A Look at Literature

I'm still plugging away at Karen Armstrong's volume "A History of God". The material is dense, and I'm learning quite a bit. I appreciate her acumen, her narrative style, and her sidelong humour. But after finishing Bart Ehrman's relevant but, sadly, anticlimactic book "God's Problem: How the Bible Fails to Answer Our Most Important Question -- Why We Suffer", I needed a change of pace.

Truth-seeking can be a dogged business. And what with the swath of contrarian, and anti-religious literature I've been slogging through this past year, I thought it might be apropos to turn my obstinance toward some new, not necessarily 'Christian' apologetics for religious faith. To start, I have these two gems:

I'm not that far into this little volume, but so far, Timothy Keller seems to be an astute, articulate, and compassionate writer. He has an easy writing style, he's a logic-hound, and he pulls from a wide base of sources: literature, philosophy, movies, etc. What's not to like? I suppose I may find that out.

Then there's this one:

David Berlinski is not a favourite amongst the celebrities of the scientific communities. People like PZ Myers have a spartan hate on for Berlinski. Richard Dawkins considers Berlinski a 'flea'; but anyone reading Dawkins will understand that even yippy chihuahua's are not immune from being bitten. And that is just what Berlinski proposes to do in his crafty little volume: take a bite out of Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, and Harris (a.k.a., The Four Horsemen). I'm sure that if I can mark out the margins of my books with the gross, and indecent errors of these four quixotic heroes of atheism, a world-renowned raconteur like Berlinski should be able to cripple them, and the horses they rode in on.

Authority and the Church P. V

This is a rather long series, isn't it? Well, it was quite a long debate, to be honest. So here's part V. There will be several more parts to come. Enjoy!

Tim. Christopher.

"What are the reasons for the way Church has become? The traditions of men have nullified the word of God. Matt .15:6-9"

This is only true if a) the Word of God is not being preached, taught, and lived; and b) if those traditions are considered binding without the support of Scripture (indulgences, for example, or disallowing dancing, or prohibiting alcohol).

It is most emphatically not true that voluntary participation in traditions, such as the liturgy, is a hinderance to the faith-life of a Christian and his communication with our Lord.

"They have patterned themselves after the world and not after Christ. Col.2:8"

Who is 'they' in this passage, Tim? Or in other words, in what way are you intending to use this passage of Scripture to back your perspective?

"beware lest any man spoil you through philosophy and vain deceit, after the tradition of men, after the rudiments of the world, and not after Christ."

That's all fine and stuff, but it has no real bearing on this conversation unless you can somehow provide some context for your use of this Scripture.

It can very well be argued that the Scripture you cited is an argument against the heretical sects, and pagan religions present at the time Paul wrote, even currently. It could also be a warning against the philosophies of pleasure (hedonism, and epicurianism) rampant amongst the affluent members of society at the time and, again, currently.

How are you using this passage? If you state that you're using this passage against the leadership of conventional churches, then you need to qualify it. Simply throwing Scripture at me doesn't make a defense of your position; it sets up the expectation that I have to intuit your meaning from a hodge-podge of passages, and somehow waive-off the fact that you seemed to have used 'proof-texting' as your method of argumentation.

"They regard the traditions of the world above the scriptures. Celebrating Babylonians feasts such as Easter and Christmas."

Again, who is 'they'?

Now, you've listed two traditions: the celebration of Christmas, and Easter. You've called them 'Babylonian', I'm assuming because of their approximate resemblance to mid-east mithraic customs, and pagan festivities reflecting fertility cycles (winter=death; spring=life). Simple question: do you think that reclaiming certain celebratory ideas for Christ is wrong?

In any case, perhaps you could explain why celebrating the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ is 'Babylonian', or wrong? I'm intensely curious about your point of view on this issue, to be honest.

"Unbiblical hierarchal leadership that takes titles to themselves (Reverend, Pope, His holiness) with top down authority with every one else beneath them. Jesus called this the Nicolaitan doctrine which things he hates. Rev.2:15"

Yeah, titles are a bit of a bore. They certainly don't have any compelling authority in and of themselves, and lots of people disregard them even though they've been given them. Nevertheless, you've incorrectly identified the doctrine of the Nicolaitans, who were to the best of our knowledge a sect of hedonists (people who seek pleasure as the highest good). The Catholic Encyclopedia notes the following from Irenaeus, the single-most influential scholar and early church minister from about AD 120:

Catholic Encyclopedia wrote:
Irenaeus (Adv. haer., I, xxvi, 3; III, xi, I) discusses them but adds nothing to the Apocalypse except that "they lead lives of unrestrained indulgence."

So saying, there is historically nothing to do with the Nicolaitans that has anything to do with top-down authority. In fact, they were a small, short-lived, chaotic group of pleasure seekers with very little authoritarianism except that authority that is pleasure. Your use of Scripture in this instance is misplaced, and doesn't support your premise that the authority excercised by heirarchical church governments is ungodly.

"The people themselves love to have it this way."

Which 'people'?

"(the prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so; and what will ye do in the end thereof? Jer.5:31)"

1. You've used this passage out of context. Jeremiah was talking about people belonging to false religions, doing evil deeds, and having prophets and priests to endorse the false religions and evil deeds. That's not on parallel with churches today having a governmental structure where priests, or pastors preach the Word of God regularly, regardless of their ignorance on other matters.

2. I hardly think people being ignorant of different ways of meeting together for fellowship qualifies as false prophesy, or obstinate and purposeful disregard for God's desire that we should fellowship in our homes.

"They would rather have a man stand up front and lead them while they are passive instead of seeking and following the Lord for themselves. This is why this kind of gathering fosters spiritual infants."

That's a mutually enabling relationship, Tim. By that I mean that each one is at fault for his/her own 'spiritual infancy', or laziness. It is an improper model of relationship between believers, for sure, but doesn't qualify either the leaders or the congregants (gatherers) as having evil intent, or being blasphemers, or that they as individuals are in disobedience of God. They may be, but we don't know, and we can't assume that based on the form that they choose for gathering. To do so would be a direct transgression of the 8th Commandment (as I mentioned earlier), "do not bear false witness against your neighbour."

"This nation is a nation that obey not the voice of the Lord their God, nor receiveth correction: truth is perished and is cut off from their mouth. Jer. 7:28"

Again, you've taken Scripture out of context. This passage is in the larger context of Jeremiah being told by God to tell the Hebrews of his generation that they were worse than their fathers who were brought out of Egypt. If you want to apply it to the church today, then give the Scripture some context within your argument. Otherwise, all that's left for me to say is, "okay. So?"

But besides that, how do you reconcile the fact that there are thousands of churches daily applying the Word of God, preaching the Word of God, and giving godly counsel, and that this Scripture is not universally applicable to all believers? 'Cause if it is, my friend, you're guilty of the same thing you're charging others of.

On a different note, Tim, I would like to re-focus this discussion. If you would be willing, it would be a more beneficial use of our time, and conversation if we could agree on a specific topic to look at. Right now, there are several topics at hand: leadership, heirarchy, qualifications to leadership, and contextualization of Scripture to present day. All of these topics are huge in and of themselves, and I'd like to deal with each of them in a more focused manner; that would lend integrity to the topics, which are important to both you, and me.

So my proposal is this: let's discuss what the nature of religious authority actually is. Where is authority derived from? How is it best used? Are Christian leaders vested with specific authority to lead, teach, and make decisions for the betterment of Christians near them? Etc.

How Hitchens Poisons Logic

Christopher Hitchens's international bestseller god is not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is a poignant but embittered look at the effects and influence of religion in history, and the modern world.  I commented briefly about the book a while ago in an article called "The Muppets and Christopher Hitchens".  Still, I think Eric Reitan gives voice to one of the major flaws of Hitchens's work in the following quote:

But to say these things requires an account of what I mean by "religion." Instead of offering his own account, Hitchens' strategy seems to be this: if it is good, noble, or tends to inspire compassion, then it isn't "religion." It is "humanism" or something of the sort. With no clear definition to guide him, Hitchens is free to locate only what is cruel, callous, insipid, or banal in the camp of religion, while excluding anything that could reliably motivate the heroic moral action exemplified by Bonhoeffer and King. When "religion" is never defined, but in practice is treated so that only what is poisonous qualifies, it becomes trivially easy to conclude that "religion poisons everything."

IS GOD A DELUSION? A REPLY TO RELIGION'S CULTURED DESPISERS (WILEY-BLACKWELL: DEC. 3, 2008), P. 19.

Essentially, if you set out to state a thing is bad, and then remove all the good from it, you're left with the bad.  Hitchens's logic on this count is rancorous and amounts to nothing more than affirming the consequent; that is, if religion poisons everything then religion is bad; religion poisons everything, therefore religion is bad.  Hitchens does nothing to either define religion, or allow for any of the good that religion provides (that fellow atheists like Dennett and Dawkins freely admit) to be part of his definition of 'religion'.  He simply removes everything that stands in the way of his assumed conclusion that 'religion is poisonous' and works from there.  A very disingenuous move to say the least.

Thanks to Afterall.net for this one.

Authority and the Church P. III

It's been a while, but I thought I'd revisit the issue of authority and the church. The first two installments of this debate I entertained are here, and here. My comments will be in black, and TJG's will be in red.

Having said that, I have to ask a few questions in return: what makes you think that doing Church as a House Church will avoid any of the partitioning, and pandering that accompanies conventional churches? And just to keep in focus with your question a little more, why do you think a house church model will avoid the pitfalls and downswings of churches as they've been through the centuries?

"Meeting in our homes doesn’t ensure anything will be what it is suppose to be. Meeting in the home is not a guard against a Diotrephes but it his the wisdom of God to gather as a family in ones home"

Absolutely it is the 'wisdom of God' to gather in one's home. I have no quarrel with you there. My concern is that you've written off a large portion of history, and thousands of years (2000, that is) of people meeting in larger houses affectionately known as the 'house of God' all for a change in location. If I can venture a bit of sarcasm without it being taken as hostility, you've exchanged mitigation for mortgages. In other words, you've exchanged a bigger building for a smaller building. But practically speaking, meeting in the home is valid, for sure. But not meeting in the home, and opting for a larger place to gather in not invalidated by other Christians meeting in their homes.

But more to the point, the necessity of meeting in homes was a fact of Roman persecution. The apostles and the early Christians met in homes because the influence of the Hellenic Jewish community around them was oppressive, and the Romans were obliged to apply the law to Christians since they were viewed as upstarts, rebels, and a disturbance to the peace. It didn't take 50 years after Christ's death before Jerusalem was burnt to the ground and the Christians were blamed (AD 70)! If they didn't all want to get nailed shut into their public buildings and burnt alive, or worse, they had to meet in secret. Thus the origin of the icthus (the symbol of the fish, or the first letter of the Greek alphabet, alpha): it was a symbol used in secret to identify without speaking who was a Christian. One person would etch the first arch of the symbol into the ground with a walking stick, or their foot, and the one passing by would intersect the arch with the completing arch. Then the two passers-by knew each other as Christians.

Oppression and persecution drove people into their homes, caves, catacombs, and tombs until roughly AD 313; why don't we meet in caves, or tombs then, if we want to be biblically and historically pure, Tim? The fact that the apostles started meeting with people in their homes was not only a Jewish custom at the time, it was also a matter of being a seed community. That is, a fledgling group of believers with no financial clout, and no ability or influence to gain a public building of their choice. Given all that, I'm concerned that 'house church' is simply a different format for doing church and is no more right, or wrong than church as it presently is. God isn't stopped, or slowed by methodology, or location. Geography isn't a barrier to our Lord.

"it is how the apostles brought the body to relate and function together with out any kind of dedicated edifice for that function."

Because it was their only option. I mean, aside from the caves, catacombs, and tombs I mentioned earlier.

"Leadership is to be understood as a servant not a lord.(1Pet.5:3 Luke 22:26) Leaders lead the church but are not lords’ of the church."

Yes, you're right. I think that is an established, almost universal understanding, if not a doctrine (i.e., established teaching) amongst conventional churches. The fact that some people take advantage of a leadership position is not an argument for the illegitimacy of present-day church leadership. It is an argument for the immorality of some people, but it does nothing to debunk the presence, or even necessity of leadership in present-day churches.

Dear Toshido:

Since you've been able to stir up some conversation here at St. Cynic and provoke some thoughtful responses from us, something has come to my attention: you seem to think you understand how Christians ought to be, while not being one yourself. It seems you have taken up a highly presumptuous position wherein you feel free to swing down your gavel in judgement, and "fix" our perspectives with your own.

For example, you consider the notion that understanding the word יוֹם (yowm) as a 'span of time' is a deviation from the English definition 'day'; id est (abbr.: i.e. --> that is), a literal 24 hours. Hence a real Christian can only view God's creative act as happening in 6 successive 24 hour periods. And you think that anyone holding to a different view has deviated from Scripture, and is not listening to the actual words of God.

Meanwhile, almost 2000 years of scholarship from ingenius Christian and Jewish academics have noted the metaphorical nature of Genesis. Their work, based on the ancient Hebrew texts and, in particular, in the past 150-or-so years, has focused largely on the use of the word יוֹם as an indication of the consonance between the historical aspect of the creation story, and scientific data that boldly proclaims a very long creative process via evolution. So, given the fact that textual examinations of Scripture can work in focused purpose with scientific research, are you purposefully putting yourself at cross-purposes with reliable scholarship?

On another note, you seem to have taken it on yourself to adjudicate between what I have come to understand about the context of my Christian life under God, and what you would estimate must be what a real Christian is, or would look like to you. You accuse me (and Sarah) of 'cherry-picking' the Scriptures and importing our own meanings for this-or-that word, or principle. Yet, you fail to realise that part of biblical literalism is mapping out historical contexts, metaphors, and symbolism. I am not cherry-picking if I realise that I don't have to stone my wife if she disobeys me because the Bible, at that point, is quite literally, a historical document. That is (i.e.), Israel, under the expectations of the old covenant, and without a consummate propitiation, had to literally act under such expiatory responses to law-breaking*.

However, since expiatory measures were superceded via Christ's consumate propitiation in the New Testament era (or, 'days', as it were), those particular ordinances were fulfilled. They are no longer necessary under the new covenant. So, am I cherry-picking if I follow the content of Scriptural narrative through its context to its literal conclusion? The only logical answer is 'no'.

However, by speaking out of ignorance and expecting us to cater to your expectations of what it must mean for a Christian to be 'literal', you have actually cherry-picked Scripture yourself -- because you have not taken the time to understand what it says, and therefore have come up with a wrong conclusion due to your faulty premise. And then, on top of that, you have used particular pericopes to back your lack of understanding. That, my friend, is cherry-picking.

So, without taking up too much space on my blog for this, I'd like to invite you to take this one-time opportunity to correct Christianity to your way of thinking. Be prepared to meet some resistance along the way, but if you really think certain Christians are wrong for taking up a view alternate to your interpretation of what you think their view ought to be, then it should be worth it to you to prove yourself against them, yes?

* Theological terms like propitiation and expiatory (expiation) are included for your own personal benefit and learning.

Addendum: Before you address the topic of biblical literalism (if you actually choose to), please be aware that one of the nuances of biblical literalism -- at least since the neo-orthodoxy of Karl Barth -- is that the Bible is not God but contains the word of God. Hence a person doesn't follow the Bible but the Christ to whom the Bible testifies.

Atheism Gets Screwtaped

There have been some rather creative responses to the New Atheists (as some are wont to call them): Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett, and Harris.  These 'heroes' of the world of rationalism, materialism, and naturalism have contributed a great deal to the ongoing cultural considerations of the existence of God.  Nevermind their common categorical error -- judging the non-empirical by means of the empirical -- they have done the world a good turn by reinvigorating a necessary philosophical question in a creative, though rather acerbic manner.

But I digress.

As stated earlier, there have been some rather creative responses to the Four Horsemen of Atheism.  Here is just one of them.  It's written after the fashion of C.S. Lewis' Screwtape Letters, and Screwtape Proposes a Toast.  It's quite amusing, but be patient because it's not short.

Thank you to Dr. Veith for bringing this to my attention.

What I'll Be Reading After I'm Done Reading What I'll Be Reading When I'm Done Reading What I'm Currently Reading!

What I'm Currently Reading

In Defense of the Ontological Argument

St. Anslem's Ontological Argument asserts that God is the perfect ground for all conception and all reality, so-much-so that the denial of His existence is logically impossible. Therefore, God exists.

Historically, St. Anselm’s argument was held to be untenable. Gaunilo, monk of Marmoutier, responded with his famous In Behalf of the Fool, in which he protests that the conception of a thing does not necessitate its reality. Moreover, Gaunilo charges that people refer to those things they already know (men are known by the characteristics that men have), but the conception of a supreme essence that is greater than all is not something that any person can refer to on their own. Therefore, “one might more appropriately say that it cannot be understood not to exist and cannot be understood even to be able not to exist.”[1]

Knowing, for Gaunilo, implies a certainty that understanding does not: one can understand the existence of another person in a different country, but that in no way means that one knows that other person actually exists. To that end, Gaunilo does not deny that St. Anselm’s argument carries a certain force with it, but asserts that it must be “more cogently argued.”[2]

To wit, the main challenge to the Ontological Argument can be summed up by the simple phrase “it assumes that all ideas have their parallel in reality.”[3] To say this, however, places reverse emphasis on the direction of the Ontological Argument, and ultimately ends in circularity. The Ontological Argument moves from a direction of cause to effect, conception to concretion, but the popular contention that reality contains the parallels of the ideas moves from effect to cause, concretion to conception, and thereby slips the limits of St. Anselm’s a priori intentions.

What St. Anselm was describing was that there is no parallel in reality to a supreme God, for that would make the physical parallel God and not the Christian deity. Therefore, God is wholly beyond parallel in both humanity’s conception of the supreme deity, and in the observable world around us. However, for God to be perfect, He had to really exist, free from parallels, in order to be God. God is His own cause, and our understanding of His supremacy beyond reality and human conception is the effect of His truly being real.

Moreover, if all ideas are paralleled in reality, then reality can be said to be the reflection of an idea. Who conceived the idea then? Certainly not contingent beings who need the reality they exist in to survive! Presumably then, God, who is beyond parallel in conception and reality must have conceived the idea of reality. So unless one is willing to admit to St. Anselm’s a priori assertion, one ends up with an ineffective argument that reads something like this: ideas have their parallel in reality, ergo reality is composed of ideas. Nothing is ventured and nothing is gained from such speedy trips around Pi (π).

© Christopher J. Freeman

____________________
[1] Hopkins, Jasper and Herbert Richardson, ed. & trans. Anselm ofCanterbury V.I, 120
[2] Ibid., 120
[3] Dr. William Mundt, “Fundamental Arguments for God’s Existence” Concordia Lutheran Theological Seminary, November 30th, 2004.

A Glass House and a Rock to Throw

INTRODUCTION
If a loose summary for John Hick’s essay Jesus and the World Religions could be given, it might read like this: “all’s well that ends well.” Essentially, Hick moves from the observance of Christianity in modern culture as being surrounded by a multitude of other religions, to the conclusion that Christianity cannot be exclusively right. His reasons are simply that the historical evidences about Jesus of Nazareth are fragmentary, and that people’s imaginings of Christ are varied enough to support other messianic figures.

"For New Testament scholarship has shown how fragmentary and ambiguous are the data available to us as we try to look back across nineteen and a half centuries, and at the same time how large and how variable is the contribution of the imagination to our ‘pictures’ of Jesus... a number of different beings, describable in partly similar and partly different ways, have been worshipped under the name of Jesus or under the title of Christ" (p. 167).

However, where Hick’s essay may serve to aid those who wish to view Christianity through Gnostic syncretism, it is wholly untenable for the orthodox believer. Further, Hick’s position on the identity of the historical Jesus is not original, but merely a restatement of two alternative positions, liberalism and universalism. As such, Hick’s essay simply recreates another image of Jesus, rather than discovering who the historical Jesus was. He creates nothing that has not been said before, that is, that Jesus is just another manifestation among many that reveal God. The orthodox believer would do well then in noting several arguments that weigh against Hick’s position.

ALL THINGS TO ALL PEOPLE
To start, Hick notes that people project certain ideals on the figure of Christ; that he is “a divine psychologist probing and healing,” or that he is “a figure of inexhaustible gracious tenderness” (p. 167), and other such descriptions. In doing so, people elevate Christ to a position of being able to be “many things to many [people]” (p. 168). In short, because people project these ideals onto Christ, he becomes the answer to “the spiritual needs of his devotees” (p. 168).

Here Hick’s reasoning fails to be convincing. The notion that Christ is all things to all people because people have made him out to be, is circular. For Christ to be all sorts of wonderful things to people he must have first exhibited those characteristics, and for Christ to exhibit those characteristics he had first to be all sorts of wonderful things. In order for Hick to be able to question who the historical Jesus was then, he must first account for whether we attribute characteristics to Jesus for our own needs; or in fact, whether Christ reflected such descriptions as he has been come to be known by, and thus we have “mental images of him” (p. 168).

THE DEIFICATION OF A HUMAN TEACHER
For Hick, Jesus of Nazareth was a human being deified. To illustrate this, he draws on similarities between Christ and “the founder of Buddhism, Guatama” (p. 168).

"It may be helpful to observe the exaltation of a human teacher into a divine figure of universal power in another religious tradition which we can survey from the outside" (p. 168).

Guatama, Hick maintains, gave up an affluent lifestyle to pursue spiritual truth. In doing so, he attained enlightenment, became an itinerant teacher, and finally established a “community of disciples, monks and nuns” (p. 168). To this day, Guatama’s teachings continue to influence the Asian community, a large section of humankind.

Hick’s point behind all this comparison of Christ to Guatama is simply that like Guatama, Christ is considered divine because people are severely appreciative of his teachings, and awareness of God. In short, Christ is a man deified by our veneration of his deep spiritual teachings. A couple of arguments run counter to Hick’s position, however.

First, if all greatly spiritual teachers naturally move into a deified position in the eyes of their devotees, why is it that others like St. Paul, Isaiah, or Alistar Crowely are not deified? One answer in favour of Christ’s status as divine, is that others like St. Paul, Isaiah, and Alistar Crowely were not resurrected. In saying this then, we must admit that the records of Christ’s resurrection imply something unique about him which make him more than a deeply spiritual man. The natural implication from that last statement is that if Christ were more than deeply spiritual, resulting in his resurrection, he must go beyond the finite limitations of human beings. If he is beyond human beings’ natural capacity, he must be supernatural, which is what we usually equate with divine.

Second, Jesus’ ministry is full of his own implicit recognition of divinity, and other’s explicit confession of his divine status. In fact, it is the reason why the Jews crucified him, because of his talk of being divine. After Christ’s resurrection, he gave the commission to baptise in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19). If we take Hick’s position ~ that Christ was simply a human deified ~ and combine it with Christ’s commission, we end up with a guy named Jesus who already assumed enough of himself that he would rank himself among the divine. Or to put it differently, Christ was an egomaniac who used his awareness of being spiritual as leverage over the people of his time in an effort to gain a place in divine reality.

If this is true, then Christ was not necessarily spiritual, but severely self-doting. His whole ministry was a scam and the world has been deceived for two thousand years. Here, however, the weight of history, other intelligent theologians and philosophers, the integrity of logical thought, and some five thousand extant manuscripts which agree practically synonymously about the identity of Jesus as God*, come crashing down against Hick. The identity of Jesus as divine and human, rather than merely a deified man, remains strongly convincing to the rational orthodox believer.

THE SUBJUGATION OF LIBERALISM
To further his argument about Christ being only a deified man, Hick turns to the considerations of “modern New Testament scholarship” (p. 171). This is an obvious euphemism for “liberal theology” which, as stated earlier, is the position Hick takes alongside universalism. Here Hick suggests that the synoptic gospels convey a sense that Jesus was a real person with a real message; that this message can be gleaned properly when one looks beyond the confusing terms like ‘God the Son Incarnate,’ or ‘the only begotten son of God’ (p. 171-172). The synoptic gospels, as it were, are narratives of Jesus meeting the fancies of the people of his time.

"These documents give us three sets of communal ‘memories’ of Jesus, variously influenced by the needs, interests and circumstances of the Christian circles within which they were produced" (p. 172).

If this much is true, then the gospel writers point to Jesus as the one who they see most fits their needs, and interpret accordingly. Surely, if Christ was not afterall divine, he must have had needs like the gospel writers and the rest of us. The question which naturally arises from this admission is, who modelled or fulfilled Christ’s needs? To say ‘another person,’ perhaps someone pre-dating Christ, submits that Christ heeded examples of those who were less aware spiritually than he was. Afterall, the reason why God might keep manifesting himself through other deified people was to bring spiritual awareness to a deeper level ~ a progression to some sort of eschatological revelation of “Absolute Reality” (p. 169).

Surely, however, Christ could not fulfil his needs by finding exemplars with less spiritual insight, or greater deficit of knowledge of the divine than himself. If we say Christ’s needs were fulfilled by God, then we end up in two logical hang-ups, given Hick’s liberal context. It is important to note here that the issue at hand does not question whether God can fulfil needs, but rather how Christ received God’s fulfilment of his needs.

First, Hick’s position suggests that Jesus, Guatama, and other deified figures, all ‘attained’ spiritual fulfilment (p. 168). In other words, they apprehended the divine. Remembering that Christ, to Hick, is simply a man whom other’s deified, how is it that this mere mortal ever arrived at infinite insight? How can the finite ever apprehend the infinite.

This then, is the first hang-up of Hick’s liberal theology: he offers a lot of context about Christ’s apperception of the divine, but suggests no content of how Christ knew what he did, or how Christ ‘attained’ spiritual insight. For the orthodox believer reading Hick’s essay then, a lot of speculation is given, but no solid evidence is offered to verify his conclusions.

Closely related to the first point, another logical hang-up occurs when observing Hick’s liberalism. If Christ was simply a man, then he was finite. The finite is by definition, limited; and the infinite, unlimited. How then can the human figure of Jesus transcend his finitude to become aware of the infinite God without being divine too? The problem with Hick’s liberalism then, is that it allows for the finite to somehow grasp the infinite. As this concerns Hick’s view of Christ as only a man, it would have been impossible for Christ to have gained the spiritual knowledge he had unless he was also divine. As it were, Christ had to have been God as well as human to effect such a tremendous impact on history, and humanity.

SOME PARTICULARS ABOUT HICK’S UNIVERSALISM
The natural outgrowth of Hick’s liberal theology of Christ being only a man whom people deified out of a deep and abiding respect for him, is universalism. That is, all people, no matter what their religion, will be saved because God is the God of all religions. The great people who testify to God, all testify to the same God but under different names.

"We must thus be willing to see God at work within the total religious life of [humankind]... and we must come to see Christianity within this pluralistic setting... The different religions have their different names for God acting savingly towards [humankind]... But what we cannot say is that all who are saved are saved by Jesus of Nazareth" (p. 180-181).

Hick quite obviously views God then, as the God of all religions. In fact, Hick goes so far as to remove the title of God at one point and use instead the proper noun form “Ultimate Reality” (p. 181). Simply stated, Ultimate Reality is the common denominator of all conceptions and manifestations of God which underlie the witness of highly spiritual people. It is the universalising of all reality into one big ‘cosmic weave,’ so to speak. Two problems rise out of this position, however, and again further the strength of orthodoxy.

First, if, as Hick implies, God is the God of all religions, then he is a very poor God indeed. The Gods of other religions are described and understood in contrary fashions. For example, the Hindu’s Atman is ever changing, whereas the Christian triune God in never changing. Hence not all religions agree on one picture of God. If this is true, then the revelations of God as revealed by people like Jesus, Mohammed, Guatama, or Krishna should also contradict each other. The logical question here is, how could God contradict himself and still be God? If we note contradiction as a flaw in reasoning, then for God to contradict himself is a flaw of cosmic proportions. God becomes nothing more than a very confused, perhaps even inept logician, deserving no more attention than a sarcastic question like ‘does your mind hate you?’

Second, the universalism offered through Hick’s idea of Jesus, and God is exclusive, oddly enough. When dealing with Christianity universalism must be accepted on the grounds of giving up Christian belief. Quite simply, Christianity professes one God, and one only (Deut. 6:4). To be a universalist means that all other gods are just as valid and equally part of the one ultimate reality. A combination of these two views, which would create a contradiction, necessitates the rejection of Christianity’s one God, to the inclusion of the world’s many others. Clearly then, the orthodox believer is better off viewing Hick’s position as legitimate grounds for academic exercise, rather than a believable statement.

CONCLUSION
Although John Hick can be commended for his clear presentation of ideas, straightforward writing style, and creative speculation, his ideas run into serious logical inconsistencies. These inconsistencies provide the orthodox believer with ample arguments to dismiss his premises as true. As it were, Hick has created a glass house and invited orthodox theologians to throw rocks at it.

Some of Hick’s general contentions about the identity of the historical Jesus, and how he relates to God and other religions have been examined throughout this essay. Those ideas of Hick’s shown have been found to be erroneous. Where Hick seeks to discover the identity of Jesus in relation to other religions, he does nothing but reinstate Gnostic syncretism. When the evidence of logic and history are considered in opposition to Hick, the orthodox believer can rest assured that Hick’s assumed knowledge of the historical figure of Christ does not preclude his divinity, or remove his special status as over above all other religious figures.

© Christopher J. Freeman

* Geisler, Norman L. Christian Apologetics Baker Book House, 1976, p. 307