Book Write-Up: Between One Faith and Another

Peter Kreeft.  Between One Faith and Another: Engaging Conversations on the World’s Great Religions.  IVP Books, 2017.  See here to purchase the book.

Peter Kreeft teaches philosophy at Boston College and is the author of over fifty books.  Because Kreeft has written about Christian apologetics and uses rigorous logic in his presentations that I have heard, I was expecting this book to be a critique of non-Christian religions and an argument that Christianity is superior.  I was wrong, and pleasantly surprised.

The book is a fictional dialogue among three people, all of whom participate in a religion class.  First, there is Thomas Keptic, a student.  Thomas is an exclusivist.  What that often means in this book is that Thomas believes that the truth claims of the religions are mutually irreconcilable: they cannot all be true.  Thomas is not a conservative Christian claiming that Christianity is true, however, but rather is a skeptic (get it, Thomas Ceptic) and an agnostic about religious truth claims.  He relies heavily on logic, particularly the law of non-contradiction.

Second, there is Bea Lever, another student.  She is an inclusivist, which means that she maintains that the different religions share commonalities in their practices and even, on some level, in their truth claims, and thus they are accessing a common reality.  She considers herself a Christian (her name is Bea Lever, as in “believer”), and Thomas often nitpicks her about how she can be a Christian while rejecting the exclusivism (in this case, the claim that one religion is true while others are false) that is promoted in the Bible.  Whereas Thomas relies on logic, Bea values intuition.

Third, there is Professor Fesser, who teaches the religion class.  He is somewhat of a mediator in the discussions between Thomas and Bea.  He points out the strengths and weaknesses of both sides, and he often encourages both to consider the aspects of the religions themselves, rather than continually falling back on the exclusivism-inclusivism debate.  He is called a pluralist.

The book explores the question of the definition of religion and the religious sense, and it also discusses specific religions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Zen, Confucianism, Taoism, Judaism, Islam, and Christianity.  The final chapter is about the question of whether contradictory religions can simultaneously be true.  This question recurs throughout the book, but it is the focus of the final chapter.

All three perspectives get their licks in.  That does not mean that the book is a long, acrimonious debate (though it occasionally does become heated), but rather that each side boldly defends its beliefs.  Conservative Christianity does not mercilessly mow down the other sides, in short.  Near the end, I thought that the book would go in that direction, when Professor Fesser encouraged Thomas to seriously consider Pascal’s Wager and the Lord-Liar-Lunatic argument in light of his (Thomas’) logical “either-or” perspective.  But Professor Fesser does not dwell on that, and the book ends on an inconclusive note, as if the journey, not the destination, is what is important.  In addition, while each side holds its beliefs, they also modify them, on some level: Thomas eventually sees some value in inclusivism, and Bea admits that she is not an absolute inclusivist but draws the line somewhere.

The book does not just dwell on the exclusivism-inclusivism debate, but it also delves into the peculiarities of different religions, and the diversity within them.  For example, an intriguing part of the book is when Professor Fesser explains that the co-existence of contradictions, in which prominent aspects of Hinduism believe, makes sense in light of Hindu principles about theology and cosmology.

Although the debate itself does not go in an explicitly conservative Christian direction, Kreeft, in a thoughtful introduction, explains how the three approaches fit into his own understanding of Christianity.  Kreeft is an exclusivist in that he believes that Christ is God incarnate, yet he also holds that the Logos/light enlightens everyone who comes into the world (a la John 1:9, though the meaning of that verse has been debated), meaning that non-Christian religions have at least some access to truth.  Kreeft also shares where he identifies with the three schools of thought that he addresses, and where he has reservations.

The book is worth reading, particularly on account of its rounded exploration of issues.

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher.  My review is honest!

Book Write-Up: Christ among Other Gods, by Erwin Lutzer

Erwin Lutzer.  Christ among Other Gods: A Defense of Christ in an Age of Tolerance.  Moody: 1994, 2016.  See here to buy the book.

Erwin Lutzer is senior pastor as Chicago’s Moody Church and a graduate of Dallas Theological Seminary and Loyola University.  In Christ among the Gods, Lutzer argues that Jesus Christ in the New Testament makes unique and better claims than those made by other religions.  He criticizes the Jesus Seminar and New Age portrayals of Christ, defends the historicity of Jesus’ resurrection as an indicator for the truth of Christianity, and critiques Christian inclusivism, which holds that non-Christians can go to heaven without having knowingly accepted Christ in this life.  Lutzer goes through the birth, life, death, resurrection, ascension, and return of Jesus—-not so much in a biographical sense, but more to highlight the uniqueness and authority of Jesus, present the Gospel as one of grace and not works, critique relativistic pluralism, respond to criticisms of Christian doctrines (i.e., the virgin birth), and offer eschatological speculations.  On eschatology, Lutzer forecasts that the current push towards pluralism will lead to the Antichrist religion and the stigmatization of Christians as intolerant, even dangerous.

Here are some of my thoughts about this book:

A.  Lutzer often says that the biblical Gospels reflect eyewitness testimony, but he never defends that claim.  A lot of the biblical scholarship that he cites is dated: for example, he mentions Sir William Ramsay’s conclusion that the Book of Acts is historically trustworthy, and Ramsay lived in 1852-1916!  Lutzer still makes fairly decent arguments and asks good questions: Why would the Gospel authors invent an incredible virgin birth story to counter charges that Jesus was born illegitimately (for Lutzer, they did not)?    How would the notion of Jesus’ divinity arise in a strictly monotheistic Jewish culture (for Lutzer, the answer is that Jesus actually rose from the dead)?  Lutzer’s arguments are not infallible: the Gospel authors could have been modeling Jesus’ birth on miraculous births in the Hebrew Bible, and Bart Ehrman has argued that the raw materials for seeing Jesus as divine existed in Second Temple Judaism.  Still, there may be something to Lutzer’s argument: even Bart Ehrman maintains that the disciples’ belief in Jesus’ resurrection (obtained through visions) contributed to their belief in Jesus’ divinity!

How could Lutzer have made the book better, in terms of interacting with biblical scholarship?  He could have referred to N.T. Wright’s arguments on the resurrection, Ben Witherington III’s work on Acts, and Richard Bauckham’s work on the Gospels as eyewitness testimony and the early Christian conception of Jesus as divine.  Lutzer could have cited common ground between himself and Bart Ehrman on the significance of a belief in Jesus’ resurrection in conceptions of Jesus as divine.
Granted, Lutzer’s book first came out in 1994, before a lot of these books were even written.  Still, is it too much to ask that the book contain at least some updates when it is being re-released?  The updates would not entail a lot of revision: Lutzer can still make the same points, but he would cite additional (or, in some cases, different) scholars and elaborate, in places.

B.  Did Lutzer utilize or critique sources fairly and accurately?  He probably tried to do so.  I would be interested in tracking down some of his sources and reading the quotations in context (i.e., a New Age author’s defense of the plagues in the Book of Revelation, which Lutzer ties with the Antichrist’s coming persecution of Christians).  And, while Lutzer was rather dismissive of Clark Pinnock’s open-theism, treating it as Pinnock’s wishful thinking, Lutzer did address inclusivists’ Scriptural arguments.

In a few cases, Lutzer did seem to interpret sources in light of his agenda, when the sources may have been saying something else, or promoting a different ideology.  Two examples come to mind.  First, Lutzer refers to Augustine’s statement, “O, God, demand what you will, but supply what you demand!”  Lutzer states that Augustine “understood that we do not have to fear God’s high standard as long as He meets it for us” (page 151).  Augustine did not appear to be talking about Christ’s perfect righteousness being imputed to believers in that context (Confessions, Book 9, Chapter 29), however, but rather was expressing his wish that God would make him continent.

Second, Lutzer frequently discusses his experiences at the Parliament of World Religions.  Lutzer argues that pluralism will lead to an attempt to merge the world religions together, while stigmatizing religions (like Christianity) that are narrow in their conception of truth.  But the mission statement of the Parliament of World Religions presents another picture, supporting religious diversity, rather than trying to merge religions into one.  It states: “The problem with seeking unity among religions is the risk of loss of the unique and precious character of each individual religious and spiritual tradition; this understanding is key to our framework.”

C.  Lutzer makes one argument that is effective, albeit frightening.  In critiquing Christian inclusivism, Lutzer argues that God does not necessarily act according to our conceptions of fairness.  Therefore, God may condemn non-believers to hell, even if many deem that to be unfair.  Many of us would expect a fair or loving God to deliver people from pain and catastrophe, Lutzer argues, but God does not always do that.  God also permits inequalities, as some people have more access to the truth of God than others.  Lutzer makes a good point: If there is a God, God does not always seem to be acting according to what we believe is fair, at least not in a manner that is apparent to us.  Lutzer still believes God has done beneficent things, though.

D.  Lutzer’s book was not incredibly deep.  He criticized Lessing’s statement that he would prefer a search for truth rather than having the truth, as well as people who leave Christianity in search of something deeper (in their eyes).  Lutzer seems to believe that truth and error are black and white, while characterizing Eastern religions as more open to contradictions (with exceptions).  Lutzer’s arguments are good, but they are not incredibly satisfying, from an emotional standpoint.  Sure, one needs the truth to avoid falling into a ditch, but cannot one at least sympathize with Lessing’s desire for a search for truth, an intellectual adventure of learning, growth, and exploration?  Cannot one at least understand an openness to paradox, as opposed to strict binary thinking?  Christianity itself can be deep and paradoxical, in areas!

Still, I did gain some new and interesting insights from Lutzer’s book.  For example, Lutzer raises the possibility that there may have been multiple Antichrists throughout history.  Lutzer states that Satan does not know when Christ will return, so Satan may have attempted to raise up the Antichrist in the past.  Hitler may have been an example of this, for Lutzer.  I have questions about this proposal: Hitler did not try to make peace with Israel, which Lutzer believes the Antichrist will do, in fulfillment of biblical prophecy.  Yet, Lutzer’s proposal is intriguing, and perhaps tempting for one who wants to reconcile Christianity with historical criticism of the Bible (not that Lutzer has that agenda).  Maybe people like Nero, Domitian, Hitler, etc. were Satan’s attempts to raise up the Antichrist in the past!  Could we even go before the historical Jesus Christ with this proposal, seeing Antiochus Epiphanes as a similar Antichrist figure?  Could this be a key to seeing apocalyptic literature as discussing its own historical contexts, while still being divine revelation?

I received a complimentary copy of this book from the publisher.  My review is honest!

Ramblings on Philo and "Only One Way"

In this post, I will use as my starting-point something that Philo of Alexandria says in Special Laws IV:109.  Philo of Alexandria was a first century Hellenistic Jewish thinker.  Special Laws IV:109 is part of Philo's larger discussion about the symbolism of the dietary laws in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14.

Leviticus 11:3 permits the Israelites to eat animals that have divided hooves and chew the cud.  By implication, according to Philo, the Torah prohibits the Israelites to eat land mammals that do not have divided hooves.  These prohibited animals would include those with solid, unsplit hooves, and those with toes.  (Note: Leviticus 11:27 prohibits the Israelites to eat animals that have paws.)

For Philo, each of these animals has symbolic value.  Land mammals that have divided hooves and that chew the cud, which are permitted as food, represent a lifestyle of distinguishing between good and evil (presumably in one's walk) and meditating on wisdom.  The prohibited land mammals with unsplit hooves represent a failure or unwillingness to distinguish between good and evil.  The prohibited animals with toes represent the opposite extreme: the toes represent the existence of so many options out there, that one cannot determine which path is the best. 

I can certainly identify with the problem of there being so many options out there, that it is difficult to determine which is the best.  This difficulty can apply to looking for a job or a health care plan, buying products, researching, and the list goes on and on.  There are so many dead ends.  One can be on a path and wonder if that is the best path to be on.

When I was thinking about Philo's statement about many options, I thought about passages in the New Testament. 

Jesus said in John 14:6 that he is the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to the Father but by him.  Here, Jesus is the only path to God. 

In Luke 13:24, Jesus exhorts people to strive to enter the strait gate, for many will try to enter but will not be able.  Here, the strait gate seems to represent believing in Jesus and avoiding iniquity.  Jesus in vv 25-30 envisions a time when people who were aware of Jesus when Jesus was on earth would ask to be let into the Kingdom, but they would be turned away.  They are called workers of iniquity.  The people cast out are probably the religious leaders who rejected Jesus when he was on earth.

In Matthew 7:13-14, Jesus exhorts people to enter the strait gate that leads to life.  Here, the narrow gate probably refers to obeying Jesus' teachings in the Sermon on the Mount, and avoiding false prophets.  Calling Jesus "Lord" is not enough; one needs to be on the narrow way.

There are many evangelical Christians who believe that faith in Jesus is the only path to God.  For Christian exclusivists, this implies that people of non-Christian religions do not have access to God, or they lack a genuine relationship with God.  For Christian exclusivists, they are doing to hell.

Of course, Philo did not believe in Jesus.  But did Philo have a similar view, albeit one that regarded the Torah or belief in the God of Israel as the only path to God?

Philo did believe in a right path, which includes asceticism, not being weighed down by passions, virtue, contemplation of God and nature (which is orderly), and seeing God.  Philo apparently believed that the Torah was the best exemplar of that path.  In Life of Moses 2.44, he envisions a time when the nations will abandon their customs and embrace the Torah.  Yet, Philo did acknowledge the existence of wise, virtuous people in other cultures.  In "Every Good Man Is Free" I:73-74, Philo refers to Greeks, Persians, and Indians who were virtuous, contemplative, and wise. 

Because there are different kinds of people, Philo also acknowledged that people could be on the path of truth in different ways, or at least that they could relate to that path differently.  A while back, I blogged through Erwin Goodenough's By Light, Light: The Mystic Gospel of Hellenistic Judaism.  See especially my post "Grace and Philo."  For Philo, Noah was a person who was virtuous, yet Noah failed to elevate his thoughts to the immaterial realm.  In a class that I took on Philo, I learned that, for Philo, the three patriarchs represented three different approaches to the spiritual life.  Abraham was one who gained spiritual enlightenment as a result of training and education.  Isaac had it by divine grace.  Jacob, by contrast, had to work hard to attain it and often fell, which is why he is sometimes called "Jacob" and sometimes called "Israel" (which relates to seeing God).  Philo also thought that a person's path could encompass all three of these features: a person may be learning (Abraham) and struggling (Jacob), and God could then decide to give that person divine grace (Isaac) to make the path easier----not by downgrading the path but by elevating the person and giving that person the insight and grace to walk the path successfully.

Is there only one way to God?  For exclusivist Christians, that one way is belief in Jesus.  This includes believing Jesus is God and accepting his sacrifice for forgiveness of sins.  But exclusivist Christians would acknowledge diversity among Christians who embrace that one way: Christians are at different stages and levels of understanding; they have different experiences.

For Philo, the one way, or the best way, was a spiritual path of contemplation, virtue, and asceticism.  Were beliefs unimportant in his conceptualization of that way?  Well, Philo did apparently believe that a person could walk that way without explicit belief in the God of Israel.  At the same time, he also probably held that certain Gentile beliefs and practices were inconsistent with the right way: idolatry, for example, which, according to Philo, brought the divine down to people's level and treated the natural as supernatural.  In the first century, there were Gentiles who disdained idolatry and gravitated towards an abstract or monotheistic conception of the divine.  Philo may have held that they were close to the truth, if not on the true path.  In that case, a belief in monotheism, on some level, would be important to Philo. 

Philo's focus on the true path as a way of life more than a belief system (or a system of doctrines) is tempting to me.  I often wonder: Why stress out over beliefs?  Why not focus on the righteous path itself?  John Hick emphasized the commonality among religions of a respect for the transcendent and ethics.  Could not that be the righteous path, which is manifested in various ways across religions?

Yet, the exclusivist evangelical Christian view can be tempting, too.  The fact is that we do not walk that righteous path consistently.  If a path to God were to require asceticism, rigorous contemplation, and virtue, I would fall short.  Believing in Jesus looks much easier!  That is still consistent with a righteous path, though, for it entails belief in a Jesus who himself is righteous and who encourages our righteousness through his grace towards us, the hope that he provides for us, and his teachings and example.   

Of course, things are messy.  Many of us are close to righteousness in some areas, but not in others.  I think of Jesus' statement to the scribe in Mark 12:34 after the scribe affirmed the importance of loving God and neighbor: You are not far from the Kingdom of God.

There may be one path, but different ways of being on it.  With all the subjectivity and differences among people, one can ask if that in effect means different paths.  I think there is some commonality, even if there are differences. 

Book Write-Up: While We're Far Apart, by Lynn Austin

Lynn Austin. While We’re Far Apart. Minneapolis: Bethany House, 2010. See here to buy the book.

While We’re Far Apart is set in World War II New England. Eddie Schaffer is about to go to war, and the shy Penny Goodrich, who has been infatuated with Eddie since the two of them were children, offers to take care of his kids, Esther and Peter. Peter cannot talk after his father leaves, and Esther resents Penny, thinking that Penny is trying to take the place of Esther’s late mother, Rachel, who died in an accident. Penny also has to contend with her elderly parents, who are overly protective and continually berate her. Meanwhile, there is the Schaffers’ landlord, a Jewish man named Jacob Mendel, who lost his own wife in the same accident that took Rachel Schaffer. Jacob is angry with God and has refused to attend synagogue, and so, when the local synagogue burns down after he has an argument with the rabbi, the authorities suspect him of arson. Jacob is also worried about his son, Avraham, and Avraham’s family, for Avraham went to Hungary to study at the yeshiva, and there is news that the Nazis are invading Hungary.

Mysteries emerge in the course of the book. Penny learns that she is actually adopted, and she is curious about the identity of her real mother and father. Esther and Peter know absolutely nothing about their late mother’s side of the family, and they are curious about them. Then there is the question of who burned down the synagogue. The mysteries definitely propelled my reading of the book. I especially liked the road trips that characters took in search of answers. (I think of the show, Brothers and Sisters: “Road trip! Road trip!”) The resolution that particularly surprised me concerned the burning of the synagogue: I was not surprised that one of the characters did it, but I was surprised that a certain character participated.

What most intrigued me about this book, however, was the author’s portrayal of Judaism as a path to God. Or so it seemed to me. This is an evangelical Christian book. Lynn Austin in other fictional works, and even in this one, says that the death of Christ is what brings people forgiveness. Yet, the sources of spiritual wisdom in this book were two non-Christian Jewish characters: Jacob’s rabbi, who encourages Jacob to return to faith, and Jacob himself, who finds his faith again as he helps Esther and Peter to cope with the death of their mother, and the challenges after that. I usually do not read Amazon reviews of books I have read until I have written my own review, but I wonder if any right-wing evangelicals have taken Lynn Austin to task for this.

A theological question that recurred to me as I read this book, and which comes up often when I read Lynn Austin’s books, concerns God’s activity in the world. Does God protect us and our loved ones when we pray for protection? If so, how can we account for the bad things that happen to people? Lynn Austin seems to vacillate on this: she appears to believe that God protects, but she also does not think that God is a genie who does whatever we ask. She thinks that God can bring good out of bad, and she also maintains that God respects people’s free-will, and thus they, not God, are to blame for evil. I was thinking of a point that I read in atheist Robert Price’s The Reason Driven Life: that many Christian pastors advertise that God protects people, but later they have to deal with fallout after something tragic happens to someone, and that person comes to the pastors for answers. As I read Lynn Austin’s book and saw that some people survived, and some did not, I wondered if the people who survived really did so as a result of divine protection, or if it was simply a matter of chance: that people should be happy that they are alive, for things could have easily turned out differently. I still pray for God to protect people, however, for maybe God does; plus, doing so makes me feel better. In addition, I believe that God protects me, even if I die, for I believe in an afterlife: that I am safe in God’s hands, whatever happens.

In reading this book, I learned about Raoul Wallenberg, a Swedish businessman who saved Jews from annihilation by giving them fake papers portraying them as Swedish nationals. As it did with Oscar Schindler, the Israeli government declared Wallenberg to be one of the “Righteous Among the Nations.” And so he was. So many people turned the other way or minded their own affairs when the Nazis were persecuting and killing the Jews. For someone to stick his neck out for his fellow human being was not only righteous, but heroic.

My favorite line in the book is on page 405. One of the characters is Roy, a likable, happy-go-lucky serviceman who strikes up a friendship with Penny on the bus. Penny helps Roy write love letters to Sally. Later in the book, Roy says: “I finally realized why I always had so much trouble telling Sally how I felt. It was because what I felt wasn’t love. A man in love should have no trouble at all. Even if he’s tongue-tied, he should overflow with ways to express how he feels. I never felt any of that. I was dazzled by her beauty and by the fact that she would even look twice at a guy like me.”

What I appreciated the most about this book was the development of relationships. Esther did not care for Penny and treated her shabbily for a long time, but they came to care for each other. Jacob Mendel was alone in his bitterness, until Esther, Peter, and Penny came into his life, and he did what he could to help them out.

This book won a Christy Award. No surprise there!

Book Write-Up: God's Other Children, by Bradley Malkovsky

Bradley Malkovsky.  God’s Other Children: Personal Encounters with Faith, Love, and Holiness in Sacred India.  New York: HarperOne, 2013.  See here to buy the book.

Bradley Malkovsky teaches comparative theology at the University of Notre Dame.  God’s Other Children is about his spiritual pilgrimage and his experiences in India.  Malkovsky as a teenager became a Catholic after looking for the meaning of life, but he would later observe a confidence and a wisdom among teachers and practitioners of other religions.  Malkovsky came to believe that God reveals himself to people in other religions, even though he also holds that Jesus Christ was a unique revelation of God and God’s love, that it offers the hope of God renewing the cosmos, and that liberation theology provides important insights on God’s love for the poor.  Malkovsky went to India for academic research purposes, and he interacted with Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, and Muslims while he was there.  It was also there that he met the woman who would become his wife, a woman from a Muslim family who converted to Catholicism after meeting him.

The book had a number of interesting stories and items.  It talked about the practice of the caste system even within Indian Christianity, the discrimination against the Muslim minority in India, the existence of miracles (or things that are difficult to account for naturally) within Indian Christianity and Islam, and the difference between earlier and later yoga.  According to Malkovsky, earlier yoga was about shedding the ego and getting in touch with the part of the self that was not subject to the changing material world, whereas later yoga was about getting in touch with the divine, the ground of being that pervades and underlies all. 

Malkovsky contrasts yoga and meditation with Christianity, saying that the former two emphasize hard work, whereas Christianity is about God’s gracious revelation.  Malkovsky believes that meditation can cleanse the mind, get one in touch with certain truths about oneself (even bad memories), and heighten one’s focus and sensitivity towards others and to God; at the same time, Malkovsky also attempts to justify the idea of God’s grace, that God reveals Godself freely to whomever God chooses, not necessarily in response to people’s hard work.  In addition, Malkovsky thoughtfully addresses the claim among evangelicals and some Catholics that yoga can open one up to demons.  Malkovsky does not casually dismiss that claim, for he does acknowledge that people can become spiritually proud as a result of their success with yoga, and that this can be a response to the demonic.  Yet, Malkovsky sees spiritual value in yoga.

There were two parts of the book that I particularly appreciated.  First, Malkovsky was explaining why he partakes of food that has been sacrificed to Vishnu, something that some of his fundamentalist relatives believe is wrong.  He states on page 60: “But the God to whom the coconut was offered, according to this Hindu theology, was the supreme Lord and Creator of the universe, an infinite and eternal God of mercy and love, a God who, Hindus believe, periodically incarnates into the world to relieve humanity of its suffering and to guide it to the peace of liberation…In many ways, Vi[shn]u was my God, the God of Jesus Christ.”

Second, Malkovsky discussed the views of the late Father Bede Griffiths.  For Father Bade, all are saved in Christ, and all in some way receive the benefits of Christ’s work.  Father Bede said that “The grace of Christ is present in some way to every human being from the beginning to the end.”  This is an intriguing concept, and yet I wonder if it can mesh with the opposition to idolatry throughout the Bible, or the traditional Christian practice of trying to persuade others to convert to Christianity.  Still, I do believe that non-Christians and non-Christian religions can manifest wisdom, peace, love, and humility, and that they may very well be attesting to an experience with a power greater than themselves.

This is a well-written book, and it has other stories and reflections that I have not mentioned.  Malkovsky writes as a Christian who has been informed and edified by other religions.

Book Write-Up: Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods

Gerald R. McDermott.  Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods: Christian Theology, Enlightenment Religion, and Non-Christian Faiths.  Oxford University Press, 2000.

Jonathan Edwards was an eighteenth century pastor and theologian.  Many of you may know him on account of his sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” which is a standard reading assignment in high school American literature courses.  But there was much more to Jonathan Edwards than fire and brimstone.  Edwards had thoughts about the beauty of God, and, as Gerald McDermott talks about in Jonathan Edwards Confronts the Gods, the topic of faith and reason and the role of God in non-Christian religions also were a part of Edwards’ thought.

Edwards was contending against deism, a belief in God that tended to dismiss the Bible as God’s divine revelation.  Deists believed that the truth should be available to everybody, not just Israel, the church, or those who happen to have been exposed to the Bible or Christianity.  This truth, according to them, was attained through reason. Deists also tended to believe that parts of the Bible should be accepted or rejected on the basis of their agreement with reason (or what they thought was reasonable).  Moreover, there were deists who thought that God as he was portrayed in the Bible and by Christianity was narcissistic, conceited, and obsessed with others giving him glory.

Jonathan Edwards himself supported reason, but he did not dismiss the value of special revelation.  While he believed that the truths of special revelation were reasonable, sometimes in a manner not apparent to us, he did not think that human beings could climb to certain Gospel truths solely through the use of their reason, and thus these concepts needed to be revealed by God, both through the Bible and the inward illumination of the Holy Spirit.  Edwards also noted the existence of paradox in reason and nature, and thus he did not agree with the deist belief that paradoxical things in the Bible should not be accepted because they diverge from reason.  On the question of whether God was narcissistic, Edwards maintained that God was beautiful, exuded that beauty, appreciated it within the Trinity, and desired the happiness of his creatures.

Edwards thought that even people in non-Christian cultures had some access to God’s special revelation, even if they did not have an explicit understanding of the Christian Gospel.  According to Edwards, Noah’s sons spread the truth of God throughout the world, and Israel also communicated aspects of God’s special revelation to other countries.  Edwards relied on writings that argued that there were parallels between non-Christian philosophies and religions and the Gospel: that Plato believed in the Trinity, that China talked about a Savior, etc.  While Edwards’ Reformed predecessors held that people in non-Christian religions knew of God as creator, Edwards went a step farther and posited that they knew some things about the Gospel of Jesus Christ as well, albeit in a veiled form.  Edwards maintained that people in non-Christian cultures had enough light to respond to the Gospel, even if they never read a Bible or met a Christian missionary.  Moreover, on the basis of what Edwards said about salvation in pre-Christian times and the Gentile centurion Cornelius (Acts 10), McDermott speculates that Edwards may have been open to the possibility that people who had never heard the full Gospel could be saved.  Because Edwards emphasized disposition, McDermott argues that Edwards could have believed that those in non-Christian cultures with a proper disposition to God—-those who acknowledged their sinfulness and need for divine mercy—-could receive salvation.

McDermott also explores Edwards’ attitudes towards Judaism, Islam, and Native Americans.  Edwards was a step up from the anti-Judaism of the deists, for Edwards believed that the history of Israel and her laws played a significant role in God’s plan and activity in history.  Edwards also thought that Christians were part of God’s covenant with Israel, and he looked forward to the conversion of the Jews to Christianity.    On Islam, Edwards maintained that Islam was the false prophet of the Book of Revelation, the right arm of the Antichrist (the papacy, according to him and many Puritans).  Yet, Edwards was familiar with what was in the Koran, knew that Muslims worshiped Allah rather than Muhammad (unlike some of his day), and honored the fact that Muslims believed Jesus was the Messiah.  On Native Americans, Edwards thought that they were descended from the lost ten tribes of Israel and that their religion was devil worship.  Yet, he was grateful to a Native American tribe on account of the acceptance that they extended to him when he was preaching to them, after his own church had kicked him out.

I especially appreciate McDermott’s attention to nuance.  For one, McDermott contrasts Edwards’ understandings of world religions and Greek philosophy with the world religions and Greek philosophers themselves, and he does not find their alleged parallels with Christianity to be iron-clad or particularly convincing, when they are viewed in context.  For example, regarding Chinese religion, McDermott states that “the passages that Edwards’s sources interpreted as messianic were almost certainly intended to describe the ‘superior person,’ an entire class of human beings who manifest Confucian virtue” (page 216).  While McDermott highlights the differences between non-Christian religions and philosophies and Christianity, he argues in another book that God may still play a role in non-Christian religions (see my review of that book here).  Second, McDermott had an interesting paragraph about the diversity within deism, as some deists ascribed to God a greater providential role than did other deists.

Excellent book!

Book Write-Up: Many Mansions, by Harvey Cox

Harvey Cox.  Many Mansions: A Christian’s Encounter with Other Faiths.  Boston: Beacon Press, 1988, 1992.

I first saw this book over ten years ago, when I was shelving books at Harvard Divinity School’s library.  I was a conservative Christian at the time, and, upon seeing the book’s cover, I immediately dismissed it as one of these pluralistic sorts of works that claim there are many roads to God or heaven, whereas I believed that the Scriptures were clear that there is only one path to God and the good afterlife: belief in Jesus Christ.  I did not read this book back then, but, after reading it now, I wonder how I would have responded to it had I read it back then.  Surprisingly, even from my conservative Christian perspective at the time, I probably would have appreciated a lot of what Harvey Cox had to say.

This is particularly the case on the issue of interfaith dialogue.  Cox laments that formal interfaith dialogue is often rather stale and boring.  It usually includes the liberal adherents to religions while the more conservative voices are left out.  It focuses on doctrines and rituals rather than people’s testimonies and stories.  Moreover, according to Cox, Christian participants in the dialogue are often reluctant to bring up or to stress Jesus, fearing that would set up barriers, when the irony is that many people in non-Christian religions (including the Ayatollah Khomeini—-does that name ring any bells?) actually want to talk about Jesus.  Cox also states that it is simplistic to construct interfaith dialogue in such a manner that it places Christians in one category and Hindus in another, for the fact is that there is diversity within Hinduism: some branches are intellectual, whereas others are more emotional, and a Hindu from a more emotional branch may identify more with a charismatic Christian than with a Hindu from a more intellectual branch.  That would have intrigued my conservative Christian self, for I was interested in emotion and intellect in the area of religion: I looked to conservative Christianity to feed both my emotions and my intellect.

Cox tells a lot of interesting stories and offers a number of profound insights, as he thoughtfully engages Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Liberation Theology, Marxism, Freud, and the list goes on.  I do not think that Cox successfully explains how one could bring conservative Christian voices into a constructive interfaith dialogue, however, but he does profile Christians who are rather conservative, ranging from a dispensationalist fundamentalist in Israel who baffled him immensely, to a well-read man in the Soviet Union who was very familiar with philosophy and finally settled on Russian Orthodoxy as the answer he was seeking.  The latter may be open to dialogue, whereas the former may not be, at least not the constructive sort of dialogue that Harvey Cox probably promotes!  Moreover, in the chapter on Judaism, Cox affirms his belief that Gentile Christians have been included in the commonwealth of Israel: Cox does not seem to think that Jews need to believe in Jesus to be saved, holding instead that Christianity is about the inclusion of Gentiles, not the exclusion of non-Christian Jews.  I am rather skeptical about this being Paul’s position, but, whether it is or not, I still have a question: Can a Christian who believes that Jews need to believe in Jesus to be saved participate in a constructive dialogue with a non-Christian Jew, without sacrificing his or her beliefs?  If so, how?

Good book!

Book Write-Up: Warranted Christian Belief, by Alvin Plantinga

Alvin Plantinga.  Warranted Christian Belief.  New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Alvin Plantinga is a renowned Christian philosopher.  I first heard of him when I was a student at Harvard Divinity School.  I was taking William Abraham’s class on “Crossing the Threshold of Divine Revelation,” and Professor Abraham may have mentioned to us that Plantinga was speaking at Boston College.  And so some friends and I went to Boston College to hear Alvin Plantinga.  To be honest, I did not quite know what to make of Plantinga’s lecture.  Plantinga seemed to me to be assuming the truth of Christianity, without attempting to provide it with any foundation of evidence.  My friends and I wondered if there was more to Plantinga’s ideas that we were not getting.

The next morning, I asked Professor Abraham what he thought of Plantinga’s lecture, and Professor Abraham responded that he was up late at night, taking notes, trying to unpack what Plantinga had said.  Later on in the class, Abraham gave a lecture that summarized Plantinga’s thought.  From what I remember of that lecture, Plantinga believed that Christianity was a coherent belief system, and that humans had something within them that allowed them to sense the divine.  I was later talking with a fellow student about presuppositional apologetics.  The concept did not make much sense to me, to tell you the truth: what, you just presuppose that Christianity is true?  The student replied to me that there’s more to it than that, that some of the issue relates to Christianity being a coherent belief system.  That reminded me of what Professor Abraham had said about Plantinga, and I began to suspect that Plantinga might not be the sort of apologist who seeks to rest Christianity on the foundation of evidence; rather, he might be a presuppositional apologist.

I would hear Plantinga speak again, this time at Harvard Divinity School.  To be honest, I did not understand his lecture because it was loaded with logical equations.  Years later, after I checked out Warranted Christian Belief from the library, I decided to listen to the episode of the radio program Unbelievable on which Plantinga was a guest (see here to access the link to that).  Plantinga seemed to be arguing that naturalism (a belief that excludes the supernatural) and evolution are mutually contradictory.  If there is no God, Plantinga appeared to be arguing, how can we trust our minds, which lead us to the conclusion that evolution is true?  Plantinga doubted that naturalism was sufficient to explain how we arrived at the ability to make determinations about what is true and what is false.  My impression, from reading wikipedia’s article on Plantinga’s argument and also Plantinga’s discussion of this topic in Warranted Christian Belief, is that Plantinga does not believe that fully knowing what is true is always necessary for human survival, and so he doubts that natural selection by itself can account for how we got that skill.  (My question is “Why not?”  The skill helps us to survive, even if there are things that we know that are unrelated to our survival.)  

All of that said, what are some of my thoughts about Plantinga’s Warranted Christian Belief?  Well, as with that second lecture of Plantinga’s that I heard, there were parts of the book that I did not understand, on account of the logical equations.  Moreover, I was not always paying close, intense attention to Plantinga’s analogies.  But there were many parts of the book that I did understand, and so I will comment on those.  I apologize for any misunderstandings on my part.

One topic that stood out to me in reading Plantinga’s book was foundationalism: Is there a foundation for truth-claims, particularly a foundation of evidence or logical argument?  When it comes to Christianity, does a person have warrant to accept it, or should Christianity be rejected because it appears to lack the support of logic and evidence?  Plantinga’s response seems to be that one can have warrant to accept Christianity.  According to Plantinga, Christianity, when understood properly, is a coherent and internally consistent belief system.  We have within us the ability to sense the divine, since there are times when we feel guilty or when we marvel at the majesty of God’s handiwork, and yet that ability has been clouded by our sinfulness and selfishness.  But God confirms to certain people’s hearts that Christianity is true, allowing them to see the beauty of God’s character.  This work of the Holy Spirit in people’s hearts, Plantinga argues, is what makes their belief in Christianity warranted.

But isn’t this rather subjective?  Couldn’t there be some objective evidence out there that Christianity is true, evidence that can is available to everyone, not just those God privileges to receive the internal testimony of the Holy Spirit?  Well, Plantinga does not appear to accept a lot of classical apologetic arguments, such as the one that says that we know Christianity is true because of the alleged evidence that Jesus rose from the dead.  Plantinga does not believe that argument is iron-clad.  And, against the charge that believing in God is simply accepting something that has no logical or evidentiary foundation, Plantinga appeals to philosophical skepticism.  How do we know anything is true?  Is there any solid evidence that our memories are reliable, or that the world outside of us is real?  I’m somewhat doubtful that Plantinga takes this skepticism overly seriously: after all, he says that skepticism about the reality of the outside world will not help us after we leave our study.  I’m not sure if he has some way to get us back to believing that there is a world out there that we can rationally and reliably discern: he mentions Descartes’ view that God’s existence is what assures us of this, but I could not tell if Plantinga was agreeing with Descartes here.  I should also note that Plantinga more than once challenges other views because he says that they lack evidence or logical support: he asks, for example, what the evidence is that Christians believe in God due to wish-fulfillment or insecurity.  Does Plantinga require other views to have evidence, while exempting Christianity from that requirement?

Plantinga’s belief in the inward illumination of the Holy Spirit proves to be significant in some of his other arguments.  The existence of different religious beliefs undercuts the truth of Christianity?  Hey, just because not everyone accepts Christianity, that doesn’t mean it isn’t true, Plantinga responds (albeit with sophistication).  Suffering and evil call into question the existence of a loving God?  Hey, why should a Christian disregard the illumination he or she has personally received on account of the existence of suffering and evil, as if it’s obvious that God has no reason for God’s ways of running the world?  Plantinga’s arguments here are not bad, I guess, but they strike me as rather diversionary.  For example, on pluralism, I wouldn’t say that the existence of different religions means that it’s arrogant to accept one of those religions, or by itself entails that Christianity is false.  I would, however, ask whether a loving God would judge people with eternal damnation in hell for not accepting Christianity, when it’s not obvious to them that Christianity is true, with all of the religions out there for them to choose from.  

One chapter in Plantinga’s book that I found rather disappointing was the one about the historical-critical method of interpreting the Bible.  Plantinga was attempting to show that it is not strong enough to undermine the truth of Christianity.  The chapter was all right in that it discussed the different schools of historical-criticism, but it did not seem to address one of historical-criticism’s most significant challenges: that it highlights the theological diversity of the biblical writings.  That has the potential to undermine the idea that Christianity or the Bible represent a coherent, internally-consistent belief system.  I wonder how Plantinga would address that.  Would he try to harmonize and flatten out the biblical contradictions?  Would he say that God has a purpose behind them?  Or would he say that they’re not important, since they don’t detract from the big picture, which is God’s act of salvation in Jesus Christ?

There were some cases in which the footnotes provided the most interesting discussions in the book.  For example, one question that I have when people say that God reveals his truth to people’s hearts is why there are so many Christians out there with incomplete understanding, if God is revealing the truth to them.  Why do Christians disagree with each other over doctrine, if God is revealing the truth to all of their hearts?  In one footnote, Plantinga says that we don’t entirely know what numbers are, yet we can still know that mathematics works.  For Plantinga, God is somehow at work in the hearts of Christians, revealing to them the truth, even if their understanding is incomplete and they disagree with one another.

Probably the biggest reason that I found this book valuable was its interaction with theological and philosophical thought: Kant, John Hick, Gordon Kaufman, David Hume, and the list goes on.  I learned that there are different ways that Kant has been interpreted, and that some argue that David Hume was a theist.  There were many times when I agreed with Plantinga’s evaluation of certain thinkers’ thought: for example, I have long been confused by the concept of negative theology, the notion that we can only know what God is not, not what God is.  As Plantinga notes, we cannot really escape making positive statements about God.  I also appreciated Plantinga’s argument that God can have emotions: that this does not mean that God is a passive recipient of emotional stimuli, but rather that God acts in a way that demonstrates God’s love.  I have long questioned whether theists should be so committed to a Greek philosophical conception of the divine.

But I wonder: Is Plantinga’s interaction with philosophical thought even necessary, if what is truly important is the inward illumination of the Holy Spirit?  Plantinga interacts with Kant, Hick, and Kaufman because he is trying to dispute any notion that they have shown successfully that humans cannot know anything about God.  But why care about what they think?  If a person knows God after being illuminated by the Holy Spirit, is it really important what Kant, Hick, and Kaufman say?  The person knows God, and no one can take that away from her.  Or is Plantinga interacting with these philosophers because, notwithstanding his rejection of foundationalism, he still wants to show that Christianity is a coherent belief system—-that, even if it has no evidence backing it up, it is still consistent with reason?

I’ll close this already long post by speaking briefly about the inward illumination of the Holy Spirit.  I recently listened to a sermon in which a pastor was incredulous that there were Christians who were becoming atheists.  He was skeptical that they truly knew God over the many years that they were in church, if they could simply wake up one day and conclude that God did not exist.  The thing is, there are many people who have said the sinner’s prayer, who go to church, and who try to believe in the Bible, and yet they do not know that Christianity is true.  And there are some who think that they know, but that’s only because they’ve never been exposed to sources that question it.  My hunch is that these are the sorts of Christians who become atheists.  And is that their fault?  They did what Christianity presents as the right things: accepting Jesus, going to church, reading the Bible.  If God does not come through and reveal himself to their hearts, which Plantinga says God does for certain people, is it their fault that they left Christianity and became atheists?

And does God revealing himself to people’s hearts enable them to know that God exists?  Plantinga’s argument appears to be that it does, and yet in one place he refers to John Calvin’s statement that a Christian may find himself doubting God’s love.  Doesn’t that call into question the idea that God truly reveals himself to people’s hearts?  Or maybe God does so, and yet that does not presto-chango make us perfect?

In any case, this is a good book.  It’s actually the third volume of a series that Plantinga did on warrant, so, in a sense, I jumped in at the third act of the play!  But Plantinga did mention some resources that I may want to check out, such as William Alson’s Perceiving God.     

Book Write-Up: Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions?, by Gerald R. McDermott

Gerald R. McDermott.  Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions?: Jesus, Revelation & Religious Traditions.  Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2000.

I would like to thank Intervarsity Press for my review copy of this book.

Can Evangelicals Learn from World Religions?  Professor Gerald R. McDermott answers yes.  McDermott sees examples in Scripture of God using concepts or people from non-Israelite religions to teach God’s people.  There is Abraham’s equation of the Canaanite god of Melchizedek with his own God, the ancient Israelite appropriation of the Canaanite god El, the way that God functioned as Abraham’s personal deity (a type of deity that was common in ancient Mesopotamia), and Jesus’ appeal to certain Gentiles as exemplars of faith.  McDermott looks at church history, noting times when concepts in non-Christian religions helped notorious Christian thinkers through intellectual snags, providing them with resources to arrive at reasonable explanations for puzzles in the Christian faith.  McDermott also discusses how concepts from Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism, and Islam can instruct evangelical Christians, as they highlight to evangelicals elements of Christianity that might be neglected, teach evangelicals a new way to understand and apply their tradition, or demonstrate piety and devotion to evangelicals.

Another significant feature of this book is that McDermott interacts with the question of how God might be involved in world religions.  McDermott notes that non-Christian religions have concepts that overlap with Christianity, and McDermott believes that God is somehow behind that, revealing himself to non-Christians.  Why doesn’t God provide people in non-Christian religions with a fuller revelation, rather than just dropping some concepts here-and-there that overlap with Christianity?  McDermott notes that there are times when God does provide a number of people with a revelation that is incomplete: Jesus, for example, spoke to the multitudes in parables, while offering fuller explanations to his disciples; ancient Israel had a conception of God that was incomplete, at least in comparison with the revelation in Jesus Christ.  According to McDermott, God may be using “veils to protect His pearls from being trampled by swine” (page 102), or God may be basing his level of revelation on where people are spiritually.  God may not want to reveal grace fully to some cultures, preferring instead to allow them to be in a system of salvation by works so that they can learn human inability.  McDermott also refers extensively to Jonathan Edwards, who offered reasons that God put Israel through a system of animal sacrifices rather than revealing to them grace through Jesus Christ at the outset: so that ancient Israelites could learn respect for God’s law and the necessity for atonement, whereas ancient Israelites might take God’s mercy for granted had they been permitted at that time simply to flee to God’s mercy.  Similarly, McDermott contends, God has reasons for giving an incomplete revelation of himself within non-Christian religions.

Does God reveal bits and pieces about himself within world religions to bring non-Christians to salvation?  McDermott says a couple of times that his focus in this book is revelation within world religions, not the question of whether or not non-Christians can be saved within those religions.  But McDermott does say on page 103 that “some of the religions may be providential preparations for future peoples to receive the full revelation of God in Christ” (page 103).  Whether or not McDermott believes that people in non-Christian religions can be saved with the light that God gives them, or that non-Christian religions can provide the soil for non-Christians in the afterlife to receive salvation through Jesus Christ, McDermott does appear to maintain that God’s incomplete revelation of himself in non-Christian religions may have a salvific purpose: that God could be setting the stage for future generations to receive Christ.

On some level, I have encountered the sorts of arguments that McDermott presents in other sources.  C.S. Lewis stated in his chapter “Nice People or New Men” in Mere Christianity that “There are people in other religions who are being led by God’s secret influence to concentrate on those parts of their religion which are in agreement with Christianity, and who thus belong to Christ without knowing it.”  (Not that McDermott explicitly believes that those non-Christians are saved, for he does not take a position on that in this book, but C.S. Lewis, like McDermott, talks about people in world religions responding to Christian-like themes within their own religions.)  David Marshall’s books talk about areas in which world religions overlap with Christianity.  Ron Dart, a preacher I listened to growing up, said that the sacrificial system within the Old Testament was designed to reinforce to ancient Israelites that they needed a substitutionary death to atone for their sins.  (I don’t know if I agree with Dart on this, for I don’t think there is evidence that the animals were expiating sin by dying in place of the sinners, but I don’t want to get too deeply into that topic here.)  Paul Knitter and William Placher discuss what Christians can learn from non-Christian religions, and how non-Christian religions can deepen Christians’ appreciation of themes within the Christian faith.


I cannot say, however, that McDermott’s book was boring to me, or that it was a “Been there, done that” sort of book, as far as I was concerned.  I learned from McDermott’s book about the differences between fundamentalism and evangelicalism (since I, as one who is rather liberal, tend to conflate the two), and the significance of the filoque (the idea that the Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son) to the question of whether God is involved in other religions.  I also found McDermott’s discussion of practical ways that world religions can teach evangelicals to be quite edifying.  As one who is insecure about whether people like me or not, I especially appreciated McDermott’s discussion of how certain Asian religions address what attitude one should have when one is disliked.

I was recently telling my Mom that McDermott’s book is actually one of the best books about theology that I have read as of late.  (I distinguish theology from biblical studies.)  I have been reading more liberal theologians, and their language is often dense, plus I wonder where exactly they are going with their arguments, if anywhere.  McDermott, however, managed to be deep and scholarly, and yet lucid and practical.  While some of his abstract discussions were not exactly neat (since, well, conceptualizing things accurately with all of the exceptions to the rule can be a difficult task), I did appreciate that he provided examples from church history of the sort of thing that he was talking about: Christians learning from other religions.

Do I have any disagreements with McDermott’s arguments in this book?  Well, I have questions that are rooted in some of my own outlook.  I tend to gravitate towards the historical-critical method of interpreting the Bible—-a method that interprets the biblical writings in light of their own historical contexts.  I believe that there are areas in which the historical-critical method overlaps with and diverges from McDermott’s approach.  Where the two overlap is that both essentially acknowledge that biblical religions have been influenced by other religions.  (Well, some scholars would minimize that influence, but my impression is that many biblical scholars acknowledge it.)  Where the two diverge is that historical criticism would say that we should attempt to understand the Hebrew Bible in light of its ancient Near Eastern context, while denying that we can understand it in reference to early Christianity, Asian religions, Neo-Platonism, or Islam.  My impression is that historical criticism would also treat the biblical writings as rather static—-that they meant something to their original authors and audiences, within their historical context, and that is their meaning—-whereas McDermott presents a more dynamic process in which the Spirit supposedly highlights fresh implications to the biblical writings and brings the church to newer understandings (without contradicting earlier orthodoxy).  A historical critical reading, to use an example, would probably say that the Hebrew Bible was okay with slavery, and that’s that, whereas McDermott argues that the Spirit brought the church to the realization that slavery was wrong.  McDermott also apparently disagrees with how historical criticism highlights tension within the Bible, for he believes that the Bible has a coherent narrative.

I wouldn’t exactly say that McDermott should have devoted a section to the topic of historical criticism, but I do believe that the topic is relevant to the sorts of issues that he is discussing.  How can we justify hermeneutical approaches that go beyond the historical-critical method, as McDermott's approach seems to do?  On what basis can we justify interpretations of the biblical text that don’t limit themselves to the text’s original, historical meaning?  Reader response?  Intertextuality?  McDermott's approach is arguably rather intertextual in that McDermott, as a reader, juxtaposes the Bible with the teachings of other religions, allowing the latter to influence his understanding of the former.  But, in contrast to many reader response and intertextual approaches, McDermott does not seem to locate interpretive authority in the reader, but rather he appears to believe that the Spirit helps people to interpret the text as God desires.  I find that approach rather subjective, but I do admit that McDermott's intertextuality does generate interesting thoughts.

I also question whether McDermott should be so quick to dismiss the tension within Scripture (if I am correct that he does that).  Perhaps biblical diversity has the same theological significance that McDermott sees in the existence of diverse religions throughout the world: that God is interacting with people in different ways, based on where they are.

That said, this is an excellent book.  Click here for information that Intervarsity Press provides about it.

Book Write-Up: Unapologetic Theology, by William Placher

William Placher.  Unapologetic Theology: A Christian Voice in a Pluralistic Conversation.  Louisville: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1989.

Can Christians say something of value to non-Christians in a pluralistic world, where some doubt that there is even evidence that Christianity is true?  That appears to be the question that Placher tries to tackle in this book.  Placher addresses such issues as foundationalism, the Enlightenment, relativism, postmodernism, religious dialogue, and how Christians can find religious value in the Bible, notwithstanding its historical inaccuracies.

The book is an excellent resource for those who want to read a crisp, lucid summary of significant thinkers, such as Wittgenstein, Gadamer, Rawls, and the list goes on.  I did not understand Placher's discussion of Bertrand Russell's paradox, but Placher explained everything else in a clear and accessible manner.  Plus, I can't find anything that explains Russell's paradox in a way that makes sense to me, so I probably can't blame Placher here!

Placher seeks a middle-ground between relativist postmodernism and a belief in objective truth.  Like postmodernists, Placher doubts that there is a stable foundation of evidence for much of anything, and this includes science.  Placher argues that even science contains interpretation, and that scientists stick with theories that are not entirely consistent with all of the data (and yet Placher notes that science has made progress based on theories that were later supplanted).  Placher is also critical of past attempts to find some objective standard of justice, for he believes that some of them have marginalized traditional voices while privileging Western thought.

At the same time, Placher does believe that Christians can offer something of value to non-Christian cultures, and vice-versa.  At least once, Placher mentions that humans are made in God's image, and he seems to think that this means that there is enough common ground among diverse human beings that they can talk with one another, notwithstanding their different conceptualizations of the world.  And yet, relativism remains a backdrop to Placher's discussion of dialogue.  Placher does not think that Christians can appeal to some alleged objective moral standard in speaking to people from other cultures, for those other cultures do not necessarily believe in that standard (at least not entirely).  But, according to Placher, Christians can critique practices of non-Christian cultures on the basis of the non-Christian cultures' standards, looking at places where conclusions don't follow from their premises.  And Christians can find common ground with non-Christians on such issues as social justice.  Can Christians benefit from religious dialogue, according to Placher?  Placher thinks so, for he refers to someone who argued that religious dialogue can highlight what Christians believe, as well as help Christians to correct what may be wrong or deficient in their own tradition.
Placher also discusses how Christians can find value in the Bible, notwithstanding its historical inaccuracies.  Essentially, he seems to think that Christians can appreciate the Bible as a source that presents how God and the world are, even if not all of its details are historically-accurate.

Here are some of my thoughts:

1.  I am not a hard relativist or postmodernist, for I believe that there is truth out there, and that there are times when human beings can approximate what that truth is.  Don't get me wrong: I seriously doubt that our conceptualizations of reality correspond perfectly with that reality, for there are factors such as human interpretation, human limitation in trying to describe reality, human selectivity on what facts deserve to be considered, and the vast amount of things that we just do not know.  But my impression (which is subject to correction) is that relativists and postmodernists go too far.  I believe that there are some facts, and that we can know what they are.

2.  Placher does not seem to believe in foundationalism, whereas I don't go that far.  Still, I find Placher's critiques of attempts to find an objective standard of justice or truth to be valuable.  One person may believe that he has the truth and that there is a reliable foundation for that truth, and yet how would he convince someone who does not share his truth, or even acknowledge the criteria that allegedly support his truth?  In light of that, attempts to find some "objective" standard may prove to be useless because they marginalize non-Western voices and contain a Western bias----useless, not because they are false necessarily, but because they may not be convincing to people within other cultural frameworks.  I can have a truth, and my truth can help me and maybe influence me to help others; but what good is my truth in the world of public discourse if others are not convinced by it?

3.  And yet, I have to be careful here.  While there are different cultures, I don't think that there is some brick wall of language and different conceptualizations inhibiting one culture from influencing the other, for better or for worse.  Obviously, cultures do influence one another.  Christian missionaries have had their influence, which has sometimes resulted in humanitarian reforms.  Capitalism has had its impact on the world, for good and for bad.  Admittedly, some of the influence that the West has had on other cultures has been due to force, imperialism, and gross insensitivity to the cultures.  And yet, some of these cultures have been persuaded by Western values.  And, conversely, people in the West have been influenced by Eastern cultures----consider the attraction that some Americans have towards Buddhism!

Why is this?  I think that it's because many people want certain things, and they believe that elements of other cultures can help them to get those things.  Moreover, encounter with another culture may convince them that what they are experiencing within their own culture is not the only way to do things----that there are other ways of doing things that may treat them with more dignity or give them more opportunities.  

4.  On Placher's argument regarding the Bible and history, yes, there may be something to it, but I think that more work needs to be done.  I have problems saying that, say, the non-historicity of the Exodus is no big deal theologically, when so many voices in the Bible do believe that it's a big deal, appealing to it as an example of God concretely intervening in history on behalf of the oppressed Israelites.  If we erase what were believed to be concrete examples of God's intervention in history, do we have much of a theology?  Are we just left with some general belief that God is just?  Without belief that God concretely demonstrated that justice in history, we're rather impoverished, in my opinion.  I'm not saying that my faith personally rests on the Bible being historically accurate, but I don't think that the importance of the Bible's history to theology should be casually dismissed, but should be wrestled with more.

Overall, Placher's book is good.  Like Van Harvey's The Historian and the Believer, it does an effective job dismantling other approaches, yet its own approach leaves me with questions.  As Placher and (I think) Van Harvey acknowledge, it's easier to critique other positions than it is to construct an alternative.  I have to give them credit for trying to be constructive, however, even if their approaches (as I understand them) do not entirely convince me.  

They Should Be Bigger Challenges Than They Are!

Biblical scholar Pete Enns had a post this morning entitled 5 Main Challenges to Staying Christian, and moving forward anyway (part 1).  He was basing his list on responses he got to a blog post that he wrote.  The five challenges to staying Christian are:

1.  Problems with the idea that the Bible is inerrant.
2.  The conflict between the Bible and science.
3.  God's apparent absence in the midst of suffering.
4.  Christians being jerks.
5.  Christian exclusivism.

One could take issue with how I conceptualized or phrased these challenges in summarizing them, but you can read Enns' post for yourself to see how he defines the challenges.

Someone who read the article told me that she thought that number 3 was the biggest challenge for Christians, and that a number of Christians could reconcile the other challenges in their own minds.  I found this intriguing, since 1-2 and 4-5 have been huge challenges to me in my own Christian faith.  But I think that she's right----there are many Christians who are not particularly phased by 1-2 and 4-5.

Let's look at the challenges:

1.  The Bible is inerrant.  I'm surprised that this is not a bigger challenge for Christians than it is.  After all, there are plenty of television documentaries that poke holes at a conservative Christian conception of Scripture, while highlighting the views of critical scholars.  The Internet can bring people of different persuasions together into dialogue and debate, such that a conservative Christian can be exposed to the views of an atheist or a non-Christian religious Jew.  Heck, even reading the Bible itself can expose one to its different tellings of the same stories, its contradictions, and its passages that offend today's moral sensibilities.

Why, then, is biblical inerrancy not a problem for a number of Christians?  I think there are a variety of reasons.  For one, not every Christian is aware of every challenge to biblical inerrancy.  In some cases, that's because they are busy living their lives, but there are also cases in which they're reading or listening to people who don't talk much about these challenges.  I know Christians who believe that the Old Testament's prophecies have a solid record of coming to pass, and that Jesus fulfilled a number of Old Testament prophecies.  They are not aware that there are scholars who argue that Ezekiel's prophecies about Tyre and Egypt did not come to pass, or that the Old Testament "prophecies" (supposedly) about Jesus mean something different in their original contexts than how Christians in the New Testament (and thereafter) applied them.  Come to think of it, I wasn't aware of these issues, either, until they were thrown in my face, and I was one who went to church and read the Bible.

Second, on the television documentaries, you have to admit that sometimes they posit scenarios that can easily strike a person as speculative or even ridiculous!  Even seminarians and scholars make fun of many of these documentaries about the Bible.  A conservative Christian can easily watch them and conclude that the challenges to Christianity must not be particularly strong.

Third, conservative Christians have their own set of experts.  You think the Bible contradicts itself or has errors?  Check out Gleason Archer's Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties, or read commentaries online that seek to reconcile biblical contradictions.  In a number of cases, conservative Christians go on believing because they think that their experts have come up with good answers to the objections against the Bible.  Many decide to go deeper and follow the debate further; many do not.  I wish, though, that more conservative Christians who place their faith in their experts would realize that a number of people who have problems with biblical inerrancy are well aware of what the conservative Christian experts argue and have found the arguments lacking.  I know of one conservative Christian student who was surprised to see Josh McDowell's Evidence that Demands a Verdict on his liberal professor's bookshelf.  So one can read Josh McDowell and walk away unconvinced?  Apparently so!  

2.  The conflict between the Bible and science.  I think that much of what I said for 1 applies here.  There are a number of conservative Christians who believe that creationists have answered the challenges of evolutionists while upholding Genesis 1.  Some choose to go deeper in researching the topic; some don't.
 
3.  God's apparent absence in the midst of suffering.  This challenges the faith of many Christians, but I think that a number of Christians find ways to help them to deal with suffering: to chalk it up to God's will or God's plan.  The problem is that, sometimes, the burdens get to be too great, and the usual ways of dealing with suffering become less helpful.  While a number of Christians may be able to find some way to cope with (or avoid) intellectual challenges to their faith, coping with suffering is much more difficult.

4.  Christians being jerks.  Conservative Christians can just say that Christians aren't perfect, only forgiven, or that being around jerks is a refining process that makes us more Christ-like.  Maybe they have a point, but number 4 is still a challenge to me.  For one, I wonder why many Christians are so smug about how right they are and how everyone else is wrong, when they themselves have the same flaws as others.  And, second, there are cases in which I believe that the content of Christian dogma itself encourages people to become jerks.  It's easy to get an us vs. them mindset when reading the Bible!

5.  Christian exclusivism.  I'm surprised that this isn't a bigger challenge than it is, since many Christians know and love non-Christians, even if they may live in an area that does not have too many people from other religions.  How can they make peace with the notion that these non-Christians will go to hell?  I think there are a variety of ways.  Some are satisfied with the idea that God is just to condemn them to hell.  Some hold out hope that their non-Christian family members, friends, and neighbors will accept Christ before they die.  Some may even adopt more inclusivistic versions of Christianity----and these are becoming more popular (or such is my impression).

Concluding Circle of Life

I finished James David Audlin's Circle of Life: Traditional Teachings of Native American Elders.  I have three items.

1.  On page 336, Audlin states:

"The generations to follow us will be unlike us, the Two-Minded Generation...They will not say one religion or ancestry is better than another.  They will not blindly insist on one or another way of doing things.  Rather, they will live fully as traditional people, in complete harmony with each other and all living beings."

On page 338, Audlin draws from a variety of religious traditions:

"The Talmud of Judaism teaches (in Yalkut Shim'oni): 'G-d formed Adam of dust from all over the world: yellow clay and white sand, black loam and red soil, so that the Earth can declare to no race or color of humanity that they do not belong here, that this soil is not their home.'  In the Acts of the Apostles, Peter the disciple of Jesus declares, 'I truly know that G-d pays no attention to your face [i.e., race], but in every nation those who fear G-d and do what is right are acceptable to G-d.'  The Prophet Muhammad, on whom let there be peace, is remembered for standing in respect one day as a funeral went by; according to the Hadith, when his disciples asked if he realized the deceased was a Jew, he replied, 'Was he not a living spirit?'  Lord Krishna says to Arjuna in the Bhagavad-[Gita], 'Many are the paths of humanity, but they all in the end come to me.'  The Creator created us all, and not only humans, but all living things."

I know how a number of conservative Christian apologists would respond to what Audlin is saying.  "Audlin says that one religion is not better than another, but does not he presume that his beliefs and way of doing things are better than others?"  "Audlin is quoting selectively from the religious traditions that he mentions, cherry-picking the parts that accord with his own ideology.  There are exclusivist elements of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which Audlin ignores."  I've never actually heard these words being used to critique Audlin, but I have heard or read similar words being used to critique religious pluralism.

I think that the critiques are fair, but I don't dismiss religious pluralism.  The reason is that I believe that a number of religions have wisdom and appear to advocate similar principles of spirituality, or getting in touch with the sacred.  It's important to remember that the religions have differences among each other, too, and so they're not always saying the same thing.  But there also seem to be commonalities, and I enjoyed reading Audlin because he traveled between religious traditions in seeking to communicate profound spiritual points.

2.  In reading this book, I absorbed some things and not others.  At some times, I was passively reading words and was not paying too much attention to what I was reading.  At other times, however, I was deeply absorbing what I was reading, and the pages went by quickly.  This book reminded me of Madeleine L'Engle's Crosswicks Journals and Genesis Trilogy in that it had a lot of spiritual meanderings, and that's a big reason that I enjoyed it.  On some occasions, I needed to reread a section because I felt that I had glossed over it and missed something profound.  This was true of a story that Audlin tells on pages 98-99.

In this story, there is a hunter whom many women wanted to marry, and whom many grandmothers wanted their granddaughters to marry, and yet the hunter was not interested in marrying anyone.  Rather, he was preoccupied with hunting.  One day, when he was out hunting in an unfamiliar area, he saw a beautiful woman.  He gave her some deer and they had a meal together, and he also looked at what she was weaving.  They spent the night together.  The next morning, however, the hunter looked beside him and saw in the bed a dry and shrunken body, which seemed to have been dead for a long time.  The hunter took the weaving still and returned to his tribe, wiser and sadder than he was before.  He was now seeing in all women the mystery of the woman whom he had met, and he was sensitized to the transitory nature of life.  He settled down with a woman and had a family, but he still cried whenever he "took out a bit of old, unfinished weaving".

I liked this story because of its bittersweet ending, but also on account of the man encountering a woman who lived years ago.  I enjoy time-travel stories.  Moreover, this story reminded me of an episode of The Dead Zone from Season 1, "Shaman", in which Johnny interacts with a Native American from the past in an attempt to save his tribe from a meteor (I draw from wikipedia's language here).

3.  I talked yesterday about Audlin's discussion of Native American eschatology.  I should note that Audlin has a series, Seven Novels of the Last Days, some of which are about eschatology.  I may read them sometime.

Frightening, Yet Liberating

On page 231 of Circle of Life: Traditional Teachings of Native American Elders, James David Audlin says the following about a Vietnam veteran's experience in a Native American lodge:

"I was told that one of my teachers took a Vietnam War veteran into the lodge, to help the man work through his deeply repressed anger.  During the ceremony, his anger came bursting forth in a screaming rage.  The vet told me later that, without thinking, he balled up his fist and swung it at our medicine man friend.  He felt a hand grab his wrist, forestalling the blow, and hold it still with a great strength the vet could not break----until the anger slowly dissipated.  After the ceremony, he asked the medicine man how he was able to see the punch coming in the dark and grab his wrist in time.  The medicine man replied, 'I didn't.'  Again, it was clearly the spirits."

A number of conservative Christians, were they to accept that story as having occurred, would probably say that the spirits were demons.  But why should we assume that?  Jesus denied that he was casting out demons through the power of Beelzebub because Beelzebub would not undermine his own kingdom by enabling Jesus to perform exorcisms.  Well, in that story that Audlin tells, the spirits are helping a man to let go of his bitterness and anger.  They are doing good, in short.  Why would demons undermine Satan's own kingdom by helping a man to be released from his emotional pain?  So how could one account for the spirits, from a Christian perspective.  Perhaps they were angels.

That's not to say that I want to mess around with the supernatural realm, for I actually do fear demons.  Perhaps that's because I was raised to do so, coupled with the frightening stories that I have heard about the supernatural.  But Audlin talks at great length about how one should not approach the supernatural flippantly, for approaching the supernatural often entails protocol and cleansing, plus the supernatural is frightening.  And yet, there is a freedom and a release that come when one experiences the supernatural (at least certain elements of it).  Is that not like the God of the Bible, in certain respects?  Could the same God be interacting with people of different religions?

Can Religious Truth-Claims Be Verified?

I finished Paul Knitter's No Other Name?  A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes Toward the World Religions.  In this post, I'll use as my starting-point something that Knitter says on page 269:

"[Alan Race and I] both agree that religious truth-claims can be made only in the actual praxis of dialogue and that whatever claims are made, the mystery encompassing humanity will always be more than any religious truth can express.  Race, however, insists that the criterion for verifying truth-claims within dialogue can be only subjective; any further verification can come only 'eschatologically'...The criteria I have drawn from Jung and from the liberation theologians try to reach beyond such subjectivism; they are intended to examine whether the 'vision of life' of a religion actually promotes the psychological welfare and the liberation of both individuals and societies.  Such criteria, it is hoped, can be applied now, in this ambiguous and ever incomplete course of history, and do not have to wait for some kind of eschatological judgment at the end of time."

How can we verify whether religious truth-claims are true or false?  Apparently, the view of Alan Race is that we really cannot in this day and age, but we have to wait for God to reveal himself to everyone at the end of history.  (Or so I am interpreting Race, based on what Knitter says.)  But Knitter believes that we actually can evaluate religious truth claims.  Do they promote psychological health and individual and societal liberation?  If so, then, according to Knitter, those religious truth claims are true.

I should make a note about religion and psychological welfare.  When I think about this issue, my initial impulse is to say that religious truth-claims that comfort me are true, whereas those that do not comfort me are false.  Overall, I wouldn't throw this criterion totally out of the window.  But I don't consider it to be the end-all-be-all.  On page 69, when Knitter is summarizing Jung's view on religious truth-claims and psychological health, Knitter states: "If religion is a crutch, if it does not allow us to assume responsibility for our own lives...then its truth must be seriously doubted."  The notion that I should passively wait for God to do stuff for me may comfort me, but that does not make the notion true or psychologically healthy.

So what can I say about the views of Race and Knitter?  Do I agree with Race that we need an eschatological revelation to know for sure what religious truth-claims are correct?  Or do I agree with Knitter that, on some level, we can evaluate religious truth-claims in the here and now, according to whether they promote psychological health and individual and societal liberation?  I think about one relative I have, whose worldview has elements of both.  On the one hand, he does not believe that God in this day and age judges people according to what religion they accept (if any), for he does not think that there is any clear evidence that one religion is right while others are wrong.  On the other hand, he himself is a Christian, and one reason is that he feels that he has experienced God through Christianity, and that he has seen that Christian morality works better for him and makes more sense to him than other worldviews.

I have to admit that there are religious truth-claims that work for many people.  The thing is, some of them are based on things that (in my opinion) cannot be verified in the here and now.  For example, I can have inner peace if I accept the idea that Christ defeated death and the devil by rising from the dead.  But, in my opinion, there is no proof that Christ rose from the dead.  So there's a sense in which even certain religious truth-claims that give Christians comfort, courage, hope, and even inspiration to pursue liberation need eschatological verification for us to know that they are true.

But my impression is that, for Knitter, eschatology may not be overly important.  I'm open to correction on this, but he seems to me to be rather utopian about humans' ability to get together and effect justice, as opposed to despairing in the human ability to do so and waiting for Christ to come back to bring about a paradise.  As I read Knitter's book, there was a part of me that had chills.  Why?  Because, over my life, I've been influenced by an eschatological mindset that regards people coming together to create a one-world government as the Beast system of Revelation 13.  Moreover, I was raised to believe in original sin, the idea that humans are corrupt and thus cannot create a utopia on their own.  I don't take this in the direction of saying that I shouldn't help the poor, even through support for certain political policies.  But I tend to regard globalist language as frightening, and optimism as naive and sappy.  Maybe I'm wrong on this.  Or perhaps I can believe that positive social change is possible, while also holding to a degree of realism.

Seeing the Elephant

For my write-up today on Paul Knitter's No Other Name?  A Critical Survey of Christian Attitudes Toward the World Religions, I'll comment on points that Knitter makes on page 221 and page 229.
On page 221, Knitter states the following:

"More concretely, the Christian doctrine of the trinity needs the Islamic insistence on divine oneness; the impersonal emptiness of Buddhism needs the Christian experience of the divine Thou; the Christian teaching on the distinction between the ultimate and the finite needs the Hindu insight into the nonduality between Brahma and atman; the prophetic-praxis oriented content of the Judeo-Christian tradition needs the Eastern stress on personal contemplation and 'acting without seeking the fruits of action.'"

On page 229, Knitter states: "A global practical theology is telling Christian social prophets that they must be more contemplative, and Eastern mystics that they must be more prophetic.  As John A.T. Robinson concluded from his passing over to Hinduism: 'The mystical center needs the prophetic center if it is not to become airborne....But equally the prophetic center needs the mystical center if it is not to become arrogant, narrow, and unlovely."

There's a lot of wisdom in what John A.T. Robinson is saying.  There are advocates of social justice who are arrogant, self-righteous, condescending, and unhappy, and why not?  They're concerned about injustice and how it is hurting and killing vulnerable people, and yet they live in a world that is unjust, where a number of people do not share their concerns.  And then there are mystical people who sit around staring at their navels without accomplishing any concrete good in the world.  But they themselves are taming their inward beasts, as they become more patient and understanding of themselves and of others.  As Robinson astutely affirms, both a concern for social justice and self-reflection are good to have.

That said, I'd like to comment on what Knitter says about inter-religious dialogue in the passages that I just mentioned.  Many of you have probably heard the story of the blind men and the elephant (see here), in which blind men are feeling different parts of the elephant and disagree about what it is that they are touching.  The blind man who is feeling the elephant's leg believes that he's touching a pillar, the one feeling the elephant's tail thinks that he's touching a rope, and so on.  The lesson of the story is that, by talking with one another, the blind men can get a fuller picture of what it is that they all are touching, and perhaps they would then realize that it's an elephant.

The story has been said to be a parable that supports relativism or religious pluralism, but I can understand the argument of critics that this is not so.  The story does not appear to be saying that each blind man is correct according to his own point of view; rather, the story is saying that there is a truth out there (the elephant), all the blind men have the wrong idea, and that only by talking with one another and bringing their experiences to the table can they arrive at the truth of what it is that they are touching.

Knitter believes that he sees the elephant.  Granted, he says that we should all be humble as we realize that we do not have the full truth, and thus we should be open to learning.  But he seems to have an idea in his mind about what the conclusions of inter-religious dialogue should be, and where the world religions are right and wrong.  Perhaps he makes good points: As I said above, I'm all in favor of balancing the prophetic with the mystical.  And I also see value in viewing everything as one, while also respecting individuality.  But I think that it would be presumptuous for a Christian to tell a Buddhist that he needs to recognize a divine Thou.  Maybe the Buddhist does not want to recognize a divine Thou because he's a Buddhist and has a more impersonal conception of the transcendent.  Is Knitter interested in letting Christians be Christians and Buddhists be Buddhists, or does he want everyone to convert to his own conception of what religion should be?

I suppose that the way that I would approach this issue is to be open myself to what other religions can teach me, while realizing that others are free to be open or closed to the lessons of my religion.  At the same time, I would feel free to explain why I believe that elements of my religion are so valuable----why I think that a personal God is important, why I am committed to social justice, why I feel that apathy regarding social justice has disastrous consequences, etc.  Perhaps my approach of listening and trying to persuade overlaps in areas with Knitter's conception of inter-religious dialogue.