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September 20, 2016 - June 24, 2020
Some secular thinkers have tried to explain why human rights exist. Wolterstorff writes: “Almost all secular proposals concerning the ground of human rights . . . are what one might call capacity accounts. They hold that the worth that grounds human rights supervenes on a certain capacity that human beings have . . . either the capacity for rational agency in general, or some specific form of that capacity, such as . . . the capacity for acting on an apprehension of the good.”10 In other words, it is argued that human beings have rights because of their capacity for rational choice, or some
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Drawing on the biblical teaching that every human being is created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26–27), he wrote that God’s image in us gives every person a uniqueness, it gives him worth, it gives him a dignity. And we must never forget this as a nation: there are no gradations in the image of God. Every man from a treble white to a bass black is significant on God’s keyboard, precisely because every man is made in the image of God.17
Each ideology found ways to make its respective social ideal so totalitarian as to exclude and exploit any opposed to it. This led to Adorno’s “negative dialectic” against systems of thought that were “totalizing,” that is, that claimed to be able to explain all of reality, to fix and improve all reality, and that crushed and marginalized all dissent to their account.19
Philosopher Jean-François Lyotard famously defined postmodernism as “incredulity toward metanarratives.”21 A grand narrative or metanarrative is “a totalizing [as in totalitarian] theory that aims to subsume all events, all perspectives, and all forms of knowledge in a comprehensive explanation.”22
Lyotard would include Marxism in this group, with its belief in the inevitable triumph of the working class, and so postmodernism is not popular with many on the Left.23 But he and those following him also opposed the claims of capitalism, of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market. That metanarrative dictates that people can best be understood as rational actors and consumers, and that only free enterprise will inevitably lead human beings to the most rational and efficient allocation of all assets. The market, not government, is the way to bring about prosperity and peace in the world.
To oppose these modern grand narratives, postmodernism denied any universally true values, any ability of reason to penetrate and comprehend all of reality. Rulers use truth as a form of “social control.”25 So all claims of “truth” are now perceived as being a rhetorical move by those in power to marginalize and dominate those whose criticism might diminish their hold on power.
Any attempt at all to reach consensus and peace in society was seen by Lyotard and his heirs as always oppressive to someone or some group. The great irony is that postmodernism creates its own metanarrative. As Terry Eagleton has pointed out, postmodernism is just as prone to divide the world into a binary of “white hats”—those promoting plurality, multiple, local, changeable micronarratives—and “black hats”—those espousing universal values, absolutes, and metanarratives.26 Postmodern advocates are just as “exclusive and censorious,” just as quick to demonize and marginalize opposing points
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he asks, “Is politics practicable without religion . . . without any appeal to transcendence? . . . Can a political collectivity maintain itself . . . its unity and identity, without a moment of the sacred, without religion, rituals, and something we can only call belief?” He answers, “I do not think so.”35 He adds that he has “come to this conclusion with no particular joy.”
In short, we need a “nontotalizing metanarrative,” a nonoppressive absolute.
metanarratives through their claims of truth can lead to domination, but the biblical plotline reveals “a story of God’s repeated choice of the dominated and the wretched, the powerless and the marginal.”43
The Bible begins with the book of Genesis, written when primogeniture—the passing of all the family’s wealth and estate to the eldest son—was the iron law in virtually all societies. Yet the entirety of Genesis is subversive of this cultural norm.44 God constantly chooses and works through the second sons, the ones without social power. He chooses Abel rather than Cain, Isaac rather than Ishmael, Jacob rather than Esau, Joseph rather than Reuben. And when he works with women, he does not choose women with the cultural power of beauty and sexuality. He does his saving work through old,
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It affirms that we are not fated to the way the world is presently organized. That is the premise of the ministry of Jesus: the poor, the mourning, the meek, the hungry . . . are the heirs to the kingdom (Matt. 5:3–7).45
Then in the New Testament, when Jesus Christ encounters a respected male and a socially marginal woman (John 3 and 4) or a religious leader and a tax collector (Luke 18) or a religious teacher and a fallen woman (Luke 7), it is always the moral, racial, sexual outsider and socially marginalized person who connects to Jesus most readily.
Along with this narrative of the reversal of the weak and the strong, the poor and the rich, there is a wide and deep river of ethical teaching and appeal to all believers to live justly and be agents of social justice in the world. The Old Testament prophets insist that a lack of care for the poor and needy is a sign of a lack of genuine faith in God (Isaiah 1:17; 58:6–7). The New Testament likewise teaches that a practical love for the poor is a mark of a heart changed by grace (James 2:14–17; 1 John 3: 17–18). God “raises the poor from the dust and lifts the needy from the ash heap; he
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the ultimate example of God’s working in the world was Jesus Christ, the only founder of a major religion who died in disgrace, not surrounded by all of his loving disciples but abandoned by everybody whom he cared about, including his Father. He was the victim of a miscarriage of justice and he died oppressed and helpless. Jesus Christ’s salvation comes to us through his poverty, rejection, and weakness. And Christians are not saved by summoning up their strength and accomplishing great deeds but by admitting their weakness and need for a savior.
one of the main themes of the biblical story and stories is that even some of the ablest human beings who have ever lived, such as Abraham and David, could not rise above the brutality of their own cultures nor the self-centeredness of their own hearts. But by clinging to the wondrous promise that God’s grace is given to moral failures, they triumphed.
The biblical story shows us a God who loves the downtrodden, but it does more than that. In a penetrating insight, Bauckham writes that belief in the story of salvation “also breaks the cycle by which the oppressed become oppressors in their turn.”47 In the Old Testament the Israelites are constantly warned not to oppress immigrants and racial outsiders “because you were foreigners in Egypt” (Leviticus 19:33–34). The memory of their salvation from slavery not by their own power but by God’s grace was to radically undermine their natural human inclination to domination. But, Bauckham writes,
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it is only in Jesus that we see how radically and literally God identified with the poor and oppressed. He was born to a poor family; he lived among the marginalized and outcast. His trial was a miscarriage of justice. He died violently, naked and penniless. And so the Son of God himself knew what it was like to be a victim of injustice, to stand up to a corrupt system and be killed by it. And, Christians believe, he did this to make atonement for our sins, to free us from their penalty. Christians know, then, that, in the eyes of God, we were spiritually poor and powerless—we too were aliens
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The Gospel of Jesus Christ provides a nonoppressive absolute truth, one that provides a norm outside us as a way to escape the ineffectiveness of relativism and of selfish individualism, yet one that cannot truly be used to oppress others.
Neither religion nor secularity can be demonstrably proven—they are systems of thinking and believing that need to be compared and contrasted to one another in order to determine which makes the most sense.
The volume you are reading was written to bring secular readers to a place where they might find it even sensible and desirable to explore the extensive foundations for the truth of the Christianity.
If there is no God, then either original matter sprang from nothing, or original matter has always existed without a cause, or there is an infinite regress of causes without a beginning. Each of these answers takes us out of the realm of science and the universe we know. They are nothing short of miracles, for science knows nothing of beings or physical processes that spring out of nothing or that have no beginning. Ironically, then, there is an agreement that modern science is completely insufficient to explain the existence of the world. Whatever brought it about must have been something
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But even if one accepts this somewhat tortured explanation, no one can account scientifically for the link between brain events and thoughts. Though we know that chemical processes in the brain are involved in thoughts, that does not prove that they are fully created by them. Nor has anyone shown how electrochemical events could produce what we call thoughts. So consciousness can’t be explained simply as a means to reproductive fitness, nor can anyone explain how neurochemistry produces subjective experience. Many scientists insist, however, that it is only a matter of time before we
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“Beauty has a physical effect on us that ideas alone ordinarily do not, an admixture of longing and a sense that beauty is not as enduring as it should be.” David Skeel says that this indelible sense that beauty is real, and that it reflects the universe as it ought to be but in large part is not, is “the paradox of beauty.”25
David Bentley Hart writes, when we find something intensely beautiful, it is seldom because of its utility. In fact, to find something useful is to see it as a means to an end, but to find something beautiful is different. It is marked by “utter gratuity.” It is deeply satisfying immediately, in itself, not for anything it does for us. “The beautiful presents itself to us as an entirely unwarranted, unnecessary, and yet marvelously fitting gift.”28
Paul Eddy and Gregory Boyd, in their formidable volume The Jesus Legend, point to a number of the features of the Gospel accounts—“the claims of Jesus’s identity . . . [as] that of Yahweh-God and that he should receive worship, the notion of a crucified messiah, the concept of an individual resurrection, the dullness of the disciples, the unsavory crowd Jesus attracted.” Eddy and Boyd call these all highly “embarrassing aspects” of the Jesus story for Christians. Every one of them went painfully against the grain of both Greek and Hebrew worldviews and subjected Christians to ridicule at best
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