The Little Friar

There's always that inevitable moment in any Philosophy of Religion class when we come up against the various arguments for the existence of God.  And students are generally really excited, particularly Christian students.  That's because they think they're getting the necessary intellectual and critical armaments for assaulting the non-belief of non-believers. I always try to point out that, as far as these intellectual "arguments" go, they have more to do with the internally coherent logic of one's faith than they do with achieving intellectual superiority over non-belief.  In other words, while believing isn't non-rational, it is super-rational.  One can't get to belief by the way of reason alone -- especially for Christians. Take, for example, the so-called Ontological Argument for God's existence . When we're reading Anselm's account, I always point out to students that Anselm prays the ontological argument.  Direct address to...

Those of us who've grown up in the Church -- at least since the 18th century -- have been influenced by ways of thinking that we really don't even realize. Take, for example, the idea of miracle . At least since the 18th century, those of us who've ever given much thought to these things have to take a stand:  Either miracles happen or they don't.  And, as anyone who has taken Philosophy 101 knows, David Hume pretty much demolished the logical idea of a miracle back then.  According to Hume, there can never be sufficient logical evidence that miracles ever happened.  So, since you can't prove miracles ever occurred, Jesus obviously didn't do them.  And since Jesus never performed a miracle, he wasn't divine. And so many Christians find themselves unable to respond to Hume's critique precisely because they take the assumption -- namely, that miracles are an intervention into the natural world by a God who's somewhere remote -- as a fact. W...

Know you know: " If one were to describe the whole orthodox apologetic effort in one single sentence, but also with categorical precision, one might say that it has the intent to make  Christianity plausible .  To this one might add that, if it were to succeed, then this effort would have the ironical fate that precisely upon the day of triumph it would have lost everything and entirely quashed Christianity ...  To make Christianity plausible is the same as to misinterpret it" (Soren Kierkegaard, Book on Adler ).

I've been attempting over the past few days to lay out what unapologetic preaching looks like.   Let me turn to that event most discussed (as Evidence That Demands a Verdict  in building The Case for Christ ):  The Resurrection of Jesus.  Is this event something we can prove  either  historically (e.g. Pannenberg, NT Wright) or probabilistically (e.g. Richard Swinburne) or scientifically (e.g. various nutty apologists)?  In my view, such proof is neither possible nor even a good thing.  Resurrection isn't a natural or historical possibility, but it is precisely a contradiction  of the whole order of the possible.  It's not one event alongside other events within world-history, but it is the  end  and  boundary  of history as such.  I'm not talking here about all that silly Deism stuff that insists the universe is Newtonian and therefore a closed system.  "Divine intervention", as most readers here know is a...

Or, why it's wicked to solve the problem of evil.  Or, what to preach about doom, gloom and the cross.  Nowhere does apologetics get more off course than when theologians and philosophers attempt theodicy , trying to solve the "problem of evil".  Let me lay out today, as part of my continuing exploration of what unapologetic  preaching looks like, why that's the case.  My thesis is this:  Any  biblical theodicy (defence of God in the face of manifest evil and suffering) must at some point be eschatological , that is, it must refer to the future for which Christians hope.  Let me clarify.  I begin with three biblical characters who each acutely faced the problem of evil in their experience, not simply as an intellectual puzzle.  Joseph, for being an arrogant prat to his brothers, is sold into slavery.  Twenty years later, he ends up being in the position to take revenge and humiliate, enslave or kill them.  Apart from a little t...

A couple of years ago, I had a sustained discussion with a "Jesus myther" on Facebook.  The "Jesus Myth Movement", for those unfamiliar, is a modern movement among skeptics and critics that Jesus wasn't a historical figure; instead, he had been created, whole-cloth, from older a syncretic amalgamation of older religious traditions in the ancient world.  According to "Jesus Mythers", Jesus is a myth.  I tried, at the time, setting out all the historical reasons that argument is problematic.   So today I'm not recreating that argument.  Instead, I want to demonstrate what a non-foundationalist, unapologetic preaching of Jesus looks like.  Let me do that by addressing two primary arguments I hear a lot.  First:  " I don't think there is a good reason to believe in Jesus as the Christ because the accounts of him are historically non-convincing for two reasons (a) these are not his accounts but accounts of him from flawed men ..." This com...

Preaching, I wrote recently, is done "without apology".   Someone reading that couple of paragraphs rightly asked, "So what do you think about Christian apologetics?" For those of you unfamiliar with it, Christian apologetics  is the task of mounting a rationally convincing argument in defense of ( apologia  in Greek means "a defense offered at court") the Christian faith.  I think that's a misbegotten enterprise at best.  But, on my more snarky days, I think it's crap.  I have no room for a foundationalist, rhetorically-convincing logical argument that someone convinces our culture in a compelling way to rethink Christianity.  Which is an odd  position for a Christian theologian and pastor to take.  So, over the course of the next couple of days, let me lay out why I think thus.  Today, I want to talk about the hollowness of apologetics as a whole.  I believe the Christian message is concerned with  truth  -- and tha...