Gregory Koukl's Blog, page 92

Literature and the Gospels' Genre

C.S. Lewis is well known for being an apologist and writer. But first, he was a literature scholar. His remarks about claims that the Gospels were legend draws from his experience. He wrote this essay in 1959, and the original title was "Modern Theology and Biblical Criticism." It is still a quite timely and apt observation on the current Biblical critics:

[W]hatever these men may be as Biblical critics, I distrust them as critics. They seem to me to lack literary judgement, to be imperceptive about the very quality of the texts they are reading. It sounds a strange charge to bring against men who have been steeped in those books all their lives. But that might be just the trouble. A man who has spent his youth and manhood in the minute study of New Testament texts and of other people's studies of them, whose literary experience of those texts lacks any standard of comparison such as can only grow from a wide and deep and genial experience of literature in general, is, I should think, very likely to miss the obvious thing about them. If he tells me that something in a Gospel is legend or romance, I want to know how many legends and romances he has read, how well his palate is trained in detecting them by the flavour; not how many years he has spent on that Gospel....

I have been reading poems, romances, vision-literature, legends, myths all my life. I know what they are like. I know that not one of them is like this. Of this text there are only two possible views. Either this is reportage – though it may no doubt contain errors – pretty close up to the facts; nearly as close as Boswell. Or else, some unknown writer in the second century, without known predecessors or successors, suddenly anticipated the whole technique of modern, novelistic, realistic narrative. If it is untrue, it must be narrative of that kind. The reader who doesn't see this has simply not learned to read....

That then is my first bleat. These men ask me to believe they can read between the lines of the old texts; the evidence is their obvious inability to read (in any sense worth discussing) the lines themselves. They claim to see fern-seed and can't see an elephant ten yards way in broad daylight.

Now for my second bleat. All theology of the liberal type involves at some point – and often involves throughout – the claim that the real behavior and purpose and teaching of Christ came very rapidly to be misunderstood and misrepresented by his followers, and has been recovered or exhumed only by modern scholars.... The idea that any man or writer should be opaque to those who lived in the same culture, spoke the same language, shared the same habitual imagery and unconscious assumptions, and yet be transparent to those who have none of these advantages, is in my opinion preposterous. There is an a priori improbability in it which almost no argument and no evidence could counterbalance.

Thirdly, I find in these theologians a constant use of the principle that the miraculous does not occur. Thus any statement put into our Lord's mouth by the old texts, which, if he had really made it, would constitute a prediction of the future, is taken to have been put in after the occurrence which it seemed to predict. This is very sensible if we start by knowing that inspired prediction can never occur. Similarly in general, the rejection as unhistorical of all passages which narrate miracles is sensible if we start by knowing that the miraculous in general never occurs. Now I do not here want to discuss whether the miraculous is possible. I only want to point out that this is a purely philosophical question. Scholars, as scholars, speak on it with no more authority than anyone else. The canon 'If miraculous, then unhistorical' is one they bring to their study of the texts, not one they have learned from it. If one is speaking of authority, the united authority of all the biblical critics in the world counts here for nothing. On this they speak simply as men; men obviously influenced by, and perhaps insufficiently critical of, the spirit of the age they grew up in.

Links Mentioned on the 5/13/14 Show

The following are links that were either mentioned on this week's show or inspired by it, as posted live on the @STRtweets Twitter feed:

Beacon Hill Classical Academy
Classical Christian Education by Melinda Penner
The trivium pattern of classical education: What Is Classical Education? by Susan Wise Bauer
Can We Trade Sexual Morality for Church Growth? by Russell Moore
Who Are You to Judge? by Brett Kunkle
How Can Christians Show Love to Homosexuals? by Alan Shlemon
Rick Warren's tweet
Berkeley and Utah mission trips with Brett Kunkle
DVDs for training students: Metamorphosis, Flight, Privileged Planet, TrueU DVDs, Responding to Relativism, Tactics
Campus Conversational Surveys by Brett Kunkle
Evangelism and the Sovereignty of God by J.I. Packer (FREE audio version for the month of May)
The Heresy of Orthodoxy by Michael Kruger
Cold Case Christianity by J. Warner Wallace
The Question of Canon by Michael Kruger
Three Podcasts where Greg interviews Michael Kruger
Ten Basic Facts about the New Testament Canon that Every Christian Should Memorize by Michael Kruger
Unlocking the Mystery of Life – DVD
The Case for Christ and The Case for Faith – DVDs
Dolphins Fine and Suspend DB Don Jones for Anti-Michael Sam Tweet – CBS Sports
HGTV Fires Benham Brothers for Christian Beliefs – Christian Today
How Does the Old Testament Law Apply to Christians Today? by Greg Koukl
Christianity's Real Record by Greg Koukl (PDF)

Listen to today's show or download any archived show for free. (Find links from past shows here.)

To follow the Twitter conversation during the live show (Tuesdays 4:00–7:00 p.m. PT), use the hashtag #STRtalk.

Our Culture Persuades and Is Persuaded Not by Reason, but by Advertising

I came across a post written last year by Alastair Roberts, and though it’s specifically about how Rob Bell (and other postmodern Christians) seek to persuade others, the insight he has into Rob Bell’s style applies to a great number of people in our culture, and not just in the area of religion:

The ad man doesn’t persuade his customer by making a carefully reasoned and developed argument, but by subtly deflecting objections, evoking feelings and impressions, and directing those feelings and harnessing those impressions in a way that serves his interests. Where the lawyer argues, the ad man massages….

Advertisers can be masters of eliciting feelings and states of mind…. Vague and indefinite terms that will be filled with highly emotive states (e.g. ‘spiritual’, ‘transcendent’, ‘wonder’ – words which almost always carry great emotional resonance for any hearer) and prose that seems to be saying something profound without making much of a specific claim is fairly typical here….

I am a fan of the TV show Mad Men, set in an ad agency in 1960s New York. The show’s chief protagonist, the charismatic philanderer, Don Draper, puts this point well…‘You are the product. You, feeling something.’

The ad man knows this secret, and so do many contemporary evangelicals. Much of the time Bell isn’t trying to communicate a particular abstract theology to people. Rather, he elicits desirable emotive states from his audience and connects those with a heavily chamfered theology while tying undesirable emotive states to opposing viewpoints. All of this can be done without actually presenting a carefully reasoned and developed argument for one’s own position, or engaging closely with opposing viewpoints….

The advertiser does not make lengthy and involved arguments and those who are raised on advertising can seldom handle them.

If you listen for it, you’ll hear it—people using words as ideological tools to paint emotional images rather than to communicate objective truth, choosing those words according to their emotional connotations rather than their accurate representation of reality (e.g., try reading, not watching, recent political speeches). Roberts’s explanation for this is the key point of his post:

[T]he overwhelming majority of people today were trained in the process of making up their minds by advertisers. They also picked up the art of persuasion, not from classic texts of reason, but from advertising. As a result, many people fail to demonstrate genuine literacy in understanding and creating reasoned arguments, but are adept at producing advertising copy for their impressions. They have been taught both to process and to persuade using impressions.

So what does this mean for us? If this is how people are communicating, should we change our style to match theirs? I agree with Roberts that the answer is no:

While recognizing the power and potential uses of advertising, we need to develop a deeper understanding of the ways that it works and the manner in which it can distort our thought and discourse. As Christians, maintaining the integrity of our discourse is one of our primary duties. This duty does not merely demand an attention to the content of our discourse, but also to the weaknesses, temptations, and inclinations of our chosen forms. Is the fragmented, vague, and emotionally-oriented and disorienting discourse of advertising, with its dense maze of interlocking narratives, questions, anecdotes, quotations, images, metaphors, and suggestions, the most faithful means of communication? I don’t think that it usually is.

Read the rest of his post.

(HT: Tim Challies)

What Is Marriage Anyway?

Greg reminds us what marriage is from the biblical perspective. 

 

Remember "HANDS" When Arguing for Jesus’ Deity

Does the Bible teach that Jesus is God? Over at Come Reason's Apologetics Notes, Lenny Esposito has a summary of the acronym “HANDS” given in the book Putting Jesus in His Place: The Case for the Deity of Christ (by Rob Bowman and Ed Komoszewski):

1. Jesus shares the HONORS due only to God.

2. Jesus shares the ATTRIBUTES of God.

3. Jesus shares the NAMES that are used of God.

4. Jesus shares in the DEEDS that only God can do.

5. Jesus shares the SEAT of God—that is, Jesus sits on God's throne.

Read a brief overview of each of these categories on Lenny’s post or get all the details in Putting Jesus in His Place.

How Christianity Created Science (and Why Atheism Wouldn’t Have)

It takes some imagination to grasp how radically different ancient worldviews were from our Western perspective. Much of what we now take for granted as being common sense was not actually common throughout human history. Rather, our particular worldview was built over time on a foundation of unique ideas, and Rodney Stark, author of How the West Won, argued in a recent radio interview that it’s the Western view of God that made the biggest difference for us:

It’s pretty obvious…that the Judeo-Christian concept of God held the key to the rise of the West, and that is the belief in a rational Creator God, because that had the implication, then, that the creation was itself rational—that is to say, it obeys rules. The rules are reasonable, rational. Consequently, since humans have the ability to reason, it might be possible to discover the rules of the creation. And that was the whole basis of science.

Science only happened in the West. And the reason it happened [is] because only in the West was science plausible. Elsewhere, it was thought that the universe was eternal, that it was mystical, that it was beyond understanding and human comprehension. We could meditate on it, but we couldn’t try to discover the rules that made it work.

People like Newton believed that there were rules to be discovered, and the marvelous thing, of course, is there were rules that could be discovered.

So in one sense, the greatest scientific theory of all is that the universe is rational. And it’s been tested again and again, as people have discovered these rational rules by which everything works. That’s the key to the whole rise of the West.

Very often, atheists will lump all ancient religions together, imagining that any belief in the supernatural necessarily conjures up a chaotic, unpredictable universe in the minds of the believers. But it was actually the opposite with Christianity. It was only a belief in the biblical God that rescued people from a chaotic-universe mindset.

Atheists need to use their imaginations to strip away what our culture has unreflectively absorbed from Christianity and think about how they would see the world if Christianity had never existed.

Imagine if at the beginning of human history every human being had a naturalistic understanding of the universe—everything was thought to have come together randomly, as atoms happened to bump into atoms, with no reason for its existence. No design, no purpose to the way the universe developed. That foundational idea would have invoked not the view of today’s naturalist scientist (whose view grew out of our culture’s ancient Christian belief in an ordered universe), but a worldview every bit as chaotic as any that rested on capricious gods. Who, in a culture developing under a belief in a meaningless, random universe where something might at any moment come out of nothing, would have thought to search for rational, predictable natural laws?

An atheistic understanding of the universe does not naturally lead to the pursuit of science, nor does a supernatural view automatically lead there. Only in a culture with a belief in a rational, orderly, sovereign Creator—where it’s believed a reasonable mind is behind things—would science be likely to appear. And a look at world history backs up that conclusion.

Now let’s take this one step further: No worldview other than one with a Creator would likely have brought people to science, and yet it turns out that science is an accurate way of discovering truth about our world—that is, the scientific laws predicted by a worldview with a biblical concept of God, and unexpected in any other worldview, actually exist.

Why is that?

Challenge Response: Religion Is a Threat to Morality

Here's my response to this week's challenge:

 

Science, a Worthy Christian Vocation

"For some, the wonder may be that a monk contributed anything at all to science. Don't people in monasteries spend all their time praying, singing, and fighting off dirty thoughts? Not so the friars of the St. Thomas Monastery in Brno, the Czech Republic." Gregory Mendel, the father of genetics, entered the monastery in 1843, uneducated but intelligent. The abbott recognized his intelligence and sent him to the University of Vienna. When he returned to the monastery, he engaged in the rigorous intellectual life there. "St. Thomas was a vibrant center of science and culture. Its friars taught and researched in philosophy, mathematics, mineralogy, and botany. The library housed many scientific works."

Mendel subjected the basic observations of how attributes are inherited to scientific and mathematical rigor. He studied one trait at a time in his pea plant experiments, describing how dominant and recessive genes work. He is part of a legacy of scientists who believed God created an orderly world that we could study and know.

Lord, Liar, Lunatic...or Legend?

The first time I heard C.S. Lewis' Trilemma challenged was nearly 20 years ago. A local college professor invited Greg to speak to his philosophy class each term. The professor was a skeptic, but was happy to expose his students to good thinking even if he didn't believe what the Bible taught about Jesus. After one class period, he chatted with Greg and presented his challenge to the Trilemma. It was incomplete, he said. There is a fourth possibility: The Gospels are legends.

So there's a "quadlemma" to answer, and Tom Gilson has written an excellent new article in Touchstone. He considers this fourth possibility in an interesting way. It's not only about how a legend about a man called Jesus developed. It's about how four separate legends about a man called Jesus with a uniquely good character and great power developed independently and remarkably similar. It's easy to miscalculate what this would require, and Tom thinks it through very carefully and in an extremely helpful way.

In order for the legend hypothesis to hold water, there must be a plausible explanation for the genesis of the Gospels. Somebody—or more precisely, four somebodies—put the Gospels in writing, and they got their information, or their ideas, from somewhere. And here we encounter a remarkable thing about the story of Christ: that it was placed in its final form not just once but four times, and that each of those four final authors (or author groups) got the crucial aspect of Jesus' character—his perfect power and perfect goodness—exactly right, without flaw.

For the Gospel authors to have produced generally compatible pictures of Jesus would be no surprise: we can certainly assume that they worked interdependently, borrowing sources from each other, relying on common tradition, and so on. In the end, though, they all worked independently to some degree, and yet they all produced a character of unparalleled power and self-sacrifice, with no mar or imperfection of any sort.

The implications of this may be more profound than is commonly recognized. For there seem to be only two plausible explanations for the Gospel writings: either Jesus Christ was a real man, and the Gospel authors painted a consistent picture because they recorded his life faithfully; or he was the stuff of human invention, at least in large part, and all four sources just happened to come up with a character of moral excellence beyond any other in all history or human imagination.

According to the most skeptical scholarship, the character and story of Jesus came about through processes of legendary development. The question is, who would have been involved in that, and what must have been true of them—and is it really likely that they could have accomplished such a feat of moral and literary excellence out of whole cloth? Let's consider what this legend hypothesis calls on us to accept as true.

Read his entire article and add it to your tool kit to answer this increasingly common challenge.

More Charges of Forgery Leveled against Jesus' Wife Fragment

Not long after the papyrus and ink of the “Gospel of Jesus’ Wife” fragment were dated to AD 659-859 in refutation of accusations of forgery, new evidence has come to light that may once again point to forgery. From the New York Times:

Last month, the Harvard Theological Review published the results, saying that radiocarbon tests produced a date of 659 to 859 A.D., and examinations using a technique called micro-Raman spectroscopy found that the ink matched other papyruses that were dated from the first to the eighth centuries….

Dr. Askeland discovered among the papers published in the theological review a photograph of a small tattered square of papyrus called the “Gospel of John,” which features strikingly similar handwriting in Coptic to the Jesus’ wife fragment and was tested alongside it. Both fragments were given to Dr. King by the same owner.

It happens that Dr. Askeland wrote his Ph.D. thesis at Cambridge on the Coptic versions of John’s Gospel, so he decided to compare this square fragment with another John text called the Codex Qau, an authentic relic which was discovered in 1923 in a jar buried in an Egyptian grave site. Amazingly, the text of the small John fragment replicated every other line from a leaf of the Qau codex, and for 17 lines the breaks in the text were identical. It “defied coincidence,” he said.

Dr. Askeland’s theory is that a modern-day forger copied from a photograph of the Qua codex off the Internet. If the John text is forged, he reasons, so is the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife, which seems to be written by the same hand.

Not only that, but he found that both these John texts were written in the Lycopolitan dialect, which experts believe died out before the seventh or eighth century, when the Gospel of Jesus’ Wife was supposedly written, according to radiocarbon testing. [For another problem with the John fragment, see here.]

Dr. King herself is taking this seriously:

“This is substantive, it’s worth taking seriously, and it may point in the direction of forgery,” Karen L. King, the historian at Harvard Divinity School, said in a telephone interview, her first since the recent developments. “This is one option that should receive serious consideration, but I don’t think it’s a done deal.”

A scholar who previously supported the authenticity of the fragment also says more research needs to be done:

Malcolm Choat, a Coptic expert at Macquarie University in Australia who cautiously contradicted the doubters in his paper last month for the Harvard journal, said in an interview that the new evidence was “persuasive,” but “we’re not completely there yet” — until the John and Jesus wife papyruses can be studied in person or using high-resolution images to understand their relationship.

While nothing theological rides on such a late fragment, even if genuine, I’m still interested to see how this turns out and grateful for the public scrutiny, which I hope will discourage future forgeries.