Undeception

A Bible study I’ve been attending recently decided to go through Focus on the Family’s The Truth [sic] Project, for which I will gladly accept your condolescences, sympathy, intercessory prayer, donations, etc. This is especially awkward in that I am still altogether “in the closet” regarding the ways in which my beliefs differ from the conservative Presbyterian beliefs of the others in the Bible study (unless one of them reads this, in which case: Hi there!), but sitting through this nonsense is enough to ensure that I’ll bang my head against the wall hard enough to tumble out at some point.

Anyway, I started to blog through it, but having a flagging interest in chronicling every misguided and/or stupid statement made by Del Tackett (the host), I am foregoing that effort and directing you to my friend Mike Beidler’s review of The Truth Project series over at Rethinking the αlpha and Ωmega. But in the last episode he discussed something I hadn’t spent too much time thinking about before, and in the few days since watching it I have come across two independent rebuttals (coincidentally? hmm…) that I thought I’d share with you.

Tackett targets “assumptive language” in the educational miniseries Cosmos hosted by Carl Sagan, who begins his narration with the statement, “The cosmos is all there is, or was, or ever will be.” Notice, says Tackett, that Sagan is subtly and craftily painting God right out of the picture, because God is not part of the physical universe. I was tracking with Tackett here. Pretty slick, Carl.

Then Tackett drew a box signifying the entire material universe and called it the “cosmic cube” to illustrate that Sagan’s statement negated the possibility that anything existed outside the cube. Now, I don’t want to try to make too much of what was probably just a poorly chosen diagram, but there are certain factors that make it worthy of a serious critique. I became uncomfortable as he took great pains to elucidate how Sagan was contradicting the Real and True Bona Fide Christian Fact that God exists outside of our universe. This isn’t to say that God doesn’t intervene in our universe, but that He exists fundamentally independently of it. Atheists simply deny that anything outside the box exists; deists deny that God ever steps into the box; “supernatural naturalists” (who?) believe that some force or forces exist, but only within and as a feature of the physical universe. Tackett’s diagram looked something like this:

I do hope that you, dear Christian, don’t have a problem with this diagram. After all, it is the Christian view, whereas everything else is a deceptive, godless lie.

This is my chief problem with The Truth Project: it is everywhere assumed that there is a single, authoritative “biblical worldview” that is somehow obvious and will be universally recognized just by reading our Bibles, the interpretation of which we all agree upon. Points of divergence among different Christian traditions are ignored except where said to be indicative of an “atheistic worldview” that is opposed to God — or worse, the Bible Himself.

Is the only proper Christian view that God is external to the universe, a “wholly other” who steps in to influence and settle our affairs but remains totally separate in every meaningful sense? One thing’s for sure: this diagram does a particularly bad job of upholding the concept of omnipresence that I’m sure Tackett affirms. Moreover, it also implies that if God were to cease to exist, the universe could keep trucking along. What happened to “by him all things consist”? I ask again, is this the Christian antidote to Sagan’s reductive materialism?

The next evening while still pondering this, I ran across a quote that I ended up using for my most recent “Mondays with George MacDonald” feature. Allow me to reproduce part of it here:

I repent me of the ignorance wherein I ever said that God made man out of nothing: there is no nothing out of which to make anything; God is all in all, and he made us out of himself.

Even if, as Sagan and Moby agree, we are indeed made of stars, MacDonald would probably contend that the stars themselves are made of godstuff, at least infosfar that they, like God, exist. Coming from a man whose theology I appreciate so much, that was a weighty counterpoint for me. Considering Tackett’s view as contrasted by MacDonald’s, it’s obvious why humans are considered by certain theologies to be wholly fallen, by nature at enmity with God, and utterly incapable of anything good. (The incongruity is that this depravity seems more like a flaw in the design of the “cube” than the result of the two human progenitors’ failure. But I digress.)

Later in the same lesson, Tackett began a short discussion of the Euthyphro Dilemma: “Is piety loved by the gods because it is pious, or is it pious because it is loved by the gods?” Tackett answers it by denying both horns, asserting that God is by nature what we recognize as good; His own immutable character, which apparently just happens to be what most humans recognize as good and ideal despite our residence in the cube and our innate sinfulness, is the standard by which He judges the universe He created. Tackett contends that the laws of ethics/morality are neither based in God’s arbitrary will nor in some external code, but flow from God’s unchanging nature. I think Tackett handled this tolerably well, if only for the fact that he explicitly rejected divine command theory; still, I was not satisfied with his implication of morality being rules imposed from outside the cosmic cube upon those within the cosmic box. Couldn’t put my finger on it, but it sounded fishy.

Then, the day after I found the MacDonald quote, I stumbled upon David Withun‘s recent video, Euthyphro Dilemma Redux. I was once again fascinated by the coincidence of my own theological meanderings with the ancient beliefs of the Eastern Orthodox. Please take the time to view this short (18 min.) video.

(YouTube link)

It amazed me the relevance that this video had to that lesson of The Truth Project. The Orthodox version of panentheism (N.B. not pantheism) as explained by Withun is, to my mind, a highly preferable way of viewing God’s relation to the universe, and makes better sense of Tackett’s own rejection of the Euthyphro Dilemma: God pervades and animates the universe, and so the extent to which we grasp morality is the extent to which we are in touch with a very real ought built into the fabric of our universe — not something alien to us or our “cube”, but something that essentially composes our entire reality, including God. Anyone who lives apart from God and in opposition to His nature is what MacDonald called “a live discord, an anti-truth…an abyss of positive negation.” Or as Epimenides put it, “In Him we live and move and have our being.”

Agree or not, the views that MacDonald and Withun describe – and I do not mean to imply they are identical – have very interesting and profoundly Christian (even biblical!) things to say about the nature of God, the definitions of good and evil, and the condition of man (i.e. our default disposition toward God and His toward us). But most of those unquestioningly drinking in whatever Focus on the Family and/or Del Tackett tell them in Tackett’s Christian re-education program presumptuously titled The Truth Project are unlikely to ever hear that such views exist.

The irony of the thousands of Christians who sit and listen uncritically to someone warning them of the dangers of sitting and listening uncritically to everyone else is painfully striking. So is the irony of seeing someone placing God in a box precisely by ejecting Him from the one box He willingly fills with Himself.

And don’t get me started on Tackett’s anti-evolution, anti-postmodernism diatribes. Holy walking Jesus fish!

This last week’s episode of the Unbelievable? radio show was a rerun, but a good one to listen to (if you’re patient, that is). It was a conversation between apologist Jay Smith and atheist Stephen Pilcher concerning the so-called “Easter Challenge“: can you weave together all the NT accounts of that seminal event in Christian theology, the Resurrection?

The show goes as might be expected. Naturally, the apologist thinks he can meet the challenge. And so he tries, pulling together all the disparate accounts with different eyewitnesses, sequences of events, and other information and weaving them into a harmonized tapestry (compliments of Andy Bannister). The atheist isn’t buying it. The apologist hears all of the atheists’ objections, but he doesn’t buy them, either, because he has an explanation that can support his presupposition of the NT’s complete correspondence with actual history. On the whole it reminds me of another creative “enterprise” of affirming and concocting continuity.

Can Star Trek’s continuity over several series and movies be resolved? Despite certain hiccups (the Klingons’ foreheads, anyone?!), a devout Trekkie will tell you, “Sure, if you try hard enough.” The originators of new content were often simply not familiar enough with all the other existing content to produce a seamless narrative and probably nearly as often were aware but intentionally recast certain plot points or character details for the purposes of their current script. Convincing resolutions of continuity errors are debated among the fans, so it was welcome news when ENT finally explained why Klingons’ appearance changed between TOS and TMP. But unlike apologists, Star Trek fans realize that they’re only interested in the effort of clearing up continuity errors in order to preserve an ideal of continuity that was simply not shared by their sources (especially Gene Roddenberry). They were all functioning from within varying perspectives and emphases, and so their material differed.

Smith readily acknowledges that each NT author also had different perspectives and emphases: he clings to this, in fact, since that alone begins to account for the very different ways the Resurrection accounts are presented. But different emphases and perspectives are not enough to explain why the authors of the accounts selected testimony with so many surface incongruities with one another. As is commonly pointed out, for any given complex of confluent events such as those leading up to and following a car wreck, four eyewitnesses will most often have some conflicting testimony, and while those differences can often be explained (bad eyesight, fear of implicating themselves, etc.), they can’t always be believably explained away to be completely reconciled as independent, factual observations. Nor does anyone expect them to be, unless requirements of unfailing factual accuracy are applied ex post facto.

Ok, so the various authors were drawing on different sources, viewing them from different angles. But can we credibly account for the reasons the authors drew on those different sources, especially when they seemed to contradict one another? Yes, each author wrote for his own purpose and to his own audience, but if Luke’s explicitly stated purpose was to consult the various sources and compile them into an “orderly account”, this was his opportunity to do so for a subject of peak importance. Even if he did what he could with what he had available, it’s a shame indeed that the Holy Spirit didn’t inspire him to undertake what Andy Bannister would some two thousand years later!

Granted, if the events took place precisely as Jay Smith thinks they must have, the details could indeed be pulled apart and divvied up over the different NT authors to give us exactly what we have. And I’d like to go further and state that some of the discrepancies can indeed be plausibly accounted for or dismissed. For instance, Smith points out the weak objection that there are “men” at the tomb in Luke’s account vs. “angels” in Matthew’s: in the first century, angels were not pictured with wings, and so may not have been readily distinguishable from humans (cf. Heb 13.2). We can indeed get nit-picky to the point of nonsense if we’re consciously trying to pull apart a story (just ask a defense attorney), and many critics do. Still, how plausible is the intricate aggregation of all the rationalizations required to order to present a single unified account?

As with Star Trek, given the conviction that it all must hang together, continuity can be achieved. Square pegs can be crammed into round holes. This is why it’s hard to dissuade someone from believing in inerrancy: humans are well-suited for coming up with explanations to fit their expectations, even if it requires “explaining away”.

While admitting their own presuppositions, Jay Smith and host Justin Brierley both contended that Pilcher came to the table with certain theological presuppositions of his own. While no doubt true, I think this is mostly irrelevant for Pilcher’s view, but it is telling on the part of Smith and Brierley. As a Christian who believes that in one way or another the Resurrection occurred, my baseline theological presuppositions do not differ so very radically from the Christians on the show. What puts me closer to Pilcher’s views than Smith’s on this issue is only a difference in theological presupposition insofar as the Smith’s theology is based upon certain expectations of Scripture that I do not share.

As Justin Brierley admitted, “We come [to the Bible] with an attitude of faith, and when we see things that are contradictions we will happily say ‘yes’ to something which helps us to reconcile them.” First, notice that their faith is in the Bible, or at best, in God’s intention to give us a crystallized piece of truth (which happens to be the Bible). And so they approach the Bible with a certain expectation that is to be defended at all costs, and consequently they’ll gladly accept anything that appears to help their case, cumbersome and implausible as it may be on its own merit. On the other hand, I come to the NT accounts with an expectation that they are a collection of ancient texts consisting of differing people’s takes on a bewildering event that certainly would have easily outlasted the memory of the events surrounding it. If anything, for me this aftershock haze of refracted recollection and attempted reconstruction, which was then visualized by the theological emphases of the different Gospel narratives’ craftsmen, actually serves the purpose of focusing the lens on the event in question: the Resurrection.

If we wake up one morning to find Reuters, the AP, the New York Times, Yomiuri Shimbun, and the Times of India all reporting on the same astoundingly surprising story, will we insist upon a complete harmonization of their accounts before believing the story that induced them all to publish? Will we demand that every single story each paper publishes in their respective issues be inerrant as a condition for believing the basic event they’re recounting? In the end we may not believe their story, but it won’t be because of such unreasonable expectations as those.

No, the first century accounts of the NT do not come close to matching the reporting standards of a modern newspaper — understood, acknowledged, undisputed. But that’s kind of the point, isn’t it? Outside of a presupposition of an inerrant Bible, which I don’t at all share, why should we expect such a thing from Paul, Luke, and the other Evangelists? They wrote decades later than the events they describe, only marginally intending to solidify an already fuzzy remembrance of peripheral details, and they presented the events in ways that applied particular lessons tailored to their respective audiences.

The Easter Challenge, like so many other evangelistic atheist methods, is most successful at putting Christians on the defensive about something they really have no need to be defensive about. We don’t need inerrant, reconcilable Easter accounts in order to place hope in the Resurrection. Losing one’s faith in the Bible’s ability to perfectly convey certain facts does not require a loss of faith in the facts underlying their imperfect conveyance. It requires considerably less blind credulity on my part to believe in the event testified to in the various conflicting and competing Easter morning accounts than to bank my entire faith upon the faultless concord and historicity of those accounts. Sure, we can’t prove the Resurrection, given that the event is only recorded in a Bible that is neither inerrant nor completely consistent internally, but it’s easier to believe in that event for which no contrary evidence exists than to believe that the Bible is inerrant and completely consistent internally, a contention for which contrary evidence abounds and which requires…well, creative explanations to support it.

Luckily, Paul did not say that we had to feign or psyche ourselves into absolute certainty that God raised Jesus from the dead, or that the NT contains an inerrant account of it (what rum luck it would have been for anyone alive before the Inerrant and Completely Trustworthy Account was available!): he said that believing it in our hearts was sufficient. And that I do, continuity errors notwithstanding.

Thom Stark has just published an extensive critical review of Paul Copan’s recent book, Is God a Moral Monster? Making Sense of the Old Testament God.

And I do mean “extensive”: by page count, the review is actually longer than the original book. But most messes take longer to clean up than they do to make, don’t they?

As messes go, Copan’s book is certainly a doozie. An apologist par excellence, Copan pulls out all the stops to argue that God as pictured in the Old Testament is not in conflict with the God most Christians worship as the foundation of absolute morality. With Copan’s guide in hand, you’ll be more than equipped to do battle with non-inerrantists and other atheists who raise objections about the morality of the Old Testament:

• Q: Why did God tell the Israelites to slaughter people groups wholesale?
  A: He didn’t! Unless He did, or commanded something marginally less unconscionable, in which case it was unfortunate but necessary.
• Q: Wasn’t Torah misogynistic, responsible for the institutionalization of slavery, and the product of benighted ethnocentrism?
  A: Au contraire, the laws of Torah were wonderfully enlightened! Except when they weren’t, in which case they were the best thing going at the time.

And much, much more!

I’m trying to be light-hearted, but it’s probably coming off as snark. It’s just that I get a little annoyed whenever I talk about apologetics tactics: they’re characteristically shoddy, and do a lot better job keeping people from answering the good questions raised by outsiders than they do answering those questions for the outsiders’ benefit as advertised. It’s a pep talk for the choir and little else, yet apologists are lauded as the evangelical Christian version of real life intellectuals — which I guess kind of works in the same way that the Left Behind movie is the Christian version of a real movie.

I don’t want to uncharitably smear the motives of the leading apologists with too broad a brush; there’s far too much of that going around these days on all sides. But when you read some of Copan’s arguments it’s clear at least that even the well-intentioned occasionally let the need to make an argument get the better of their desire to make sure the argument is actually valid, whether by the requisite research or mere common sense.

Thankfully, contrary to popular opinion, apologetics and the inerrantist presuppositions they are formulated to prop up are not the only things standing between the faithful and godlessness. Our faith is only ever justified when placed in a God worth serving, a God who can indeed be found within Scripture but who would surely rather the whole thing be burned than to have people making careers out of passing off slick and ingenious (or not) justifications for every misconception about Him recorded in its pages. Further, I’d be willing to stake real money on my guess that apologetics are a more significant factor in both 1) the deconversion of people tired of pat answers and clever dismissals of hard facts and 2) the hostility toward Christianity as a system of irrational belief.

Thom’s review is more than a take-down of Copan’s book: it’s devastating for apologetics as an industry (I almost said “discipline”). Thankfully, we have all been provided easy access to the antidote:

This review may be freely distributed, reposted on your personal blogs and websites, printed off, emailed to friends and enemies, or completely ignored. If you do post it online or quote from it, please link back here or cite the source.

So once again, here’s the source: Is God a Moral Compromiser? A Critical Review of Paul Copan’s “Is God a Moral Monster?” via Religion at the Margins.