The last couple of weeks have been good for me, as far as reading goes. I typically have a list of 12-14 books that I’m reading simultaneously, and I have the worst habit of starting new ones with no regard for when I’ll be able to finish them. Well, as I mentioned before I finished both The Truth War and The Dark River on vacation last week, and since I got home I’ve finished Donald Bloesch’s A Theology of Word & Spirit. I’ve mentioned a couple of insights before, here.

I loved the approach to the intersection of theological and philosophical ideals:

One of the salient needs in academic theology today is to combat the ideal of an undogmatic theology, a theology free from the constraint of biblical or confessional norms. Currently the emphasis is not on the truth of the gospel but on the wonder of the gospel or on the experience of the gospel. It is not the normativeness of the Christian faith but the edification of the human psyche or the broadening of the human imagination that commands our attention.

In light of Doug Pagitt’s recent comments about yoga on CNN: “The Jesus agenda is a whole life, is a complete life, is a healed life. So when people use it to relieve stress, to be healthy in their relationships, to feel good in their body, that’s a really good thing.” The concern is feeling better. John MacArthur points out that when people do this they’re turning inward for a “complete”, “healed life”, rather than to Christ. (continue reading…)

I’ve been reading a few books lately, The Case for a Creator, Theology of Word and Spirit (still), The Bourne Supremacy, Harry Potter, and Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World (Counterpoints). I’m a bit ADD, so it helps if I can switch books if I get antsy about the subject matter. I’ve been deep into physics and cosmology and philosophy with Case, so I decided to change up and take on the next quarter of Four Views.

The first chapter was John Hick’s position of pluralism: all “ethical” religions lead to God (air-quotes mine). He begins by recounting a spiritual journey much like Marcus Borg’s. The main difference is that he came to Christ during law school. He then went on to study philosophy where he began asking the Big Questions, and, as with many in the wide world of Liberal Christianity, assumed that since people weren’t answering those questions, they couldn’t be answered.

An example of these questions is about the sun standing still in Joshua. “In light of our modern knowledge of astronomy, we would have to say that the earth, which rotates at a speed of about a thousand miles an hour, suddenly ceased to rotate; but taken seriously, this is mind-boggling.” Is this idea more mind-boggling than a man being raised from the dead after a couple of days? More mind-boggling than God taking the form of a human to live among us? For me the answer is this simple: if God wanted to stop the earth from rotating, He could. And if He wanted to keep us (and everything else) from hurtling into space at indeterminable speeds, He could.

One of his other questions is the ever-present, “is it loving to send (insert descriptive phrase here…he chose “the majority of”) the human race to eternal torment in hell?” I find it interesting that it’s apparently ok to ask this question, but not ok to ask, “is it just to allow any human to enter heaven?”

Hick’s position of “pluralism” is problematic in its justification because it centers around a severely altered definition of salvation, and moral equivalence. For most Christians, salvation means being set free from sin and spared from Hell by the sacrifice of Jesus. For other people and in other situations, it generally refers to being rescued from some form of peril. But Hick decides to swing for the fences on this one.

He spends quite a bit of time establishing many things, some true (Paul’s first letter is dated about 50 A.D., Gospel of Mark about 70), and some quite speculative (the early followers didn’t believe Jesus was divine). He also talks about the son of God “metaphor”, saying that it was several centuries before Jesus was considered by the church to be the “literal God the Son.” Of course, he just said the Gospels were written within 7o years of Jesus death, and they all attest to his being of one being with the Father (”who can forgive sins but God alone”). How did 40 years become 400?

Anyway, his focus, leading up to his new definition of salvation is to establish the moral equality of the world religions. He wants to show that all of the major religions are doing an equally good job of causing people to think less about themselves and more about others. It’s not hard to do with narrow terms and a priori assumptions, like that human goodness “reflects a right relationship to God.”

He shows that all religions teach a variation of the Golden Rule, and follow it with about the same success rate. He argues that “if Christians have a more complete and direct access to God than anyone else and live in a closer relationship to him, being indwelt by the Holy Spirit”, there would be evidence that we have more of that “human goodness”.

Now that he has established this equality, he turns to salvation, which he considers to be a change from natural self-focus to others-focus. Now that he’s established a new definition for the term, relegating it to a personal change, he can make his move on the uniqueness of Christ.

He argues that because there is moral parity in the great world religions, all must have the same level of access to “the Real”. But his argument fails in that it requires you to accept his highly…”stylized” definition of salvation.

What he’s actually talking about is described in the Bible. It’s called sanctification. Most of us have heard the word before, but may not quite know what it means. Well, in a nutshell (a very small one) it coincides with Hick’s (misguided) definition of salvation.

He also presents the speculation that Jesus didn’t say the things attributed to him in the New Testament as fact. He cites a lot of people who agree with him, then establishes the point: “That Jesus himself did not claim to be God cuts the ground from under the feet of the old apologetic.” The only problem is that this is not established fact. It will never be, unless we find writings from an eyewitness who wrote as things were happening. The two problems with that are a) it’ll never happen, and b) even if it does, the question will still be clouded with doubt.

You can choose to believe he didn’t say those things, but that poses more problems. What did he say? How do you know he said that and not the other things? How can you trust any part of the Bible? How do you know which parts are trustworthy and which aren’t?

Hick never addresses these questions, except to say that the writings of the New Testament were still “documents of faith”. But according to his argument, they were essentially hallucinations of faith.

I think Hick uses the weakest theological and philosophical reason of the three authors I’ve read. Though his arguments have reached their peak of efficiency and fulfilled their potential, that potential is alarmingly low. Logic was not on his side.

Dawkins uses the first section of chapter 1, “Deserved Respect” to set up some things; first, good religion and bad religion. For Dawkins, good religion is what he calls “Einsteinian” (aka pantheism, or natural theology), and “supernatural religion” (aka theism, or supernatural theism, a la Borg) is bad. Dawkins liberally, and glowingly, quotes Einstein embracing “naturalism” (belief that nothing exists beyond the material world, also called “materialism”) and thrashing “supernaturalism”.

He then goes on to quote letters from people implied to be Christian leaders to expose the “weakness of the religious mind.” He chooses a sample of writers that in no way reflects the intellectual elites of Christianity to compare to the genius of Albert Einstein, Carl Sagan, and Stephen Hawking. This seems like a slightly unfair comparison. Why not sample writings from C.S. Lewis or Alister McGrath? Why not find some people with M.Div.’s from Princeton and Yale? It’s simple, Dawkins is trying to (not-so)subtly set up his second point: that smart people are atheists and Christians/religious people are dumb.

The letters Dawkins samples are perfect for his purpose. They are the product of undereducated, overzealous people trying to protect their mistaken beliefs. They use poor logic and non-Christian theology to attack Einstein. One is far more nationalist (not to mention hateful) than Christian. But is this really an accurate representation of Christians? I don’t have to answer that , do I? (continue reading…)

Here we are. Ryan has summarized the project pretty well, so I’ll send you there to see his post first (if you’re returning, or started there, read on).I’ll follow his lead in just a moment to give you a little background into me and my perspective, but I do have some comments about Dawkins’ preface to the God Delusion.

Judging from the preface, much of his argument centers around the premise that Christians believe what they do because they were inculcated as children, and that teaching is so ingrained that they refuse to see the “truth” of his arguments: The story of his wife and her school (”I didn’t know I could.”), his comments about there being “no such thing as a Muslim child,” only the “child of Muslim parents,” and statement that “dyed-in-the-wool faith-heads are immune to argument, their resistance built up over years of childhood indoctrination.”

Unfortunately, none of this applies to me. (continue reading…)

You may or may not be familiar with the series by Zondervan in which people from different viewpoints each write a chapter and the others write a response. Though it was difficult at times, I’ve enjoyed reading Four Views on Salvation in a Pluralistic World, and Listening to the Beliefs of Emerging Churches. The format is interesting and fulfilling to see the arguments responded to immediately.

In light of that and the ridiculous discussions I have with my brother-in-law, we’ll be having a counterpoints-style discussion of our own. (continue reading…)

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