How Many Christians are there in China?


Since Mao Zedong died in 1976 and the Cultural Revolution ended, no country on Earth has changed more dramatically and significantly than China. When I first visited Canton in 1984, crowds would gather around us every time we stopped to buy oranges in the street. We stayed in a dorm for 6 yuan a head -- less than a dollar in today's money. The streets were full of bicycles, which marked Canton as a prosperous city.

Over the past twenty years, China has followed the upward economic growth curve pioneered by Japan, then Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore before it.

Christianity has spread in China at a rapid pace as well. There has been much debate over how many Christians there are in China. The official figure is some 20 million, but popular rumors, often ascribed to some government official, often put the number at over 100 million. (Even the figure of 200 million is thrown around.) Loren Cunningham, founder of Youth With a Mission, has cited 110 million: when I challenged that figure, he said he obtained it from David Barrett, editor of the World Christian Encyclopedia, whose numbers are often cited as authoritative. Two years ago, The Economist bandied about a figure of 130 million.

My own view, based on travel throughout China in dozens of visits, and two longer-term stays, and study of the data, has been that a figure of 50-70 million, for Protestants and Catholics combined, is probably closer to the mark.

Figures of over 100 million seem to me to fly in the face of reality. Even in cities like Wenzhou, the "Jerusalem of China," one sees about three temples for every church. When I ask people their religion, that seems about the right proportion. Even in Henan Province, thought to be quite a citadel of Christianity, most young people seem to be "hand-me-down" skeptics. And there are vast areas of China -- Sichuan, Guangxi, Hunan, some parts of Yunnan -- where Christians remain fairly rare. (Though that may be changing.)

Last year, Baylor's Institute for Studies of Religion completed an exhaustive survey of religious belief in China. Sponsored by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation, and guided by Carson Mencken (who kindly sent me a copy of the report), Byron Johnson, and Rodney Stark. The study involved more than 7,000 respondents.

At first glance, the results yield a surprisingly low number of Christians, and a surprisingly high percentage of unbelievers. Only 2.7% of respondents described themselves as Protestant or Catholic. 17% called themselves Buddhists, and 77% claimed to have no religious beliefs. (Only 1% claimed other religions -- Daoism, Confucianism, and Islam included.)

The number of Christians appeared low to the researchers, too, so they commissioned a second survey to test the response rates of people whose religious identify they knew. They found that two thirds of Christians refused to answer the survey, while only one third of non-Christians refused.

Adjusting the data according to this bias, it appears that there are about 70+ million Christians in China today. (This includes Protestants and Catholics, also nominal believers and cultists. It may also be based on adult response, then include children in the total -- I'll have to see how they extrapolated. If so, this procedure would probably be less valid in China than in countries where children of believers generally go to church, and the true number might be a bit lower.)

I haven't had a chance to study the numbers in detail, yet, but I guess the number of Muslims here also seems too low. "Taoist" and "Confucianist" are vague terms -- often people who call themselves "Buddhist" have been as much influenced by these, or folk religions, as formal Buddhism. Most likely the number of committed and informed believers in Buddhism, in any recognizable sense, is a small percentage of the supposed 17%, while many included in that number would more accurately be described as followers of folk religion.

The survey showed that women were 2.3 times more likely to call themselves Christians than men. That seems a bit high to me, though there certainly has been a remarkable "people movement" among elderly ladies! Probably men (and young people) more often refuse to respond, since religious faith would be more of a stigma for men.

All in all, the survey confirmed what those who have been involved with China for a long time recognize: communism has had a real and lasting effect on how Chinese see the world. The country is still something of a spiritual desert. Compared to those in the West, who often convert away from Christianity and have conceived a great distaste for it, many of China's "agnostics" are conventional in their second-hand skepticism, and in many cases seem open to changing their minds. Most regions of China with few Christians (aside from Guangdong), also seem to have few "Buddhists," apparently because of the latent winter-like effect of Maoism on all spiritual shoots. It seems, though, that the winter may soon be over, and the desert about to bloom.

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(photos: (1) a large rural church near Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province, one of many; (2) a believer in the same area, some 20 years ago, telling me how the Gospel had spread through miracles from village to village; (3) John 3:16 in stylized Chinese, on the wall of a church in Wuhan, Hubei; (4) White Horse Temple, founded outside the capital of China near modern Luoyang, in 68 AD, the oldest official Buddhist temple in China, though the present buildings are more recent.)

The Loftrino

The Loftrino: New Meme Isolated

Fort Wayne, Indiana: Scientists here have isolated a new fundamental memetic particle with a remarkable set of properties. Called the loftrino, after atheist writer John Loftus, the particle has a large negative probative mass, (it can prove some 46 times the opposite of whatever it claims), seems to always be in motion, was produced in an imaginary epoch called the Enlightenment, and can never be destroyed by outside action, no matter how long or fiercely you bombard it with facts. The loftrino has been observed traveling through two thousand years of Christian history, without being swayed by the gravitational pull of facts, the informed opinion of historians, or even the evident sequence of events.

The particle was isolated last week when, in a demonstration, John Loftus posted a graph of the purported baneful influence of Christianity on science. This graph shows seven distinct eras in the history of science: (1) Egyptian, (2) Greek, (3) Roman, (4) "Christian Dark Ages," (5) Renaissance, (6) Age of "Enlightenment," and (7) Modern Science. The graph shows scientific knowledge and understanding increasing in each of these eras, except for the "Christian Dark Ages," when it drops off like a rock about 420 AD, then flatlines until 1300 AD. After the "Enlightenment," it picks up at an accelerated rate.

If that isn't clear enough, in large black letters the words "The Hole Left by the Christian Dark Ages" fill an empty space in the graph, like a dragon on the edge of an old map.

The graph did not originate with Loftus. It appears to have been produced by an anti-Christian blogger named Jim Walker, at nobeliefs.com. (If someone knows of an earlier use of this graphic, please let me know!) Here's a sample of the history prose on offer in Walker's accompanying essay:


"The Christian Dark Ages represents a time in the history of Europe where scientific advancement not only halted but went backwards. The hole left by the Dark Ages bears the imprint of scientific ignorance that lasted longer than the Roman Empire. Imagine where scientific advancement would stand today if not for the scars left by Christianity.


"During the Renaissance, and especially the Age of Enlightenment, people began to wake up. Many freethinkers and scientists rejected orthodox religion and replaced it with unitarianism, deism, or non-theistic philosophy. During the 1800s and after, scientists no longer had to fear religious persecution in any form. As never before in the history of mankind, scientists began to reject theocracy entirely. And what happened as a result of the freedom from religious influence? Science literally exploded with new ideas and discoveries!"

Scientists are allowed an element of whimsy in named elementary particles (quark, charm quark, gluon). Also, perhaps because of all the scientific explosions going on there, the meme was not originally isolated on Walker's blog. (Though it was devastatingly debunked, to the extent that a loftrino can be debunked, by Mike Flynn here. Flynn appears to operate with the unfair advantage of having studied history.) But rather than calling it the "Walker," the new particle was named after the site at which it was first isolated and described, John Loftus' Debunking Christianity site.

The peculiar character of the loftrino has to do with its imperviousness to contrary evidence. Carl Sagan has also made similiar claims about how Christianity ruined ancient science. But Sagan was an astronomer, and no one expects him to know much about the history of Christianity. Loftus, by contrast, used to be an evangelist, and certainly knows a lot of facts about Christianity.

Furthermore, Loftus edited a book just last year that gives the lie to some of the claims on which this view of history are based, in a chapter written by Walker's favorite historian, Richard Carrier. If one can edit a book that debunks one's pet theory, yet still hold fast to that theory, loftrinos are likely to be on the loose.

Let's look more closely at the development of science during the historical periods covered by this graph:

# 2 + #3 Was Greek science on the steady upswing until about the time of Christ, as the Walker / Loftus graph shows? Did Roman science continue to progress for the next 400 years?

Here's Richard Carrier, in The Christian Delusion:

"Pagans did set the stage for the end of ancient science -- just not for any of the reasons Christians now claim. By failing to develop a stable and effective constitutional government, the Roman Empire was doomed to collapse under the weight of constant civil war and disastrous economic policy; and in the third century BCE that's exactly what it did. Pagan society responded to this collapse by retreating from the scientific values of its past and fleeing to increasingly mystical and fantastical ways of viewing the world and its wonders." (my emphasis)

Indeed, none of the 16 leading ancient scientists Carrier named on pages 401-2 worked within a century of the legalization of Christianity. (One list of the 100 most important scientists names seven before about 200 BC, but only Galen after that date.)

So according to Loftus' own book, not to mention historical reality, the second and third periods of the graph should show a declining, not a rising, slope.

In addition, Carrier credits theism in part for the rise of ancient science:

"Most intellectual polytheists believed in a Creator who had intelligently ordered the cosmos, that this order could be discovered by the human mind, and that such discovery honored God. Scientists like Galen and Ptolemy were thus motivated to pursue scientific inquiry by their religious piety, exactly as (Rodney) Stark claims Christians were, and for exactly the same reasons." (407)

Carrier describes Christianity as one of the "mystical and fantastic" worldviews into which Roman society fled while (supposedly) abandoning science. Yet he also admits that one key element in Christianity, faith in a good and rational Creator God, was in fact intimately associated with the rise of science BOTH in ancient Greece AND in modern Europe. The loftrino passes through these facts, not swerving one micron to right or left.

#4 What about the "Christian Dark Ages?" Historians recognize that science was not, in fact, abandoned by ancient Christians. In the 6th Century, for example, John Philoponus (who does not appear on Carrier's list) applied the idea of impetus to the planets, "the first attempt at a unified theory of dynamics." Listen to my interview of Oxford historian of science Dr. Alan Chapman for a more judicious and genteel view of this relationship.

Why did Christians fail to revive the full-scale era of scientific inquiry that occurred in Greece some 800 years before Christianity was legalized, but that had badly faded in the interum? Put that way, the question seems rather weak, like asking why matches don't spontaneously combust after they've been dropped in a creek and then covered in a mudslide.

Even so, for anyone with some acquaintance with history, or should I say some vulnerability to it, ought to know the answer: invasions. "Christendom" was on the defensive from 400 AD for most of the next millennia. Goths, Visigoths, Huns, Arabs, Vikings, Moors, Turks, wave after wave came crashing against European civilization. Whenever the tide slowed for a few years, civilizations popped up like crocuses in the spring. These civilizations and new institutions -- Irish monasteries, universities, Charlemagne, Alfred the Great -- had four things in common: Christian origins, unbounded curiosity, a fundamental sense of human equality that allowed social mobility, and a creativity that met and far surpassed even that of those few ancient Greeks who dabbled in science.

(5) The Renaissance. Walker shows science beginning a steep climb again from 1300. He actually credits the rise of science to a backlash against priestcraft failed to stem the tide of bubonic plague, or "Black Death." Actually the science of the Middle Ages was developed in the 13th and early 14th Century by people like Roger Grosseteste, Roger Bacon, Pierre de Maricourt, William of Occam, and Jean Buridan, mostly friars and priests. (Bacon was especially concerned for missions.) This was all DECADES before the bubonic plague even arrived in Crimea, in 1346! Those little rats, and the fleas that rode them, would have had to travel backwards in time to help inspire Medieval science! Perhaps that science was more advanced than we thought!

(6) The Enlightenment. Like many skeptics, Walker (and Loftus through him) credits the Enlightenment for increasing the pace of scientific discovery. He therefore sets the next slope increase at 1700 -- AFTER Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, Boyle, Hooke, Newton, the Royal Academy, and all the great bible-thumper scientists who founded most of the modern scientific disciplines.

The Enlightenment was a movement in mostly bad philosophy and bad history. It's leaders, like Hobbes and Voltaire, were often also bad at science. Many skeptics fervently wish Enlightenment figures had inspired the birth of science; but until we find their time machines, we will have to reject that theory, too.

Other ancient civilizations developed the beginnings of what might be called science: Sumer, India, China, even MesoAmerica. Why did those civilizations get no further? Was Christianity somehow to blame for their failure, too?

But the thesis, "The Christian Dark Ages killed science" will, like most "New Atheist" claims, travel to the edge of the known universe, without being moved one micron up or down, left or right, by any of these facts, or those Flynn mentions.

Other skeptics may dispute credit with Loftus for discovery of the loftrino. Richard Dawkins, for example, has ardently held to the belief that Christian theology recommends "blind faith" from 1976 to the present, a long career even for a loftrino. (They cannot be influenced by outside realities, but their half-life is one lunar year, after which they degrade into back issues of the Huffington Post.)

If another claimant is produced, though, and is able to make a strong historical claim, and come up with a pithy alternative name for the loftrino, speak now, or forever hold your whirled peas!

From Far Formosa

The day after 9/11, I boldy boarded a plane in Fukuoka, Japan, and flew back to Taiwan. This felt bold not only because airplanes had been going missing, but also because we had to fly around a hurricane that was positioning itself between islands. But I was eager to return to an island where I had spent five or six years of my life, a the beautiful and fascinating shoe-shaped country once called Formosa.

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For years after that trip, whenever we played "Quiz" at the dinner table, my younger son would often blurt out the answer, "Taiwan" to irrelevant questions. "What is the capital of New Jersey?" "Taiwan!" This is no doubt partly because his stock of geographical names was small, and partly because my trip, under those conditions, and no doubt accompanied by prayer at home, made a deep impression on his mind.

Recently, I read a book by pioneer missionary George MacKay, called From Far Formosa! Gosh! How that book brought back memories. And what an amazing story he has to tell -- one of the most successful missionaries to China, one of the only ones to dare marry a Chinese girl, attacked by Chinese, aboriginal head-hunters, French naval vessels, poisonous snakes.

Everything has, of course, changed -- but much also remains the same.

I thought I'd share my review of that book, then some quotes from it, along with some of my funky old photos from my years in "Far Formosa."

(I. Here's an explanation of the photos: (1) On a 300 mile "prayer hike" across Taiwan with Keenan Booher; his wife Juanita missed this part of the walk. (2) Peace Park in the usually rainy port of Jilong at the north of Taiwan. Some of Mackay's adventures take place nearby; so did mine. (3) A Taiwan fern tree. (4) A tribal girl decorating a Christmas tree high in the mountains of Taiwan; MacKay had some interesting run-ins with their "headhunter" ancestors; some became Christians. (5) What would an anti-government demonstration be without snacks like tianbula? (6) A tribal village in Hualian. MacKay describes traveling to this region by boat across a beautiful night ocean, then contending with headhunters and waves on the way back. I usually took the train, aside from walking that one time!)

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II. Here's the review, also posted on Amazon:

"When I first went to Taiwan as a solitary missionary, 6 story MacKay Hospital on Zhong Shan Rd was a popular meeting place, including for dates. I felt a little guilty about going out with some of those girls -- they made it a little harder to concentrate on the job, you know!

"One of my amusing discoveries in this wonderful old book, was to learn that MacKay himself, for whom the hospital was named, raised a lot of eyebrows when he married a Taiwanese girl. (James Rohrer points out in a critical article that MacKay was one of only two China missionaries he found who dared marry a Chinese lady.)

"MacKay was a man deeply in love not just with one Taiwanese girl (who turned out to be a tremendous help), but with the island of Formosa and its peoples as a whole.

"The book is cobbled together, Rohrer suggests, from MacKay's notes and a first draft that emphasized a scientific description of Taiwan. Two church colleagues apparently helped write the book. The final draft is well-written, but has a bit of a disjointed structure. First MacKay tells a bit about his early life. Then he plunges into a long description of the geography, history, geology, plants, animals, and ethnic groups of Taiwan, the industry, (in) justice system. Finally he describes his travels, work, and the institutions he established.

"Don't be afraid of those middle chapters! There are priceless nuggets in there, too. MacKay can never get far without telling a story -- about famous snakes he knew (tried to bite him, were killed with tobacco, etc - ah! those snakes brings back memories!), about European sailors chased by a mob for hitting pigs with walking sticks, loving descriptions of luscious local fruit, the story of Christian converts who were tortured and killed for their faith.

"But the best of the book is probably the last and by far longest part of the book. Like the young Taiwanese who followed him around the island on interminable mission travels, I found MacKay a delightful companion. He's full of humor. His descriptions of nature are often eloquent and bring me back to my own trips to Hualien, the hills behind Xindian, and so on. There are bombardments by the French, riots among the Chinese, stalkings by headhunters, nighttime ocean journeys.

"MacKay's love for God is also palpably clear. As a missions narrative, this book is full of interest. Some 3000 Taiwanese were practicing baptized Christians in northern Taiwan by the time of MacKay's untimely death, along with many churches, schools, a museum, an educated group of minister-doctors. How did all that happen, when the price of conversion could be death? Especially interesting to me (I worked with "mountain people," as they called them in those days) were his accounts of the quick conversion of several villages of lowland tribemen, within a few weeks. This is amazing -- most of these villages were very leery of strangers, and had not accepted Chinese religions for hundreds of years.

"There are a few passages that breath of spin, and a few words suggesting late Victorian over-floweriness here and there. Let's blame that on the editors. I enjoyed this book so much, I've read passages to my family over dinner. Gotta get back to Taiwan.

III. And here are a few exerpts from the book:
"Ginger. This very useful pant attains the height of about a foot, and has long, pointed leaves. The rhizomes or roots are taken when green, sliced, and prepared as a relish. Around the city of Tek-chham there has sprung up quite an industry in preparing it for market. It is preserved dry, in sugar, in small earthn pots. It is not in any way like the preparation in Canton which is brought into Western lands. Plums, peaches, and pears are preserved in small earthen pots like the Tek-chham ginger."

"Reptiles. Serpents. One day, on returning from the country, and goin up the steps to the door of our house in Tamsui, I found a large serpent, eight feet in lengthy, lying across the threshold. With help I succeeded in dispatching him. The following day, when about to leave my study-room, I was confronted by its mate, of equal length and very fierce-looking. A loud call brought two or three students, and we ended that one's life. They belonged to the species Ptyas mucosus."

"Once, as I ented a small shed like a hen-coop, a snake which resembled the hoop-snake sprang from the roof and fell coied up in front of me. Its head was up in a moment, and ready to spring. I jumped backward, and with the assistance of others I succeeded in securing this rare specimen for my museum."

"At Tamsui, near the mission bungalow, I erected a second story above an old kitchen for a small study-room. One night, about eleven o'clock, I heard a noice among papers which were lying over a hole in the floor. Supposing that the noise was produced by rats, I called to those below. Presently Koa Kau ran up, looked into the room, then darted downstairs again, and in a twinkling pinned the exposed part of a monstrous serpent to the wall below. By this time fully three feet of the body was through the hole into the room above."

"The pig is a great pet among the Chinese. It is always to be found about the door, and often has free access into the house . . . The affection of an Englishman for his dog is scarcely stronger than the affection of a Chinese for his pig. Foreigners in China should remember this, and not thoughtlessly excite enmity and antagonism. Not long after my arrival, when in my house in Tamsui, I heard loud voices and hurried trampling in the street in front. On opening the door I saw several European sailors, from a ship lying at anchor in the harbor, running in wild haste down the street toward me. As they came near, one of them, mad with rage, asked if I had a gun. They were followed by a mob that seemed to be furious and eager to overtake them. I directed the sailors down a narrow lane, by which they escaped to their ship. Turning to the crowd, I asked the cause of the disturbance. They replied that the sailors had been striking the pigs belonging to one of their families with their walking-sticks. The people were very indignant, and had they overtaken the sailors there would have been trouble. I appeased them by the assurance that should the offenders misbehave again complaint would be made to the authorities."

"It has been my custom never to denounce or revile what is . . . sacredly cherished, but rather to recognize whatever of truth or beauty there is in it, and to utilize it as an 'open sesame' to the heart. Many, many times, standing on the steps of a temple, after singing a hymn, have I repeated the fifth commandment, and the words 'Honor thy father and thy mother' never failed to secure respectful attention."

"This venerable cultus, the worship of ancestors, is indeed the most stubborn obstacle Christianity has to face."

"Out on the downs I saw a dozen boys herding water buffaloes. As soon as I went near they shouted, 'Foreign devil, foreign devil!' jumped on the ground, waved their large sun-hats, and disappeared behind boulders. The next day I tried them again. They looked at me in silence, but on the alert, and ready to run at the first sign of danger. The third day I spoke to them, and as I had carefully practiced my words they exclaimed, in utter astonishment, 'He knows our language!' That the 'barbarian' could speak even a few of their words interested them very much. I took out my watch and held it up for them to see. They were around me instantly, feeling my hands, fingers, buttons, and clothes. The herdboys and I became friends that day . . . I was out there on the plateau with them every day for four or five hours, talking to them, hearing them talk, noting down new words and phrases, until my vocabulary began to grow with a rapidity that quite amazed my servant . . . years after, when they grew to manhood, they continued friendly, and were always delighted to recall the first days on the buffalo-pasture. Several of them became converts to Christianity, one a student and preacher."

But the stories in this book are endless; that's probably enough for now, but I may add more later.

Argument from Transcultural Plausibility (ATP): or, "How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love John Loftus' Favorite Argument
Perhaps John Loftus will be famous some day, like the ancient polemicist Celsus, for formulating a challenge that led to a interesting argument for the Christian faith. John calls his challenge the "Outsider Test for Faith. (OTF)" Perhaps history will know it as the Argument from Transcultural Plausibility (ATP).

The idea is not, of course, original with John. He asks, if his argument is no good, as some people say, why do critics like Victor Reppert and myself keep bringing it up?

Speaking just for myself, I find the idea of looking at Christianity from the viewpoint of other traditions fascinating. I lived many years in different Asian countries, and have been studying world religions and the history of missions for decades. I'm fascinated by how Christianity originated in a highly parochial and defensive Jewish culture, then found a way to transcend Jewish culture and become the dominant faith of the Greco-Roman, then other worlds.

As someone else points out, G. K. Chesterton also asks us to look at Christianity from the outside, in a great book called The Everlasting Man. Eleven years ago, I wrote as follows, in a book called Jesus and the Religions of Man, meant as an updating of Chesterton's classic:

"What should a Christian say to an idealist setting out on a journey? Seek the good in every spiritual tradition and cherish it; but don't be naive. Allow yourself to become desperate enough to be heretical, and even desperate enough to be orthodox. Give credit where credit is due, bu talso blame where blame is due. Take ideals seriously enough to live by, even die for. But be careful to whom you open your heart. Follow each star to the place where it leads. Then come and look again in a town called Bethlehem."

I don't want to take anything away from John: I appreciate him bringing the subject up, and in an interesting way. But that's the Outsider Test for Faith in a nutshell.

I explained some problems I have with the way John formulates OTF, as an argument against Christianity, in an earlier post.

In my last post, though, I did a bit what might have seemed a bit of an about-face, accepting John's conclusion that we should look at our own faith (whatever that is) from an outside perspective, at least for the sake of the argument. I then discussed the various difficulties involved in transmitting faith from one culture to another, and made a few modifications to OTF. I call the modified version the "Argument from Transcultural Plausibility" (ATP).

ATP takes into account the real-world challenges of convincing people in foreign cultures, speaking different languages, and with defense mechanisms against foreigners as subtle as the Great Wall of China, to swap their deepest beliefs for a "foreign religion." I argued that Christianity has actually done remarkably well, considering all the challenges. If there's anything to ATP, it might be seen as an argument FOR the Christian faith, and, possibly, against secular humanism.

But is there anything to ATP? Or is it based simply on the logical fallacy of Ad Populum? John suggests I am making some such mistake:

"David Marshall's latest critique of the OTF confuses the success of a particular religion with passing the OTF, which, if correct, would make contradictory religions true by virtue of being successful."

In other words, I am supposedly saying that Christianity must be true, because it is so popular. In that case, what about Islam or Marxism, which also caught on in many diverse cultures?

Can we reasonably deduce anything about the truth of Christianity from the fact that people in thousands of different cultures have come to believe in it, even at great risk or cost, or at the price of their own lives? Don't people often die for lies?

One does not want to be caught in public committing logical fallacies. But I do see two potentially viable arguments for Christianity based on the ATP:

(1) The first argument is based on a fulfilled prophecy.

One of the most dramatic and significant stories in the OT is the story of Abraham taking his son Isaac to a hill in the region of Mt. Moriah to sacrifice him. Richard Dawkins sees in this story "child abuse, bullying in two asymmetrical power relationships, and the first recorded use of the Nuremberg defense: 'I was only following orders.'" Jews read in it as the story of how human sacrifice, which had been common around the world, began to end. God was saying, in effect, "This, I don't need." Christians see the lamb who substituted for Isaac as a figure of Jesus, who would ultimately die (perhaps on this very same hill) for sinful humanity.

But notice how the story ends. After the angel appears and the lad is dramatically spared, God promises Abraham:

"I will greatly bless you, and I will greatly multiply your seed as the stars of the heavens . . . And in your seed all the nations of the earth shall be blessed, because you obeyed my voice."

This is quite a promise to make a Bedoin herder who lived in a tent in the wilderness 3500 years ago! Of what Pharoah of Egypt can we say all nations of the world have been blessed because of him? Can we say it of Alexander the Great?

Many mighty empires have disappeared without a genetic trace since this promise. But the Jewish people have not. And no one can deny they have had an often positive impact on the world -- for instance, some 30% of Nobel Prize winners have been Jewish.

Jesus was the most famous "seed" of Abraham. The universal spread of his teachings, and their impact, marks a stupendous fulfillment of this ancient promise.

Admittedly, Islam also claims in some sense to be a religion that arose from "Abraham's seed." (Though don't tell anyone in the Muslim world I said this, but I tend to see Mohammed as more of a bad seed.)

(2) As philosopher John Hick points out, people reasonably see a claim as more plausible if "great figures in the past" came up with something similiar. At any rate, he notes, “it is encouraging to find that one’s hard-won view of things was also the view seen by other and greater minds in earlier ages."

Aristotle agreed. He distinguished between two kinds of valid knowledge: Science, (which meant, broadly, what we know based on intentional empirical study) and Wisdom. As a source for the latter, Aristotle encourages us to "attend to the undemonstrated dicta and opinions of the skilful, the old, and the wise."

We do this every day, in classrooms, on the Internet, in conversations with friends. "Implicit faith," said Dr. Johnson, is the source of most of what we know.

An argument might be made that the sum total of wise men and women who tested Christianity from the perspective of different cultures, and found it passed, or that parts of it they knew best passed, makes it more reasonable to believe in Jesus Christ. There are some "Christians" who embarrass us. But clearly, the Christian faith is rendered more credible by winning the fervent allegiance of the likes of Augustine, Aquinas, Kepler, Solzhenitsyn, and Pascal.

But some converts impress me even more. Those are the men and women who fervently love great non-Christian civilizations and cultures. They know it as well, study it with passion, and interpret it with genius. They then take the OTF, and determine that not only does Christianity pass, but that the Gospel renews the wellspring of their civilization.

In the Greco-Roman world, I think of Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine, in particular. There may be others, but these are the "skillful, the old, and the wise" I know, whose arguments for the Christian faith still impress me.

There are some of the same quality in India. One of the great reformers of India, Ram Mohan Roy, a father of modern India, wrote a pamphlet exerting some of Jesus' teachings, under the title, "The Principles of Jesus, the Guide to Peace and Happiness."

How does the Gospel look to "outsiders" like Roy, Keshab Chandra Sen, Krishna Banerja, and (yes) Gandhi? Obviously most Indians did not convert. It would have been difficult for them to do so, especially while India was occupied by often ravenous English imperialists! But the Gospel deeply affected India.

My own field is China. Perhaps the three most revered leaders in all China's long history are Emperor Tai Zong who helped found the great Tang Dynasty about 618 AD, the wise and noble Emperor Kang Xi who set the Qing Dynasty on its foundations in the late 16th Century, and Sun Yat-sen, who overthrew the Qing Dynasty and began the Republican era.

Remarkably, these three "wise, old, skilful" Chinese leaders interacted with three great branches of Christianity: Nestorian (eastern), Catholic (Jesuit) and Protestant.

Tai Zong read some of the works of Nestorians who arrived in China in 635 AD, and wrote a "blurb" for the Nestorian stele later found outside of Xian. He seemed to like what he understood of it (judging by textual products of that period, the translation was probably less than stellar). He also sponsored the church financially.

Kang Xi was educated, in part, by Jesuit priests. He seemed to believe in God, and liked and respected the Jesuit missionaries. In his early years he was a big help to Christians. (And they were a help to him!) Unfortunately, due to the bossy stupidity of some Catholic missionaries, and a foolish pope, Kang Xi came to feel threatened by these foreigners, and was forced to outlaw Christian evangelism -- though he did not much enforce the law. It was not the Gospel that pushed him away (though he he was not a convert), it was European arrogance (along with Chinese pride) that kept the Gospel at a distance.

Sun Yat-sen, like many 19th Century Asian reformers, was himself a Christian. Despite all the cultural barriers, despite the signs that read "dogs and Chinamen keep out," despite the saying, "One more Christian, one less Chinese," the father of modern China took, and passed, the ATP.

Such great lovers of Chinese civilization as Lin Yutang, John Wu, and many thinkers behind the Tiananmen protests of 1989, ultimately turned to Jesus not as a repudiation of their cultural heritage, but as a fulfillment of it.

If God intended to bless the world through Abraham's seed, as prophesied, one would expect the life of Christ to make a noticable impact on the world. And if one wants to get "outside one's own culturally-influenced head" and see if the Christian faith remains plausible, the thought experiment John suggests (and G. K. Chesterton before him) may be a great way to do so. I think, when both questions are considered fairly, Christianity passes ATP, and this may indeed give us two more legitimate reasons to believe it is true.

Why Christianity passes the OTF, and Humanism fails

Why Christianity passes the "Outsider Test for Faith," and Secular Humanism may fail.
In an earlier blog, I responded to an argument made by atheist writer John Loftus against Christianity, which he calls the "Outsider Test for Faith (OFT)." John answered me in a series of five blogs on his Debunking Christianity web site. I responded with a later, somewhat rushed post.

Here's the nub of the argument, in John's own words (from the book The Christian Delusion):

"1) Rational people in distinct geographical locations around the globe overwhelmingly adopt and defend a wide diversity of religious faiths due to their upbringing and cultural heritage. This is the religious diversity thesis."

2) "Consequently, it seems very unlikely that adopting one's religious faith is not merely a matter of independent rational judgment but is causally dependent on cultural conditions to an overwhelming degree. This is the religious dependency thesis."

3) "Hence the odds are highly likely that any given adopted religious faith is false."

"4) So the best way to test one's adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider with the same level of skepticism used to evaluate other religious faiths. This expresses the OTF."

I don't actually much mind John's conclusion, though I think both his first two premises are badly flawed, and conclusion (3) does not at all follow from them. But in this post, I don't want to rehash earlier points or respond to John's criticism and drag readers into a conventional Internet tit-for-tat.

Let me try something bolder. Let us consider the possibility that the OTF is actually a disguised argument FOR the Christian faith, and AGAINST secular humanism.

First, I amend the test to better reflect the true nature and difficulty of conversion. Then I show how three specific Christian teachings pass "OTF-2.0." After that, I argue that Christianity as a "package deal" has passed OTF around the world in a remarkable way, even all the bells and whistles of Jewish and European culture attached. (And that when it is rejected by entire peoples, it is usually for these irrelevant acrudements, not for the Gospel is itself.) Finally, I briefly consider the shorter and spottier record of Secular Humanism in meeting the challenge of OTF-2.0.

I. Amending the Test. This gemstone will, of course, need a little rubbing, to make it gleam in that light. Six facts must be polished to reveal the true import of OTF.

First, we must remember that most people have never had or taken time to carefully investigate any belief system. The 17th Century Jesuit missionary to India, Roberto de Nobili, noted,

"To preach the faith to simple and uneducated people and, with divine grace, to persuade them is not such a difficult affair. They are, so to speak, blank sheets on which we can write without hindrance. But it is a very difficult proposition when you have to teach men of learning, such as the Brahmins are, who not onnly are proficient in several sciences, but consider themselves the wise men of this world and the teachers of other men."

At the same time, Nobili pointed out that these same Brahmins would not even talk with Europeans dressed as Europeans usually were -- they were considered unclean. Still less would they listen to religious ideas from those they considered out of caste and impure.

Second, human beings are social animals. Since early man hunted mammoths in family packs, we have made important decisions in groups. This is true of evaluating religious claims as well: while no one person may do all the research required to decide about Christianity or secular humanism, they often assume, truly or falsely, that the group as a whole has done the research, and rely on the family or clan or tribal or national will. This also applies to those Nobili called the "simple and uneducated:" in Athens, philosophers scoffed at Paul, but in the countryside in Lystra, they stoned him half to death.

People feel, as Aristotle put it, that one "should attend to the undemonstrated dicta and opinions of the skilful, the old, and the wise." Their judgement or subjective opinion (γνωμη) may be in error, but should not be too quickly slighted.

Third, it is extremely hard for most individuals in most societies to go against their family, clan, tribe and nation.

Fourth, missions must open locked and guarded doors. Often people are impeded in choosing a faith for reasons that have nothing to do with the intrinsic value of that faith.

These reasons can be as elemental as life and death. A December 2010 poll showed that in Egypt and Pakistan, at least three quarters of Muslim respondents favored the death penalty for those who leave Islam. Death, torture, imprisonment, loss of job, and in some ways worst of all (for social creatures) ostrication, losing the love of one's family, have in many societies been normal consequences of converting.

In many cases, conversion to Christianity seemed to involve two terrible acts: (1) A repudiation of one's own traditions, and (2) Embracing the traditions of a dangerous foe.

At first, Christianity arrives from people who speak a different language, act strangely, eat weird foods, and (often) are perceived as a real or potential threat.

Even in the late 20th Century, in a free and innovative country like Taiwan, I found that about three quarters of the people I asked saw Christianity as "alien religion" ("洋教." Many agreed it was a good thing, and many agreed with specific Christian teachings, but its apparently foreign character made it hard for people to consider it fairly.
So we must not be naive. The dice, in most cultures, have always been loaded. It is simply not the case that most people over most of human history have had easy access to the facts as we do, or if they did, been socially in a position to choose a new faith if they wanted to.

For these reasons, the test Christianity and Secular Humanism must pass is not mainly of individuals. It must be of entire cultures, over periods of time, with allowance made for the innate conservativism of most human cultures.

Furthermore, some conversions are more impressive than others. Conversion to Christianity has almost always been socially and often physically dangerous. In some countries, especially Islamic countries, and some periods of European history, it can also be risky to come out as an atheist. But while atheism may be seen as repudiation of tradition, it is usually not seen as involving allying oneself with "the Franj," or "the Crusaders."

Fifth, other barriers have impeded the spread of faith.

Christianity was born into a world of tribes. Perhaps some twenty thousand different ethnic groups, each speaking its own language, were scattered across the globe. Most were at war with their neighbors. Fundamental beliefs could not pass freely from one mountain valley in Guang Xi province, or one village in the Amazon rainforest, or one tribal band on the Great Plains, to the next. Each was an animal with a tough hide and claws that scratched and teeth that bit. (Indeed, many had such totems.)

In such a world, evangelism could only proceed slowly. Paul was hounded and whipped and imprisoned from village to village, but he was in some ways lucky: most the towns he visited spoke Greek or Latin, had met Jews and understood some of his references, and were subject to Roman law. Outside that circle, man could be even more wolf to man: violent northern European tribes, Arabs, Africans speakings thousands of mutually-incomprensible languages across an unbridgeable desert, the vast, peopled, defensive plains, deserts, and jungles of Asia, and then endless oceans to other quarellsome continents.

Evangelism could not, under any circumstances, be the work of a day, a century, or probably even a millennia.

Sixth, if people need to be treated as groups as well as individuals, belief systems should also be broken down into specific tenets. Christianity invokes a series of claims about the world: a good God, Who created the world, speaks to humanity, sends prophets, sent his Son Jesus, who did miracles, taught truth, died and rose again.

The package theology called "Christianity" may be impeded by cultural or geographical barriers, even while the people who reject that package accept, or already believe, some of its constituent tenets.

With that introduction, let us consider the record of these two faiths in passing, in this ammended sense, the "Outsider Test for Faith."

(II.) God or non-God?

The idea of God clearly has passed the "outsider test for faith."

300 years ago, David Hume claimed that at the time of Christ, the whole world was polytheistic: "It is a matter of fact incontestable, that about 1,700 years ago all mankind were polytheists." This was a bit of an exagerration -- Hume did not know that many tribes were aware of a "High God" similiar to the God of the Bible. (Though they also usually believed in other spirits.)

But certainly, the theism that arose in Judaism, and then was adopted by Christians and Muslims, has crossed barriers with remarkable success. Today, about half the people in the world today believe in God in the Judeo-Christian sense. My survey in Taiwan found many non-Christians there who believed in a supreme God. Even in Japan, where Christians are less than 1%, and the government tried to snuff out theism by 200 years of murder and mayhem, when I surveyed my students, I found that about one fifth believed in a personal God who created the world.

III. Redemptive Sacrifice

The idea that "without the shedding of blood, there is no remission of sins," is almost universal. This seems almost to be a fundamental intuition. Red ochre is often found in prehistoric graves, which seems to be a substitute for blood. Sacrifice is central to the earliest Indian texts, the Rig Veda, (which even speaks of Prajapati or God sacrificing himself for human salvation), the Chinese Classics, in Indonesia, Africa, and in much of the world.

The Gospel does not simply affirm this intuition -- it fulfills it, and by fulfilling it, ends actual blood sacrifice. Rene Girard has written profoundly on the social implications of that.

IV. Need for a Savior

All the world, it seems, is looking for a Savior: Messiah, Christ, Sanatan Sadguru, Sheng Ren. I argued, in True Son of Heaven and Jesus and the Religions of Man, that Jesus fulfills many of these prophecies in remarkable ways.

So in this case, too, Christianity passes passes the "outsider test" from the inside.

It is remarkable how universally the figure of Jesus seems to have been accepted as ideal, in cultures around the world, even as fulfilling vastly different ideals, as I attempt to show.

V. Christianity as a Package Deal

Why does John Loftus create a web site in Fort Wayne, Indiana, half way between glacier-scoured Lake Michigan and Lake Erie, in the northern American plains, trying to debunk beliefs about a politically-powerless peasant who lived 2,000 years ago on a piece of semi-desert where Asia, Africa and Europe come together?

Consider what barriers the Gospel overcame to get to Indiana. At every step -- from Jesus to the disciples, the crisis after Jesus died, persecution from defenders of Jewish orthodoxy, transmission to Greek and Latin cultures, then to Egypt, Libya, Gaul, Spain, England, Saxony, 300 years of persecution from defenders of Greco-Roman culture, Islamic invasions, Norse invasions -- each step represented choices, usually by thousands of individuals.

Often those choices were a matter of life or death. Often they involved ostricism. Often they involved identifying with hated foreigners.

True, Christianity was never entirely an "outsider" faith. Always it seemed to fulfill deep and ancient sacred hopes in each civilization. But the barriers were high.

We should not ignore the elephant in the room -- the fact that to become the world's largest religion, Christianity faced, and passed, the OTF millions of times.

Where, today, are there no Christians?

It may be hardest to find Christians in some Muslim countries. Maybe also in North Korea.

Why are Christians hard to find in Saudi Arabia or Omar? Do you need to ask! According to Mohammed, the penalty for leaving Islam and embracing another religion should be death. This rule was accepted throughout the Muslim world, and remains the assumption (as Pew Poll showed) for the vast majority of Muslims at least in two large Muslim countries. (I recently asked a friend who had been an imam and Muslim legal scholar in Africa: "When you were still Muslim, did you think it was right to put converts to Christianity to death?" "Absolutely!" He replied.)

Aside even from that, there is tremendous social pressure against conversion to Christianity, for obvious historical and religious reasons.

Nonetheless, a Coptic friend from Egypt tells me that hundreds of thousands of Muslims have converted to Christianity there. He may be exagerrating, but many certainly have. Thousand of Iranians and Algerian Berbers have also converted in recent years, and probably two million Indonesians a few decades ago.

My friend converted, he says, when he heard the audible voice of God.

In China, Christianity was associated with barbarians, imperialism, and the Opium Wars for hundreds of years. Many early converts were also killed. Communist education teaches atheism, which is why (according to a recent study) 66% of Chinese say they have no religion. Most Chinese still only have a hazy idea of what Christianity is about, and most young people scoff at religion, as they have been taught to do.

Still, over the past few decades, some 60 million mainland Chinese have converted to Christianity.

Christianity is also beginning to spread in Nepal. In India, members of a movement called Christ bakhti attempt to retain Hindu culture while trusting in Jesus. What this shows is that while few Indians are "Christians" yet, what India largely rejected was not the Gospel, but Western imperialism and cultural forms that came with it.

Triumphalism would be misplaced: Christian faith is not an easy thing, and each of us faces choices every day. But it seems clear that, given a fair chance, and taking the real world into consideration, Christianity does not fail the Outsider Test for Faith, but passes it in a remarkable, unprecedented way.

VI. Does Secular Humanism pass OTF?

The core tenets of Secular Humanism, as explained by Paul Kurtz, involves four simple assumptions: (1) There is no God; (2) or afterlife; (3) One should be concerned for oneself; (4) and for other people. One might distinguish western secular humanism, which usually accepts democracy, from Marxism, a non-democratic form of secular humanism. I see Secular Humanism, defined in this way, as probably the leading atheist faith in the Western world.

The last two tenets are, of course, accepted by almost everyone. So in order to make a convert, Secular Humanism needs only to convince you of two simple facts. You don't need to go to church, tithe, get baptized refrain from sleeping around (always a selling point), or (usually) die a martyr's death.

Still, most Secular Humanism seem to be either (a) an elite faith, bred in western universities, and fairly rare in the real world, or (b) a top-down faith, believed on government authority. (Maybe the two are related: education, many secular humanists have affirmed, is the key to a God-free future.)

This is just a thought, and maybe I'm wrong. But it seems that Christianity, both in parts and whole, has passed OTF-2.0 with flying colors. Secular Humanism certainly has easy appeal, and a fairly large congregation, but has yet to prove it can succeed without wholesale government sponsorship.

Update: In this post, I mostly assumed for the sake of the argument that there is, or can be, some validity to OTF 2.0. In a follow-up post, re-christening it the Argument from Transcultural Plausibility (ATP), I argue that in two ways, it may indeed carry some weight.

How Confucius proves Jesus

How Confucius proves Jesus.

The Gospels are commonly subjected to intense skepticism. In recent years, skeptics like Robert Price and Richard Carrier have claimed that not only are many of the bare facts related in the Gospels false -- but even that Jesus may have never lived.

Are the Gospels believable?

The evidence for them, I think, is historically compelling. If they did not tell about miracles, and if some scholars did not find philosophical reasons to doubt such things can happen, with the evidence in front of us in the Gospels alone, no one would think to deny the outline of Jesus' life, personality, career, teachings, teachings, death, and (yes) resurrection.

In this post I'll consider an interesting parallel, the great sage whose life and personality stand at the heart of Chinese tradition, as Jesus does in Western tradition. (My arguments are largely adapted from a chapter in my book, Why the Jesus Seminar can't find Jesus, and Grandma Marshall Could.)

The Analects of Confucius is, in some ways, quite similiar to the Gospels: a collection of sayings and anecdotes about a wandering ancient teacher, written down some time afterwards by disciples. I know of no serious China scholar who denies that Confucius lived. Few doubt that the Analects, especially the first chapters, provides a fairly accurate picture of who Confucius was, what he taught and did.

Yet as historical sources, the Gospels have many advantages over the Analects:

(1) Timing. The Gospels are probably closer in time to the main events they record. Confucius died at the age of about 70, so his early life would be much further removed from the time of his death, than was the case for Jesus.

(2) Multiple attestation. There are four Gospels, but only one Analects. A house with four pillars stands in an earthquake, when one resting on one pillar topples in a breeze!

True, scholars find a relationship between the Gospels, especially the first three "Synoptics." Probably both Matthew and Luke borrowed heavily from Mark. But both writers also relied on their own material, named by scholars (doubtless after breakfast), "Special M" and "Special L." So together with John, we still have at least four early and detailed sources for the life of Jesus, compared to just one for Confucius.

(3) Cultural specificity: H. G. Creel effectively applied the principle of what Jesus scholars call "dissimilarity" to the Analects. On the one hand, the book is free of the jargon and freeze-frame philosophy of later Confucian thought. On the other, while respectful towards traditional writings, Confucius has a different agenda, and even language, from the classics. For example, he often spoke of Heaven, the contemporary term for God, but seldom of Shang Di, the term earlier poets and historians used, or "Heaven and Earth," (except in late chapters), a pantheistic term that would be popular later.

In the Zhuang Zi, a couple centuries later, the character called "Confucius" would parrot Taoist ideas: "Just go along with things and let your mind move freely." But in Analects, he speaks in a unique and what we recognize as his true voice, reflecting and interpreting prior beliefs, floating distinct ideas down the current of tradition for later generations to work over.

The eminent British scholar N. T. Wright tests the gospels by the more strenuous tool of 'double dissimilarity:"

"When something can be shown to be credible (though perhaps deeply subversive) within first-century Judaism, and credible as the implied starting point (though not the exact replica) of something in later Christianity, there is a strong possibility of our being in touch with the genuine history of Jesus."

Wright shows that even by this much more rigorous standard, much in the Gospels is affirmed by stringent historical method.

(4) Realistic details. "Zu Gong wanted to dispense with the live sheep presented at the Ducal Temple at the announcement of the new moon. The Master said, 'Zu! You care for the sheep. I care for the ritual.'"

Analects is full of non-dramatic anecdotes of that kind -- daily conversations one can imagine springing up around a person of Confucius' sort. The combination of specific background facts, concrete, believable characters, and sayings that carry the flavor of the teacher's thought, make the text credible.

The same is also true of the Gospels. One gets the feeling of meeting a real person in the Gospels, mediated by place, personalities (of disciples as well as master), disputes, and unique teachings.

(5) Embarrassing! Scholars also evaluate Analects by the "criterion of embarrassment." Confucian educator Chen Jingpan argued we can believe in it in part because the book contains a lot of material

Confucianists would not appreciate:

"Chapter 19 details squabbles between the disciples, and 19:25 tells us that one of them said Confucius was no better than the disciple Zu Gong. In 6:26 it is related that Confucius had an interview with a notorious duchess; this had embarrassed countless prudish Confucians, and was used by their enemies to mock them in Han times. Yet these things were not deleted from the text, which must increase our respect for it." . Notice, Chen argued more than just that certain sayings would not have been invented by skeptics. More, their willingness to report dicey goings on helps establish their credibility. The entire text, or at least the chapters where such sayings are found, deserve our respect.

The Gospels relate far more material that is much more deeply "embarrassing" than these examples. Jesus not only met one sinful woman: he saved one from stoning, chatted another up by a well, and told dinner hosts that another impressed him with her love! Jesus is not only said to be no better than Peter, he is accused of sorcery and betraying sacred traditions. The criterion of embarrassment therefore supports the historicity of the Gospels far more strongly than that of the Analects -- and it supports the latter quite well.

(6) Criticism of subject. Here the picture of Confucius appears to have been slightly airbrushed. A few complaints are reported, in an off-hand way, but nothing serious enough to explain why at least one tried to assassinate him.

The Gospels, by contrast, are full of intense, heated, and realistic criticism of Jesus. Strong verbal attacks on Jesus are reported, sometimes without defense. The four gospels contain nit-picking, suspicion, entrapment, barbed comments, and angry denunciations, directed by respectable citizens at Jesus. He is accused of being a commoner, sinner, "Samaritan and a demon," of breaking Jewish law, the Sabbath in particular, not paying taxes, lack of education, blasphemy, insanity, and black magic.

What disciple would have made all this up? It is hard to think of any parallels -- the wind-bag sage in Apollonius of Tyana is treated with almost universal adulation, as is the "Jesus" of the Gnostic texts. The Gospels, in this regard, seem raw to the touch with uncensored reportage.

(7) Emotions Many ancient writers, both in the Greco-Roman and Chinese worlds, were leary of honestly depicting the emotions of their heroes. (So, of course, are many Hollywood screenwriters -- which is how Arnold Schwarteneggar became an actor!) One way the early records about Confucius persuade us of their honesty, is by recording the raw emotions of the teacher: "If I have in any way done wrong, may Heaven reject me! May Heaven reject me!" "When the Master was in Chi (note: the large state to the north) and heard the Shao music, for three months he was unconscious of the taste of meat. 'I did not imagine,' he said, 'That music had reached such perfection as this!'" "When Yan Yuan died the Master said, 'Alas! Heaven has bereft me!'"

The Gospels confront us even more powerfully with raw human emotion. (By contrast to the Gnostics, where Jesus is a cosmic stick figure.) Jesus shows his feelings naturally, and without apology. Despite the bold authority with which he spoke, his eyes were not focused on himself. He did not project "death-like serenity" or "austere severity" like some gurus. Nor, like others, did he brag.

Jesus was never blase or incurious. He asked, "Who touched me?" He felt pity, became indignant, showed anger, expressed frustration, and displayed delight, joy, and sorrow. . Thomas Cahill complains that Luke "consistently omits" the emotions of Jesus. But in that Gospel, Jesus weeps over Jerusalem. He prays "in agony" in the Garden of Eden, until sweat pours down his back. Passion is often implicit in his words: "Was no one found to return and give thanks to God but this foreigner?" "Blessed are the eyes that see what you see!" "Simon, Simon, Satan has asked permission to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed for you that your faith may not fail." Jesus' stories, like the Prodigal Son and the Good Samaritan, are intense in their feelings. . A good modern novelist can make up realistic emotions, of course. But can anyone point to a genuine parallel in the fiction of the ancient world?

(8) Unique quality A wise man does not build his house on sand, nor can a great civilization rest on shaky epigrams. On close consideration, though sometimes his teachings border on platitude, the sayings of Confucius surprise us by their very humility and common sense. Later scholars exagerrated his teachings or ignored the fine balance he found. Confucius' sayings, while not unmatched, and sometimes prosaic, are sensible, and played a mostly positive role in East Asian civilization.

Reading later Confucius literature, such as the Book of Rites, it is hard to imagine any Confucian scholar making up these sayings. They are too personal, too humble, too sensible, and too balanced, for a second-teer scribe to invent.

While some of it is puzzling or off-putting, overall, the quality of teachings given in the Gospels is far more astonishing. "No one ever taught like this man." Even after 2000 years, this anonymous voice in the crowd offers what seems a mild statement of the obvious, as true to the words that prompted it as every other crowd response in the Gospels.

Modern giants of literature and scholarship, surveying a far vaster range of thought, have echoed that ancient comment. The editors of National Review called the words of Jesus "inimitable" -- which, obviously, they are. Dickens described the parable of the Prodigal Son as the best story in literature. Tolstoy spent a lifetime trying to live up to the Sermon on the Mount. . Lin Yutang was one of the great literary figures of 20th Century China. He wrote novels, social criticism, biography, practical philosophy, an anthology of Chinese and Indian literature, and a dictionary. Lin grew up in the Church, left, studied Buddhism, Taoism, Western and Indian thought, and then concluded, "No one has taught as Jesus Christ."

The Gospels are the background Muzak of the Western world, and it may be hard for those who are too familiar with them -- including some biblical scholars -- to see them for what they are. Clearly Jesus' great teachings could only have come from some paramount genius. It is folly to imagine anonymous clerical bookworms making this stuff up. The Gospels preserved the teachings of Jesus, because they recognized from the beginning that he spoke as no one ever else could.

(9) Women. Females figure little in Analects, except for Confucius' nieces, whom he married off to worthy disciples. Another exception was his visit to an upper-class woman of shaky reputation, followed by vehement denial of impropriety. Confucius was, in general, almost as much of a prude as his later followers might wish. . The Jesus of the Gospels, by contrast, consistently treated women with compassion, and without fear, condescension, or male superiority. Walter Wink argued that Jesus' behavior towards women is "astounding:"

"In every single encounter with women in the four Gospels, Jesus violated the mores of his time . . . his behavior towards women . . . was without parallel in 'civilized' societies since the rise of patriarchy roughly three thousand years before his birth."

Skeptics often suggest the Gospels were written to preserve traditional male hierarchy. But how could Jesus have torn down gender conventions every single time he talked to a women in them, if they were written to devalue women? At least one must conclude that the authors were unusually honest patriarchs, to record so much that seemed to undermine their biases. Radical criticism thus shows the humility and honesty of the gospels from yet a new angle.

(10) Caste. Confucius did not pose with famous people all the time, like Apollonius of Tyana. But he was fairly class-conscious. He spen most of his time with disciples or officials, though he would teach a poor student, if need be. His approach is only very mildly revolutionary.

In seeing people, Jesus was blind to the social boundaries of his day. A lot has been written on this topic in recent years, no doubt because we esteem "equality" and "pluralism" highly. These were not the dominant values in the 1st Century, however. In Jewish culture, holiness was defined by placement within a series of concentric circles. The high priest was the most righteous, followed by ordinary priests, Levites, Israelites of pure blood, illicit children of priests, Gentile converts, children born out of wedlock in general, foundlings and eunuchs, those born with deformed sexual organs, then last and least, non-Jews.

By sharp contrast (and Jesus Seminar founder Robert Funk has written well on this), Jesus was willing to fall in with anyone. He "routinely breached the walls and barriers that set sacred space off from profane, and he trampled indifferently on the social dividers that enforced segregation." When Jesus told a story, one was not surprised to find half-breeds, tax collectors, and beggars as heroes. This is the Jesus the Jesus Seminar believes in:

"In contravention of the social order, Jesus was socially promiscuous: he ate and drank publicly with petty tax officials and 'sinners,' yet he did not refuse dinner with the learned and wealthy. He was seen in the company of women in public -- an occasion for scandal in his society. He included children in his social circle -- children were regarded as chattel, especially females, if they were permitted to live at birth -- and advised that God's domain is filled with them."

Like the servant in Isaiah, Jesus displayed a strange, redemptive blindness. In steadfastly failing to notice caste, class, gender, or age, he began to change the world.

How likely is it that such a figure was the invention of pious fiction writers? Read the "Gospel of Judas," even the "Gospel of Thomas," to see what a fictional "Jesus" would look like, praised by so many clever intellectuals, but a proper Gnostic bore. The real Jesus was too original, even while preserving and extending the deep truths of Jewish culture, to be a pious stick figure. These are just ten of the fifty traits that I found describe Jesus in the four canonical Gospels. Each of these, like the winding threads of nucleotides in DNA, suggest that the texts originate from a complex and unique person. It is not easy to invent aphorisms and stories geniuses like Dickens, Tolstoy, and Lin Yutang would stand in awe of: it passes belief that several anonymous early followers of Jesus did so. One cannot believe that Jesus' concern for women was ascribed to him, with deft realism, by several unknown 1st Century proto-feminist propagandists. Jesus' teaching only makes sense as coming from a Jew, and only makes sense as the source of Christian doctrines: yet it makes no sense as merely Jewish, or merely Christian, as N. T. Wright demonstrates.

And on it goes. Each argument, like a strand winding around other strands, makes the whole immeasurably stronger. The evidence for the life, teachings, personality, acts, death and resurrection of Jesus is, as purely historical evidence, thus exponentially greater than for the life and teachings of Confucius. And almost no one doubts, or should doubt, that Confucius lived, and did much of what the early Analects say he did.

But is even such strong historical evidence, strong enough? Is it good enough to persuade us that Jesus walked on water, healed the sick, or raised the dead? Confucius did no miracles. We are not asked, in the Analects, or Quran, or Lao Zi, to move beyond the intellectual familiarity of practical materialism. Someone might well respond, "So maybe the evidence for Jesus is overwhelming. But I can't believe in miracles, anyway. Such things just cannot happen."

The validity of such a response is a question to consider another day. But one has to wonder: If skeptics have for so long overlooked truths that stand out clearly in the Gospels, like an "elephant ten yards away in broad daylight," as C. S. Lewis put it, is it not possible they have overlooked other things, about the world in general, that ought to fit into the background knowledge by which they evaluate the Gospel evidence?

Response to John Loftus: The Insider Test for Outsiders

One trait of Christianity that I find intellectually exciting is how it helps us understand and appreciate the world's religious traditions. If you're an atheist, as C. S. Lewis explained, you have to believe that most of what people in every civilization have always believed was mainly wrong. The Gospel, on the other hand, digs deep into the heart of tradition and reveals forgotten and overlooked truth, bringing it out into the open, and invigorating it with new life.

Yet comparative religion has often been used to attack Christianity, and seems to have caused some to lose their faith. I have seen the question of how the Gospel relates to other religions brought up in all kinds of contexts -- in debates over the resurrection, in the Q & A after a talk about astronomy.

In his recent book, The Christian Delusion, atheist John Loftus argues for what he calls the "Outsider Test for Faith," his marque critique of Christianity. He also often supports this "OTF" on his popular Debunking Christianity blog. I posted a rebuttal in September. Loftus has now responded, in four posts.

There's a lot of material here, and I won't have time to reply to it all right now.  (For later posts, follow the "Loftus" link.)

What I'd like to do in this post, is (a) reprise John's argument, and (b) note a few important problems I have with it, as formulated. (c) Then I'll respond to some of John's more relevant recent points. (d) Finally, and most importantly, I'll briefly explain why I think the "Outsider Test," rightly understood, should be beneficial to Christianity. I've written two books on roughly that subject already, and my ongoing dissertation (finish early 2012?); I'll be brief here.

A. In bare bones, John's argument runs like this:"1) Rational people in distinct geographical locations around the globe overwhelmingly adopt and defend a wide diversity of religious faiths due to their upbringing and cultural heritage. This is the religious diversity thesis."

(2) "Consequently, it seems very likely that adopting one's religious faith is not merely a matter of independent rational judgment but is causally dependent on cultural conditions to an overwhelming degree. This is the religious dependency thesis."

(3) "Hence the odds are highly likely that any given adopted religious faith is false."

"4) So the best way to test one's adopted religious faith is from the perspective of an outsider with the same level of skepticism used to evaluate other religious faiths. This expresses the OTF."

II. A few basic problems. I pointed some out some problems with this line of reasoning in my original blog. Here are a few observations that strike me, reading it several months later:

First, points one to three looks like a deductive argument. For a deductive argument to work, you need two things: true premises, and a conclusion that logically follows from them.

Second, the term "diversity of religious faiths" is deeply ambiguous. As G. K. Chesterton pointed out, religions around the world commonly include four kinds of beliefs: in "God, the gods, philosophy, and demons," as he put it. This might be called the "lack of religious diversity thesis." In years of studying world religions, I have found Chesterton's observation to be essentially true. So the validity of (1) largely depends on what you mean by "religious faiths."

Third, Loftus' second premise is neither clearly true nor even truly clear. Often (as Loftus admits) people do adopt religions they were not socialized into as children; this is how Christianity and Buddhism spread. Even Americans born into one particular religion, do, as Michael Shermer shows (most of us knew this already), often rationally evaluate our beliefs. (Sometimes altering them in the process.) In most of the world, serious Christian faith is not the default position: even most American Christians go to secular schools, listen to secular music, watch secular movies, and (in extreme cases) even read John Loftus' blog. So the cultural dependency is partial, not "overwhelming."

One might, therefore, rephrase this premise as follows:

"Most people do not adopt their worldview solely as an independent rational judgement, but also largely in response to socializing influences of various kinds."

To this, I certainly agree, as, I think, would almost every sociologist. 

Fourth, John's initial conclusion -- point three -- does not follow from his first two premises, even in the defective form he uses.

The general form of his argument is: (1) Ideas about X vary; (2) The beliefs one adopts about X originate in one's culture, and in that sense depend on it; (3) Therefore one's beliefs are probably wrong.

"Why?"  I asked.

This seems to commit the generic fallacy. This is the idea that the origin of an idea disproves it: "Guino is Italian, so of course he thinks olive oil is healthier than corn oil!" Maybe Guino's cultural bias does incline him to favor the olives; but that doesn't mean olive oil isn't superior, or even that Guino doesn't hold to his belief for good medical reasons.


III. Response to John Loftus.

On second thought, given how much there is to say below, I think I'll save this for a later blog.

IV. Outsider as Insider: how world religions brings pagans to Jesus.

Christianity is the world's largest religion. It started out small. (This cannot be taken for granted: many religions evolve organically from broad roots.)  Christianity spread, not by the sword, as Richard Carrier falsely asserts (see Response to Carrier, "Did Christianity Spread by the Sword?"), but mostly by persuasion. (Unlike Islam and Tai Ping faiths.)

The first people to accept the Gospel were Jews who saw Jesus as the fulfillment of hopes and dreams that the Jewish people had held for many centuries. They were, in fact, both "insiders" and "outsiders" in relation to Christianity. Jesus said, "Don't think I've come to abolish the Law and the Prophets. No, I've come to fulfill them." Yet he also challenged many time-honored Hebrew conventions.

So did Matthew, Mark, Peter, John, James, Mary, and Paul adopt Christianity as insiders, or as outsiders? Originally they stood outside the Christian culture, but found Jesus to fulfill truths within their Jewish heritage.

What about the first Gentile Christians? In relation to Greco-Roman tradition, people like Justin, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, and Augustine were clearly "insiders." Each first approached the "Galilean sect" from the outside looking in, and not always liking what they saw. Yet much within their own culture -- the theism that had spread among Greco-Roman philosophers, the heroic example of the sage, Socrates, and his willingness to die for truth, the moral teachings of the Stoics, and much else -- also encouraged them towards faith in Jesus.

Origen saw this clearly:

"If anyone were to come from the study of Grecian opinions and useages to the Gospel, he would not only decide that its doctrines were true, but would by practice establish their truth, and supply whatever seemed wanting, from a Grecian point of view." (Contra Celsus, Book 1, chapter 2)

Justin similarly called Greek philosophers "tutors to Christ," a term Clement used as well:

"Philosophy was given to the Greeks directly and primarily, until the Lord should call the Greeks."

Ancient peoples had powerful incentives to reject Christianity. Few people easily ditch their own traditions, and while Christianity fulfills much in Greek tradition, it also challenged many things -- the gods, popular sports, popular cults. In effect, it turned everyone into a Jew, which was not a popular thing to be. Not to mention, of course, the fact that you might be fed to a lion for falling Jesus.

But over a brief 350 years, beginning at almost zero, Christianity passed that remarkable "outsider test." By the time of Constantine, it had become a force to be reckoned with. By the time of Theodisius, most Greco-Romans at least claimed to be Christians.

How is Christianity doing today?


Africa: One hundred years ago, there were few Christians in sub-Saharan Africa. Now there are more than 400 millions Christians in this region -- Christianity took, and passed, the OTF in Africa, with flying colors.

Latin America: A century ago, there were few evangelicals in Latin America, and most Latins belonged to a syncretistic "Christo-paganism." Today there are tens of millions, and many Catholics seem to have become more orthodox in their beliefs. South and Central America, too, took, and passed, OTF for orthodox Christianity.

China: Some 60-90 million Chinese have taken the OTF, and found that Christianity passed, and converted, in the past 20 years. Most others have probably not yet really considered Christianity, or been reluctant to convert for non-rational reasons -- cultural inertia, some persecution, love of sin, unexamined atheistic propaganda, continued anger over 19th Century "Christian" imperialism.

Why have so many believed? Those I've talked with have given many reasons, often involving miracles, or a search for truth.

My roomate in seminary in Taiwan many years ago, a bookish young man with shelves of translated works on existentialism, told me what he found attractive about Christianity was how it combined truths of different Chinese belief systems -- I think he mentioned Daoism, Buddhism, and Confucianism.

Having studied this issue for many years, I believe Chinese find in Christianity something that is both "outside" and "inside" their religious tradition, challenging errors in it, but as a friend.

The Muslim World: A month ago, I talked with a former Islamic legal scholar from an African country, in his apartment in the UK. I asked, "When you were imam at this mosque, would you have agreed that a person who converts out of Islam should be killed?" "Oh, absolutely!" He replied.

My friend did convert, and left home, because he took the "OTF," and Christianity passed.

Probably at least a million or more contemporary Muslims have done the same, despite the manifest dangers, and despite their natural attachment to their own cultural traditions. How many more would convert, if those barriers were lowered? There's no telling -- we may have only seen the beginning, so far.

Can you best tell the value of a house from inside, or outside? Both, of course, are important. Depending on how you keep things up, the "insider test" can be quite misleading. You also need to compare other homes for sale, and get a feel for the market.

To really appreciate the value of Christianity, it does help, I do think, to go outside it, either historically (by studying what Christianity fulfilled and changed in the ancient world), or geographically (by getting to know other religious traditions).

But we are human, and what is human is common to us all.

Religions are not, as many skeptics assume, a "zero-sum game." (Like the fruits at the market by the Taipei temple I photographed at top right, from which you are required to pick one, and leave the rest.) What made Christianity persuasive for Justin and Clement, and for my Taiwanese friend, helps persuade me of its truth as well, though unlike them, I begin, in part, as an "insider" to the Christian faith.

Christianity provides a larger map of the world. It embraces and includes the deepest truths as known to Socrates, Zeno, Epictetus, Confucius, Lao Zi, and informed modern "outsiders" who become insiders, like G. K. Chesterton, Scott Peck, Rene Girard, Robert Coles, Alexander Solzhentisyn, Rodney Stark.

So in one sense, while I think John forumulates and uses it wrongly, I approve of the OTF. As Francis Bacon put it:

"A little or superficial knowledge of philosophy may incline the mind of man to atheism, but a farther proceeding therein doth bring the mind back to religion." (Bacon, The Proficience and Advancement of Learning)

If the test means anything, empirically, it is that Christianity must possess remarkable reserves of plausibility, to have convinced so many people, in so many cultures, to risk so much, to follow Jesus.