2019-08-06T09:49:22-04:00

Last updated on: August 6, 2019 at 9:49 am   By

This is an installment of my series of replies to an article by Dr. David Madison: a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, who has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. It’s called, “Things We Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said” (Debunking Christianity, 7-21-19). His words will be in blue below. Dr. Madison makes several “generic” digs at Jesus and Christianity, in the written portion (it details a series of 12 podcasts):

A challenge for Christians: If you’re so sure Jesus existed, then you have some explaining to do. A major frustration is that, while believers are indignant at all the talk about Jesus not existing, they don’t know the issues that fuel the skepticism—and are unwilling to inform themselves.

Yes, I’m up to the “challenge.” No problem at all. I’m not threatened or “scared” by this in the slightest. It’s what I do, as an apologist. The question is whether Dr. Madison is up to interacting with counter-critiques? Or will he act like the voluminous anti-theist atheist polemicist Bob Seidensticker?: who directly challenged me in one of his own comboxes to respond to his innumerable attack-pieces against Christianity and the Bible, and then courageously proceeded to utterly ignore my 35 specific critiques of his claims as of this writing. We shall soon see which course Dr. Madison will decide to take. Anyway, he also states in his post and combox:

[S]o many of the words of Jesus are genuinely shocking. These words aren’t proclaimed much from the pulpit, . . . Hence the folks in the pews have absorbed and adored an idealized Jesus. Christian apologists make their livings refiguring so many of the things Jesus supposedly said.

The gospels are riddled with contradictions and bad theology, and Jesus is so frequently depicted as a cult fanatic—because cult fanatics wrote the gospels. We see Jesus only through their theological filters. I just want to grab hold of Christian heads (standing behind them, with a hand on each ear) and force them to look straight ahead, unflinchingly, at the gospels, and then ask “Tell me what you see!” uncoached by apologist specialists, i.e., priests and pastors, who’ve had a lot of practice making bad texts look good. . . . I DO say, “Deal with the really bad stuff in the gospels.” Are you SURE you’ve not make a big mistake endorsing this particular Lord and Savior? That’s the whole point of this series of Flash Podcasts, because a helluva lot of Christians would agree, right away, that these quotes are bad news—if no one told then that they’ve been attributed to Jesus.

Of course, Dr. Madison — good anti-theist atheist that he is — takes the view that we are not at all sure whether Jesus in fact said anything recorded in the Gospels in the first place. I don’t play that game, because there is no end to it. It’s like trying to pin jello to the wall. The atheist always has their convenient out (when refuted in argument about some biblical text) that Jesus never said it anyway [wink wink and sly patronizing grin], and/or that the biblical text in question was simply added later by dishonest ultra-biased Christian partisans and propagandists. It’s a silly and ultimately intellectually dishonest game, and so I always refuse to play it with atheists or anyone else, because there is no way to “win” with such an absurdly stacked, purely subjective deck.

In my defense of biblical texts, I start with the assumption that the manuscripts we have are quite sufficient for us to know what is in the Bible (believe it or not). Going on from there, I simply defend particular [supposedly “difficult”] texts, and note with appropriate argumentation, that “here, the Bible teaches so-and-so,” etc. I deal with the texts as they exist. I don’t get into the endlessly arbitrary, subjective games that atheists and theologically liberal biblical skeptics play with the texts, in their self-serving textual criticism.

Dr. Madison himself (fortunately) grants my outlook in terms of practical “x vs. y” debate purposes: “For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story.” And in the combox: “So, we can go along with their insistence that he did exist. We’ll play on their field, i.e., the gospels.”

Good! So we shall examine his cherry-picked texts and see whether his interpretations of them can stand up to scrutiny. He is issuing challenges, and I as an apologist will be dishing a bunch of my own right back to him. Two can play this game. I will be dealing honestly with his challenges. Will he return the favor, and engage in serious and substantive dialogue? Again, we’ll soon know what his reaction will be. A true dialogue is of a confident, inquisitive, “nothing to fear and everything to gain” back-and-forth and interactive nature, not merely “ships passing in the night” or what I call “mutual monologue.”

*****

Dr. Madison’s sixth podcast of twelve is entitled: “On Mark 12:30, Jesus’ command to love God at the all-all-all level.” Here is the passage in question:

Mark 12:30 (RSV)  and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.

Our ever-wise critic of God and all things biblical and Christian, Dr. Madison, pontificates about this as follows:

We are dealing with a colossal case of cosmic narcissism. God expects, God demands, God gets off on human adoration? . . . How does this possibly make sense? . . . This makes God seem like an insecure monarch . . . Here’s Jesus trying to make us love God. No thank you. A God who is top-heavy with ego . . . this is bad theology; this is bad religion. . . . mindless cult fanaticism. . . . The God of the Bible is a horrible God: so much anger and wrath.

The Bible teaches that God is in need of nothing:

Acts 17:24-25 The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth, does not live in shrines made by man, [25] nor is he served by human hands, as though he needed anything, since he himself gives to all men life and breath and everything.

I basically dealt with this issue in my paper, “Why Do We Worship God? Dialogue with an Atheist” (5-11-18). I wrote:

If we’re talking about the supreme being of the universe, then the respect, leading up to worship and praise, is all that much more to be expected, and the natural state of things.

God “needs” no worship whatever because in Christian theology, He needs nothing. He’s completely all-sufficient and self-sufficient. It’s for our sake that we “render unto God’s what is rightfully God’s.”

I cited my friend, Deacon Steven D. Greydanus in this paper. He explained it very eloquently:

[N]othing that happens, nothing we do, can diminish or increase God or his beatitude in any way. We say metaphorically that our sins anger or grieve God and that our virtues delight him, but this is analogical language. He cannot become any happier or sadder than the infinite beatitude he enjoys necessarily and absolutely. . . .

Worship is not something we offer to God to make him happy. Rather, in worship we grow closer to God to our benefit. Worship, like virtue, knowledge of truth, and appreciation of beauty, is for our good.

I added:

I searched “demand worship” in my online RSV Bible and it never appears. God does say in the Ten Commandments: “You shall have no other gods before me. . . . you shall not bow down to them or serve them” (Ex 20:3, 5). It is the purpose and nature of such worship that [atheists] are not grasping. As I have explained, it’s for our good, not God’s. Why does God give His commands, which include monotheism and worship of Him alone?:

Deuteronomy 4:40 Therefore you shall keep his statutes and his commandments, which I command you this day, that it may go well with you, and with your children after you, and that you may prolong your days in the land which the LORD your God gives you for ever.

Deuteronomy 5:33 You shall walk in all the way which the LORD your God has commanded you, that you may live, and that it may go well with you, and that you may live long in the land which you shall possess.

Deuteronomy 6:18 And you shall do what is right and good in the sight of the LORD, that it may go well with you, . . .

Deuteronomy 12:28 Be careful to heed all these words which I command you, that it may go well with you and with your children after you for ever, when you do what is good and right in the sight of the LORD your God.

Deuteronomy 28:1 And if you obey the voice of the LORD your God, being careful to do all his commandments which I command you this day, the LORD your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. [all the blessings God will give them are then listed in 28:2-14; then 28:15 states, “But if you will not obey the voice of the LORD your God or be careful to do all his commandments and his statutes which I command you this day, then all these curses shall come upon you and overtake you.” This is followed by a list of calamities in 28:16-67.]

It’s always the same, and this is the story of the Old Testament and the ancient Jews. God tells them to follow His laws and commands and everything will be wonderful for them. They will have manifold blessings. Then they decide not to and to rebel against God and it goes terribly, just as God said it would. And then these same men (and atheists today who think like them) blame God rather than their own stupidity and stubbornness. But if we sum up what God wants, as expressed in the Bible, here it is:

1 Timothy 2:3-4 . . . God our Savior, [4] who desires all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.

Atheists are simply projecting human emotions onto God, as if He is some sort of high maintenance drama queen who needs constant attention.Ironically, this is what fundamentalists often do, too (hence they tend to reject anthropopathism and anthropomorphism, which entail non-literal concepts). They are both unsophisticated, improperly thought-through views (i.e., referring to this one topic of worship). And [atheists] want to make Him a despot and tyrant, which is not at all how the Bible presents Him. . . .

We don’t worship God because He needs it (He needs nothing and is entirely self-sufficient), but because we need it, as a fundamental attribute of a human being, who came ultimately from God in creation and through parents in procreation. God made it that way because He knows that we are most happy and fulfilled living as He intended it to be: in as close of a union with Him as possible. Likewise, the parent knows that children will be happier if they accept both the love and correction of the parents. If they reject both, they will likely have problems in their lives. . . .

We’re saying that God is inherently infinitely greater than we are. He created the universe. He gave us life (as parents also do in a lesser sense). He loves us and blesses us in so many ways. So we praise Him and worship Him for Who He is.

Another partial analogy would be how we act towards those we are in love with. Look at any love poems and you find rapturous praise, lavish, over-the-top compliments, placing this loved one at the very center of our existence and the meaningfulness of our life and indeed our happiness and fulfillment. So we praise and compliment in the most extravagant ways.

Yet when it comes to God (even trying to imagine the Christian God for a second: that you reject or deny) you can’t comprehend that we praise and worship Him because of what we believe His loving, all-benevolent nature is; because He created us and fulfills us when we serve Him, and due to all the wonderful things He has done or made possible to do. What is so mysterious or difficult to understand about that, truly baffles me. I don’t have a clue.

But if you redefine what God is like (the ubiquitous arbitrary, capricious tyrant of the atheist imagination), then yes, I can see why you couldn’t comprehend worship of a Being like that.

The RationalChristianity.Net site offers some further insight on the question:

Some people object that God doesn’t merely accept worship, he demands it. They picture God as an egotistical or even insecure tyrant who insists that everyone tell him how great he is. This is not an accurate portrayal, for God’s command to us is, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your strength” (Dt 6:5), not “Tell me five times a day how wonderful I am.” Worship is included as part of God’s command to love him, for it’s a proper expression of our love for someone who is perfect and so much above us in every way. If it’s fitting for us to praise our friends and family when they do well, how much more appropriate it is for us to praise a perfect God! When we love God and realize how awesome he is, worship and praise are natural results.

God’s instruction to worship him is only a demand in the sense that God’s other moral laws are demands. God doesn’t command us not to murder because he’s a dictator, but because it’s morally right (and therefore ultimately in our best interests). Similarly, God tells us to worship him because it’s the proper way for us to relate to him and because it’s to our benefit to do so (see above).

Something else to consider: If God were vain, one would think that he would want pictures and statues of him everywhere, yet he commanded that no one make images of him. Instead, he told the Israelites to keep copies of his commands everywhere (Dt 6:6-9), so that they would remember them and obey them and receive blessings as a result (Dt 6:18).

I would add that God is also eager to share His glory (hardly a quality of a “narcissist”), as I have documented. And God also praises human beings:

Romans 2:29 . . . His praise is not from men but from God.

1 Corinthians 4:5 . . . Then every man will receive his commendation from God.

The Christian attitude is: “We love, because he first loved us” (1 John 4:19). God’s love (which we can reject, because He gives us that freedom) is very tender, and is compared to a mother hen and her chicks:

Matthew 23:37 O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!

Scripture is chock-full of passages detailing God’s intense love for human beings.

Apologist Glenn Miller has offered eloquent and wise thoughts on this topic, as usual, with which I shall close:

I had by this time discovered that a person’s happiness, well-being, and personal actualization was bound up with the number and intensity of “healthy” relationships maintained–with family, with other people, with authority, with secondary groups, with institutions, with self, with ‘nature’, with God. Defining ‘healthiness’ within a relationship typically involved ‘working within the structures that inherently defined the relationship’. For example, if I were a child, it was healthy to respect my parents. If I was a parent, it was healthy to encourage and urge my children to develop. If I was a citizen, it was healthy to be “conforming” but still “dissenting” enough to make a contribution to the development, goals, and effectiveness of the institutions.

So, if one of my primary (if not THE primary) relationships in life was that of my relationship to the God of the Universe, then my happiness/well-being/actualization would be adversely affected by an improper, dysfunctional, or ignored relationship with the Living God. It is ultimately restrictive/destructive for a person to have healthy relationships in only a few of the major areas–we generally must have at least a ‘working’ relationship with ALL of the relationships (that we are members of). And too, if a person is ‘doing well’ in all of the relationships, but IGNORING/FIGHTING God, their internal health is not at the highest level it should be.

If the ‘structures of the relationship’ with God involves an awareness of His qualitative and quantitative differences from me (suitable to encourage me to honesty with, and dependence on, Him), then for God to seek for me to admit these differences was a matter no longer of just intellectual honesty, but now was a matter of seeking after my happiness, well-being, and actualization. It was now to my benefit (given the very definition of what I was as a creature!) to do this. And, accordingly, it didn’t look quite as ‘pathological’ for God to desire this!

***

Photo credit: [Max Pixel / CC0 public domain license]

***

2019-08-05T11:49:33-04:00

Last updated on: August 5, 2019 at 11:49 am   By

This is an installment of my series of replies to an article by Dr. David Madison: a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, who has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. It’s called, “Things We Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said” (Debunking Christianity, 7-21-19). His words will be in blue below. Dr. Madison makes several “generic” digs at Jesus and Christianity, in the written portion (it details a series of 12 podcasts):

A challenge for Christians: If you’re so sure Jesus existed, then you have some explaining to do. A major frustration is that, while believers are indignant at all the talk about Jesus not existing, they don’t know the issues that fuel the skepticism—and are unwilling to inform themselves.

Yes, I’m up to the “challenge.” No problem at all. I’m not threatened or “scared” by this in the slightest. It’s what I do, as an apologist. The question is whether Dr. Madison is up to interacting with counter-critiques? Or will he act like the voluminous anti-theist atheist polemicist Bob Seidensticker?: who directly challenged me in one of his own comboxes to respond to his innumerable attack-pieces against Christianity and the Bible, and then courageously proceeded to utterly ignore my 35 specific critiques of his claims as of this writing. We shall soon see which course Dr. Madison will decide to take. Anyway, he also states in his post and combox:

[S]o many of the words of Jesus are genuinely shocking. These words aren’t proclaimed much from the pulpit, . . . Hence the folks in the pews have absorbed and adored an idealized Jesus. Christian apologists make their livings refiguring so many of the things Jesus supposedly said.

The gospels are riddled with contradictions and bad theology, and Jesus is so frequently depicted as a cult fanatic—because cult fanatics wrote the gospels. We see Jesus only through their theological filters. I just want to grab hold of Christian heads (standing behind them, with a hand on each ear) and force them to look straight ahead, unflinchingly, at the gospels, and then ask “Tell me what you see!” uncoached by apologist specialists, i.e., priests and pastors, who’ve had a lot of practice making bad texts look good. . . . I DO say, “Deal with the really bad stuff in the gospels.” Are you SURE you’ve not make a big mistake endorsing this particular Lord and Savior? That’s the whole point of this series of Flash Podcasts, because a helluva lot of Christians would agree, right away, that these quotes are bad news—if no one told then that they’ve been attributed to Jesus.

Of course, Dr. Madison — good anti-theist atheist that he is — takes the view that we are not at all sure whether Jesus in fact said anything recorded in the Gospels in the first place. I don’t play that game, because there is no end to it. It’s like trying to pin jello to the wall. The atheist always has their convenient out (when refuted in argument about some biblical text) that Jesus never said it anyway [wink wink and sly patronizing grin], and/or that the biblical text in question was simply added later by dishonest ultra-biased Christian partisans and propagandists. It’s a silly and ultimately intellectually dishonest game, and so I always refuse to play it with atheists or anyone else, because there is no way to “win” with such an absurdly stacked, purely subjective deck.

In my defense of biblical texts, I start with the assumption that the manuscripts we have are quite sufficient for us to know what is in the Bible (believe it or not). Going on from there, I simply defend particular [supposedly “difficult”] texts, and note with appropriate argumentation, that “here, the Bible teaches so-and-so,” etc. I deal with the texts as they exist. I don’t get into the endlessly arbitrary, subjective games that atheists and theologically liberal biblical skeptics play with the texts, in their self-serving textual criticism.

Dr. Madison himself (fortunately) grants my outlook in terms of practical “x vs. y” debate purposes: “For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story.” And in the combox: “So, we can go along with their insistence that he did exist. We’ll play on their field, i.e., the gospels.”

Good! So we shall examine his cherry-picked texts and see whether his interpretations of them can stand up to scrutiny. He is issuing challenges, and I as an apologist will be dishing a bunch of my own right back to him. Two can play this game. I will be dealing honestly with his challenges. Will he return the favor, and engage in serious and substantive dialogue? Again, we’ll soon know what his reaction will be. A true dialogue is of a confident, inquisitive, “nothing to fear and everything to gain” back-and-forth and interactive nature, not merely “ships passing in the night” or what I call “mutual monologue.”

*****

Dr. Madison’s fifth podcast of twelve is entitled: “On Mark 10:29-30, on Jesus’ promise of a hundred-fold return if people give up families and houses.” Here is that passage:

Mark 10:29-30 (RSV) Jesus said, “Truly, I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake and for the gospel, [30] who will not receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and lands, with persecutions, and in the age to come eternal life. 

All the Gospel writers were propagandists for the early Jesus cult. They wanted followers who would be loyal to nothing but the cult. Not even family should matter. . . . This is what cult fanatics do and say. They make outrageous promises . . . Christianity has specialized in this deception, as has so many other cults throughout the ages. . . . This Jesus quote is utterly mindless . . . Now Jesus enthusiasts, Jesus defenders may say that this is just exaggeration to make a point. But it falls into the pattern of cult leaders making wild promises to sucker people in. This is religion at its worst: right there in the Gospel.

Protestant apologist Glenn Miller responds to this sort of charge in his article, “Jesus versus Family Values?” (1994):

  1. This is not an ‘updated’ set at all…the OT is replete with similar passages in which one’s commitment to God must supercede all other relationships (so Deut 13, where family entices someone to violate the covenant with Yahweh, or I Samuel 2, where the priest Eli is judged by God for ‘honoring his sons more than Me’–with the attendant de-moralization of the nation). If one’s relationship with God is the primal and ultimate relationship in one’s existence, then from the relationship will develop the strength, commitment, and wisdom to grow healthy relationships with family…the biblical witness is consistent in this throughout…
  2. Also, in the times of Jesus, as he is inaugurating the New Covenant, there were some calls to radical forms of discipleship. The apostles were called to ‘abnormal service’, but were never free to neglect their responsibilities to their families…For example, Peter brought Jesus to his sick mother-in-law (Matt 8) and most of the apostles traveled with their wives during their itinerant ministries (I Cor 9.5)…if someone had to ‘leave’ it was typically due to radical disagreement over basic values–but we are not given the option of not providing for the needs of those left behind.
  3. In some cases, people whose lives were touched by Jesus wanted to leave family and travel with him, but he instructed them to go back and minister to their families (e.g. Mrk 5.19)
  4. But for all these qualifications, it still must be maintained that God must form the core priority over all priorities (for the balance and strength needed to be able to meet all priorities)

Catholics would say that this refers to what we call the “evangelical counsels.” Jesus is not making this scenario mandatory for all followers. He simply cites the fact regarding certain highly devoted Christians: “there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or lands, for my sake.” Parallel verse Luke 18:29 phrases it as “there is no man who has left” while the corresponding Matthew 19:29 reads “every one who has left”. This is the language of voluntary heroic renunciation, not universal requirement. It’s a vast difference. And it demolishes Dr. Madison’s present insinuation.

And that puts the lie to the derogatory references to Christianity as a “cult” repeatedly made by Dr. Madison in his podcasts. If the intention of either a real Jesus or the supposed evangelist-“propagandists” for an imaginary “Jesus” was to require this extreme sacrificial renunciation of everyone, then the text would have plainly stated and required that. What would have prevented a bunch of lying deceivers from doing that?

But it doesn’t, and one should note also that Jesus said this in direct response to his leading disciple, Peter, having said, “Lo, we have left everything and followed you.” He didn’t completely forsake his entire family, because Jesus healed his mother-in-law (Matthew 8:14-15). To hear Dr. Madison tell it, Jesus should have said, “why do you mention and bring Me to your sick mother-in-law? Did I not tell you to hate your families and utterly forget about them [see my first reply], in order to follow Me?” But He didn’t do that, did He? He healed her.

And this is consistent with other passages having to do with the evangelical counsels (see a great explanation in the Catholic Encyclopedia). For example, Jesus said:

Matthew 19:9-12 And I say to you: whoever divorces his wife, except for unchastity, and marries another, commits adultery.” [10] The disciples said to him, “If such is the case of a man with his wife, it is not expedient to marry.” [11] But he said to them, “Not all men can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. [12] For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it.” 

The Apostle Paul teaches the same thing: marriage is the usual norm, but in some cases, it is good to sacrifice good and holy marriage for the sake of Christian service:

Marriage

1 Corinthians 7:2 But because of the temptation to immorality, each man should have his own wife and each woman her own husband. 

1 Corinthians 7:9 But if they cannot exercise self-control, they should marry. For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion. 

1 Corinthians 7:28 But if you marry, you do not sin, . . . 

1 Corinthians 7:36 If any one thinks that he is not behaving properly toward his betrothed, if his passions are strong, and it has to be, let him do as he wishes: let them marry — it is no sin.

1 Corinthians 7:38 So that he who marries his betrothed does well; . . . 

1 Corinthians 9:5 Do we not have the right to be accompanied by a wife, as the other apostles . . . ?

Voluntary and Heroic Celibacy

1 Corinthians 7:7-8 I wish that all were as I myself am [single / celibate]. But each has his own special gift from God, one of one kind and one of another. [8] To the unmarried and the widows I say that it is well for them to remain single as I do.

1 Corinthians 7:32, 35 I want you to be free from anxieties. The unmarried man is anxious about the affairs of the Lord, how to please the Lord; . . . [35] I say this for your own benefit, not to lay any restraint upon you, but to promote good order and to secure your undivided devotion to the Lord. 

1 Corinthians 7:38 . . . he who refrains from marriage will do better. 

1 Corinthians 9:15 . . . I have made no use of any of these rights . . . 

Freedom to Follow One’s Own Life Choices and Callings

1 Corinthians 7:17 Only, let every one lead the life which the Lord has assigned to him, and in which God has called him. . . . 

This is the furthest thing from mandatory requirements, forcing every Christian to give up the pleasures of family and married life. To find that, one must look to the ancient Gnostics, who taught that sex was literally evil. That has never been mainstream Christian (and especially not Catholic) teaching. One could note fringe sects like the Shakers, who required celibacy of all members. Of course, that was a view destined to render them extinct, as they pretty much are today. At its height in the mid-19th century, it only had 6,000 adherents. Today there is exactly one remaining community in Maine. It has two members.

Dr. Madison seems to think that Mark and Luke came up with this tyrannical requirement that every Christian ought to utterly forsake his or her family. That would (if it had ever actually obtained) have reduced Christianity to the status of the tiny Shaker sect, which is historically ridiculous, just as this entire podcast and what it insinuates is beyond ludicrous.

***

Photo credit: The Healing of Peter’s Mother-in-law, by James Tissot (1836-1902) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

***

 

2019-08-05T11:43:57-04:00

Last updated on: August 5, 2019 at 11:43 am   By

This is an installment of my series of replies to an article by Dr. David Madison: a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, who has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. It’s called, “Things We Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said” (Debunking Christianity, 7-21-19). His words will be in blue below. Dr. Madison makes several “generic” digs at Jesus and Christianity, in the written portion (it details a series of 12 podcasts):

A challenge for Christians: If you’re so sure Jesus existed, then you have some explaining to do. A major frustration is that, while believers are indignant at all the talk about Jesus not existing, they don’t know the issues that fuel the skepticism—and are unwilling to inform themselves.

Yes, I’m up to the “challenge.” No problem at all. I’m not threatened or “scared” by this in the slightest. It’s what I do, as an apologist. The question is whether Dr. Madison is up to interacting with counter-critiques? Or will he act like the voluminous anti-theist atheist polemicist Bob Seidensticker?: who directly challenged me in one of his own comboxes to respond to his innumerable attack-pieces against Christianity and the Bible, and then courageously proceeded to utterly ignore my 35 specific critiques of his claims as of this writing. We shall soon see which course Dr. Madison will decide to take. Anyway, he also states in his post and combox:

[S]o many of the words of Jesus are genuinely shocking. These words aren’t proclaimed much from the pulpit, . . . Hence the folks in the pews have absorbed and adored an idealized Jesus. Christian apologists make their livings refiguring so many of the things Jesus supposedly said.

The gospels are riddled with contradictions and bad theology, and Jesus is so frequently depicted as a cult fanatic—because cult fanatics wrote the gospels. We see Jesus only through their theological filters. I just want to grab hold of Christian heads (standing behind them, with a hand on each ear) and force them to look straight ahead, unflinchingly, at the gospels, and then ask “Tell me what you see!” uncoached by apologist specialists, i.e., priests and pastors, who’ve had a lot of practice making bad texts look good. . . . I DO say, “Deal with the really bad stuff in the gospels.” Are you SURE you’ve not make a big mistake endorsing this particular Lord and Savior? That’s the whole point of this series of Flash Podcasts, because a helluva lot of Christians would agree, right away, that these quotes are bad news—if no one told then that they’ve been attributed to Jesus.

Of course, Dr. Madison — good anti-theist atheist that he is — takes the view that we are not at all sure whether Jesus in fact said anything recorded in the Gospels in the first place. I don’t play that game, because there is no end to it. It’s like trying to pin jello to the wall. The atheist always has their convenient out (when refuted in argument about some biblical text) that Jesus never said it anyway [wink wink and sly patronizing grin], and/or that the biblical text in question was simply added later by dishonest ultra-biased Christian partisans and propagandists. It’s a silly and ultimately intellectually dishonest game, and so I always refuse to play it with atheists or anyone else, because there is no way to “win” with such an absurdly stacked, purely subjective deck.

In my defense of biblical texts, I start with the assumption that the manuscripts we have are quite sufficient for us to know what is in the Bible (believe it or not). Going on from there, I simply defend particular [supposedly “difficult”] texts, and note with appropriate argumentation, that “here, the Bible teaches so-and-so,” etc. I deal with the texts as they exist. I don’t get into the endlessly arbitrary, subjective games that atheists and theologically liberal biblical skeptics play with the texts, in their self-serving textual criticism.

Dr. Madison himself (fortunately) grants my outlook in terms of practical “x vs. y” debate purposes: “For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story.” And in the combox: “So, we can go along with their insistence that he did exist. We’ll play on their field, i.e., the gospels.”

Good! So we shall examine his cherry-picked texts and see whether his interpretations of them can stand up to scrutiny. He is issuing challenges, and I as an apologist will be dishing a bunch of my own right back to him. Two can play this game. I will be dealing honestly with his challenges. Will he return the favor, and engage in serious and substantive dialogue? Again, we’ll soon know what his reaction will be. A true dialogue is of a confident, inquisitive, “nothing to fear and everything to gain” back-and-forth and interactive nature, not merely “ships passing in the night” or what I call “mutual monologue.”

*****

Dr. Madison’s fourth podcast is entitled: “On Mark 10:9, Jesus’ disastrous teaching about divorce.” Here is the “offending” passage:

Mark 10:6-9 (RSV) But from the beginning of creation, `God made them male and female.’ [7] `For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, [8] and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. [9] What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” 

He starts out with a dig at evangelicals, who (according to a study he is drawing from) have a higher divorce rate than the general public, and higher than atheists as well. We see where he is going with this. That may be true, but if so, has to be closely examined. I have seen, myself, several social studies (and my major was sociology), indicating that couples who test high on religious piety and observance, have more successful marriages than their colleagues who lack such qualities.

He cites a study from Baylor University, which I located online. It, in turn, cites a more detailed report of the studies undertaken. In its section on marriage, the latter states:

Religion is popularly thought of as a social institution that encourages marriage and family growth, and conservative religious traditions are especially supportive of “traditional” family forms and values. But there are some interesting and not always predictable variations among and within different religious groups. . . . 

Thus the common conservative argument that strong religion leads to strong families does not hold up. Some have argued that evangelical Protestantism (the typical example of “strong religion”) is correlated with low socioeconomic status, and that this explains the increased risk of divorce. However, new research by Jennifer Glass and Philip Levchak suggests that evangelical Protestants’ cultural encouragement of early marriage and discouragement of birth control and higher education attainment explain the higher divorce rate in counties with a larger proportion of evangelical Protestants.

What the same article also states, however, is the following:

Overall, couples who have higher levels of religious service attendance, especially if the couple attends together, have lower rates of divorce.

The “new research” cited in this article, from Glass and Levchak, was published in the American Journal of Sociology (February 2014). But it’s a lot more nuanced than these “triumphant” evangelical-bashing summaries would suggest. Charles E. Stokes explains:

[T]here is more to the story. Below I suggest a few additional considerations that are in order before rushing to declare conservative Protestants unwitting enemies of marriage.

. . . a few intriguing findings in the article are likely to get buried in mass media coverage of the main storyline. Early in the article, Glass and Levchak point out that “the average county would double its divorce rate as its proportion conservative Protestant moved from 0 to 100%,” but then they note “this effect is much smaller than the unaffiliated effect which is almost three times larger [emphasis mine].” The evidence from this article does not suggest that marriages would be better off in non-religious contexts but actually points in the opposite direction.

. . . it is important to note the comparison group throughout this study. Conservative Protestants are compared not to the non-religious (who, as noted earlier, are more divorce prone by comparison) but to all other major Christian groups.

. . . According to the logic of the article, it is the regularly involved conservative Protestants who should be most invested in promoting the “pro-marriage” norms that are paradoxically putting their marriages (and others’) at risk. But new data discussed below suggest just the opposite.

Figure 1 shows the proportion of ever-divorced young adults by religious affiliation and participation. These data are taken from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative study of young Americans who were first surveyed as teens in 1994 and most recently surveyed again as young adults in 2008. . . .

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) Waves III and IV.
*Statistically significant difference at the .05 level from Other Christian: Active in logistic regression models.
^Statistically significant difference at the .05 level from Non-Religious in logistic regression models.

The comparison groups in Figure 1 are designed to mirror those of the Glass and Levchak study, but they are divided into active (attending religious services two or more times a month) and nominal (attending less than two times a month) subgroups. As the figure shows, active conservative Protestants are statistically no more likely to have divorced in the first few years of marriage than their active peers from other Christian denominations, and both groups who attend church frequently are significantly less likely to have divorced than their non-religious peers. The group that stands out in Figure 1 is the nominal conservative Protestants, the most likely group to have divorced. Thus, in the exact group (early-marrying conservative Protestants) whose marriages Glass and Levchak would expect to falter, active conservative Protestants are above average in marital stability early in marriage, while nominal conservative Protestants fare worse than the non-religious.

This hardly confirms Dr. Madison’s point. It’s a disconfirmation. One simply had to look deeply enough into the study cited, to see the more specific relevant data.

Dr. Madison then changes his approach and goes directly after Mark 10:9, stating: “Here Jesus seems to imply that every marriage is designed by God.” Well, not exactly. Jesus is saying that marriage is a divinely instituted sacrament, that ought not be broken. That’s far different from claiming that every specific marriage in fact was divinely ordained: as if there is no human free will involved (including the usual range of possible human mistakes, folly, immaturity, haste and lack of preparation and planning, possibly excessive lust, etc.). These human mistakes (and sins, where applicable) are not God’s fault, and it’s beyond silly to blame Him for them. And among the human free will actions or beliefs that can help cause an unsuccessful marriage are religious nominalism and cohabitation.

Dr. Madison stumbles into the truth, by asserting: “it doesn’t follow at all that God has engineered every marriage or put His seal on every marriage.” Exactly right. Lots of people get married who have no business doing so. He continues: “Just think of all the bad marriages that have happened since the beginning. People have been forced to marry for all sorts of wrong reasons: money: family pressures and expectations, political alliances, . . . people miserable in bad marriages.” Bingo again! This sort of human error and bad judgment has caused untold misery, but it’s absurd to blame God for it.

In fact, we have data in the Bible regarding God advising the ancient Jews not to enter into certain unwise marriages: with foreign women who followed contrary religious practices (Ezra 10:2-3; cf. Dt 17:17; Neh 13:23-28). Therefore, it can’t be that “every [particular] marriage is designed by God.” The institution was designed and sanctioned by Him, and as we know, any and every institution can be corrupted and abused. These men were actually commanded to “put away” or “send away” foreign women who worshiped false gods (Ezra 10:4-19, 44; cf. 9:1-2, 14-15). In my own apologetics I have used these examples as biblical analogies for the Catholic practice of annulment, which is the most sensible way to deal with marriages that were “wrong” from the beginning.

Thus, God approved and approves of ending an ostensible marriage: the very opposite of Dr. Madison’s claims that God ordains each and every human marriage forever, no matter how bad the situation is. There are many instances of God not approving of particular marriages:

Leviticus 21:7, 14 They shall not marry a harlot or a woman who has been defiled; neither shall they marry a woman divorced from her husband . . . [14] A widow, or one divorced, or a woman who has been defiled, or a harlot, these he shall not marry; but he shall take to wife a virgin of his own people, 

Nehemiah 13:27 Shall we then listen to you and do all this great evil and act treacherously against our God by marrying foreign women?

Ezekiel 44:22 They shall not marry a widow, or a divorced woman, but only a virgin of the stock of the house of Israel, or a widow who is the widow of a priest.

Tobit 4:12 . . . First of all take a wife from among the descendants of your fathers and do not marry a foreign woman, who is not of your father’s tribe; for we are the sons of the prophets. Remember, my son, that Noah, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, our fathers of old, all took wives from among their brethren. . . . 

Mark 10:11-12 [Jesus] And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; [12] and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.” 

Jesus taught that a valid marriage was indissoluble, and that divorce in these circumstances constituted adultery. But of course the key question is what constitutes a valid marriage. Dr. Madison himself notes several factors that would be prime instances of grounds for Catholic annulment: “People have been forced to marry for . . . money: family pressures and expectations, political alliances.” Thus, Catholic theology has a very practical and compassionate way to help people trapped in such circumstances, while not undermining the institution of marriage itself, or promoting an unbiblical divorce, because an annulment is a declaration (one that exists even in secular civil law) that marriage never actually existed from the beginning.

It’s the Protestants and the Orthodox (lacking annulments) who labor under such difficulties: but they do not represent all of Christianity. Catholicism is by far the largest portion. But Dr. Madison continues with unwarranted caricatures and juvenile swipes at God: “But hey, God designed them all, God brought all these folks to the altar, or if they just ended up there against their will, God still added His seal of approval; no escape ever. God did all that joining. . . . How could God be so incompetent?”

No, He does not approve of every ill-advised marriage that people enter into, and it’s ludicrous to assert that He does. But that’s what atheists do: they always want to irrationally and unjustly blame God for the mistakes and sins of human beings. It’s always His fault (whether He exists or not, is the comic element in it all).

***

Photo credit: Houkouki (10-26-18) [Wikimedia Commons / Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license]

***

 

2019-08-05T16:12:10-04:00

Last updated on: August 5, 2019 at 4:12 pm   By

The following “replies” took place on the Debunking Christianity website in early August 2019, underneath the post, “Things We Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said” (7-21-19), by Dr. David Madison. The sky fell down because (lowly ignorant Christian that I am) I dared to write (and announce there) a refutation of one of twelve podcasts that Dr. Madison presented in his article (I’ll be writing many more, too: possibly replies to all twelve).  Words of the attackers will be in various colors:

sir_russ = blue

Jim Mallett = green

Zeta = purple 

Zarquon5 = brown

John W. Loftus = red

*****

I have now thoroughly replied to the supposed “embarrassment” of what Jesus said about “hating” families:

Dr. David Madison vs. Jesus #1: Hating One’s Family?

Let me say I am nowhere near as educated as most on this blog in refuting believers. But, in reading your “defense” on your blog. I can safely say all you have succeeded to accomplish is to quote bible verses to prove the bible true. Not impressed. Sorry bud, it doesn’t work that way with unbelievers Also, a little advice, don’t link your blog on Mr. Lofus’ blog. If you want traffic, do it somewhere else.

I’m not trying to prove the Bible to be true by citing it. That would be circular reasoning. I’m trying to prove that the Bible teaches x in verse y: a completely different thing. Dr. Madison claimed that Jesus taught believers that we ought to literally hate our families. I showed that He did no such thing.

Whether one believes that the Bible is inspired or that Jesus said these utterances is a completely separate question (as Dr. Madison himself acknowledged). It need not be presupposed in order to assert that the Bible teaches thus-and-so on topic z.

I linked to my reply to the piece above this combox. This is what I consider a courtesy. I do quite well in traffic. I’m generally in the top three on the Catholic Patheos channel.

Why should I or anyone else give a s*%$ about your interpretation of the bible? Convince me in ONE sentence why I should believe you. No bible quotes, just your own words. What makes you so special among the millions and millions of apologists who spout the same tired defense?

Why does god need your need help relaying what he really meant? That is the funniest part about preachers and apologists. Hilarious..

Eat another jesus wafer, then spend some time pondering why your Catholic church fathers have committed so many heinous crimes.

“Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers.”

— Socrates

The fact that Armstrong’s god needs preachers and apologists to explain what he really wants to say is indeed hilarious. And in a big way too. Exhibits include

Norman L. Geisler’s 864-page (!) tome:
Baker Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics

or his 672-page tome
The Big Book of Christian Apologetics: An A to Z Guide

All these just show that this god (if it exists) is truly an extremely poor communicator, not worthy of the fantastic attributes that it supposedly has. Lots of human authors have done or can do a much better job. Apologetics on this scale is a slap on the face (if it has one) of this god.

Yet another person who refuses to discuss the topic at hand. It’s equal parts ridiculous and entertaining.

[Mallett “responded” with this meme]:

Again, your defense is to site bible verses and quote other apologists. Is that supposed to impress anyone?

The word is “cite”, not “site.”

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha.

Wow my phone used the wrong word. Never happen to you? What do you think of the pic? Try to defend your Big Papi and his cronies with all their billions of dollars, while millions live in squalor and starve to death.

“Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”

I think it’s more evidence that you are an intellectual coward. It’s still zero interaction with / refutation of my counter-reply from anyone.

You sir are typical arrogant, self delusional, who is blind to the horrible &*%$#@^ atrocities your own &*%$#@^ church has done for thousands of years. First, refute why your priests like to &*%$ little boys.

Deal with your anger issues, then come back and provide rational, on-topic replies to my reply to Dr. Madison. Thanks!

You might know this one. Just insert yourself where the word”fool” is used.

Do not answer a fool according to his folly,
or you yourself will be just like him.
Answer a fool according to his folly,
or he will be wise in his own eyes.
Sending a message by the hands of a fool
is like cutting off one’s feet or drinking poison.

***

Dr. David Madison replied to someone else:

The gospels are riddled with contradictions and bad theology, and Jesus is so frequently depicted as a cult fanatic—because cult fanatics wrote the gospels. We see Jesus only through their theological filters. I just want to grab hold of Christian heads (standing behind them, with a hand on each ear) and force them to look straight ahead, unflinchingly, at the gospels, and then ask “Tell me what you see!” uncoached by apologist specialists, i.e., priests and pastors, who’ve had a lot of practice making bad texts look good.

Richard Carrier rates the existence of Jesus, 1 chance in 3, and he is highly critical of shoddy arguments that have been advanced by some mythicists. I don’t say to Christians, “Aha, he never existed.” At the end of the day I never claim that. But I DO say, “Deal with the really bad stuff in the gospels.” Are you SURE you’ve not make a big mistake endorsing this particular Lord and Savior? That’s the whole point of this series of Flash Podcasts, because a helluva lot of Christians would agree, right away, that these quotes are bad news—if no one told then that they’ve been attributed to Jesus.

“Deal with the really bad stuff in the gospels.”

Not so much “bad” as wildly misunderstood and miscomprehended by critics. Usually, I’ve found that it is either misunderstanding linguistic genres and context, or so-called “contradictions” which really aren’t at all (from a strictly logical standpoint).

That’s what I have invariably found, in my scores and scores of replies to such charges. I have a very extensive web page of critiques of atheism, and I would like to tackle some of your claims here, over the next week or so, depending on how much is involved and time-permitting.

[Jim Mallett “replied” with this meme]:

Mock away. Meanwhile, I have just completed my counter-reply, which I shall post in this combox. You’re welcome (along with Dr. Madison) to overcome it with rational argument rather than memes. I surely won’t hold my breath.

2000 years have passed, yet YOU have the key to understanding the New Testament. HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
Yeah, I won’t hold my breath either.

Right. Well, I won’t expect any substance from you. But thanks for the chuckle.

Jesus wasn’t Divine because nobody is Divine. If God brought light to Judea, he would bring it again, today, practically everywhere, because there are now places worse than Jesus ever saw. There you go, not a meme in sight.

No meme, but also no interaction whatever with the topic at hand: whether the real Jesus or (as one might think) the fictional “Jesus” portrayed in the Bible taught folks to literally hate their families.

You said, “whether the real Jesus or (as one might think) the fictional “Jesus” portrayed in the Bible taught folks to literally hate their families.”

From my standpoint, what the Bible’s Jesus character said or did not say is not as important as, say, Christians today abusing and killing children as witches. [link given] Are you one of those Christians? Is that how you read the Bible? If you are not one of those Christians, do you realize that there really are Christians who kill children today as witches? Just as an idea maybe you could fix children being killed in the name of the Bible, and then work your way back to quibbling about what words are associated with the Bible’s Jesus character.

I’m sure that ironing out all the bugaboos of exactly what the Jesus character said is a real important way to spend one’s time. But, it seems to me that Christians have more urgent matters to address.

I ain’t gonna be distracted from the topic at hand. Nice try. If the topic is so utterly unimportant in your eyes, then take it up with Dr. Madison, who seems to think it was important enough to devote 12 podcasts to it.

I imagine you as one of those philosophical hacks who, like all the others, has nothing that would show anything Christian specific to be true. What you work from is the assumption: let’s pretend Christianity is true. Then, you beat the snot out of Biblical semantics. Fun, but really no point to it.

I think it’s really important to note that if the Bible was dictated, handed down, or inspired by the creator of the universe, then the creator of the universe is one piss poor author or muse. And, your need to fight over silly words put into the mouth of a fictional character in a book of fairy tales just underscores that.

A matter of much greater concern to all Christians should be that if Bible-God and Bible-Jesus were real and really cared about people, why did they write such a shit book. A book so s*&%$# that it has you, Dave Armstrong, up in arms over a trifle. You’re twisting yourself in knots, itching for a fight, about a few words in a book that the people who say they believe in it won’t even read. Not exactly a glowing endorsement.

Here are some links to Christians and others fighting about the same topic. Stop acting as if one has to see the world differently than you do to get “Jesus wants me to hate my family” from the Bible. [six links provided]

These are all from Christian or Jewish sites.

If I’m such an idiot and a hack, then by all means refute my counter-replies to Dr. Madison (which will be three after I post two more in the next 90 minutes). We’re all waiting with baited breath. Put up or shut up. Can’t you figure out by now that I don’t play your games?

You said, ” I have a very extensive web page of critiques of atheism,”

That is all well and good, but a criticism of one thing, here atheism, is not the same as proving that some other thing, here Christian theism(or any theism for that matter), is true, is it?

Before you try to impress or baffle or b&%^$#*@ us with your critiques of atheism, just do us the favor of showing us that anything Christian specific is true.

For instance, if Christian theism is true and there really is a god who answers prayers, we should see how the quality of life for those who are more faithful is observably better than the quality of life for those who are less faithful – especially atheists, but not excluding persons from other religious faiths and, of course, not excluding all those wrong types of Christians.

The most faithful of Christians in the US are found in the Bible Belt. Every year they rank at the top of religious observation among US states. So how do they rank for overall quality of life? That’s altogether different. Essentially every measure of personal and social well-being ranks them right at the bottom.

If a Christian god is real and the US Bible Belt Christians exemplify what it does for those who are the most faithful, I wouldn’t want to have anything to do with it anyway. It appears that those who believe most strongly get s%$# on the most. I like people; I don’t want that for anyone.

So have at it. Show us. If we’ve heard it all before, we’ll let you know.

I’m not here at the moment to prove that Christianity is true (though I’d be happy to do that in another context). I’m not here to do the “101 topics all at once” routine. I’m here to specifically critique Dr. Madison’s claims about Jesus. And I’ve only just begun.

So far, not one peep from him or anyone else here about my present argument. But that’s just how it usually goes with atheists, which is not particularly an indication that y’all (generally speaking) are confident about the criticisms of Christianity that you set forth. Otherwise you would defend them when they are scrutinized.

Now perhaps Dr. Madison has been detained and still intends to do so, and there can actually be intelligent, substantive atheist-Christian discussion about what Scripture teaches in specific passages. I hope so, and we’ll see. It very rarely happens once a Christian makes a plausible critique of atheist “exegesis.”

As Dr. Madison himself stated in this combox: “You have not addressed the issues that I raise, but move right away to obfuscation.” I know the feeling well!

The matter of what the Bible’s Jesus character said seems to be real important to you, but we know it’s essentially meaningless to Christians in general. How do we know?: Christians can’t even be bothered to read it. Christians literally spend more time reading horoscopes than they spend reading Bibles.

You said,

Now perhaps Dr. Madison has been detained and still intends to do so,
and there can actually be intelligent, substantive atheist-Christian
discussion about what Scripture teaches in specific passages. I hope so,
and we’ll see. It very rarely happens once a Christian makes a
plausible critique of atheist “exegesis.”

So do you imagine yourself to the “Christian answer man”? Let me clue you in: you’re not. You have your opinion, but the Bible is so confused, incoherent, and inscrutable that PhD’s from every seminary and school of divinity fight over everything associated with Christianity. What you say is nothing more than one more opinion among millions.

Some Christians say god is real; others, not so much.
Some Christians say Jesus answers prayers; others say nope.

No one need accept what you happen to imagine as the “God’s honest truth” about anything Christian.

As far as anyone can tell the Bible’s Jesus character is just one more fictional creature.

***

You said, “I have now thoroughly replied to the supposed “embarrassment” of what Jesus said about “hating” families:”
You obviously accept it as an embarrassment, that is why you responded with more than 3,000 words of that mental masturbation called apologetics. You cite opinion after opinion to justify your opinion concerning David Madison’s opinion. And, then you bring your whiny assed Christian apologist self here to piss and moan about not being engaged.

Oh, wow, I just looked at comment counts on your blog. You are really desperate for blog traffic aren’t you.

You should start a new blog, one that is more honestly titled: Dave Armstrong Whiny Assed Catholic-type Christian Apologist. It’s a far more catchy title, and much closer to the truth.

As I said earlier, if that oh-so-stupid self-appointed creator of the universe you call God didn’t want there to be confusion it should have written a better book. That’s what real entities do. Matters are even worse for your mythical God because it is also claimed that it knew all this confusion was going to happen before it wrote the book. Wow. How totally screwed is that. How screwed is the book? Let’s see now: lots of Judaisms comes from the book; numerous Islams comes from the book; and tens of thousands of Christianities, including a glut of Catholicisms. Yeah, the book is totally screwed.

Ain’t is lucky we got Dave Armstrong beating his head against a wall to sort it all out for us. Cuz Dave Armstrong really, really knows. Only about almost all of Christianity and the rest of humanity ignore or disagree with him. That puts him a pretty exclusive club. Imagine that!: a Christian apologist lost in his own little philosophical construction of a Christianity. We’ve only seen a few thousand of those before.

You show yourself quite the colorful figure and pompous ass. These techniques don’t work with me. If you know so much, then you’d simply respond rationally to what I wrote instead of immediately going to ad hominem and obfuscation and throwing tons of manure against the wall, hoping some of it will stick.

It’s terrifically entertaining, though. I do grant you that much.

***

Why don’t you explain why a supposedly omniscient god needs apologists like you to explain what he wants to tell humans? Can’t he do it properly in the first place? Why does he need people like you to act as a middle man?

Off-topic yet again, but just this once: Why We Should Fully Expect Many “Bible Difficulties”.

Thanks for the response. I have just read your post. Some of the points you made are laughable, especially when you attempt to compare your holy book to scientific theories.

Yahweh was a local war deity invented in the ancient Near East, later promoted by his believers to be the Creator god endowed with fantastic attributes. If the father god is imaginary, so is the son. So, to me, your holy book is largely fiction.

Since you are not going to continue this discussion, I’ll also stop here.

As expected. Be well. I continue to await even the slightest response to my three critiques. The fact that none has been forthcoming leads me to suspect that there are no good replies; that the ability to do so is lacking. Why not blow the lowly and ignorant Christian’s arguments out of the water? But no one has yet done so; no one has even tried at all.

Since this comment is a reply to my previous comment, I need to add on to what I said before: Your holy book is largely a work of fiction about an invented god. From my point of view, what is the point of wading through piles of word salad that seek to defend an embarrassing verse from a piece of fictional work?

Thus, the thought of “loving Jesus more than one’s own family” is expressed by the non-literal “hate [one’s family, in order to] be my disciple.”

This is just shameless whitewashing. Why was the very strong word ‘hate’ used in the first place when the intended meaning could be very easily expressed in another way? This is a confirmation of what I said before: “All these just show that this god (if it exists) is truly an extremely poor communicator, not worthy of the fantastic attributes that it supposedly has. “

***

You quoted Socrates: “Smart people learn from everything and everyone, average people from their experiences, stupid people already have all the answers.”

I think it odd that you would highlight a quote that automatically places Christians into the “stupid people” category. Christians think they have all the answers, and, thus, are stupid people. And, those like you, Dave Armstrong, who have a deep enough understanding to know that Christianity is false (many of your blog posts support this) and, yet, still defend it for money, power, authority or social status, are plainly immoral.

You seem so very butthurt in your statement: “Why not blow the lowly and ignorant Christian’s arguments out of the water? But no one has yet done so; no one has even tried at all.”

Until someone can show that anything Christian specific is true, Christianity remains no closer to truth than any other mythology. There is no reason at all for anyone to indulge your fetish for philosophically pounding the s%$# out of mythological trivialities.

The number [of] comments and visitors on your blog demonstrate how you are quite capable of delivering long-winded explications to an empty house. You need no one else to be involved.

As a matter of record, I have had my blog at Patheos almost exactly four years (since 4 August 2015), and according to Google Analytics, my total page views over that period is 2,132,645, or an average of 1461 views per day average, the entire time.

That’s a helluva lot of people for an “empty house” ain’t it?

To approach it another way: let’s descend down to your silly level of insults-only and fallacies, and see how well it works, in terms of this “argument” of yours. In your mentality, all that matters is how many page views and comments one can obtain (which is, of course, the ad populum fallacy). The actual strength or merits of one’s arguments or the amount of truth and facts in them don’t matter a hill of beans.

So, adopting this goofy outlook, we see that Dr. Madison garnered 923 views of his first podcast in this series of twelve. It was posted on April 10th. My critique of it, on the other hand, has gotten 203 views in four days, which is an average of about fifty per day, compared to Dr. Madison’s average of eight per day over the time it’s been up. Therefore (by your “reasoning”) my post is more than six times more truthful and worthy of attention than Dr. Madison’s.

Remember, you, Dave Armstrong, are already, as a Christian, one of the stupid people who has all the answers. Worse yet, you, Dave Armstrong, are on one of those really stupid who defines themselves as having all the answers.

You said, “As expected. Be well. I continue to await even the slightest response to my three critiques. The fact that none has been forthcoming leads me to suspect that there are no good replies; that the ability to do so is lacking.”

You are correct. There are no good replies to the application of philosophy to fairy tales.

When a book, in this case the Bible, includes talking snakes, witches, demons, resurrections, immoral dictates from a rather hollow “supreme being”, and many, many factual errors about the world, an intelligent critical thinker can only conclude that the book is a fairy tale. To then apply philosophy to it, seriously apply it as you, Dave Armstrong, do, is pure farce. It doesn’t deserve serious consideration. Yeah, one can play with the semantics as an intellectual game, just as with any book, but, you, Dave Armstrong, are waging jihad for Jesus. Sadly, though, since you, Dave Armstrong, are a stupid Christian who has all the answers already, you could have your ass handed to you, and you would go off and, nonetheless, declare victory, so playing your game would be of no value to anyone. Since you are a stupid Christian, you have lost the capacity to learn what’s true about the world.

If you could show anything Christian specific to be true, you would. But, you can’t show anything Christian specific to be true so you want someone to join you in a dive into the cesspool of philosophy over useless trivialities about the Bible’s Jesus character. Too bad the authors of the Bible were not more than ignorant, barbaric and superstitious people; maybe they would have written a better book; maybe even a “good” book.

You said, “You show yourself quite the colorful figure and pompous ass.”

Actually, no, I am not a pompous ass, though, I might be a bit colorful. I am, however, accustomed to reading apologists who have defined themselves as having all the answers, despite all the rest of us being able to recognize that they don’t. You, Dave Armstrong. and your silly church do not have all the answers. Fact is, you have almost none. Maybe Friday fish fries and Bingo are good ideas, but nothing Christian specific makes sense at all.

Show me that you can show anything Christian specific to be true and I will give full consideration to other Biblical topics. I don’t want to waste time fiddling with fairy tales.

***

What does it say that you have about 46 comments for your last 20 essays? Given your mean spirited attitude, one probable interpretation is that your headlines grab attention from the massive amount of readers attracted to Patheos. But when people see how you treat others they leave you to your anger. And you are angry. That is clear. You hate people who disagree with you, which actually proves Dr. Madison’s point, that Jesus wants you to hate others in deference to him. Readers see this quickly then they go away.

I wrote in one of my papers:

In our postmodern culture today, to disagree with someone is to “hate” them. It can’t possibly be otherwise, because now people are their opinions (x = y); not separate from them (x has opinion y).

The people who commit these horrible acts of tough love must have hidden nefarious motives: so we are informed by the upholders of the secularization zeitgeist and idol. There are no absolutes. We either agree with other people (in which case we “love” them), or we disagree, which is intolerance and hate. Those are the only two possible scenarios. We can’t disagree and love them. Disagreeing (by definition) is hatred and touchy-feely / warm fuzzy agreement is love.

I am not a postmodernist and so, must necessarily (so we’re told) be a hater in the postmodernist’s eyes, because (routinely, in the course of doing apologetics) I dare to disagree with someone, and beyond that, even outrageously dare to tell them sometimes that they are wrong, for their own good (and to accept the same criticism coming my way). Thus, the “bad guys” in this brave new thought-world are those who reject postmodernist subjective-mush-relativism.

I wish I had a dime for every time I’ve been accused of “hating” someone just because I had an honest disagreement concerning what they believe or do. But fuzzy, illogical thinking is also part and parcel of postmodernism.

Your speech betrays you. I can get a bit angry when purposely misunderstood by self-proclaimed know-it-alls like you. But you enter a debate angry! You write as if Dr. David Madison is a non-entity, a non-being, who is mere fodder for your supposed “superior” debate skills. I cannot convince you of this I’m sure, but that’s what I see, and it’s one good reason I ignore you.

Just like you’re doing now . . .

I don’t hate anyone, including you and Dr. Madison. If anyone is hating (and I don’t even claim it here, but am merely being rhetorical and turning the tables), it is the 100% ad hominem (minus any rational substance in reply to my arguments) insult-fest directed towards me here. Since it can’t be justified, and is an embarrassing farce, you decide to project all that idiocy onto me, as if I am exhibiting it. Nice try, but no cigar.

Self-respecting intellectuals and thinkers will defend their assertions over against serious counter-replies. Dr. Madison has not so far (he may be otherwise detained), and no one here has, either.

That speaks volumes . . .

***

Photo credit: Clker-Free-Vector-Images (7-5-14) [Pixabay / Pixabay License]

***

2019-08-03T20:35:29-04:00

Last updated on: August 3, 2019 at 8:35 pm   By

This is an installment of my series of replies to an article by Dr. David Madison: a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, who has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. It’s called, “Things We Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said” (Debunking Christianity, 7-21-19). His words will be in blue below. Dr. Madison makes several “generic” digs at Jesus and Christianity, in the written portion (it details a series of 12 podcasts):

A challenge for Christians: If you’re so sure Jesus existed, then you have some explaining to do. A major frustration is that, while believers are indignant at all the talk about Jesus not existing, they don’t know the issues that fuel the skepticism—and are unwilling to inform themselves.

Yes, I’m up to the “challenge.” No problem at all. I’m not threatened or “scared” by this in the slightest. It’s what I do, as an apologist. The question is whether Dr. Madison is up to interacting with counter-critiques? Or will he act like the voluminous anti-theist atheist polemicist Bob Seidensticker?: who directly challenged me in one of his own comboxes to respond to his innumerable attack-pieces against Christianity and the Bible, and then courageously proceeded to utterly ignore my 35 specific critiques of his claims as of this writing. We shall soon see which course Dr. Madison will decide to take. Anyway, he also states in his post and combox:

[S]o many of the words of Jesus are genuinely shocking. These words aren’t proclaimed much from the pulpit, . . . Hence the folks in the pews have absorbed and adored an idealized Jesus. Christian apologists make their livings refiguring so many of the things Jesus supposedly said.

The gospels are riddled with contradictions and bad theology, and Jesus is so frequently depicted as a cult fanatic—because cult fanatics wrote the gospels. We see Jesus only through their theological filters. I just want to grab hold of Christian heads (standing behind them, with a hand on each ear) and force them to look straight ahead, unflinchingly, at the gospels, and then ask “Tell me what you see!” uncoached by apologist specialists, i.e., priests and pastors, who’ve had a lot of practice making bad texts look good. . . . I DO say, “Deal with the really bad stuff in the gospels.” Are you SURE you’ve not make a big mistake endorsing this particular Lord and Savior? That’s the whole point of this series of Flash Podcasts, because a helluva lot of Christians would agree, right away, that these quotes are bad news—if no one told then that they’ve been attributed to Jesus.

Of course, Dr. Madison — good anti-theist atheist that he is — takes the view that we are not at all sure whether Jesus in fact said anything recorded in the Gospels in the first place. I don’t play that game, because there is no end to it. It’s like trying to pin jello to the wall. The atheist always has their convenient out (when refuted in argument about some biblical text) that Jesus never said it anyway [wink wink and sly patronizing grin], and/or that the biblical text in question was simply added later by dishonest ultra-biased Christian partisans and propagandists. It’s a silly and ultimately intellectually dishonest game, and so I always refuse to play it with atheists or anyone else, because there is no way to “win” with such an absurdly stacked, purely subjective deck.

In my defense of biblical texts, I start with the assumption that the manuscripts we have are quite sufficient for us to know what is in the Bible (believe it or not). Going on from there, I simply defend particular [supposedly “difficult”] texts, and note with appropriate argumentation, that “here, the Bible teaches so-and-so,” etc. I deal with the texts as they exist. I don’t get into the endlessly arbitrary, subjective games that atheists and theologically liberal biblical skeptics play with the texts, in their self-serving textual criticism.

Dr. Madison himself (fortunately) grants my outlook in terms of practical “x vs. y” debate purposes: “For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story.” And in the combox: “So, we can go along with their insistence that he did exist. We’ll play on their field, i.e., the gospels.”

Good! So we shall examine his cherry-picked texts and see whether his interpretations of them can stand up to scrutiny. He is issuing challenges, and I as an apologist will be dishing a bunch of my own right back to him. Two can play this game. I will be dealing honestly with his challenges. Will he return the favor, and engage in serious and substantive dialogue? Again, we’ll soon know what his reaction will be. A true dialogue is of a confident, inquisitive, “nothing to fear and everything to gain” back-and-forth and interactive nature, not merely “ships passing in the night” or what I call “mutual monologue.”

*****

Dr. Madison’s third podcast is entitled, “On Matthew 24:37-39, on Jesus’ prediction of suffering—as at the time of Noah—when the Son of Man comes.” Here is the text:

Matthew 24:37-39 (RSV) As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of man. [38] For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, [39] and they did not know until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of man.

Eating and drinking, marrying, and giving in marriage, are all that bad?

Of course they’re not bad at all. Dr. Madison completely misses the point. No one is judged for doing those things. Jesus is simply saying that people were going about their daily business and doing all the usual things of life, not expecting judgment, and yet all of a sudden it swept upon them. Hence, Barnes’ Notes on the Bible:

The things mentioned here denote attention to the affairs of this life rather than to what was coming on them. It does not mean that these things were wrong, but only that such was their actual employment, and that they were regardless of what was coming upon them.

And, Expositor’s Greek Testament: “The idea rather seems to be that all things went on as usual, as if nothing were going to happen.’

Jesus may have had the somewhat sarcastic and cynical Ecclesiastes 8:15 in mind:

And I commend enjoyment, for man has no good thing under the sun but to eat and drink, and enjoy himself, for this will go with him in his toil through the days of life which God gives him under the sun.

The notion of the Second Coming being sudden and unexpected is repeatedly reinforced in context:

Matthew 24:36 . . . of that day and hour no one knows . . .

Matthew 24:42 Watch therefore, for you do not know on what day your Lord is coming.

Matthew 24:44 Therefore you also must be ready; for the Son of man is coming at an hour you do not expect.

Matthew 24:50  the master of that servant will come on a day when he does not expect him and at an hour he does not know,

The Bible never teaches that eating and drinking and marrying per se are bad. Its ridiculous to believe otherwise, and to think these words imply the contrary. They do not.

This is comic book religion. A hero flying from the sky, to make everything better? Really? . . . But this is silly theology. It’s bad theology.

Why would the very notion of a Second Coming, where the wicked are judged and the righteous rewarded be either “comic book” or “silly” or “bad”? Atheists always say they want God to appear and make things right (since they seem to blame Him for anything bad in the world). Dr. Madison complains in the podcast that God should have done this before now and mocks him ads a “procrastinator.”

It’s rather inconsistent and unfair to state on the one hand that God ought to have tangibly appeared in the past, and then turn around and say that if indeed God appears in the future, that it is, on the other hand, “comic book” or “silly” or “bad”. If it was right thing to do in the past, likewise, it is in the future. He can’t have it both ways. His beef is simply with God’s timing.

This thoroughly undermines the concept of the good Jesus, doesn’t it? In Matthew, Jesus has promised that most of the human race will be killed off when he arrives. He compares it to the time of Noah. Noah is the story of genocide.

What Dr. Madison calls “genocide” Christians call judgment. God is the judge of the world and will judge every human being, based on what they have believed and done. If — again — the very notion of righteous judgment and justice is such a terrible thing, then why doesn’t Dr. Madison endorse anarchy? For, after all, we have human judges and laws, which, if broken, cause penalties to be given to human beings. If one human being can do that to another, and we proclaim it “just” and “good” why is it so incomprehensible that God, the Creator of all men, would judge them? It’s not.

This is what Jesus will do? Have everyone but the folks in the Jesus cult be killed off?

But that’s not what He said. He didn’t say, “As were the days of Noah, everyone but eight people will be killed [or damned].” This is a figment of Dr. Madison’s imagination. Jesus wasn’t comparing the extent of judgment, but rather, the unexpected suddenness of it in both cases. This is quite clear in context, as I showed above. Jesus said, “As were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of man”: as opposed to “so will be the judgment of the Son of man.”

In the next chapter we have the great scene of the separation of the sheep and goats at the last judgment (Matthew 25:31-46). Jesus never says that the sheep are just eight people out of the entire earth (or any similar such small number). No indication in this text is given of relative numbers of the saved and the damned. In two of His parables nearby, however, He does give indication. And it is assuredly not as Dr. Madison foolishly asserts.

In the parable of the ten maidens with lamps (Matthew 25:1-13), five were foolish and were damned (“the door was shut . . . I do not know you”: 25:10, 12) and five were wise and received eternal life (“went in with him to the marriage feast”: 25:10). That’s hardly a 99.99999999% damned scenario, is it? It’s a 50-50 proposition.

The parable of the talents follows (25:14-30). Here, there are three servants, who are given five talents, two talents, and one talent [a form of money], respectively. The ones who are saved are the first two (“enter into the joy of your master”: 25:21, 23), while the servant with one talent, who did nothing with it, was damned (“cast the worthless servant into the outer darkness”: 25:30).

So this parable suggests a 67% rate of final salvation and a 33% rate of damnation. That’s even further away from a 99.99999999% damned scenario. Thus, the very thing that Dr. Madison brings to the table in an effort to condemn Jesus as a cruel taskmaster, wanting to send virtually everyone to hell, blows up in his face. Could he not read the next chapter, to see the fuller context? Would that have put him out?

Both Paul and Jesus were wrong. They were dead wrong. These predictions were not fulfilled. . . . Paul was quite confident he was gonna be among those who would meet Jesus in the sky.

1 Thessalonians 4:14-17 For since we believe that Jesus died and rose again, even so, through Jesus, God will bring with him those who have fallen asleep. [15] For this we declare to you by the word of the Lord, that we who are alive, who are left until the coming of the Lord, shall not precede those who have fallen asleep. [16] For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; [17] then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.

Paul was referring to the people alive when the Second Coming occurred. He did not teach when it would occur, since Jesus had instructed His disciples in a post-Resurrection appearance that they can’t and shouldn’t know when this momentous event would happen:

Acts 1:6-7 [written by Luke] So when they had come together, they asked him, “Lord, will you at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” [7] He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has fixed by his own authority.

The Apostle Paul reflects this “eschatological agnosticism” in his next chapter:

1 Thessalonians 5:1-3 But as to the times and the seasons, brethren, you have no need to have anything written to you. [2] For you yourselves know well that the day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night. [3] When people say, “There is peace and security,” then sudden destruction will come upon them as travail comes upon a woman with child, and there will be no escape.

Cambridge Bible for Schools and Colleges thus comments on 1 Thessalonians 4:15:

that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord] This should be: we that are alive, that remain (or survive) unto the coming of the Lord. The second designation qualifies the first,—“those (I mean) who survive till the Lord comes.” St Paul did not count on any very near approach of the second Advent: comp. 2 Thessalonians 2:1-2. At the same time, his language implies the possibility of the great event taking place within his lifetime, or that of the present generation. This remained an open question, or rather a matter on which questioning was forbidden (see Acts 1:7; Matthew 24:36). “Concerning the times and seasons” nothing was definitely known (ch. 1 Thessalonians 5:1, see note). The Apostles “knew in part” and “prophesied in part” (1 Corinthians 13:12); and until further light came, it was natural for the Church, ever sighing “Come Lord Jesus, come quickly!” to speak as St Paul does here. The same “we” occurs in this connection in 1 Corinthians 15:51-52.

Matthew 24:34 Truly, I say to you, this generation will not pass away till all these things take place.

Mark 13:1-4 And as he came out of the temple, one of his disciples said to him, “Look, Teacher, what wonderful stones and what wonderful buildings!” [2] And Jesus said to him, “Do you see these great buildings? There will not be left here one stone upon another, that will not be thrown down.” [3] And as he sat on the Mount of Olives opposite the temple, Peter and James and John and Andrew asked him privately, [4] “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign when these things are all to be accomplished?”

Jesus said it would happen “before this generation passes away.”

This is an old chestnut of anti-theist atheist polemics. A plausible explanation (where Jesus would be referring both to His hearers’ generation and the end times) is explicated by Glenn Miller at the wonderful Christian Thinktank site:

[W]hen we notice the structure of the ending in Matthew and Mark, we see how some of the items lay out.

The ending has four points:

    1. The lesson of the fig tree (Mt 24.32-33; Mk 13.28-29; Lk 21.29-31) [e.g. “Even so, when you see these things happening, you know that it is near, right at the door.”]
    2. The “this generation” saying (Mt 24.34; Mk 13.30; Lk 21.32)
    3. The “heaven and earth will pass away” saying (Mt 24.35; Mk 13.31; Lk 21.33)
    4. The “no one knows the hour” saying (Mt 24.36; Mk 13.31; not in Luke)

Now, the Lesson of the fig tree (Point 1) can only be a reference to the destruction of the Temple/City. It draws a distinction between “all these things” and “it is near”–all these things cannot logically then contain the 2nd Advent [which is the “it” in “it is near”-cf. D.A.Carson, EBC, in. loc.; and William Lane in NICNT (Mark):478: “They (all these things) cannot refer to the celestial upheavals described in verses 24-25 which are inseparable from the parousia (verse 26) and the gathering of the elect (verse 27). These events represent the end and cannot constitute a preliminary sign of something else.”]

With this “end” of the end-time continuum being identified in Point 1 (as the “these things” question of the disciples), Jesus then solemnly announces WHEN this ‘beginning of the end-times’ will occur–within that generation (Point 2). With this, He has answered the initial question of the ‘these things’–the immediate historical context of the question of the destruction of the temple.

He then turns (in point 3 above) to describe the “other end” of the end-times continuum–the destruction of the universe (cf. 2 Peter 2.10: But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.). Here Jesus is pointing back to those descriptions of the very end, as in Mt 24.29: “Immediately after the distress of those days “`the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’ and Lk 21.25f: On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. 26 Men will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken. He points out that the Great End will be certain, as the continuance of His word is certain (yes!).

And then we have Point 4–the comment that no one but the Father knows the time of the Very-End. [The subsequent parables by Matt in 24.42ff and Luke in 12.39ff, which use the ‘thief’ image, connect this piece–via the 2 Peter quote above–with the Great-End, and NOT with the destruction of the Temple.]

So we have a reasonable structure for the ending sequence-(Point 1) pay attention to the beginning of signs; (Point 2) some of you will definitely see these beginnings; (Point 3) the Big-End pointed to by these signs will surely come; and (Point 4) but none of you can know when (with the implications that are immediately drawn in several of the texts to watchfulness, faithfulness, and industry.)

Thus, [F.F.] Bruce summarizes the same conclusion reached here . . .:

Jesus, as in Mark, foretells how not one stone of the temple will be left standing on another, and the disciples say, ‘Tell us, (a) when will these things be, and (b) what will be the sign of your coming and of the close of the age?’ (Matt. 24:3). Then, at the end of the following discourse, Jesus answers their twofold question by saying that (a) ‘this generation will not pass away till all these things take place (Mtt 24.34) while, (b) with regard to his coming and ‘the close of the age’, he tells them that ‘of that day and hour no one knows…’ [Hard Sayings of Jesus, IVP, 1983, 229-230]

This would yield a very nice Hebraic parallelism:

 (A) Pay attention to my words–they come before (pre-announce) these things–the beginning of the end-times (destruction of Temple)
(B) When will it occur?–You know when, within your generation
(A’) Pay attention to my words–they outlast that day–the ending of the end-times
(B’) When will it occur?–No one knows when (except the Father)

(“On…was Jesus mistaken about this 2nd Coming?”: 10-22-96)

For related in-depth analysis of this general subject matter, see my papers:

Debate with an Agnostic on the Meaning of “Last Days” and Whether the Author of Hebrews Was a False Prophet.

“The Last Days”: Meaning in Hebrew, Biblical Thought

***

Photo credit: geralt (9-3-17) [Pixabay / Pixabay License]

***

2019-08-03T20:35:03-04:00

Last updated on: August 3, 2019 at 8:35 pm   By

This is an installment of my series of replies to an article by Dr. David Madison: a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, who has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. It’s called, “Things We Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said” (Debunking Christianity, 7-21-19). His words will be in blue below. Dr. Madison makes several “generic” digs at Jesus and Christianity, in the written portion (it details a series of 12 podcasts):

A challenge for Christians: If you’re so sure Jesus existed, then you have some explaining to do. A major frustration is that, while believers are indignant at all the talk about Jesus not existing, they don’t know the issues that fuel the skepticism—and are unwilling to inform themselves.

Yes, I’m up to the “challenge.” No problem at all. I’m not threatened or “scared” by this in the slightest. It’s what I do, as an apologist. The question is whether Dr. Madison is up to interacting with counter-critiques? Or will he act like the voluminous anti-theist atheist polemicist Bob Seidensticker?: who directly challenged me in one of his own comboxes to respond to his innumerable attack-pieces against Christianity and the Bible, and then courageously proceeded to utterly ignore my 35 specific critiques of his claims as of this writing. We shall soon see which course Dr. Madison will decide to take. Anyway, he also states in his post and combox:

[S]o many of the words of Jesus are genuinely shocking. These words aren’t proclaimed much from the pulpit, . . . Hence the folks in the pews have absorbed and adored an idealized Jesus. Christian apologists make their livings refiguring so many of the things Jesus supposedly said.

The gospels are riddled with contradictions and bad theology, and Jesus is so frequently depicted as a cult fanatic—because cult fanatics wrote the gospels. We see Jesus only through their theological filters. I just want to grab hold of Christian heads (standing behind them, with a hand on each ear) and force them to look straight ahead, unflinchingly, at the gospels, and then ask “Tell me what you see!” uncoached by apologist specialists, i.e., priests and pastors, who’ve had a lot of practice making bad texts look good. . . . I DO say, “Deal with the really bad stuff in the gospels.” Are you SURE you’ve not make a big mistake endorsing this particular Lord and Savior? That’s the whole point of this series of Flash Podcasts, because a helluva lot of Christians would agree, right away, that these quotes are bad news—if no one told then that they’ve been attributed to Jesus.

Of course, Dr. Madison — good anti-theist atheist that he is — takes the view that we are not at all sure whether Jesus in fact said anything recorded in the Gospels in the first place. I don’t play that game, because there is no end to it. It’s like trying to pin jello to the wall. The atheist always has their convenient out (when refuted in argument about some biblical text) that Jesus never said it anyway [wink wink and sly patronizing grin], and/or that the biblical text in question was simply added later by dishonest ultra-biased Christian partisans and propagandists. It’s a silly and ultimately intellectually dishonest game, and so I always refuse to play it with atheists or anyone else, because there is no way to “win” with such an absurdly stacked, purely subjective deck.

In my defense of biblical texts, I start with the assumption that the manuscripts we have are quite sufficient for us to know what is in the Bible (believe it or not). Going on from there, I simply defend particular [supposedly “difficult”] texts, and note with appropriate argumentation, that “here, the Bible teaches so-and-so,” etc. I deal with the texts as they exist. I don’t get into the endlessly arbitrary, subjective games that atheists and theologically liberal biblical skeptics play with the texts, in their self-serving textual criticism.

Dr. Madison himself (fortunately) grants my outlook in terms of practical “x vs. y” debate purposes: “For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story.” And in the combox: “So, we can go along with their insistence that he did exist. We’ll play on their field, i.e., the gospels.”

Good! So we shall examine his cherry-picked texts and see whether his interpretations of them can stand up to scrutiny. He is issuing challenges, and I as an apologist will be dishing a bunch of my own right back to him. Two can play this game. I will be dealing honestly with his challenges. Will he return the favor, and engage in serious and substantive dialogue? Again, we’ll soon know what his reaction will be. A true dialogue is of a confident, inquisitive, “nothing to fear and everything to gain” back-and-forth and interactive nature, not merely “ships passing in the night” or what I call “mutual monologue.”

*****

Dr. Madison calls his second podcast, “On Mark 16:16-18, on the five things baptized Christians ought to be able to do”. Here is the passage:

Mark 16:16-18 (RSV) “He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned. [17] And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons; they will speak in new tongues; [18] they will pick up serpents, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” 

He starts off by making the textual argument that Mark 16:9-20 is a disputed text. And indeed it is, among many Christians. That discussion is too complex and involved to delve into here, for my purposes of rebuttal. Catholics accept the “long ending”, and the many reasons we do are explained in the Catholic Encyclopedia: “Gospel of St. Mark” (section: “State of text and integrity”).

Protestants are divided on the issue, as they are on many issues. But (for what it’s worth) a solid and extensive case for inclusion of 16:9-20 was made by Protestant Dave Miller (“Is Mark 16:9-20 Inspired?,” Apologetics Press, 2005 [link] ).

That said, the gist of this podcast is to contend that the long ending of Mark 16 is strange and “weird” and “bizarre” (especially the bit about serpents) and doesn’t sound like what Jesus would say. He says “someone invented verses 19-20” [I’m pretty sure he meant “9-20”] as a result of “creative imagination”: a piece of “religious fantasy literature.”

The five things Christians are supposed to be able to do are not “good religion”: so we are told. Dr. Madison suggests things like “love your enemies, love your neighbors . . . forgive 70 x 70” as more appropriate utterances for Jesus to express right before His ascension (as “much better religion”). Well, I suppose atheists would have all sorts of advice to Jesus as to what He ought to teach, and how and when. That’s neither here nor there. But Dr. Madison makes this argument as part of his skepticism regarding whether these things were said by Jesus at all. And we shall consider them each in turn.

Dr. Madison opines that “there was a heavy cult flavor to early Christianity, especially that line about, ‘if you do not believe, you will be condemned’: that’s typical cult playbook stuff.” If he is trying to insinuate that Jesus wouldn’t have said that, and it was simply added by overzealous, fanatical, “cultlike” adherents, he’s wrong:

John 5:24 Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears my word and believes him who sent me, has eternal life; he does not come into judgment, but has passed from death to life. 

John 6:40 For this is the will of my Father, that every one who sees the Son and believes in him should have eternal life; and I will raise him up at the last day.

John 10:28 and I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish, and no one shall snatch them out of my hand.

Jesus taught more about hell (see Gospel passages on “fire” and “hell”) than He did about heaven. Hell and condemnation was not invented as fantasy by some wild-eyed scribe who made up Mark 16:9-20.

Dave Miller (see his cited article above) contends that there is nothing in the long ending that is unique and not found elsewhere in Scripture:

Most, if not all, scholars who have examined the subject concede that the truths presented in the verses are historically authentic—even if they reject the genuineness of the verses as being originally part of Mark’s account. The verses contain no teaching of significance that is not taught elsewhere. Christ’s post-resurrection appearance to Mary is verified elsewhere (Luke 8:2; John 20:1-18), as is His appearance to the two disciples on the road to Emmaus (Luke 24:35), and His appearance to the eleven apostles (Luke 24:36-43; John 20:19-23). The “Great Commission” is presented by two of the other three gospel writers (Matthew 28:18-20; Luke 24:46-48), and Luke verifies the ascension twice (Luke 24:51; Acts 1:9). The promise of the signs that were to accompany the apostles’ activities is hinted at by Matthew (28:20), noted by the Hebrews writer (2:3-4), explained in greater detail by John (chapters 14-16; cf. 14:12), and demonstrated by the events of the book of Acts . . . 

Here are the five things “baptized Christians ought to be able to do” (right from the passage):

1) they will cast out demons;

2) they will speak in new tongues;

3) they will pick up serpents,

4) and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not hurt them;

5) they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.

First of all, note that this is a proverbial-type statement, meaning that it doesn’t follow that every Christian believer “ought” to be able to do any of these things at any time, at will. Proverbs are generalized statements, that allow many exceptions. So Jesus is saying, “these signs will accompany those who believe”; that is, “among Christians [not every single one, for all time] you will see all of this sort of phenomena, or signs.” I’ve written at length about the biblical view of healing, and to some extent, also about the related issue of how not all prayers are answered.

But (this is what many — including the snake-handling fools — don’t get): signs were never to be considered normative among Christians. In fact, Jesus was scathingly critical of those who sought signs for their own sake (e.g., “An evil and adulterous generation seeks for a sign”: Mt 12:39; “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe”: Jn 20:29).

That understood, the writer of Hebrews proclaims: “God also bore witness by signs and wonders and various miracles” (2:4). And Jesus said: “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in me will also do the works that I do; and greater works than these will he do, because I go to the Father” (Jn 14:12). Thus, Jesus told His disciples: “Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse lepers, cast out demons” (Mt 10:8). Thus, we can find examples of all of the five things above among Christians:

1) casting out demons (Mk 3:15; 6:13; Lk 9:1; 10:17, 20; Acts 5:16; 8:7; 16:16-18; 19:12)

2) speaking in tongues (Acts 2:4-11)

3) contact with serpents, unharmed (Lk 10:19; Acts 28:1-6)

4) unharmed by poison (Lk 10:19)

5) healing the sick, including raising the dead (Mk 6:13; Lk 9:1-2; Acts 3:6-9; 5:15-16; 8:7; 9:34-40; 19:12; 28:8)

Conclusion: there is nothing novel or new in Mark 16 that cannot be found elsewhere. It’s completely consistent with Jesus’ teachings and actions, and those of His disciples. That’s why even those Bible scholars who think it is not an authentic biblical text concede that it preserved a portion of authentic tradition, from Jesus. In other words, it was the very opposite of “creative imagination” and “religious fantasy literature.”

Hence, Dr. Madison’s second claim fails.

***

Photo credit: Saint Paul Shipwrecked on Malta (1630) [note the snake on his hand], by Laurent de La Hyre (1606-1656) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

***

 

2019-08-03T20:34:41-04:00

Last updated on: August 3, 2019 at 8:34 pm   By

This is an installment of my series of replies to an article by Dr. David Madison: a pastor in the Methodist Church for nine years, who has a PhD in Biblical Studies from Boston University. It’s called, “Things We Wish Jesus Hadn’t Said” (Debunking Christianity, 7-21-19). His words will be in blue below. Dr. Madison makes several “generic” digs at Jesus and Christianity, in the written portion (it details a series of 12 podcasts):

A challenge for Christians: If you’re so sure Jesus existed, then you have some explaining to do. A major frustration is that, while believers are indignant at all the talk about Jesus not existing, they don’t know the issues that fuel the skepticism—and are unwilling to inform themselves.

Yes, I’m up to the “challenge.” No problem at all. I’m not threatened or “scared” by this in the slightest. It’s what I do, as an apologist. The question is whether Dr. Madison is up to interacting with counter-critiques? Or will he act like the voluminous anti-theist atheist polemicist Bob Seidensticker?: who directly challenged me in one of his own comboxes to respond to his innumerable attack-pieces against Christianity and the Bible, and then courageously proceeded to utterly ignore my 35 specific critiques of his claims as of this writing. We shall soon see which course Dr. Madison will decide to take. Anyway, he also states in his post and combox:

[S]o many of the words of Jesus are genuinely shocking. These words aren’t proclaimed much from the pulpit, . . . Hence the folks in the pews have absorbed and adored an idealized Jesus. Christian apologists make their livings refiguring so many of the things Jesus supposedly said.

The gospels are riddled with contradictions and bad theology, and Jesus is so frequently depicted as a cult fanatic—because cult fanatics wrote the gospels. We see Jesus only through their theological filters. I just want to grab hold of Christian heads (standing behind them, with a hand on each ear) and force them to look straight ahead, unflinchingly, at the gospels, and then ask “Tell me what you see!” uncoached by apologist specialists, i.e., priests and pastors, who’ve had a lot of practice making bad texts look good. . . . I DO say, “Deal with the really bad stuff in the gospels.” Are you SURE you’ve not make a big mistake endorsing this particular Lord and Savior? That’s the whole point of this series of Flash Podcasts, because a helluva lot of Christians would agree, right away, that these quotes are bad news—if no one told then that they’ve been attributed to Jesus.

Of course, Dr. Madison — good anti-theist atheist that he is — takes the view that we are not at all sure whether Jesus in fact said anything recorded in the Gospels in the first place. I don’t play that game, because there is no end to it. It’s like trying to pin jello to the wall. The atheist always has their convenient out (when refuted in argument about some biblical text) that Jesus never said it anyway [wink wink and sly patronizing grin], and/or that the biblical text in question was simply added later by dishonest ultra-biased Christian partisans and propagandists. It’s a silly and ultimately intellectually dishonest game, and so I always refuse to play it with atheists or anyone else, because there is no way to “win” with such an absurdly stacked, purely subjective deck.

In my defense of biblical texts, I start with the assumption that the manuscripts we have are quite sufficient for us to know what is in the Bible (believe it or not). Going on from there, I simply defend particular [supposedly “difficult”] texts, and note with appropriate argumentation, that “here, the Bible teaches so-and-so,” etc. I deal with the texts as they exist. I don’t get into the endlessly arbitrary, subjective games that atheists and theologically liberal biblical skeptics play with the texts, in their self-serving textual criticism.

Dr. Madison himself (fortunately) grants my outlook in terms of practical “x vs. y” debate purposes: “For the sake of argument, I’m willing to say, okay, Jesus was real and, yes, we have gospels that tell the story.” And in the combox: “So, we can go along with their insistence that he did exist. We’ll play on their field, i.e., the gospels.”

Good! So we shall examine his cherry-picked texts and see whether his interpretations of them can stand up to scrutiny. He is issuing challenges, and I as an apologist will be dishing a bunch of my own right back to him. Two can play this game. I will be dealing honestly with his challenges. Will he return the favor, and engage in serious and substantive dialogue? Again, we’ll soon know what his reaction will be. A true dialogue is of a confident, inquisitive, “nothing to fear and everything to gain” back-and-forth and interactive nature, not merely “ships passing in the night” or what I call “mutual monologue.”

*****

Luke 14:26 (RSV) If any one comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple.

Dr. Madison, in his podcast, calls the text in question a “full body blow” and “embarrassing.” He adds (for no extra charge): “cult leaders . . . have not wanted people who would be swayed by family . . . that was part of his [Luke’s] agenda . . . for him it was standard operating procedure.”

Is that so? How very odd, then, that the same writer, eyes allegedly ablaze with propagandizing purposes and a cultish hatred of normal familial relations, records Jesus healing Peter’s mother-in-law:

Luke 4:38-39 And he arose and left the synagogue, and entered Simon’s house. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was ill with a high fever, and they besought him for her. [39] And he stood over her and rebuked the fever, and it left her; and immediately she rose and served them.

What sense does that make? None . . . If we interpret everything with a stultified, wooden literalism (utterly ignoring the richness of literary forms and genres that every language has: including Hebrew and Greek), then we have the absurdity of Jesus supposedly advocating literal hatred of family members, yet turning around and healing one of same. And Luke the wild-eyed “true believer” — inexplicably, if we accept Dr. Madison’s take — records this! So do Matthew (8:14-15) and Mark (1:29-31).

“Hate” . . . means exactly what it seems to mean . . . This verse has to be at the top of the list of things we wish Jesus hadn’t said. . . . 

One would have to know Greek or Aramaic . . . if not, so Dr. Madison opines, it is a “knee jerk reaction” to not interpret literally.

I’m delighted that he actually brought up the question of language and [implied] literary genres. It’s the only indication we have in his podcast, that he is aware of such factors that are crucial in interpretation. But one would fully expect this in one who has a PhD in Biblical Studies. This is what makes it all the more odd and strange that Dr. Madison can’t figure out what is going on in this passage. It’s really not all that complicated.

Bible scholar E. W. Bullinger catalogued “over 200 distinct figures [in the Bible], several of them with from 30 to 40 varieties.” That is a  statement from the Introduction to his 1104-page tome, Figures of Speech Used in the Bible (London: 1898). I have this work in my own library (hardcover). It’s also available for free, online. Bullinger continues, in the Introduction:

All language is governed by law; but, in order to increase the power of a word, or the force of an expression, these laws are designedly departed from, and words and sentences are thrown into, and used in, new forms, or figures.

The ancient Greeks reduced these new and peculiar forms to science, and gave names to more than two hundred of them.

The Romans carried forward this science . . .

These manifold forms which words and sentences assume were called by the Greeks Schema and by the Romans, Figura. Both words have the same meaning, viz., a shape or figure. . . .

Applied to words, a figure denotes some form which a word or sentence takes, different from its ordinary and natural form. This is always for the purpose of giving additional force, more life, intensified feeling, and greater emphasis.

Bullinger devotes six pages (423-428) to “Hyperbole; or, Exaggeration”: which he defines as follows:

The figure is so called because the expression adds to the sense so much that it exaggerates it, and enlarges or diminishes it more than is really meant in fact. Or, when more is said than is meant to be literally understood, in order to heighten the sense.

It is the superlative degree applied to verbs and sentences and expressions or descriptions, rather than to mere adjectives. . . .

It was called by the Latins superlatio, a carrying beyond, an exaggerating.

I shall cite some of his more notable and obvious examples (omitting ellipses: “. . .” ):

Gen. ii. 24. — “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife.” This does not mean that he is to forsake and no longer to love or care for his parents. So Matt. xix. 5.

Ex. viii. 17. — “All the dust of the land became lice throughout all the land of Egypt”: i.e., wherever in all the land there was dust, it became lice.

I Sam. xxv. 37. — Nabal’s “heart died within him, and he became as a stone”: i.e., he was terribly frightened and collapsed or fainted away.

I Kings i. 40. — “So that the earth rent with the sound of them.” A hyperbolical description of their jumping and leaping for joy.Job xxix. 6. — “The rock poured me out rivers of oil”: i.e., I had abundance of all good things. So chap. xx. 17 and Micah vi. 7.

Isa. xiv. 13, — “I will ascend into heaven”: to express the pride of Lucifer.

Lam. ii. 11.— “My liver is poured upon the earth, etc”: to express the depth of the Prophet’s grief and sorrow at the desolations of Zion.

Luke xiv. 26. — “If any man come to me and hate not his father and mother”: i.e., does not esteem them less than me. So the verb to hate is used (Gen. xxix. 31. Rom. ix. 13). [my bolding]

John iii. 26. — “All men come to him.” Thus his disciples said to John, to show their sense of the many people who followed the Lord.

John xii. 19. — “Behold, the world is gone after him.” The enemies of the Lord thus expressed their indignation at the vast multitudes which followed Him.

Gary Amirault highlights more biblical examples in a similar article:

[T]is verse is a hyperbole, an exaggeration for effect:

“You blind guides! You strain out a gnat but swallow a camel.” (Matt. 23:24, NIV)

It is not too difficult to determine that this is a hyperbole, an exaggeration. Because the English language is full of Bible terms and phraseology, this Hebrew idiom has become part of the English language. Therefore most English speaking people know the real meaning of that phrase: “You pay close attention to little things but neglect the important things.” [Dave: or, “you can’t see the forest for the trees”]

However, here is a hyperbole that the average Bible reader may miss and formulate doctrine from which may end up being harmful to themselves and others.

“Everything is possible for him who believes.” (Mark 9:23b, NIV)

The Bible is full of exaggerations like the one above which are not to be taken literally. Careful attention, comparing scripture with scripture, knowing the Bible and its author thoroughly, making certain not to necessary apply things to ourselves which weren’t meant for us individually and some basics about the original languages are needed to prevent us from misinterpreting various scripture verses like this one. . . .

“If thy right eye offend thee, pluck it out…” Matt. 5:29 (I met a Christian who actually tried to pluck out his right eye because he had a lust problem. This is an example the kind of problem a Bible translation can cause if one is not informed of the various figures of speech found in the Bible.)

The literary device of antithesis, or contrast also seems more specifically applicable to the verse we are considering. Bullinger writes about this in his pages 715-718:

A setting of one Phrase in Contrast with another.

. . .   It is a figure by which two thoughts, ideas, or phrases, are set over one against the other, in order to make the contrast more striking, and thus to emphasize it. [footnote: “When this consists of words rather than of sentences, it is called Epanodos, and Antimetabole (q.v.).”]

The two parts so placed are hence called in Greek antitheta, and in Latin opposita and contraposita. . . .

It is called also contentio: i.e., comparison, or contrast. When this contrast is made by affirmatives and negatives, it is called Enantiosis, see below. The Book of Proverbs so abounds in such Antitheses that we have not given any examples from it.

Hence (understanding all this, which Dr. Madison obviously does not), when Jesus says “does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters” He is expressing Hebrew hyperbole and/or antithesis to express with extreme exaggeration what He literally means: “does not esteem them less than me.” Thus, the thought of “loving Jesus more than one’s own family” is expressed by the non-literal “hate [one’s family, in order to] be my disciple.”

In fact, Jesus did express what we contend He was stating non-literally in Luke 14:26, in a literal fashion elsewhere (and here we see the important hermeneutical principle of “interpret less clear or obvious passages by more clear related passages”):

Matthew 10:37  He who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me; and he who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me;

We see precisely the same parallelism (“hate” = “love relatively more than”) in the poetic literary expression of Genesis:

Genesis 29:30-33 So Jacob went in to Rachel also, and he loved Rachel more than Leah, and served Laban for another seven years. [31] When the LORD saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb; but Rachel was barren. [32] And Leah conceived and bore a son, and she called his name Reuben; for she said, “Because the LORD has looked upon my affliction; surely now my husband will love me.” [33] She conceived again and bore a son, and said, “Because the LORD has heard that I am hated, he has given me this son also”; and she called his name Simeon.

The apostle Paul expresses largely the same sort of thing in the same way:

Philippians 3:7-8 But whatever gain I had, I counted as loss for the sake of Christ. [8] Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ

Paul also seemed blissfully unaware of Luke and other early Christian “cultist” supposed fanatical anti-family views, since he casually alluded to apostles like himself and Peter (“Cephas”) having “the right to be accompanied by a wife” (1 Cor 9:5).

I submit that Jesus commented on his own statement in another related sense in this passage:

Matthew 12:47-50 While he was still speaking to the people, behold, his mother and his brothers stood outside, asking to speak to him. [48] But he replied to the man who told him, “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” [49] And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers! [50] For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother, and sister, and mother.”

He’s not rejecting His family. He is enlarging the concept of family to include people like His disciples and indeed, anyone who “does the will of my Father in heaven.” It’s another very typical instance of Hebrew hyperbole or a type of antithesis. But it’s inclusive, not exclusive.

Jesus taught that we are to love (not hate) even our enemies:

Matthew 5:43-44  You have heard that it was said, `You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ [44] But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, (cf. Lk 6:27-35)

Obviously, then, He would not (and did not) teach that we ought to hate our own families. Jesus taught that we should love all people, and that includes families:

Matthew 19:19 Honor your father and mother, and, You shall love your neighbor as yourself.

Matthew 22:37-40 And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. [38] This is the great and first commandment. [39] And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. [40] On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”

Mark 12:30-31 and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ [31] The second is this, `You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.”

Luke 10:27 And he answered, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your strength, and with all your mind; and your neighbor as yourself.

John 13:34-35  A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another.[35] By this all men will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.

John 15:17 This I command you, to love one another.

I rest my case. This poses no problem whatsoever for either Christians, or a consistent interpretation of these Bible passages. It’s simply a function of non-literal forms of speaking that were common in Hebrew culture (just as in every other culture and language, to more or less degrees). But Hebrew language was especially rich in figures and non-literal techniques.

And this leads to innumerable misguided readings of Scripture from atheists and other biblical skeptics (even including those with doctorates in biblical studies) who — oddly — don’t grasp this rather elementary consideration, and appear to make no effort to try to understand it. They’re too busy tearing down Holy Scripture and approaching it like how a butcher views a hog.

***

Photo credit: The Sermon on the Mount (1877, portion), by Carl Bloch (1834-1890) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

2019-08-03T02:03:03-04:00

Last updated on: August 3, 2019 at 2:03 am   By

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker, who was “raised Presbyterian”, runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He also made a general statement on 6-22-17: “Christians’ arguments are easy to refute . . . I’ve heard the good stuff, and it’s not very good.” He added in the combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.” 

Such confusion would indeed be predictable, seeing that Bob himself admitted (2-13-16): “My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment.” I’m always one to oblige people’s wishes if I am able, so I decided to do a series of posts in reply. It’s also been said, “be careful what you wish for.”  If Bob responds to this post, and makes me aware of it, his reply will be added to the end along with my counter-reply. If you don’t see that, rest assured that he either hasn’t replied, or didn’t inform me that he did. But don’t hold your breath.

Bob (for the record) virtually begged and pleaded with me to dialogue with him in May 2018, via email. But by 10-3-18, following massive, childish name-calling attacks against me,  encouraged by Bob on his blog (just prior to his banning me from it), his opinion was as follows: “Dave Armstrong . . . made it clear that a thoughtful intellectual conversation wasn’t his goal. . . . [I] have no interest in what he’s writing about.”

And on 10-25-18, utterly oblivious to the ludicrous irony of his making the statement, Bob wrote in a combox on his blog: “The problem, it seems to me, is when someone gets these clues, like you, but ignores them. I suppose the act of ignoring could be deliberate or just out of apathy, but someone who’s not a little bit driven to investigate cognitive dissonance will just stay a Christian, fat ‘n sassy and ignorant.” Again, Bob mocks some Christian in his combox on 10-27-18: “You can’t explain it to us, you can’t defend it, you can’t even defend it to yourself. Defend your position or shut up about it. It’s clear you have nothing.” And again on the same day: “If you can’t answer the question, man up and say so.” And on 10-26-18: “you refuse to defend it, after being asked over and over again.” And again: “You’re the one playing games, equivocating, and being unable to answer the challenges.”

Bob’s cowardly hypocrisy knows no bounds. Again, on 6-30-19, he was chiding someone who (very much like he himself and my 35 critiques) was (to hear him tell it) not backing up his position: “Spoken like a true weasel trying to run away from a previous argument. You know, you could just say, ‘Let me retract my previous statement of X’ or something like that.” Yeah, Bob could!  He still hasn’t yet uttered one peep in reply to — now — 35 of my critiques of his atrocious reasoning. As of 7-9-19, this is how Bob absurdly rationalizes his non-response to these 35 articles: “He’s written several blog posts titled, in effect, ‘In Which Bob Seidensticker Was Mean to Me.’ Normally, I’d enjoy a semi-thoughtful debate, but I’m sure they weren’t.”

Bible-Basher Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, word-search “Seidensticker” on my atheist page or search “Seidensticker Folly #” in my sidebar search (near the top).

*****

In his article, George Washington Couldn’t Tell a Lie … But God Can (4-21-18; update of post from 8-11-14), Bible-Basher Bob provides a potpourri of ridiculous lies: all for the purpose of “proving” that the God revealed in the Bible is a liar. Let’s take each whopper in turn:

God lies in Garden of Eden story

We can’t even get out of the Creation story without seeing God lie. God says to Adam, “You must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die” (Genesis 2:17). Adam doesn’t, and he lives to be 930 years old.

Bodie Hodge, in his article, “Time of Death” (Demolishing Supposed Bible Contradictions: Volume 1: 10-20-08), explains this:

The Hebrew phrase in English is more literally:

“Tree knowledge good evil eat day eat die (dying) die”

The Hebrew is “die die” (muwth—muwth) with two different verb tenses (dying and die), which can be translated as “surely die” or literally as “dying you shall die,” indicating the beginning of dying—an ingressive sense—and finally culminating with death. At the point when they ate, Adam and Eve began to die and would return to dust (Genesis 3:19). If they were meant to die right then, God would have used muwth only once, as is used in the Hebrew to mean dead, died, or die, not beginning to die or surely die as die-die is used in Hebrew. . . .

[T]he Hebrew word yom for day in Genesis 2:17, . . .refers directly to the following action—eating—not the latter “dying die.” For example Solomon used an almost identical construct in 1 Kings 2:37 when referring to Shimei:

“For on the day (yom) you go out and cross over the brook Kidron, you will know for certain that you shall surely (muwth) die (muwth); your blood shall be on your own head.”

This uses yom (day) and the dual muwth just as Genesis 2:17 did. In Genesis 2:17, yom referred to the action (eating) in the same way that yom refers the action here (go out and cross over). In neither case do they mean that was the particular day they would die, but the particular day they did what they weren’t supposed to do. Solomon also understood that it would not be a death on that particular day, but that Shimei’s days were numbered from that point. In other words, their (Adam and Shimei) actions on that day were what gave them the final death sentence—it was coming, and they would surely die as a result of their actions. Therefore, the day in Genesis 2:17 was referring to when they ate (disobeyed), and not the day they died.

The rationalization that “die” only meant that Adam and Eve had been immortal before eating the fruit won’t work. Remember that God had to exile them from the Garden so they wouldn’t eat from the Tree of Life.

In a second related paper, Bob digs in even further:

Apologists respond that this instead means that they will die eventually, that this introduced physical death and they would no longer be immortal. But the text makes clear that they never were immortal. They were driven from the Garden so they wouldn’t eat from the Tree of Life. That’s what makes you immortal.

The Keil and Delitzsch Commentary explains this alleged discrepancy:

[T]he man had not yet eaten of the tree of life. Had he continued in fellowship with God by obedience to the command of God, he might have eaten of it, for he was created for eternal life. But after he had fallen through sin into the power of death, the fruit which produced immortality could only do him harm. For immortality in a state of sin is not the ζωὴ αἰώνιος , which God designed for man, but endless misery, which the Scriptures call “the second death” (Revelation 2:11; Revelation 20:6, Revelation 20:14; Revelation 21:8). The expulsion from paradise, therefore, was a punishment inflicted for man’s good, intended, while exposing him to temporal death, to preserve him from eternal death.

Now it’s true that Genesis does not describe in great depth all of these elements: physical death, spiritual death, and the Christian doctrine of original sin. The New Testament develops it much further, as I have written about, although King David is aware of it: “Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, and in sin did my mother conceive me.” (Psalm 51:5, RSV), and so is Moses, in the book of Genesis itself: “the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth” (8:21).

It is standard biblical hermeneutics to interpret less clear portions of the Bible by means of clearer related cross-references. Nevertheless, there are several more Old Testament passages that describe the fallen condition of man, as a result of Adam and Eve’s rebellion (which Christians believe implicated all mankind: 1 Corinthians 15:22: “in Adam all die”). Here are other similar texts:

Job 15:14 (RSV) What is man, that he can be clean? Or he that is born of a woman, that he can be righteous?

Psalms 14:2-3 The LORD looks down from heaven upon the children of men, to see if there are any that act wisely, that seek after God. [3] They have all gone astray, they are all alike corrupt; there is none that does good, no, not one.

Ecclesiastes 9:3 This is an evil in all that is done under the sun, that one fate comes to all; also the hearts of men are full of evil, and madness is in their hearts while they live, and after that they go to the dead.

Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?

God’s solution to all this misery is salvation through the blood of Christ and His free gift of grace: received with repentance:

Romans 5:6-11 While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. [7] Why, one will hardly die for a righteous man — though perhaps for a good man one will dare even to die. [8] But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. [9] Since, therefore, we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God. [10] For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. [11] Not only so, but we also rejoice in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received our reconciliation.

God lies to Ahab

Israel and Judah allied to fight the country of Aram across the Jordan River in 1 Kings 22. King Ahab of Israel consulted his 400 prophets and was assured of success. Prophet Micaiah was the sole holdout, but his prophecy turned out to be correct—the battle was lost and Ahab was killed. How then had the 400 other prophets gotten it completely wrong? Micaiah tells us that Yahweh wanted Ahab to die and authorized a spirit to cause the prophets to lie to lure him into the battle.

The Keil and Delitzsch Commentary states:

The manner in which the supernatural influence of the lying spirit upon the false prophets is brought out in Micah’s vision is, that the spirit of prophecy ( רוח הנבואה ) offers itself to deceive Ahab as שׁקר רוּח in the false prophets. Jehovah sends this spirit, inasmuch as the deception of Ahab has been inflicted upon him as a judgment of God for his unbelief. . . .

As he would not listen to the word of the Lord in the mouth of His true servants, God had given him up ( παρέδωκεν , Romans 1:24, Romans 1:26, Romans 1:28) in his unbelief to the working of the spirits of lying. But that this did not destroy the freedom of the human will is evident from the expression תּפתּה , “thou canst persuade him,” and still more clearly from תּוּכל גּם , “thou wilt also be able,” since they both presuppose the possibility of resistance to temptation on the part of man.

This is a common way of expressing God’s judgment and His providence. Romans 1 (mentioned above), explains it:

Romans 1:18-25 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. [19] For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. [20] Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made. So they are without excuse; [21] for although they knew God they did not honor him as God or give thanks to him, but they became futile in their thinking and their senseless minds were darkened. [22] Claiming to be wise, they became fools, [23] and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images resembling mortal man or birds or animals or reptiles. [24] Therefore God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, [25] because they exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed for ever! Amen.

Note that the onus lies upon the people who “suppress the truth” and are engaged in “all ungodliness and wickedness” (1:18). They choose in their own free will to disobey God, then the text says that “God gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity” (1:24). In other words, He didn’t cause their rebellion; He only allowed them in their free choices, to rebel.

Likewise, in the present scenario, God allowed the false prophets (see Deut 8:22) to lead Ahab astray, and this led to his judgment, which was inevitable (by Ahab’s own choice to be wicked and rebellious). Ahab chose to believe them. It was the false prophets who lied to Ahab, not God. The same dynamic is seen in the juxtaposition between Pharaoh freely hardening his heart, which is then applied to God (in a limited sense) doing it (which means that He allowed it, in His providence; He didn’t ordain it). I explain this at length, in two papers.

A fourth similar example occurs in the book of Job. Satan comes to God and challenges Him to allow him to torment Job. God responds, “Behold, he is in your power; only spare his life” (2:6; cf. 1:12). So it is clear that Satan is behind the direct persecution of Job. But later, the text refers to “all the evil that the LORD had brought upon him” (42:11); that is (properly interpreted, with knowledge of the multitude of Hebrew literary devices), allowed in His providence. Then it is reported (now literally) that God “restored the fortunes of Job, . . . and the LORD gave Job twice as much as he had before” (42:10) and “blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning” (42:12).

Bob himself virtually makes this same argument for me in his next section (I am answering as I read, so I didn’t see this before i wrote the above):

New Testament lying

Remember how God hardened Pharaoh’s heart to prevent him from doing the right thing (Exodus 9:12)? We see the same thing in the New Testament. 2 Thessalonians predicts that “the lawless one” will deceive during the end times. To people caught by the lie, “God sends them a powerful delusion so that they will believe the lie and so that all will be condemned who have not believed the truth but have delighted in wickedness” (2 Thess. 2:11–12).

We see something similar when Paul describes God’s frustration at the people who don’t get it. “God [gives] them over in the sinful desires of their hearts” (Romans 1:24).

Explained above . . . 2 Thessalonians (also written by St. Paul) expresses precisely the same dynamic as we see in Romans 1 and the other three examples above. Men rebel in their wickedness (“they refused to love the truth and so be saved”: 2:10). Then it is stated (as a forceful hyperbolic manifestation of God’s providence and His permissive will) that “God sends upon them a strong delusion, to make them believe what is false, so that all may be condemned who did not believe the truth but had pleasure in unrighteousness” (2:11-12).

It’s not a contradiction. This way of speaking is common in the Bible. When Paul talks about wicked men, he is being literal; but when He talks about God, it is hyperbolic and a form of sarcasm. 2:10 makes it quite clear what caused their damnation: “those who are to perish, because they refused to love the truth.” Even 2:12 again reiterates that man’s rebellion was the cause of the demise of the damned: not because God willed and ordained it from all eternity.

The Jewish opponents of Jesus saw his miracles. They didn’t believe, not because the evidence was poor or because they didn’t understand or because they were stubborn. No, they didn’t believe because God deliberately hardened their hearts (John 12:37–40). John says, “He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, so they can neither see with their eyes, nor understand with their hearts.”

But why harden the hearts of bad people? Were they going to do bad things on their own accord or not?

Coffman’s Commentaries on the Bible, in its treatment of the Old Testament passage cited in John 12 (Isaiah 6:9-10) states:

What is prophesied in this passage is the judicial hardening of Israel in their rebellion against God. The prophecy is stated in different forms. Here it appears imperatively; but in other places the prophecy is referred to as self-accomplished as in Acts 28:27, or as having occurred passively as in Matthew 13:13-15. Here, as Dummelow pointed out, “The result of Isaiah’s preaching is spoken of as if it were the purpose of it.” . . .

The classical example from the Bible is that of Pharaoh, of whom it is stated ten times that “Pharaoh hardened his heart …” after which it is said that, “God hardened Pharaoh’s heart.” God never hardened anyone’s heart who had not already hardened his own heart many times. Thus it was said of this prophecy that Israel had themselves shut their ears, closed their eyes, and hardened their hearts.

Thus we may say that God hardened Israel, that Israel hardened themselves, and further, that Satan hardened their hearts. “The god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelieving” (2 Corinthians 4:4). The “blinding” of this passage and the “strong delusion” of 2 Thessalonians 2:11 KJV, and the “working of error” (2 Thessalonians 2:11, ASV) are all designations of exactly the same condition described here as “hardening.”

The key to understanding lies in the parallel passage of Acts 28:27, which the commentary above describes as “self-accomplished” rebellion. This shows the same dynamic as the “hardened hearts” passages. In the overall context of Acts 28, we don’t see the language of God deliberately blinding them, etc. We see their own choices causing these things. Hence, we see references to “others disbelieved” (28:24); then the Isaiah passage is cited, but in a milder fashion, followed by “Let it be known to you then that this salvation of God has been sent to the Gentiles; they will listen” (28:28). In other words, these hearers would not listen. It was their fault; they were rebellious. God didn’t cause that.

Likewise, here is how Jesus put it in Matthew 13:13, 16: “This is why I speak to them in parables, because seeing they do not see, and hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. . . . their eyes they have closed . . . But blessed are your eyes, for they see, and your ears, for they hear.” If one looks at the larger context of John 12:37-40, one can also see that it is man’s rebellion, not God’s foreordination, that causes the disbelief and wickedness:

John 12:37, 47-48  Though he had done so many signs before them, yet they did not believe in him; . . . [47] [Jesus] If any one hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world but to save the world. [48] He who rejects me and does not receive my sayings has a judge; the word that I have spoken will be his judge on the last day.

Jesus lying

Jesus was wrong when he predicted an imminent end: “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (Matthew 24:34). The end of the world obviously didn’t happen in the first century. . . .

This may not be a deliberate lie like we saw from God but rather a false statement, but the result is the same when it comes from an omniscient being.

This is an old chestnut of anti-theist atheist polemics. A plausible explanation (where Jesus would be referring both to His hearers’ generation and the end times) is explicated by Glenn Miller at the wonderful Christian Thinktank site:

[W]hen we notice the structure of the ending in Matthew and Mark, we see how some of the items lay out.

The ending has four points:

    1. The lesson of the fig tree (Mt 24.32-33; Mk 13.28-29; Lk 21.29-31) [e.g. “Even so, when you see these things happening, you know that it is near, right at the door.”]
    2. The “this generation” saying (Mt 24.34; Mk 13.30; Lk 21.32)
    3. The “heaven and earth will pass away” saying (Mt 24.35; Mk 13.31; Lk 21.33)
    4. The “no one knows the hour” saying (Mt 24.36; Mk 13.31; not in Luke)

Now, the Lesson of the fig tree (Point 1) can only be a reference to the destruction of the Temple/City. It draws a distinction between “all these things” and “it is near”–all these things cannot logically then contain the 2nd Advent [which is the “it” in “it is near”-cf. D.A.Carson, EBC, in. loc.; and William Lane in NICNT (Mark):478: “They (all these things) cannot refer to the celestial upheavals described in verses 24-25 which are inseparable from the parousia (verse 26) and the gathering of the elect (verse 27). These events represent the end and cannot constitute a preliminary sign of something else.”]

With this “end” of the end-time continuum being identified in Point 1 (as the “these things” question of the disciples), Jesus then solemnly announces WHEN this ‘beginning of the end-times’ will occur–within that generation (Point 2). With this, He has answered the initial question of the ‘these things’–the immediate historical context of the question of the destruction of the temple.

He then turns (in point 3 above) to describe the “other end” of the end-times continuum–the destruction of the universe (cf. 2 Peter 2.10: But the day of the Lord will come like a thief. The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire, and the earth and everything in it will be laid bare.). Here Jesus is pointing back to those descriptions of the very end, as in Mt 24.29: “Immediately after the distress of those days “`the sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give its light; the stars will fall from the sky, and the heavenly bodies will be shaken.’ and Lk 21.25f: On the earth, nations will be in anguish and perplexity at the roaring and tossing of the sea. 26 Men will faint from terror, apprehensive of what is coming on the world, for the heavenly bodies will be shaken. He points out that the Great End will be certain, as the continuance of His word is certain (yes!).

And then we have Point 4–the comment that no one but the Father knows the time of the Very-End. [The subsequent parables by Matt in 24.42ff and Luke in 12.39ff, which use the ‘thief’ image, connect this piece–via the 2 Peter quote above–with the Great-End, and NOT with the destruction of the Temple.]

So we have a reasonable structure for the ending sequence-(Point 1) pay attention to the beginning of signs; (Point 2) some of you will definitely see these beginnings; (Point 3) the Big-End pointed to by these signs will surely come; and (Point 4) but none of you can know when (with the implications that are immediately drawn in several of the texts to watchfulness, faithfulness, and industry.)

Thus, [F.F.] Bruce summarizes the same conclusion reached here . . .:

Jesus, as in Mark, foretells how not one stone of the temple will be left standing on another, and the disciples say, ‘Tell us, (a) when will these things be, and (b) what will be the sign of your coming and of the close of the age?’ (Matt. 24:3). Then, at the end of the following discourse, Jesus answers their twofold question by saying that (a) ‘this generation will not pass away till all these things take place (Mtt 24.34) while, (b) with regard to his coming and ‘the close of the age’, he tells them that ‘of that day and hour no one knows…’ [Hard Sayings of Jesus, IVP, 1983, 229-230]

This would yield a very nice Hebraic parallelism:

 (A) Pay attention to my words–they come before (pre-announce) these things–the beginning of the end-times (destruction of Temple)
(B) When will it occur?–You know when, within your generation
(A’) Pay attention to my words–they outlast that day–the ending of the end-times
(B’) When will it occur?–No one knows when (except the Father)

(“On…was Jesus mistaken about this 2nd Coming?”: 10-22-96)

For related in-depth analysis of this general subject matter, see my papers:

Debate with an Agnostic on the Meaning of “Last Days” and Whether the Author of Hebrews Was a False Prophet.

“The Last Days”: Meaning in Hebrew, Biblical Thought

God is untrustworthy

In a recent post, I noted that God bragged that he had deliberately given his people bad laws:

So I gave them other statutes that were not good and laws through which they could not live; I defiled them through their gifts—the sacrifice of every firstborn—that I might fill them with horror so they would know that I am the Lord (Ezekiel 20:25–6).

As always (shown by multiple analogous examples above), the primary causation of all this is man’s rebellion. It’s no different in this larger passage:

Ezekiel 20:8 But they rebelled against me and would not listen to me; they did not every man cast away the detestable things their eyes feasted on, nor did they forsake the idols of Egypt.

Ezekiel 20:13 But the house of Israel rebelled against me in the wilderness; they did not walk in my statutes but rejected my ordinances, by whose observance man shall live; and my sabbaths they greatly profaned.

Ezekiel 20:16 because they rejected my ordinances and did not walk in my statutes, and profaned my sabbaths; for their heart went after their idols.

Ezekiel 20:21 But the children rebelled against me; they did not walk in my statutes, and were not careful to observe my ordinances, by whose observance man shall live; they profaned my sabbaths.

Ezekiel 20:27-28 “Therefore, son of man, speak to the house of Israel and say to them, Thus says the Lord GOD: In this again your fathers blasphemed me, by dealing treacherously with me. [28] For when I had brought them into the land which I swore to give them, then wherever they saw any high hill or any leafy tree, there they offered their sacrifices and presented the provocation of their offering; there they sent up their soothing odors, and there they poured out their drink offerings.”

All that expressed, we also see the pungent Hebrew literary expression of God “giving them up” to their sins (cf. Micah 5:3; Acts 7:42; Rom 1:24-28; 2 Thess 2:11).

Since God has lied to us in the past, what’s to stop him from doing it again? . . . That’s the problem when you lie—now we can’t trust you about anything.

As I have shown, none of these alleged “lies” has been sufficiently proven . . . But Bob continually lies about God, Christianity, and Christians. That has been shown in these 35 refutations of mine.

Which of God’s current laws is also a deliberately bad law?

It was simply a sarcastic literary device. This is what Bob (along with the vast majority of anti-theist atheists) doesn’t grasp. But Bob gives the basic idea of the true meaning of the passage in citing 20:26, having to do with child sacrifice (very similar to our abortion today). Keil and Delitzsch elaborate:

It is perfectly self-evident that we are not to understand by these statutes and rights, which were not good, either the Mosaic commandments of the ceremonial law, as some of the Fathers and earlier Protestant commentators supposed, or the threatenings contained in the law; so that this needs no elaborate proof. The ceremonial commandments given by God were good, and had the promise attached to them, that obedience to them would give life; whilst the threats of punishment contained in the law are never called חקּים and משׁפּטים . Those statutes only are called “not good” the fulfilment of which did not bring life or blessings and salvation. The second clause serves as an explanation of the first. The examples quoted in Ezekiel 20:26 show what the words really mean. The defiling in their sacrificial gifts (Ezekiel 20:26), for example, consisted in their causing that which opened the womb to pass through, i.e., in the sacrifice of the first-born. העביר כּל־פּטר points back to Exodus 13:12; only ליהוה , which occurs in that passage, is omitted, because the allusion is not to the commandment given there, but to its perversion into idolatry. This formula is used in the book of Exodus ( l.c. ) to denote the dedication of the first-born to Jehovah; but in Ezekiel 20:13 this limitation is introduced, that the first-born of man is to be redeemed. העביר signifies a dedication through fire (= העביר בּאשׁ , Ezekiel 20:31), and is adopted in the book of Exodus, where it is joined to ליהוה , in marked opposition to the Canaanitish custom of dedicating children of Moloch by februation in fire (see the comm. on ex. Ezekiel 13:12). The prophet refers to this Canaanitish custom, and cites it as a striking example of the defilement of the Israelites in their sacrificial gifts ( טמּא , to make unclean, not to declare unclean, or treat as unclean). That this custom also made its way among the Israelites, is evident from the repeated prohibition against offering children through the fire to Moloch (Leviticus 18:21 and Deuteronomy 18:10). When, therefore, it is affirmed with regard to a statute so sternly prohibited in the law of God, that Jehovah gave it to the Israelites in the wilderness, the word נתן (give) can only be used in the sense of a judicial sentence, and must not be taken merely as indicating divine permission . . .

He hardened hearts to steer people away from the right path.

He did not, as I explained in depth, in two papers.

He demanded that Abraham sacrifice Isaac and then revealed that it was a ruse.

This is sheer nonsense, as I have also explained.

Sure, an all-powerful god can do whatever that he wants, but this god has shown himself to be untrustworthy.

In Bob’s fantasy world, this “god” has. But in the real world, where one must reason and present facts (and must subject one’s arguments to cross-examination and scrutiny), Bob has consistently failed to establish this.

Am I an atheist because God hardened my heart?

No; according to the Bible, rightly understood, it’s because he has hardened his own heart.

If so, why do I deserve hell when it was God’s doing?

It wasn’t His doing, as I have shown again and again. If Bob spends eternity in hell, it will be because of his deliberate obstinacy; his choice (that God allows him to make). It won’t be because of God, Who desires that none perish. Among many other things, God is providing these refutations of mine, to show Bob how he has greatly erred, and to provide him a way to reverse his rebellion and to repent and freely receive God’s offer of grace and salvation, by faith in Jesus Christ.

But, as we have seen, Bob ignores them. That’s how many folks are with regard to God. They simply ignore Him and go their merry way. Then at Judgment Day they finally get serious about the most important things in life, and (being atheist naysayers) accuse God of being unjust and not having adequately revealed Himself, etc. The time to repent and change one’s life is now: not at Judgment Day, when it’s too late.

***

Photo credit: Shinobu Kaitani (2005): Liar Game (ライアーゲーム) original manga logo. [source] [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

2019-07-25T12:23:28-04:00

Last updated on: July 25, 2019 at 12:23 pm   By

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker, who was “raised Presbyterian”, runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He also made a general statement on 6-22-17: “Christians’ arguments are easy to refute . . . I’ve heard the good stuff, and it’s not very good.” He added in the combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.” 

Such confusion would indeed be predictable, seeing that Bob himself admitted (2-13-16): “My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment.” I’m always one to oblige people’s wishes if I am able, so I decided to do a series of posts in reply. It’s also been said, “be careful what you wish for.”  If Bob responds to this post, and makes me aware of it, his reply will be added to the end along with my counter-reply. If you don’t see that, rest assured that he either hasn’t replied, or didn’t inform me that he did. But don’t hold your breath.

Bob (for the record) virtually begged and pleaded with me to dialogue with him in May 2018, via email. But by 10-3-18, following massive, childish name-calling attacks against me,  encouraged by Bob on his blog (just prior to his banning me from it), his opinion was as follows: “Dave Armstrong . . . made it clear that a thoughtful intellectual conversation wasn’t his goal. . . . [I] have no interest in what he’s writing about.”

And on 10-25-18, utterly oblivious to the ludicrous irony of his making the statement, Bob wrote in a combox on his blog: “The problem, it seems to me, is when someone gets these clues, like you, but ignores them. I suppose the act of ignoring could be deliberate or just out of apathy, but someone who’s not a little bit driven to investigate cognitive dissonance will just stay a Christian, fat ‘n sassy and ignorant.” Again, Bob mocks some Christian in his combox on 10-27-18: “You can’t explain it to us, you can’t defend it, you can’t even defend it to yourself. Defend your position or shut up about it. It’s clear you have nothing.” And again on the same day: “If you can’t answer the question, man up and say so.” And on 10-26-18: “you refuse to defend it, after being asked over and over again.” And again: “You’re the one playing games, equivocating, and being unable to answer the challenges.” Bob’s cowardly hypocrisy knows no bounds. He still hasn’t yet uttered one peep in reply to — now — 33 of my critiques of his atrocious reasoning.

Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, word-search “Seidensticker” on my atheist page or search “Seidensticker Folly #” in my sidebar search (near the top).

*****

In his article, The Leaky Noah’s Ark Tale (2 of 2) (9-2-16; updated from a post on 7-4-13), Bible-Basher Bob pontificates:

What was going through God’s mind?

Here’s how God begins the project.

[Jehovah] regretted that he had made human beings on the earth, and his heart was deeply troubled. So [Jehovah] said, “I will wipe from the face of the earth the human race I have created—and with them the animals, the birds and the creatures that move along the ground—for I regret that I have made them.” (Gen. 6:6–7)

God regrets? God changes his mind? As an omniscient being, why didn’t he see this coming? . . . 

But in the early days, of course, God was merely powerful, not omniscient. And not particularly benevolent either.

I covered this general ground in my treatment of anthropopathism last time. The present issue involves the same dynamics; that is: the Bible states something about God that human beings can relate to. He (at least prima facie in the text, interpreted literally) thinks differently now about something He did. So the text says that He “regretted” it.

Kevin DeYoung, writing at The Gospel Coalition site, stated:

The word of the Lord came to Samuel: “I regret that I have made Saul king, for he has turned back from following me and has not performed my commandments.” (1 Samuel 15:10-11)

In 1 Samuel 15:35, we see a similar statement:

And Samuel did not see Saul again until the day of his death, but Samuel grieved over Saul. And the Lord regretted that he had made Saul king over Israel.

Strong words. And surprising too. What does it mean for God to say “I regret”? Can God change his mind? Can we thwart God’s plans? Is God ignorant about the future? Is God just like us in that he makes honest mistakes and sometimes look back at his decisions and says, “Golly, I wish I could do that one over again”? It seems like our God makes mistakes and is forced to change course.

And yet, we know this is not the right way to understand God’s regret because of what we read a few verses earlier in 1 Samuel 15:

And Samuel said to him, “The Lord has torn the kingdom of Israel from you this day and has given it to a neighbor of yours, who is better than you. And also the Glory of Israel will not lie or have regret, for he is not a man, that he should have regret.” (28-29)

. . . As God’s ways appear to us, there will be change and variation, but as God is in his character and essence there can be no variation of shadow due to change (James 1:17; cf. Mal.3:6; Heb. 13:8; 2 Tim. 2:13). (“Does God Have Regret?”, 10-7-14)

The magnificent multi-volume Keil & Delitzsch Commentary on the Old Testament elaborates a bit more:

To confirm his own words, he adds in 1 Samuel 15:29 : “ And also the Trust of Israel doth not lie and doth not repent, for He is not a man to repent .” נצח signifies constancy, endurance, then confidence, trust, because a man can trust in what is constant. . . . the context suggests the idea of unchangeableness. For a man’s repentance or regret arises from his changeableness, from the fluctuations in his desires and actions. This is never the case with God; consequently He is ישׂראל נצח , the unchangeable One, in whom Israel can trust, since He does not lie or deceive, or repent of His purposes . These words are spoken θεοπρεπῶς (theomorphically), whereas in 1 Samuel 15:11 and other passages, which speak of God as repenting, the words are to be understood ἀνθρωποπαθῶς (anthropomorphically; cf. Numbers 23:19).

Here is the latter passage in RSV:

Numbers 23:19 God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should repent. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfil it?

The word, anthropomorphically is used several other times in the Keil & Delitzsch Commentary, as we learn from a search function at the online version. Here are two examples:

[Exodus 33:18-23] The manifested glory of the Lord would so surely be followed by the destruction of man, that even Moses needed to be protected before it (Exodus 33:21, Exodus 33:22). Whilst Jehovah, therefore, allowed him to come to a place upon the rock near Him, i.e., upon the summit of Sinai (Exodus 34:2), He said that He would put him in a cleft of the rock whilst He was passing by, and cover him with His hand when He had gone by, that he might see His back, because His face could not be seen. The back, as contrasted with the face, signifies the reflection of the glory of God that had just passed by. The words are transferred anthropomorphically from man to God, because human language and human thought can only conceive of the nature of the absolute Spirit according to the analogy of the human form. As the inward nature of man manifests itself in his face, and the sight of his back gives only an imperfect and outward view of him, so Moses saw only the back and not the face of Jehovah. It is impossible to put more into human words concerning this unparalleled vision, which far surpasses all human thought and comprehension.

Keil & Delitzsch comment on the very passage that Bob brought up:

[Genesis 6:5-8] Now when the wickedness of man became great, and “ every imagination of the thoughts of his heart was only evil the whole day ,” i.e., continually and altogether evil, it repented God that He had made man, and He determined to destroy them. . . .

The force of ינּחם , “it repented the Lord,” may be gathered from the explanatory יתעצּב , “it grieved Him at His heart.” This shows that the repentance of God does not presuppose any variableness in His nature of His purposes. In this sense God never repents of anything (1 Samuel 15:29), “ quia nihil illi inopinatum vel non praevisum accidit ” ( Calvin ). The repentance of God is an anthropomorphic expression for the pain of the divine love at the sin of man, and signifies that “God is hurt no less by the atrocious sins of men than if they pierced His heart with mortal anguish” ( Calvin ).

Dr. Bert Thompson, writing for the wonderful Apologetics Press site in 2003 (“Why does God Sometimes Repent?”) observes:

On occasion, within Scripture we find the comment made that God “repented” of certain actions (or intended actions) on His part. [e.g., Jonah 3:10 (RSV): “When God saw what they did, how they turned from their evil way, God repented of the evil which he had said he would do to them; and he did not do it.”] . . .

[D]uring the Patriarchal Age in which they were living, Noah and his contemporaries had received instructions on how to live righteously (see 1 Peter 3:18-20), and as long as they continued in this manner, God’s presence and blessings would abide with them. But when they became sinful and unrepentant, He no longer could condone their actions. As a consequence of their sinful rebelliousness, God withdrew His spirit (Genesis 6:3), and pledged to send a flood to destroy all mankind except Noah and his immediate family (6:7). God was grieved (6:6), not because He did not know that this series of events would happen, or because He somehow “regretted” having created man in the first place, but because, having given man the choice to serve Him or reject Him, man had chosen the latter with such unanimity. . . .

The examples described above (from Genesis 6 and Jonah 3) represent situations in which God’s actions were necessary because of the fact that man, although created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:26-27), had morphed into a sinful creature. Thus, God’s decision to judge man via a universal flood, or to destroy the inhabitants of an entire city, was dependent upon man’s (negative) response to the conditions of righteousness that God had imposed at an earlier time via His divine commands. . . .

Consider the following passage.

At what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to pluck up, and to pull down, and to destroy it; if that nation, against whom I have pronounced, turn from their evil, I will repent of the evil that I thought to do unto them. And at what instant I shall speak concerning a nation, and concerning a kingdom, to build and to plant it; if it do evil in my sight, that it obey not my voice, then I will repent of the good, wherewith I said I would benefit them (Jeremiah 18:7-10).

This passage is an explicit statement of the very principle under consideration here—i.e., God’s plan or rule of conduct in dealing with man. God’s promises and/or threats may be either directly stated, or implied. Whenever God, in reacting to a change of character or intent in certain persons, does not execute the threats, nor fulfill the promises He made to them, the reason is clear. If a wicked man turns from his wickedness, God no longer holds the threat against him. If a righteous man turns from righteousness to wickedness, God withdraws the previously promised blessings. It is precisely because God is immutable that His relationship to men, and/or His treatment of them, varies with the changes in their conduct. When the Scriptures thus speak of “God having repented,” the wording is accommodative (viz., written from a human vantage point). As Samuel Davidson has well said: “When repentance is attributed to God, it implies a change in His mode of dealing with men, such as would indicate on their part a change of purpose” (1843, p. 527). From a human vantage point, we view God’s act(s) as “repentance.” But, in reality, God’s immutable law has not changed one iota; only the response of man to that law has changed. Seen in this light, God cannot be accused of any self-contradictory attributes.

Bob (always fair to and accurate about God at all times) also opined: “in the early days, of course, God was merely powerful, not omniscient.” I disposed of this self-serving, complately groundless and arbitrary myth about the Bible and its presentation of God’s attributes in the paper: Seidensticker Folly #20: An Evolving God in the OT? (God’s Omnipotence, Omniscience, & Omnipresence in Early Bible Books & Ancient Jewish Understanding).

It’s one thing to simply state, “I don’t believe or accept what the Bible / Christianity teaches.” We understand that this is (broadly speaking) the position of the atheist.

It’s quite another, on the other hand, to state, “The Bible teaches particulars x, y, and z” [in this case, the claim is submitted that God repents or regrets just as men do, and is therefore changeable and not immutable, as classic and orthodox Christianity holds], which opens one up to the possibility of being shown that the claims made are demonstrably false statements as to fact.

The necessity of interpretation is inescapable. If atheists wish to enter into serious, in-depth discussions about what the Bible actually teaches, they’re going to have to understand (at least in a rudimentary way) biblical exegesis and hermeneutics, and the wide variety of literary genre present in the Bible: as it is in all languages and cultures of all times. They are in our realm when they want to intelligently discuss the Bible (to the extent that they actually do that).

Bob (typically of atheists) doesn’t do that at all. He assumes that 1) Christians are stupid and ignorant, and that 2) the ancient Hebrews were stupid and ignorant (therefore, so is the Bible). Then he proceeds to “tear down” what he has only a very dim comprehension of in the first place: thus presenting (irony of ironies!) a very stupid and ignorant critique of this, that, or the other in Holy Scripture.

And I will keep pointing out the flimsiness and fallaciousness of all such pseudo-“arguments” as Bob almost certainly continues to offer ample and golden opportunities to do so.

***

Photo credit: God’s Judgment upon Gog (1852), by Asher Brown Durand (1796-1886) [public domain / Wikimedia Commons]

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2019-07-24T13:05:05-04:00

Last updated on: July 24, 2019 at 1:05 pm   By

Atheist and anti-theist Bob Seidensticker, who was “raised Presbyterian”, runs the influential Cross Examined blog. He asked me there, on 8-11-18: “I’ve got 1000+ posts here attacking your worldview. You just going to let that stand? Or could you present a helpful new perspective that I’ve ignored on one or two of those posts?” He also made a general statement on 6-22-17: “Christians’ arguments are easy to refute . . . I’ve heard the good stuff, and it’s not very good.” He added in the combox: “If I’ve misunderstood the Christian position or Christian arguments, point that out. Show me where I’ve mischaracterized them.” 

Such confusion would indeed be predictable, seeing that Bob himself admitted (2-13-16): “My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment.” I’m always one to oblige people’s wishes if I am able, so I decided to do a series of posts in reply. It’s also been said, “be careful what you wish for.”  If Bob responds to this post, and makes me aware of it, his reply will be added to the end along with my counter-reply. If you don’t see that, rest assured that he either hasn’t replied, or didn’t inform me that he did. But don’t hold your breath.

Bob (for the record) virtually begged and pleaded with me to dialogue with him in May 2018, via email. But by 10-3-18, following massive, childish name-calling attacks against me,  encouraged by Bob on his blog (just prior to his banning me from it), his opinion was as follows: “Dave Armstrong . . . made it clear that a thoughtful intellectual conversation wasn’t his goal. . . . [I] have no interest in what he’s writing about.”

And on 10-25-18, utterly oblivious to the ludicrous irony of his making the statement, Bob wrote in a combox on his blog: “The problem, it seems to me, is when someone gets these clues, like you, but ignores them. I suppose the act of ignoring could be deliberate or just out of apathy, but someone who’s not a little bit driven to investigate cognitive dissonance will just stay a Christian, fat ‘n sassy and ignorant.” Again, Bob mocks some Christian in his combox on 10-27-18: “You can’t explain it to us, you can’t defend it, you can’t even defend it to yourself. Defend your position or shut up about it. It’s clear you have nothing.” And again on the same day: “If you can’t answer the question, man up and say so.” And on 10-26-18: “you refuse to defend it, after being asked over and over again.” And again: “You’re the one playing games, equivocating, and being unable to answer the challenges.” Bob’s cowardly hypocrisy knows no bounds. He still hasn’t yet uttered one peep in reply to — now — 32 of my critiques of his atrocious reasoning.

Bob’s words will be in blue. To find these posts, word-search “Seidensticker” on my atheist page or search “Seidensticker Folly #” in my sidebar search (near the top).

*****

In his article, Top 10 Most Common Atheist Arguments—Do They Fail? (2 of 4) (7-19-19; update of a post dated 6-29-15), Bible-Basher Bob pontificated:

We typically give Christians a pass when they list God’s properties—it’s their religion, so why not? But the Bible gives some very human limitations on God.

  • God changed his mind: “The Lord changed his mind about the disaster that he planned to bring on his people” (Exodus 32:10–14). He dithered about whether Balaam (the one with the talking donkey) should go on his trip or not (Numbers 22).
  • God doesn’t know everything: “I will go down [to Sodom] and see if what they have done is as bad as the outcry that has reached me” (Genesis 18:21). . . . 
  • God regrets.
  • God lies.

I shall deal with the last two false accusations in papers devoted to each (my next two). Bible-Basher Bob links to involved papers in both instances. I shall dismantle those, and indeed, they are based on the same profound and inexcusable dunce-level ignorance (of the same type) that I am presently critiquing.

This is truly garden variety atheist playbook / boilerplate stuff: complete (I kid you not) with the classic “Can God make a rock so heavy he can’t lift it?” I find it hilariously funny, from my perspective as an apologist, because it is an ongoing silliness that the anti-theist atheist (Bible-Basher Bob being an absolutely classic and quintessential example) prides himself or herself as so intellectually superior to us poor ignorant Christians, who are so stupid and idiotic, and who supposedly believe the most ridiculous things.

But the last laugh turns out to be on him. He is abominably ignorant about rather humdrum, common aspects of biblical scholarship. I hate to upset Bob’s little “ignorance is bliss” fantasy-bubble (it’s like the spank when a baby is born), but (sorry!), here I come with the pin . . .  

When we are faced with alleged biblical contradictions of God changing His mind (a violation of His immutability) or acting as if He is limited in knowledge (which would contradict omniscience), it is a question of biblical anthropopathism. I’ve written about and explained this aspect, and it is nothing new, either. It was widely written about by the Church fathers, prior to the 7th  century and almost back to the beginning of Christianity. For example, Origen (c. 185 – c. 254):

And now, if, on account of those expressions which occur in the Old Testament, as when God is said to be angry or to repent, or when any other human affection or passion is described, (our opponents) think that they are furnished with grounds for refuting us, who maintain that God is altogether impassible, and is to be regarded as wholly free from all affections of that kind, we have to show them that similar statements are found even in the parables of the Gospel; as when it is said, that he who planted a vineyard, and let it out to husbandmen, who slew the servants that were sent to them, and at last put to death even the son, is said in anger to have taken away the vineyard from them, and to have delivered over the wicked husbandmen to destruction, and to have handed over the vineyard to others, who would yield him the fruit in its season. And so also with regard to those citizens who, when the head of the household had set out to receive for himself a kingdom, sent messengers after him, saying, We will not have this man to reign over us; for the head of the household having obtained the kingdom, returned, and in anger commanded them to be put to death before him, and burned their city with fire. But when we read either in the Old Testament or in the New of the anger of God, we do not take such expressions literally, but seek in them a spiritual meaning, that we may think of God as He deserves to be thought of. And on these points, when expounding the verse in the second Psalm, Then shall He speak to them in His anger, and trouble them in His fury, we showed, to the best of our poor ability, how such an expression ought to be understood. (De Principiis, 2, 4, 4; ANF, vol. 4)

But as, in what follows, Celsus, not understanding that the language of Scripture regarding God is adapted to an anthropopathic point of view, ridicules those passages which speak of words of anger addressed to the ungodly, and of threatenings directed against sinners, we have to say that, as we ourselves, when talking with very young children, do not aim at exerting our own power of eloquence, but, adapting ourselves to the weakness of our charge, both say and do those things which may appear to us useful for the correction and improvement of the children as children, so the word of God appears to have dealt with the history, making the capacity of the hearers, and the benefit which they were to receive, the standard of the appropriateness of its announcements (regarding Him). And, generally, with regard to such a style of speaking about God, we find in the book of Deuteronomy the following: “The Lord thy God bare with your manners, as a man would bear with the manners of his son.” It is, as it were, assuming the manners of a man in order to secure the advantage of men that the Scripture makes use of such expressions; for it would not have been suitable to the condition of the multitude, that what God had to say to them should be spoken by Him in a manner more befitting the majesty of His own person. And yet he who is anxious to attain a true understanding of holy Scripture, will discover the spiritual truths which are spoken by it to those who are called “spiritual,” by comparing the meaning of what is addressed to those of weaker mind with what is announced to such as are of acuter understanding, both meanings being frequently found in the same passage by him who is capable of comprehending it. (Contra Celsus, 4, 71; in ANF, Vol. 4)

I gave a fairly short explanation in my own paper on the topic:

God “condescends” to the limited understanding of human beings, by expressing many truths about himself analogically (as compared to human actions and emotions) so that we can understand Him at all. Otherwise, we would not be able to comprehend a Being so startlingly different and distinct from us and greater than we are. Thus, the passages (in this framework) that say He doesn’t and cannot change are to be interpreted literally, while the ones stating the opposite are to be interpreted figuratively or metaphorically or anthropopathically. 

The International Standard Bible Encyclopedia (“Anthropomorphism”) provides a more in-depth definition:

1. Definition of the Term:

By this term is meant, conformably with its etymological signification, i.e. as being in the form or likeness of man, the attribution to God of human form, parts or passions, and the taking of Scripture passages which speak of God as having hands, or eyes, or ears, in a literal sense. This anthropomorphic procedure called forth Divine rebuke so early as Psalms 50:21:

“Thou thoughtest that I was altogether such a one as thyself.”

[RSV: “you thought that I was one like yourself.”]

2. Old Testament Anthropomorphisms:

Fear of the charge of anthropomorphism has had a strangely deterrent effect upon many minds, but very needlessly so. Even that rich storehouse of apparently crude anthropomorphisms, the Old Testament, when it ascribes to Deity physical characters, mental and moral attributes, like those of man, merely means to make the Divine nature and operations intelligible, not to transfer to Him the defects and limitations of human character and life.

3. In What Senses an Anthropomorphic Element Is Necessity:

In all really theistic forms of religion, there is an anthropomorphic element present, for they all presuppose the psychological truth of a certain essential likeness between God and man. Nor, perfect as we may our theistic idea or conception of Deity, can we, in the realm of spirit, ever wholly eliminate the anthropomorphic element involved in this assumption, without which religion itself were not. It is of the essence of the religious consciousness to recognize the analogy subsisting between God’s relations to man, and man’s relations to his fellow.

The Bible repeatedly teaches that God is omniscient:

God alone is omniscient

1 Chronicles 28:9 [RSV] …the LORD searches all hearts, and understands every plan and thought.… (cf. 1 Ki 8:39; 2 Chr 6:30; Ps 44:21; Is 66:18; Ezek 11:5; Mt 6:8; Lk 16:15; Acts 1:24; Rom 8:27; Heb 4:13)

Psalm 147:5 Great is our LORD, and abundant in power;  his understanding is beyond measure. (cf. Job 36:4; 37:16; Is 40:28; 46:10; 48:3; Acts 15:18)

Romans 11:33 O the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways!

1 John 3:20 …God is greater than our hearts, and he knows everything.

Jesus is omniscient

John 16:30 Now we know that you know all things,… (cf. 21:17)

Colossians 2:3 in whom are hid all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.

Revelation 2:23 …I am he who searches mind and heart…. (cf. 1 Chr 28:9)

Omniscience is also implied (though not proven) in many passages that describe Jesus’ extraordinary knowledge; these are consistent with omniscience (Mt 9:4; 12:25; Mk 2:8; 14:13-15; Lk 5:22; 6:8; 9:47; 22:10-13; Jn 2:24-25; 4:17-19, 29; 6:64; 13:11).

Additionally, there are many other verses illustrating that Jesus knew the future perfectly, which is consistent with, and suggestive of omniscience, though not a proof (Mt 12:40; 13:1; 16:21; 17:9, 11-12, 22-23; 20:18-19; 21:39; 24:2; 26:2, 12, 21, 31-34, 54; Mk 8:31; 9:31; 10:32-34; 14:9, 18, 27-30, 42, 49; Lk 9:22, 44; 11:30; 12:50; 17:25; 18:31-33; 22:15, 21-22, 32, 34, 37; Jn 2:19; 3:14; 10:11, 15, 17-18; 12:32-34; 13:18-21; 14:19; 15:13; 16:20; 18:4, 11; 21:18-19).

God is also immutable (cannot change). St. Thomas Aquinas refers to anthropopathism and metaphorical attribution of human qualities to God:

Objection 3. Further, to approach and to recede signify movement. But these are said of God in Scripture, “Draw nigh to God and He will draw nigh to you” (James 4:8). Therefore God is mutable.

[ . . . ]

Reply to Objection 3. These things are said of God in Scripture metaphorically. For as the sun is said to enter a house, or to go out, according as its rays reach the house, so God is said to approach to us, or to recede from us, when we receive the influx of His goodness, or decline from Him.

As so often, atheists (many of them, alas, former fundamentalists or otherwise relatively theologically uneducated in their past Christian lives) interpret Scripture with a wooden literalism, that massively and relentlessly fails to take into account the rich storehouse of literary genres and expressions (including many figurative, hyperbolic, analogical or otherwise non-literal ones) in the thinking of ancient near eastern / Hebrew culture. This leads them into making many foolish arguments, that — far from revealing ancient Hebrew, biblical, or Christian ignorance –, spectacularly and ironically displays their own.

This is one such example. And in the previous 32 installments where I have refuted Bob’s contentions, I showed repeatedly how he neglects of ignores this aspect. It’s embarrassing to have to point out such basic things, but it is what it is. I delved into this aspect at great length in one of my “contra-Bob” papers in particular: Seidensticker Folly #25: Jesus’ Alleged Mustard Seed Error. Excerpts:

Bible scholar E. W. Bullinger catalogued “over 200 distinct figures [in the Bible], several of them with from 30 to 40 varieties.” That is a a statement from the Introduction to his 1104-page tome, Figures of Speech Used in the Bible (London: 1898). I have this work in my own library (hardcover). It’s also available for free, online.  . . .

Bible scholar Kyle Butt, in an article on biblical hyperbole, compares the biblical usage of this type of figurative language to the same kind of application today:

We who use the English language are quite familiar with the use of hyperbole, even though we may not be as familiar with the term itself. When a teenager explains to her parent that “everybody” is going to be at the party, does she mean that literally the world’s population of 6.6 billion people will be there? Of course she does not. She is intentionally exaggerating to make a point. When a teacher explains to his class that “everybody” knows who the first president of the United States was, does the teacher believe all toddlers can correctly answer the question? No. Once again, the teacher is simply using a well-understood figure of speech to convey a point.

In a similar way, the Bible uses hyperbole on numerous occasions. Take John 4:39 as an example. In this passage, a Samaritan woman spoke of Jesus and said: “He told me all that I ever did” (emp. added). Had Jesus really told that woman everything that she had ever done in her life? No, she was using hyperbole to make her point.

In that article, I was only dealing with hyperbole (or, exaggeration): which is but one (though very common) Hebrew non-literal “technique.” The point is that there are many instances where biblical language is not literal, and was never intended to be. The culture at the time understood that, just as we do, today: per the analogies provided in the previous cited paragraph. But somehow many atheists and other biblical skeptics forget all this when they approach the Bible, and all of a sudden everything is interpreted literally. Thus, the Bible (so they think) “obviously” contains many glaring contradictions.

Bob, oblivious to all these explanations, responded to a Christian in the combox of this paper of his, who pointed out to him that sound explanations do exist: “These verses all have bull&%*$ explanations. To see this, explain them yourself and see how convincing they are.” That’s the level he’s at. He knows everything about the Bible, and apparently feels that he can learn nothing. Like I made note of above: I hate to bust his bubble, but folks have to visit [biblical] reality at some point. We can’t all dwell in a mere fantasy land like children often do. Bob will have to realize and acknowledge his own massive ignorance and prejudice (per Socrates’ sage advice) in order to truly learn about the Bible and Christianity.

As it is, his anti-Bible and anti-Christian arguments are relentlessly stupid and ignorant, and one tires of having to explain elementary things relating to literary genre over and over. I hate to be so crass and blunt, but I mean this literally (not figuratively!), and I sure know what I’m talking about, having now directly refuted his nonsense 33 times. Atheists like Bible-Basher Bob are, in effect, trying to do trigonometry or calculus, when they haven’t even gotten their basic arithmetic and times tables mastered.

***

Photo credit: [PublicDomainPictures.Net / CC0 Public Domain]

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