A forum for discussing matters of moment, from a curmudgeonly perspective. (The ideas posted here do not necessarily represent those of any organization with which I am a part). Rude and insulting remarks will not be published, but civil disagreement is welcome.
[Having heard Os Guinness give two presentations yesterday, I am stirred to re-post my review of his excellent book, The Case for Civility. The review was first published in The Denver Post in 2008.]
Os Guinness, The Case For Civility: And Why Out Future Depends on it. HarperOne, 2008. $23.95. 214 pages with index. Reviewed by Douglas Groothuis, Professor of Philosophy, Denver Seminary.
Os Guinness is an Englishman born in China, who has lived in the United States for over twenty years. His many previous books have established him as an astute sociologist and social critic, who is deeply concerned about what has been called “the American experiment.” But this noble experiment is, he believes, now endangered by a rancorous lack of civility in the public square. The 2008 political campaigns give us countless examples of such bombastic infractions, but the deeper problem lies in the national character of the last several decades. Guinness claims that unless America develops a more respectful and thoughtful mode of public conversation it may lose its privileged status. Unless this country becomes more peaceable in debate, it will become less respectable before the eyes and ears of the world.
Guinness offers a wise and compelling vision for civilizing the American public square, one which moves beyond the shouting matches of the culture wars. Quoting President John F. Kennedy, he envisions a “world safe for diversity.” But unlike multiculturalists, Guinness neither vilifies the unique heritage of America nor opts for ethical relativism. He rather appeals to the principles of the American founding, most notably those enshrined in The First Amendment. The five freedoms found there enact a covenant of good will between dissenting parties. This demands the discipline of respecting the rights of those with whom one disagrees, but it by no means excludes the pursuit of objective truth as the goal of such disputes. Unlike tolerance, civility, on the contrary, requires knowledge and courage. Guinness argues that civility is a higher virtue than mere tolerance, which easily devolves into apathy and indifference. Civility is not the fruit of relativism, which despairs of objective moral knowledge. Guinness writes, “Truth and tough-minded debates about truth are the oxygen of a free society.”
While writing as a Christian, Guinness charts a course for "a civil public square," in which citizens of any religion or no religion are allowed and encouraged to let their voices be known and to respect the voice of others. Guinness argues against two popular views of public life: "the sacred public square" and "the naked public square." The sacred public square allows but one religion, which dominates and excludes other dissenting voices, religious or otherwise. Such theocratic arrangements are both un-American and unjust, since conscience must be respected. Yet Guinness equally rejects the naked public square (a term coined by Richard John Neuhaus in 1984), in which religious citizens are not allowed to bring their deepest convictions into civil life. This, too, is un-American, since what the First Amendment disallows is a church established by the state, not a state informed by the religious convictions of its citizens.
Guinness is no partisan politically. He has strong words against the both the Christian Right and the New Atheism of Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and others. These acerbic unbelievers are free to disagree with religious claims, he writes, but their scorched-earth approach to all religion as irrational and unworthy of political representation makes them deeply uncivil. Religious conservatives, on the other hand, have failed to convincingly articulate a vision of the common good, have too often played “the victim card,” have been too narrowly partisan, and have often descended into apocalyptic rhetoric that ill-befits the public square. A civil public square demands better behavior from both—and all other—groups.
Readers of Guinness's previous and much larger work, The American Hour (1992), will find echoes of it in The Case for Civility; but the latter is far more than a digest of the former. It is, rather, a timely and clarion call to principled pluralism tied to the essence of the American experiment. We ignore its message to our own shame and detriment.
This question was posed by the moderator at an early Republican presidential debate in 1999: “Who is your favorite political philosopher?” George W. Bush surprised, if not stunned, his fellow candidates, moderator, and audience when he tersely declared, “Jesus Christ, because he changed my life.”
At the philosophical level, we might say candidate Bush dropped the ball. He gave a religious or devotional justification for his choice of Jesus as favorite philosopher instead of stipulating just what it was about Jesus as a philosopher that he valued above other philosophers.
The responses to Bush’s one-liner ranged all over the political map. Was his response just shameless, pious posturing? Or was it a sincere and disarmingly modest confession—or just inappropriate in that setting however sincere it may have been? In any event, Bush’s clipped but controversial response raises a deeper question largely if not entirely avoided in the popular press: Was Jesus—whatever else he may have been—abona fide philosopher? If the answer is Yes, several other engaging sorts of questions emerge: What kind of philosopher was he? What did he believe and why? How does his philosophy relate to that of other philosophers? Does his philosophizing have anything to contribute to contemporary philosophical debates? Further, just what is a philosopher anyway?
Jesus and the Philosophers
Jesus remains a potent symbol for influencing opinion, political or otherwise. Some teenagers wear bracelets with the initials WWJD, which stands for “What would Jesus do?” This reveals that they regard him as a moral exemplar, the ideal ethical agent, who should be emulated because of his character and insight. The same perspective is expressed in the classic medieval text on spiritual devotion, The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas á Kempis.
Some today claim to know Jesus’ essential philosophy and use it for marshalling mass opinion. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) launched a campaign in 2000 claiming that Jesus was a vegetarian. One of their advertisements features an iconic depiction of Jesus surrounded not by a nimbus, but by an orange slice. It reads: “Be merciful. Go vegetarian.” Claiming that an ancient Jew who celebrated Passover was a vegetarian is highly implausible. Nevertheless, the campaign shows the importance people place on Jesus’ outlook.
No one can sanely question the global, historical, and perennial influence of Jesus of Nazareth in every area of human endeavor.In a work limited to Jesus’ influence in Western culture, the esteemed historian Jaroslav Pelikan wrote:
Regardless of what anyone may personally think or believe about him, Jesus of Nazareth has been the dominant figure in the history of Western culture for almost twenty centuries. If it were possible, with some sort of super magnet, to pull out of that history every scrap of metal bearing at least a trace of his name, how much would be left?[1]
In the last several decades the most explosive growth of Christian belief has occurred not in the West, but in the developing world. Moreover, Jesus’ influence has never been confined to the West. He was, to steal a term from Hegel, a “world-historical” figure, whose life continues to radiate and resonate worldwide.
But none of this directly answers the question before us: Was Jesus a philosopher? Most reference books in philosophy apparently think that Jesus was not a philosopher, given the lack of references to him. For example, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1967), long a standard reference work, has no entry under “Jesus” or “Christ.” The newer and well-respected Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998) has no entry for “Jesus” or “Christ,” but includes one on “Buddha.” Even the recent resurgence in Christian philosophy, evidenced by the size and influence of the Society of Christian Philosophers, seems to have done little to counter these conspicuous omissions.[2] Karl Jaspers includes Jesus (along with Socrates, Buddha and Confucius) in the first slim volume of The Great Philosophers (1957), but this is rare. As we will see, Jaspers did not esteem Jesus as a philosopher in the classical sense.
Jesus certainly influenced philosophers and thinkers of all kinds (Augustine, Anselm, Aquinas, Pascal, Kierkegaard, etc.), and countless thinkers have philosophized about him (how could he be both divine and human?) but this, in itself, does not make Jesus a philosopher. The philosopher Augustine was very influenced by his pious mother Monica, but that does not make her a philosopher.
One’s religious commitments do not necessarily answer this question a priori. One may worship Jesus as God Incarnate yet be puzzled or even offended at the notion that he was a philosopher. “Isn’t philosophy something the Apostle Paul warned against?” one might object, based on a certain reading of the second chapter of Colossians (verse eight), which warns of “hollow and deceptive philosophy.”
But even those with no fear of philosophy per se may demur at defining Jesus as a philosopher. In a move unlike virtually all other recent histories of philosophy, the Protestant philosopher Gordon Clark devotes several pages to Jesus’ thought in his once-popular history of philosophy, Thales to Dewey (1957). Clark denies that Jesus was “a naïve, nontheological teacher of simple morality,”as some have affirmed.But Clark asserts that although Jesus had a developed monotheistic theology, his importance lies not in what he taught, but in what he did—particularly his death—and in his claim to be God incarnate. For Clark, Jesus as a teacher (or philosopher) takes a back seat to Jesus as crucified and risen savior. Clark seems worried that if one emphasizes the teaching of Jesus this might demote him to a mere moralist, stripping him of his supernatural credentials.[3]
Conversely, contemporary Christian philosopher Dallas Willard insists that Jesus was the most intelligent person who ever lived. He laments that so many fail to take note of this and instead view Jesus as “a mere icon, a wraithlike semblance of a man, fit for the role of sacrificial lamb or alienated social critic, perhaps, but little more.”[4] For Willard, a religious commitment to Jesus entails a certain view of his intellectual abilities: “‘Jesus is Lord’ can mean little in practice for anyone who has to hesitate before saying, ‘Jesus is smart.’ He is not just nice, he is brilliant.”[5] Willard certainly does not shy away from deeming Jesus a philosopher.
It seems that the presence or absence of Christian faith does not automatically answer the question of whether Jesus was a philosopher. We must delve deeper into the matter by attending to Jesus’ statements in the Gospels.
Jews, Greeks, and Philosophers
Some have excluded Jesus from the ranks of the philosophers simply because he happened to be an ancient Jew, and not a Greek. Historian Humphrey Carpenter entitles a section of his short book on Jesus, “Jew, Not Philosopher.” His assessment trades on the well-worn notion that Jews never developed philosophy because they, unlike the venerable Greeks, were too theological, and, therefore, not speculative. Reason was not their tool of enlightenment. Jews were called to believe and obey a higher authority, which they rarely questioned and never investigated in any truly philosophical fashion.
Carpenter asks if Jesus’ teachings would appear remarkable when contrasted with those of Plato and Aristotle. His answer is that “such a comparison is meaningless.”[6] This conclusion was not reached because of their different ideas about humanity and the good life, but because of their different approach to knowledge. Plato and Aristotle constructed “elaborate philosophical models of man and the world, from which they deduced ethical conclusions.” But Jesus supposedly lacked such a system. His modus operandi was “inspirational,” not discursive or systematic. Jesus was unsystematic to the point that he had “no concern with consistency in his teaching.”[7] Although Carpenter allows that philosophers may glean insights from Jesus, “Jesus himself…was no philosopher; his mind was characteristically Jewish.”[8]
Carpenter’s position is puzzling. First, he seems to identify philosophy per se with the Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. While these giants are paradigmatic philosophers, a thinker need not resemble them in every way to be a philosopher. Nietzsche, for instance, is deemed a philosopher by nearly everyone; yet he was not systematic and took pride in that fact. Moreover, he often wrote in parables, stories and aphorisms—methods used by Jesus himself.
Carpenter’s criteria for being a philosopher would appear to shut out Socrates, a character vital to the philosophy of Plato and all subsequent philosophy. Socrates built no system but engaged in protracted dialectic with a host of interlocutors. He was a gadfly and a midwife, not a builder of an intellectual edifice. Worse yet, like Jesus, he wrote nothing. What we know of him is preserved in other’s writings, principally Plato’s. This is another parallel to Jesus, whose words are recorded by others in the Gospels. Moreover, Socrates himself operated in the “inspirational” mode when seized by his “daimonion,” an unphilosophical thing to do, according to Carpenter.
Interestingly, in his discussion of Jesus’ approach to the Jewish Law, Carpenter notes that Jesus did not endorse blind obedience to the Law, “but the kind of reasoning obedience which considers why God has given some particular commandment to men.”[9] Carpenter further maintains that if Jesus thought in terms of conscience, “he would presumably have regarded it as the will of God expressing itself clearly in human reason.”[10] Jesus, according to Carpenter, uses reason in his understanding of God, the Law, and the proper human response to God—yet he is somehow not a philosopher because he was non-rational and unsystematic. This looks inconsistent.
What is a Philosopher?
These reflections show that we cannot proceed further in answering our question, “Was Jesus a philosopher?” without thinking more clearly about the term “philosopher.” What qualifies someone as a philosopher? We can certainly point to uncontroversial specimens, such as Plato and Aristotle. This is an ostensive definition: we pick out a referent that fits the category. But what of harder cases, such as Jesus? Of course, philosophers philosophize, but not everyone who philosophizes is a philosopher, just as not everyone who works on an automobile is a mechanic. We think of most philosophers as intelligent, but not all the intelligent are philosophers. Many individuals’ intelligence may not be invested primarily in philosophy. Neither can we limit the philosophers to those who are formal academics, those who hold professorships in philosophy. Some philosophers, such as Hume, Spinoza, and Pascal, have lacked institutional affiliation, but not philosophical credentials.
Rather than chase down further definitional dead ends, I propose that the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a philosopher (whether good or bad, major or minor, employed or unemployed) are a strong and lived-out inclination to pursue truth about philosophical matters through the rigorous use of human reasoning, and to do so with some intellectual facility. The last proviso is added to rule out those who may fancy themselves philosophers but cannot philosophize well enough to merit the title. Even a bad philosopher must be able to philosophize in some recognizable sense. By “philosophical matters” I mean the enduring questions of life’s meaning, purpose, and value as they relate to all the major divisions of philosophy (primarily epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics).
What makes a question philosophical may be highlighted by the following: To explain the physical basis of vision is not, in itself, a philosophical matter, but a scientific one regarding physics and physiology. But to ask whether vision allows us to know the external world as it is in itself is a philosophical question regarding realism and nonrealism. Likewise, to ask whether a personal agent may be immaterial (such as God or an angel) is a philosophical question.
Yet one may speak to life’s meaning, purpose, and value in a nonphilosophical manner—by merely issuing assertions or by simply declaring divine judgments with no further discussion. A philosophical approach to these matters, on the contrary, explores the logic or rationale of various claims about reality; it sniffs out intellectual presuppositions and implications; it ponders possibilities and weighs their rational credibility.
Therefore, the work of a philosopher need not include system- building, nor need it exclude religious authority or even divine inspiration so long as this perspective does not preclude rational argumentation. Being a philosopher requires a certain orientation to knowledge, a willingness to argue and debate logically, and to do so with some proficiency. On this account, was Jesus a philosopher?
Was Jesus a Philosopher?
Despite Jesus’ inclusion in the Great Philosophers series, Karl Jaspers discounts Jesus as a traditional philosopher because he “preaches not knowledge, but faith,” and he “shows little concern for logical consistency.”[11] Jesus was a prophet heralding the end of the world and calling people to a new order of life in light of this immanent urgency, “not a philosopher who reflects methodically and systematically orders his ideas.”[12] He cannot take a “place in the history of philosophy with any rational positions.”[13] However, if Jesus’ lack of concern for knowledge ordered into a system disqualifies him as a philosopher, it should also exclude Socrates, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein, who built no systems.
Inconsistency in philosophy, or elsewhere, is no virtue, but a vice. If one affirms A and non-A in the same way and in the same respect, one has affirmed nothing—except a classic defect in reasoning (violating the law of noncontradiction). Nevertheless, some philosophers have viewed consistency with some skepticism, thinking that reality is too complex or opaque for such stipulations. That may have rendered them bad philosophers, but it does not disqualify them from the ranks entirely. Besides, philosophers who explicitly prize consistency (the vast majority) sometimes contradict themselves anyway. This philosophical failing can have small or great consequences for the cogency of the philosopher’s views, but the presence of inconsistencies within a philosopher’s viewpoint does not, by itself, disqualify the thinker from being a philosopher.
In any event, the consistency of Jesus’ teachings cannot be so easily impugned. Jaspers cites just two cases of Jesus’ supposed inconsistency and explores no possibilities for how these might be reconciled.[14] One example contrasts Jesus’ teaching on not resisting evil (Matthew 5:38-42) with his statement that he came not to bring peace, but a sword. How can one be a sword-brandishing pacifist? Yet the passage about bringing a sword (Matthew 10:34-39) has nothing to do with self-defense or military situations, but with the fact that one’s allegiance to Jesus will bring strife and division when one’s family members do not follow Jesus. Therefore, the contradiction between Jesus’ two statements is only apparent and not real.
Jaspers juxtaposes two more sayings of Jesus, which he claims are logically inconsistent. Jesus says that (1) those who are not against him are with him, but in another place he says that (2) those who are not with him are against him. Jaspers does not explain what the inconsistency between these statements might be, so we are left to guess. However, statement (2) could easily be seen as another way of putting statement (1). Thus there are those who are not against Jesus (that is, those who are with him) and there are those who are against Jesus (that is, those who are not with him). So, statements (1) and (2) seem correlative, not contradictory. The point in both cases is that there is no neutral ground; one must be either with him or against him.
But consider the events occasioning both of Jesus’ statements. These two statements are made in different dialogical contexts and serve different purposes. The context for Jesus’ statement that “those who are not against us are for us” is a case where those not in the inner circle of his disciples are seen casting out demons in Jesus’ name (Mark 9:38-41). Jesus tells his disciples that these others are following him as well, although they are not known to the disciples. He explains, “No one who does a miracle in my name can in the next moment say anything bad about me.” The context for the other statement, “he is who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters” (Matthew 12:30), is Jesus’ confrontation with his theological opponents over his authority to drive out demons. Rather than widening the circle to include those who are already really following him (as in the first case), here Jesus is drawing a clear contrast between his followers and his detractors. While the contexts and purposes differ, there is no logical contradiction between Jesus’ two statements.
Despite Jasper’s claim that all Jesus’ “direct statements are vehicles of a meaning which ultimately evades rational interpretation,”[15] Jaspers later approvingly quotes Hegel on Jesus: “Never have words so revolutionary been spoken, for everything otherwise looked on as valid is represented as indifferent, unworthy of consideration.”[16] Whether this assessment of Jesus is accurate or not, it belies the notion that Jesus’ message is “beyond rational interpretation,” since Jaspers and Hegel rationally interpret Jesus’ message as “revolutionary.”
Jesus did not build a philosophical system in the same sense that Spinoza or Hegel did. Wittgenstein, arguably the most influential philosopher of the twentieth century, did not build a system at all, although he developed a distinctive philosophical method, which in some ways attempts to dissolve philosophical questions.[17] But the fact that Jesus did not “build” a philosophical system does not preclude the possibility that he thought in terms of a well-ordered and logically consistent account of reality and argued rationally with those who disputed it. If he thought and spoke in this manner, he was a philosopher indeed—and the most influential one in Western history.
Some may bar Jesus from the halls of philosophers by virtue of his prophetic or supernatural orientation toward teaching and the rest of his activities. It is assumed that a prophetic or oracular disposition makes philosophizing unnecessary or even counterproductive. If one receives a revelation from above, why argue from premise to conclusion? Why bother with induction, deduction, abduction, reductio ad absurdum or a fortiori arguments and the like when one is divinely inspired? Why criticize another’s argument as fallacious? One would simply announce, declare, or proclaim—or bring down fire from heaven to end the argument entirely. Some Christians might even regard the notion that Jesus was a philosopher as ill-advised or blasphemous, since they take him to be God Incarnate. God has no need of human philosophy, after all.
These objections can be met in two ways. First, one need not bristle at the thought that even God Incarnate might philosophize with lesser beings, if it were for the purpose of engaging their God-given reasoning abilities. After all, the Apostle Paul—taken by many to be a superlative authority on Jesus—claimed that all knowledge and wisdom is found in Jesus Christ (Colossians 2:9). According to orthodox Christian thought, Jesus is not only divine, but truly human: “The Word became flesh” (John 1:14). However Christians may understand the relationship of deity and humanity in the person of Jesus, they must confess that God in Christ took on a genuinely human nature—reasoning abilities and all. As I will later argue, a close look at many passages in the Gospels reveals that Jesus does engage in careful reasoning regarding the afterlife, his own identity, political obligations, and more. He was not above a good debate. The Hebrew Scriptures, which Jesus revered, report that the prophet Isaiah, speaking as God’s oracle, said, “‘Come now, let us reason together,’ says the Lord” (Isaiah 1:18). Jesus would agree.[18]
Second, and more generally, a claim to divine or supernatural inspiration (whether explicit or implicit) need not rule out reasoning and debate in principle. Authority can be established through sound reasoning and the ability to interact rationally with disputants. While the sacred books of theistic religions offer divine pronouncements sans argument, this is not the only mode of divine disclosure possible.
However, as we will discover later in this book, the tone, style, and content of Jesus’ teachings and his debates with the leading thinkers of his day are very different from, say, the manner of Socrates, the quintessential philosopher (if unpublished). Jesus was a unique kind of philosopher. Jaspers underscores this in a passage worth examining:
Jesus teaches by proclaiming the glad tidings, Socrates by compelling men to think. Jesus demands faith, Socrates an exchange of thought. Jesus speaks with direct earnestness, Socrates indirectly, even by irony. Jesus knows the kingdom of heaven and eternal life, Socrates has no definite knowledge of these matters and leaves the question open. But neither will let men rest. Jesus proclaims the only way; Socrates leaves man free, but keeps reminding him of his responsibility rooted in freedom. Both raise supreme claims. Jesus confers salvation. Socrates provokes men to look for it.[19]
I will argue that Jesus’ “proclaiming glad tidings” (the gospel) is not incompatible with prodding people to think; he often did so. Demanding (or, better, encouraging or calling for) faith can occur alongside the rational exchange of ideas, and Jesus illustrated this. While Jesus spoke with “direct earnestness,” sometimes he did communicate indirectly, especially in his parables. Jesus and Socrates do differ dramatically in that Jesus is never described as searching for truth or being gripped by uncertainty. Although Jesus proclaims ideas from a certainty of knowledge, he does leave some questions open (such as the number of those redeemed, why certain evils occur, and the timing of his return). Socrates is a kind of philosophical goad and midwife while Jesus exhorts his listeners to be “born again”—but not without reason and argument in support of the faith and commitment enjoined.
[1] Jaroslav Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 1.
[2] On this movement, see Kelly James Clark, ed. Philosophers Who Believe (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1993).
[3] Gordon Clark, Thales to Dewey: A History of Philosophy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1957), 210.
[4]Dallas Willard, The Divine Conspiracy (San Francisco: Harper- SanFrancisco, 1998), 134.
[11] Karl Jaspers, The Great Philosophers, Volume 1: Socrates, Buddha, Confucius, Jesus, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Ralph Manheim (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1962), 71.
[16] Ibid. Jaspers does not cite his source for the quotation.
[17] See Jaako Hintikka, On Wittgenstein (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth-Thompson Learning, 2000).
[18] George Mavrodes explores different modes of divine revelation, which include revelation through reasoning, in Revelation in Religious Belief (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988).
William Lane Craig, On Guard: Defending Your Faith with Reason and Precision. Colorado Springs, CO: David C. Cook, 2010. $16.99. 286 pages.
Apologetics is the discipline of defending Christianity as true, rational, and pertinent to life. The apologist may be a philosopher, historian, theologian, or a practitioner of some other intellectual discipline. However, in the broadest sense, all Christians are commanded to have a reason for the hope within them, to offer this with gentleness and respect (1 Peter 3:15), and to love God with all their minds (Matthew 22:37-38; see also Romans 12:1-2). Jesus defended his views through argument (see three examples of this in Matthew 22), as did the Apostle Paul throughout the Book of Acts (see especially his speech to the Athenians in Acts 17). (I defend the claim that Jesus was a philosopher and apologist in On Jesus [Wadsworth, 2002]).
Learning apologetics (first from Francis Schaeffer) transformed me from an intellectually insecure and timid Christian into a thinker who had found confidence and certainty in the challenging world of ideas. All Christians need this kind of confidence and should receive the exhortation that the Apostle Paul gave to his disciple Timothy, “God has not given us a spirit of fear, but of power, love, and a sound mind” (2 Timothy 1:7). While I have learned much from many apologists, William Lane Craig work’s has been formative for me in many respects. As a respected philosopher who often writes at the highest intellectual levels in academic journals and books, Craig has, through his long and fruitful career (which includes debating influential atheists and other non-Christians), also offered apologetics at a more popular (but always intellectually serious) level. With On Guard, Craig distills and simplifies work available in other books (such as Reasonable Faith and God: A Debate Between a Christian an a Atheist) in order to present a thorough defense of Christianity. While taking the reader fairly deep into apologetic arguments, the book does not presume much knowledge of philosophy. To keep the reader’s interest, it uses charts and graphics—but not to excess. The book is also punctuated by two “personal interludes” in which Craig presents his own “journey to faith.”
In ten chapters, Craig explains the nature and purpose of apologetics, the significance of God’s existence for the meaning of life, why the existence of the universe is best explained by God, how the universe reveals God’s design, and how the existence of morality is best explained by God as its source. He also takes up the problem of suffering, and the identity of Jesus as God Incarnate and as raised from the dead. The final chapter asks, “Is Jesus the Only Way to God?” and addresses the claim that Christianity is too exclusive and harsh (consigning unbelievers to hell). While presented in a rather popular form, Craig does not cut any corners, and he gives ample documentation where needed.
While I disagree with Craig’s strategy at a few points (particularly on religious exclusivism and the problem of evil), the book deserves high praise as a complete, readable, and compelling defense of Christianity. While Craig uses the design inference to defend the fine-tuning of the universe for human life (given its unlikely combination of constants, proportions, and laws), he fails to use this argument to infer design at the biological level, as do the proponents of Intelligent Design such as William Dembski, Stephen Meyer, and Michael Behe. But this is a small complaint given the overall excellence of this work, which I highly recommend to who are all interested in apologetics at the beginning to intermediate level. After reading On Guard, one will want to explore Craig’s more advanced works, as well as writings by J.P. Moreland, Paul Copan, Winfried Corduan, Norman Geisler, Richard Swinburne, Alvin Plantinga, and other philosophical apologists. Nothing less than the rational defense of eternal truth is at stake.
Terry Eagleton, After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2003. 231 pages with index. $25.00. Reviewed by Douglas Groothuis, Professor of Philosophy at Denver Seminary and the author of Truth Decay. [Sorry for the typeface inconsistencies.]
Apologetic endeavor has many faces and works on many fronts. The aim of apologetics is to articulate and defend any biblical truth that the unbelieving world is calling into question, especially those directly related to the gospel. People cannot come to the Christ of the Bible on God’s terms unless certain beliefs have been banished from their thinking and other beliefs are then put in their place. They cannot embrace the gospel in an intellectual vacuum by sheer willpower. When Paul preached to the Greek intellectuals at the Areopagus council, he did not begin by calling people to turn to Jesus or to understand that Jesus was the promised Messiah of the Hebrew Scriptures, as he had done with Jews and God-fearers (Acts 17:10-12).Instead, he found a point of contact (their religiosity) and then proceeded to speak of God’s objective character (Acts 17:22-30)—even quoting non-Christian Greek sources to make strategic points. After establishing the fact of God, he began to explain the significance of Christ and his resurrection (v. 31)
J. Gretchen Machen, a key conservative apologist in the Fundamentalist-Modernist split, thundered forth the same message in 1912 in a message called “The Scientific Preparation of the Minster.” “False ideas are the greatest obstacles to the reception of the gospel. We may preach with all the fervor of a reformer and yet succeed only in winning a straggler here and there, if we permit the whole collective thought of the nation or of the world to be controlled by ideas which…prevent Christianity from being regarded as anything more than a harmless delusion.”
One such anti-Christian idea today that inhibits the reception of the gospel is the claim that truth is neither objective nor absolute, but constructed in terms of how various communities use language. This pernicious postmodernist idea was once promoted by Terry Eagleton, Professor of Cultural Theory at ManchesterUniversity. Eagleton introduced a generation of students to deconstructionism and postmodern theory (also called just “theory”) through his book Literary Theory (1983; revised 1996). However, he has had second thoughts about the movement he once heralded, and even laments some aspects of postmodernism that neglect or trivialize the great intellectual questions of truth, goodness, and justice. While still respecting some of the insights of Derrida, Barthes, Kristeva, and others, Eagleton believes the movement is in need of serious correction. The movement is largely spent, focusing on trivialities instead of on deeper questions of truth and justice. So he charts a course “after theory.” (He voiced similar criticisms in his 1996 book, The Illusions of Postmodernism.)
Unlike most postmodernists, who often revel in obscurity, Eagleton writes with lucidity, passion, and pluck (sometimes bordering on belligerence). Although he is a literary theorist, Eagleton addresses classic philosophical topics such as the objectivity and absoluteness of truth, the meaning and moral purpose of human life, and political philosophy. When an influential non-Christian intellectual repents of significant errors regarding his previous thinking so that he moves closer to a Christian worldview (even without embracing it), this turnabout presents an important apologetic opportunity. Good arguments by non-Christians in support of truth integral to the Christian worldview should be applauded. But we should also challenge such thinkers to embrace the only worldview that fits all the pieces of truth together into a coherent whole—Christian theism. Eagleton’s change of mind on postmodernism presents such an apologetic opportunity, both in terms of what he gets right and what he gets wrong. All in all, this book is worth assessing despite Eagleton’s atheism, naïve socialism, unfair attacks on Christian “fundamentalism,” and his shrill anti-Americanism, which is especially evidence in the postscript.[1]
Eagleton aptly defines “postmodernism” as “roughly speaking, the contemporary movement of thought which rejects totalities, universal values, grand historical narratives, solid foundations to human existence and the possibility of objective knowledge. Postmodernism is skeptical of truth, unity and progress, opposes what it sees as elitism in culture, tends toward cultural relativism, and celebrates pluralism, discontinuity and heterogeneity” (13). This perspective, he rightly claims, provides scant resources for the perennial issues of philosophy and politics, since it denies the possibility of finding a philosophically satisfying worldview (or metanarrative.) But Eagleton believes that the crisis of international terrorism against the West means that it must reflect on its own foundations—a notion that postmodernists abhor as “modernistic.”He writes: “The West, then, may need to come up with some persuasive-sounding legitimations of its form of life, at exactly the point when laid-back cultural thinkers are assuring it that such legitimations are neither possible nor necessary. It may be forced to reflect on the truth and reality of its existence, at a time when postmodern thought has grave doubts about both truth and reality. It will need, in short, to sound deep in a progressively more shallow age” (73).
Eagleton sometimes strongly indicts the deficits of postmodern theory. “It has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil, reticent about death and suffering, dogmatic about essences, universals, and foundations, and superficial about truth objectivity and disinterestedness. This, on any estimate, is a rather large slice of human existence to fall down on” (101-102). Postmodernism has, in other words, marginalized the very questions that philosophy and religion have addressed for millennia. In this sense, it is a kind of “anti-philosophy” (as Eagleton puts it)—a veto on profitably pondering on the things that matter most (63). This kind of approach would render the claim of biblical revelation irrelevant, since religion supposedly cannot speak to matters of truth, evil, love, death, suffering, and so on.
Cutting against the postmodern grain, Eagleton argues persuasively for the existence and knowability of objective and absolute truth (103-139). He rightly notes that the fallibility of some truth claims does nothing to undermine the category of truth itself—a simple distinction that many postmodernists miss. Although Eagleton does not put it this way, postmodernists often confuse the metaphysics of truth with the epistemology of truth. Truth, on the correspondence view—which Eagleton advocates— is (or means) “agreement with reality.” This is the definition (or metaphysics) of truth. Correspondence with reality is what truth consists of. But truth-claims may be defended or attacked through a variety of intellectual means. This is the realm of epistemology, which concerns the intellectual justification of truth claims. Simply because truth is sometimes elusive—which is part of the curse of the fall, after all—this does not imply that it is constructed (and deconstructed) by linguistic communities, as postmodernists posit.[2]
This view of truth matters to Eagleton—and it should matter to us—because, as he says, it is part of our dignity as “moderately rational beings” to have access to the truth. Moreover, political critique and action demand access to reality. Political radicals—of which Eagleton is one—can stop complaining that it is certainly true that women are oppressed if the idea of objective truth loses its power. And we might add a comment that Eagleton would never make. If truth loses its power, political conservatives can stop talking as though it is unequivocally true that abortion on demand is a moral atrocity. Without a strong claim to truth, all political discourse devolves into mere manipulation.
This concern about the relationship of truth to ethics lies at the root of Eagleton’s desire to reform society according to a particular vision—a mixture of Marxism and Thomism (without God). Eagleton’s Catholic roots—abandoned long ago—are evident when he describes an ideal order in which humans flourish within communities. Humans thrive by realizing their own natures and contributing to the realization of others’ natures as well. His vision, however, is socialistic—with plenty of acerbic and reactive criticisms of capitalism and American conservatism—and post-religious. Nevertheless, Eagleton argues that a secular worldview will have difficulty wedding fact and value meaningfully. In one eloquent paragraph, he speaks of Christianity’s profound power to give meaning, value, morality, and vision to existence. This is worth quoting at some length. “Through ritual and moral code, religion could link questions of absolute value to men and women’s everyday experience. Nothing was less abstract that God, heaven, sin, redemption. . . . It planted the cosmic law in the very depths of the individual, in a faculty known as conscience. Faith bound together the people and the intellectuals, the simple faithful and the clergy, in the most durable of bonds. It could create a sense of common purpose far beyond the capacity of a minority culture, It outlined the grand narrative of all, known as eschatology. It could interweave art, ritual, politics, ethics, mythology, metaphysics and everyday life while lending this mighty edifice the sanction of supreme authority” (99). In spite of all that, “It was thus a particular shame that it involved a set of beliefs which seemed to many decent, rational people remarkably benighted and implausible” (99).
There are, of course, “many decent, rational people” (including many contemporary evangelical philosophers) who do not find this religious worldview “benighted and implausible” but rational and indeed compelling. Eagleton, like many British secular intellectuals, seems content to relegate religion to a thing of the past, even if wistfully. But in so doing, he ignores the renaissance in Christian philosophy that has occurred in the past twenty-five years, which includes both American and British thinkers. The pervasive secularism of England is conducive to these kinds of comments, however unwarranted they may be given the larger intellectual climate.[3] Of course, truth isn’t settled by counting noses (educated or otherwise), but one wishes that Eagleton had provided some arguments for denying a Christian worldview that he seems ambivalent about relinquishing.
Eagleton sometimes sounds like a bit like a God-haunted atheist, given the attention he pays to explicitly biblical themes. But Eagleton’s biblical criticism is far less convincing than his criticisms of postmodernism. Eagleton finds some biblical discussions to have contemporary significance, but disparages “fundamentalism.” This is evident when he rejects Luke’s infancy account of Jesus as a ludicrous fabrication for theological purposes, which has no historical basis (204-205). Luke’s account of Jesus’ youth, particularly the remarks about the Roman census, differ from the other Gospels but can be harmonized with them. Moreover, Luke’s explicit purpose is historical (Luke 1:1-4) and has been proven accurate by extrabiblical sources on many matters of historical detail.[4] Eagleton gives some outlandish and embarrassing interpretations of Scripture, showing he has not transcended the hermeneutical gymnastics of deconstructionism. He claims that the New Testament view of ethics is relatively “irreligious,” since “salvation comes down to…the “humdrum material business of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and visiting the sick” (154). Matthew’s account of the Second Coming, he claims, “is one of carefully contrived bathos” and “even heaven is something of a let down” (154).
One wonders what Bible the Professor Eagleton has been reading. His flippant comments to the contrary, the ethics of the Bible is rooted in the commands and character of a holy and loving God (Exodus 20:1-18; Matthew 22:37-40). Salvation is won for us through the vicarious atonement and glorious resurrection of Jesus Christ (1 Corinthians 15:3-4). Salvation is received by faith alone, but saving faith fosters good works for the glory of God (Ephesians 2:8-9; James 2:14-26: Colossians 3:17). The notion that either the root or fruit of salvation is “humdrum” is patently absurd. Even in serving “the least of these” we serve Christ (Matthew 25:31-46). Eagleton’s claim that Matthew’s account of the Second Coming is crafted to treat a serious subject in a superficial way (bathos) is itself an egregious example of(unintentional) bathos.
Eagleton even blithely asserts that “The New Testament also adopts a fairly relaxed attitude to sex, and takes a notable dim view of the family” (154). The New Testament is, in fact, less “relaxed” about sex than the Old Testament, since it forbids polygamy and is more strict concerning divorce (see Matthew 19:1-12). Paul’s attitude toward sexual debauchery is hardly relaxed (see Paul’s instruction on sexual morality in 1 Corinthians, for example.) Jesus, in fact, tightens the screws on sexual behavior when he teaches that lust in the heart is a kind of adultery (Matthew 5:27-30). Jesus affirmed that we should not put the family above God (Matthew 10:37-39), but that is hardly “a dim view of the family.” Nor does any other New Testament instruction diminish the importance of the family, since heterosexual marriage and godly child-rearing are God-ordained (Genesis 1:28; 2:20-25).
Leaving aside Eagleton’s unholy wrangling about Holy Writ, his own notion of a rational human nature and telos with access to objective moral truths coheres far better with a theistic worldview than his atheistic one. Christianity provides a solid basis for an objective ethic that highly values human beings and encourages their flourishing in accord with the principles of the Kingdom of God (Matthew 6:33). This perspective is rooted in the revealed truth that we are made in God’s image and likeness (Genesis 1:26) and have access to the moral law through our conscience (Romans 2:14-15) and Scripture (2 Timothy 3:15-17).
But Eagleton asks, “What are human beings for? The answer is surely: nothing…” because we are simply ends in ourselves (120). He takes this to be a brute fact, requiring no explanation. But humans can have no intrinsic moral value as ends in themselves in a materialistic world without design. On this scheme we are merely evolved animals whose behaviors are constrained only by biology and contingent moral norms.How could any objective moral values that transcend instinct and culture emerge from the purely material matrix of cause and effect to which Eagleton the atheist is confined? Moral relativism—or even nihilism—is more fitting for such a materialistic metaphysic. Eagleton advances no real arguments regarding these significant philosophical concerns. It is one thing to assert that morality is objective; it is another to argue that claim cogently on the basis of a morally sufficient worldview.
Despite its deep flaws, After Theory serves the significant purpose of calling key postmodernist ideas into question and by arguing that the reality of objective truth has yet to succumb to the stratagem of postmodernist assailants. Nevertheless, in light of the horrific apocalypse of September 11, 2001, and the war against terrorist in which we are enmeshed, the West needs much more than an atheistic literary critic with second thoughts on postmodernism can offer. As Alexander Solzhenitsyn said in A World Split Apart (1978), the decline of the West is traceable to one principal thing. We have rejected God. Sadly, so has Terry Eagleton.
[1] On anti-Americanism, see Jean-Francois Revel, trans. Diarmid Cammell, Anti-Americanism (San Francisco, Encounter Books, 2000).
[2] On the importance of truth, see Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay: Defending Christianity Against the Challenges of Postmodernism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000).
[3] For the testimonies of Christian philosophers, see James Kelly Clark, ed., Philosophers Who Believe (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1994).
[4] On the historicity of Luke infancy narratives, see Craig Keener, Bible Background Commentary: New Testament (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1992), 193.
Societies will ultimately be judged by how they treated the least, the last, and the lost. The most fragile among us need the most protection and love from those with the power to provide it. None are more fragile or more endangered in American today than the unborn. With fewer rights than endangered animal species, unborn human beings are slaughtered legally at the ghastly rate of more than one million a year. This must change. The fetus is living being with potential, not a potential life; a human being with potential, not a potential human; a person with potential, not a potential person. As a member of the human species and family, the fetus has the right to life, the right not to be killed.
This is why I support The Personhood Amendment. May all former fetuses of Colorado join me for the sake of sanity and morality.
Postcard from InterVarsity Press: "Congratulations, Are all Religions One" has been reprinted. This is the 11the printing, bringing the total to 64,562..." This is a booklet of mine, published in 1996. Only Unmasking the New Age (IVP, 1986) has sold more of all my books and booklets. Praise be to God.
Centennial, CO – Jane Norton, candidate for U.S. Senate, issued the following statement on the passage of the Arizona immigration law:
“The Arizona law was an inevitable consequence of the federal government’s failure to act over the last 30 years to secure all our borders. Securing America’s borders is a national security imperative. Federal inaction has meant border violence and a drug trade run amok. Is it any wonder Arizonans are angry and fed up?”
“Year in and year out, states have been forced to shoulder the increased costs associated with illegal immigration. Millions have crossed our border illegally or overstayed their visas and have driven up the costs of health care, education, welfare, law enforcement and incarceration.”
“Meanwhile, our leaders in Washington have done nothing. The Arizona legislature and governor decided to stand up and say ‘no more.’ And contrary to popular belief, they aren't the only state that has done so. Georgia, Colorado, and other states have all approved tough illegal immigrant enforcement laws in an effort to address a problem our federal government has ignored. States under the 10th Amendment have the right and the duty to protect their citizens.”
“The solution to this problem isn't for the Justice Department to file a taxpayer-funded lawsuit against the Governor of Arizona for responding to a law enforcement crisis. It isn't to give amnesty to the 12-20 million illegal immigrants who are already in this country -- as Barack Obama has suggested. And it isn't to give illegal immigrants public benefits that will only induce even more illegal immigrants to come here.”
“The time has come to secure America’s borders and end illegal immigration. America is a nation established on the rule of law, and if I'm elected as your U.S. Senator, I will demand that our immigration laws are enforced. America was established and built by immigrants and will continue to need immigrants for its future economic vitality and global competitiveness. I will insist on an enforceable and verifiable temporary worker program to meet the needs of our nation’s economy to ensure that employers hire only people who are here legally and that their stay is truly temporary. We have the technology to do this in a way that is fair and sensible, and I believe we must. Amnesty violates the rule of law. Those who wish to obtain American citizenship must follow the legal process, and therefore I oppose amnesty and efforts to create a ‘path to citizenship’ for people in this country illegally.
Please go to the Moseley Gallery and learn of Elayne Moseley's upcoming artist reception in San Francisco. The gorgeous painting to the left will be on display.
The more we submit to the higher, the more control we have over ourselves, and the more we find our place with that which is equal to us and and with that which is lower. Otherwise, we botch the hierarchy and bring (even more) chaos into this wounded world.
I am a Christian, philosopher, teacher. My most recent of my twenty books is Beyond the Wager. My magnum opus is Christian Apologetics: A Comprehensive Case for Biblical Faith (InterVarsity Press, 2011). I have published ten others, including Truth Decay and On Jesus.
