Changing Apologetics

February 10, 2012 By scotmcknight 16 Comments

In some ways defense of the Christian faith is the same; in other ways it has changed — for some quite dramatically. Example: C.S. Lewis argued that without God morality is disestablished as a universal. For some this argument is compelling; for many today this argument confirms what one already believes but does not compel faith. Apologetics, then, shifts to meet new counterarguments and new challenges. Good apologists shift because they listen.

I have a question of two for you: What is the most compelling argument for you when it comes to the Christian faith?

In reading this new book by McClymond and McDermott on Jonathan Edwards (The Theology of Jonathan Edwards) I was struck how versatile Edwards was in his apologetics, and in some ways anticipates apologetics in postmodernity. (And in some ways offends the same.) The authors of this sketch Edwards’ apologetics, a topic he never addressed in a book but the man left behind notebook after notebook with detailed discussions of most issues in apologetics.

The context for Edwards’ apologetics is deism, and they observe that much of deism is Christianity diluted. Former Christians became deists, or deists were expressing their beliefs out of a Christian culture so that the reasonable religion and reasonable ethics were de-Christianized or de-supernaturalized remains. Edwards’ own apologetics emerge from William Paley’s evidentialism and Schleiermacher’s religious sense.

They break Edwards’ apologetics into three kinds of arguments: [Read more...]

Filed Under: Apologetics, Church History 16 Comments

The Reformers and their Bible

September 21, 2011 By scotmcknight 6 Comments

Of all the contributions of the Reformation, surely at the top of the list was the renewed affirmation of the Bible’s authority, often called sola scriptura. I’m a firm believer in this Reformation contribution and find it most accurately expressed in prima scriptura and not nuda scriptura (as it has sometimes been practiced by some). So I stand up to clap for and welcome the brand new book by Timothy George, Reading Scripture with the Reformers, because he’s a master of the Reformers and because he focuses on this major theme of the Reformers: how they viewed and read the Bible, and he is fully aware of how the Reformers interacted with the early church fathers.

Translation is one of the major contributions of the Reformation, beginning with Luther’s famous translation of the whole Bible into German and then when Tyndale himself translated from the original languages. The KJV itself is about 90% Tyndale and that means the KJV, especially as it was often accompanied by The Geneva Bible, was a Reformation Bible. (We can avoid the nuances of each for this post.)

And then there was preaching: the Reformation churches stood firm that church services, which they did not restrict to one hour on a Sunday morning, would entail the public reading of Scripture and the public exposition of Scripture and a theology shaped more and more by Scripture. The Reformation and the Bible go hand in hand. And Timothy George’s new book makes this abundantly clear, even if he gives priority to Luther and less attention to Calvin and even less to the Anabaptist Reformers. But they are all here.

But there’s more here than this new book by Timothy George. Folks, I am a huge fan of IVP’s Ancient Christian Commentary and I will be just as big of a fan of their next series, the Reformation Commentary on Scripture. Poor Gerald Bray, or some would say lucky Gerald Bray, must have spent — along with his fellow editors Timothy George and Scott Manetsch — nights and weekends in libraries finding the appropriate selections in order to compile an anthology of comments from the comments of Reformers. The first volume of this new series is now sitting proudly on my desk: Galatians, Ephesians (Reformation Commentary on Scripture Series). One way of saying this is that I’m glad I didn’t have to do this task but I’m sure glad someone did. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Bible, Church History 6 Comments

Defending the Real Constantine 2

November 10, 2010 By scotmcknight 30 Comments

Here’s the situation as I can discern it: a vocal segment of scholarship believes Constantine more or less ruined the church. By combining political power, sometimes described as persecution of those with anything other than Christian faith and the use of coercion to create theological uniformity, with the church, Constantine created “Constantinianism.”

Peter Leithart is out to reclaim the real Constantine and suggest that much of the Constantine of the above sketch is an unhistorical bogeyman.

What would western democracies look like if Constantine’s theory of concord were the guiding principle? Do you think Leithart’s comparison of Constantine with Locke is accurate and useful for today? Do you think Constantine’s empire was tolerant? Was Constantine a Christian? A big one: Have the critics of Constantine misunderstood him and misused him?

Leithart’s book is called Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom. For those who are willing to read it carefully and fairly, it will be a powerful challenge to the ruling Constantinianism theory. It would take pages and pages to summarize the details of this book and we can’t do that. So I want to get at some central ideas. I suggest you read the book for yourself to see the details.

First, Leithart argues that Constantine was genuinely converted, and this against the grain of some who think his “conversion” was little more than political powermongering. Here is his summary statement of the “By this sign, conquer” vision of Constantine:

Prior to 312, Constantine’s coinage and military standard honored pagan gods, particularly Sol or Apollo. After 312, he adopted a Christian standard and military insignia and put Christian symbols on his coins, which gradually replaced pagan signs. Something happened in between. Constantine said he changed because he received a sign from the Christian God. Was that true?

I believe the answer is yes.

That is the first plank in this book, and he goes on to support it in Constantine’s own words about how he saw his responsibility before God. Divisions in the church and empire displeased God; he wanted God’s favor. Furthermore, Constantine, and here he quotes Timothy Barnes — major Constantine scholar, believed his mission was to convert the Roman empire to Christianity. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Christianity, Church History Tagged With: , 30 Comments

Celtic monks

September 30, 2010 By scotmcknight 9 Comments

What makes us content? What leads to clarity of mind — to soul clarity? Is it the striving for what we want, or do we find it the way the monks of Ireland found it?

From Daniel Taylor, In Search of Sacred Places: Looking for Wisdom on Celtic Holy Islands:

We do not want to live their lives, but we want very much something they seemed to have – something we can’t quite put our finger on.  Perhaps we want clarity.  They were clear in their minds and hearts about the ultimate purpose and meaning of life.  They knew why they were alive and what they were to do with the short time they had.  Amid all their striving they had a peace about things, an acceptance of the world and their place in it – and, paradoxically, a determination to change that world and themselves.  They were forever blessing things and forever trying to make things better.  They fit into their world in a way in which many of us do not quite fit into ours.  In a word, they were content.

Filed Under: Christianity, Church History Tagged With: , , 9 Comments

Our History, Our Weakness

September 12, 2010 By scotmcknight 15 Comments

The average Christian knows next to nothing about the history of Christian theology. The average pastor learned the stuff in seminary but does little with it in the busy life of parish ministry. I could be wrong in those two points, or slightly exaggerated, but there is nothing I’ve read or experienced that counters those two points.

What can be done about this “black hole” of our history? How can we resurrect memory? What are you doing or what do you hear others are doing? Is this a genuine problem in your view?

Preaching tends to involve two poles: the biblical text and the practical life of Christians. One source for bridging the two, for framing the former and for helping the latter is the great thinking of Christian theologians. The time for serious reading for most pastors is limited. And only the narrowest of opinions thinks pastors can spend enough time to master the theologians of the past — unless the pastor has the sort of schedule that asks him/her only to study and preach. For the others something else must be done and something has been done.

Enter a book that sketches the history of Christian thinking in clear, accessible, and big-idea bite-sized chunks. Chad Meister and J.B. Stump, both at Bethel (Indiana), have co-authored a wonderful book for the pastor: a chp a week and in a few months you are done and have gone through the great thinkers and major ideas of the Christian Church. The book is called: Christian Thought: A Historical Introduction.

What I think will happen is that the pastor will find herself or himself injecting small points, suggestions, and perspective in preaching and teaching and conversation — and through this local churches can begin to fill in the “black hole” and resurrect memory of what we have always believed.

The book is accessible because it has introductions, graphs and bullet point summaries at the end of each chapter; it provides accessible bibliography. The prose is clear. Highly recommended.

Filed Under: Church History, Theology Tagged With: , , , 15 Comments

The Challenge of Adam 1 (RJS)

March 16, 2010 By RJS 59 Comments

I am currently reading a book by David N. Livingstone, Adam’s Ancestors: Race, Religion, and the Politics of Human Origins. David Livingstone is Professor of Geography and Intellectual History at Queen’s University, Belfast and this book reflects both of his interests. It is a readable, but thorough and academic, book looking at the history of the idea of pre-adamic or non-adamic humans in western Christian thinking from the early church (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, and Augustine) through the middle ages, the explorations of the fifteenth and sixteenth century, the debates on racial supremacy, and on to the present day. The book presents an interesting survey and puts many factors into perspective – it is well worth a few posts.

As we open the series I would like to consider a simple question: Why is the story of Adam and Eve – or even the entire primeval history in Genesis 1-11 a problem? There are several candidate reasons to consider:

(1) The recognition of inconsistencies in the Genesis account.

(2) The presence of records indication the existence of civilizations predating Adam (Egyptian, Chaldean, Mesopotamian, etc.)

(3) The increased exploration of the world and the discovery of humans in
the new world.

(4) The consideration of human language in connection with the Genesis
story.

(5) Darwin’s theory of evolution including common descent.

In your mind which factors  contributed most significantly to the Challenge of
Adam in Christian thought?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Church History, Problems for Faith, Science and Faith 59 Comments

Eugene Peterson: Practice Resurrection 2

February 26, 2010 By scotmcknight 15 Comments

Peterson.jpgIn Eugene Peterson’s new book, Practice Resurrection: A Conversation on Growing Up in Christ , we are treated to a response to the posted from Wednesday about criticizing the church.

What is the church? Do you tend to idealized the earliest churches? But do you neglect then the deformities of those same churches?
“Church,” he observes, “is the textured context in which we grow up in Christ to maturity.”
“So, why church? The short answer is because the Holy Spirit formed it to be a colony of heaven in the country of death” (11-12).
The church, he says, is those people who practice the resurrection of Christ in the country of death.
Sure, he admits, the church isn’t all it seems it should be but he makes this observation: “Maybe God knows what he is doing, giving us church, this church” (14). Peterson thinks Ephesians gives us a behind-the-scenes look at what church is.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Church History, Prayer and Formation 15 Comments

Lengthening Our Memory 3

January 27, 2010 By scotmcknight 25 Comments

Pantocrator.jpgChris Hall, in Worshiping With the Church Fathers
, examines in his second chp the central focus of the early Christian’s sense of worship: eucharist. (I didn’t say the “central focus of the NT’s sense of worship” though some will say I quibble.)

Eucharist … a story. Not all that long ago, I was sitting around a late night fire with some friends (it was a male bonding time too) and we were sipping a glass of wine and not a few were smoking cigars and the question was raised:

“Do you think we should celebrate the eucharist every week?”

(I’d be interested in how you’d answer that question.) The question, so it seems to me, is being asked by many low church types today (while many high church types are thinking of moving over to low churches to get more sermon!).

Chris Hall begins by observing that among many evangelicals today the question is “Why even celebrate communion? What’s it for?” (Our high church friends are now rolling their eyes.) The suggestion is that this question emerges from a gnostic perception of the faith — the material and the spiritual are not intimately connected. What matters is the spiritual; the material doesn’t matter. Hall shows how the early fathers reacted strongly against the gnostic ideas, including docetism. Hall examines what he calls sacramental realism.

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Church History 25 Comments

Lengthening our Memory 2

January 22, 2010 By scotmcknight 9 Comments

Pantocrator.jpgI grew up baptist, and that meant we were big on baptism and it also meant we did not baptize infants. Baptism was for those who consciously believed. The oddest thing about baptism for us was that baptism as an act did nothing to us or for us but was instead understood to be an act of obedience to the command of Jesus. Not so always with the Church. Chris Hall, in Worshiping With the Church Fathers
, examines in his first chp what the fathers believed and practiced and taught about baptism. Studying the history of baptism, and seeing how the Church has taught baptism, lengthens our memory.

This is a rich chp, loaded with original source quotations and sorted out in clean and crisp categories.
Hall begins with a fundamental observation: sacramental theology, which contrasts with what I grew up with and with most low-church evangelicals, is rooted in the Incarnation. That is, sacramental theology claims that God draws near to humans in matter. That is, the invisible in the visible. Why did they believe in sacramental ideas?
The Incarnation — and this shifted and shaped everything for the earliest Christian theologians. God became flesh and this sanctifies matter and shows that God redeems through matter. Thus, they are “concrete, grace-filled, earthy means God employs to communicate central themes of the gospel narrative and the overarching biblical story to the mind and body of a Christian” (25-26).

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Church History 9 Comments

Faith and the Future 3 (RJS)

November 10, 2009 By RJS 30 Comments

The central portion of Harvey Cox’s new book The Future of Faith lays out the New Perspective on The Church – which is no longer new. It is broad brush summarized as follows:

Jesus taught and enacted a kingdom vision.

His immediate followers were committed to this vision

Paul’s disavowal of the necessity to submit to Jerusalem demonstrates that it was Spirit driven

At its core the movement was a rebellion against human, particularly Roman, empire in favor of what could be – Kingdom of God

The diversity of texts found at Nag Hammadi among others demonstrate that belief in the early church was not uniform

The Gospel of Thomas is as old and as faithful as any of the four in the NT

Luke in Luke-Acts was setting forth a Christian epic to compete with the Aeneid and other epics

This community (ekklesia = gathering with political undertones) became distorted into a hierarchical church emphasizing beliefs and authority

→ The distortion is apparent as early as the first epistle of Clement (ca. 92 AD)

→ The distortion develops through Tertullian and Origin and Cyprian 

→ The distortion crystallized with Roman favor and Constantine

The council at Nicaea, far from being a sober and Spirit led occasion marked the end of the beginning. The transition was complete.

Meanwhile the Christian bishops went on debating the fine points of theology, Now they argued over what homoousious really meant and the nature of Mary’s relationship to God and Christ. They composed more creeds and excommunicated more people. After the fall of Rome in 476, the ensuing centuries toll a dismal story if the repeated failure of using creeds and excommunications to achieve any result, except for further rancor. (p. 108)

So here is a question to ponder:

Which parts of Cox’s perspective on the Church ring true – and which parts don’t? How would you tell the story?

[Read more...]

Filed Under: Bible, Christianity, Church History, Emerging Movement, Problems for Faith 30 Comments
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