apologetics – Page 6 – Christ the Truth

Which God Don’t You Believe In – an evangelistic talk 1

glenscrivJanuary 12, 20131 Comment

You might have heard me (or others!!) bang this drum before. But if not, here's a 25 minute evangelistic talk entitled "Which God don't you believe in?"

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Colossians 1:15-23

Three thought prompter questions...

What do you picture when you think of God?
What do you picture when you think of Jesus?
What does God picture when He thinks of you?

When you think of God…?

Problem - v15: He's invisible. Which means unknowable!

There's been a divorce- v21.

But there's an Image: Jesus.

This is the reverse of natural thinking

We think God is obvious, we're unsure of Jesus.

Bibles says, Jesus is on show, God is unknown.

God is Jesus shaped.

When you picture Jesus...?

V15-20 What kind of God is this!?

Climaxing in the cross.

Jesus is God sized.

When God pictures you…?

Not dimmer switch. On or off.

V21: OFF - going against the grain of reality

V22: ON - holy, without blemish, free from accusation.

Have you been reconciled?

Have you forgotten Jesus?

Every day I imagine an unChristlike God on the throne.

Let's return to the God of Jesus.

Converting People 6

glenscrivDecember 4, 20126 Comments

-- "Are you trying to convert me?" asks the unbeliever.

-- "Oh, no, no, no, no" replies the evangelist. "I can't convert anyone, only God can do that."

... Later on in that same conversation...

-- "Can I do anything to become a Christian?"

-- "Why yes. Here are the three steps to getting saved."

Anyone see a problem here?

Interestingly Paul had no problem talking about "winning" and even "saving" people (1 Corinthians 9:19-22). At the same time he never prays the sinners prayer with people. What does this tell us?

Well I think it diagnoses a funny kind of "sovereignty when it suits us" thinking. The evangelist can't convert the unbeliever but the unbeliever can convert themselves!

It also betrays a very enlightenment view of the interaction between "the natural" and "the supernatural." We assume that "the natural" equals the mechanics of evangelism and "the supernatural" equals a capricious and arbitrary zapping from on high.

This is not the way the bible co-ordinates things. There is the realm of the flesh, in which human reason and the basic principles of this world rule (Colossians 2:8a). And there is the realm of the Spirit, in which Christ is offered in the word (Colossians 2:8a-9).

Paul wins (and even saves) people in that he points away from all the powers of the flesh and offers Christ in the word - all praise to the almighty Spirit. And the unbeliever is saved quite apart from the steps they take to convert themselves - Christ in His word has conquered them - all praise to the almighty Spirit.

Don't be afraid to try to convert people. Everyone's trying to convert everyone. All the time. Just don't do it according to the flesh, but according to the Spirit. In other words: Preach the Word!

Fear and Faith: Derren Brown undone in 60 seconds by his own subject 57

glenscrivNovember 25, 201257 Comments

I'm 9 days late to this, but last Friday Derren Brown's "Fear and Faith" aired - watch here.

It was 10 minutes of fascinating viewing padded out by some seriously underwhelming logic by way of explanation.

The show centres on the challenge Brown sets himself to elicit "a religious experience" from an atheist. To be fair the emotional "conversion", when it came, was indeed dramatic. In a candlelit church, Derren spoke to atheist Natalie and through various NLP-type techniques evoked feelings of father-hunger, a sense of awe at the mystery of the world, regrets over her past, that kind of thing. Having anchored those feelings and established some triggers, Derren left and - BOOM - the "conversion" was dramatic. There were tears and exclamations of both sorrow and joy, almost simultaneously. Alone with the candles and the stained-glass images, "I'm sorry"s came flooding out along with "I love you"s. It was a salutary warning of how prone we are to emotional manipulation. This woman was an avowed atheist and her discussion with Derren contained no "God-talk" whatsover. He simply spoke about feelings of love, awe and regret in a "religious" setting and his techniques produced a "conversion" the envy of many an evangelist.

So lesson number one - beware Christian evangelists using manipulative methods!

But then lesson number two has got to be: Beware atheist evangelists too. Because Derren's preaching was seriously misleading. Throughout the programme he put two and two together and made 600. First came the trivially true assertions: "religious experience can be explained by psychology". In the same vein he asks "Can our experience of religion be explained by psychology alone?" And he expects the answer yes.

Well of course the answer is yes, Derren! Of course "our experience of religion" can be explained by psychology! Even psychology alone. My experience of falling in love with my wife could be explained in entirely psychological terms. And if Derren did it, I'd be all ears. I'm sure there'd be insights - certain needs from my childhood met in 'some sort of spouse figure', yes, yes. All useful, all true. And, I suppose, such psychology might - at another level of explanation - be put down to biology, and biology reduced to chemistry and chemistry explained by physics... or something. I'd be genuinely interested in all such analyses. But...

A) the further we "progress" into those materialistic explanations, the less satisfying they are as an account of what is, irreducibly, a personal experience.

And, crucially....

B) the claim that, because there might be a perfectly satisfying psychological explanation, my wife doesn't exist needs unmasking as the rank idiocy that it is.

Yet Brown's whole show is set up on precisely this absurd foundation. Derren says he's out to prove that "religious belief comes from us, not from the existence of the divine". Which is exactly parallel to saying my love for my wife comes from me and not from the existence of Emma. Well of course it comes from me - my religious and my marital experiences come from me. But what's that got to do with the truth or otherwise of the object of those feelings??

David Bentley Hart nails this in Atheist Delusions as he turns his withering wit upon Daniel Dennett's "Breaking the Spell". Dennett, a philosopher and one of the four horsemen of the Atheist apocalypse, similarly attempts to describe religion as an entirely natural phenomenon. Against this Hart writes

Not only does [Dennett's project] pose no challenge to faith, it is in fact perfectly compatible with what most developed faiths already teach regarding religion. Of course religion is a natural phenomenon. Who would be so foolish as to deny that...

...It does not logically follow that simply because religion is natural it cannot become a vehicle of divine truth, or that it is not in some sense oriented towards ultimate reality (as, according to Christian tradition, all natural things are)...

...As for Dennett's amazing discovery that the "natural desire for God" is in fact a desire for God that is natural, it amounts to a revolution not of thought, only of syntax. (David Bentley-Hart, Atheist Delusions, p7-8)

How else would you measure a religious experience anyway, if not via natural methods? What else could provoke such an experience, if not natural phenomena? The God who meets us in a Jewish carpenter, a library of ancient texts, men and women of faith, water, wheat and wine... His encounters with us do not happen in the 7th dimension. He meets us where we are. (That's the meaning of Christmas by the way). But since He meets us where we are then He meets us in naturally measurable and naturally explicable ways. Neither Dennett nor Derren will have any objections from Christians at that point.

Where we might raise an eyebrow is during the galactic leaps of faith they employ to tell their naturalistic story. Derren speaks of pareidolia whereby the human brain naturally sees personal significance in randomness - seeing "a man in the moon" when really there are only craters and shadows. This is, according to Derren, "probably the biggest contributor to religious belief" in our evolutionary story.

Notice the irony though. Derren is trying to tell you a story - the naturalistic evolution of all things, including belief. His story is all about going from randomness to personality. And now, here we are, persons at the end of a random process, telling other persons not to read personal significance into randomness. Eh?

The only way you could take that move seriously would be to reduce everything personal down to randomness. That sounds bleak, but Derren makes other such moves in just that direction. He happily gives accounts of morality and religion entirely based on the survival benefits they bestow in the grand evolutionary scheme. But if he were consistent I suggest he should also add love, beauty and truth to that same heap. And at that stage of course the whole endeavour collapses.

Which is very depressing. And the show was indeed very depressing. But for me it was saved by the last few minutes in which Derren interviewed Natalie. He revealed that her conversion was all a psychological trick - the emotions were real, but God was not, yada yada. Yet in my view her response, completely unscripted, torpedoed Derren's whole enterprise. And I think he knew it.

When asked whether she now viewed her experience in the church differently, she said

It has added a kind of artificial element to it for me now... But inducing an emotional reaction to something, if it’s through external influences is always artificial in a way... If I’m listening to an amazing piece of music, that’s an emotional stimulus that’s come from an artificial source...

Amen Natalie! Preach it. All emotions come from somewhere beyond us. To explain the feeling doesn't explain away everything to be said about the experience. At this point Derren talked right across her and didn't let her speak again. He forcefully asserted...

The emotions are real, that’s the point. It’s just important to me that you don’t feel it has to be attached to something supernatural or superstitious. Because it wasn’t. And it’s not even like it came from me, it certainly didn’t come from God, it came from you. They were perfectly real emotions, they are things you can carry with you for the rest of your life but you don’t have to attach them to a superstitious belief.

Carry the emotions Natalie - that's Derren's take home message. Keep hold of the emotions. Emotions that can be conjured up in 15 minutes by a TV showman. Emotions based entirely on our ancient and selfish survival instincts. Emotions which probably reduce down to randomness anyway.

And don't ever ask yourself why you live in a universe in which father-hunger, awe and regret can trigger such feelings. Boil it down to selfishness in the struggle for survival, that'll satisfy. That and the emotions. Induced for entertainment. As a trick of the mind. Take that away with you Natalie. Cos that's all this evangelist can offer.

Five minutes on the bible and slavery 9

glenscrivNovember 21, 20129 Comments

In 1776 Thomas Jefferson introduced the Declaration of Independence with these words:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

This bold and attractive vision of human flourishing is articulated in the context of some very specific views of God, of humanity and the good life. Yet without this framework it's difficult to imagine anything less self-evident than the truth that "all men are created equal." If you divorce this conviction from its theological foundations, it's one of the most instantly falsifiable "self-evident" truths going! When you look at the mass of humanity born in such differing circumstances, with such differing opportunities and capacities, who on earth are the "we" who are able to see "equality" when all that's really "self-evident" is endemic inequality?

The answer is that the "we" who hold this vision of equality have soaked for long centuries in a view of God, the world and humanity which has been completely alien to the rest of thinking people.

Take Aristotle in Politics:

For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth, some are marked out for subjection, others for rule...

Aristotle took inequality to be the thing "self-evident." He repeatedly called slaves "living tools" and was quite comfortable with that arrangement. Same with Plato:

...nature herself intimates that it is just for the better to have more than the worse, the more powerful than the weaker; and in many ways she shows, among men as well as among animals, and indeed among whole cities and races, that justice consists in the superior ruling over and having more than the inferior. (Gorgias)

According to these brilliant pagan minds, equality is not taught by nature. The very opposite. Whatever "human nature" was, clearly some humans conformed closer to the ideal than others. So who could object if some were given more human "rights" than others?

The point is this: if observations of "nature" were all we had to go by, who on earth could disagree with the inequitable status quo? Of course nature produces more powerful and less powerful creatures, superiors and inferiors. If nature is our teacher why not endorse a class of rulers and a class of the ruled? Why not support the inequalities which nature clearly intends? Why fight it? On what grounds? With what justification? From where could you get an alternative vision of humanity? The only humanity we've ever observed has been one of profound inequalities!

Thus it seemed absolutely right to have a perilously steep hierarchy of being - the emporer at the top, the slaves at the bottom, with every subject knowing their place. Who could possibly object?

Except that the ancient Scriptures kept speaking of another way. The God who gets dirt under His fingernails forming humanity (Genesis 2), who wants to walk with His creatures in the cool of the day (Genesis 3). The Saviour who would fight for us and take the blow (Genesis 3:15). The Son who would give Himself in atoning death (Genesis 22). The LORD who is Servant and Sacrifice (see Isaiah 42; 49; 50; 53).

And then He comes to a humble "servant" (Luke 1:48) as a humble servant (Philippians 2:5-11). The whole pyramid is subverted as God becomes a Slave! And He becomes a Slave so that we, the slaves of sin and Satan, might become sons and daughters in His royal family. He descends to the depths and raises us to the heights so that now we might all feast at the same table - royals and commoners, masters and bond-servants.

And through this divine stooping, Christ shows us a radically different way of assessing "human nature." The Son "became flesh" - just common or garden humanity. He became a Jewish pauper with nothing in His appearance that we should desire Him (Isaiah 53:2). Whatever might be deemed "ideal humanity" had nothing to do with the properties inherent in it. The Man Jesus was valuable not because of the attributes of His humanity but only because the Son had chosen this flesh to be. Thus a Christian account of "human nature" does not look to the properties and capacities of particular persons but declares that humans as humans are inherently valuable. From there it's a hop, skip and a jump to declaring their "unalienable rights".

But wait - doesn't the bible (particularly the OT) endorse slavery? Well distinguish Hebrew slavery from Greco-Roman practice and distinguish both from the Trans-Atlantic slave trade of the 16th-19th centuries. Hebrew slavery was nothing like that which Wilberforce fought.

Certainly the Western mind has difficulty with the idea of selling oneself into slavery for a limited period (we prefer other forms of economic slavery), but those OT provisions were always temporary arrangements. In everyone's lifetime Jubilee was always just around the corner (Leviticus 25) - and the great hope was the Messiah who would bring ultimate and eternal liberation (Isaiah 61; Luke 4:16-21).

In the NT, Paul counselled slaves (in this new Greco-Roman context) to seek their freedom if they could (1 Cor 7:21-24) and declared slave-trading to be sinful (1 Tim 1:10) thereby cutting the jugular of the whole practice. But really, it was the intellectual revolution of the gospel that was so much more subversive than any 'revolt of the slaves' could be.

And it's a revolution that we need to continue today. It's estimated that there are 27 million slaves in the world right now and so often it is Christians who continue to be at the forefront of the fight against human-trafficking. Why? Because Christians actually have an anthropology that treats each human with "unalienable rights" rather than as "living tools". Anyone who seeks to take some high-ground on the issue of slavery must produce an account of human nature that will actually protect the weak and the vulnerable from being used. But on what grounds will they justify such a stand?

I live in a country that kills 200 000 of the weakest members of our species every year because of the will of the strong. Our culture can claim no high ground in protecting the "unalienable rights" of all people. We have our own hierarchies based on the properties and capacities of individuals and we discriminate with extreme prejudice. If we want real equality we must return to the only true foundation: the Master who became Slave.

Five minutes on the conquest of Canaan 9

glenscrivOctober 29, 20129 Comments

I wasn't asked about the conquest of Canaan during Thursday's debate. But if I was, here are 5 minutes worth of thoughts prepared in advance. (Quite a bit was taken from Paul Copan's Is God a Moral Monster?)

There’s not a Christian in the world who doesn’t read Scriptures like Deuteronomy 20:16-18 without a lump in their throat. But this jarring sensation does not come in spite of their Christianity, but precisely because of it. Christians don’t need to step outside the bible to learn the infinite and intrinsic value of human life. We don’t need humanist ethicists to tell us how to treat our enemies. Jesus Himself has taught us:

“Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, bless those who curse you, bless and do not curse them, turn the other cheek, go the extra mile, if your adversary sues you for your coat, give him the shirt off your back, don’t pick up the sword, those who live by the sword will die by the sword, my kingdom is not from this world otherwise my followers would fight for me but my kingdom is not from this world, the kingdom of heaven is within, etc, etc.”

Atheists haven’t taught Christians to be sensitive to the spilling of blood, Jesus has. And, never forget, Jesus has taught both believers and unbelievers of the West exactly the sensibilities that make these ancient stories so difficult to our ears. We look back at these three and a half thousand year old stories and find it almost impossible to think ourselves into their war-like worlds. A massive reason for that is the advent of Christianity.

Nonetheless, the Christian is faced with Jesus who tells us both to put down our own swords and to take up His book - the Old Testament. Jesus emphatically tells us that these Hebrew Scriptures are His Scriptures. We cannot have Him and not His book. So how then do we read it?

Well as we go back to the OT, what we see are Canaanite cultures involved in child-burning levels of evil. For four hundred years they are engaged in repugnant spiritual and moral wickedness. And, having given them four hundred years to repent of it - considerably longer than any other "just war" ever launched! - God visits them with a one off, unrepeatable judgement.

And it has nothing to do with ethnicity. This is not genocide, there is nothing racial about this. It’s about spiritual and moral evil which, when the Israelites are guilty of it, they too are conquered by foreign nations. What we see is a God who gives the Canaanites 400 years to repent. Every Canaanite who ever sought mercy from the Israelites was granted mercy. It's true that, prior to the conquest, there is language of total destruction and “giving over” whole cities to the LORD, actually the language of “driving out” the Canaanites precedes and predominates over language of “wiping out.” Copan argues that this is militaristic hyperbole that, even within the Bible, is fulfilled in non-literal ways. i.e. the Canaanites just weren't wiped out (nor were the Korahites). The narrative of the wars does not describe non-combatants being killed (Copan argues that Jericho and Ai were fortresses - military installations if you like). And when Joshua sums up his achievements he considers that he's done what Moses had commanded - this, in spite of the Canaanites not even being wholly driven out, let alone "wiped out."

Now there is still a bloody intensity in these stories that confronts our placid, peace-time sensibilities. And there is a fearfulness to the judgement of God falling here in history. But if we tell God he should do more about the evil of this world and then He gives us a one-off, unrepeatable pre-figurement of His righteous judgement – we can’t then complain at His intervention! God can bring judgement. God does bring judgement. God will bring judgement.

If you read the OT you realise God is not a Rotarian. He’s not an old softy. There is blood and fire and justice to the Living God. But when you read the NT you get the same. Jesus is not Sweet. But neither does He allow us to take justice into our own hands. Jesus absorbs the fire and the justice on the cross. He sheds His own blood for His enemies and as He does so He prays “Father forgive them.” The Kingdom He brings is one of cheek-turning, enemy-forgiving, love. There is blood-shed in Christ's kingdom - but it's our own blood shed in place of our enemies. There can be no Christian genocide. That is a contradiction in terms.

On the other hand, what is it about atheism that absolutely rules out mass murder? What if it really achieved a greater goal for the species? What if it would preserve more favoured races in the struggle for survival? Is it at all possible that a mass murderer could justify their actions as consistent with a thorough-going atheism? They wouldn't win humanist of the year, that's for sure. Certainly, no atheist I know wants to do such things, nor do they want to provide any justification for it. But can such evils be perpetrated consistently within atheism? I contend that the answer is yes. Therefore the problem of genocide does not lie in millennia old Hebrew wars. It lies in the here and now. And the answer is not to jettison Jesus or His book. Instead we need to return again to the Crucified PeaceMaker.

Parasites! 14

glenscrivOctober 28, 2012September 28, 202214 Comments

It's apparently the death-knell for all theists: Parasites! Grotesque, painful, life-destroying Parasites!

Take this famous discussion of it by Stephen Fry. Parasites are proof positive that a loving God does not exist.

I was part of a debate on Thursday discussing "Is God worthy of worship?" One of our opponents, crowd-sourcing his material from eager Twitter followers, spent his talk listing some of nature's ugliest monstrosities. Horrific diseases and deformities were rattled off in quick succession. At points he played it for laughs, and he got them.

Which ought to make us think. If this is really being raised as the "problem of evil" why are comfortable westerners, sipping red wine in an Oxford College, sniggering about such horrors? Is this stuff really evil? In which case let's treat it seriously as a challenge to belief in a good God, recognising that all of us face such wickedness. Or is it not really evil? Is it just a freak-show, an object of macabre fascination, or—God forbid—an exercise in apologetic points-scoring? If it isn't actually evil, perhaps the lesson we should learn is 'Abandon all hope and adjust your expectations accordingly.' Well, ok. But a) drop the secret (or not so secret) glee regarding creation's monstrosities, b) realise you've solved the problem of evil but only by losing the right to call it "evil" and c) brace yourself for a much harder intellectual problem: the problem of good (of which, more shortly).

In all this, the greatest mis-step in the parasites conversation is to ignore (often times wilfully) the doctrine of the fall. To imagine for a moment that we can simply read God from creation is to engage in the kind of paganism roundly condemned in Scripture. As Francis Spufford says in Unapologetic:

To anyone inclined to think that nature is God, nature replies: Have a cup of pus, Mystic Boy.

The world is fallen. It is corrupted, cursed, 'knocked off its axis', disconnected from its true Life-source. To speak of parasites in the world does not put the merest dint in the Christian world-view. It only supports it.

Think about parasites. We're dealing with creatures that are, well, parasitic. In fact 5 minutes' meditation on parasites will pretty much give you the Christian doctrine of creation and fall.

These things cause monstrous perversions, hellish corruptions, wicked deviations from what should be. The disease and death they bring is not Right, it's wrong. This is not Light, it's Darkness. There is an original and ultimate life-giving source. And there is a secondary distortion which takes life.

This is the Christian doctrine of creation and fall: an original good perverted into corruption and death. Good is ultimate, Evil comes later to steal, kill and destroy. The Light is ultimate, the Darkness is a privation of the Light. First there is a straight line from which all crooked lines are corruptions.

But here’s the thing: to judge a line “crooked”, what exactly is “straight”? And if you want to avoid the conclusion that there is an Original Straightness to things, you might say “Ok, these lines aren’t definitively crooked, it’s just that everything’s messy.” Well ok, fine, but at that point you’re not wrestling with the problem of evil any more. You’re just saying “Things are messy. Stuff happens.”

And then you have to face a much greater intellectual hurdle: the problem of good. You see evil, as a secondary corruption of good, is not intellectually difficult to understand. (It's horrifically unpleasant and evokes understandably emotive reactions, but intellectually it's origins are understandable). On the other hand, Good—if it's not original and ultimate—becomes extremely difficult to explain. This is because Good and Evil are not symmetrically opposite to each other. They are like light and darkness: Light can illuminate darkness, darkness cannot darken light. Darkness is the absence or obscuring of Light in a way that is not true the other way around.

I'm speaking of light and darkness figuratively here, but they are powerful illustrations. When the Christian is asked "Where does the darkness come from?" They answer: "From a turning away from the light." When the atheist is asked "Where does the light come from?" the answer "From the darkness" seems absurdly improbable. If light does exist then it needs to be there from the beginning. But this is the Christian account of reality.

The atheists are right: parasites are powerful illustrations of the problem of evil. But they're also a perfect analogy for how evil works. It is derivative, privative, secondary. But once you've said that, you've essentially told the Christian story of the world. There's something Good and Life-giving and something came along to spoil it.

From Creation and Fall, the Christian can explain both good and evil. But if our "creation story" is effectively: "slime + struggle + selfishness" with no injection of an original Good, it's quite a stretch to end up with "selves, sentience and symphonies."

Parasites are horrible. As they work their way through the eye-ball of an 8 year old boy we are appalled. This is not simply painful, not simply ugly, not simply maladapted to life - it is wrong.

But let's also remember, parasites are parasites! There can't be parasites "all the way down". No, there is an ultimate and original Good by which to judge these things evil. And the Christian can hate this evil with a holy and almighty antipathy for we are seeing the work of God's enemy —an enemy Christ opposes with every drop of His own blood. We do not shrug our shoulders or snigger or adapt ourselves to the inevitable. We call evil evil and we fight it.

Evangelism: It aint rocket surgery 4

glenscrivOctober 1, 20124 Comments

On Saturday a friend told me he could never be much of a witness in the workplace because... (notice where his thinking begins)... if he entered into debate, he'd only end up losing the arguments. I, on the other hand, would (he imagined) wipe the floor with their non-Christian reasoning and establish the unassailable right-ness of Christian truth. And... (at this point the details became hazy)... somehow his work colleagues would then bow to the superior intellectual credibility of the gospel, and... I dunno... become Christians?

Yeah, at that point the fantasy goes completely bonkers. But the opening assumptions are powerful. And they shape the way we think about evangelism. Essentially "being a witness" at work means - in the popular Christian imagination - being able to "hold your own" in discussions of stem-cell research and providing a Christian response to Euro-zone debt. Or at least it means being able to bridge seamlessly from discussions of popular culture to gospel truths. And, frankly, few people are up to that. I'm not really up to that and I'm paid to be.

But here are some things I told my friend...

What if the goal is not to win the arguments in the workplace? What if the goal is to be the kind of work colleague who others would open up to in a crisis? Because, let's face it, the person who's good at winning arguments aint always the person you'd confide in when your life's falling apart. In fact, scratch that. They almost never are!

I think that's a vital and fundamental change that needs to happen in our thinking. The key characteristic of "a good witness" needs to be someone who hurting people can confide in. Once we're thinking in those categories, evangelism in the workplace becomes a different beast.

Now the aim is to be a person who's known as a Christian, who seems to have something different about them, who loves people, who has an integrity, an openness, a pastoral heart and who has something different to say. Note - it's not that they have to be contrary, nor that they have to be "right", nor that they have to be heard, just that when they do speak, they seem to come from a different angle than the 'wisdom of the world.' In other words - our aim in being a witness in the workplace is... wait for it... to be a Christian.

This is not to make being a witness easy. It's not (because being a Christian isn't easy). But hopefully it simplifies our aims. And now, if you want some strategies for offering distinctive speech as a Christian, how about sitting down and thinking about how you'd finish these introductory sentences...

"Yeah, that's what I love about Jesus. He's constantly..."

"To be honest, that's why I'm a Christian. What really appealed was..."

"We thought about that at my church last Sunday. There's this story in the bible where..."

"Actually my church is really different like that. When such and such happened, they responded..."

"When I suffered X, the one thing that got me through was..."

If you can't finish off those sentences, the issue is not that you're a bad evangelist. If you can't finish those sentences it's because you've forgotten what you have in Jesus. And together with a Christian friend or two, perhaps you need to remind one another. Being able to finish those sentences will do your Christian life the world of good. And, by the by, it will also help your witness.

The mouth speaks what the heart is full of. (Matthew 12:34)

Nietzsche and Christ – Terry Eagleton 15

glenscrivAugust 17, 201215 Comments

So stimulating. Read in full here.

Nietzsche claims, humanism won’t plug the gap [left by the "death of God"]. All humanism does is substitute one useless form of transcendence (Man) for another (God). The death of God therefore has to herald the death of Man as well. You can’t just swap one fetish for another. This is why the Übermensch signifies the kind of transformed humanity which would flow from genuinely accepting the death of God. It’s the reckless, exuberant, self-delighting existence of those who are able to celebrate a life without foundations – the cavalier insouciance of those spiritual aristocrats who have the courage to risk a life without guarantees. The Overman or Meta-Man is the one who can peer into the fathomless pit of the nothingness of God without being turned to stone. He (never a she, for Nietzsche) is the ecstatic creature who sings and dances at the very thought that his existence is every bit as mortal, fragile, ungrounded, arbitrary and contingent as a modernist work of art.

The only problem is that all this sounds rather like Christianity, which isn’t quite what Nietzsche had in mind. For the New Testament, as for Also sprach Zarathustra, the only good God is a dead one. For Christianity as for Nietzsche, the death of God in the figure of a tortured political criminal known as Jesus means not replacing God with humanity, but the advent of a transfigured humanity. For Christianity too, God is an abyss of sheer nothingness, absolutely no kind of entity at all, a groundless ground; and to say that we are created is to say that our existence is absolutely non-essential, that we might perfectly well have never been. Such existence is pure gift, sheer gratuity and contingency, a radical end in itself, a supreme acte gratuite – self-founding, self-grounding and self-delighting. Just as God exists for absolutely no purpose beyond himself, so human beings are fashioned to live in this way too, to be at their best when they are as gloriously pointless as a work of art. A just social order is one which would allow men and women to be in this sense ends in themselves, not means to another’s power or profit. God, as Aquinas sees, is the power that allows us to be autonomous. Thinking that faith in God puts firm foundations beneath your feet, rather than shattering them, is the delusion of fundamentalists...

So Nietzsche and Christianity, those supposedly sworn antagonists, actually agree on an embarrassing amount. (Embarrassing for Nietzsche, anyway). Nietzsche believes that we can’t be free unless we can get out from under the patriarchal Nobodaddy (as William Blake calls him) known as God. But of course the New Testament believes just the same. Seeing God as judge, patriarch and accuser is what is meant in scripture by Satan – the Satanic image of God, the God who will beat the shit out of us. And since we’re all inveterate masochists, cravenly in thrall to the Law, or to what Freud knows as the death drive, this is exactly what we secretly hanker for. We’ll gladly tear ourselves apart as long as there’s enough gratification in it for us. This is the terrible, lethal nexus of law and desire – which is also, as it happens, the chief subjectmatter of psychoanalysis. Those who are eternally trapped in this closed circuit, in which law and desire feed endlessly, fruitlessly off one another, are traditionally said to be in hell. The figure of the tortured and executed Jesus is the overthrowing of the Satanic image of God, for God as friend, lover, victim, counsel for the defence, fellow accused and flayed flesh and blood. It replaces the Satanic God not with humanity at its most triumphant, as rationalist humanism does, but with humanity at its most torn and vulnerable.

And this is what Nietzsche can’t stomach. It’s here, not over the death of God, that he and the Gospel part company most decisively. Because weakness, suffering and mortality for him are simply part of a ghoulish, morbid religious conspiracy to bring low the noble, heroic and life-affirming. He forgets that Jesus never once counsels the sick to reconcile themselves to their afflictions. On the contrary, he seems to regard such suffering as evil, and is out to abolish it. Nietzsche forgets, too, that any power which is not rooted in a solidarity with human creatureliness and fragility, with the raw fact of our bodily finitude, will never prove durable or effective enough. That this is so is one of the lessons of tragedy, an art-form which fascinated Nietzsche himself for quite different reasons.

And so in the end Nietzsche is less revolutionary than the New Testament. Like some demented health-club proprietor, he can’t stop worshipping vigour, robustness and virility, or seeing failure as sickly and shameful. Like those Americans who hate a loser, he doesn’t see that what matters is failure, not success – that Jesus is a sick joke of a Saviour, that in every human sense his mission is an embarrassing, abysmal failure, that the notion of a crucified Messiah would have been a horrendous, unspeakable scandal and blasphemy to the pious Jews of his day. In the end, Nietzsche disowns the deepest insight of tragedy – that, as W.B. Yeats puts it, ‘nothing can be sole or whole that has not been rent’.

Beginnings and Before Beginnings 13

glenscrivAugust 14, 201213 Comments

Beginnings

Charles Darwin published the Origin of the Species in 1859. Up until then, said Richard Dawkins, atheism was "logically tenable" but from Darwin onwards you could be "an intellectually fulfilled atheist." (The Blind Watchmaker). Notice that philosophy might give you tenable arguments, but biology is the place for true intellectual fulfillment... according to this biologist anyway...

With the discovery of natural selection, biologists had a naturalistic explanation for the existence of brilliantly adapted (and therefore apparently designed) species, populating an intricate and flourishing bio-sphere.

Well, for the sake of argument, let's say that the whole thing is explained according to this process (I mean it's a bit like the old saying "If all you've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail", but let's go with the argument). Let's imagine it explains the whole variation and adaptation of life on the planet. What we have here is a mechanism explaining the origin of species.

Notice first that mechanism says nothing about agency - a point John Lennox makes well in places like here.

But notice, second, that we're talking merely of the origin of species. There are other origins questions to ask. Like - the origin of the cosmos, the origin of life (natural selection assumes the existence of life) and the origin of consciousness. These are not at all suited to explanations via natural selection and yet they pose even more fundamental questions for us. So if an atheist claims to have origins questions sewn up, tell them they have, at best, a mechanism to explain one of the least interesting of the origins questions.

Before Beginnings

It's not just beginnings that are fascinating. What about before the beginnings? What are we assuming pre-existed these origins questions?

As we've just noted, natural selection assumes the pre-existence of 'life.' But when it comes to the even bigger origins questions, what about the pre-existence of things like laws of physics, logic and mathematics. Every attempted naturalistic explanation for 'beginnings' assumes plenty about 'before beginnings.' Take, for example, Hawking's book from 2 years ago which said:

"Because there is a law such as gravity, the universe can and will create itself from nothing,"

Besides the logical incoherence of the universe self-creating, we have here pre-existing 'laws'. We have an ordered, self-consistent reality calling the tune for all the cosmos. Gravity is chief among the gods as he bosses around lesser deities like time, matter and energy, which in turn war to create the cosmos as we know it.

Now Christians also have beliefs about before the beginning. We believe in the pre-existence of Persons, of love, of minds, of purpose. And these Persons have brought forth laws, time, matter and energy. It was not matter that made minds, but minds that made matter.

When you consider that every minute of our waking life we're confronted in technicolour by the reality of persons, love, minds and purpose. In fact, everything we hold dear consists of persons, love, minds and purpose. What should we believe about ultimate reality - about before beginnings? Gravity reigning as supreme being? Or love?

We shouldn't fear questions of beginnings. And we should positively pursue questions about before beginnings.

An introduction to humanism – transcript and comment 11

glenscrivJuly 30, 201211 Comments

Here's a video released today by the British Humanist Association:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZN8Ne1nmr4]

Below is the transcript with some comments from me:

An Introduction to Humanism

Rumy Hasan: It’s important to realise that one can live a fulfilling life without religion – where the focus is on human beings.

Many religions do in fact put the focus very firmly on human beings. So how is "religion" being used by you and in this video?

AC Grayling: Humanism of course is not a religion. It’s something which bases itself on a common-sensical view of the world. It’s an open-eyed view. It takes seriously the facts about human beings and their experiences and tries to do the best on that basis.

From the descriptions following, humanism sounds very much like a religion. It doesn't sound like Christianity, but, sheesh, get a load of the moralising below.

It's a good and right concern to want to be open-eyed, truth-seekers. But there are some underlying assumptions here. There's an assumption that we can un-blind ourselves from our ignorance (through clear thinking?), that we know where our blind spots lie and can get perspective (notice how Grayling claims the commonsensical high-ground - he and the humanist fraternity are the ones who see). There's also an assumption about what kind of truth lies out there. If the truth consists purely in facts to be discovered within the world by empirical studies then go for your life. But you've pre-judged what kind of truth you can discover by pre-judging what kind of truth you believe already exists.

Polly Toynbee: A humanist sees the world as infinitely precious and quite extraordinary and almost miraculous.

Of course you do. We are all worshippers who are awed by something. If you aren't awed by God, of course you're awed by the world.

Tim Minchin: I think humanism is important because having a non-superstitious world-view allows you to go about your own business, making ethical choices based on a general desire to do the most possible good.

Having gotten rid of God, the humanist can now get on with the important business of doing good. Again, this is not Christianity (which rather swaps "our goodness" for God), but it is distinctly religious in flavour.

There's an excellent comment on the video from a free-thinker, Ontologistics: "As Nietzsche showed, Humanism is part of the Christian legacy. The word "good" is bandied about in this video without explanation or sanction, because it cannot be sanctioned. A freethinker will in fact adopt a Nihilist view, as this does not require belief in some supernatural, metaphysical "good". I.e. Humanism exchanges "God" for "good", both of which are delusions. In this sense, it comes close to being a religion."

Philip Pullman: I view the world as a place where I am extremely lucky to have been born and to have a consciousness because there are so many wonderful things to be conscious of.

Well you're either absurdly lucky or there's consciousness behind the cosmos. A consciousness that arises from a mindless cosmos is quite a turn of luck indeed.

Zoe Margolis: We can be decent human beings and love and care and support each other and not expect a fantasy to fulfil our hopes and our dreams when we can actually live them in this lifetime.

Well I suppose rich westerners, if they're talented and lucky enough, can live a few, very limited dreams. But this comment seems to be a plea for dreaming smaller.

Isn’t it sad to think there is no after-life?

Andrew Copson: Some people worry that a view of death as being the total and final end of life can be depressing. They think it would be a more comforting thought that life went on. But I think, and many other humanists think, that, rather than robbing life of its meaning, giving a finality to the story of your life actually imbues it with greater meaning.

Or, put it this way: Either we are taken seriously as a creature of eternal significance in the eyes of One who gives everything meaning, or we are a rational animal soon to expire and become compost.

Richard Dawkins: If there’s something frightening about death, it’s the idea of eternity. Something about everything just going on forever and ever and ever. That’s a frightening thought. And it’s just as frightening if you’re there as if you’re not.

"If there's something frightening about death."? If? There's a disturbing lack of reality to this approach to death.

Rumy Hasan: It just means that we have this life and we make the most of it. If anything that’s a positive. So we don’t say “Ah well, you know if we muck it up in this life, we have an afterlife.” The onus is on us to lead better lives in this life.

Spoken like a true religionist.

How can humanists live ethical lives without religion?

Philip Pullman: The morality question is another one where people think, “Well we’ve got to have religion or we’ll all be immoral.” That’s a very shallow and hasty way of thinking it seems to me. There are all sorts of guides to morality.

No doubt! Some good and some bad wouldn't you say? And who's to arbitrate? Really, who?

A.C. Grayling: People often think that you can't have morals unless there is a god to enforce them somehow. Look at classical antiquity, nearly 1000 years before Christianity became the official outlook of Europe, you have people who base their morality on reason.

Sure. They base a morality on an approach to reason. But I doubt that Grayling adopts, wholesale, their morality or their account of reason.

Philip Pullman: There are enormous tracts, ranges, mountain ranges of meaning that our available to us without our needing to go to the Bible for them.

...and the Bible encourages us to explore them

Tim Minchin: I guess humanism is the beginning of a life of trying to live well and be good. And the thought that, you know, some mistranslated off-translated doctrine to tell you that that's a good way to live is not just surprising but slightly abhorrent to me. If you can have something that’s slightly abhorrent...

Again, Minchin reveals his deeply religious outlook - "trying to live well and be good." If any Christians are flirting with atheism because you can't stand the moralism of your church - take a long hard look at humanism. The only escape from moralism is the gospel!

And it's not so much that Christians need a divine command to know what's good. That's not our position. Far more we say, "'good' depends on an understanding of reality shot through with the glory of Christ." "Good" corresponds to "God" in a profoundly personal way. The good life is love of God and love of neighbour and it goes with the grain of a whole universe charged with His beauty. Nothing abhorrent here.

Rumy Hasan: The humanist views the world in a rational manner. It's wondrous, it's astonishing, awe inspiring, yes at times fearsome. But a humanist says “well let's try and understand the world”

Yes, let's try and understand the world. And in a rational manner. But rationalism will shrink your view, not expand it.

Why might a humanist hold science in particularly high regard?

Andrew Copson: If you believe that we live in a universe which is a natural phenomenon which behaves according to certain discoverable natural laws and norms then of course the only way of finding out true facts about reality is through the scientific endeavour.

Wow.

First notice the premise: "If you believe..." This is an inescapable fact of all enquiries - we're all involved in faith seeking understanding. But it's nice to see Copson admitting it.

Second, these "discoverable natural laws and norms" - do they ever make you think? Especially since they correspond to that consciousness we all love? You seem to take these as a given. Shouldn't you be more curious about the ways of this world, wondering at "laws and norms" as part of this "natural phenomenon"?

Thirdly - and most outrageously - "the only way of finding out true facts"? The only way?? For a start, this sentence has not been the outcome of the scientific method - it's the result of certain beliefs. So what the heck?? This amounts to something like: True facts are entirely the domain of the scientific endeavour (except for these self-justifying assertions that prop it up, in which case bad philosophy will do the trick nicely).

Fourthly, we see here a humanist side-lining the humanities. Humanism de-humanizes.

A.C. Grayling: Humanists hold science in very high regard because science is the careful open-minded approach to trying to understand the world and human beings in it. It's a method of critical enquiry which is always ready to change its mind when better facts come along.

Good. And in its own limited way it works well. But science is set up as a naturalistic endeavour to study naturalistic phenomena. Let's discover all the facts we can in this way. But let's never think we've discovered the totality of reality via these methods (there's also things like goodness, truth, beauty, love). And if you want to pronounce on God, you'll have to study Him via a method suited to His own self-revelation - i.e. you'll have to listen to His Word. If you won't do that, I question how ready to change your mind you really are.

Polly Toynbee: It is a method of communication from one generation to another building on layers of knowledge and layers of knowledge on a really solid foundation.

What solid foundation is that? Or should I say Whose solid foundation is that? The firm ground on which the scientific endeavour stands relies on the intelligibility of nature. The self-consistency of these laws and norms. Their consistency throughout creation. Their correspondence with our own minds. Humanists are glad for these foundations, but humanism doesn't give them to us.

Richard Dawkins: Science is not only the way to go if you want to discover the truth about something, science is also wonderful, science actually exposes how wonderful the universe is and what a wonderful privilege it is that every one of us has the opportunity to understand the universe in which we live: where we came from, why we exist and where we're going. It's just a wonderful, thrilling experience to immerse yourself in modern science. It’s a poetic experience. Science is the poetry of reality

We begin with self-refuting nonsense about science being the way to discover truth (science didn't tell him this!). We end with the flourish: "science is the poetry of reality." Garbage. Science is the appreciation of a poetry that's already there. That's a hugely important distinction. Because in the space of one sentence Dawkins has claimed science as the arbiter of truth and beauty. Stunning!

But let's get some perspective. There's truth that's out there to be discovered. There's beauty that's out there to be appreciated. And science has a role in uncovering it. But the biggest question remains - and it remains beyond the scope of scientific endeavour - what on earth is truth and beauty doing out there?

What is the humanist view on human nature?

Andrew Copson: One of the natural consequences of humanism, of the idea that the human race is one species, of the idea that every individual member of that species is a bearer of the dignity that humanity gives us, is a general spirit of inclusiveness and that’s always characterised humanist thinking.

So the human race is one species (among 15 000 other species of mammals). And apparently this confers a certain unspecified dignity on us. In fact, humanity itself confers on each one of us this undefined dignity.... How does that work then? This seems to amount to the claim that we are humans and not puffins. And every human is a human and not a puffin. And this is our basis for equality and inclusivism. To be honest, I can think of firmer foundations.

Zoe Margolis: Unlike many religions which are unfortunately about repressing sexuality and having very anti-female and homophobic perspectives, humanism offers an alternative which is actually inclusive.

Without the gospel, all inclusivism works according to a certain ethic. Some are in, some are out. You're not preaching a new inclusivism, you're just preaching a new ethic. Jesus came to bring true inclusivism - we're invited to His table as sinners (outsiders!) and, through an acknowledgement that we're all law-breakers, we're brought into true community.

A.C. Grayling: Humanists begin to think about the good and flourishing life on the basis of their best understanding of how things are for human beings. But that does not mean that it's got a particular line, a particular doctrine, that everyone has to fall in with. In fact it demands of people that they think for themselves.

I dunno A.C., some of your friends here seem to be pushing some quite particular lines. And let's face it, you all have a very firm line on the nature of humanity, the kind of truth you are seeking and the way you discover and verify it.

Polly Toynbee: We have power in our hands to make our life and our society and our world better. We don't stand to ask, there’s nobody else, no good getting on knees begging for someone else to do something, it's just up to us.

Yep. Sounds like religion to me. And a religion for the strong, the rich and the brave.

But if you're not up to the BHA's religious regime, I've got good news for you. There's a way to be a true humanist. At Christmas we sing the line "Pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus our Immanuel." Eternally our God has pledged Himself to man. Forevermore our Lord has become Man - the truly inclusive Man - the man for all humanity. And He's for you.

Some just focus on humanity, some just focus on God-myths and after-lifes - in both cases you'll lose a true vision for humanity. But in the God-Man you'll find true humanity. He will liberate you from the self-justifying burden of being good and He'll send you out into the world to rejoice in the truth and beauty that reflects His character. There is a poetry to this world, and He's the Poet.