Why Pluralism, Exclusivism, and Inclusivism all fail

(Note: this is, in part, adapted from portions of my doctoral dissertation.)


Visiting the home of Mateo Ricci in 1601, Li Zhizao, a young magistrate with an interest in cartography, spotted a map on the wall. The map showed not just the thirteen provinces and two capitals of Ming China, and not only Japan, Korea, Tibet and India, or coastal Africa to which Admiral Zheng He had sailed early in the dynasty, but six continental masses, plus extensive regions in white at bottom. Years later, after he fell ill and Ricci nursed him to health, Li became a Christian.  Ricci’s greater calling was to map Christianity in relation to the Confucian classics on which Li, like all of the literati class, had been raised.  Indeed, Li subsequently wrote a series of works describing ‘Heavenly Studies,’ based on the religious and scientific doctrines Ricci brought to China. But he never forgot that map, which literally expanded his view of the world.  

Over the four centuries since, a credible mapping of beliefs in relation to one another, Ricci’s larger ambition, has become a pressing priority of emerging world civilization.   

Schemes for relating world religions, like misfortunes, often come in threes. Gibbon famously said ancient Romans of different classes saw religions as equally true (commoners), false (philosophers) or useful (magistrates, Gibbon 1776: 43). In the late 1930s, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan borrowed the political terms ‘right, centre, and left’ to describe models, taking Karl Barth and missionary-scholar John Farquhar as Christian representatives of the first two, and ascribing the third to Hindus and liberal Christians (Radhakrishnan 1959: 347). Paul Tillich described Barth’s position (with some sympathy) as ‘exclusivist,’ contrasting it with ‘pluralist’ and ‘inclusivist’ (Tillich 1963), terms that have bedeviled analysis ever since. 

I am tempted to illustrate the shortcomings of the latter two in reference to an ironic interlude in the recent Boston tragedy, when two young terrorists hijacked a Mercedes SUV with the legend ‘COEXIST’ on its rear fender, ‘C’ being the ‘Islamic’ crescent.  We do share a planet, and the overt sentiment of the bumper-sticker ought not be controversial.  But the thinness of the ambition is matched by the crudeness of its implicit theology.  How exactly does Islam, founded by a man who started numerous wars and married numerous women (not all of whom were given a choice), rest alongside peace (‘O’ for the peace sign) and gender equality (‘E’)?   And isn’t the one-dimensionality of this row of icons, as misleading as the strange bedfellows it creates?  Shouldn’t the crescent moon (originally a Turkish moon god) be in the sky?  And isn’t the cross (‘T’) set on a hill, like the serpent in the wilderness, for a particular reason? 

I will argue in this post that when it comes to the question of truth -- I will not argue in relation to salvation here, which I see as  "above my pay grade" -- the conventional theologies of religions are almost as fatally simple and misleading.  They are not only wrong as to guiding assumptions, they are unbiblical (especially pluralism and exclusivism), and are even logically incoherent.  A model more orthodox and traditional, radical and of greater explanatory power – a multidimensional sketch of world religions rather like Mateo Ricci’s own – is needed.  In a later essay, I will propose such a solution, based on the idea of fulfillment.      

 

Why Pluralism Fails



Philosopher John Hick

In 1973, John Hick called for a ‘Copernican Revolution’ leading to equal respect for the world’s great religions.  These he compared to planets circling the sun (at first representing God, later a mysterious and much-debated ‘Real’). For Wilfred Smith, rather than emphasize the discreet individuality of traditions as Hick’s solar metaphor did, pluralism was a story that united humanity across many divides: ‘What we seek is a theology that will interpret the history of our race in a way that will give intellectual expression to our faith, the faith of all of us, and to our modern perception of the world (W Smith 1981: 125).’    

Working with ethnic communities in Birmingham, England, Hick began visiting mosques, temples, synagogues, and gurdwaras.  He converted to pluralism from that experience: ‘It was evident to me that essentially the same kind of thing is taking place in them as in a Christian church – namely human beings opening their minds to a higher divine Reality, known as personal and good and as demanding righteousness and love between man and man.’  At first Hick called this Higher Reality ‘God.’  But that seemed to exclude Buddhist and secular communities in which ‘salvation’ also seemed to occur.  Hick therefore reasoned that each community was in touch not with ultimate reality itself, which is after all beyond personality and impersonality, good and evil, but with a ‘manifestation’ or ‘face’ of the ‘Real.’  

Hick suggested that Yahweh is ‘the divine persona in relation to the Jewish people,’ and while ‘genuine, authentic and valid,’ belongs within that history. In the same way, Shiva or Krishna ‘are divine personae in relation respectively to the Shaivite and the Vaishnavite communities of India. Thus the many gods are not separate and distinct divine beings, but rather different personae formed in the interaction of divine presence and human projection’ (Hick 1980: 52-3).

Both Hick’s appeal to astronomy and Smith’s to history echo Ricci’s desire to join East and West by mapping traditions within one grand scheme. Both claim to posit credible ‘modern,’ that is, scientific, models of universal knowledge.

But pluralism has floundered on epistemological, historical, moral, and logical grounds. 

Epistemologically, most travelled people will concede that kindness, courage, self-control, honesty, and other virtues can be found outside their native traditions, beginning, for Christians, with the Good Samaritan. But why should we take that as evidence that the religion of the person we admire is significantly true?  One also finds kind atheists.  Hick himself seems to concede the weakness of this argument by including ‘humanism,’ ‘Marxism’ and ‘Maoism’ as valid categories within pluralism.  But if the Real manifests itself by non-existence as easily as by existence, why credit it with the latter virtue?  If the 'Real' is just as easily 'revealed' as 'the Unreal,' Hick's model has reached its Reductio Ad Absurdum.  Such an ephemeral concept becomes itself of no useful value. 

Historically, how in fact has ‘salvific’ reform taken place? The Judeo-Christian model of salvation does not predict that all believers will be uniformly superior to all unbelievers, but that through the ‘seed of Abraham’ God will bless humanity. One might ask, ‘How would the rise of science, the reformist thinking of Roy, Gandhi, or Sun, the end of sati or foot binding, improvement in the status of women, universal education, the long, fitful reform of war-like European forest tribes that in American iconography culminates with Martin Luther King quoting Isaiah before a statue of Abraham Lincoln, have been different if Jesus remained in Nazareth and hewn wood?’ Considered historically, as Hick advises us to do, ‘rough equality’ in salvific influence of the great prophets can hardly be assumed. (Especially given a rich literature that intricately ties the greatest reforms to the Gospel.)  One suspects some pluralists stress the dark side of Christian history precisely to avoid serious analysis of this difficult but not self-evidently inscrutable question. 

Logically, how can salvation, which for Hick reveals itself through virtuous deeds, be evidence of a Real that cannot be called morally good? One might argue that followers of the Chinese goddess Guan Yin act kindly by the grace of a benevolent and ontologically real bodhisattva. But what would it mean to say the kindness of fatalists proves the existence of an indifferent Fate? If anything, the evidence would seem to undermine the claim, since the quality 'indifference' undermines the quality of 'kindness.'  Yet tempted to call the Real at least analogously good, Hick hurled the forbidden fruit aside:

‘I see the force of your argument. Nevertheless I don’t think it can be accepted, because it violates the principle that any comprehensive interpretation of religion must take account of all the major traditions, and not just of one’s own.’ (Hick 1995: 61-2)

But why just major traditions?’ Why exclude human sacrifice as salvific? Or torture of counter-revolutionaries? This is not just a moral objection (that, shortly) but a logical conundrum. Hick argued for the Real from the allegedly salvific character of ‘major’ traditions, even while denying that which alone could make that evidence mean something – that the Real resembles what we want to be saved to, more than what we cry to God for salvation from. Unable to affirm even that, the Real becomes not only exclusive and unsupported, but self-defeating: its essential reason for Being dissipates. 

 

Moral Failings

Like all ineffable beings, Hick’s Real must be that of which nothing can be predicated and therefore provides no basis for preference. The Real cannot, Hick wrote, be described as ‘one or many, person or thing, conscious or unconscious, purposive or non-purposive, substance or process, good or evil, loving or hating’ (Hick 1992: 350).  But Hick seemed caught between the horns of exclusivism, and the consequences of denying that, say, Mother Theresa acted in relation to the Real more appropriately than Jim Jones.  If the Real is not more loving than hating, why should we identify it with heaven which saves us, rather than hell, which seeks our damnation? 

In an essay in Christianity and Other Religions (2001), Hick responded to such objections.  I italicize key terms that, ironically, reveal the confusion of his position with particular clarity:

‘We do not worship the Real in its infinite transcendent nature, beyond the scope of our human categories, but the Real as humanly thought and experienced within our own tradition. In religious practice we relate ourselves to a particular “face” or appearance or manifestation of the ultimate divine reality (2001: 169).

‘If we say that the figure of the Heavenly Father is a manifestation of the Real because it is salvific, and that it is salvific because it is a manifestation of the Real, are we not moving in a circle? Reply: Yes, the hypothesis is ultimately circular, as indeed every comprehensive hypothesis must be. The circle is entered, in this case, by the faith that human religious experience is not purely imaginative projection but is also a response to a transcendent reality. The hypothesis should be judged by its comprehensiveness, its internal consistency and its adequacy to the data – in this case, the data of the history of religions (2001: 170).’

Hick used the word ‘manifestation’ three times in these paragraphs. To ‘manifest’ means ‘to reveal, show, or display.’ What does it mean to say the Real ‘manifests’ itself through ‘faces’ of ultimate reality, if what is manifest does not truly reflect that reality? Hick smuggled in with his left hand what he extracts with his right: that God truly reveals Himself by ‘saving,’ and by Hick’s quiet exclusion of some means of salvation. The word ‘manifest’ carries one rhetorical advantage over synonyms: it is vaguer and therefore does not reveal the contradiction so clearly as ‘display’ or ‘show’ might.  This shows clearly that on some level, Hick recoiled from the moral bankruptcy of his own doctrine.

A nebulous ‘Real’ that has no characteristics but that reveals itself (however unreliably!) in all religions, may be comprehensive, but it is hard to see how it explains even religious ethics.  Why should a Real that is not ‘good’ want to save? When Wilfred Smith described religion as ‘a response to a divine initiative’ (Smith 1981: 30), how did that help us understand Aztec sacrifices, sati, or the Goan Inquisition?  Pluralists cannot, it seems, escape the fact that some ‘manifestations’ of the ‘Real’ save more than others, or from insinuating that they thereby manifest the Real more truly than others.  Hick focuses on ‘great traditions,’ one suspects, because Aztec ritual, Nazi metaphysics, or the ethical insights of Peoples’ Temple manifest the ineffable Real rather too paradoxically. 

The problem is not just that religion is often horrible.  It is that on principle, discrimination (in either sense of the word) is not something pluralism can admit.  Yet Hick’s basis for accepting pluralism is that all major religions (he originally included Maoism, which may have seemed like a good idea in 1973) are vehicles of salvation.  If so, it is a salvation that would often bring glee to the forces of darkness.

 

‘Lead me from the unreal to the Real’ 

Pluralists posit that all ‘great’ religions (at least) are more or less equally valid, true, or useful. John Hick’s metaphor of planets circling the sun begs the question, ‘Valid, true, or useful in relation to what?’  Just as a solar system requires one center of gravity, so pluralism seems to require some Ultimate that lends unity to different religions. Likewise, value judgments about religious systems are meaningless except in reference to some standard. Pluralism thus seems to demand something like ‘the Real,’ or the Enlightenment ideals D’Costa says western pluralists generally smuggle into their systems.  But any such entity seems doomed to be seen as both too vague and too specific. 

Wilfred Smith had a name for the error (common, he noted, in Christian tradition) of identifying transcendent or absolute truth with the manifestation through which one

Wilfred Canwell Smith, former director
 of Harvard's Center for the Study of
World Religions.

is introduced to it: idolatry (Smith 1987: 58). But ‘transcendent’ or ‘absolute’ are attributes ascribed to God, along with others, such as (the Stoics were whispering, even before Paul announced this on Mars Hill) a belief that idols are inadequate to represent Him. On what basis does Smith decree we should privilege two divine attributes above all others? And how do these privileged and reified concepts – or the Real – escape the charge of cultural conditioning? So pluralists must be equally guilty of this sin.  In any case, by berating Christian ‘idolatry,’ Smith in essence admits that even ‘pluralistic’ systems need to exclude. D’Costa explores this contradiction unrelentingly: ‘harmony (in Hick’s pluralism) is arrived at through the destruction and neutralizing of the Other’ (D’Costa 2000: 27).

While Paul Knitter saw a ‘theocentric universe’ as part and parcel of inclusive Christology (Knitter 1983), some find even the attenuated ‘theocentricism’ of ‘The Real’ to be ‘implicitly exclusivist’ (Apczynski 1992). Looking at Hick’s system from an even stronger position of Enlightenment rationality, John Apczynski saw it as parochial and ‘retrograde,’ pock-marked with unacknowledged ‘narrowness’ and ‘exclusivism.’ D’Costa compared Hick’s ‘Enlightenment Exclusivism’ unfavorably to Hindu and Tibetan Buddhist versions (D’Costa 2000: 72-79):  ‘It privileges liberal modernity as the master code within which all the religions are positioned, and neutered.’ Yet it was precisely to avoid exclusivism that Hick fled orthodox Christology (McCready 1996), then theology, in the first place.

Sikhism began as a "unity" religion; it later took up arms to
protect its often admirable distinctiveness. 

While the ‘richness’ of individual traditions should not be abandoned, Paul Badham argued that pluralism may help advance interfaith dialogue (Badham 1991). Badham drew attention to the fact that religions are produced and sorted not only in view of truth claims or salvation, but also (as the title of the magazine in which his comments were published, Dialogue and Alliance, suggests) in pursuit of social harmony. Indeed, there is a large class of religions that originate as attempts to harmonize faiths: Gnosticism, Tian Tai Buddhism, Unitarian Universalism, Sikhism, Bahai, Cao Dai, Yi Guandao. Most, having failed to unify humanity, ultimately became distinct religions. D’Costa, also Apczynski and Badham, in effect see (from opposite sides) that western ‘pluralism’ may be becoming one more unity sect hawking wares in this already bustling alley off the religious marketplace. 

The irony is, more of humanity is arguably prepared to accept a concrete theism than a post-cultural and ineffable ‘Real.’ Chinese Zen practitioners may deny God as Buddhists, yet recognize the classical theistic term Shang Di.  Advaita Vedanta may dominate philosophical Indian thought, but the masses (not excluding a Ram Mohan Roy or Gandhi) pray to a God outside themselves they hope will hear and answer. Cleanthes, Lao Zi, Epictetus, and Zhuang Zi (the second and fourth forming the ‘S’ in COEXIST) arguably recognize a personal Supreme God even while espousing philosophies often taken as pantheistic.

But the Jewish Scriptures portray Yahweh as acting in relation to all peoples: judging, punishing, and rewarding, answering prayers, and preparing a universal Messiah. Early Christians read Plato as ‘Moses in Attic Greek’ because they saw his theos (at least in Timaeus) as a Greek name for God. Paul also seemed to tacitly accept the Zeus of Aratus as an acceptable synonym, while Augustine called Latins to a fuller and saner conception of Jupiter.  Even Australian and Chinese tribes accepted names for the Supreme Being as given by neighboring tribes. If God already transcends particular cultures, might not the Real represent a constriction rather than an expansion of sympathies?

And while the ‘high religion’ of some nations discourages monotheism, it is often present anyway. Anthropologist David Lewis asked 651 Japanese if they believed in a ‘Being above man and nature,’ and found almost two thirds believed (D. Lewis 1993: 242-3). I asked a smaller sample of students at Nagasaki and Siebold Universities, giving them pantheistic, atheistic, and polytheistic options, along with ‘There is only one God, who made everything,’ and ‘There are many gods, but one God made everything and is greater than the others.’ About one fifth chose one of these two options, mostly the former, though only a few appeared to belong to theistic religions (Marshall 2002: 88-9). In chapter 24 of the Lotus Sutra, which influenced the popular Japanese Nichiren sect, the bodhisattva Avalokitsvara functions much like Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita, a personal High God who reveals himself in many disguises (Tagaki 2001: 257-9). Henotheism at least does not seem inherently inimical to Japanese sensibilities.   

It seems, then, that while a Christian model of religions that begins with God must exclude models that deny God, some degree of ontological exclusivism is probably an inescapable consequence of the nature of logical disjunction, which ‘broader’ theologies fail to escape, anyway. While theism ‘excludes’ non-theism, as ‘realism’ excludes non-realism, placing God at center of the Christian map of religions is less provincial than commonly supposed, and seldom (if ever?) need ‘exclude’ any full human tradition.   

So should we accept Hick’s Real because it is real, or for social reasons? If the latter, is it moral or even possible to believe something fundamental about the nature of reality simply to build community? Anyway, given the tendency of ‘unity’ religions to evolve into sects, why should this one succeed in unifying? And if unity is the goal, why not start with the idea of God, or of a savior who dies for sin – beliefs that include far more of humanity, and far more of humanity’s branches? 

Nor, for all the problems the Real creates, does it save Hick from accusations of ‘exclusivism’ on either side. The search for something inert enough that everyone can believe in it collapses on both flanks: it excludes the majority, whose concepts of the Absolute are concrete, and it remains subject to charges of cultural bias when traces of orthodox theology and Christology are (inevitably) found tainting the ethnological headwaters of even the most prestine pluralism.

 

Why Exclusivism Fails  

Leslie Newbigin

Exclusivism is often taken as the traditional Christian view of world religions.  Perhaps it has most often been, if we define religion as the answer to the question, ‘Who will be saved?’  Christians have often answered by excluding (depending on whom you ask) those outside the Church, those who have never been baptized, said the sinner’s prayer, assented to true doctrines, been filled with the Spirit, or failed to believe in even the vaguest anonymous Christianity.  Leslie Newbigin questioned the whole  line of inquiry:  ‘That is a question which God alone will answer, and it is arrogant presumption on the part of theologians to suppose that it is their business to answer it.’ (Newbigin 1980: 180)

I agree with Newbigin that the humbler alternative is to model religions by what they aver as true, rather than claim to know who will enter heaven.   

Yet one difficulty with pure ontological exclusivism is finding anyone who holds it. The term seems to imply that truth is limited to one tradition. But how likely is it that a developed system of doctrines that millions of people have believed and often productively lived by for centuries could be so wrong that its claims overlap with truth exactly nowhere? John Hick found truth in Maoism: so did a pastor I knew who had spent two decades in one of Mao’s prisons for his faith.  Even the Tsarnaevs, if they were as informed in Islamic orthodoxy as devoted to it, would be obliged to confess Jesus as the ‘Breath of God,’ as the Qur’an calls him.  Likewise, what can it mean to say the Christian faith is exclusively true in relation to Islam, if one accepts the Muslim belief that there is one good God who created all things?

Newbigin described himself as exclusive in regard to the unique truth of Christianity (Newbigin 1989: 182) and the value of other religions for salvation, while being ‘inclusive or pluralist’ about the work of God in the lives of non-Christians, and the hope of their salvation. But in saying Christianity was uniquely true, Newbigin did not mean truth is exclusively Christian.  In calling for a ‘new and unequivocal interpretation and elucidation’ of ‘exclusivism,’ Hendrik Kraemer likewise insisted that his own ‘exclusivism’ ‘includes a real openness to truth wherever it may be found . . . ‘ (Kraemer 1960: 365)  But if even Kraemer admitted truth in other religions, then what exactly does exclusivism exclude?   

Bristol University theologian of
religions Gavin D'Costa

In practice, Gavin D’Costa has argued, people in all three camps admit some truth in

other traditions, but hold their own views to be more fully true.  D’Costa himself sees Christianity as exclusive in the sense that the sum of Christian propositions excludes the sum of competing packages.  He therefore defines exclusivism as meaning ‘one single religion is true and all other revelations or religions are ultimately false,’ (D’Costa 2000: 20; my emphasis). But if that is all we mean by exclusivism, then it seems an implication of any belief, and not very descriptive or of much predictive consequence.  So it seems that either no one is an ontological exclusivist, or everyone is.  The circle that encompasses this camp is either a point, or the whole (unmarked, undifferentiated) globe. 

Perhaps we should understand pluralism and exclusivism as not about truth and error, but about the set of facts one chooses to focus on, or the attitude one adopts towards those facts.    

Over decades of research, Hick uncovered ‘immense spiritual riches’ in non-Christian faiths (Hick 1987: 17), while Peter Cotterell found a ‘morass of superstition, ignorance, exploitation, oppression, fear’ (Cotterell 1990: 51).  One can find plenty of either.  These extremes apparently describe how a scholar focuses attention, rather than any useful generalization about the varieties of religious experience or practice.  

 

Challenges for Inclusivism

But life consists neither in including, nor excluding, but in discriminating between what ought to be taken in, and what rejected.  Cells grow by taking in useful proteins, catalytic metals, water and oxygen, and by expelling viruses, bacteria, harmful chemicals, and waste.  Homeland Security operates, ideally, on similar principles. Those who map world religions also face the need, as Paul Tillich put it, to ‘subject’ elements in religion to some ‘central criteria,’ which like DNA will orchestrate the uses of those elements.

With the dubious success of modernism at offering a universal narrative, and of post-modernism at escaping one, compromise models are often proposed: ‘provisional pluralism,’ ‘anonymous Christianity,’ ‘evolution of religions.’ Models that split the difference between pluralism and exclusivism are often jointly labelled ‘inclusivist,’ ‘acceptance,’ or (using the word rather vaguely, as Paul Knitter for example does) ‘fulfillment.’ Hick explained the popularity of such models by claiming the original, allegedly exclusivist Christian view of other faiths became ‘increasingly implausible and unrealistic,’ as Christians met followers of other religions after the Voyages of Discovery. Afraid to ‘explicitly renounce’ the old orthodoxy, these views, like the epicycles of late Ptolemaic astronomy, represent ad hoc, and doomed, attempts to escape the implications of contrary data (Hick 1980: 67).  Hick thus defined the ‘older Christian view of other faiths’ as ‘areas of spiritual darkness within which there is no salvation, no knowledge of God, and no acceptable worship.’ Smith asked of those who held such views, ‘May we not accept their ignorance as ignorance?’ (Smith 1981: 120)

Roberto de Nobili

Should we not, rather, take such generalizations as obtuse?  Observers as astute as Tillich (Tillich: 1963: 26), Jaroslav Pelikan (Pelikan: 1985), Richard Fletcher (Fletcher 1999), Lamin Sanneh (Sanneh: 1989), and Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, more loosely (Radhakrishnan 1959: 331 and 343), have long recognized that ‘accommodation’ to positive elements in pagan thought has usually been part of mainstream Christian theology. As Tillich put it, the norm has been ‘a dialectical union of acceptance and rejection, with all the tensions, uncertainties, and changes which such dialectic implies’ (Tillich 1963: 35). Rather than don the cap of innovator, Jesuit missionary to India Roberto de Nobili cited extensive European precedent for accommodating Brahmin culture (De Nobili 1971: 11, 21-87). Kwame Bediako and Wang Xiaochao describe, in the context of young African and Chinese churches respectively, how early Church fathers both criticized non-Christian thought, and affirmed important truths in it (Bediako 1992; Wang 1998). Justin Martyr, enthusing over how Greek philosophy (‘the greatest possession’) draws one towards God, could hardly have been meditating on the impact of fifteenth century Portuguese shipping.  

Hick was right though to be leery of ad hoc rationalization.  He was right, also, to demand that models be judged by ‘comprehensiveness, internal consistency and ability to explain religious history (2001: 170).’  We have seen that his own pluralism fails badly to achieve these goals, however.  The Real is itself narrow, incoherent, and of little explanatory value.

Inclusivism is, however, a vague term that by itself does nothing to solve this problem.  What does a given model of religions include?  What does it still need to exclude?  On what grounds?  Inclusivists run the risk of missing forest for trees, recognizing common traits without setting them in a coherent theoretical framework. Terms like ‘redemptive analogies’ (Richardson 1980), ‘promises God gave the Chinese,’ or ‘the Gospel in Indian cups’ bandied about by modern missionaries, echo the teleological daring and evocative flare of ancient slogans like ‘tutors to Christ,’ ‘seeds of the Word,’ ‘evangelical preparation.’ But analogies, metaphors, fulfilled promises, and other correlations, need to be set into a workable intellectual framework. 

The challenge to ‘compromise’ theories is thus three-fold: (1) Are they grounded in Christian theology, or (as Hick and others claim) mere ad hoc adaptations? (2) Is the attitude to other religions they promote subtle and wisely selective?  Or are they susceptible to Chesterton’s critique of the meson of Aristotle: ‘Being a mixture of two things, it is a dilution of two things?’ (Chesterton 1990: 93-4) (3) Do they accurately predict new facts?  In other words, can an alternative to pluralism and exclusivism be found that is not just vaguely fair-minded or a ‘moderate’ balance between orthodox rigor and generosity of spirit, but follows cogent internal logic that discriminates and predicts both noble and ignoble within ‘pagan’ traditions, and even lends it new meaning?  

A class of solutions that is richly biblical, claims theoretically coherence and ambition, tells a story of all humanity, includes and excludes according to clear-cut and orthodox criteria, derives at best from careful observation, and provides a basis for practical acts of contextualization, is one that I call ‘Fulfillment Theology (FT).’   My next essay will suggest that it has been central to Christian thought, and argue that it sheds powerful light on world religions. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Blind Faith: "I refute it thus!"

Yesterday I finally had the chance to give my Mom, who will be celebrating her 80th birthday in a few months, a copy of True Reason. Mom is not really an intellectual, and is becoming a bit forgetful. But as a Christian for some 65 years, now she still maintains generally good sense. She opened to Chapter Ten, "The Marriage of Faith and Reason," and read the comment by biologist Sheldon Gottlieb, "In the world of the supernatural, anything goes, and the only limitation is ...the extent of one's imagination. No evidence is required to substantiate any claims." Sitting at a Thai restaurant outside in the Seattle neighborhood of Fremont, "Center of the Known Universe," she exclaimed out loud, "That's not true! Jesus pointed to his miracles to back up the truth of his claims."

As to the populist version of the Blind Faith Meme (BFM), the notion that ordinary Christians believe without any reason, as Samuel Johnson said in a different context, "I refute it thus!"

Was Jesus Literate?

(Note: apologies for all the extra spaces here; don't know what happened to Blogger while I was in China.)


In Zealot: the Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, Muslim scholar Reza Aslan argues that Jesus was illiterate: 

"It is estimated that nearly 97% of the Jewish peasantry could neither read nor write . . . Whatever languages Jesus may have spoken, there is no reason to think he could read or write in any of them, not even Aramaic.   Luke's (accounts) . . . are fabulous concoctions of the evangelist's own devising. Jesus would not have had access to the kind of formal education necessary to make Luke's account even remotely credible." (34)

In addition, Aslan claims that Jesus belonged to "the lowest class of peasants" of the time, "just above the indigent, the beggar, and the slave."  He adds that there were "no schools in Nazareth" for peasant children, and surmises that Jesus' only education would have been in his trade.







To this I responded earlier, on this site, on Amazon, and in an article for Radix Magazine.  Here's the version from this site. 






Here are thirteen reasons why Aslan's argument fails, and it is far more reasonable to believe that Jesus was fully literate in one or more languages:








(1) The claim that only 3% of Jews at the time were illiterate has been disputed. 

(2) It is illegitimate to dismiss specific historical reports, such as that Jesus could read, based on broad demographic generalizations, such as that most people at the time could not read, therefore any given person could not read.  There are several such passages in the gospels, our earliest sources for the life of Jesus.  If any one of them is accurate, then Jesus must have been literate. 

(3) Aslan's main argument  (A) against Jesus' literacy goes like this: (a) X belonged to Category N.  (b) People in N usually possessed quality Q.  (c) Since X belonged to N, X probably also possessed Q. 






How much confidence can we place in such an argument?  When there are contrary historical reports, almost none. 


If we accepted arguments of type A, the claim that I was born in Seattle would have to be dismissed, since only one maybe ten thousand human beings are born in that city.  (A far smaller percentage than 3%.)  So would the claim that William Carey taught himself ancient languages while cobbling shoes, then introduced modern agriculture, printing, botany and other science to India, transforming that nation.  After all, no other cobbler did all that, so the prior probability against the story would seem to be vast, "not even remotely credible," in Aslan's words, but not 30 to 1, 300 billion to one. 

For an example from India where we have actual figures, less than 1% of Indian women could read before the early 20th Century.  Does that render biographies of female reformer Pandita Ramabai, which say she was educated in Hindu texts, incredible?

(4) Learning Greek letters is easy. 

(5) Aramaic does not appear difficult, either.  (I say that, having studied far more complex writing systems.) 

(6) Jesus was ambitious.  An ambitious young man who makes his living from the Hebrew Scriptures, would have strong motivation to learn to read them, or to read in general.  (And of course a young man who had gained mastery in the Hebrew texts, would be far more likely to make a big splash in Jewish religious society.) 

(7) His parents may also have wanted him to learn to read.  Luke reports that there were educated people in the family.  Surely it was more common for people with educated relatives, to learn to read, than for people without such relatives. 


(8) Other famous people come from humble backgrounds, and expended a great deal of energy in acquiring an education.  For example, almost no one read books in the town where Abraham Lincoln acquired his education.   Yet no one doubts reports that he could read, and indeed write with great mastery. 

(9) Jesus would have been able to speak Aramaic, and probably Greek.  This would give him a great advantage over those of us who study Greek without ever hearing it spoken. 

(10) Greek sounds the way it is spelled, unlike English.  Perhaps the same is true of Aramaic, as it seems to be of most languages more than English.  (This is true of all the languages I have studied enough to know that have alphabets or syllabaries, including Dai, French, German, Koine Greek, Japanese, Korean, Russian, and Spanish.) 

(11) The article Aslan appeared to be relying upon to show that few people in Jesus' day could read, admitted that more men than women learned to read.  Jesus was, of course, male. 

(12) It also admitted that more people who left the village life also learned to read. 


(13)  In addition to being ambitious in a field that required literacy, Jesus was also smart, perhaps the smartest person who even lived.  (M. Scott Peck)  That of course makes it almost inevitable that he would have learned to read and write, even aside from the positive evidence in the NT that he did (of which I have only touched the fringes.)   







All these factors combined make it probable a priori that an ambitious and brilliant male who moved from the country to the city and sought to reform Jewish tradition, and may have had well-educated relatives, would in the process of preparing to minister, have taken the elementary and fairly easy precaution of learning how to read. 






(14) That is speaking strictly of prior probability.  But as we have seen, reasonable historians recognize that prior probability must usually yield to actual reports of what happened. 
(15) And even aside from a few direct reports of Jesus reading, his whole complex and brilliant interaction with the Old Testament Scriptures, which so inspired his followers and ultimately changed history, is not easily understood on the hypothesis that Jesus could not read the Jewish Scriptures for himself.  (Craig Evans offers good observations on this.) 




Therefore, the claim that Jesus was illiterate, is vanishingly improbable, and can only be held against the weight of both reason and evidence. 
(Note: as a reader points out, Craig Evans has also addressed this question.  Of course he goes into much more historical detail, adding many important points, and coming to much the same conclusion.)

The Worst Book Ever? Raphael Lataster's "No Jesus, no God."

If you are about to order this book, STOP! Think of your loved ones! Think of your cat! You will die of embarrassment for having fed this young man's purse and ego. Especially if you are Australian, or have any affiliation with the University of Sydney.

 It should be called, "THERE IS NO GRAMMAR, I HAVE NO IDEA HOW TO WRITE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE."

 Or maybe,

 "EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT THE HISTORICAL JESUS, I LEARNED FROM RICHARD CARRIER AND ROBERT PRICE."

 Or perhaps,

 "SEE HOW MANY TIMES I USE THE WORDS 'SCHOLARLY' AND HOW I PATRONIZE MY PRESUMABLY EVEN LESS-LITERATE READERS? THAT'S BECAUSE I'M WORKING ON MY PHD AND AM A REAL-LIFE, GENUINE SCHOLAR!"

OK (remember, you were warned), now for some of the ugly details.  Here's how to write, against stiff competition, The World's Worst Book on the ("non") Historical Jesus.  (And a potential contender for overall worst book, ever.)


Step One: Mess with your readers' minds, and reveal your own limitations, in the bibliography.

First, you must begin by being innovative with your bibliography.  So list some books beginning with the last name of the author, like this:

Carrier, Richard. Not the Impossible Faith . . .

Then for variety, reverse the order of the author's names for the next or previous book:

Richard Carrier. "Proving History! . . . "

To keep the reader guessing, in fact, go ahead and list three of Carrier's works the first way, and four the second.  Then mix around Robert Price's writings, too.  Then while we're trying to keep readers on their toes, throw in a bunch of references that seem at first glance to totally fall outside the alphabet.  Thus between "Droge, Arthur J" and "Ehrman, Bart D" we get, "The Huffington Post. 'Did Jesus Exist'" and then "NPR. 'Did Jesus Exist?'"  Make the reader notice for herself that the next eight books are by Bart Ehrman, and then intuit that the two previous works, listed by site instead of author, are also by him.

But what, you ask, does the quality of books cited tell us?  To write a truly awful Historical Jesus book, you must reference numerous books.  (Given that the genre you are satirically aiming at is the "pseudo-scholarly mythical Jesus panegyric.")  A few books by people who actually believe in Jesus can be included, so long as your notes weigh heavily towards fringe figures.  More established scholars who attack Christianity can be presented as your "conservative" opponents, so that you can slip in statements like, "Even Bart Erhman admits that the gospels are pretty bogus," as if you had to water-board him to make him say that.

Aside from seven works by Richard Carrier, five by fellow Jesus mythicist Robert Price, two by Hector Avalos, and two by Earl Doherty, we thus find ten works by Bart Ehrman cited.  We find a liberal smattering (fittingly) of Jesus Seminar scholars -- Borg, Crossan, Funk, Meyer.  We find Karen King, James Robinson, and Elaine Pagels.

What of Christian scholars, you ask?  Philosophers William Craig, Alvin Plantinga, and Richard Swinburne are named.

The only conservative Christian New Testament scholars I noticed in the bibliography are Richard Burridge, who writes on genre, John Dickson, and Edwin Yamauchi.  There is no mention of such major figures as NT Wright, Richard Bauckham, Ben Witherington, Craig Keener, Craig Evans (aside from a bibliography), or Craig Blomberg.

This latter omission is telling.  On page 13, Lataster cites Richard Carrier as saying "Craig Blomberg argues that one should approach all texts with complete trust unless you have a specific reason to doubt what they say" (The Historical Reliability of the Gospels, 1987, p.240-54.)

Knowing Dr. Blomberg well enough to doubt that was really his position, I checked Carrier's source.  Sure enough, while one could snatch a single sentence out of context and make it seem to support that view ("Unless there is good reason for believing otherwise, one will assume that a given detail in the work of a particular historian is factual" [240]), read in context, Blomberg certainly did not mean "one should approach all texts with complete truth unless you have a specific reason to doubt what they say."  His issue, rather, is burden of proof.  Blomberg describes three approaches to historical sources, and argues that historians most often place the burden of proof upon those who deny the factuality of a given claim.  This being at the end of Blomberg's book, he also reminds the reader that he has given numerous reasons why the gospels have earned "an overall presumption of reliability." (242)

So what does that show, in regard to Lataster's bibliography?  Simple.  Blomberg is absent from it.  In other words, Lataster simply took Carrier's word for what Blomberg said, apparently without checking the original source.  And by doing so, he grossly misrepresents Blomberg, as did Carrier.
Which shows the reader that we have a bad satire on scholarship here, not the real thing.


Step Two: Write abysmally poor English

I used to find it a bit mystifying when my professor, who was head of the History Department at the University of Washington, took some of his precious time to mark in red mere lapses in spelling on my part.  What does that have to do with the substance of my argument?  I used to wonder.  Why does a scholar who records the fate of millions under the evil Joseph Stalin, bother to correct something so trivial as a letter or two out of sequence?

As a teacher myself, I begin to understand.  He or she who writes sloppily, usually thinks sloppily.  If you cannot present your thoughts on paper grammatically, there is a strong chance your thoughts are not yet worth presenting.

Lord, please send Raphael Lataster such a professor.  Don't let him earn his doctorate (I was working on my BA), before he learns how to write well in English.

We begin at the beginning, with the title and first sentence:

Title: "There Was No Jesus, There Is No God."

Page One: "Is is not my job, intention, or desire to prove atheism true, whatever that means."

But what atheism means is the title Lataster chose for his book: "There is no God."  If it isn't your intent to prove your title is true, Raphael, why did you pick it?  Were you trying to fool your readers with a tease, and now you are disavowing the goal your title clearly sets forward?  Or do you not know what you are doing?

And if you don't know what the first twelve words in your book MEAN, or that they directly conflict with the title of your book, why did you write them?

We're in trouble already.

"As a scholar working in the academic field of Studies in Religion who specializes in the arguments for God's existence . . . it is my job to examine the evidence / arguments presented by various religious apologists and to share my analysis with all who will hear it . . . "

Experienced readers recognize when an author is trying to drumbeat his readers into submission.  That seems to be the case here.  The subtitle of the book is "A Scholarly Examination of the Scientific, Historical, and Philosophical Evidence & Arguments for Monotheism."  A few words into the book, and the author is already repeating the word "scholarly" and adding the word "academic."
A young author who does not have his PhD yet ought to realize that such a heavy-handed drumbeat is likely to draw the readers attention to his youth and inexperience, relative to the scholars he intends to debunk.  Phrases like "with all who will hear it" underscore the bathetic tone of preachiness he thus establishes.  This will not be a dialogue, apparently, but a sermon, by a writer who does not know how to disguise his didacticism.

Also, in written English, we use the symbol "or" or the symbol "and," or the symbols "either . . . or" when we present two possibilities, one or both of which we want to deny is realized.  It is bad English to use the symbol "/" instead.

On page two, we find that Lataster plans to capitalize the word "god" even when it refers to a generic supernatural being: "They wish to argue for their specific God."

One page three, Lataster unexpectedly inserts his author bio.  Even more strangely, in the first two of three paragraphs of this author bio, Lataster writes about himself in the third person ("A former fundamentalist Christian, Raphael Lataster is a professionally secular PhD researcher . . . at the University of Sydney.")  He then switches without warning to the first person ("Please note that this is not an appeal to (my) authority.  The qualifications, intelligence, character, popularity, sexual appeal, etc, or the arguer is (sic) not what is truly important . . . ")

Aside from the larger confusion of this switch, the use of the lame noun "arguer," and the use of a singular verb with a plural subject in that last sentence, Lataster commits a basic and gross grammatical error in the second of these two paragraphs.  (One that I warn my Chinese SAT students against, and they learn to avoid in a foreign language at the age of 16.)  Watch the verbs carefully:
"For his doctoral work, Raphael is analyzing the major philosophical arguments for God's existence (as argued by [Craig, Swinburne, Plantinga, and Aquinas], attempts to demonstrate the logical implausibility of the monotheistic concept, explores the theological tendencies of Philosophy of Religion, considers the plausibility of pantheistic worldviews, and ponders the sociological impact of certain sophisticated apologists, such as Craig, whom he dubs the 'New Theologian.'"
Heaven help Sidney University.

First of all, any competent supervisor ought to have squashed the notion of taking on such a meandering, ephemeral program of studies, that purports to add to human knowledge in philosophy, theology, and sociology, within the first week of Lataster's study, if not sooner.  A doctoral study requires clear focus, a coherent research question to answer.  That is not in evidence here.
But back to grammar.  If all these verbs are describing the same program conducted at the same time, why aren't they all in the same tense?  I see no grammatical reason for switching from "is analyzing" to "attempts."

And how can anyone speak of "the theological tendencies of Philosophy of Religion?"  How did this fellow reach college, let alone grad school, without someone informing him that real scholars do not "explore tendencies" of an entire, vast field -- that's like telling NASA "Apollo 15's mission is to explore the moon's surface" -- good enough for vague PR, maybe, not good for a government grant, or description of a serious research project.

And finally, how can one write of the "sociological impact of certain apologists, such as Craig, whom he (sic) dubs the 'New Atheists?'"  What, is Craig possessed by a legion of devils, that we refer to him in the plural?

And now we're up to Page Four, and you've understandably run out of patience with my review.  So what if the man can't write?  This book is supposed (according to its cover, anyway) to refute God and Jesus.  Lataster does not claim to be William Shakespeare.

But scholarship also bares norms and stipulations for the writing craft.  I am presently reading sociologist Rodney Starks' new book as well.  When I turn from this clumsily-spilled series of ink stains to Stark's clear and stimulating prose, it is like stepping out of a playground and entering a symposium by a philosopher.  Poor writing may not always go with weak thinking.  But what are the odds that a young Aussie student who can barely write, and who has not bothered to read much yet on the subject he is writing about, nevertheless solves a problem that has taxed the minds of such thinkers as Origen, Blaise Pascal, Ernest Renan, C. S. Lewis, John Crossan, William Lane Craig, and N.T.Wright, and shows that they are all dead wrong?

One in a million?

One in 5.3 trillion?

Either way, don't waste that dollar on this dodo.


Step Three: Be Bombastic, Dismissive, AND Gullible

"Before we begin our sober and scholarly investigations on Jesus, we shall consider the scholars, their methods, and why their claims are based on foundations of sand." (9)

Wow!  So much, in 27 pages?  "The" scholars?  All of them?

"Sober and scholarly?"  Lataster doth protest over-much.

"The minority non-Christian Biblical scholars (generally taken more seriously by secular -- ie 'real' scholarship) -- rejects the Biblical Jesus, and tend to champion the historical Jesus." (9)

Oh, OK.  So Christian scholarship is "not real."  Glad we have that out of the way, already, on page 9.  Who can stand in the face of such sober analysis?

"Many top scholars will be referred to, with three modern scholars in particular: New Testament scholar Bart Ehrman, theologian and former minister Robert Price, and historian Richard Carrier." (10)

Bart Erhman is arguably a "top scholar," though most of his writing is popular.  But Richard Carrier and Robert Price are in no serious estimation or reasonable measure, "top scholars."
"Carrier then uses Bayesian methods to show that the authenticity criteria used to authenticate sayings and deeds of Jesus are either invalid, inappropriately used, or superceded by Bayesian reasoning . . . " (16)

Carrier attempts something like that, but does not succeed.  A sober scholar should keep his distance from such wild claims, until he has given strong reason to think they are true.  Lataster thinks he does this: he does not.  Neither does Carrier.  (See my Amazon review of Carrier's book.)
". . . the ridiculous supernatural claims made about Jesus . . . " (26)

In a book debunking religion, shouldn't "miracles are ridiculous" be a conclusion, rather than a premise?  I mean, if we all begin by knowing miracles are ridiculous, why are we arguing about Jesus in the first place?

"Furthermore, using the Gospels to argue for Jesus' existence is to use circular reasoning.  Arguing from external (non-Biblical) sources produces a much more convincing case." (26)

Huh?  The gospels are the four earliest sources, all from the First Century, which tell about Jesus' life.  Is Lacaster seriously trying to tell us that we should just toss them out because they were written by Christians?

This is not, in fact, how historians work.  If they did, they'd have almost no history to write, since ALL sources are biased, including good and essential sources.

Scientists are biased, too -- for one thing, they generally make money from their work.  For another, as Kuhn showed, they can be very pig-headed about their own theories.  So should we toss out scientific reports, as well?  In an effort to undermine the gospels, Lataster seems to be asking world scholarship to commit intellectual suicide, here.

"Believing Bible scholars who are often seen as lay people with a few letters after their name, by 'real scholars.'" (28)

Yes, Lataster often is that childish.  He doesn't even seem to KNOW any "Biblical scholars," or at least not the main ones, yet he declares them all frauds, including those vastly more experienced and competent than himself.

"Miracles are by definition the most improbable explanations.  They are considered to be miracles because they overturn scientific laws." (31)

This is uncritical Hume worship, without a hint that Lataster has ever even heard of any of the many philosophers who have long since debunked this reasoning -- which really is circular.  Tim McGrew gives a good overview in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on miracles.

"We can only speculate why (most of) the more liberal scholars do not allow for the possibility that all of the gospels could potentially be dismissed as unreliable.  This may have to do with personal motives, ego and job security . . . " (32)

"Ehrman is clearly confused.  Christian believers or not, these Bible scholars don't always come off as logical and level-headed." (33)

Pot: "Gee, that kettle takes on a dark shade in this light."  It is sleazy, as well as intellectually illegitimate, to dismiss the scholarly consensus by questioning the motives of mainstream scholars.  But if mythicists insist on going down that road, if they ever get any traction -- and reading this book, that seems unlikely -- then they should expect the same sorts of "arguments" to be thrown back at them, and they will have no cause to complain when their motives are assumed to be devious, as well.


Step Four: Argue Poorly

Bad arguments are inevitable here, given the apparent fact that Lataster has not read opposing arguments, at least not by Christians.  It turns out he cites Burridge just to make the point that no one really knows for sure what genre the gospels belong to.  (Even though Burridge argues in great detail, and with force that has persuaded many eminent scholars, that the gospels are typical Greek bioi or biography.  I show in more detail in Why the Jesus Seminar can't find Jesus that for many reasons, they are more credible than most other bioi.)  Lataster dismisses Plantinga -- that's Notre Dame's highly esteemed Dr. Alvin Plantinga -- with a wave of his hand, by crudely paraphrasing his argument even by his own admission.  So it appears that even those very few books by Christians that Lataster has read, he has not read well.

But his arguments here are bad, even given the author's patent ignorance.

Typically, Lataster will make Claim A.  He will support Claim A with a scoffing comment from a fringy mythicist "scholar."  He will add a few of his own scoffs.  He may also add a "supporting" comment from a liberal scholar like Ehrman or one of the Jesus Seminar crowd, often taken out of context and ill-defined, sometimes adding, "Even Ehrman / Crossan / Borg admits," as if they were hostile witnesses from whom the truth were being painfully extracted by the rhetorical magic of Perry Mason.  (He never addresses Christian counter-arguments, even to the most elementary and banal claims, since he doesn't know what they are.)  Then later he will refer back to that mess of an "argument" by saying "I proved A earlier," and add another snarky comment or quasi-supporting quote.  Lataster continues "supporting" his opinions this way, in dribs and drabs, like fronds on a pond for a frog to hop around a bit, without ever putting his webbed feet anywhere near solid empirical earth.


Step Five: Repeat old skeptical clichés about the gospels, as Gospel. 

Make it sound like you discovered them yourself.  Do not, of course, ask if they are true, still less inquire of opposing scholars about that truth.

"Younger (sic) than the earliest Pauline writings, the gospels are (sic) written around forty or more years after the supposed death of Jesus, which could also eliminate the possibility of them being written (sic) by eyewitnesses, long after the fact (considering life expectancies in the first century)." (48)

For my own mental health, let me begin by translating this mess into better English:

"The gospels were written later than the Pauline letters, at least forty years after the alleged death of Jesus.  This fact precludes the possibility that they were written by eyewitnesses, especially considering the short life expectancies people of the First Century experienced."

Lataster has not apparently read any scholars who think Mark (or even John) were written before 70 AD, though the former are thick on the ground.  But let's leave that one alone for the moment.
Jesus died, and rose, at a young age.  His disciples would have been mostly younger than he, given that peripatetic revolutionary movements tend to consist mostly of young people.

If a disciple was born in 10 AD, how long could he be expected to live?  Is there anything improbable about early Christian reports that Peter's memoires were recorded in the Gospel of Mark, or that John's disciples recorded his account in his waning years?

Let's see.  70 minus 10 is 60.  70 minus 15 (some of Jesus' disciples would have been that young) is 55.  95 minus 15 (John was supposed to be the youngest of the Twelve) is still only 80.  My grandmother was writing poetry at 95 or so.  My father-in-law recalls events at the end of World War II in Japan, which are now almost 70 years ago -- that would correspond to 100 AD!  By analogy, it is probable that SOME of Jesus' first disciples would still have been around to be interviewed, if one could find them in the close-knit Christian community (shouldn't have been that hard), decades AFTER the first gospels were written.

But what about life-expectancies in those days?

Short life expectancy was largely (not entirely) due to infant mortality.  If adults died off too quickly, the human race would not have been able to self-propagate, still less grow naturally.  (Especially given abortion, infanticide, war, and sadistic "games" in the Roman Empire, that artificially kept the population down.)

Indeed, when one checks the biographies of scientists whom Richard Carrier, Lataster's favorite scholar, names as important in this era, one finds that many of them lived lives long enough to write gospels, had they been among Jesus' early followers.

So baloney on this old cliché, which Lataster repeats ad nauseum.

"The  New Testament Biblical books all appear several decades to a century after the alleged events of Jesus' life.  None of these sources are contemporary, nor can they be assumed to be penned by eyewitnesses." (39)

False.  Some of Paul's epistles were written a mere two decades after those events.  Two is not "several."  At which time, of course, some of Jesus' first followers would still have been in their 30s!  And no NT books was written as late as 130 AD.  (One might technically excuse Lataster here by supposing he was talking about the birth narratives, but that interpretation would make the final sentence above a non sequitur, since the authors of the gospels could still have been contemporaries or even eyewitnesses to the ministry of Jesus, which is the main focus of the gospels.)

"One of the most curious problems the historian faces when researching Jesus is not posed by the sources, but by the lack of sources. There are no extra-Biblical references to Jesus that are contemporary and by eyewitnesses." (37)

"Another popular defense against the argument of silence may be that modern historians cannot reasonably expect primary sources.  Various scholars reject this claim, asserting that if Jesus was a historically significant figure, someone would have written about him, in a time when there were ample historians and authors (such as Philo of Alexandria), and especially considering the Biblical claims of Jesus' fame, controversies, miracles, and other great achievements." (42)

This is an astoundingly stupid argument, whoever made it.  (It is telling that Lataster is not able to name the scholars who debunk it, and is apparently not even sure if anyone has done so, while appearing unwilling to name the alleged "scholars" who offer it.  Earl Doherty?)

Of course when trying to think of "historians" who should have mentioned Jesus, the best Lataster can come up with is Philo.  Surviving works by Philo say almost nothing about contemporary Israel.  They are mainly philosophical in character.  If Philo barely even names contemporary Jerusalem, why in the world should he be expected to name one particular popular preacher, who mostly preached up-country in the Lake District?

How often do modern historians like Paul Johnson or even Philip Jenkins mention even famous preachers like Mark Driscoll?  Almost never.  If two thirds of their works were lost, the chances of finding references to one particular modern preacher would become insignificant, even if he was famous and controversial.

In fact, I agree with Bart Ehrman, whom Lataster quotes and then childishly derides, when Ehrman writes about how amazing it is that we have such wonderful sources for Jesus:

"Historical sources like that are pretty astounding for an ancient figure of any kind." (38)

It really is astonishing, how many early sources we have for this one particular Jewish preacher.  Their quality and historical force are even more astonishing, for reasons I give in Why the Jesus Seminar can't find Jesus, and Grandma Marshall Could.  Of course this amateur does not even seem aware of any of my positive reasons for trusting the gospels as generally credible sources.  Still less does he lay a finger on those arguments.

So back down from the ledge! Your life still has meaning! Your cat loves you, in as much as cats can love anyone! Don't do anything rash, like buy this book!  Buy a book about the mating habits of porcupines.  Christmas ornaments glazed with sand from Mount Saint Helens.  Futures in a Martian colony.  Anything.

This book is not dangerous to your soul -- but it may well cause you terminal cringing.

"Eastern" and "Western" religion: two ridiculous notions that sound absurd together.

Recently, a radio talk show host accused me (off the air) of credulity and stupidity for suggesting that the categories "eastern religions" and "western religions" are incoherent, and that these adjectives are better employed to describe directions, not ideas.  He failed to ask what I meant, or why I think that way.  But let me explain, anyway:


(1) All the main "western" religions arose in the "Middle East."  (You can stop there, if you like.) 


(2) What does Africa belong to, West or East?  Why?  If you don't know, is that because the world's second-most populous continent is not important?
(3) Most Christians today live OUTSIDE of Europe and North America.



(4) What do you mean by "east?"  Just India?  India and China?  India and China and Tibet and Japan and Korea?  All those, plus the thousands of tribes scattered around Asia?  Plus the what, 700 million Muslims of Asia?  Or do we leave those out, even though the founder of Islam was born in the "Middle East?"  And do we leave Asia's hundreds of millions of Christians out, even though Christ was also born in the "Middle East," his birth heralded by astrologers from the same tribe that trekked the Silk Road with the Gospel 600 years later? 


(5) What are the teachings of Confucius, Lao Zi, the Rig Veda, the Upanishads, Buddha, and Mozi supposed to have in common? 


(6) If "Eastern Religion" means pantheism, why not say pantheism?


(7) Except that most Asians disbelieve in pantheism?


(8) And some Europeans have believed in it, all the way back to the ancient Greeks? 


(9) Also reincarnation. 


(10) The world has six continents.  Australia and Asia (including Siberia) are in the East.  Africa and Europe are in the middle.  North and South America are in the West.  So what, Australians and Siberians are half again as pantheistic as Africans, and twice as much as Indians in the Amazon rain forest?  Who says? 


(11) Or if these familiar terms are unrelated to geography, why use such terms?


(12) The assumption seems to be that Christianity and Islam are similar to one another.  Are they?  Granted, both say God created the world.  But one tells us to follow (at least) the best person who ever lived.  The other tells us the greatest prophet of God was a fellow who couldn't keep his hands off women, threatened them with hell if they talked back, assassinated his critics, raped, enslaved, started wars, and murdered those he suspected of imperfect loyalty en masse. 


(13) Buddha, by contrast, at least preached compassion.  (Whatever he meant by that.) 


(14)  Confucius, who also believed in God, also seemed to practice compassion.  He was also looking for a savior, a lot like Jesus.  What if I think he was more like Jesus, in a limited but important ways, than Mohammed was?  Confucius lived way over near the eastern seashore of China, in a province called "East Mountain," or "East of the Mountain."


(15) Lao Zi, from the same neck of the woods, also hinted at something like forgiving one's enemies.  I also see him as a theist.  More "Eastern Religion?"


(16) Many tribes along the western shore of the Pacific Ocean, including the Polynesians, the Koreans, and the Chinese, had a strong and sometimes fairly personal notion of a Supreme God.  So did many Australian and Southeast Asian tribes.  Eastern religion, again? 


(16) "I'm really into Eastern Religion" usually means, "I'm into pot-smoking, faux Native Americana, American and European and Indian gurus who know squat about real Asian religions but sound cool, and 60s like, radical stuff."


(17) Your typical Asian would look at your typical "I'm into Eastern Religion" hippy and say, "These westerners are so weird."      

Beijing and Hunan: photos from China

A couple pictures from China.  Here on the right is a surprisingly deep lake in Zhangjiajie, western Hunan Province.  (Which is in the south of China, two thirds of the way to Hong Kong.)  Imagine being at sea in waves that choppy. 

Below is the Summer Palace in Beijing, last winter.  (You may notice a few open leads in the water; shortly after this, one could walk on the ice, and this one did.)  Here the emperors of Qing China would come to "get away from it all."

Don't be fooled: this is merely an oasis in a desert, an island of peace in a sea of buildings.  In all directions just past that hill, or to my right or to a lesser extent behind me (it is not far in that direction to the Fragrant Hills), spreads a vast city of some 20 million people.  And when the ice was frozen more solidly, it acquired a layer of precipitated smog, grit and grime, that kept one from slipping on the ice.  But still, it was nice to visit such islands, which I would do before work in the morning, the front gate of the Summer Palace just past that hill, being just five or so subway stops from the high-tech mecca in northern Beijing where my company was based.  Beijing University is about halfway between the two, and with its traditional architecture and landscaped lake (used as a skating rink in winter), was also a good place to stroll in the morning. 

After a month and a half in Beijing, I was sent to work in Changsha, the capital of Hunan Province.  Zhangjiajia is several hours by train to the west of the provincial capital. 

Hindu Texts on Women II: The Ramayana

Back from China yesterday, I'll try to put up a few posts during my visit to the US.  (China blocks BlogSpot, for some obscure reason.) 

Here we continue our ongoing series on "How Jesus Liberates Women."   Since this series has now been spread over several years, it may help to recap the argument to date before continuing it, and provide links. 

I began the series by describing the challenge, from John Loftus this time as it happens, that precipitated it.  I then told the story of how I became interested in the subject, as a missionary confronted with forced prostitution in Southeast Asia.  We looked at the strong sociological correlation between the influence of Christianity on a society and the high status of women in that society, around the world.  I described historical evidence that it was in fact the Gospel that changed things for the better, and not just in "Christian" countries.  We thoroughly examined the gospels, and found the life and teachings and example of Jesus in fact provide a very plausible  cause of that effect.  Then we looked at Acts, and found that while not quite as revolutionary as Jesus' own teachings, early Christians tended most of the time to further the revolution that he had set in motion in liberating women.  (We have not yet gotten to the letters of Paul, though I intend to analyze them as well.) 

The first several arguments above having generated hundreds of responses on various sites, we took a pause and amused ourselves by looking at ten amusingly lame "rebuttals" to my arguments, including by John Loftus and Anne Rice.  (Not many very good responses have come yet, but I do plan to get to those eventually, as well.)

The conversation then shifted to what other religious texts say about the status of women, or their role in society.  First, I read the entire Qu'ran, and cited and analyzed every single important passage related to women, and almost every minor passage, first in answer to Karen Armstrong, then a second analysis, then a final one, in which I concluded that traditional Christian criticism of Mohammed and his book was on the money.  It turned out that Mohammed was even a greater cad, and a more shameless and selfish manipulator and abuser, than I had realized before reading the Muslim holy book.  Then I offered a similar analysis of the Hindu Rig Veda, which turned out to reserve for women quite conventional roles of highly subservient wives and seductresses.  The gross abuse of later centuries had not yet been justified, but neither can one find in the sections analyzed (I did not read the entire text, which is quite long and often boring) any special compassion or liberation for women.


How Jesus Liberates Women: The Ramayana

Retold by Krishna Dharma

Now we turn to the great Indian epic, the Ramayana.  This is a story about Rama and his wife, Sita.  Briefly, it tells how the god Vishnu, the greatest god among a panoply of divine figures, incarnates as the son of a king of vast and wealthy state.  His goal is to defeat the great demon, Ravana.  The demon, who already has a huge harem, and who easily defeats the gods in battle, kidnaps Rama's wife, Sita, and demands that she marry him.  She refuses, and Rama goes to war, aided by an army of humans, monkeys, and some bears, on the demon stronghold across the ocean. 

Not surprisingly, there is quite a bit about relations between the sexes and the role of women in such a tale.  While women are still allowed to move about to some extent -- Sita accompanies her husband to live in the forest when he is banished by his father -- hints of increasing oppression, perhaps even justification for such oppression, is liberally scattered about the text.  It is made clear that a woman's only good is to look to her husband with starry eyes.  Several times it is even suggested that if he should die, the best she could do would be to go ahead and roast herself to death to follow him. (Though this is never carried out.)

(Note: apparently it actually was carried out in the oldest extant version of the tale.  Here is a feminist and secularist take-down of the influence of The Ramayana on women in India which goes into more scholarly detail than the more naïve present piece will do.)

Here's the play-by-play, and commentary:

2. "As Ravana sat idly . . . he suddenly noticed a lady sitting in meditation.  This was most unusual.  Women were rarely seen in those mountains.  Sometimes the rishis would have their wives with them."  

"She would make an excellent addition to his other consorts."

Ravana, as a demon, can perhaps be allowed a bit of sexism.  But notice the background assumption: it was still possible for religious ascetics to bring wives, but rarely done.  Of course, in Buddhism it would become impossible.

4.  "Looking down in shyness she said, 'I was born as an incarnation of the holy Vedas.'"

So women can also be divine -- that is never doubted -- though even divine women should express a kind of public deference, should not assert themselves.


Mother's Day

83.  "The greatest piety lies in serving one's father.  Indeed, O gentle lady, greater still is service to the mother, according to sacred texts." 



Treat your women with love.

48.  Janaka loved his daughter Sita, raised her with love.  

53. Janaka: "My dear Rama, I now give to you Sita, my own beloved daughter . . . She will always remain exclusively devoted to you ad wil follow you like your own shadow."

 54.  Gives daughter 100,000s of cows and elephants, horses, chariots, and foot soldiers as a dowry.  Millions of pieces of silk, cotton, also carpets, gold, silver, jewels, "and hundreds of richly adorned maids for each of the brides."

Good men in the Ramayana thus do love their daughters and wives, more or less.  However, this is perceived as very much the love of a superior to an inferior:


General subservient role of women

19. "His senior wife, Kaushalya, gently massaged his feet, while Sumitra and Kaikeyi fanned him with snow-white chamara whisks."

These are the king's three named women, fulfilling their roles.

21. "Dasareth was perturbed that he had no son."

He did not, apparently, worry about daughters.

136. "Sons would disobey their fathers and wives their husbands."

156.  "Beautiful young maidens attended upon the soldiers, washing them and massaging their feet and bodies with fragrant oils."

176.  The god Indra is fanned with whisks by two beautiful young girls.  

206.  "The nature of women is to be fickle and given to sentimentality."

However, women should not be treated with violence, but be protected: 


Don't do violence to women.

36. Yaksha woman named Tataka, "as powerful as a thousand elephants and able to assume any form she desired."  "Virtuous Rama was hesitant to attack a woman."

The impropriety of attacking a women is mentioned several times in the Ramayana, though this reluctance is in this case rightly overcome, the woman in question being a deadly demon.

150.  "Even when sinful, women should never be slain." 

386.  Ravana advised, "No good can ever come from killing a woman, for it is condemned by everyone."


Rape is Wrong!

6. Parvati's eyes turned red as she replied to her powerful husband.  'As this wretch has frightened a woman by his violence, his death shall be caused by a woman."

"Ravana was not at all concerned whether she was married or not.  He had stolen the wives of gods, Gandharvas and demons everywhere . ."

10.  "But this beautiful girl did not reciprocate his advance . . . (He rapes Rambha)  "If he ever again rapes another maiden he will immediately fall dead."

Rape, then, is a recognized evil.


Sex Happens

249.  "Even great sages in the forest were sometimes overcome by lust."  

250.  "Even the great Vishvamitra had once lost himself in sexual pleasure for a hundred years, thinking it to be a day."



Polygamy and its consequences

61-73.  Hunch-backed maid Manthara appears to be the only commoner in the book.  She's the villain who precipitates all the troubles.  As senior maid to king Dasareth's beautiful younger wife, Kaikeyi, she "enjoyed special privileges." "Kaushalya had long been snubbed by the king in favor of Kaikeyi."  She would get revenge when Rama became king, the maid argued.   Dasarath: "I have always neglected that godly lady in favor of you.  Remembering my acts now gives me great pain."

86. "That pain will be compounded by the cruel words of a junior wife - What could be more painful for a woman?" . . . "Kaushalya thought how she had always been neglected by her husband in favor of Kaikeyi."

So even in the ideal kingdom, it is recognized that polygamy cannot help but result in quarrels and in-fighting and misery, afflicting the next generation.   No hint it given, however, that it is therefore wrong or ought to be discontinued.

If both sages and sagely kings will grab when they can, and women should be protected, one should one do to protect them?  Well, you might try keeping them inside the house.


Guard Your Women -- by shutting them indoors?

Given that any man may give into lust, and given the apparent dearth of protections against rape

213.  Ravana kept his wives in an inner section in Lanka, with Rakshasas guarding them.

276.  "Protecting one's wife was always the duty of pious men."

The central dilemma of the Ramayana is that the divine wife of the incarnation of Vishnu has been kidnapped by the ruler of the demons, and has stayed in his home for a year.  In fact, she has adamantly refused his advances, and repined in sorry by herself, despite many cruelties visited upon her by his attendants.   But the appearance of evil is enough for him.  He cannot even be perceived as trusting his wife to refuse a rival's advances, because his people will not forgive him for being so weak. Therefore:

408.  Rama: "The people desire to see her and that is not condemned by scripture.  A house, a veil or a costume are never the protection of a chaste woman.  Her character alone is her shield. "

But that, apparently, was not enough.  The demon had held Sita at least in the act of kidnapping her:

409.  "I have not undergone this endevour out of a desire to again have you as my wife.  You have long dwelt in the house of another.  How then can I take you back into my house?  Your good character has become suspect.  Ravana clasped you in his arms and lookd upon you with a lustful eye.  Therefore, my attachment for you has ended."

So a wife need not actually commit adultery for her husband to ditch her.   She needs merely to have the possibility or suspicion of adultery.  And then he MUST get rid of her, or the neighbors will begin to talk, and he will lose their respect.

From which it follows, that the only solution is to lock women indoors.  And if you can afford it, have men who have been mutilated and cannot have sex with them guard your women.

Husband = God

92.  "So long as the king lives you should render him service, for this is the eternal moral code.  For a married woman the husband is her deity and her lord."

"The queen listened in silence as Rama, invoking the ancient religious codes, described the fate of a woman who does not serve her worthy husband . . . A woman who devotedly serves her husband, even without any other religious practices, will reach the highest heaven."

95.  She had been trained in all the arts of service.

96.  You have always instructed me that a wife can never be independent from her husband, O Rama, indeed she is half of his very self.

The husband was the wife's supreme deity.  Sita quoted the scriptures. 

107.  Whether wealthy or without any means whatsoever, he is always your worshipful deity. 

"As a lute is useless without its strings or a chariot wihout its wheels, so a wife is destitute when separated from her worthy husband . . . the husband is a veritable deity."

426.  "For a chase woman the husband is the master, deity and preceptor." 

The moral of perhaps India's most influential epic is clear, here: wives should serve their husbands as gods.  That's how to get to heaven.  Now I wonder which gender thought up that rule? 


A Good Woman should not want to live after her husband is gone!

136.  "Only Kaikeyi, casting all propriety to the winds, could live happily after seeing her husband die in agony."

148.  Although they both longed to ascend the pyre and follow their husband . . .
 

317.  Sita: "The death of a husband before his wife is declared to be a catastrophe."

318.  "Kill me at once, O demon. Lay my dead body on top of Rama and unite a husband with his wife."

242.  "I too shall enter the fire along with Vali.  I have no desire for life without my husband."
 
403.  Ravana's wife: "When I was always your devoted servant, why did you long for Sita?  Alas, my life is useless as I could not satisfy my lord."
 "As my husband has renounced me in a public gathering, I shall enter fire and give up my life."

Sita does just that.  But the fire god Agni protects her, and she emerges from the fire hale and hearty.  However, her divine husband then dumps his innocent wife for the sake of propriety.


Conclusions

The status of women in the Ramayana is not, then, utterly black, with no chinks of light.  Men should not be violent against women, even evil women.  They should, rather, be kind to their daughters and wives.

However, women are clearly inferior to men, and should serve them in just about every way.

Furthermore, the good principle that women should be protected, is easily manipulated into a desire to control, enslave or abuse them.  Just the appearance or possibility of betrayal by their wives is enough for even a great incarnation of Vishnu to ditch his beloved wife, even after she has suffered great pains for her love for him.  The obvious solution is to follow the course of the demon Ravana, and keep one's women locked up indoors -- as the Indian upper classes would come to do.  Then one can love them (if that's really what one wants to do -- incentive is lost without a market economy in love!) without fear of betrayal.

Meanwhile, the influence of the Law of Manu, or similar texts (which we may analyze later), is already strong upon the Ramayana.  A truly faithful women, it is said again and again, will throw herself into the fire upon her husband's death, or even if he ditches her, or even just doubts her.

This is not liberation, it marks the course of enslavement that women would undergo over some two millennia, until the Good News of Jesus arrived in the subcontinent.

As we have already seen, Jesus treated women in an entirely different way.  And Jesus' teachings and examples would liberate women enslaved by the increasing degradation of women in the evolving Hindu tradition -- of which the Law of Manu provides even clearer evidence.

True Reason -- now out!

(Writing from Hong Kong, where I'm renewing my visa.)

Well, our new book, True Reason, is now out.  The book has about two dozen reviews on Amazon already, in just a few days (Tom Gilson's hard work, no doubt), and seems to be selling pretty well, so far.  One of the nice things about the book that the reviews demonstrate, is that different chapters appeal to a variety of readers -- lots of chapters are described as "my favorite," appealing to people with various interests.  That must be gratifying to the editors. It shows they did an excellent job of finding good writers and balancing interesting and important topics.  Reviews also show that so far most readers have also really liked the book.

I think you probably will, too!

This version is frankly much better than the e-version we put out two years ago, for two reasons: (1) It includes two new chapters, including one by Tim McGrew and myself on how early Christians understood faith and reason; (2) The other chapters were also mostly updated and improved.  (I helped edit them myself, as a matter of fact -- including adding a bit of a response to John Loftus' reply to my chapter rebutting his Outsider Test for Faith, and showing why the Gospel passes that test four times over.  Truthfully, John didn't offer my arguments too much of a challenge, but there were other things that needed improving, anyway.)

So far, my OTF chapter has attracted quite a bit of attention from reviewers, both positive and negative.  Here are most of the comments to date.  I especially appreciated David Hedges' critical comments, and hope to respond to them in more detail later -- see also his comments on the Amazon site.  He really tries to understand my position and represent it accurately -- not always the case with my critics!  But of course he's still wrong. :- )

Of course I also greatly appreciate the favorable comments -- they are very encouraging.  Thanks!

Anyway, here are some of the comments on my chapters:

True North: My favorite contributor to this book is David Marshall. He is a very engaging defender with a unique sense of humor, a down-to-earth writing style, and reasoning that is really easy to understand. In "John Loftus and the Insider-Outsider Test for Faith," Marshall points out that he actually gave Loftus the very tools Loftus used in formulating his Outsider Test for Faith! Marshall also authored "The Marriage of Faith & Reason," showing how the Christian concept of faith is intellectually exciting, and explains the complex world we live in. Marshall co-wrote an article with Timothy McGrew, "Faith & Reason in Historical Perspective," wherein they reason that Christianity compels itself to the rational mind.

David Hodges: I do admit to not being entirely satisfied with David Marshall's contribution to this category, since its effort to show wide agreement in non-Christian religions with Christian truths is phrased in such a way as to risk suggesting that Christianity is less exclusively "the true faith" than it is, or suggesting that false religions are not the culpable efforts to evade the whole (Christian) truth that Scripture seems (notable in Romans 1) to say they are. My difficulty with Marshall's piece is more rhetorical than substantive, though of course bad rhetoric can lead to substantive errors if left uncorrected.

Jason Livingstone: At its best, it boasts impressive scholarship, thoughtful evaluation of the arguments to which the authors are responding, and an invitation to the reader to do his/her own thinking (the contributions of David Marshall and Randall Hardman fit this description well).

Writer Rani: Chuck Edwards, David Marshall, Peter Grice, and the other Christian authors did such a wonderful job of presenting the information that lay-people and scholars alike will be able to learn a lot from their essays.

I was very surprised when I read the quotes from Loftus, and others on how weak their arguments were. They seemed to have nothing to base their arguments on and they contradicted what they were saying. The Christian authors had facts and history to support their ideas. It shows me that the New Atheists claim of reason is truly a weakness. Christianity has a lot more going for it.

Randal Everist: One of the essays I found to be most fascinating was David Marshall’s on John Loftus’ “Outsider Test for Faith” (hereafter OTF). OTF is as follows:

1. “People who are located in distinct geographical areas . . . overwhelmingly adopt and justify a wide diversity of religious faith due to their particular upbringing and shared cultural heritage, and most of these faiths are mutually exclusive.
2. To an overwhelming degree, one’s religious faith is causally dependent on brain processes, cultural conditions, and irrational thinking patterns.
3. Therefore, it is highly likely that any given religious faith is false.
4. In practice, one should hence test one’s religion ‘from the perspective of an outsider, a nonbeliever, with the same level of reasonable skepticism believers already use when examining the other religious faiths they reject.’” (p. 77)

Now, the point of Marshall’s essay is to show that Loftus’ contention that OTF is opposed by Christians because they know Christianity will fail is demonstrably false, historically. This we will return to in a moment. First, Marshall casually mentions that (3) doesn’t follow from (1-2); I think, however, we can rescue OTF pretty easily from this malady. Consider:

OTF1. If, to an overwhelming degree, one’s religious faith is causally dependent on brain processes, cultural conditions, and irrational thinking patterns, then it is highly likely their religious belief is false.

It’s worth noting Loftus might resent this oversimplification, because he wants to include all other religions as live options for complete pictures. So let’s include that fact in our consideration of (OTF1). Marshall mentions that (OTF1) is nonetheless an example of the genetic fallacy (p. 78). I think this is less than clear. Why? Because Loftus includes, in (OTF1), that irrational thinking patterns have helped causally inform particular religious beliefs. Surely we wouldn’t want to say, given that such-and-such a belief is formed in an irrational manner, that it is just as likely true as false? If I bang my head into the wall four times, and announce that on this basis I now am a devotee of the Easter Bunny, you’re just as likely to suspect I have a concussion as anything else—but surely you (nor I) don’t thereby gain some support for the premise that the Easter Bunny is real. I think that, all things being equal, if a belief is formed for irrational reasons, we can safely say, epistemologically, that there’s no reason to regard it as true, and even some reason to say it is false.

The crucial question then becomes two-fold: Are all things equal?, and Do people form their belief in God in an irrational thinking pattern? The latter question demands that we see reason to think that we have been irrational in our thinking about God. That will require an account of rationality and that our belief in God has arisen from something contrary to rationality (or irrationality). As Alvin Plantinga has argued, it’s not even clear this can be done without appealing to the de facto question of whether or not God exists. The former question is evidential: we can only conclude that our religious beliefs are false or very likely false if we don’t have countervailing evidence (of course, if we already have these evidences, it’s very unlikely we meet condition [2] of Loftus’ argument, and so [OTF] doesn’t really have any application for us).

The rest of Marshall’s essay, however, is an excellent discussion on other world religions and conversions. I was especially happy to see his reference of the great African scholar John Mbiti. One should charitably read Marshall at this point in saying that other world religions do in fact contain shadows of truth; the true God’s witness of Himself in the real world, even if it has been diluted and perverted.

Jason: David Marshall puts ex-Christian John Loftus's "insider-outsider test for faith" to the test and gives it a failing grade while showing how the claim that most people who view Christianity from the outside will reject it is unfounded. I can attest to this as a person who grew up with a secular worldview and did not accept the truth of Christianity until adulthood. Marshall concludes by making a case of how Christianity passes the tests of history, prophecy, transformation, and lo and behold, the insider-outsider test for faith.

David Marshall skillfully expounds upon how faith and reason are the product of a marriage undefiled. After properly defining faith (which has nothing to do with blindness) he unpacks seven different ways that the New Testament ties faith to reason. Touching on topics such as historical investigation, critical accounts of Jesus's life, and the resurrection, Marshal combines logic, philosophy, and careful exegesis to explain how no man can put faith and reason asunder.

David Marshall and Timothy McGrew provide a thorough review of how Christians—including the early church fathers and modern-day scholars—have historically viewed faith. They use contextual analysis to set the record straight against false characterizations of Christian faith as an uninformed, lazy default position.