, it can now only impede and retard— moral standards and duties. In other words, morality or try to turn back—the measurable advances that we have needs to be ultimately anchored outside of nature. If it is made.”11 Here then is the agenda of the New Atheism. It not, at best morals are determined by a person’s relative seeks to replace what it considers outdated worldviews historical circumstances. informed by religion with philosophical naturalism, a The New Atheists typically respond to this argument by worldview that denies the existence of anything beyond diverting attention away from it by pointing out the what can be observed with a telescope or microscope. immoral things religious people have done through the This basic philosophical assumption is the heart of the centuries. But this is not the issue. The issue concerns the New Atheism. Where this is especially clear is in their source of general morality. If our moral norms cannot be responses to the traditional arguments for God’s existence. grounded in something outside the flux of history, and They always opt for a naturalistic explanation for things. humans are merely highly evolved mammals, there really The original elements behind the makeup of the universe is no such thing as morality in the objective sense—only always existed. They certainly were not created from survival instincts. Some atheists are certainly content with nothing. And it was by chance—not design—that the universe took its shape. Regardless of how philosophical seeing morality as normative behavior that has evolved naturalism informs one’s cosmology, it still assumes from with human beings for the express purpose of the survival the beginning that everything can be explained naturally. of the species. Such reasoning, however, is wrought with Assuming this requires, at the very least, an act of faith problems. The chief issue being that moral relativism that such an assumption is in principle true. But as Phillip inhibits our ability to deem something immoral, for no one E. Johnson puts it, this “is no more ‘scientific’ (that is, could not say with any certainty that something currently empirically based) than any other kind of faith.”12 regarded as immoral couldn’t possibly in the future Of course, looking to a natural explanation for contribute to the survival of the species. commonly occurring phenomena is not unreasonable in Consider how such vacuous reasoning might play out and of itself. What is unreasonable is the ruling out the in the mind of Harris. “Some propositions are so existence of anything beyond the natural world, such as dangerous,” he argues, “that it may even be ethical to kill God, before any empirical investigation. But this is people for believing them.”9 Notice that he does not claim some actions or even planned actions, but rather that mere precisely what the New Atheists do when faced with the propositions (or beliefs) may warrant a person to be particular claims of Christianity.

What is unreasonable is the ruling out the existence of

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Christianity claims that God especially made himself known in the natural world by taking on human flesh and walking the earth in the person and work of Jesus of Nazareth. To demonstrate his deity, he offered numerous miraculous signs throughout the course of his life; but the chief sign was his resurrection from the dead. All the claims of Christ and the Christian faith rest on this one claim. This anchors the veracity of Christianity in empirical history. In fact, in 1 Corinthians 15:12-19, St. Paul went so far as to argue that if Christ did not bodily rise from the dead, then the Christian faith is a scam. In other words, Christianity is capable of being verified or falsified with historical evidence.

Do the New Atheists—empiricists who claim to be interested in facts and evidence—undertake any investigation into the remarkable claims of Christianity?

No. Instead, true to form, they dismiss it. Dawkins and Hitchens are not convinced Jesus existed and they all regard the Gospels as fiction. Why? They contain reports of miracles. Naturalism rules out the possibility of miracles.

Thus, documents that record them, such as the Gospels, are untrustworthy.

Modern scholarship—from F. F. Bruce’s older The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable? to Richard Bauckham’s recent Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony—claims exactly the opposite. The Gospels are primary source documents that, from four different vantage points, provide historically reliable accounts of Jesus’ life and work. In the Gospels, Christ claims to be God in human flesh, and he evidenced the veracity of this claim by performing numerous miracles throughout his life. The greatest evidence, however, came when he rose from the dead three days after his death. It is this—not emotions, intuition, or even the authority of the church—that serves as the evidentiary basis of the Christian religion. Isn’t it time we start advancing this claim with as much rigor as we can muster?

Regardless of how contemptible one may find the New Atheism, we would ignore it to our peril. They have an ambitious agenda, and it is sure to proliferate over the coming years. Dennett, a professor at Tufts University, even advocates that atheists everywhere adopt a “policy” to “firmly educate the people of the world” in atheism.13 Now more than ever Christians need to be ready to respond to whatever challenges they may raise. Peter enjoins us to do as much in 1 Peter 3:15: “Be prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for the reason for the hope that is in you.” ■

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WORKS CITED: 1 Alister McGrath, The Twilight of Atheism: The Rise and Fall of Disbelief in the Modern World (New York: Doubleday, 2004), p. 279.

2 Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), p. 5.

3 Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Freedom (New York: W. W. Norton, 2004), p. 130.

4 Harris, p. 227.

5 Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve, 2007), p. 8.

6 Dawkins, pp. 113-159.

7 William Lane Craig, “Theistic Critiques of Atheism,” The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed. Michael Martin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 69.

8 Dawkins, p. 77.

9 Harris, pp. 52-53.

10 Harris, p. 151.

11 Hitchens, p. 282.

12 Phillip E. Johnson, “Evolution as Dogma: The Establishment of Naturalism,” Uncommon Dissent: Intellectuals Who Find Darwinism Unconvincing, ed. William A. Dembski (Wilmington, Delaware: ISI, 2004), p. 27.

13 Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2006), p. 338.

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ut if it is preached that Christ has been raised from

the dead, how can some of you say that there is

no resurrection of the dead? If there is no resurrection of the dead, then not even Christ has been raised. And if Christ has not been raised, our preaching is useless and so is your faith. More than that, we are then found to be false witnesses about God, for we have testified about God that he raised Christ from the dead. But he did not raise him if in fact the dead are not raised. For if the dead are not raised, then Christ has not been raised either. And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins. Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ are lost. If only for this life

Adam S. Francisco (DPhil, Oxford), is guest professor of historical theology at Concordia Theological Seminary (Fort Wayne, Indiana), and author of Martin Luther and Islam: A Study in Sixteenth-Century Polemics and Apologetics (E. J. Brill, 2007).

we have hope in Christ, we are to be pitied more than all men. But Christ has indeed been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep.

—The Apostle Paul to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 15: 12-20)

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The Empiricist Christianity fell out of intellectual favor during the Enlightenment in large part because Rationalist and Empiricist critics charged it with being incompatible with all reason and evidence. At the time, sadly, the church as a whole did less than a stellar job of responding to such charges. But a funny thing happened on the way to an atheist paradise: the Enlightenment turned on itself—quite literally in events such as France’s Reign of Terror, but also on the intellectual level as even über-skeptics such as David Hume and Immanuel Kant began to wage war on their colleagues’ naïve confidence in “pure reason.”

Such naïveté, or the hollow shell of it, is back in full force. The new philosophes are those “New Atheist” polemicists—mostly scientists overwhelmingly committed to empiricism grounded in philosophical naturalism—who have taken to excoriating Christianity in several recent best-sellers. Men such as Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have all the intellectual confidence and acerbic wit of Voltaire (indeed, many of their arguments, such as they are, are simply eighteenthcentury rehash); but a number of their fellow atheists are less than impressed by their forays into anti-theist propaganda and the arrogance that attends it.

Even Hitchens, for example, whose own arrogance is on full display in a book unambiguously subtitled How Religion Poisons Everything, publicly chastised Dawkins and Dennett for their “cringe-making proposal that atheists should conceitedly nominate themselves to be called ‘brights.’”1 Others have astutely noted that the smug dogmatism on display in the New Atheist oeuvre bears a striking resemblance to the religious fundamentalism it condemns; it’s been dubbed by many as “Darwinian fundamentalism” or “evangelical atheism.”2 To be sure, some of this contention is carryover from earlier disciplinary feuds and has little to do with critiques of religion per se. Such is the case, for example, when the late Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould dismissed Dawkins’ ideas as “a logically flawed and basically foolish caricature” of Darwin’s,3 even going on to lambaste Dawkins’ acolyte Dennett, calling his own “limited and superficial book” a “caricature of a caricature.”4 But such strictly scientific feuds are not irrelevant for understanding many skeptics’ equally hostile

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criticisms of the anti-theological works penned by Dawkins et al. As Gould also noted, the fundamentalist tendency simply to anathematize opponents “rarely follows the dictates of logic or evidence, and nearly always scores distressingly high in heat/light ratio.”5 It is the utter lack of logic and evidence in the most recent atheist screeds that a growing number of skeptics and atheists themselves find most disturbing.

Representative of those embarrassed by such polemic is H. Allen Orr, evolutionary geneticist at the University of Rochester. “Though I once labeled Dawkins a professional atheist,” he recently wrote in The New York Review of Books, “I’m forced, after reading his new book, to conclude he’s actually more of an amateur.”6 Orr is clear on what prompted such a conclusion: “One reason for the lack of extended argument in The God Delusion is clear: Dawkins doesn’t seem very good at it.”7 Despite Dawkins’ scientific commitment to empiricism, he notes, “None of Dawkins’s loud pronouncements on God follows from any experiment or piece of data.

It’s just Dawkins talking.”8 When (rather predictably) Daniel Dennett came to Dawkins’ defense with a letter to the editor, Orr remained unapologetic, insisting Dawkins had done nothing more than “string together anecdotes and exercises in bad philosophy.”9 The bad philosophy of the Dawkins-Dennett duo has also taken well-publicized lumps from Florida State philosopher, skeptic, and admitted “hard-line Darwinian” Michael Ruse. Corresponding with Dennett, he wrote bluntly, “I think that you and Richard are absolute disasters” in the public war on theism.10 Once again, the warrant for such a pronouncement derives from the blatantly illogical claims of the New Atheists. In a comment that could just as well have been directed at Hitchens as at Dawkins or Dennett, Ruse rightly insisted that it is “just plain silly and grotesquely immoral to claim that Christianity is simply a force for evil.”11 The repetition of this claim at great length by Hitchens himself has been similarly rebuffed in publications not known to be mouthpieces for Christian apologists. Shaun Doherty of Britain’s Socialist Review charged Hitchens with engaging in “wilful intellectual dishonesty,” concluding his piece with the short, sharp declaration that “Hitchens is a fraud.”12

Has No Clothes Well-founded charges of intellectual dishonesty among the New Atheists are nearly ubiquitous, even in reviews penned by those equally hostile to Christianity. Evolutionary anthropologist David Sloan Wilson complained in a Skeptics Society newsletter that Dawkins, especially, misrepresents the work of his colleagues.13 Philosopher Antony Flew, no longer a strident atheist but certainly no defender of Christianity, concurs: “Dawkins is selective to the point of dishonesty when he cites the views of scientists.”14 Even more revealing than comments about misrepresentations of fellow scientists, however, are those concerning disingenuous dealings with theological viewpoints. Criticizing Dennett, Doherty had to spell out the obvious: “If you want to engage critically with religious belief you have an obligation to engage with it at its most persuasive rather than simply scoring a few cheap points.”15 Apparently, this is far from obvious to the New Atheists, whose works are regularly described—again, by fellow atheists—as “trite” and “shallow,”16 “sophomoric,”17 and “deeply misinformed”18 when it comes to the Christianity they are attempting to refute.

As Richard Dawkins is the most well-known and egregious offender, Michael Ruse is eminently justified when he complains, “I would like to see Dawkins take Christianity as seriously as he undoubtedly expects Christians to take Darwinism.”19 None of the New Atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, or Hitchens), however, offer the slightest evidence that they intend to take Christianity seriously. Then again, they don’t offer much real evidence for anything. They emote, they vent, they jeer, and they cheer; but in the end it is all sound and fury, signifying nothing. The empiricist has no clothes. And his bedfellows know it.

Korey D. Maas (DPhil, Oxford University), is assistant professor of theology and church history at Concordia University (Irvine, California) and coeditor of Theologia et Apologia: Essays in Reformation Theology and its Defense (Wipf & Stock, 2007).

Group, 2007), p. 5.

2 Stephen Jay Gould, “Darwinian Fundamentalism,” The New York Review of Books 44/10 (12 June 1997), p.

34. Simon Blackburn, “The Ethics of Belief,” The New Republic (1 December 2003), p. 30.

3 Gould, p. 34.

4 Gould, p. 36.

5 Gould, p. 36.

6 H. Allen Orr, “A Mission to Convert,” The New York Review of Books (11 January 2007), p. 22.

7 Orr, “A Mission to Convert,” p. 22.

8 Orr, “A Mission to Convert,” p. 24.

9 H. Allen Orr, “H. Allen Orr Replies,” The New York Review of Books (1 March 2007), p. 49.

10 Michael Ruse and Daniel Dennett, “Remarkable Exchange between Michael Ruse and Daniel Dennett” (19 February 2006), posted at www.uncommondescent.com/ intelligent-design/the-ruse-dennett-briefwechsel-theclash-between-evolution-and-evolutionism/.

11 Ruse and Dennett.

12 Shaun Doherty, “Review of God Is Not Great,” Socialist Review (July/August 2007), accessed at www.socialistreview.org.uk/article.php?articlenumbe r=10039.

13 David Sloan Wilson, “Beyond Demonic Memes: Why Richard Dawkins is Wrong about Religion,” eSkeptic: the Email Newsletter of the Skeptics Society (4 July 2007), posted at www.skeptic.com/eskeptic/07-0704.html.

14 Antony Flew and Benjamin Wiker, “Exclusive Flew Interview” (30 October 2007), posted at www.tothesource.org/10_30_2007/10_30_2007.htm.

15 Doherty.

16 Shannon Love, “The Atheist Delusion, Part 1” (6 December 2006), posted at http://chicagoboyz.net/ archives/004608.html.

17 Michael Ruse, “Through a Glass Darkly,” American Scientist (November/December 2003), p. 555.

18 Wilson.

19 Ruse, “Through a Glass Darkly,” p. 555.

WORKS CITED: 1 Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Twelve/Hachette Book

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God Does Not Believe in Atheists BY

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CRAIG A. PARTON

he current virulent strain of evangelical atheism does a disservice to many of the arguments of traditional atheism. I am thinking here of the latest efforts by the new Apostles of Atheism, Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion), Sam Harris (Letter to a Christian Nation), and Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything). It certainly does not advance the atheist position to have a proponent like Dawkins rambling around the world arguing that if one raises a child to be “religious,” then one is basically raising them to be an axe murderer and/or a terrorist. Dawkins’ extremism alone has led renowned atheist Michael Ruse to confess that “The God Delusion makes me embarrassed to be an atheist.”1 This article summarizes the arguments of traditional or “classical” atheism—i.e., atheism as it has been presented since the eighteenth-century Enlightenment.

The articulation of these arguments also serves to cover the essential arguments of the new Apostles of Atheism, without the need for dealing with their hysteria from which even other atheists such as Ruse are beginning to distance themselves. Next, each argument is separately analyzed and found to be wanting in evidence and in logic.

Finally, since one has hardly proved enough by ending at the existence of God if God has chosen to be silent, the importance of the case for God’s specific entrance into the human situation is put forth.

My vocation is one of a trial lawyer. The assertions of atheism—as well as the assertions that God is there and has not been silent—will, therefore, be implicitly tested by legal canons of evidence employed in law courts for almost a millennia as a means for arbitrating competing factual claims.

We only note in passing that God does not believe in atheists because, as pointed out by trial lawyer John Warwick Montgomery, in the end there really are no atheists and never have been in the history of the world.

In fact, everybody has what Paul Tillich called an “ultimate concern,” something that gets first place in one’s life when the chips are down. That “ultimate concern” is that person’s religion, regardless of whether they formally consider themselves to be an atheist. More importantly, that ultimate concern is their god—whether it be their intellect and ability to reason logically, a girlfriend, a Ph.D.,

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buffed abs, an Academy Award, a toy poodle, or season tickets to Green Bay Packers games.

The Traditional Arguments of Classical Atheism The main objections of classical atheism are as follows: Belief in God is psychologically explainable as part of a regressive and infantile cultural stage.

Belief in God has disastrous social implications.

Belief in God has harmed the advancement of science and the findings of modern science contradict any such belief.

Belief in God is illogical.

These four categories of argument have been carefully analyzed, and repeatedly and thoroughly refuted by serious Christian apologists for the past two millennia.

One would think (as far as one can surmise from the cloistered world of contemporary evangelical atheism of the Dawkins-Adams-Hitchens variety), however, that new evidence has been discovered that refutes theism and, more specifically, that refutes the central claims of historical Christianity. This is simply not so.

Let me also preface my comments to each of these four arguments by confessing that I would rather deal any day of the week with a serious atheist than with a religious liberal of the Christian species-type.

Those who technically and officially stand within the House of Salvation, and yet then gladly (and utterly irrationally) stand in judgment and criticism of the Word inscripturated and the Word Incarnate, are infinitely more dangerous to the future of the Christian faith than all the DawkinsAdams-Hitchens the outside world will ever produce.

Also note that none of the traditional arguments of atheism deal head on with the actual primary source evidence for the central claims of Christianity—namely that God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself.

Why is this? The answer is simple: The sheer factual strength of the historical case for the trustworthiness of the biblical authors and the claims of its central figure Jesus Christ (both of which are subjects that have been analyzed by trial lawyers for over 400 years) are so impressive and deep that an informed atheist is wise not to trod there.

The four arguments and refutations that follow are only introductory in nature. The endnotes will lead one to greater depth and further study.

Arguments and Refutations Belief in God is psychologically explainable While Dawkins argues this point loud and clear in The God Delusion, this contention has been presented repeatedly since the psychoanalytic revolution began in the nineteenth century and was also echoed in the reigning philosophical circles of that time. Freud and Nietzsche certainly articulated the position that belief in God the Father is nothing more, and nothing less, than wish projection. It is the infantile groping of a repressed psyche to turn into reality that which it desperately wants to be true—namely, that one has an all-loving, all-wise, all-benevolent Father way up there. It is akin

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to belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy, and it is a belief that only intellectual and cultural maturity can show to be mere fiction.

This psychological pull toward the need for a father figure and for some type of order that is imposed on a random universe is—per classical atheism—eminently understandable, but also eminently explainable. In short, the argument says that the “God Wish” goes back to the domain of primitive man. As man progresses psychologically and socially, belief in God has been shown to be largely irrelevant and only of persuasive interest to the uneducated classes who then indoctrinate their children in order to prevent intellectual and social progress from occurring.

Refutation This argument is invalid on several grounds.

First, belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy is a natural condition in the early years where the lines between fantasy and reality are necessarily blurred.

Many people, in fact, mature to a belief in God (witness the recent controversial conversion to theism of renowned British atheist Antony Flew). This argument simply fails to explain why so many come to a belief in God, and specifically a belief in the God of Christianity, late in life and after obtaining a robust university education. Clearly not all these people have simply retreated to infantile regressive behavior by becoming theists or Christians. Many, for example, would see the conversion of an adult C. S. Lewis—as he himself did—as a progression into maturity rather than a regression into an infantile world of denial.2 This argument also ignores some basic facts derived from the biblical data in support of Christian theism. The Bible is hardly a book full of teachings that are equivalent to the vocational teachings of a wet nurse. From “turn the other cheek” to “give your enemy your coat,” from “feed the poor” to the doctrine of hell as a place for those not perfectly holy and for those failing to perfectly follow the Law, this is decidedly not the religious pablum that naïve primitive man would conjure up over a hot fire, a juicy femur head, and a pot of gruel. An infantile position would be one that, for example, failed to deal with the reality of evil and instead focused only on man’s glory and greatness, or one that ignored man’s essential inability to follow even his own moral standards. In Christian intellectual history, one finds serious reflection on issues of man’s nature and the nature of God, the reality of sin and the possibility of salvation, the nature of history, and the existence of real ethics. Profound insights on these topics have hardly come from what might be called the “infantile or regressive” impulses of such men as Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Blaise Pascal, John Henry Newman, G. K. Chesterton, and Alvin Plantinga, to name but a few. Finally, R. C. Sproul is perfectly correct when he contends that this argument by atheists might just as easily be turned on its head.3 M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 31

With no transcendent and defensible basis for the dignity

of the Reich Church mean that Christianity necessarily condones Nazism? Or as John of all human beings, atheistic materialism has tended to Warwick Montgomery put it in his debate with atheist be incapable of moving in any direction but one of trial lawyer Mark Plummer, if Einstein had been “might makes right,” and has utterly failed to provide convicted of shop lifting would that mean that E does any defensible basis for universally valid human rights. not equal MC squared?4 Finally, a commitment to In short, perhaps atheists wish so badly for an allthe existence of God, and more specifically God’s particular knowing Last Judge not to exist that they have projected existence in the person of Jesus Christ, has in fact resulted their highly regressive and infantile fantasies onto the issue in a remarkable track record throughout history of the of the existence of God. The argument, therefore, ends up relieving of human suffering and support for the social and being utterly self-defeating on logical grounds alone. cultural progress of man. This is in sharp contrast to the social devolution that is the lot of societies wedded to a Belief in God has disastrous social implications materialistic metaphysic formally based on atheism This argument contends that belief in a lie (i.e., that God (Stalin’s Soviet Union comes to mind). Christianity in exists) leads inextricably to disastrous social consequences particular gave birth to the rise of modern medicine and done “in the name of God”—from wars to slavery to loss of the establishment of the first hospitals and care for the any kind of a truly liberal social conscience. More misery, mentally ill and the elderly,5 the beginning of orphanages,6 so the argument goes, is caused per cubic inch by the development of the university in Europe and in misguided religionists espousing a belief in God as a pretext America,7 the rise of compulsory and universal education for the imposition of the worst possible social conditions. and the rise of the library,8 and the elimination of slavery This misery has crossed cultures and spanned all in England.9 generations. Jews kill Arabs, Protestants kill Catholics, While all of these advances are easily established Muslim sectarians kill Muslim sectarians, and evangelicals through a multiplicity of scholarly sources, the world has kill abortionists. Islam has its jihads, Christianity has its yet to see its first atheist leper colony. This is not crusades, Hinduism has its caste system, and the world accidental. With no transcendent and defensible basis for groans and travails as a result. the dignity of all human beings, atheistic materialism has tended to be incapable of moving in any direction but one Refutation of “might makes right,” and has utterly failed to provide First, an initial comment on strategy: Many wellany defensible basis for universally valid human rights. meaning Christians think the way to attack this argument is to show that what the atheist says happened in the Belief in God has harmed the advancement of science and history of the Christian church really did not happen or can the findings of modern science contradict any such belief be explained or understood in a different way “once all the The position of classical atheism, and especially as facts are known.” This is a disastrous defense strategy. argued by Dawkins, is that science has disproved God. One who takes this approach will harm the strength of the Anybody who insists on clinging to belief in God is a fundamental refutation of this argument. superstitious reactionary, a religious fundamentalist who is We note in passing that since the Christian church has in complete denial about the advances of science, since been full of sinners since the time of Jesus, this means that atheism is the only viable option for evolved thinkers. we should expect sin also to be intertwined in the history Science is the only reliable tool for the discovery of of the church. If the history of the church was only a knowledge and it alone has revelatory power.

Furthermore, believers in God have always been history of “sweetness and light,” it would refute a central threatened by progress in science since they intuitively and repeated teaching found in the biblical data—i.e., the understand that science holds the silver stake necessary to depravity of man. impale the blood-thirsty vampire of belief in God. Next, just because individual practitioners of a position may have personal moral failings and/or utterly fail to Refutation remotely understand, interpret or apply the truth of their First, let us deal with the argument that believers in God worldview, does not mean there is necessarily anything (and specifically Christian believers) have historically wrong with that worldview. Does the fact that a liberal reflected hostility toward science and have done all they environmentalist drives a gas-guzzling SUV mean that all can to thwart the progress of science. Actually, the arguments for global warming are necessarily incorrect? opposite is true—Christian believers have a long and Does the fact that some Christians in Nazi Germany failed distinguished history of involvement in the scientific to condemn Hitler and even went along with the concept 3 2 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

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enterprise, which has been based on the belief that the universe reflected a rational and intelligent Creator and that intelligence was built into the universe. The origin of modern science, as Alfred North Whitehead says,10 required an insistence on the rationality of God that deified nature (as seen in Aristotelian pantheism) could never achieve nor could Eastern religions, since they considered nature utterly random and incapable of objective investigation.

The list of serious Christian believers involved in the scientific endeavor is deeply impressive and includes Copernicus (who proposed the heliostatic theory), Tycho Brahe (who discovered a new comet and built an observatory), Roger Bacon (a prime developer of the inductive method), Kepler (who formulated the elliptical movement of the planets, and developed and confirmed three astronomical laws), Galileo (the first to use the telescope to study the universe), Pascal (who discovered barometric pressures vary with different altitudes), Newton (who discovered the law of gravity and invented calculus), Farraday (the discoverer of electromagnetic induction), Pasteur (the founder of microbiology), and Gregor Mendel (who laid the foundation for modern genetics).11 In our own day, Dr. Francis Collins, director of the Human Genome Project and a former atheist now turned evangelical Christian, is credited with mapping and sequencing the full human genome.12 As for the argument that Christianity fears science, one must be careful to determine from the outset exactly how the term “science” is being used. Christianity does not fear the scientific method nor does Christianity fear factual data. The problem comes when science brings philosophy in through the backdoor and without a proper introduction to the other house guests. This happens when scientists operate with philosophical starting points that preclude contact with data (or require convoluted explanations to avoid, at any cost, a nonmaterialistic interpretation of the data). This avoidance strategy is required to protect and defend deeply held naturalistic assumptions about the universe. One example is the a priori assumption that nature is all there is and that only natural explanations are meaningful, no matter what kind of gerrymandering one must do with the data. One immediately thinks of the arguments against the so-called Intelligent Design movement that seek to shut down data accumulation and reasonable scientific theorizing on purely philosophical grounds by claiming that the Intelligent Design movement is simply theology or religion masquerading as science.

In point of fact, the findings of modern science are confirming the biblical material that complexity and intelligence are basic building blocks in the universe.

Professor Michael Behe has shown that Darwin did not have the tools to observe what we can observe today on the biochemical level, and what we do observe establishes that the fundamental tenants of Darwinian evolution (i.e., random mutations over long periods of time) are

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insufficient to generate even the “simple” complexity seen in the most basic life forms.13 Belief in God is illogical This argument can take two different forms, both of which we will consider briefly. The first argument contends that all philosophical proofs for the existence of God are inherently contradictory because they all beg the question: “Who then created God?” The second argument insists that the existence of evil (e.g., the Holocaust, 9/11, pediatric AIDS victims, the shopping channel, etc.) makes irrelevant any evidence for the existence of God. This is because any God shown to exist is hardly worth human allegiance since he is either incapable of preventing evil (and thus not all powerful), or could prevent it but chooses not to (and thus clearly not all good).

Refutation The issue of “who created God” is not particularly profound, though it apparently started Bertrand Russell on the downhill slide to atheism. The fact of the matter is that the world is a contingent universe (i.e., nothing in the world contains the explanation for its existence in itself, but instead one must look outside of it for an explanation). The physical sciences have an impressive battery of illustrations of the fact that the universe we live in is contingent and finite (the second law of thermodynamics being only one such example14). To regard the world we live in as eternal is simply out of the question. Similarly, to regard the Creator of this world as likewise contingent (i.e., “Who created him?”) begs the question since that only forces us to continue to pose the same question ad infinitum. As Montgomery says, “Only by stopping with a God who is the final answer to the series do we avoid begging the question—and only then do we offer any adequate account for the contingent universe with which we began.”15 Our universe is simply a blooming lot of contingency! The atheist stops at this universe and refuses to move to the God who is not contingent and who is himself the necessary being to start the whole process. The atheist, however, stops with his explanations at this world, and yet this world offers utterly no reason for stopping with it and its heap of contingent “stuff” crying out for explanation.

As for the problem of evil, first we note a logical problem with the argument that the existence of evil disproves the existence of God. As the analytical philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein established,16 there is no such thing as “ethics” unless one has a truly transcendent source of such ethics. Without that transcendent judgment on what is right and what is wrong, one cannot even speak of “evil” save in only relative or culturally conditioned manner. In short, one must presuppose an absolute moral standard even to employ the word “evil” in the across-allcultures manner employed by the atheist in this argument.

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Conclusion “Christianity has compelled the mind of man not because it is evil in many Eastern religions…Christianity speaks of the most cheering view of man’s existence, but because it is truest to human depravity as being so real and dreadful that it the facts”—Dorothy Sayers.17 Theism, however, has required the Son of God to enter human history in order some very disconcerting bedfellows. We are told that to make atonement for humanity’s sin. the devil himself is a theist, and that he and his minions conditions and sociological-political-psychological factors. at least “tremble” in that knowledge (James 2:19). The More directly, if God does not exist then there simply is no case for theism is ultimately of little value if God had not “problem of evil.” What is is, and no more can be said. chosen to enter human history and to speak clearly about Secondly, Christianity is not in the least incompatible man’s condition. This, in fact, is precisely the claim of with the existence of evil in the universe. The biblical data historic Christianity. It is the many infallible proofs that is unimpeachably clear that evil entered the universe “God was in Christ reconciling the world unto himself” through the volitional acts of the creatures, not the that must be finally confronted. That those proofs come in Creator. Evil entered the human condition as a result of a writings that have an overwhelmingly solid documentary completely free moral choice by the creatures to do their pedigree can take a serious skeptic to the place where a own will in direct contradiction to the plain and long line of lawyers18 have also allowed the compelling unambiguous word of God Almighty. The consequence primary source evidence to lead—namely, to the very was eternal separation from God as well as suffering and doors of eternity where life and salvation lie within the death in this life. Sin and its effects are irrational, however, saving work of Jesus Christ. ■ and do not obey nice, clean rules of cause and effect (i.e., the idea that you only get what you truly deserve). Thus, innocent children get AIDS and innocent bystanders die in Craig Parton is a trial lawyer and partner in Price, Postel & terrorist attacks while the elderly Godfather, Don Parma LLP of Santa Barbara, California. He is also the United Corleone, dies quickly of a heart attack in his tranquil States director of the International Academy of Apologetics, garden after playing a game of chase around the vines and Evangelism and Human Rights, which meets each summer in tomato bushes with his beloved grandson.

Strasbourg, France, to provide advanced training in apologetics But the biblical picture does not end by simply (see www.apologeticsacademy.eu). separating God from the cause of evil. Indeed, in Jesus Christ death (the final result of sin and evil) is conquered WORKS CITED: 1 decisively and forever. Jesus grieves at the tomb of Ruse is quoted on the cover of Alister McGrath’s The Lazarus over the devastation that human evil and death Dawkins Delusion: Atheist Fundamentalism and the Denial of bring. In Christianity, a most solid foundation exists for the Divine (Carol Stream, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2007).

2 standing against moral evil and for doing so with complete For more detail, see Lewis’s spiritual autobiography, confidence that such a stand has the divine stamp of Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1955).

3 approval. Contrary to the attitude of benign resignation R. C. Sproul, If there is a God, Why are there Atheists? toward evil in many Eastern religions (the concept of (Minneapolis: Bethany Publishers, 1978).

4 karma and the essential unity of good and evil emasculate The Great Australia Atheism Debate Tape Series any real ability to aggressively counter the cause and (Edmonton: Canadian Institute for Law, Theology and Public Policy, 1986). See www.ciltpp.com for tape catalog. effects of human evil and suffering), Christianity speaks of 5 Alvin Schmidt, Under the Influence: How Christianity human depravity as being so real and dreadful that it Transformed Civilization (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2001), required the Son of God to enter human history in order p. 156. to make atonement for humanity’s sin. Thus, not only is 6 A. R. Hands, Charities and Social Aid in Greece and Rome evil condemned, but God himself takes the consequences (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), pp. 27-28. of that evil onto himself in his very body.

7 Donald Tewksbury, The Founding of American Colleges The result is that no one can say that God does not and Universities Before the Civil War (New York: Colombia understand human suffering and evil. The cross of Jesus University Press, 1932), p. 82. forever silences the argument that God does not 8 John Warwick Montgomery, “Luther, Libraries and understand what it is like to suffer, to be unjustly treated, Learning,” reprinted in Montgomery’s In Defense of Martin and to die. Finally, Christianity is clear that Jesus Christ Luther (Milwaukee: Northwestern Publishing Co., 1970), will return again to totally obliterate all sin and human pp. 116-139. suffering and to wipe away all tears from every eye.

Contrary to the attitude of benign resignation toward

3 4 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

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W. E. H. Lecky, History of European Morals (New York: D. Appleton, 1927); see also Edward Ryan, The History of the Effects of Religion on Mankind: In Countries Ancient and Modern, Barbarous and Civilized (Dublin: T. M. Bates, 1802), p. 151. Alvin Schmidt devotes a chapter to the topic in Under the Influence, supra at ft. 5, pp. 272-291.

10 Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Macmillan Press, 1926), p. 18.

11 Schmidt, Under the Influence, supra at ft. 5, pp. 240-241.

12 Dr. Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief (Old Tappan, New Jersey: Free Press, 2006).

13 Michael J. Behe, Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

14 See Professor Gordon J. Van Wylen, Thermodynamics (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1959), pp. 119-174, see esp. p. 169.

15 John Warwick Montgomery, Christianity for the Tough Minded: Essays in Support of an Intellectually Defensible Religious Commitment (Edmonton: Canadian Institute for Law, Theology and Public Policy, 2001), p. 27.

16 Wittgenstein concluded in his magnum opus, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1971), that “[e]thics is transcendental.” Proposition 6.421.

17 Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker (London: Methuen & Co., 1946), p. 13.

18 A partial list includes Hugo Grotius in the sixteenth century (the so-called “Father of International Law”), Sir Matthew Hale in the seventeenth century (Lord High Chancellor under Charles II), William Blackstone in the eighteenth century (codifier of the English common law), Simon Greenleaf in the nineteenth century (dean of Harvard Law School and greatest living authority at that time on common law evidence), Lord Hailsham in the twentieth century (former Lord High Chancellor and accomplished trial lawyer), Jacques Ellul in the twentieth century (professor of law at the University of Bordeaux), Sir Norman Anderson (authority on Muslim law), and John Warwick Montgomery (English barrister, American lawyer, chief trial counsel in some of the most important human rights cases of the day litigated before the International Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France). For further discussion on the issue of why trial lawyers in particular are so attracted to the Christian faith, see Parton, The Defense Never Rests (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2004).

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C. S. Lewis on Atheism…

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theism turns out to be too simple. If the whole universe has no meaning, we should never

have found out that it has no meaning.

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hen you are arguing against Him you are arguing against the very power that makes

you able to argue at all.

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owthatIamaChristianIdonothavemoodsinwhichthe

wholethinglooksveryimprobable:butwhenIwasan

atheistIhadmoodsinwhichChristianitylookedterriblyprobable.

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believe in God as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it, but because by it I see

everything else.

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man who was merely a man and said the sort of things Jesus said would not be a great moral

teacher. He would either be a lunatic—on the level with a man who says he is a poached egg—or he would be the devil of hell. You must take your choice. Either this was, and is, the Son of God, or else a madman or something worse. You can shut Him up for a fool or you can fall at His feet and call Him Lord and God. But let us not come with any patronizing nonsense about His being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us.

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Prologue to “the Great Story” The Recalling of C. S. Lewis from Atheism

by Patricia Anders

T

he bright young student in the first row looked up at me with surprise: “C. S. Lewis was an atheist?”

Several undergraduates in the class nodded and audibly confirmed my statement. “I had no idea,” he muttered wide-eyed as he jotted down some notes.

Indeed, C. S. Lewis (“Jack” to his friends) considered himself an atheist, albeit a confused one, until his time at Oxford: I was at this time living, like so many Atheists or Antitheists, in a whirl of contradictions. I maintained that God did not exist. I was also very angry with God for not existing. I was equally angry with Him for creating a world.1

According to literary legend, Gertrude Stein said to Ernest Hemingway and his fellow expatriates living in Paris in the 1920s (most notably, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound) that they were all a “lost generation.”

She was referring to those who came of age between 1914 and 1918 during World War I. More than 9 million soldiers died, over 20 million were wounded, and 7 million were permanently disabled; and at the end of the war, a worldwide epidemic of the Spanish Influenza killed another 50 million people. Disillusioned by the war’s devastation, the “Lost Generation” became generally cynical about morality, society, and religion— basically, they “lost” their way. This abandonment of Victorian ideals led to the “anything goes” Jazz Age (as portrayed in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby), which crashed with the Stock Market in 1929 and crumbled to dust in the Great Depression of the 1930s; and barely 20 years after the “War to End all Wars,” the world found itself destructively embroiled again on a massive scale.

In the literature class I was teaching at a Christian liberal arts college, I wanted to focus on those World War I era writers—like Fitzgerald and Virginia Woolf—who wrote from the pain of their perceived hopelessness within this devastation; but I also wanted to contrast them with those who had struggled through the same horrendous problems and yet—through faith in God and the promise of his gospel—had managed to find hope out of their original hopelessness. Of course, all the “great” writers were the despondent skeptical ones who, not surprisingly, generally 3 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

ended badly: alcoholism (Fitzgerald at the age of 44); a shotgun (Hemingway after his diagnosis with terminal cancer); and drowning (Woolf after a final bout with severe mental illness). The one obvious example of someone who successfully made this transition from despair to faith was the poet T. S. Eliot (for his story, see “After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness?” in Modern Reformation, March/April 2004); but I knew there had to be more than just “dear Tom” (as Woolf called him).

Then I remembered that C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien had both served as infantrymen for Britain in the war. As Lewis writes, “I arrived in the front trenches on my nineteenth birthday (November 1917), saw most of my service in the villages before Arras— Fampoux and Monchy—and was wounded at Mt. Bernenchon, near Lillers, in April, 1918.”2 He doesn’t go into any details of the battle since “the war itself has been so often described by those who saw more of it than I that I shall say here little about it.”3 After all, he was only one young man out of 20 million who were wounded. What he chose to write about instead was another larger-scale battle that he was undergoing with the Creator of the universe, whom he was doing his best to ignore or at least avoid.

A young man who wishes to remain a sound Atheist cannot be too careful of his reading. There are traps everywhere—“Bibles laid open, millions of surprises,” as Herbert says, “fine nets and stratagems.” God is, if I may say it, very unscrupulous.4 Surely, Lewis could have remained on the same path as many of his contemporaries and turned his back with finality on the God who had allowed such suffering in his life (the premature and painful death of his beloved mother, his harsh years in school as a sensitive and bright boy, the WWI deaths of friends and his own wounding).

After all, he was encouraged by brilliant rationalists who were also avowed atheists, and he did his best to convince himself that there was no God—until he read George MacDonald’s Phantastes and G. K. Chesterton’s The Everlasting Man; and then at Oxford he met Owen Barfield and J. R. R. Tolkien among others. Now he began to read

and talk with men who were just as intelligent and as educated as he, but who actually believed in God. Lewis’s avoidance of God was akin to someone lost in the jungle trying to hide from a lion hot on his scent.

Despite Jack’s strongest efforts, Aslan found him out.

I know very well when, but hardly how, the final step was taken. I was driven to Whipsnade one sunny morning. When we set out I did not believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, and when we reached the zoo I did….It was more like when a man, after long sleep, still lying motionless in bed, becomes aware that he is now awake.5 He had been through all the arguments and yet could not stand against the God who revealed himself and drew Lewis to him (or as he put it, “recalled me to Himself”).

Perhaps it was this lengthy struggle against the Almighty that enabled Lewis to become such a strong apologist for the Christian faith—preparing him to help his country through World War II with his radio broadcasts, which were published soon afterward as Mere Christianity (a book that remains important for us almost 60 years later).

Of course, this short article can do no justice to the story of his conversion from atheism to deism and then to Christianity, which is precisely why Lewis recorded his personal history in Surprised by Joy. What I can offer, however, are my own thoughts on how Lewis fits within Gertrude Stein’s “Lost Generation” category—as does Tolkien. True, they may not compare with the “great” literary (and poetically tragic) icons of the first half of the twentieth century, but their stories still speak to us today just as powerfully as ever. Witness the epic film dramas of Peter Jackson’s Academy Award-winning The Lord of the Rings trilogy (which Tolkien based on the First World War), the recent movie version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe in the first of The Chronicles of Narnia series, and now the new film, Prince Caspian, coming this May. Unfortunately, some “serious thinkers”—such as some of my undergraduate students—dismiss these books as “only fantasy” (either they don’t like worlds that “don’t really exist” or they say they just “don’t get it”). As I argued to my students, however, one of the reasons why fantasy worlds such as Narnia or Middle Earth are important is that they can help us to understand ultimate reality in a new light. How does one take the truth of the very real battle between Good and Evil and show that in our everyday world? One way is to become “sub-creator” (as Tolkien referred to himself) of another world that echoes the spiritual struggles of our own. In The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien speaks to us on multiple levels, providing even the christological typology of prophet (Gandalf), priest (Frodo), and king (Aragorn). We recognize our Christian journey in this rich and vivid epic fraught with dread mixed with hope, finally ending in victory. As Lewis writes:

Indeed, in my view…I do not think the resemblance between the Christian and the merely imaginative experience is accidental. I think that all things, in their way, reflect heavenly truth, the imagination not least.6 In a much simpler tale, one intentionally written for children (unlike Tolkien’s life work with its intricate history and multiple languages), Lewis tells the fantastical story of Aslan the Great Lion defeating evil first by destroying the White Witch and finally through the overthrow of Old Narnia (earth as we currently know it) and the revelation of New Narnia (the New Jerusalem).

Ever trying to recapture that glimpse of “Joy,” Lewis sought to help us see our Christian faith through fresh eyes by creating a lion who “isn’t safe” but “good”; one who would devour his enemies and restore the children of Adam and Eve to their rightful places. (It should be noted, however, that as an Oxford academic, Narnia—and Lewis’s Christian apologetic writings—cost him any serious scholarly reputation at the university.)

Like Tolkien, Lewis endured the horrors of war and what can be labeled as one of the bloodiest centuries of recent memory; but he didn’t suffer long the fate of the rest of the “Lost Generation.” The Shepherd (or, in this case, the Great Lion) called this wayward, stubborn sheep and brought him (“kicking, struggling, resentful, and darting his eyes in every direction for a chance of escape”7) into his fold of green pastures and still waters. We should give thanks to the One who pursued after Jack, and who pursues and holds us as well.

And as He spoke He no longer looked to them like a lion; but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them.

And for us this is the end of all the stories, and we can most truly say that they all lived happily ever after. But for them, it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world and all their adventures in Narnia had only been the cover and the title page: now at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before.8

Patricia Anders is managing editor of Modern Reformation and an adjunct instructor in English literature and writing.

WORKS CITED: C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy (New York: Harcourt, 1955), p. 115.

2 Lewis, p. 188.

3 Lewis, p. 195.

4 Lewis, p. 191.

5 Lewis, p. 237.

6 Lewis, p. 167.

7 Lewis, p. 229.

8 C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle (New York: Harper, 1956), p. 228.

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hat do you think of Van Tillian presuppositionalism?” asked the earnest young man in a Starbucks café situated in the Borders store in Leeds, England. Not exactly the question I was expecting at an outreach event discussing atheism. “It’s okay,” I replied, “as long as you don’t take it too seriously.” Wrong answer. The next 15 minutes were taken up with this earnest young Christian trying to explain in the most animated terms why I had just wasted my time coming to Leeds to speak in a secular bookstore to people who, in his view, could not and would not listen, because of their presuppositions. The fact that most of the questions came from non-Christians or that many people in the store that night heard the gospel, perhaps for the first time, did not move him one inch. When challenged with Acts 17, he was still unimpressed. I found the whole experience profoundly disturbing, and yet another lesson learned in a year of extensive outreach and evangelism in our predominantly secular culture.

“The Brights” For me, it all began over a year ago. I walked into our local bookstore and noticed a book by Richard Dawkins entitled The God Delusion. Dawkins is Britain’s most famous atheist and his latest book has proved to be his most successful, influential, and lucrative yet. It has been on The New York Times best-seller list for over a year, and has sold well over a million copies in the U.S. American Christians should be aware of this book because Dawkins, and his colleagues, have a specific American agenda in mind. They want to “out” American atheists, making a comparison between themselves and the gay movement. They have gone even to the extent of renaming themselves, somewhat embarrassingly, “the Brights.” Dawkins believes that the 14 percent of Americans who say they are atheists are just the tip of the iceberg. He believes that beneath the surface there is a considerable number of Americans who are, in reality, atheists. He also wants to remove religion from public life—and to that end he is conducting an effective public campaign—going on tour, using the media, and organizing the “A” campaign to raise the profile of secularism and atheism at this opportune moment.

On Being a Flea Although Dawkins and others undoubtedly see the New Atheist publishing phenomena as an opportunity for themselves, it is also an opportunity for the gospel. We should not regard Dawkins as primarily a threat and react defensively. Nor should we regard him as an opportunity to advance our status within our own circles or an opportunity to make money. Dawkins and his followers have been quick to accuse those of us who have responded to him in writing as being fleas, seeking to make a living off his back. Apart from the delicious irony of a man 3 8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

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having made millions by publishing old ideas about the non-existence of God, Dawkins is obviously not aware of the limited money to be made in Christian publishing—at least in the U.K.! It has saddened me, however, to see that the number of “flea” books has now rapidly multiplied; with it appears a great many being written, if not to make money, at least to reassure the followers of particular ministries that their “man” is on the ball.

Much of what has been written has been written from within the citadel of the church (whether Catholic, liberal, or evangelical) and seems to have been written for the people within. Which is a great shame because instead of speaking about people, we need to be speaking to people (have you ever noticed how much we talk about the gospel, but seem to struggle to actually proclaim the gospel itself to those who most need to hear it?); and we need to be providing our fellow Christians with material that they can use to communicate the Good News to their families, friends, and workmates.

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fairy is late for his second coming and will be angry with you. Why is anyone debating with this moron? He doesn’t know how to! He has the intellectual capacity of road kill.” What is interesting is that comments like this were allowed to remain on the Dawkins website (which self-advertises as “an oasis of clear thinking”!), whilst many of my comments were removed and I have been banned six times. When I asked the webmaster why I had been banned, he stated that it was because my views caused arguments! So much for tolerance, reason, and clear thinking!

Suffice it to say that apart from the personal insults, the arguments largely seemed to be from “the atheist’s handbook to attacking Christians.” It is only fair to point out that a number of more thoughtful atheists contacted me personally, some to apologize and others seeming to want to genuinely discuss and question.

A Personal Reflection

“The Intellectual Capacity of Road Kill” After reading Dawkins, I could not get away from the idea that The God Delusion was something that should be addressed. Tim Keller of Redeemer Presbyterian in New York speaks of “defeater beliefs”—those generally held views in society that prevent people from even hearing the gospel. Dawkins’ book contains several of these beliefs and so, with some degree of trepidation, I began a series of articles that were posted on the Free Church website (www.freechurch.org).

The Dawkins website (www.richarddawkins.net) then put the article on their front page. The response was immediate. Within a few hours, dozens of comments (most of them hostile) had been posted—over 800 in all.

Modern Reformation is a family magazine, so the more vehement of the quotes cannot be reproduced here, but at least let me give you a flavor: “David Robertson is a selfrighteous narrow minded, up his own [expletive], thick as pig [expletive] moronic retard! Watch out David, the sky

God or the Green Moustache?

As for Dawkins’ book itself, it is an uncompromising and relentless attack upon religion and especially upon the God of the Bible. Having “proved” there is no God, Dawkins then goes on to deal with other issues like the roots of religion and morality, the Bible, what’s wrong with religion, and why teaching religion to children is a form of child abuse. Much of this is badly argued, bitter, and continually uses the worst examples of “religion,” the imbalanced and the extreme as though they are normative.

What is really surprising is the weakness of his core argument in chapter four. His basic “proof” that there is no God boils down to the question, “Who designed the Designer?” “Who made God?” is a question I am used to hearing from six year olds. I was shocked to find it being asked several times by a professor from Oxford and a man advertised as one of the top three intellectuals in the world. Dawkins clearly does not understand or accept that no Christian believes in a created God. Yet whilst he mocks and dismisses those who think that the God who created the universe is perfectly capable of raising the dead, he is prepared to accept as a serious proposition that the complexity and constants within the universe that allow life in the first place can best be explained by a multiverse. In other words, he argues that you could exist in several different universes, in one of which you may already be dead and in another you may have a green moustache! If it is true that “those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad,” then Dawkins ridiculing of those of us who believe that an Almighty God could raise his son from the dead, whilst asking us to seriously accept the possibility that we exist in a parallel universe (with or without our green moustache) is clearly evidence that we are on the eve of destruction!

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In terms of emerging from our own—as we would say in Scotland, “wee world”—we people there are profound intellectual questions, need to engage in marketplace evangelistic apologetics. Our for many there is a deep-seated emotional and publishing, preaching, and proclamation should be done psychological reaction to God, perhaps caused by in the secular marketplace, not in the Christian marketsome form of religious abuse or maybe just good place, otherwise we are not communicating the gospel. old-fashioned sin.

Indeed, the very concept of a specifically Christian marketLessons for the Church place is biblical nonsense—resulting in the world’s The constant e-mails, writing of articles, reading methods being brought into the church and, just as numerous books referred to me, and the engagement that devastatingly, the church failing to get into the world. has resulted with many different people has been an What has surprised me is the extent to which the exhausting, stimulating, depressing, yet encouraging evangelical church in the U.S. seems to be unaware of the experience. I would like to humbly suggest that there may dangers and the opportunities presented by the New be some lessons here for the church.

Atheists. My publisher informed me that at a recent Christian booksellers’ convention about 50 percent had The God Haters never even heard of Dawkins. I began a lecture at a Firstly, we must acknowledge that, whilst for some Reformed seminary in the U.S. by asking how many had people there are profound intellectual questions, for many heard of either Dawkins or Sam Harris. Much to my there is a deep-seated emotional and psychological reaction astonishment only a handful of the students had heard of to God, perhaps caused by some form of religious abuse or them and most thought it was irrelevant. Needless to say, maybe just good old-fashioned sin. Dawkins delights in we had an interesting lecture and feedback! Of course, beginning public lectures on his book with a reading from there are exceptions to this ignorance and apathy—the chapter two, which is a most bitter and blasphemous attack fact that Modern Reformation is dealing with the issue is one upon the God of the Old Testament. This generally receives encouragement, as is the Fixed Point Foundation a warm round of applause. Why? Because it is perceived (www.fixed-point.org) in Birmingham, Alabama, who do to be daring, challenging, and most of all because it reflects excellent work. Somehow they managed to persuade the emotive anger of the God haters.

Richard Dawkins to debate with Dr. John Lennox, also of the University of Oxford. That debate is well worth Coming out of the Cocoon listening to and John Lennox’s book, God’s Undertaker: Has Secondly, we need to emerge from our cocooned world.

Science Buried Religion?, is in my view the best response to I have lost count of the number of times that I have heard the New Atheist publishing that I have read. from Christians in the U.S. that atheism is not a problem and that it really has nothing to do with them. After all, is Engaging and Equipping it not the case that 86 percent of Americans profess belief Thirdly, we must learn to engage with the arguments in God? What politician could get elected in the U.S. if that are put forward. We must equip and encourage our they stated they were an atheist? Has atheism not been people to do so. The work of people such as William Lane defeated? Alister McGrath’s excellent book, The Twilight of Craig, Ravi Zacharias, and Alister McGrath is essential.

Atheism, argues that the century of atheism has gone; but I There is a danger, however, that we reduce apologetics to suspect he was being a little premature. In the U.S., the the level of an Oxford tea party debate wherein those trouble is that atheism has largely been equated with interested in “that sort of thing” get involved and excited, Communism and specifically Russian Communism. It is but the average believer—thinking that “apologetics” is true that there are not many Stalinists in Savannah; only for those who understand or at least have heard of however, whilst it is the case that the vast majority of Wittgenstein or Nietzsche—remain untouched and Americans proclaim some kind of religious faith, we too unequipped. If we are only talking to ourselves, then we can easily forget that a significant number are in fact are not taking the opportunities afforded by the New functional atheists. In other words, they are cultural Atheist publishing to tell people about Jesus. I wrote in Christians who accept belief in God as part of the the first letter to Dawkins: American culture, but they live as though there were no God. Dawkins et al recognize this and their appeal is Your book comes across as a desperate attempt to largely to provide an emotional and intellectual apologetic shore up secularism’s crumbling defenses. To that for the way that modern man lives. extent it reminds me a lot of some of us in the

Firstly, we must acknowledge that, whilst for some

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Church, who faced with what seems to be overwhelming odds and staring defeat in the face, sometimes issue evangelistic tracts, articles and books which rather than really being aimed at the conversion of unbelievers are really designed to shore up the faith of the faithful.

Perhaps we should reflect upon whether our evangelistic and apologetic material really is scratching where our society itches.

Proclaiming Christ Fourthly, our apologetic must be Christ-centered. In that respect I wonder if much of the Christian church has been diverted from the central message of the gospel. In particular, are we not in danger of allowing the evolution/creation debate and the culture wars to divert us from the centrality of the Cross? Dawkins’ whole argument is based upon two propositions—firstly, evolution is true; and secondly, because evolution is true then religion in general and Christianity in particular is false. Many modern Christians seem to work on the basis that we should go for proposition one. This seems to me to be playing right into the atheist fundamentalist’s hands. It reduces the gospel to an indepth scientific argument about origins, it creates division within the church (Christians have at least three different positions on the subject; young earth creationism, old earth creationism, and theistic evolution), and it allows Dawkins and his allies to fight the battle on their territory using their weapons. Would it not be better, whilst not ignoring the question of evolution, to start our apologetic a bit earlier—with the creation of the universe and the fact that the universe itself is surprisingly balanced? (I am not surprised that far more cosmologists than biologists tend to be at least theists.) We must also include the whole question of the moral sense that we have the nature of humanity, the Bible, and above all Jesus Christ. Is he not after all the supreme proof of God—“the radiance of his glory and the exact representation of his being” (Heb. 1:3)? The answers are in Christ.

Dinesh D’Souza’s book, What’s so Great about Christianity?, is being seen in the U.S. as the answer to both Dawkins and especially Hitchens’ God Is Not Great.

It is a good book, well written with a good deal of valuable material within it; however, it does not live up to the publisher’s hyperbole as the next Mere Christianity.

It will be successful within the U.S. because it appeals to the “America is great because of Christianity” mindset; but outside the U.S., and indeed outside the Christian community within the U.S., it will have little impact.

The issue is not “What’s so great about Christianity?” but rather “What’s so great about Jesus Christ?” Telling your typical postmodern/pagan secularist that Christianity is great is a much harder sell than showing them that Christ is great.

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Ecclesiological Evangelism Fifthly, we need to realize the importance of the church in bringing the gospel. Far too often we have developed an individualistic mindset, which sees salvation only in a “personal” sense, and as a result we have become spiritual consumerists, going from church to church or relying on parachurch organizations to provide our particular felt needs at any one time. Ecclesiology is essential to evangelism. Why? Because people need to meet Jesus.

And we meet Jesus in preaching and sacrament, through which the Spirit prepares a new society whose good works glorify the Father and are a testimony to the world.

I regularly conduct apologetic evangelistic meetings in secular venues such as Borders, Starbucks, etc. These normally consist of a 20-minute talk followed by an hour of questions and discussion. It has been thrilling to be able to proclaim the beauty and the glory of Christ to those who are in desperate need of him. But it is incomplete.

My aim is to remove some of the “defeater” beliefs that prevent people from even considering Christ, and then to be able to say to them, “If you want to meet Jesus, then go to such and such a church.” The church is central and core to a biblical evangelism.

Are Calvinists Cuckoos?

Finally, it is vital to me to understand that a biblical church and biblical evangelism come from biblical theology. I am somewhat puzzled that the Reformed church seems to have adopted the “cuckoo” method of evangelism. We let the charismatics and the Arminians do the fishing, and then when they bring the birds into the nest (forgive the mixed metaphor!) we pounce and teach the new converts “the way of God more perfectly.” The reason this puzzles me is that if what we proclaim is the Bible, if it is the Word of God, then surely what God has given should be the most effective and fruitful form of evangelism. If our theology cannot be lived and proclaimed to unbelievers, then in what sense can it be termed biblical theology? My own personal experience has been that having spent years studying the teaching and theology of the Bible, I am astonished how directly relevant it is to the questions and problems that people in our society raise. We do not need to make the Bible relevant. It is. We need to be more biblical, not less. And armed with the Word of God, prayer, and the Spirit, we can walk boldly through the open door that the Lord has provided for us at this point in history. ■

David A. Robertson is author of The Dawkins Letters: Challenging Atheist Myths (Christian Focus, 2007), editor of the Free Church Monthly Record, and minister of St. Peter’s Free Church in Dundee, Scotland.

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everal years ago, a mainline theologian told me of his experience at an evangelical megachurch. He was visiting his children and grandchildren during spring break and then Easter Sunday arrived. Nothing visibly suggested that it was a Christian service, but this distinguished theologian tried to reign in his judgments.

There was no greeting from God or sense that this was God’s gathering. The songs were almost exclusively about us, our feelings, and our intentions to worship, obey, and love; but it was not clear whom they were talking about or why. He concluded, “Well, evangelicals don’t really have a liturgy. They put all of the content into the sermon, so I’ll wait.”

His patience, however, was not rewarded. Although it was Easter, the message (with no clear text) was on how Jesus gives us the strength to overcome our obstacles.

Lacking even a benediction, this theologian left discouraged. He had come to an evangelical church at Easter and instead of meeting God and the announcement of a real victory over sin and death by Jesus Christ, he encountered other Christians who were being given fellowship and instructions for making their own “Easter” come true in their life.

Pressed with leading questions by his son-in-law as to his reaction to the service (like, “Did it touch your heart?”), the theologian broke his silence: “I assume

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you’re trying to ‘evangelize’ me right now,” he said. “But there was no ‘gospel’ anywhere in that service that might convert me if I were unconverted.” He concluded, “Not even in the most liberal churches I’ve been in was the service so devoid of Christ and the gospel. It’s like ‘God who?’”

Since then, a mainline Methodist theologian told me of an almost identical experience—curiously also at Easter— in a conservative Presbyterian church that was known around the university for its “Bible-believing” and “Christcentered” ministry. He too left disappointed (the sermon was something about how Jesus overcame his setbacks and so can we), further substantiating his appraisal that evangelicals are as likely as mainliners today to talk poppsychology, politics, or moralism instead of the gospel.

Over a century ago, Princeton theologians Charles Hodge and B. B. Warfield observed that according to the system of revivalism associated especially with Charles Finney, God was not even necessary. If conversion and revival are “simply the philosophical result of the right use of means” rather than a miracle of God’s grace, all you have to do is find the right techniques, procedures, and methods that work across the board: in business, politics, and religion. A lot of the church growth

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literature of the past few decades assumes the same outlook. Could evangelicalism grow and experience success even if God didn’t exist?

Sociologist Christian Smith has done extensive research revealing that the spirituality of America’s teens is best described as “moralistic, therapeutic deism.”1 In fact, other sociologists have come to similar conclusions concerning older generations as well. So while evangelicals are often quick to launch public protests against “secular humanists” for diminishing the role of God in American society, it would seem that the more likely source of secularization is the church itself. I am not claiming that evangelicalism is “atheistic” or even “deistic” in principle, but that in practice it is losing its interest in God and the grand story of his saving work in Jesus Christ.

Substantiating the Charge ased on numerous studies conducted by his research group, evangelical pollster George Barna writes: “To increasing millions of Americans, God—if we even believe in a supernatural deity—exists for the pleasure of humankind. He resides in the heavenly realm solely for our utility and benefit. Although we are too clever to voice it, we live by the notion that true power is accessed not by looking upward but by turning inward.”2 Unless something changes, Barna thinks, “it will be every man for himself, with no second thoughts or regrets about the personal or societal implications of this incredibly selfish, nihilistic, narcissistic way of life.”3 Most Americans have at least an intellectual assent when it comes to God, Jesus Christ, and angels. They believe that the Bible is a good book filled with important stories and lessons. And they believe that religion is very important in their lives. But this same group of people, including many professing Christians, also believe that people are inherently good; that our primary purpose is to enjoy life as much as possible.4

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Eighty-two percent of Americans (and a majority of evangelicals) believe that Benjamin Franklin’s aphorism, “God helps those who help themselves,” is a biblical quotation. A majority believe that “all people pray to the same god or spirit, no matter what name they use for that spiritual being,” and that “if a person is generally good or does enough good things for others during their life, they will earn a place in heaven.”5 (It should not surprise us then when President Bush says, “I believe that all the world, whether they be Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, prays to the same God. That’s what I believe.”6) After citing a series of reports, Barna concludes, “In short, the spirituality of America is Christian in name only.”

We desire experience more than knowledge. We prefer choices to absolutes. We embrace preferences

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rather than truths. We seek comfort rather than growth. Faith must come on our terms or we reject it. We have enthroned ourselves as the final arbiters of righteousness, the ultimate rulers of our own experience and destiny. We are the Pharisees of the new millennium.7 Among the false assumptions that are “killing the ministry” today are that “Americans have a firm understanding of the basic tenets of Christianity,” that “people who believe in God believe in the God of Israel” known in Scripture, or that non-Christians are interested in salvation, since most Americans “are relying instead on their own good deeds, their good character, or the generosity of God” apart from Christ.8 Barna’s studies suggest that most Americans value time and efficiency over everything else, minimizing long-term commitments, maintaining “independence and individuality at all costs,” even to the point of being skeptical of institutions, people, and authorities. After all, people are told every day, “You are unique,” and that they shouldn’t submit to the expectations of others. Above all, “Trust your feelings to guide you. Relying upon absolute principles places unrealistic limitations on you. Only you know what’s right or best for you at any given moment, in those circumstances.” Finally, “Set goals and achieve them….Have fun….Stay in good health….Discover and revel in the purpose of your life.”9 These are the principal values according to Barna’s surveys of American adults today.

After expressing alarm at such trends, however, Barna himself advocates a market-driven outlook that reduces the Christian faith and mission to human-centered techniques of pragmatism and consumerism that might even have made Finney blush. There is this huge disconnect between what we say we believe and what we actually seem to believe when the rubber meets the road.

Reacting against a legalistic and self-righteous tendency in their childhood, many Americans have abandoned church altogether. Those who return often do so on their own terms. The message must be light and affirming; the form in which it is presented must be entertaining and inspirational. In this context, as Newsweek reported, churches “have developed a ‘pick and choose’ Christianity in which individuals take what they want…and pass over what does not fit their spiritual goals. What many have left behind is a pervasive view of sin.”10 A decade later, Newsweek added in yet another cover story on the search for the sacred: Disguised in the secular language of psychotherapy, the search for the sacred has turned sharply inward— a private quest. The goal, over the last forty years, has been variously described as ‘peace of mind,’ ‘higher consciousness,’ ‘personal transformation’ or—in its most banal incarnation—‘self-esteem.’…In this environment, many searching Americans flit from one tradition to the next, tasting now the nectar of this M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 43

traditional wisdom, now of that. But, like butterflies, they remain mostly up in the air.11 Ironically, it was secular psychologist Karl Menninger who pointed out (in a book titled Whatever Became of Sin?) that the growing suppression of the reality of guilt in churches was actually contributing to neuroses rather than avoiding them. Not long ago, I read a Wall Street Journal article with a similar report, bearing the headline, “To Hell with Sin: When ‘Being a Good Person’ Excuses Everything.” Isn’t it slightly odd when the world has to complain that the churches are no longer talking about sin?

If we feel guilty, maybe it is because we really are guilty.

To change the subject or downplay the seriousness of this condition actually keeps people from the liberating news that the gospel brings. If our real problem is bad feelings, then the solution is good feelings. The cure can only be as radical as the disease. Like any recreational drug, “Christianity Lite” can make people feel better for the moment, but it does not reconcile sinners to God. So while secular psychologists like Menninger are writings books about sin, many Christian leaders are converting sin—a condition from which we cannot liberate ourselves—into dysfunction and salvation into recovery. In his best-seller, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, Philip Rieff describes how pop-psychology has transformed our entire worldview, including religion.

“Christian man was born to be saved,” he writes.

“Psychological man is born to be pleased.”12 “How can I, a sinner, be right before a holy God?” is simply off the radar in a therapeutic mindset. Once the self is enthroned as the source, judge, and goal of all of life, the gospel need not be denied; it’s beside the point. But people need to see—for their own good—that self-realization, self-fulfillment, and self-help are all contemporary twists on an old heresy, which Paul identified as “worksrighteousness.”

Diagnosing the Illness: “Moralistic, Therapeutic Deism” mericans have always been “can-do” people.

Pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps, we assume that we are good people who could do better if we just had the right methods and instructions.

Add to this the triumph of the therapeutic in popular culture and we end up with “moralistic, therapeutic deism.”

Besides psychologists, sociologists are documenting the fact that Christianity in America—including evangelicalism—is less interested in truth than in therapy and in attracting consumers than in making disciples. James Davison Hunter, Robert Bellah, Wade Clark Roof, and numerous others have made these points in their extensive studies of religion in America. However, there are two relatively recent sociologists who have contributed significantly to the spiritual condition that I am highlighting in this article and the following sidebar: Christian Smith and Marsha Witten.

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As noted above, from 2001 to 2005, University of North Carolina (now Notre Dame) sociologist Christian Smith led a team in a remarkable study of teen spirituality in America today. From his extensive interviews Smith concluded that the dominant form of religion or spirituality of American young people today is “moralistic, therapeutic deism.” It is difficult to define this somewhat amorphous spirituality, especially since, ironically, “22 percent of teen ‘deists’ in our survey reported feeling very or extremely close to God (the God they believe is not involved in the world today).”13 Apparently, God’s involvement is restricted to the inner sphere of one’s private world.

Smith observed that most teens—including those reared in evangelical churches who said that their faith is “very important” and makes a big difference in their lives—are “stunningly inarticulate” concerning that actual content of that faith.14 “Interviewing teens,” he relates, “one finds little evidence that the agents of religious socialization in this country”—i.e., parents, pastors, and teachers—“are being highly effective and successful with the majority of their young people.”15 In contrast to previous generations that at least had some residual knowledge of the Bible and basic Christian teachings, it seems that there is very little serious ability to state, much less to reflect upon and examine their beliefs, much less to relate them to daily life. Many young people seem to be living on the hype and the familiar circle of friends in the youth group, both of which eventually lose their influence, especially in college.

Smith defines “moralistic, therapeutic deism” as expressing this sort of working theology: “God created the world.”

“God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and most world religions.“ “The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.”

“God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem.”

“Good people go to heaven when they die.”16 The sense one gets from reading Smith’s study jives with my own anecdotal experience of popular religion in America today. Basically, the message is that God is nice, we are nice, so we should all be nice.

Do young people raised in evangelical homes and churches really believe this? According to Barna’s reports— not to mention the studies of sociologists like Smith (as well as James Hunter, Wade Clark Roof, and others)—the tragic answer is yes.17 This approach, Smith says, reflects similar studies of their parents’ generation. Even Lutheran youths active in the church could not define “grace” or “justification,” he says, pointing up the disparity between what churches say they believe and what they are actually

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communicating week in and week out. Smith pointed out that in the working theology of those he studied, “being religious is about being good and it’s not about forgiveness….It’s unbelievable the proportion of conservative Protestant teens who do not seem to grasp elementary concepts of the gospel concerning grace and justification….It’s across all traditions.”18 Whatever churches say they believe, the incoherent answers offered by those entrusted to their ministry further substantiate my argument that a moralistic religion of self-salvation is our default setting as fallen creatures. If we are not explicitly and regularly taught out of it, we will always turn the message of God’s rescue operation into a message of self-help.

A Theological Diagnosis he theological term for this malady is “Pelagianism.”

A fourth-century British monk, Pelagius was appalled by the immorality he saw when he arrived in Rome, the center of Christendom. Assuming that the emphasis of the African bishop Augustine on human helplessness and divine grace was at the root, Pelagius and his followers denied original sin. Sin is not a universal human condition, but simply a choice that each of us makes. With our free-will, we can choose to follow Adam’s bad example or Jesus’ good example. Although it was condemned by more church councils than any heresy, Pelagianism has always been a perennial threat. After all, it is our most natural theology.

While affirming that it is our own power to be good or bad—and so merit eternal life or death—semi-Pelagianism nevertheless believed that some assistance of divine grace was necessary. Arminianism, named after a late sixteenthcentury Dutch theologian who rejected Calvinism, was nevertheless one more step removed from Pelagian convictions, affirming the necessity of grace. Nevertheless, Arminianism still holds that salvation is a cooperative effort of God and human beings.

Ever since the Second Great Awakening, especially evident in the message and methods of evangelist Charles G. Finney, American Protestantism has been more Pelagian than Arminian. In fact, Arminian theologian Roger Olson has recently made a similar point.19 Denying original sin, Finney asserted that we are only guilty and corrupt when we choose to sin.20 Christ’s work on the cross could not have paid our debt, but could only serve as a moral example and influence to persuade us to repent. “If he had obeyed the law as our substitute, then why should our own return to personal obedience be insisted upon as a sine qua non of our salvation?”21 The atonement is simply “an incentive to virtue.” Rejecting the view that “the atonement was a literal payment of a debt,” Finney can only concede, “It is true, that the atonement, of itself, does not secure the salvation of any one.”22 Justification by the imputation of Christ’s righteousness is not only “absurd,” said Finney, but undermined all

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motivation for personal holiness. The new birth is not a divine gift, but the result of a rational choice to turn from sin to obedience. Christians can perfectly obey God in this life if they choose, and only in this way are they justified. In fact, “full present obedience is a condition of justification.”

No one can be justified “while sin, any degree of sin, remains in him.”23 Finney declared concerning the Reformation formula, “simultaneously justified and sinful….This error has slain more souls, I fear, than all the universalism that ever cursed the world.” For, “Whenever a Christian sins, he comes under condemnation and must repent and do his first works, or be lost.”24 As has already been said, there can be no justification in a legal or forensic sense, but upon the ground of universal, perfect, and uninterrupted obedience to law….The doctrine of an imputed righteousness, or that Christ’s obedience to the law was accounted as our obedience, is founded on a most false and nonsensical assumption, for Christ’s righteousness could do no more than justify himself. It can never be imputed to us....It was naturally impossible, then, for him to obey in our behalf. Representing the atonement as the ground of the sinner’s justification has been a sad occasion of stumbling to many.25 Referring to “the framers of the Westminster Confession of faith,” and their view of an imputed righteousness, Finney wondered, “If this is not antinomianism, I know not what is.”26 It should be noted that these positions are far more radically antithetical to Reformation theology (with which evangelicalism supposedly identifies itself) than the condemnations of the Reformers’ views by Rome at the Council of Trent. Finney’s message was certainly moralistic.

Through various methods, the evangelist could “induce repentance,” through constant crisis experiences that generated self-transformation. It was indeed a therapeutic orientation. And, as his critics observed, it was a system of religion that did not even seem to require God. Salvation and moral improvement were entirely in the hands of the evangelist and the convert. The deistic implications are also apparent.

Even if the gospel is formally affirmed, it becomes a tool for engineering personal and public life (salvation-byworks) rather than an announcement that God’s just wrath toward us has been satisfied and his unmerited favor has been freely bestowed in Jesus Christ.

And this concern I have expressed is hardly limited to a few grumpy Calvinists and Lutherans. “Self-salvation is the goal of much of our preaching,” according to United Methodist bishop William Willimon.27 Willimon perceives that much of contemporary preaching, whether mainline or evangelical, assumes that conversion is something that we generate through our own words and sacraments. “In this respect we are heirs of Charles G. Finney,” who thought that conversion was not a miracle but a “‘purely M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 45

philosophical [i.e., scientific] result of the right use of the constituted means.’”

[W]e have forgotten that there was once a time when evangelists were forced to defend their ‘new measures’ for revivals, that there was once a time when preachers had to defend their preoccupation with listener response to their Calvinist detractors who thought that the gospel was more important than its listeners. I am here arguing that revivals are miraculous, that the gospel is so odd, so against the grain of our natural inclinations and the infatuations of our culture, that nothing less than a miracle is required in order for there to be true hearing. My position is therefore closer to that of the Calvinist Jonathan Edwards than to the position of Finney.28 Nevertheless, “The homiletical future, alas, lay with Finney rather than Edwards,” leading to Barna, who writes, Jesus Christ was a communications specialist. He communicated His message in diverse ways, and with results that would be a credit to modern advertising and marketing agencies….He promoted His product in the most efficient way possible: by communicating with the ‘hot prospects.’…He understood His product thoroughly, developed an unparalleled distribution system, advanced a method of promotion that has penetrated every continent, and offered His product at a price that is within the grasp of every consumer (without making the product so accessible that it lost its value).29 The question that naturally arises in the face of such remarks is whether it is possible to say that Jesus made anything new.

“Alas,” adds Willimon, “most ‘evangelistic’ preaching I know about is an effort to drag people even deeper into their subjectivity rather than an attempt to rescue them from it.” Our real need, whether we feel it or not, is that we systematically distort and ignore the truth. This is why we need “an external word.”30 “So in a sense, we don’t discover the gospel, it discovers us. ‘You did not choose me but I chose you’ (John 15:16).”31 Willimon concludes, “The story is euangelion, good news, because it is about grace.

Yet it is also news because it is not common knowledge, not what nine out of ten average Americans already know.

The gospel doesn’t come naturally. It comes as Jesus.”32 A Discourse of Resistance “discourse of resistance” is called for in these circumstances, but we have to be careful on this score. There is, of course, an anti-modernist spirit whose strategy of resistance is as dangerous as it is simplistic.

The enemy is easily identified: secular humanism, public schools, Democrats, liberals, and gays; or on the other side of the aisle, fundamentalism, Christian schools,

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Republicans, conservatives, and patriarchalists. And since culture—our shared public life—is reduced to the spectacle of politics, the only way to resist is to win the culture wars.

The discourse of resistance I am suggesting, however, concerns the recovery of Christian faith and practice within the church itself. It begins not only by challenging weak views of God, sin, and grace, but the plausibility structures, paradigms, or worldviews that make biblical views increasingly incomprehensible even for most Christian laypeople and pastors.

People remain hopelessly trapped within their own inner psyche and resources, suppressing the truth about themselves that might drive them to Christ. No longer objectively guilty before a holy God, they feel only a sense of guilt or shame that they should deny by changing the subject to something lighter and more upbeat. No longer saved from damnation—which is the source of their deepest sense of anxiety—they are now saved from unpleasantness.

We are the walking dead, forgetful that our designer-label fashions of religion and morality are really a death shroud.

To paraphrase Jesus, we go through life like corpses with lipstick, not even aware that all of our makeovers and selfimprovement are just cosmetic (Matt. 23:25-28).

Our fig leaves may have become more sophisticated (and expensive), but they are no more successful at covering our nakedness in God’s presence than the homespun wardrobe of our first parents. Not only our sins, but “our righteousness is like filthy rags” (Isa. 64:6). Isaiah 59 records the court trial: “Yahweh versus Israel.”

Although the people have complained that so many calamities have unjustly fallen upon them, the prophet as God’s attorney exposes the ones bringing the complaint as perpetrators rather than victims: “Their cobwebs are useless for clothing; they cannot cover themselves with what they make. Their deeds are evil deeds, and the acts of violence are in their hands” (vv. 6-7). Only after the evidence is brought forward do the people confess their sin and recognize that they have brought God’s judgment upon themselves (vv. 9-15). In this situation, the Judge, seeing “that there was no one to intervene,” took it upon himself to don the garments of battle and win the salvation of his people at his own expense. “The Redeemer will come to Zion, to those in Jacob who repent of their sins,’ declares the LORD” (vv. 16-20). The church has not only allowed us to change the subject; it has changed the subject for us.

It is the false prophets who “dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace” (Jer. 8:11). “They fill you with false hopes,” he adds. “They speak visions from their own minds, not from the mouth of the LORD. They keep saying to those who despise me, ‘The LORD says: You will have peace’” (Jer. 23:16-17). It is not compassion for the people or zeal for God’s house, but their own thirst for popularity that renders the false prophets constitutionally incapable of telling the truth about the crisis.

Enclosed in our own narrow world of personal “spin,” we are never introduced to the real world created by God’s

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Word. Instead of something new and surprising that might actually bring genuine transformation at our roots, we hear only more of the background musak that softly affirms the status quo. Instead of being brought to the end of our rope so that we will let go of all other securities and fall into the merciful arms of God, we are encouraged to have another go at saving ourselves (however defined) with God’s help. Both sin and redemption are trivialized when we write the script.

Yet, finally, we will have to examine ourselves and our own capitulations to the spirit of the age that Paul captured so poignantly in 2 Timothy 3. There are no easy targets or silver bullets. We are the problem. As the prophets pointed out with great seriousness, Israel’s apostasy was evident not by a mass exodus from public worship, but by the corruption of worship and the standards of the covenant for human relationships. Israel had become like the nations, yet wondered why God was so upset.

Many of the same people who decry moral relativism and religious pluralism in the culture, have—in their thinking, ministry, and personal life—unwittingly adopted the habits of modernization that are more directly responsible for relativism in the first place. George Barna, for example, routinely decries the lack of any obvious disparity between Christians and the secular culture, while he accepts the most secular assumptions of the self as sovereign consumer. If God is not the focus of our church life, why should we expect the culture to take its cues from God’s script?

If most churchgoers cannot tell us anything specific about the God they consider meaningful—or explain basic doctrines of creation in God’s image, original sin, the atonement, justification, sanctification, the means of grace, or the hope of glory—then the blame can hardly be placed at the feet of secular humanists.

When our churches assume the gospel, reduce it to slogans, or confuse it with moralism and hype, it is not surprising that the type of spirituality we fall back on is “moralistic, therapeutic deism.” In a therapeutic worldview, the self is always sovereign. The great questions of life do not concern what an external authority has determined to be good, true, and beautiful, but one’s own sense of wellbeing and fulfillment. God is there to be used as needed, but does not surprise, contradict, judge, or disrupt our lust to control our own lives and destinies. Accommodating this false religion is not love—either of God or neighbor—but sloth, depriving human beings of genuine liberation and depriving God of the glory that is his due. The self must be dethroned. That’s the only way out. ■

Michael S. Horton is J. Gresham Machen Professor of Systematic Theology and Apologetics at Westminster Seminary California (Escondido, California).

WORKS CITED: 1 Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American

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Teenagers (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp.

162-171, 258, 262.

2 George Barna, The Second Coming of the Church (Nashville: Word, 1998), p. 7.

3 Barna, p. 8.

4 Barna, p. 21.

5 Barna, pp. 21-22.

6 President George W. Bush in an interview with Al Arabiya (4 October 2007), reported by Mollie Ziegler Hemingway, “Between the Times,” Modern Reformation (January/February 2008).

7 Barna, p. 23.

8 Barna, pp. 25-28.

9 Barna, pp. 60-61.

10 Kenneth Woodward, Newsweek (September 1984), p. 26.

11 Kenneth Woodward, Newsweek (November 1994), p. 62.

12 Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), pp. x-xii.

13 Smith and Denton, p. 42.

14 Smith explored his findings with us on the White Horse Inn radio broadcast (available at whitehorse inn.org).

15 Smith and Denton, p. 27.

16 Smith and Denton, pp. 162-163.

17 See especially James D. Hunter, Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), chapter 2.

18 Interview by Michael Cromartie, “What American Teenagers Believe: A Conversation with Christian Smith,” Books & Culture (January/February 2005), p. 10.

19 Roger Olson, Arminian Theology (Downers Grove, IL: IVP, 2005), p. 28 (including footnote 20). Furthermore, I have been amazed that Arminian friends like Methodist theologian Thomas Oden have defended core evangelical (i.e., Reformation) teachings like justification even while some conservative Protestants seem to be losing their interest in the doctrine. Clearly, the theological divide in our day is less denominational than it is theological.

20 Charles G. Finney, Systematic Theology (reprinted, Minneapolis: Bethany, 1976), pp. 31, 179-180, 236.

21 Finney, p. 206.

22 Finney, p. 209.

23 Finney, p. 46.

24 Finney, p. 57.

25 Finney, pp. 321-322.

26 Finney, pp. 321-322.

27 William Willimon, Preaching to the Baptized (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1994), p. 53.

28 Willimon, p. 20.

29 Willimon, p. 21, citing George Barna, Marketing the Church: What They Never Taught You About Church Growth (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1988), p. 50.

30 Willimon, p. 38.

31 Willimon, p. 43.

32 Willimon, p. 52.

M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 47

How Preaching Reveals This Secularizing Trend A Look at a Sociologist’s Study

by Michael Horton

T

he Pelagian tendency of popular Christianity in our day—which Christian Smith called “moralistic, therapeutic deism”—can be further substantiated by the studies of sociologist Marsha Witten. In All Is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism, Witten revealed her results from studying the texts of 47 sermons on the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15:11-32), delivered from 1986 to 1988 by various pastors in two denominations: the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and the Southern Baptist Convention. She begins the book by recounting an afternoon on Good Friday 1990. Listening to J. S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, “with antiphonal choirs calling out sorrowfully to Jesus in his grave,” the daily mail arrived and Witten opened the thickest envelope first. It was promotional material for a new Baptist church launching in her area with the following message: Hi Neighbor!

At last! A new church for those who have given up on church services! Let’s face it. Many people aren’t active in church these days.

WHY? Too often –the sermons are boring and don’t relate to daily living –many churches seem more interested in your wallet than in you –members are unfriendly to visitors –you wonder about the quality of the nursery care for your little ones Do you think attending church should be enjoyable?

WELL, WE’VE GOT GOOD NEWS FOR YOU! Valley Church is a new church designed to meet your needs in the 1990’s. At Valley Church you –meet new friends and get to know your neighbors –enjoy exciting music with a contemporary flavor –hear positive, practical messages which uplift you each week How to feel good about yourself How to overcome depression How to have a full and successful life Learning to handle your money without it handling you The secrets of successful family living How to overcome stress –trust your children to the care of dedicated nursery workers 4 8 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

WHY NOT GET A LIFT INSTEAD OF A LETDOWN THIS SUNDAY? (3-4)1 Witten, who describes herself as a non-Christian, uses this anecdote—St. Matthew Passion contrasted with the new church’s promotional materials—to frame the conclusions she arrived at after extensive studies: These two discourses seem to form an opposition: the spirituality, the struggle of faith, and the sublime image of God in the first message; and the optimistic, untroubled, purely mundane, communication of the second….Taken together, they tell us much about the state of Christianity, and specifically, its Protestant forms, within American culture in the late twentieth century. As we shall see, the seeming incongruity of these messages—the juxtaposition of the spiritual and the psychological, the transcendent and the pragmatic—paints an accurate portrait of contemporary faith and practice. (4) According to Max Weber’s once-popular “secularization thesis,” the processes of modernity first push religion to the margins of public life until it is forced to retreat to a private island of subjectivity. Then, secularization even transforms that last refuge according to its norms until religion is finally extinguished entirely.

Like many sociologists, Witten recognizes that things have not turned out this way, at least in the United States.

Where secularization smothered Christianity in Europe, for the most part, American evangelicalism thrives under such conditions. Why? Basically because the Christian faith is translated in private, subjective, and therapeutic terms. No longer is there a necessity for a communal interpretation of the Bible learned by each successive generation. Each person has a “personal relationship with Jesus.” So, for example, “Many of the marks of its traditional denominational self-definition that have differentiated Presbyterianism from other Protestant groups in the United States have been lost in recent years” (5-6).2 Where older Christian traditions were threatened by the autonomy of the self, American revivalism has celebrated human-centered religion. God and his Word do

not confront us as an external message of judgment and grace, but as a warm and friendly exhortation to selfimprovement through a relationship with Jesus. Witten’s findings confirm studies demonstrating that Americans— only one in ten of whom say that they’ve ever doubted God’s existence—view God as “friend” rather than “king,” and that “only a small minority say they have ever been afraid of him.” Of course, this is not to deny the importance of Christ’s friendship with sinners (which was part of the Pharisees’ suspicion of Jesus). But that’s just it: he’s the friend of sinners, not of those who think they’re basically good people who could be a little better. Apart from the sense that we are in ourselves enemies of God, the fact that he befriended us “even while we were enemies” (Rom. 5:8) has little value.

Witten also supports James D. Hunter’s documentation of “the tendency of the popular evangelical literature he studied to stress God’s therapeutic role, to downplay notions of sin,” and to give central prominence to conversion as a relatively easy process of self-transformation (15).

Transforming biblical concepts of sin and redemption into pragmatic concepts of steps, tools, principles, and formulas is part of the secularization of religion.

Secularization involves the privatization of faith, which is evident in the emphasis of religious speech on “practical rationality”—namely, “working out the routine affairs of everyday life in the most expedient manner.”

Christian self-help books…arose in the 1940s and 1950s with the publication of Norman Vincent Peale’s The Power of Positive Thinking and Joshua Loth Liebman’s Peace of Mind. The focus on inner states also invites speech oriented largely to the present—to ‘natural’ life, life on earth. Concern with the pragmatic business of life stands to diminish attention to affairs of the ‘hereafter.’ Coupled with cultural forces that deemphasize notions of divine punishment for wrongdoing, the ‘now’ orientation reduces the strength of talk about sin and its consequences….An extreme formulation is the case of ‘Sheilaism,’ a private religion invented by one of the interview subjects cited in Habits of the Heart: The tenets of Sheila’s faith consist of the messages of ‘her own little voice.’ (20-21) Privatization entails “the transfer of truth-claims from the objective world to the subjectivity of the individual” (131). In other words, where previous generations—and our contemporaries in many other parts of the world today—are witnesses to Christ, even at the cost of their own lives, privatized and subjective religion offers Christ as a helpful resource. Our witness is to ourselves and our own changed lives. We feel awkward speaking of Jesus Christ as “the way, the truth, and the life,” apart from whom there is no salvation. We would rather commend Christ as someone we have found personally helpful and meaningful as we encounter challenges in life.

Privatization leads to pluralization, which means not

only that different religions and denominations are tolerated by the state, but that people come to believe that religion itself is a matter of personal commitments that one finds helpful, not of objective claims that can be argued in public. Once religion is reduced to a private matter, its beliefs are no longer objective claims about the real world, but subjective feelings about inner experience. The questions are no longer life-and-death, heaven-and-hell, but well-being here and now. This is exactly the shift that was accomplished explicitly by Protestant liberalism and now implicitly by contemporary evangelicalism (22). The motive for conversion must be practical or therapeutic usefulness in this life; thus, there is little to distinguish one denomination or religion from another.

Besides privatization and pluralization, a third process of modernity is rationalization. Once religious truth-claims have been reduced to personal usefulness, the only procedure left is to “calculate the efficiency or effectiveness of alternative means to a given end” (23). Witten’s point can be easily recognized in the pragmatic criterion for truth-claims advanced by William James—namely, their “cash-value in experiential terms.” Since we do not know yet which religion works best for the greatest number of individuals in the long run, James said, we have to postpone any final answer. For example, no longer is it a question of whether Jesus rose bodily on the third day in real history, but whether my belief that this happened gives me a sense of purpose and direction for a successful life. It does not require a lot of imagination to see how this kind of pragmatic rationalization easily adapts to a consumerist idiom; and when one is in the business of “transformation of the self,” the product has to be cast in therapeutic terms.

Evangelicalism has thrived in this therapeutic culture by converting sin into dysfunction or negative behaviors that keep us from realizing our full potential and by converting redemption into recovery by following certain steps. “Families that pray together stay together,” as one billboard campaign in the Bible belt advertised. There is a therapeutic cash-value to religious practices, regardless of whether there is an objective God to whom or Mediator through whom or Spirit by whom we bring our petitions.

Of course, no one has to deny any article of the Christian creed in order to shift the focus from the objective truth of Christ to the subjective, pragmatic, and therapeutic categories of “how-to” religion. Christ may still be called the Savior, but we really save ourselves by following certain steps. This “self-help” approach to conversion (evidenced by the title of one of Billy Graham’s best-sellers, How to Be Born Again) spills over into the countless programs for moral and spiritual improvement that in many ways parallel the diet, exercise, and financemanagement programs on the market. By following the most effective procedures, we can attain the desired “product.” There are even personal testimonies to provide a “before” and “after” snapshot.

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has a pragmatic solution. In the age of therapy, this means that the “irrational” island of subjectivity that the Enlightenment awarded to religion (analogous to the “Indian reservations” in the United States) is now itself defined by the secular aims of personal well-being.

Christian discipleship is therefore conceived in terms similar to industry: a factory in which materials are shaped and packaged on the basis of a prototype, each following a standardized method of production. We even speak in evangelical circles about “reproducing disciples,” with Christ as the prototype. The right methods will yield the anticipated results. The influence of such processes of modernization is apparent in the way evangelicals often talk about “steps,” “principles,” “methods,” and “techniques” that, if followed, lead inevitably to the intended results.

Witten substantiates these observations, adding, “Taken to the extreme, this talk constitutes a ‘do-it-yourself’ guide for personal satisfaction, with a few mentions of God or faith or prayer tossed in to mark itself as ‘religious’” (24).

As a result of these processes, says Witten, “a religion’s teachings no longer give meaning to their adherents’ life in the world; their life in the world determines both the meanings and meaningfulness of their creed” (30).

As we can see, the process of secularization is far more pervasive than theological differences between conservatives and liberals. It is not “secular humanists” but we ourselves who are secularizing the faith by transforming its odd message into something less jarring to the American psyche. This may mean, however, that precisely the most numerically successful versions of religion will be the least tethered to the biblical drama of redemption centering on Christ.

Witten’s studies revealed that there was little difference between mainline Presbyterian and Southern Baptist sermons that she sampled. “The Calvinist roots of religious practice in Colonial America” were gradually eaten away by “popular ideologies of voluntarism, democratism, and pragmatism,” making the view that human beings cannot “contribute to their own salvation” seem less plausible (33).

While confessional Reformed and Presbyterian pastors and theologians in the mid-1800s challenged the emphasis on the self rather than God and human willing over God’s gracious initiative, revivalism finally won the field. As a result, “the major categories of evangelical talk about God tend to emphasize one’s personal experience of an immanent deity.” Witten adds, “When God is seen in transcendent terms at all, his fearsome qualities are either deemphasized or banished from the discourse and replaced by portraits of a clear-thinking, well-organized ‘super-administrator,’ one of whose primary functions is to plan efficiently the affairs of the universe” (34).

This thinking, no doubt, contributes to the phenomenon that Smith characterizes as “moralistic, therapeutic deism.” God is basically the ideal Secretary of Homeland Security, “Homeland” defined as my own personal happiness, or national health—whether defined by the political left or right. Of course, when “the affairs 5 0 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

of the universe” center on me and my happiness, this generic deism becomes therapeutic, especially focusing on “‘God as daddy’ and ‘God as sufferer’” (35).

In a therapeutic paradigm, not only the parishioner but even God is put on the couch, as we empathetically interpret his feelings. God is never angry or judgmental toward people; in fact, he is more anguished than we are since he knows how much our actions can harm us. He is simply waiting for us to come to our senses, like the father in the parable of the prodigal son (40-41). We might even be inclined to feel sorry for this deity. Witten points out how frequently in these sermons the preacher seems to know God’s inner states and feelings and, again, even as a non-Christian, recognizes that this is at far remove from the Apostle Peter’s faith in the invisible God “who sees all things; uncontained, who contains all things; without needs, of whom all are in need and because of whom they exist; incomprehensible, eternal, imperishable; unmade, who made all by the word of his power” (44).

By contrast, these sermon samples treated God exclusively as the “extravagant lover” (44-47). In fact, love overwhelms law; God sets aside any question of merit or duty or achievement and simply embraces the prodigal (45). God never really surprises us, because his behavior is always predictable: he would never do anything to offend us (135). Consequently, there is no suggestion that we need a mediator at all, according to these sermons.

God’s love need not be correlated with his holiness, righteousness, and justice. Everything is okay—without any mention of Christ’s self-sacrifice as the only way of reconciliation (48). Since, as a rule, God’s love apparently overwhelms his justice and holiness, the “good news” offered here eliminates any need for the actual story recorded in the Gospels. If God’s love so easily ignores his justice, holiness, and righteousness, then Christ’s death on the cross seems like a cruel waste.

Witten writes, “The relatively weak notion of God’s fearsome capabilities regarding judgment is underscored by an almost complete lack of discursive construction of anxiety around one’s future state.” It is “negative feelings,” not an objectively negative danger, that these sermons stress as solved by the gospel (50). “The transcendent, majestic, awesome God of Luther and Calvin—whose image informed early Protestant visions of the relationship between human beings and the divine—has undergone a softening of demeanor throughout the American experience of Protestantism, with only minor interruptions” (53).

Adopting a human-centered approach that assimilates God to one’s own experience and happiness, the world is no longer God’s creation; it too, like God, exists for our own personal well-being. Everything that exists is there for us to consume for our happiness. So, for example, drugs and sexual promiscuity are not wrong because they offend God, according to most of these sermons, but because they cannot compare with the joy and happiness of living God’s way. They’re not wrong as much as unfulfilling: they wear off (60-61).

All the emphasis is on “celebration” and “happiness,” as in one sermon’s assertion, “It feels good to be a Christian” (63). When you are trying to sell a product like therapeutic transformation, there can be no ambiguity, no sense of anxiety, tension, or struggle.

In these sermons, another recurring emphasis is that human beings are victims, and being “lost” no longer means damned, but lacking direction in life (73-75). In the Southern Baptist sermons, the world is the “pigpen” in which the prodigal wasted his inheritance, with many sermons going into greater detail than Jesus on “cocktail parties, watching the vileness of Sodom in their living rooms, trying to escape reality with cocaine.” Meanwhile, the church is the family (76).

The Southern Baptist sermons were far more likely to focus on the sins of the prodigal, centering on his rebellion against the home and its values, often going into great detail in order to make the wayward son as relevant to contemporary adolescents as possible (82-83). The most common summary of his fault in these sermons was that he rejected his own “dignity and self-respect” (84). “For Presbyterian speakers, on the other hand, it is the dutiful, religiously obedient, yet joyless older brother who is more likely to serve as the emblem of sin” (85).

When the pastors sampled in these sermons do talk about sin, Witten relates, they depersonalize and generalize it, and typically deflect it to outsiders (87-91).

Without condoning their sin, says one Southern Baptist pastor, “We should go out to the poor, the blacks, the Hispanics, the beer drinkers, and the divorced” (92). The deflection of sin to “outsiders” could hardly be more obvious (95). The main Presbyterian strategy, however, was to resist offering evaluations, but to empathize with both brothers (98). None of the sermons talk about sin in theological terms, “exemplified in the omission of the foundational doctrine of original sin”; it is generalized, depersonalized, deflected to outsiders, or dismissed (101).

Finally, Witten takes up what seemed to be the main emphasis in these sermons: “the transformed self.”

While earlier preaching in America had an important place for transformation, she notes, it was “only through God’s grace”: the death of the “old man” and life of the “new man” in Christ. “This Augustinian vocabulary prevailed in Calvinist speech throughout the early years of American Protestantism,” but quickly succumbed to “modification that continues to the present day.” Where the earlier notions identified self-love as the root of original sin, revivalists appealed to it as the motivation for conversion (104).

Witten points out that Jonathan Edwards’ famous sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” despite its title and popular caricatures, affirmed total depravity along with an equally strong emphasis on God’s grace (79). This emphasis was “short-lived” however.

By the time of the Second Great Awakening, early in the nineteenth century, evangelists such as Charles

Finney were preaching doctrines that emphasized a person’s free will to seek salvation and the assurance of that salvation immediately upon repentance….The conversion event took on heightened importance, but it became transmuted in some quarters into a process partially under human control.

With rising confidence in human ability more generally and “an emphasis on Arminian doctrines of free will,” sin became transformed “into notions of sin as mistakes in behavior, amenable to correction by appropriate moral education” (80). Like all behaviors, sin could be managed according to predictable principles.

Where the older views regarded the attempt to autonomously construct our own identities as part of the futility of being, in Augustine’s words, “curved in on ourselves,” Witten found that many of the sermons she evaluated assume the “self-crafted self” of secular culture (81). God helps in this endeavor, but the sense of the self as created for God’s purposes—fallen in sin and redeemed and refashioned by God—is at least muted by the original (autonomous and therapeutic) assumption (83).

Increasingly, Americans came to see the church with its appointed “means of grace” as secondary to “Bible classes, prayer meetings, and benevolent groups”—in other words, “parachurch organizations.” Therefore, faith became increasingly privatized, with opportunities to express one’s feelings, the language of faith “frequently laced with sentimentality” (104-105).

Political liberalism’s optimism about the self and human progress merged with Arminian revivalism to radically alter the traditional Christian understanding, Witten observes. Liberals and revivalists both deemphasized God’s transcendence and tended to see God’s Word as something that welled up within a person rather than as something that came to a person from outside.

The key to salvation thus lies within the self; the charge to the individual person is to listen and be receptive to this inner voice. Also, since sin was regarded largely as error or ignorance (consonant with liberal beliefs in the essential goodness of humankind), the view prevailed that behavioral change can come about through education about ethical and moral concerns [emphasis added]. (105) This opened the door to a psychologized understanding of faith in God “as a kind of therapy that would help men and women deal with the demands of the real world” (105). Conservatives and liberals may argue over specific questions related to integrating theology and psychology, but both assume significantly psychologized interpretations of their creed. Conversion is basically “selffulfillment.” The central narrative of the Baptist sermons was “transformation through conversion,” but both spoke in therapeutic terms (106). Conversion is up to us, but it’s relatively easy to attain. It only requires “emotional selfM A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 51

awareness, openness, and receptivity” of which, of course, all people are entirely capable. Conversion will bring about “bonding with God,” meaningful relationships, and triumph over one’s daily problems (107).

The emphasis on transformation rests on important theological shifts. First, an emphasis on free will: a recurring theme is that nothing is more essential to the self than free will (108). As one Southern Baptist preacher said, “In great love, God has set us free to become and to be, to take charge and be responsible for our own destinies” (109). A second emphasis of this shift is “innate human goodness.” One Presbyterian puts it this way: “When Jesus says that [the prodigal son] came to himself, He pays us the highest of compliments, for He suggests that there is something within the human being which innately wants goodness and love, which wants to be at home and in harmony with the will of God” (110-111). A Southern Baptist includes the following quote: When you get what you want in your struggle for wealth and the world makes you king for a day, Then go the mirror and look at yourself and see what that guy (or gal) has to say.

For it isn’t your father or mother or wife who judgment upon you must pass, The fellow whose verdict counts most in your life is the guy staring back from the glass. (111) Notice how “the fellow whose verdict counts most” is one’s own rather than God’s.

A further element in this emphasis on transformation is “the psychology of openness,” “trust and self-disclosure,” and “authenticity” (111-115). The focus is almost exclusively human-centered rather than God-centered, and the view of human beings is basically Pelagian or at least semi-Pelagian. “Thus far, the speech of these sermons has identified a fundamental human nature at the core of every person: innately good, open to self-understanding, and in need of release from the artifice hiding its true identity.” Although this is identified as the Christian doctrine of conversion, Witten’s verdict is difficult to challenge: there is nothing here that couldn’t be found in secular alternatives (117). The consistent message running throughout these sermons is “reach out to God” and become “vulnerable” (119). But there is nothing here that would give a reason as to why “receiving God into the heart” is “the only possible recourse to realizing true selfhood” (120).

For this transforming process of conversion, there are always “effective procedures” that become routinized and standardized. In the Southern Baptist sermons especially, Witten pointed out that the speech itself “collapses into a technical appendix, into which preachers insert talk about the procedures of getting saved” (125). One pastor formalizes them from the parable: recognition, realization, responsibility, and restoration. Restoration is basically a human achievement of will and action. In fact, by the 5 2 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

time they have stated the “effective procedures,” which necessitate “human effort on a variety of fronts,” conversion finally seems “not as easy as advertised” (126).

Among the typical concluding remarks are the following: “Open yourself to the salvation that God wants to work in your life” (127).

So instead of introducing people to a majestic God who nevertheless condescended in mercy to save those who cannot save themselves, these sermons—even with the parable of the prodigal son as their text—proclaimed a message that can be summarized as “moralistic, therapeutic deism.” As a product, the “God-experience” can be sold and purchased with confidence that the customer is still king. Therefore, statements that would have appalled previous generations of mainline Protestants, such as the following from George Barna, are assumed as a matter of course even among evangelicals today: “The chief principle of Christian communication is that the audience, not the message, is sovereign.”3

WORKS CITED: 1 All quotes, unless otherwise noted, from Marsha Witten, All Is Forgiven: The Secular Message in American Protestantism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993).

2 For Weber’s own argument, see his essay, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, eds. H. Gerth and C. W. Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), pp. 129-160. The literature on this question is vast, but two books are especially critical for getting a beat on contemporary sociological interpretations of Weber’s theory: Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1967), and Thomas Luckmann, The Invisible Religion (London: Collier-Macmillan, 1967).

3 George Barna, Marketing the Church: What They Never Taught You About Church Growth (Colorado Springs: NavPress, 1988).

INTERVIEW for

d ialogue

in

and

out

of

ou r

c ircles

An Interview with Richard Bauckham

The Four Gospels as Authentic Testimony We have the great privilege of interviewing Richard Bauckham to talk about his book, Jesus and the Eyewitnesses: The Gospels as Eyewitness Testimony (Eerdmans, 2006). First of all, can we really get to first-century events through the documents that we have?

In my book I argue that the Gospels are very close to the way the eyewitnesses of the history of Jesus told their stories and reported his sayings. One of the Gospels, John, is actually written by an eyewitness and the others are close to the eyewitness testimony. The argument of the book is that we get about as close to Jesus as we can, that we can trust the Gospels. It’s an argument against the feeling around at the moment that the Gospels are not reliable. A lot of people have the idea that in order to find the historical Jesus, we have to dig behind the Gospels and rely on historians. The Gospels, however, are the best access we have to Jesus. The testimony in them comes firsthand from people who participated in the events and those deeply affected by the events. They do not give us mere facts; they give us interpretation, the significance of what they’ve experienced. Historians in the ancient world valued eyewitness testimony; they thought one could only write history within living memory of the events—either one had been an eyewitness or else interviewed eyewitnesses of the events. At least three of the Gospels were written around the time that the eyewitnesses must have been dying off.

Hence Luke’s sense of urgency?

That’s right. The argument of my book is that the eyewitnesses not only told their own stories at the beginning and created the oral tradition that then continued, but that the eyewitnesses were there right through that period, as long as they lived. I think they would have been regarded as the sources and, in a way, the guarantors of the tradition, those who were faithfully preserving the tradition. In terms of current New Testament scholarship, my book is putting the eyewitnesses back into the picture.

What makes these eyewitness reports distinct from other eyewitness reports of supposedly miraculous events in other religions and the mythological proportions that the Greek and Roman wars take on? What makes these eyewitness reports have a ring of truth about them?

A number of things. It is important that these are reports within living memory. The ancients themselves distinguished between the sort of history that was going way back into history, which they never thought was reliable—unless, of course, you’re repeating what an eyewitness had written at that time; but generally speaking it’s contemporary history that counts. Readers of the Gospels would have expected that. They would have been disappointed if it turned out that the Gospels were not written by eyewitnesses or had not transmitted eyewitness testimony. In the ancient world, it was a normal part of reading and writing literature. If you compare the Gospels with other writings of history and biography of the time, you’ll find that so many of the characters were common people or even people at the bottom of the social heap. Most ancient biography and history were about the top people, the elite, the top two percent— rulers, aristocrats, the wealthy. Common people hardly make an appearance in other Greek and Roman biographies and histories. In the Gospels, we’re close to witnesses who were in the crowd; they were with Jesus.

They weren’t someone sitting in the governor’s office who heard about Jesus; they’re the sort of people Jesus mixed with, which makes a difference.

Who wouldn’t have had anything to gain politically or economically by their testimony.

Exactly. The use of names in the Gospels is interesting because there are names you wouldn’t expect. You’d expect famous people like Pontius Pilate and the major disciples of Jesus (Peter, Mary Magdalene); but if you look at those who were healed and who encountered Jesus in some way or another, there are dozens and dozens of them in the Gospels. Remember Mark’s story (Mark 10:46-52) of the blind beggar Bartimaeus where Jesus restores his sight? Why is Bartimaeus named and a whole lot of other people who are healed by Jesus are not? I think it must be because Bartimaeus was well known in the early Christian community and that he went around telling his own story. I find this illuminating. Bartimaeus probably had only a few stories about Jesus to tell; but as this story was incredibly important to him, he’d tell it to everyone he met.

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It is, and I think it’s the latest of the four because there’s good reason to think that the author outlived most of the other disciples. That doesn’t, of course, mean that he wrote the Gospel all at the end of his life when he was an old man. I do put it late in the first century, but it’s the one Gospel that I think was actually written by an eyewitness. The Gospel of John actually claims that. It says: “This is the disciple.” That’s the disciple who appeared anonymously in the Gospel and was called the disciple that Jesus loved. It says, “This disciple testifies to these things and has written them” (John 21:24). There have been attempts to ignore the obvious meaning of that sentence, but it doesn’t work linguistically; it can’t mean anything other than that this disciple was the author of the Gospel. So, either that’s a pretense or we have here firsthand eyewitness testimony. The reason many scholars are reluctant to go with that is the considerable differences between the Fourth Gospel and the other three Gospels; and anything one says about the Fourth Gospel in terms of how it originated has to account for the differences. Why is John so different?

One of the keys is that the beloved disciple moved in a circle of disciples different from the circles of the other three Gospels. The people who appear by name in the Fourth Gospel are disciples of Jesus; some of them are much more prominent in the Fourth Gospel (Philip and Thomas, Martha and Mary), and some of them appear only in the Fourth Gospel (Nathaniel, Nicodemus, Lazarus). The indications here are that we’re in touch with someone, probably a Jerusalem resident; he knows the disciples of Jesus in and around Jerusalem. It’s a different circle and so we have different stories. The other difference is it’s a much more reflective and interpretative Gospel. Here we have an author who over the course of his life has reflected long and hard on the meaning of the events he experienced. It’s entirely credible that an eyewitness should do that. I think John thought that because he was close to Jesus, he was in a good position not only to recount the stories, but also to reflect on the meaning of the stories.

What I’m trying to argue in the book is that there is good reason to suppose that these Gospel texts conform very closely to Jesus and, that being so, I think there’s good reason for trust.

Do we have external corroborating evidence that lends credibility to these eyewitness reports?

While we don’t have evidence of the events that they’re recording, we do know a great deal about early first-century Jewish Palestine. The gospels are full of details about places, people, religious groups, and controversies. One way of verifying that the Gospels are credible is from this geographical-historical context, which is actually one of the most important historical methods of confirming testimony. The term “testimony” implies that we can’t actually verify independently everything the witness says.

The whole point of a witness is that they tell you something you don’t know yourself; but what you can do is assess witnesses as either trustworthy or untrustworthy.

This was the case in the ancient world and it’s the case still today that if someone tells us something and they’re not a reliable source, we doubt them. It’s what happens in a court of law: you assess which witness is trustworthy and then you believe what he or she says. Testimony asks to be trusted.

The idea is a nonstarter that we have to go through every little piece of tradition in the Gospels and verify each one—which a lot of Gospel scholarship has been trying to do for the last century. We don’t have the resources to verify each saying of Jesus one by one and decide whether they’re authentic or not. The way to go about it is through the ordinary historical method of looking for ways in which we can verify the trustworthiness of the source rather than everything the source says. This truth to the context—correspondence to the historical context at the time in which the stories are set—is a key method that Gospel scholars have neglected because they’ve been going with other incredibly difficult tasks, like a Jesus seminar when they vote on each saying of Jesus, each story about Jesus, and come out with red, gray, or black. It’s not the right way to go about it. What I’m trying to argue in the book is that there is good reason to suppose that these Gospel texts conform very closely to Jesus and, that being so, I think there’s good reason for trust—unless there’s evidence to make us think they’re untrustworthy. The burden of proof lies on those who decide these are not trustworthy witnesses.

You mention the author of John’s Gospel as an eyewitness. That goes against a lot of New Testament scholarship, doesn’t it? Isn’t John supposed to be the latest Gospel?

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How much of the criticism of your argument is that there is so much theological interpretation that it represents Jesus Christ as God incarnate? Is there a bias in New Testament scholarship against that which claims Jesus is God as being of earliest significance?

I think there is. Many New Testament scholars work with a picture whereby the early Christians’ view of Jesus started as an ordinary human being—not an ordinary human being because he’s the Messiah, but a human being—and that there was a development during the period of the New Testament that culminates in John’s Gospel, which is the highest Christology we have in the Gospels. It must be the result of a development that started much lower

down in terms of its view of Jesus. That’s completely wrong. I think the early Christians started with an extremely high view of Jesus, the meaning of which was then worked out and developed. The key is that these are the reflections on the historical Jesus—things that Jesus said and did, the meaning of which has been drawn out in John’s Gospel more than in the others; although the other Gospels also interpret Jesus and also have a high Christology. John, by writing the sort of Gospel that he has, left himself space to reflect and bring out the meaning of Jesus’ words and deeds at some length.

What do we do with those who claim that Jesus never existed at all, that the New Testament documents have been fabricated out of whole cloth?

It’s worth saying that there is a very, very small minority of people who say that. Most historians, who may not be Christians at all and may not have Christian faith in Jesus, would accept as one of the basic facts of ancient history that Jesus existed. It’s not as though all our evidence for Jesus comes from Christian sources. We have Greek and Roman sources that refer to Jesus; the historians Tacitus (A.D. 56-117) and Suetonius (A.D. 69/75– c.

130) refer briefly to Jesus, and we also have Jewish traditions that may be independent of the Gospels that say a few things about Jesus. It’s probably more impressive simply to look at the rapid growth of the Christian movement, on what everybody agrees was going on in the second century. It seems unlikely that a purely legendary figure could have had that effect; or, indeed, if they were setting out to invent the Gospels out of nothing, why do we come up with these Gospels? Why do we come up against a Jesus who fits so well into the time and place in which the Gospels put him? The evidence for that is mounting all the time, because we know more and more about Judaism and other features of early first-century society in Jewish Palestine. I think it’s unlikely that someone making it up would get it right in that respect.

You’ve written a great deal about eyewitnesses and the various names you find in the New Testament.

Could the geographical places Jesus went—such as Caesarea Philippi and Bethsaida (which changed to Julius)—help to accurately date the time?

Yes, we can say that. John’s Gospel, interestingly enough, has the most precise topographical references. Some of them have been debated and for some of them we don’t have the evidence, but it’s not too unlikely that someone who knew the time and place would know about some places that are lost to us. There is the geographical coherence with what we know of Palestine at that time.

Why are there four Gospels presented in the New Testament? Weren’t there additional gospels that were subverted? The hypothesis has gone out there that the church suppressed many other gospels and left only the four that presented Jesus as divine.

What’s wrong with that thesis?

Part of it depends on too hierarchical a view of the process, as though there were councils of bishops who were doing this. I think the canon of the four Gospels must have been happening as a grassroots process in the early church. If you think about what went on in early Christian worship—they were reading Christian writings alongside Old Testament Scripture—they would have had to decide which gospels were suitable for this use. By the end of the second century, there were a lot of gospels around and the mainstream church had to make decisions. The four Gospels had an established authority as the gospels that could be trusted to report the teaching of Jesus and the apostles. At that stage, the church tested these other gospels against the criterion of the four Gospels and they came out very differently. So the church had to make some such decisions faced with a huge variety of gospel literature. They couldn’t all be true.

The Gnostic gospels are different sorts of literature— huge religious differences, but huge historical differences as well. Unlike the four Gospels, the Gnostic gospels are not interested in historical details; their Jesus is a purely mythic figure who teaches revelation from the other world. This means that their Jesus is a different kind of figure, which is one of the key elements in the church’s sifting through these works and coming up with Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as the four authentic ones.

What are some of the other ways that the Gnostic gospels are different from the traditional four Gospels?

The New Testament Gospels are biographical—they tell the story of Jesus. The Gnostic gospels don’t do this at all.

The typical form of a Gnostic gospel is set after Jesus’ resurrection; Jesus appears to a group of the disciples and imparts esoteric teaching to them. It’s teaching additional to the teaching Jesus had given the disciples before the crucifixion, which the Gnostics say was secretly imparted to a small group or sometimes to one favored disciple after the resurrection—mythical stuff dealing with heavenly beings, emanations of one world from another; all working around the basic Gnostic myth that this world is a terrible place, material, evil. The world, therefore, must have been created by an evil and bungling creator God who made a mess of it and, in any case, was ill-intentioned; and the true God, the high God, is not that creator of the world, but is beyond that. Jesus’ mission is from that high God to enlighten the Gnostics as to who they really are and the fact that they belong in that other world. “Gnostic” is related to the Greek word gnosis meaning knowledge; it’s special knowledge that Jesus gives by no means to everybody, but to the select few that belong in the other world.

And so these gospels don’t mention fulfilled prophecy from the Jewish Old Testament, or they don’t mention the name of God? M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 55

The Gnostics regard the God of the Old Testament, the God of Israel, as this evil sub-god, the creator of the world, not the true God. They have no time for connection with the story of Israel, unlike our four Gospels, which all make close connections with the Old Testament story of Israel and see themselves as reporting the culmination of the history of Israel in Jesus; Jesus is the one who fulfills all the prophecies, all the hopes of Israel in the Old Testament. The Gnostics cut all those connections. Their Jesus is a radically different figure who comes out of nowhere with a message that has had no preparation for it, so they would never cite Old Testament Scripture as fulfilled by Jesus—all that belongs to this evil material world, from which the Gnostic desire is to simply escape.

Do you think Christians in our day have failed in their task to adequately explain the historical reliability of the New Testament, and that they portray belief as just a matter of the will—here’s inerrancy, you should just believe this—rather than giving people evidences or arguments for that?

Yes, I don’t think that approach is true for the Gospels themselves, particularly if you look at Luke’s preface to his Gospel, which is written the way ancient historians wrote prefaces to their historical works (it uses the same kind of terminology and claims about deriving from eyewitness testimony). Luke thinks that Theophilus, the patron for whom he writes the Gospel, would have expected it to go on to many other readers. He expects them to value what he’s saying because of its historical credibility, because it’s based in eyewitness testimony, because it fits with whatever they know about history.

The first readers would have read them with expectations of a contemporary biography written within living memory of the subject. They would have expected this to be based on good sources. Early Christians would not have accepted these as documents dropped from heaven. They would have expected them to be rooted in history, written and compiled with care by people sensitive to whether the traditions were reliable or not. We have the opportunity to explain that to people, partly because we actually do know so much more about Jewish Palestine of the period in which the Gospels are set; the Dead Sea scrolls are an example people know; there’s lots of archaeology and all kinds of evidence. We can describe the context of Jesus accurately now and we can see whether the Gospels fit that context. One thing we can do well, if we have access to the sources, is to root the Gospels in history.

Do you think one of the reasons for this lack of attention in our day is because modern Christians are more into subjective experience of religion rather than the objective and historical rootedness of the Christian faith?

There is a postmodern climate that is terribly relativist and for which what matters is the attitude of, “If that 5 6 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

works for you, fine; something else works for me,” and a disregard, therefore, for truth. On the other hand, when these Gnostic gospels receive publicity, people think, “Maybe the gospel of Judas is the one that’s about the real Jesus.” At that point, people actually want some solid historical ground. Modern culture is quite contradictory on this. There’s the strong experiential pull toward what works for me, but there’s also this basic desire to know the historical facts. Christians have the opportunity to bring those two things together. It’s not that the Gospels are non-experiential and it’s certainly not that it makes no difference to us. The whole point of it is that we experience salvation and come to know Jesus, the God of Jesus, through the Gospels. It’s an experience rooted in what God has objectively done in history. These two views have flown apart in the postmodern climate and neither of them makes much sense on their own. It’s when you bring them together that you have a credible way of seeing the world and experiencing whatever there is to find of authentic religious experience.

Do you see a conservative drift in New Testament scholarship?

That’s a difficult question. There is certainly a polarization in New Testament scholarship, but it’s a much more American phenomenon. Scholarship—evangelical, conservative, more liberal, whatever terms you use—is not so polarized in Britain, where people recognize the scholarly credentials of those with whom they disagree and yet still participate in conversation. My impression of the New Testament scholarly world in America is that people read what is written by those with whom they’re going to agree, and that they are often quite contemptuous of others. I don’t think that’s a climate in which to do good scholarship.

REQUIRED READING FOR 21ST CENTURY CHRISTIANS modern

reformation

m u st-r e ad s

Readings on The New Atheism The Defense of the Faith

Revelation and Reason

by Cornelius Van Til P & R Publishing, 1967 Presuppositionalism has become the foundation upon which many Reformed Christians have built new approaches in apologetics and evangelism.

It also serves to explain basic aspects of secular epistomology, which is perhaps even more important in light of the New Atheism than ever before. This book is rightfully considered a classic work of apologetics.

edited by K. Scott Oliphint and Lane G. Tipton P&R Publishing, 2007 This volume builds on Van Til’s legacy through chapters composed by graduates and teachers at the Westminster family of seminaries. Though technical, at times, it reflects the broad ways that presuppositional apologetics engages philosophy, exegesis, and systematic theology.

Defending Your Faith

Faith Founded on Fact

by R. C. Sproul Crossway Books, 2003 What are the common ideologies that the secular mind has held through the ages?

Sproul introduces readers to the four logical principles that enable Christians to intelligently engage their unbelieving friends and neighbors with the faith. This book is an excellent introductory text for those who will engage deeper questions of faith and reason.

by John Warwick Montgomery Thomas Nelson, 1978 As a defender of evidentialism, Montgomery is a force to be reckoned with. He goes beyond a merely Lutheran approach to apologetics and shows how to use evidence in Christian evangelism and apologetics. Although some of the chapters are more technical in nature, Montgomery’s work is essential to a fully rounded approach to apologetics.

SEE ALSO: Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis (Harcourt Books) Finding God at Harvard: Spiritual Journeys of Thinking Christians edited by Kelly Monroe Kullberg (IVP Books)

Charts of Apologetics and Christian Evidences

by H. Wayne House and Joseph M. Holden (Zondervan)

The Reason for God: Belief in an Age of Skepticism by Timothy Keller (Dutton)

The Case for Christ: A Journalist’s Personal Investigation of the Evidence for Jesus by Lee Strobel (Zondervan)

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REVIEWS wh at ’s

b e i n g

r ead

A City Undone

T

hirty-five years since the publication of Sydney Ahlstrom’s award-win-

simply Americans as individuals, is duty bound to do the right ning (and shelf-bending) A Religious History of the American People, which thing became a coin of common intellectual currency. Americans persuasively suggested that Puritanism is the leitmotif of America’s have consistently seen themselves as “an almost chosen peoreligious history, George ple” (Abraham Lincoln), anticipating a “rendezvous with McKenna has upped destiny” (Franklin Roosevelt), being “a nation with a misthe ante. In fewer sion” (George W. Bush). pages, but with no less The question is, What accounts for this unique patripersuasive force, he otic spirit, with its twin notions of exceptionalism and builds the case for readobligation? Its origins, McKenna argues, can be located ing not only the counin the origins of the nation itself. The providential and try’s religious history, covenantal overtones evident in the above presidential but also its social and proclamations are none other than those of Puritan New political history as, until England as expressed, for example, in representative relatively recently, variseventeenth-century works such as Edward Johnson’s ations on a Puritan Wonder-Working Providence of Sion’s Savior in New England theme. and Samuel Danforth’s A Brief Recognition of New If such a thesis England’s Errand into the Wilderness. The rhetoric is none appears implausible on other than that found in the “Ur-text of American literits face, it may seem ature,” John Winthrop’s 1630 “City Upon a Hill” sermon slightly less so when (A Model of Christian Charity). recalling Chesterton’s Despite frequent and often superficial allusions to oft-quoted description Winthrop’s famous phrase, McKenna reminds his reader of America as a “nation that this was no confident boast that New England would The Puritan Origins of with the soul of a inevitably be a light unto the world; it was in fact a sober American Patriotism church.”

It is this warning that all eyes would be upon the new nation. The

by George McKenna American soul—that whole of Winthrop’s proclamation is knit through with which gives the nation Yale University Press, 2007 “if…then” covenantal constructions: if we live justly, 431 pages (hardcover), $35.00 its unique identity and humbly, charitably…then the Lord will “command a which animates its blessing upon us”; if we forsake our obligations…then thoughts, words, and deeds—that McKenna identifies “we shall be made a story and a by-word through the with the patriotism of his title. He is thus quick to note world, we shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil that, while his thesis hangs on various social and political of the ways of God.” hooks, his interest is much less in social history than the McKenna summarizes these currents of thought: “The history of an idea—what he calls a “myth” (though not in distinctive legacy of New England Puritan rhetoric, then, is the pejorative sense), an idea that gives shape and meanthis strange two-sidedness: on the one hand, a confident ing to communal experience. sense of ‘chosenness’; on the other hand, remorse, repenHe is also quick to note, as many before him have tance, and the dread that God might at any time ‘cast us observed, that American patriotism is by no means synoff in displeasure, and scatter us in this Wilderness.’” That onymous with “blood and earth” nationalism or “my which makes for such compelling reading, however, is that country right or wrong” jingoism. To the contrary, this thesis does not flower into a polemic on America’s staMcKenna argues, America’s brand of patriotism has from tus as a “Christian nation.” Instead, McKenna demonthe start invoked and engendered an actual obligation to strates that this providential and covenantal paradigm has be right. Though possibly—indeed inevitably—the definibeen consistently shared by Christians and (unmoored tion of “right” could in any given circumstance be hotly from its explicitly theological origins and implications) contested, the sense that the nation as a nation, and not non-Christians alike.

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Of course, it motivated such culture-shaping events as the Great Awakening, frontier revivalism, and ambiguously Christian movements from abolition and temperance to civil rights and the social gospel; but no less did it animate social and political episodes as disparate as New Deal progressivism, McCarthyite anti-Communism, and Weather Underground anarchism. Each illustrates the American compulsion to purify a nation variously beset by moral failings or flirting with perceived apostasies.

McKenna does not forfeit his credibility by attempting to read all national events as variations on a Puritan theme; but he does offer enough evidence and analysis to substantiate his thesis that American patriotism—while it lasted—was the child of decidedly Puritan parents. The qualifier in the preceding sentence brings us into the present, and to McKenna’s coda: the myth of America’s “errand in the Wilderness,” he suggests, was brought home from Vietnam in a casket.

While previous generations of rebels, reformers, and malcontents had justified their protests with Puritaninspired jeremiads, the new Jeremiahs no longer admonished their nation for failing to be faithful in its errand; they rebuked her for being so naïve as to believe she had an errand. (The popularity of Howard Zinn’s indescribably awful A People’s History of the United States arguably persists because that work is, if anything, a deconstructive narrative not of the nation’s “election” but of its “reprobation.”)

Even in the aftermath of 9/11, McKenna is doubtful that we’ll again see anything like America’s earlier confidence in its status as a “city upon a hill.” His doubt may be warranted. Any despair on the part of his Christian readers, however, would not be: “For here we do not have an enduring city, but we are looking for the city that is to come” (Heb. 13:14).

Korey D. Maas serves on the editorial advisory committee for Modern Reformation and teaches at Concordia University in Irvine, California.

The Least of These: Selected Readings in Christian History

by Eric R. Severson Cascade Books, 2007 263 pages (paperback), $31.00 Eric R. Severson has collected for his readers 29 different authors’ treatments of the sheep and goats parable from Matthew 25. These range from Saint Irenaeus in the second century to George Whitefield in the eighteenth.

Each selection is followed by “reading questions” and bibliography. Sometimes the sheep and goats passage is central and sometimes not. Where it was not, I still found the passage worthwhile reading on other grounds. (Julian of

Norwich, for example, gave what some call a mystical vision, but which I call a deep meditation on Scripture.) The texts are from the public domain, and many of them can be found in the online Christian Classics Ethereal Library (www.ccel.org). As Severson notes, “These passages are raw; they appear, for the most part, in the context of ministerial concern and pastoral anxieties” (viii). Severson’s collection makes for fresher reading than I imagine a reader would find diving unaided into the Christian Classics Ethereal Library. Besides, book form is easier on the eye for extended reading.

I will warn the buyer that the editing of this book—in the original texts, not in Severson’s contributions—is atrocious. While I find that I can look past such errors easily, I know that many cannot. My favorite typo in the book is in Whitefield’s sermon, where he has Festus say to St. Paul, “Paul, much earning doth make thee mad!” (248).

My initial interest in the book was in seeing how the varying understandings of the sheep and goats passage would relate to the distinction between law and gospel.

Severson himself asked such questions, but with a clear Nazarene leaning; for instance: “Does Benedict strike a balance between grace and works?” In the question of salvation, given Romans 4:5, there is no balance; it’s one hundred to zero. Now I did not expect to find the sermons from the early church to be exemplary in their treatment of law and gospel; but would it be the case that the early church would uniformly use the passage to teach salvation by works, while the Protestants would find a way to teach salvation by grace? There were some surprises. Irenaeus, Clement, and Justin Martyr open the collection with some very profitable reading, which while not “Gospel sermons” in a Lutheran sense are faithful expositions of Scripture.

Of Luther’s sermon, Severson says, “Like no other sermon in this volume, Luther shows how relevant Matthew 25:31-46 is to his contemporary context” (199). If it seems odd that a Nazarene reviewer found Luther congenial, the oddness ceases once you read the sermon. In his treatises, especially “Two Kinds of Righteousness” (1519) and “The Freedom of a Christian” (1520), Luther expressed deep insights into the distinction between law and gospel, a distinction he notes at the start of the sermon. Luther says, “While most lessons almost exclusively teach and inculcate faith, this one treats only of works” (200). He then goes on to preach pure law. If a passage like this urges works rather than faith, then how is a pastor to preach the gospel from it? Later Lutherans decided that since the Bible is a progressive revelation that has its culmination in Christ as the Lamb of God, all sermons should culminate in the same way. Over time, some have found ways to do this that are M A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 59

more organic than artificial by appealing to the broader context of the book of the Bible being preached.

George Whitefield’s sermon is artificial in its construction, mining Scripture for illustrations without expositing one text carefully, and not for the sake of clear gospel.

Whitefield preaches on the exchange between St. Paul and Festus in Acts where Festus is almost persuaded to be a Christian. Almost persuaded, a momentary state for Festus, is changed to Almost Christian, a lifestyle for nominal Christians that has little parallel with Festus himself.

The Almost Christian relies on external ordinances rather than a true change of heart. The sheep and goats passage is used to illustrate how omitting charity fits one for hell.

Severson notes that Whitefield not only owned slaves, but made an illustration from slavery—one that condemned the slave and not his master!—to reinforce his point (viii).

If failure of charity was damnable, then how could slavery be approved? I could wish that Whitefield had pictured Christ on the Last Day saying to the goats, “I was free and you enslaved me.” I could also wish that Severson included a sermon by Robert Farrar Capon to show how a pastor might read a judgment parable while remembering what he learned from the grace parables preceding it. As Jesus taught us when he so often posed the question— “Have ye not read?”—good reading is a matter of taking a lot of Scripture into account at once.

Rick Ritchie resides in Southern California and is a long-time contributor to Modern Reformation.

Tokens of Trust: An Introduction to Christian Belief

by Rowan Williams Westminster John Knox, 2007 159 pages (hardcover), $16.95 No one who has read the current archbishop of Canterbury’s magisterial work, Arius: Heresy and Tradition, can be in any doubt about his ability to operate with ease at the highest levels of scholarship and to write prose as sophisticated and dense as its subject matter. It is thus something of a delight to discover that he is also capable of writing books that also speak the language of the laity with grace, clarity, and charm. Of such is this small volume in which Williams follows in the hallowed footsteps of many theologians throughout the ages by offering a series of reflections on the various topical 6 0 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

heads of the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds. The book consists of five chapters, dealing with faith, creation, Christology, reconciliation, ecclesiology, and the resurrection. The attractive presentation of the book is enhanced with the inclusion of numerous paintings and photographs.

Inevitably, the book’s theology is not that which typical Modern Reformation readers, including myself, have much positive sympathy. Nevertheless, Williams does make some valuable observations. For example, in the chapter, “God in Company,” he makes the necessary point that the Reformation did not envisage a radically individualist reading of Scripture, but rather saw the Bible as something to be read in the community of believers. Elsewhere, when talking about trust, he offers trenchant criticism of the idea of identifying God’s trustworthiness as wish-fulfillment and proposes instead a model rooted in the notion of a loving parent. Then he can also—and rightly, in my opinion—connect a healthy understanding of God as Creator to an ethic that respects the created order and can speak to the current ecological problems we face. He also draws attention to the way in which so many Christians have privileged the mind over the body and offered a view of Christianity that is unbiblically negative about the physicality of the world. Indeed, as is so often the case, as a Reformed evangelical I can sympathize with so many of the targets at which a mainstream theologian such as Williams takes aim.

In this context, perhaps the most satisfying part of the book is Williams’ discussion of forgiveness, where he makes the following comment: “One of the oddest things in our culture is that we seem to be tolerant of all sorts of behavior, yet are deeply unforgiving” (152). This is followed by a good discussion that avoids the unrealistic pious platitudes of so much Christianity for a much more realistic understanding of the difficulties surrounding the act of actually forgiving someone.

Nevertheless, there are the typical and obvious problems with which those who have read or heard Williams will be familiar. Williams is clearly uncomfortable with orthodox understandings of hell. He also sees the Bible’s inspiration as rooted in the fact that it is the collection of writings used by the Holy Spirit to inspire and guide the church (124), a view built on the back of a typical caricature of what orthodox notions of inspiration imply. The problem is obvious and as old as the hills: Williams wants the Bible to tell us what God wants us to know, but exactly what it is that the Bible tells us seems really to be left to Williams’ own discretion. In addition, it was not clear to me from the chapter on Christology as to why, on Williams’ account, Jesus needs to be God: there is plenty of talk about Jesus being God’s embodied action and love, but these are not the personal categories of the very orthodoxy that the Nicene Creed embodied.

For these reasons, this is not a book to give to someone looking for a good introduction to the basics of the Christian faith. For that, Tom Wright’s Simply Christian or, even better, something like Bruce Milne’s Know the Truth

would be far better. Nevertheless, this is an easy-to-read book; and, given the importance of the Anglican communion worldwide, this book is a good introduction to the thought of its leading churchman and theologian. It does make some good points and certainly stimulated me to think about certain issues; but as an introduction to Christian belief, it is seriously lacking.

Carl R. Trueman is professor of church history and vice president for academic affairs at Westminster Theological Seminary (Philadelphia).

Revelation and Reason: New Essays in Reformed Apologetics edited by K. Scott Oliphint and Lane G. Tipton Presbyterian & Reformed Publishers, 2007 360 pages (paperback), $24.99 In the 1971 festschrift dedicated to Cornelius Van Til, Jerusalem and Athens, G. C. Berkouwer complained that Van Til had supplied little biblical exegesis to establish his apologetic approach. Van Til, granting his point, regretted it and pointed to the excellent endeavors of his colleagues on the faculty of Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia as more than balancing out his deficiencies. More than 30 years have passed since Berkouwer leveled his charge against Van Til and in the meantime there have been a number of attempts to step up to the plate, to stand in the gap, and to provide the biblical evidence needed to establish what has been typically called presuppositionalism. The latest, and arguably one of the finest offerings, is K. Scott Oliphint and Lane G. Tipton’s Revelation and Reason: New Essays in Reformed Apologetics. But to suggest that this volume is only an attempt to shore up the missing exegetical basis for presuppositional apologetics would not do it justice. It is that and so much more.

Arguing that apologetics is primarily a biblical and not a philosophical discipline, the editors and contributors to this volume endeavor to demonstrate that exegetical and theological foundations are necessary for any Reformed defense of the faith; and, they argue, an apologetic is only Reformed if its “tenets, principles, methodology, and so forth are formed and re-formed by Scripture” (1). The book is helpfully organized into three sections: exegetical considerations; theological foundations; and methodologi-

cal implications, containing a useful introduction, 14 chapters and an appendix, along with Scripture and subject and names indices.

In a brief review such as this, it is nearly impossible to do justice to the chapters included here. I would like to briefly touch on a few highlights of the book from my perspective. Almost all of the contributions are a valuable development and extension of Van Til’s penetrating approach to the defense of the Christian faith. Failure to note a contribution should not be interpreted as tacit criticism. In the exegetical considerations section, I was especially impressed with Moises Silva’s “The Case for Calvinistic Hermeneutics,” which is a refreshing defense of reading Scripture responsibly from a Reformed confessional perspective. Additionally, Tipton (with his two chapters on Paul’s apologetic in Acts 17 and Colossians), Richard Gaffin (“Epistemological Reflections on 1 Corinthians 2:616”), and Oliphint (“The Irrationality of Unbelief,” an exegetical study of Romans 1), all provide sufficient evidence that Van Til’s apologetic is not only consistent with Scripture, but practically demanded by it.

In the section on theological foundations, Jeffrey Jue’s “Theologia Naturalis” ploughs new ground by showing that while Van Til’s critical historical assessment of Reformed Scholasticism on natural theology was informed by less a than stellar historiography, theologically Van Til and the Reformed Scholastics were of one mind on the value of unregenerate attempts to build a natural theology without reference to Scripture. Similarly, Michael Horton in “Consistently Reformed: The Inheritance and Legacy of Van Til’s Apologetic” demonstrates that Van Til’s doctrine of analogy and concern for the incomprehensibility of God are but contemporary applications of the standard Reformed Scholastic distinction between God’s own knowledge of himself (archetypal knowledge) and human knowledge of God based upon revelation (ectypal knowledge). William Dennison concludes this section with a fascinating biblical theological study of Adam’s priestly role as apologete in the Garden of Eden in Genesis 2:15, where we see that Adam was placed to guard the garden but failed to do so and how Christ fulfills that role in himself.

Dennison reminds us that Van Til’s apologetic method grows out of the biblical theology of Geerhardus Vos. It seems to me that Dennison’s chapter should have been placed at the end of the exegetical considerations section, but that is a minor quibble.

The methodological implications section begins with Oliphint’s “The Old-New Reformed Epistemology,” which amply demonstrates his ability to constructively interact with contemporary philosophical currents, learn from them, and correct deficiencies. Specifically, Oliphint analyzes the contribution of Alvin Plantinga’s “proper function” epistemology (the study of how humans know what they know), and offers correctives that take into consideration the sinful effects of the fall on the human mind. Don Collett’s “Van Til and Transcendental Argument” provides proof positive that the logic of the transcendental arguM A R C H / A P R I L 2 0 0 8 | M O D E R N R E F O R M AT I O N 61

ment functions differently than inferential logic. This is a fairly technical piece, but it is well worth the effort to work through it. The least satisfactory contribution to this volume is Michael Payne’s “The Fate of Apologetics in an Age of Normal Nihilism.” While in itself it is an interesting discussion of apologetics in a postmodern context, the subject is so far from having any real connection with Van Til (apart from a forced comparison in the conclusion), one wonders how this discussion forwards the goal of the book.

Revelation and Reason concludes with the republication of Oliphint’s “Cornelius Van Til and the Reformation of Christian Apologetics.” “Republication” may not be an adequate descriptor, however, as this is an updated and modified form of his argument that Van Til’s apologetic is a worldview, Trinitarian, and covenantal apologetic. This appendix ought to be required reading for anyone interested in either apologetics generally or Van Til’s contribution in particular. In fact, I was so convinced by an earlier version of this appendix that I have since referred to Van Til’s presuppositionalism as covenantal apologetics. This book is a welcome contribution to the biblical and theological underpinnings of our defense of the faith and the practices that ought to follow as a result.

Jeffrey Waddington is a doctoral candidate at Westminster Theological Seminary.

POINT OF CONTACT: BOOKS YOUR NEIGHBORS ARE READING God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything

by Christopher Hitchens Twelve/Hatchette Book Group, 2007 307 pages (hardcover), $24.99 The Man Doth Protest Too Much, Methinks If the title’s bold proclamation doesn’t get you, there is the stick-in-the-eye subtitle, How Religion Poisons Everything.

Saying Christopher Hitchens opposes faith of any stripe is like saying it gets chilly on Canada’s ice road in February.

Hitchens’ latest book joins the ranks of a fast-growing cohort of creeds written by atheists seeking to mainstream their 6 2 W W W. M O D E R N R E F O R M A T I O N . O R G

beliefs. Two others from this group include Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (Modern Reformation review July/August 2007) and Sam Harris’s Letter to a Christian Nation.

The New Atheist’s position is hostile (“It has become necessary to know the enemy and to prepare to fight it,” 283). The gloves are off (“Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience,” 56). We know that the gospel is foolishness to those who are perishing, but these fools are shocking. In October 2007, at an atheist conference, Dawkins made a comment representative of this group when he said that moderate Christians are but one step from blowing themselves up over their beliefs (implying, of course, that Christians are on a moral plane equal to the heinous jihadists).

Hitchens follows in Dawkins’ moral equivalence footsteps and exposes a fundamental lack of understanding of the distinctives that separate the major world religions. He would flunk a freshman Comparative Religion class.

Taking but one gem from many, many examples, on page 129 we find, “There is some question as to whether Islam is a separate religion at all.” This leveling of the religion playing field, of course, demonstrates a major weakness in Hitchens’ hypothesis. His attack on religion, constructed on superficial elements, ignores the doctrinal foundation that makes Christianity unique.

As a self-proclaimed “Protestant atheist,” Hitchens saves his vilest attacks for Christianity as foreshadowed in chapter titles such as The Nightmare of the “Old” Testament, The “New” Testament Exceeds the Evil of the “Old” One, and The Tawdriness of the Miraculous and the Decline of Hell. Three critical flaws listed below, however, diminish his critique’s impact.

He fundamentally distorts Scripture. To take but one example, Hitchens states definitively, “In Matthew 15:21-28 we read of [Jesus’] contempt for a Canaanite woman who implored his aid and was brusquely told that he would not waste his energy on a non-Jew” (118). Jesus’ “contempt” is so strong in fact, that the concluding verse of this passage, which Hitchens conveniently drops from his “exegesis,” is Jesus’ words to the woman, “You have great faith!

Your request is granted.”

He emphasizes caricatures or perversions of religion as valid even though these practices earn condemnation from true believers. The list is long here too, but he criticizes Mormon polygamy (51), Jehovah’s Witnesses banning blood transfusions (51), and Jerry Falwell’s 9/11 comments (32).

Would any orthodox Christian take issue with these complaints?

His sources lack credibility. He frequently quotes Thomas Paine and H. L. Mencken as if they had earned the title of “biblical scholar.” When he does get around to a recognized authority on the Bible, he pays homage to Bart Ehrman. If you aren’t familiar with Ehrman’s research, it does not adhere to traditional orthodoxy as evidenced, for

example, by his opposition position in a March 2006 debate entitled, “Is There Historical Evidence for the Resurrection of Jesus?” or his books, The Lost Gospel of Judas Iscariot: A New Look at Betrayer and Betrayed (2006) and Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (2005).

Hitchens’ “irreducible objections” against religious faith can be summarized easily as a) religion is made up or “manufactured”; b) ethics and morality are independent of faith and cannot be derived from it; and c) religion is immoral (52). To support this position, Hitchens launches a full assault across a broad front of subject areas including medical advancements, philosophy, biology, and ethics. In each area, he seeks to disprove the need or existence of God. He fails miserably on all accounts.

As it would take too much space here to delve into each, let’s look at one example. Under his chapter, “Religion Kills,” he takes the position that all faiths cause war and terror. His evidence includes the “troubles” in Northern Ireland, the Serb and Croatian conflict in Yugoslavia, and later in the book he also mentions the Hutu genocide of the Tutsi in Rwanda. But are these religious persecutions or rather conflict arising out of political ideology, nationalism, and tribalism? And, even if they were truly based upon faith beliefs, they would be wrong and not reflect the true faith as revealed in the Bible.

To believe Hitchens’ hypothesis that religion kills, one would need to discount the entire Judeo-Christian moral heritage upon which Western civilization is built. No honest person can do this. The peace and stability found in all Western democracies is due in large part to this tradition.

For example, could secular humanists lay the foundation for something as profound as Just War theory, which has governed the actions of democratic armies as they have vanquished Nazism, Communism, Nationalism, and now Islamism? Given humanity’s tragic experiences with these failed ideologies, the answer is clearly no. The blood of millions and millions provides a stark rebuttal to Hitchens’ argument.

Typically, Hitchens is enjoyable both as an author and commentator on talk shows where he can often be found “Hitch-slapping” some poor opponent. His writing style is intellectual, engaging, and often witty (or is that acerbic?).

His sharp mind and sharper tongue makes him a formidable foe (his September 2005 verbal slugfest with MP George Galloway, available on YouTube, is particularly memorable). Hitchens is also the author of well-respected books like Thomas Jefferson: Author of America, and he writes regularly for Slate and Vanity Fair.

There is much material in God Is Not Great for the Christian to engage.

First, the atheist assault is a call to action; not to fight, but to live and to live rightly. Hitchens condemns Christianity, but he focuses on the inanity of a watereddown religion. The power of the true faith found in the Bible triumphs over all opponents, transforms those who come to believe, and equips believers to act justly, to love

mercy, and to walk humbly (Mic. 6:8).

Second, the mainstreaming of atheism will put more pressure on Christians to compromise what we believe so that we can better fit within these post-Christian times.

Instead, we need to be prepared to give a defense for why we believe what we believe. The path is easy for Christians in the West today. What if it becomes less so? What we need is a modern reformation that recovers the truths that have been lost to postmodernism, multiculturalism, pluralism, and consumerism.

Finally, be encouraged, Christian, as you go forward to do the Lord’s work and do not despair. In Mr. Hitchens’ world, the case on religion was closed long ago and it is only religious yokels who hold back progressive advancements of the human race. So long as the Holy Spirit convicts us that Romans 11:33-36 is true, however, we should refuse to believe that man’s chief end is to glorify himself.

One final thought as you consider buying this book. The Wall Street Journal reported last summer that Christians were making purchases so that they could better defend their faith with others. You don’t need this book to do that.

Nothing new exists in this book that isn’t already pervasive in our culture. The now-famous words of Ted Sorensen come to mind, “If you pick this book up, don’t put it down— you won’t pick it up again.”

Brian Esterly is a ruling elder at Tenth Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia and a consultant in business development.

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FINAL THOUGHTS f r o m

t h e

d e s k

of

the

editor-in-chief

Invincible Ignorance

S

everal years ago, I was on a panel with Bill Nye (known to his TV fans as the

our presuppositions rule out the possibility of God’s “Science Guy”). The subject was religion, which Nye summarily dismissed with involvement in the world he has made even before the well-worn assertion-posing-as-an-argument: “Miracles cannot happen because any arguments are entertained. Scientists often they do not happen.” We have heard this since at least talk about how whole revolutions in scientific paradigms David Hume, although something like it has been a part of have been caused by significant anomalies. The resurrecthe materialistic worldview since antiquity. tion is just such an anomaly. Christians have never said that After agreeing with his description of the definition, role, the resurrection is normal or that it conforms to uniform and purpose of miracles in various religions (including laws. It’s a good thing, too, since this present age in much of popular American Christianity), I tried to mark bondage to sin and death since the Fall holds no power for out the radical difference from the gospel’s claim that Jesus liberation or hope. Focusing our apologetics on Christ’s resChrist rose from the dead for our salvation in history. urrection in history just may be the means that the Spirit Wouldn’t a scientist, of all people, have to amend his or uses to provoke a paradigm revolution, bringing a thoughther presupposition about what can or cannot happen ful person to realize that his or her naturalistic plausibility based on what has actually occurred? My interlocutor structure is incapable of accounting for things that actually responded, again with the well-worn theory that Jesus do in fact happen. Such arguments cannot raise Lazarus never really died but—if he existed at all—recovered and from the dead, but they can, like Martha, remove the stone. died an ordinary death in probable obscurity. I referred to Our writers in this issue have given us tremendous the study conducted by a panel of medical scientists for the insight into the history of atheism and the challenge of the Journal of the American Medical Association, which unaniNew Atheism. They have also offered useful arguments mously concluded that, based on the details included in for engaging atheist friends, relatives, and coworkers. As the Gospel accounts and the medical knowledge available they have shown, Christianity has always thrived in an at the time, Jesus most certainly did die on the cross. atmosphere of intellectual challenge and weakened in From Roman officials such as Tacitus and Pliny the periods of general shallowness of mind and heart.

Younger, as well as the Jewish historian Josephus, we The God who has spoken to the prophets and apostles know that Jesus did not die in obscurity. They report his in the past “in many times and in many ways” (Heb. 1:1) crucifixion and the commotion that surrounded that also brings people to himself through many different remarkable weekend. From the Gospels themselves we paths. Above all, the clear proclamation of the gospel and gain a picture not first of a religion but of an event around witness of ordinary Christians to that good news is essenwhich a community coalesced. Scattered in fear for their tial. Yet their “plausibility structures”—the broader paralives, these leaders and followers were willing to be mardigms in which people make sense of particular claims— tyred for their faith in and testimony to the Resurrected can begin to be altered by seeing a community of witnessSavior and Lord Jesus Christ. None of this impressed my es to Christ that is forgiven and forgiving, anticipating in conversation partner. Nevertheless, his faith in his own faith, hope, and love that coming consummation of implausible theories—itself grounded in a stubborn refusal Christ’s kingdom. People today aren’t just looking for a even to consider the possibility of Christ’s resurrection— good argument to assent to, but a great story to belong to. was just as incorrigible (that is, incapable of being quesIn all of these ways, apologetics—the defense of the faith— tioned) as any religious subjectivism could ever be. serves the glory of God and the good of the world.

Of course, we can’t argue anybody into the kingdom.

Atheists are not our enemies, but sinners like us who by The Spirit creates faith in our hearts by hearing Christ pronature “suppress the truth in unrighteousness” (Rom. claimed. Furthermore, like many similar experiences I’ve 1:18). Instead of viewing the New Atheism as a threat, we had, this conversation further confirmed the important should see it as another opportunity to offer that witness point that we do not just believe things because they are in word and deed that the church has always been obliged true, but because we want them to be true. There is nothto give in every time and place. ing wrong with having presuppositions. We can’t think or Michael S. Horton is editor-in-chief of Modern Reformation. investigate reality without them. The question is whether

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