Modern evolutionary biology, or “Darwinism,” may be proposed as a defeater for Christianity. The stronger, but less informed, version of the argument states that belief in the Christian God was justified by the necessity of a First Cause to bring about life on earth, but such belief can be discarded now that a superior explanation is in hand. (The strangely pre-Copernican overtones of this account may or may not yield to an appeal to modern cosmology and its requirement of a transcendent Causer.) The weaker, but more reasonable, form states that Darwinism provides a robust naturalistic account of the origin and diversification of life on earth, thereby reducing the likelihood of Christianity with its appeal to a miracle-working God acting detectably in time and space as outlined by its scientifically embarrassing Scriptures.

The account of modern evolutionary biology is that all life on earth originated from a universal common ancestor between three and four billion years ago, and has diversified in the intervening period to produce the millions of species known today.¹ This diversification takes place through random genetic mutations, which are normally deleterious, but occasionally result in innovative phenotypes that provide an organism with some kind of competitive advantage in its ecological niche. Advantaged organisms are more likely to survive, and therefore are more likely to pass on their newly invented genes to their progeny. In this manner, random improvements are retained over time, and weaknesses and inefficiencies are rejected. Repeated a step at a time over billions of years, this process is thought to generate human beings from the first living prokaryotes.²

Christians are not in widespread agreement about what, precisely, is required of their doctrine of creation. Some embrace evolutionary biology as a process under the Providential direction of God, and others hold to a 144-hour creation week only several thousand years in the past. A stable evangelical middle ground seems to require a transcendent God who is intentionally and purposively involved in the creation of the cosmos, the planet, and the life-forms found here, culminating in the special creation of a literal first couple who were set apart from the rest of the creation as vice-regents over it. This proposal is incompatible with the evolutionary scenario.

The scientific claims and counter-claims of the debate are essential to its resolution, but not primarily so. Darwin has not first and foremost defeated Moses as the most successful chronicler of the salient events of creation; rather, epistemological and metaphysical commitments have shifted such that the account of Darwin is accepted, and no account like that given in Genesis could possibly be admissible in respectable courts of elite opinion. Darwinism’s putatively superior account of origins is advantaged only within the context of metaphysical (or perhaps just methodological) naturalism, the belief that only natural states of affairs exist (or that only natural causes may be inferred). Naturalism triumphed first, and Darwin has only rushed in to fill the void. Given naturalism, Darwin will reign undefeated. Absent naturalism, the debate becomes more interesting.

The charge is commonly made against the Christian apologist that her denial of Darwinian evolution is an obscurantist attempt to prop up reactionary religious claims. This is normally accompanied by a mythical retelling of the seventeenth century Galilean controversy in which Galileo becomes a ruthlessly persecuted, agenda-less, honest inquirer dedicated to gaining new scientific knowledge whatever the cost to religious faith, human institutions, or personal freedom. The allegedly oppressive and belligerent history of religion in general–and Christianity in particular–is also put forth to the apologist’s detriment. However, the accusation of obscurantism is unhelpful at best and hypocritical at worst, since entrenched metaphysical naturalism in the sciences now prevents the consideration of alternative proposals altogether.³ It is not we who are reactionary.

The Intelligent Design (ID) movement seeks to provide an alternative by critiquing the account of evolutionary biology and offering an objective means by which to infer design by an intelligent agent. Negatively, it posits that some biological systems are irreducibly complex, or composed of many parts, all of which must be present for the system to function, but for which no credible evolutionary pathway can be conceived.⁴ Positively, it proposes the criterion of complex specified information (CSI), an objectively discernable state of affairs in which a single teleologically privileged state is actualized from among many possibilities. CSI allows us to discern the actions of an intelligent designer from the combined actions of chance and the laws of nature.⁵ These two lynchpins of the program are themselves highly controversial, but the debate between Darwinism and ID is not animated primarily by the search for clever co-option pathways in evolution or ruminations on Kolmogorov complexity and its implications for the validity of CSI.⁶ The issue at hand is whether supernatural causes can be invoked to explain natural phenomena, and whether such explanations can be admitted to the public square.

The apologist is advised to remember the philosophical issue at the heart of the debate. While bickering scientists are not a surprise to any regular viewer of PBS’ Nova, the ire raised by the claims of the ID movement betray the profound human import of the issues under consideration. The scientific establishment seems to fear that the heavy hand of theocracy–oppressed women, systematically persecuted homosexuals, and heresy trials in the public courts–will follow close on the heels of ID being taught in public schools. The wise apologist should therefore balance his approach to include some treatment of the relevant scientific issues, a rigorous philosophical critique of naturalism, and his most authentic assurances that we do not seek to gain political domination over our unbelieving fellows. ID needs intellectual freedom, not despotism, in order for it to be tested. Given that chance, we can hope to see it prosper in the coming decades.

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¹Peter Ward and Donald Brownlee, Rare Earth (New York: Copernicus Books, paperback edition, 2004), 57.
²Ibid, 107-112.
³William Dembski, Unapologetic Apologetics (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2001), 238-244.
⁴ Ibid, 252-254.
⁵Ibid, 244-251.
⁶Dembski, The Design Revolution (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 83.

The New Age worldview is a partially Westernized adaptation of Eastern pantheistic monism.¹ What is not marketable in authentic Eastern monism is recast in terms of Western pop psychology and capital borrowed from Theism and other worldview streams present here.² To wit, rather than seeking to subsume the self into the infinite-impersonal, ultimate Brahmin or Nirvana as Eastern monisms would require, the New Age worldview elevates the self to the position of the ultimate, while otherwise attempting to maintaining the monistic metaphysic. The sundry putatively ultimate, unified, divine selves that seem to populate reality are hindered not by inborn sin, but by ignorance of their god-like capabilities; Shirley McLaine said of the New Age anthropology, “You are unlimited; you just don’t realize it!”³ New Agers are ethical relativists who ultimately deny that distinctions between good and evil exist.⁴ Moreover, they attempt to harmonize all religions by claiming that all are valid paths to be utilized by various seekers in their quest to experience oneness with God, making liberal modification to key religious tenets in the process. They deny the uniqueness of Christ and the necessity of his death on the cross, viewing him instead as “a great Master or Teacher or Adept or Guru.”⁵ They look forward to the imminent dawn of a new era of higher human consciousness, solving the political, military, economic, and cultural problems that plague us today.⁶

In contrast, Christianity posits an infinite-personal, eternal God as ultimate reality.⁷ Created in God’s image and likeness, human beings bear an alien dignity that stands in stark contrast to the depredations of their fallen condition which they continuously realize as cosmic rebels against God’s just rule. To restore human beings to fellowship with himself after their transgression of his absolute moral claims on them, Good took on a human nature in the person of Jesus Christ, lived a life of perfect obedience to his own Law, and gave up his life as a substitutionary sacrifice for the sins of his people. He rose from the dead in the prototypical form which all redeemed people will take when he returns to consummate his perfect rule over all creation.

Two substantial critiques of New Age thought present themselves. First is the well-known logical failure of monism as a viable answer to the one-and-many problem: if all is one, then why do distinct selves and objects exist? It is normally answered that distinction is illusory, but if this is so, then who is having the illusion? The reality of individual, personal minds seems incontrovertible. Second is the New Age insistence on the essential unity of all religions. Only the most superficial examination of Islam, Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism would claim that they agree on their key tenets; indeed, it is only in superficial matters that some of them agree. Even more interestingly, the typical New Age claim is not merely that all religions agree, but that they all agree with New Age thought, particularly in their supposed orientation towards the goal of discovering oneness with an impersonal God. Shades of Eastern pantheistic monism are somehow found in the monotheistic religions that have shaped the West for centuries. This theory of the unity of religions–a reasonably robust apologetic for New Age thought if true–fails utterly.

This is not a comprehensive critique of New Age thought, but monism and the unity of all religions are sufficiently central elements of the worldview that their successful critique should pave the way for positive apologetics in support of the truth of Christianity.

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¹James Sire, The Universe Next Door, 4th ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 162.
²Ibid, 178-179.
³Douglas Groothuis, Confronting the New Age (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), 25
⁴Ibid, 114.
⁵Ibid, 119.
⁶Sire, 166-167.
⁷Ibid, 26-29.

When an unbeliever raises the problem of evil as an objection to theism, the apologist is faced not just with a singularly daunting intellectual challenge to Christianity, but also a potentially difficult pastoral problem requiring Spirit-led sensitivity. This is no puerile sophistry about God being unable to create a rock he cannot move. It is a real question, often rooted in authentic personal suffering and in the angst that attends God’s sensitive image-bearers as they are forced into contact with a cursed and fallen world.

The necessity of a careful, pastoral approach to this kind of apologetic interaction is difficult to overstate. Few will adduce this argument merely out of a desire to gain the tactical advantage in a debate. The apologist must discern whether the objection is made through veiled tears, and be willing to encounter the suffering soul not just with the good news of the Gospel, but with empathy and with the love of Christ. It is not inappropriate for the apologist to mourn with those who mourn while at the same time giving a defense of the veridicality of the Apostolic faith.

Fortunately, the foundation of our empathy puts down deep intellectual footers. When the doubting soul says, “I cannot believe in the God of the Bible because of all the evil in the world,” we must understand the implied syllogism and how to blunt its impact or defeat it altogether. The unstated argument holds that God as conceived by Christianity is omnipotent, and therefore able to prevent evil; and omnibenevolent, and therefore should desire to prevent evil. Yet evil exists, so God must not.¹

Short of embracing atheism, there are several bad solutions to this dilemma, and no shortage of apologists have affrirmed them. Gaining some currency in recent years is the tacit denial of God’s omnipotence in Openness theology. Building upon considerable theological scaffolding whose edifice we will not describe here, Openness proposes that God is powerless to control a future which does not yet exist; hence he cannot be blamed for the wicked choices made by his utterly free creatures.² Short of Openness, one might posit the classical free will defense. In this scenario, God knows and has absolute power over all future events, but grants libertarian freedom to his creatures; thus he does not in any sense ordain or interfere with the exercise of their wills, and he is exculpated from any evil actions undertaken by them. This approach fails adequately to deal with the reality of natural evil (e.g., floods, volcanoes, hurricanes, etc.) and makes questionable philosophical, theological, and exegetical claims on the relationship between the human will and divine sovereignty.

Further one might attempt to deny the existence of evil. This approach owes more to Eastern monism than it does the flawed approaches of wayward Christian apologists,³ and its heterodoxy is as evident as its existential impotence. It is to be avoided, and fortunately in the scope of evangelical apologetics, it usually is.

A robust intellectual framework for dealing with the problem of evil acknowledges the reality of evil yet carefully avoids assigning responsibility to God for creating it. It views evil as a state of privation, the absence of the good, not as a created substance.⁴ It acknowledges that the all-powerful, all-knowing creator of the universe and ordainer of all things that come to pass has ordained evil outcomes under the terms of relative, instrumental dualism as a means to good ends not otherwise achievable.⁵ This blunts the force of the deductive form of the problem-of-evil syllogism, establishing that God sought to cause good effects through the instrumentality of evil–good effects that would not otherwise have obtained in the presence of eternal, unmixed good.⁶

J.R.R. Tolkien’s legendary trilogy is not known for reflecting a scrupulously orthodox Christian theology (at least it should not be), but in the opening pages of the companion mythological history, The Silmarillion, Tolkien provides a cogent metaphorical answer to the problem of evil that matches precisely the theological and philosophical claims we seek to make. In the first act of the Middle Earth creation myth, Iluvatar, the creator, answers his rebellious creature, Melkor, who has been playing wickedly discordant musical themes in rebellion against what Iluvatar would have him and the other angelic Ainur play. Finally silencing Melkor with a deafening blast, Iluvatar says to him:

Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Iluvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.⁷

This is the Christian’s answer to the problem of evil.

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¹Winfried Corduan, Reasonable Faith (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 1993), 126-127.
²Douglas Groothuis, Defending The Christian Faith class notes, Denver Seminary, 14 December 2004.
³Corduan, 130.
⁴Corduan, 132.
⁵Douglas Groothuis, Defending The Christian Faith class notes, Denver Seminary, 14 December 2004.
⁶Ibid.
⁷J.R.R. Tolkien, The Silmarillion, ed. Christopher Tolkien (Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977), 17.

Commenting on my Apologetics essay, Jed asks a couple of questions so good that they merit their own post in reply. Plus, it’s been a few days since there’s been a new post here, so why not, eh? He asks:

Not being a student of post modernist philosophy, am I correct in inferring that “modern” apologetics is, at least to a degree, a response to the worldview espoused by such as Fritjof Capra, in The Tao of Physics, i.e. a sort of Heisenbergian view that we create our own reality by our interactions with, uh, reality? I’ve always wondered what would occur if simultaneous observations of two states of an electron were possible. Perhaps they’d cancel each other out, and we’d observe nothing?

Acknowledging the need for brevity in your paper, notably absent is the task of establishing not just the nature of truth, but that the Bible is the unerring truth. Perhaps this isn’t part of a “basic strategy”, but it seems quite basic to me.

Presumably a later paper will address this?

Did you get a good grade?

When I replied to Jed last Friday I hadn’t gotten my paper back yet. I still haven’t. So you, like me, will have to be patient in waiting to learn the one thing we all really want to know.

Beyond that, Jed asks two questions: what is “modern” (or perhaps modernist) apologetics, and why didn’t I spend any time defending the doctrine of Scripture?

I have to admit I’m not familiar with Capra, and that it is to my continuing shame that I am not better-read on modern physics than I am. However, this sort of thing isn’t what modernist apologetics would be about. To my knowledge no one every ascribed that label of “Modernist Apologist” to himself in the heady days of the nineteenth century, but we could certainly name individuals who made it their life’s work to defend the Christian faith against the attacks that occurred during what we could safely call the Modernist era. B.B. Warfield may be the exemplar of this class.

As I have lamented before, there is a trend underway to use terms like “Modernism” and “Postmodernism” in rather imprecise ways. Indulging in a bit of this trendy imprecision, we might say that the core of the Modernist impulse was to arrive at all truth through unaided, autonomous human reason. Once we tapped into the power of unhindered reason, all limits on our ability to understand the physical universe and ourselves were going to fall away, and we would eventually know all that was knowable. (George Will once described the political implications of this Enlightenment Eschaton thus: “When the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest, then Pure Reason will be enthroned and everyone will agree about everything.”)

The libertarian right of the blogosphere may wonder what sounds so all-fired bad about this. Indeed, it seems to be the philosophy that animates Instapundit and his satellites. Its cogency in the minds of some notwithstanding, it was the enemy of nineteenth century Christian orthodoxy, and gave rise to defenses of the orthodox doctrine of Scripture, miracles, the Incarnation, and of course theism itself. On the whole it was relentlessly critical of Christianity, but the two systems shared a common view of truth: that it was objective, absolute, antithetical, and knowable to some degree or other. This allowed apologetic interaction to begin by discussing actual disputed doctrines, with less time spent negotiating the laws of logic or agreeing on whether knowledge is possible.

Now, recent thinkers have made the claim that the Church first illegitimately imbibed the Modernist zeitgeist it so hated, the fell asleep at the wheel as Modernity quietly died and Postmodernity arose from its ashes. Whether either of these claims is true, it is certainly the case that much of the Modernist view of truth has passed away, to be replaced by relativism of one stripe or another. This leaves us with the notion of “Postmodern” apologetics, or the defense of the Christian faith to people in a postmodern social and historical context. These people do not automatically believe that truth is objective, antithetical, absolute, and knowable, so the apologetic enterprise must begin by convincing them that it is. The rest of apologetics may be very similar to what went on 150 years ago under the regime of “Modernism,” which is a point I was trying to make in my paper. A few complications have arisen for the contemporary apologist, but the questions that actually rob people of sleep at night are no different than they ever were.

Now, why didn’t I defend the Bible? I was constrained not just by length, but also by intent. I was outlining the Christian worldview and suggesting a strategy for engaging today’s unbelievers, not providing my own top-down apologetic of the whole faith. This is a very practical limitation, since apologetics can’t proceed in the same way for all subjects. You may see the authority of the Bible as a central apologetic question, which means that any apologist taking the time to interact with you should address it. However, I would never waste my time engaging Andy on this topic. Why would he and I expend precious words on it, when we don’t even agree on theism? And if we could agree on theism, what about miracles? What about the character of God? The Incarnation? Inerrancy finds theological purchase in the mind committed to the foregoing; in the mind of the atheistic materialist it is foolishness and always will be.

This isn’t to say that you just have to jump in to inerrancy with no prior justification. It is merely to say that the gulf is too great in many cases to bother with the argument. Theism, miracles, the character of God, and the Incarnation can all be argued before inerrancy is in place¹. It would be better to share that common ground before we go arguing about whether the Bible should be tossed because it says that π is three.

That said, let me repeat that it is your questions that matter, not so much my suggested approaches to questions you may or may not have. Apologetics must be personal. It is an authentic interaction between real human beings on matters of ultimate importance. For it to be worth anything, I must address your actual questions in a way that is cogent to you. Now, getting back to my first point, you don’t get to invent your own rules of cogency, but the fact remains that there is no antiseptic method that I can apply rigorously to all subjects and expect positive results. Dealing with persons is a little looser than that.

Again, many thanks for your excellent questions. Keep it up.

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¹I am being pretty obviously old-skoo Princeton about this. Certain readers–and you know who you are, and how many kids you have–are invited to offer alternate takes on this, or just throw virtual rotten tomatoes at me.

As promised, here is my first paper for PR-501. It is my answer to the following question:

How does the general postmodernist approach to truth challenge the task of Christian apologetics in the contemporary world? Your answer should include the following four areas:

1. The nature, purpose, and justification of Christian apologetics. Give biblical support.
2. The importance of worldview for apologetics.
3. What the Christian worldview is.
4. A basic strategy for defending the Christian worldview (apologetic method) in the postmodern context.

If it strikes you as breathlessly terse at points, you’re on to something. You’ll also notice that it doesn’t so much end as it does run up against some invisible barrier: in this case the last line of the seventh page of double-spaced 12-point text with 1.25″ margins. I make many assertions that I would normally never leave unjustified in a blog post, but to do them justice might double the size of the essay, and that was just not allowed. (In all fairness, professors and their graders can only read so much text, and there are close to 100 people in the class. Length limitations are only humane.)

Finally, the preponderance of Doug Groothuis citations can be explained easily by noting that he’s the teacher of the class–and a very fine one at that.

Enough caveats. This is pretty much exactly what I turned in four hours ago, just HTML’d up a bit. Read and comment:

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It is the new received wisdom that we are experiencing a radical transition between intellectual eras. The old primacy of rationality, method, and word is passing away, replaced by an emerging world of community, radical pluralism, and image. We are told that the old apologetic paradigms that focused on winning arguments and proving absolute truth claims are relics of an oppressive, Modernist past to be cast off as we reshape the ancient Faith into terms set by atheistic philosophers in recent decades. Is this dramatic paradigm shift warranted? Do traditional apologetic fail to meet the challenges of the postmodern world?

A thorough interaction with all of the claims of postmodernist Christianity is beyond our present scope. Instead, this paper will examine the challenge posed to traditional Christian apologetic methods by the postmodern intellectual milieu, and will propose a strategy for apologetic interaction with the present generation of men and women in Western culture. The new intellectual consensus requires not a radical recasting of Christianity, but instead suggests several minor, evolutionary changes in the practice of apologetics. These changes consist primarily in a more thoughtful approach to postmodernity’s endemic pluralism, better preparation to defend the classical Christian view of truth, and a renewed emphasis on the Biblical priority of the relational context for apologetics and evangelism.

The Nature, Purpose, and Justification of Christian Apologetics
To pursue this improved strategy, we must understand thoroughly the nature and purpose of the enterprise of Christian apologetics. Doug Groothuis defines apologetics as “The rational defense of the Christian worldview as objectively true and existentially engaging.” Apologetics so construed is undertaken in order to bring glory to God, to reach the lost, to encourage doubting believers, and to aid in the sanctification of believers who seek to deepen their knowledge of God.¹We find ample Biblical justification for this endeavor. The classical proof texts in support of the antithetical defense of Christian claims are Peter’s command that believers should “�always [be] prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you”² and Jude’s injunction to “�contend for the faith that was once for all delivered to the saints”³ against false teachers in the church. Further, we find apostolic warrant in Paul’s overt apologetic interaction with the Stoic and Epicurean philosophers in the Aeropagus of Athens.⁴ Most persuasively we see a consistent pattern of rational argumentation in the interaction of Jesus with Jewish intellectual leaders and others to whom he ministered. Jesus very deftly escaped the horns of potentially life-threatening dilemmas (Mt 22:15-22), used a fortiori arguments in defense of his teaching on the Sabbath (Jn 7:21-24, Lk 13:10-17), appealed to evidence in defense of his uniquely messianic ministry (Mt 11:4-6), and used reductio ad absurdum arguments for a variety of purposes (Mt 22:41-46, Mt 12:25-27).⁵ Even a cursory survey of the Biblical witness gives the contemporary apologist substantial comfort with the tools of rational discourse when engaging hostile skeptics, false teachers, and seeking souls in the defense of God’s truth.

Against recent claims that postmodern people have moved beyond the “white male myth” of logic and propositional truth, we may observe that logic is tellingly employed even in the defense of these claims. As bearers of the imago dei, all human beings have the capacity and indeed the need for rational thought. We may be irrational and inconsistent at times, and sin may cripple the use of our rational faculties even unto our own deaths, but the basic capacity to work out our thoughts in a non-contradictory framework remains as an unchanging part of our nature. Changes in the intellectual climate, be they real or imagined, are powerless to alter this fact.

The Importance of Worldview for Apologetics
A hypothetical apologist in sixteenth-century France might have had to engage his interlocutors on matters of ecclesiastical authority, the doctrine of justification, what systems of civil government are most consonant with Biblical principles, or in the case of extraordinary cross-cultural outreach, possibly a discussion of the uniquely messianic role of Christ with a Jewish neighbor. Even in the latter case, he might never–given a long life of fruitful ministry–encounter anyone with a basic framework for understanding life that differed materially from his own. This state of affairs no longer obtains for any nontrivial case in the postmodern world.Because postmodernity is fundamentally pluralistic, the contemporary apologist must have a robust understanding of the concept of worldview and its effect on human thought. Sire defines a worldview as follows:

A worldview is a commitment, a fundamental orientation of the heart, that can be expressed as a story or in a set of presuppositions (assumptions which may be true, partially true, or entirely false) which we hold (consciously or subconsciously, consistently or inconsistently) about the basic constitution of reality, and that provides the foundation on which we live and move and have our being.⁶

More succinctly, a worldview is a collection of “words and concepts that work together to provide a more or less coherent frame of reference for all thought and action.”⁷ Every human soul of even nominal mental acuity is in possession of a worldview, be it true or false or consciously defended or passively breathed in without any examination at all. This worldview forms the semi-permeable membrane though which all words and concepts must try to pass before they are taken into the mind, finally arriving intact, significantly modified, or not arriving at all. It is antecedently obvious that effective apologetic interaction depends sensitively of the characteristics of this membrane, both as it occurs in the mind of the apologist and in the mind of skeptic, doubter, or false teacher.

Sire proposes that a worldview can be defined by its answers to the following seven questions (the proposed answers are illustrative, not exhaustive):

1. What is ultimate reality? God or the material universe?
2. What is the nature of external reality? Ordered or chaotic? Existing objectively or only as it is perceived by subjects?
3. What is a human being? A molecular machine or God’s image bearer?
4. What happens to a person at death? Annihilation, reincarnation, resurrection?
5. Why is it possible to know anything at all? Because the same Divine Mind that conceived and created the universe also created our minds? Or is knowledge actually not possible?
6. How do we know what is right and wrong? By relative levels of pleasure and pain, by evolved survival mechanisms, or by revelation from God?
7. What is the meaning of human history? To perfect human society? To please God? Or is it meaningless? ⁸

Any given worldview-holder may be able to produce sophisticated, consistent, and defensible answers to all of these questions, or she may not be able to answer any of them in objective terms. However, she has and believes answers to all seven questions, even if she resorts to skepticism or agnosticism on any point. These answers will have a profound impact on how she receives the truth claims of Christianity (or any other sensory or conceptual input), so they and their relationship to the Christian worldview must be understood well by the apologist seeking effective communication and authentic interaction.

The Christian Worldview
Sire’s proposed worldview model can be applied effectively to Christianity. Indeed, if the aspiring apologist lacks the resources to study any other worldview–which privation would itself pose a severe handicap–knowledge of the Christian one is certainly a necessary condition of meaningful apologetic interaction. Starting from Sire’s answers to the questions of Christian worldview, we might propose the following:

1. Ultimate reality is the triune, transcendent, immanent, omniscient, omnibenevolent, sovereign God.
2. External reality exists objectively and is ordered, having been created ex nihilo to operate “with a uniformity of cause and effect in an open system.”
3. Human beings are volitional creatures created in the image and likeness of God, and therefore bear dignity and purpose that is otherwise alien to their nature.
4. Upon death, human beings face a single resurrection to a physical body which then experiences an eternal state of felicity with God or eternal torment.
5. We can know about the external world because the Mind that created it also created our minds in his image and likeness. In addition to this ability to discover the world accurately, God reveals knowledge to us using language.
6. Ethics finds its source in the character of a good God. What is right and what is wrong flow from his immutable nature; and these categories are knowable through conscience and revelation.
7. “Human history is a linear, meaningful sequence of events leading to the fulfillment of God’s purposes for humanity.”⁹

Speaking more succinctly, a Christian might describe the world as created ex nihilo by God, populated by God’s fallen image bearers who can be reconciled to their creator through the cross of Christ, and headed toward a point of historical consummation in which God’s utterly good purposes for his creation will be fully realized. Even this skeletal understanding can begin to provide a meaningful framework from which to engage postmodern men and women thoughtfully and sensitively.

A Postmodern Apologetic Strategy
Notwithstanding the urgency of recent calls for a radical reassessment of Christianity in light of the putative needs of postmodern people, human beings do not change much over time. Intellectual climates and prevailing attitudes change in readily observable ways, but the questions that rob men and women of sleep in the middle of the night are few and well-known. Likewise the immutable laws of consistent thought cannot change any more than we can begin thinking with our kidneys. Apologists can take heart that their subjects are still people, and people still reason the same way about essentially the same questions they did 2,000 years ago.Human society, in contrast, is evolving ever more rapidly. We must also be careful to discern how our generation’s seemingly fluid zeitgeist influences the thinking of those to whom we minister apologetically. The postmodern apologist is guaranteed to encounter a wide array of significantly divergent worldviews, totally unlike her hypothetical French counterpart of the High Middle Ages. This requires her to think in terms of worldview and to have a working knowledge of the worldviews she is most likely to encounter in her ministry.

The contemporary apologist should also expect to find fundamental disagreement on the nature of truth itself. Whereas the Bible views truth as revealed, objective, absolute, universal, engaging, specific, antithetical, and systematic,¹⁰ the typical postmodern is more likely to see truth as constructed, subjective, relative, trendy, and fragmented. While preparation in comparative worldviews may be the first educational task to be mastered by the apologist, agreeing on the nature of truth–and vigorously defending the Biblical view thereof–is surely the primary logical task in any given apologetic engagement. Without consensus on the Biblical view of truth, meaningful discussion and possibly even knowledge itself are ruled out.

Given a new sensitivity to the diverse worldviews likely to be encountered today and a readiness to defend an intellectually functional understanding of truth, the postmodern apologist is finally advised to engage in apologetics relationally. Postmodern men and women know what it is to be the target of a mass-market ad campaign, and they understand viscerally the utter insincerity and lack of personal concern entailed in such an appeal. To communicate to them unintentionally that they are the subject of some rote method or the target of a large-scale crusade in which they yet again a tiny part of the denominator of some impressive statistic is to ensure that our defense of Christianity will be rejected. Engaging them as persons, soul-to-soul, with authentic concern for the existential import of their questions, is a more Biblically faithful way to earn their hearing.

With these tools in hand, the apologist to the postmodern world can continue to approach unbelievers and doubters with confidence.

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¹Douglas Groothuis, Defending The Christian Faith class notes, Denver Seminary, 31 August 2004.
² 1 Pet 3:15 (ESV)
³ Jude 3 (ESV)
⁴ Acts 17:16-33
⁵ Douglas Groothuis, On Jesus, Wadsworth Philosophers Series, (United States of America: Wadsworth, 2003), 26-35.
⁶James W. Sire, The Universe Next Door: A Basic Worldview Catalog, 4th ed. (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2004), 17.
⁷Ibid.
⁸Ibid, 20.
⁹Ibid, 26-44.
¹⁰Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay, (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000), 65-79.

The boy has been reading The Silmarillion lately. It’s a bit above his reading level, but he’s getting bits and pieces of it. He’ll probably want to read it again when he’s 16, and again when he’s 25, but parts of it will stick now. I’m not reading it with him, but I did pick up and glance over the first few pages. What I found just about put me on my knees. If he forgets everything else, I will make sure he remembers Tolkien’s cosmic creation myth.

In brief: the self-existent, omnipotent Eru, in Elvish called Illuvatar (by Zach called Elevator, until I corrected him–you know how it goes, pronouncing weird names in a book you’re reading to yourself), first created a race of angelic beings called the Ainur. The Ainur made music for the sake of Iluvatar as it was given to them by him to sing. Initially each of them propounded unique musical themes, elucidating the one aspect of the being of Iluvatar that it was given to him to understand. Eventually Iluvatar called them together and revealed a single harmonious theme to them, which was greater than anything the Ainur had individually conceived beforehand. As they sang it, “a sound arose of endless interchanging melodies woven in harmony that passed beyond hearing into the depths and into the heights, and the places of the dwelling of Iluvatar were filled to overflowing, and the music and the echo of the music went out into the Void, and it was not void.” Acting as Iluvatar’s agents, the Ainur sang Creation according to the themes ordained by him.

It went well for a while, and it was initially as perfect as Eru had conceived. Eventually, however, the most powerful and wisest of the Ainur decided to sing a song of his own devising. Melkor was impatient for the creative work of Iluvatar to be completed, and he wanted his own role in it to be greater and more glorious that Iluvatar had allowed. The perfectly harmonious music of the Ainur was eventually disrupted, with some others deciding to follow the lead of the rebellious Melkor. This gave rise to open conflict between the wide, beautiful, slow, and sorrowful Music of Iluvatar and the loud, vain, repetitive, braying music of Melkor. It ended with Iluvatar playing a single, terrible chord, “deper than the Abyss, higher than the Firmament, piercing as the light of the eye of Iluvatar.” Then the Music ceased, and Iluvatar spoke, saying:

Mighty are the Ainur, and mightiest among them is Melkor; but that he may know, and all the Ainur, that I am Iluvatar, those things that ye have sung, I will show them forth, that ye may see what ye have done. And thou, Melkor, shalt see that no theme may be played that hath not its uttermost source in me, nor can any alter the music in my despite. For he that attempteth this shall prove but mine instrument in the devising of things more wonderful, which he himself hath not imagined.

That quote is as worth committing to memory as any literature outside the canon of Scripture. If anyone is aware of a more beautiful, more concise parable proposing an essentially Christian answer the question of evil, let me know.

I doubt you do.

I planned ahead for last month’s transatlantic roundtrip flight by looking for a good book to read on the plane. I’ve had Rare Earth on my Amazon wish list for some time, so I ironically popped over to Barnes and Noble to buy a copy before leaving the country.

The book is written by Peter Ward, Professor of Geological Sciences and Curator of Paleontology at the University of Washington in Seattle, and Donald Brownlee, Professor of Astronomy at the same university. Together they take a controversial stand in the new and radically cross-disciplinary field of astrobiology.

Astrobiology, sometimes referred to as the science with no data, concerns the study of life outside of Earth. Astronomers, paleontologists, chemists, biologists, and scientists of other disciplines are increasingly cooperating in the astrobiological inquiry as technology enables their reach farther outward and as origin-of-life research begins to prefer an off-world source for Earth’s first microbial life. (This is an account with which I am ultimately comfortable, although we normally use the phrase “out of this world” instead “off this world,” and my preferred account is beholden to theism rather than metaphysical naturalism. But I am getting ahead of myself.)

The book is eminently readable for the scientifically literate layman. Technical jargon that would only be accessible to the professional is mostly avoided, and explained well when necessary. Readers without a basic familiarity with astronomy, chemistry, and biology would probably find the book frustrating, but these readers would likely find it uninteresting as well. If this is the sort of stuff you like, you’ll get through this book with no problems.

Briefly summarized, the Rare Earth Hypothesis states that microbial life is common in the universe, but complex animal life is exceedingly rare, perhaps so rare as to occur only once in the cosmos. This hypothesis is defended by examining the history and present habitats of life on Earth, and by examining the features of the Earth and its surroundings that enable life.

Microbial life appears to have arisen on Earth just about as quickly as it possibly could have: fairly undisputed evidence of life’s existence appears within a few tens of millions of years of the oldest known rocks. Keeping in mind that the techniques used to date old igneous rocks actually measure the time of the rock’s transition from a liquid to a sold state, the planet seems to reveal that it played host to life very, very shortly after its surface quit being lava. This leads the authors to infer that microbial life originates quickly (however it originates) wherever conditions are even remotely amenable to its existence.

Ward and Brownlee further defend the Ubiquitous Microbes plank of the Hypothesis through a discussion of extremophiles. Extremophiles are microbes observed on earth to live at temperatures above 100°C or in conditions of extreme acidity, extreme salinity, high pressure, or other conditions normally considered to be sterile. These robust microbes provide evidence that microbial life, at least, does not require a lukewarm pond or carefully incubated nutrient agar in order to survive. Extremophiles lead the authors to believe that even a site less hospitable than the exquisitely appointed Earth might still host life, as long as it can maintain liquid water, has some kind of energy flux to drive metabolism, and possesses a few other sundries that are unusual but not nonexistent in the universe.

Animal life, they observe, seems more finicky. It does not appear to be comfortable above 40°C, and requires very stable and fairly specialized environmental conditions to survive and thrive. Ward and Brownlee occasionally caveat this to apply to “animal life as we know it,” but they seem to believe tentatively that animal life as we know it may for valid biochemical reasons be the only kind of animal life that is physically realizable in the cosmos (or capitalized “Universe,” as they prefer to say in the book). Animal life also seems to take a lot longer to develop, taking about two billion years for the first eukaryotes to appear and about 3.5 billion years for the really interesting things to happen in the Cambrian Explosion. Thus they conclude that the presence of animals should be rare in the cosmos.

But before there were even prokaryotes on Earth, just getting the right kind of planet in the right part of the universe was a chore more than worthy of a Titan. Aspiring planet creators need to choose a star with a long stable lifetime, yet with enough energy output to have a relatively broad habitable zone around it, where orbiting planets at least have a chance to maintain liquid water. The solar system needs an abundant supply of “metals” (a term astronomers use to describe elements heavier than helium, conspicuously including nonmetals heavier than helium), which ours happens to have in spades. The star also needs to be in the right part of the right kind of galaxy: not in a metal-poor elliptical or irregular galaxy; not too close to the middle of a spiral galaxy, where energy output would sterilize any life; and not too far out, where metals and are again scarce. The planet can’t exist too soon after the creation of the universe (again, all-important heavy elements are too rare), and it can’t arrive too late, when decelerating star formation will cause a paucity of the radioactive elements that drive the critical process of plate tectonics.

It helps the planet to have a Jupiter and a Moon as well. The Moon, which in our solar system is freakishly large compared to its companion planet, doesn’t just provide the ecologically significant tidal rhythm. More importantly, it helps stabilize the Earth’s remarkably consistent 23.5° axial tilt, which is key to both the stability and diversity of planetary climates. The authors assert that without the Moon, the Earth would likely flop around on its axis from time to time, even over time scales as short as thousands of years, with devastating climactic impact. Jupiter, for its part, adds stability to the orbits of other planets in the solar system and helps shepherd planet-sterilizing asteroids away from Earth. Asteroids capable of causing mass extinction events are believed still to have impacted Earth in the past, but they would be much more frequent and devastating without Jupiter to protect us.

An entire chapter is named for the “surprising importance of plate tectonics.” A major geological controversy just four decades ago, plate tectonics is now well-attested, and can be credited with several life-sustaining (and presumably rare) functions. By creating sizable landmasses with diverse climates (mountains, valleys, plains, etc.), tectonics provides a platform for the kind of biodiversity that helps insulate against mass extinctions. By exposing a fresh supply of silicate minerals like feldspar to chemical reaction with the atmosphere, tectonics helps regulate the climate. The movement of the Earth’s liquid core which drives tectonics enables the existence of the magnetic field, which shields us from all manner of harmful cosmic and solar radiation.

Most incredibly, the tectonic carbonate-silicate cycle actually exhibits a negative feedback characteristic that drives the temperature of the planet up or down as needed. It works like this: the warmer the Earth gets, the more efficiently the silicates emerging from the mantle are weathered. As these rocks are weathered, they react with CO₂ in the atmosphere, becoming sand and carbon-bearing limestone, and eventually being subducted back into the mantle. Carbon is “sequestered” in this process, thus decreasing atmospheric greenhouse gasses, and cooling the planet back towards the system’s set point. Alternatively, if the planet experiences a cooling trend, silicates are weathered less efficiently, and less carbon is subducted in the mantle. Greenhouse gas levels then increase, warming the planet back up again.

Considerable attention is given in the book to the early history of life on Earth. How the chapters on evolution advance the Rare Earth Hypothesis was not abundantly clear to me, except to say that if things happened as the naturalistic account would describe them, the Earth must be rare indeed. In the chapter on the Cambrian Explosion, the authors state, “For all of the animal phyla to appear in one single, short burst of diversification is not an obviously predictable outcome of evolution,” (p. 150, paperback edition) and for what it is worth, this layman would certainly agree. In any case, the Rare Earth Hypothesis may be somewhat controversial, but it is not so controversial as to question the naturalistic account for the origin and diversification of life. The book summarizes the broad narrative of the first 3.5 billion years of life on Earth, and explains some of the current thinking on key evolutionary questions clearly and lucidly. It does not depart from the naturalistic paradigm, as much as some readers might have liked it if it did.

The authors admit in the preface that the publication of the first edition in 2000 spurred vigorous discussion, some of which has “often left the realm of scientific discourse where we’d intended it to take place, and entered the areas of religion, ethics, and science fiction.” Fair enough. Testing whether their hypothesis is true or not is essentially beyond the reach of present technology (although they do suggest guidelines in a closing chapter), but it is a mark of a bold and influential idea to gain a hearing among those well outside of your discipline. Indeed, no question of enduring existential import is likely to be confined exclusively to a single area of intellectual inquiry with a label like Paleontology, Philology, or Eschatology. If you can have a department head in it, it’s probably too narrow to matter when it’s late and you can’t sleep. The questions that matter are going to have to be attacked in more ways than one, and the rarity of Earth is obviously one such question.

Engaging this book as an Evangelical–not desiring arbitrarily to shut off a rich means of intellectual inquiry, theology–I see much to embrace. The authors are unsurprisingly Darwinists, but only as a matter of professional course (and surely personal and scientific conviction), not in any way required by their broader Hypothesis. The timing, position, composition, and behavior of the galaxy, solar system, sun, and Earth are exceedingly rare regardless of one’s preferred abductive criteria for forming explanations of the origin and diversity of life. Beyond that question, and beyond my respected fellow Evangelicals who require that the Earth be young, this is very much our book.

It is not unlike the God of Evangelical revelation and tradition to craft a special place for his creatures to live, and to provide richly for their survival and eventual technological and social progress. It is consistent with the Old and New Testament teaching on evil that God would ordain calamities like earthquakes and volcanoes toward a greater good (although it is admittedly speculative to identify this greater good as a climatological control loop). Moreover, to affirm the Hypothesis is nearly to recovery the pre-Copernican centrality of Man that has remained so evident in revelation even while science has sojourned elsewhere for almost five centuries. Besides being a winning science text for the enjoyment and education of the lay science audience, this is a book that speaks strongly to the growing Evangelical intuition that science is reluctantly suggesting teleological conclusions. I thank Drs. Ward and Brownlee for their excellent work in writing it.

A few weeks ago a friend emailed me to ask my opinion on his use of movie clips in a series of Bible lessons to young adults. He was privy to certain recent discussions of Christian postmodernism (including some more vigorous ones that went outside this blog), and wanted to know how I felt about using video in Christian education. (Christian Education: that term ought to irk the emergent bloggers.) Here, roughly, is what I said:

You may or may not ever find me doing a multimedia lesson including actual movie clips, but I don’t condemn the practice outright. That is, I’m not nuts about it, but everybody does it, and I don’t think it’s fatal or anything.

Technology, particularly technology used for entertainment purposes, is almost literally ubiquitous in our lives. It is far too pervasive for most of us to have much perspective on it. (As they say, if you want to know what water is, don’t ask a fish–and baby, we’re technological fish.) I can’t say I’ve thought enough about this to be able to prove coercively all of the hidden assumptions and ideas that using PowerPoint to project our lesson outline or Media Player to watch a movie clip brings into a teaching environment, but I fear the unexamined assumptions that entertainment technology probably brings along for the ride when we try to harness it for our purposes. My judgment is that they will usually do some kind of harm–a kind most people are ignoring–so I personally try to avoid them most of the time.

And this from a technology professional!

My bent against the user of movie clips in teaching doesn’t have much to do with Postmodernism qua Postmodernism, although the general postmodern (and postmodernist) preference of Image over Word certainly comes into play. It’s more a matter of setting my goal to be engaging souls with ideas, and being cautious (perhaps overly so) of forcing people back into Entertainment Consumption mode instead. Certainly there are large advantages to using movie clips that should be weighed against this concern, and even more certainly, quality teaching shouldn’t be afraid to make appropriate cultural allusions. The sad fact of our lives is that movies and pop music are going to be pretty much the only cultural artifacts we are going to be able to draw on for almost all of the people to whom we minister. If I don’t like that, I might as well get mad at the wind for blowing, or the NEA for existing. Still, at the end of the day, I try to avoid the use of multimedia in teaching unless it matches the subject matter uniquely. (Like if we were studying film depictions of Christ, as in Philip Yancey’s Sunday School-productized The Jesus I Never Knew.)

I know and respect other people who have considered this question and deliberately decided against my approach and in favor of yours. I don’t do it myself, but it doesn’t bother me all that much when other people do. It is no big deal.

On the heels of this (and this was all in that hazy season of my life the few weeks before I left for Spain), I had the exciting opportunity to adapt an enterprise software architecture diagram to PowerPoint use. Now, you may be thinking that’s a simple matter of selecting the whole diagram in Visio, copying it to the clipboard, and pasting it in PowerPoint, but you’re only thinking that because you’re wrong. It has much more to do with figuring out how to present information PowerPoint-style, which consists chiefly in limiting your minimum text size to 18 points.

If you weren’t wondering why I thought it was so hard to get a block diagram into PowerPoint, you may be wondering what this has to do with using movie clips in Bible lessons. Answer: more than you might think. I’m going to try to give you more on this in the next week. Coming soon: Why PowerPoint Is The Devil.

At least a dozen people since Thursday night have asked me if I liked The Passion Of The Christ. Now, I liked Rush Hour. I liked The Return Of The King. I didn’t like Bulletproof Monk. But The Passion is not a movie one likes or dislikes.

The movie was brutal. The ten other people I saw it with could barely speak when it was over. Several women within earshot of me wept disconsolately for fully half of the movie. When it was over, we sat numbly through the credits without even seeming to consider whether we should get up (I haven’t done that since I was fifteen), then we meandered out into the lobby and stood in a circle, staring at the ground. Eventually we migrated out to the sidewalk in front of the theater: more standing and staring. None of this was planned or considered at the time. We were just raw.

The movie is every bit as violent and gory as the hype makes it out to be, but I am left wanting to differentiate the blood in The Passion from that of a slasher or snuff film, as it has been accused of being. Unlike the dehumanizing sport of horror flicks, the entire narrative is intensely personal. It seems were are never more than three feet away from Jesus, even when sitting under the judgment of the Sanhedrin, standing in the effeminate court of Herod Antipas, or seeing the blood splattered on the faces of his Roman torturers. The camera never leaves him as he suffers. This is not Sam Peckinpah’s blood fountains for dramatic effect or the sexualized gore of the Halloween or Friday the Thirteenth traditions. It is not blood for fun or blood because blood is cheap. It is blood because a weak man is in the grip of a wicked human system. It is blood because an all-powerful man is willingly laying down his life for a divinely ordained redemptive purpose. Criticisms of the shallow theology of the film notwithstanding, the dialog was sufficient to establish this proposition. The whipped and crucified Jesus is not some shadowy anthropomorphic outline aping the effects of physical violence for teenybopper shock factor; he is a man dying for the world, and we are standing next to him for 90 minutes as he dies in slow motion.

The question still must be asked and answered: Should we be watching this? My own pastor has said:

Some are arguing that the violence is necessary to accurately depict the event. I question that thinking when I look at what the Gospel writers, under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, felt was necessary to say about the physical suffering of Jesus. When Luke describes the physical suffering of Jesus arrest, trials and death he does so with very few words: Luke 22:63 “The men who were guarding Jesus began mocking and beating him” and Luke 23:32 “When they came to the place called the Skull, there they crucified him…” Luke uses a sum total of two words to describe the physical assault on Jesus. The other Gospel writers are nearly as brief. Even the prophetic passages in the Psalms (22) and Isaiah (52,53) are surprisingly brief compared to the liberties taken in the movie. I must at least ask if the Holy Spirit was intentionally taciturn on the subject so that we would not get distracted by the minor issues and miss the major one. To be certain, Jesus’ suffering was intense, but that is not the major point. The suffering is not the point; what he accomplished with his death and resurrection is the point. The major point is Romans 4:25: “He was delivered over to death for our sins and was raised to life for our justification.”

This is a weighty accusation. In response a friend has suggested that the original readers of the Gospels would have been familiar with the process of Roman beating and crucifixion, and would have had a ready mental referent for the frugally-worded text: they would have been able to remember the last crucifixion they saw. Viewed in this light, Gibson’s film then becomes a vehicle to give 21st-century readers better knowledge of the cultural context of the New Testament, a problem contemporary readers of the Bible are always trying to solve.

But the question will not go away so easily. We are not merely watching a scourging and crucifixion firsthand as the first-century residents of Palestine or Asia Minor might have. We are watching a dramatized, expertly photographed and edited, slow-motion depiction of a Roman-style scourging and crucifixion with many assumptions and potential inaccuracies included. The Roman citizen’s ready mental referent becomes our polished movie. Film is not a record of reality; it is moving picture art. Even candidly videotaped live events are altered when played in slow motion. Reality is altered much more when live events are photographed and edited to some intentional effect. Add to this a script that, while generally faithful to the Gospels, is clearly influenced by medieval Catholic tradition and the director’s artistic proclivities, and you have a series of images that may be very different from the personal experiences of the original readers of the New Testament.

The relative inaccessibility of the culture that produced the Gospels is normally not an excuse for not trying, so I don’t mean to turn these qualifications into a blanket condemnation of the film as an attempt to recount historical events. However, the burden of proof ought to rest on the film for justifying its tremendously graphic violence, and these considerations recommend against its approach.

That being said, Christians believe that Christ endured true physical suffering during his passion, but that his spiritual anguish was immeasurably worse. When he cried out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” on the cross, he is affirmed to have been experiencing fully the wrath of his Father, becoming a curse for God’s redeemed in their place. Many have pointed out that the experience of this anguish is truly inaccessible to us, even to those who have vivid experiences of their former estrangement from God turning into close fellowship subsequent to conversion. This point must be granted: we have no idea what it is like for the eternal fellowship of the Son and the Father to be broken, and we cannot know. In attempting to appreciate the suffering Christ endured for his people–surely a worthwhile devotional exercise in anyone’s view–even overstated images of his physical torment will not lead the viewer to an exaggerated understanding of his overall torment as the wrath of God toward us was imputed to him in that moment on the cross. The error of the overdone scourging, if error it be, probably will not lead to a particularly faulty view of what Christ endured for his people.

Continuing in this vein, Denver Seminary’s Craig Blomberg looks towards the development of an American theology of suffering:

…it is probably fair to say that contemporary American culture, perhaps more than any other culture in the history of the world, does not adequately appreciate the immensity of suffering that most of humanity has experienced throughout time. Not surprisingly, American Christianity is therefore infrequently faulted for having an inadequate theology of suffering. If this film helps Christians to better understanding something of what it means to “carry the cross” that their master shoulders, it will have been worthwhile.

Without adding to his words, I can say that I share this hope.

I found the defeat of Satan to be understated. As Jesus died, the genderless Satan figure kneeled in the middle of a barren hellscape, writhing energetically and growling some unspecific superlative. One reviewer read this as the agony of Satan’s defeat, but for my viewing it could as easily have been delight in his presumed final victory. It was simply unclear. The resurrection was likewise muted, a mere fifteen seconds of near-symbolism poorly reflecting the once-for-all defeat of death described in the New Testament.

Considering the anti-anti-Semitic bedlam starting a full year before the movie’s public release and the response of some critics afterward, I was surprised that I left the theater in anything but a murderous rage, wanting to avenge the senseless death of Christ which wouldn’t have happened but for the perfidy of all world Jewry, ever. The reality: the temple guards certainly would have earned U.N. censure for their mistreatment of their prisoner, Caiaphas was portrayed as conniving and murderous, and the mob demanding that Jesus be crucified would cause no one’s heart to well up with ethnic pride. But throngs of Jewish women wept as Jesus walked the Via Dolorosa, Simon of Cyrene was a manifestly heroic and tenderly human character, and dissenting Jewish voices did speak up in the Sanhedrin in defense of Jesus. Jewish religious and political leadership comes out of the movie looking bad, but Jewish people at large are untainted. It is highly unlikely that “when non-Jews around the world now see the Jewish prayer shawl, the tallis, on the heads of praying Jews, they will think, ‘Oh yeah, those were worn by the angry crowds in The Passion‘” as Fox’s Roger Friedman supposes. I am frankly more likely to think about Islamic terrorism or the question of West Bank settlements than what “Jews” did to Jesus–things substantially unrelated to Christ’s passion or Gibson’s Passion.

Italians? That’s a different story. Pilate and his wife get the benefit (as the Gospels all but afford them) of some moral ambivalence, but the Roman guards are unremittingly sadistic monsters. They cane, scourge, beat and kick Jesus, crown him with thorns, whip him even as he carries his cross, dislocate his shoulder as they crucify him for the mere subhuman efficiency of fitting the nail into the same hole used by the cross’ last victim. A judicial scribe seems to take offense at the excesses of the torture almost because it stretches the boundaries of his bureaucratic station: blood gets on his log book, one of the guards damages his table demonstrating the scourge, and there are more prisoners to be whipped, so move it along, boys. Pilate’s lieutenant disapproves of the torture and may show some compassion towards the victim, but is chiefly concerned with enforcing the governor’s politically-motivated diktat that the prisoner not be killed. In short, the Romans are weak and compromising at their best and subhuman at their worst.

Rabbi Stanley Wagner has observed that the “nice” Jews in the film are in fact not really Jews: they are followers of Christ. To satisfy him that the movie is not fundamentally anti-Semitic, Gibson would have had to invent characters who clearly rejected Jesus as the Messiah but fought to prevent his torture and unjust execution out of principle. It is worth noting that the two members of the Sanhedrin who were shown to object to the kangaroo court proceedings were not clearly identified as followers of Christ, but they were not clearly identified as his detractors either. While Gibson might have had to push too far the boundaries of artistic license by inventing important new characters and themes to satisfy this requirement, I do hear the objection with some sympathy. Ultimately I think it fails to commend the film’s alleged anti-Semitism, but I do recognize that Rabbi Wagner’s definition of “Jew” does allow for a rational framework in which to make the accusation, even if it is almost tautological.

I have yet to answer the question of whether I “liked” the movie, or whether its graphic depiction of the execution of Jesus is justified. And I don’t mean yet in this review; I mean yet in my mind. I don’t know that I can answer these questions. Applying my quintessentially American utilitarian criteria to the experience, I am tempted to say that I approve of it inasmuch as it furthers some concrete goal of Christian evangelism or discipleship, and certainly it is difficult for me to object to the true expansion of God’s Kingdom in the hearts of men. Three days after seeing it, that’s the best I can do: I don’t know how I feel about what I saw, but I trust God to move forward the boundaries of His Kingdom either through the movie or in spite of it.

Look, I’m not saying modernism is our unqualified friend. Did only good things happen in theology in the nineteenth century, the very historical epicenter of modernism? No. Was it perhaps a bit naive to think we could develop antiseptic evangelistic methods that would cut perfectly through cultural bias and conditioning to deliver utterly pure, God-pleasing belief and practice? Was that maybe a little bit influenced by the modernist zeitgeist? Were you thinking yes? I was too.

So let’s say goodbye to all of that, and thank-you to any cultural movement and its Christian exponents who are helping the church away from Fundamentalism (our own paradoxical adaptation of modernism), crusade evangelism, meticulously programmed church ministry, and other relics of the past. I am not hanging on to them. They are not mine, not of my people, and I have no zeal to defend them. Good riddance.

But you know, finding all this modernist soot on our hands, we are probably not well-served to dive into a life of fully-orbed postmodernism. Who among all my fellow disowners of modernism thinks the cultural changes in the past 30 years have been of sufficient magnitude to warrant a change in traditional church worship services–no really, pick anything in the last 30 years from Episcopalianism to the Vineyard–to this? Anyone? Anyone see the proportionality there? [tumbleweed blows across stage, sound of crickets]

(Darn it, I said stage! Clearly this is because of my patriarchal, colonialist, imperialist, phallocratic urge to oppress marginalized voices by being the Big Man standing up in front of the masses telling my Big Story in order to keep them pliant and working diligently for the capitalist oppressor whom I enable. I am Wal-Mart Shareholder, hear me roar!)

This blog’s deconstruction notwithstanding, I am having a hard time taking the Emergent Church seriously. The movement tends to discredit itself by being breathlessly radical. It’s impossible to see it as anything other than the current age’s instance of the time-honored tradition of young people doing foolish and short-lived things in their zeal of just having awakened to adult life. They roll out of the bed of their teen years, get a cup of coffee by age 20 or 22, and are shocked to see the horrible state of their parents’ house. The velvet Elvis, the green shag carpet, the olive appliances! They never noticed all these things before. Time to replace all these dated things with the right decor: white carpet, low-voltage halogen lighting, and stainless steel appliances. See how old and busted you were, Mom and Dad? Stainless and halogen, that’s the right paradigm. We get it. You didn’t. The sins of the past have been redressed!

And the saddest part is always the few aging hipsters who are willing to jump in for the ride, giving faux intellectual heft and organized leadership to youthful folly. Now there is not a thing in the world wrong with being an aging hipster: take if from me, being a hipster is better than being a nerd, and I like the idea of aging better every year. These folk ought to be able to connect with especially foolish youth, identify with them, and share their hard-won lessons. This does not seem comprehensively to be the case with the leaders of the Emerging church. Despite being old enough to know better, they seem to be embracing a certain amount of folly themselves.

Running with the parents’ decor metaphor a bit, I have noticed that grandchildren are seldom so horrified by their grandparents’ faults as are first-generation offspring. Grandma and Grandpa’s bickering is kind of funny, after all. Grandchildren didn’t grow up hearing it, didn’t feel the shame and self-loathing at long fights touched off by their own misbehavior, didn’t sit alone in their rooms wondering if this was finally the fight that would end in divorce just like the parents of all their friends at school. Absent the pain of close contact, Grandma and Grandpa’s faults faults become endearing.

Applying this to the question of the ongoing modernism debate–and that is what this really is, still–we can look back now with some fondness on the Medieval European classical synthesis. It’s not as bad as Modernism told us it was; maybe a little tip o’ the hat to some kind of tradition every now and again isn’t so bad. It’s easy when no one has ever held a sword to your throat for questioning received authority. Sure that Francis Bacon was a cut-up, but premodernism can’t have been as bad as all of that, can it?

Of course the real world is more complicated than this. Sweeping historical movements (which so dominate history that their immediate neighbors are defined using the suffixes pre- and post-) are not monolithically good or evil. My generation is well past any kind of uncritical embrace of modernism, but does that mean we should reject it like Dad’s velvet Elvis and run into the waiting arms of postmodernism? I doubt it. A more mature appraisal of our situation might go a long way.

And what would Christmas be without innumerable Christmas parties, people griping about Christmas music, compulsively updated retail sales figures, overly eggnogged divorcées macking on married men on trains¹, and the children’s pageant at church? I’ll tell you what it would be: no fun at all, that’s what.

Southern Gables’ Christmas pageant was last Sunday night. Normally this is rather prosaically called the “Children’s Christmas Musical,” or something like that. Today’s evangelicals have lost none of their parents’ drive to put on a cute show for the kids in mid-December, but we’re far too jaded and savvy just to put on the old-school Christmas play with sheep and shepherds and Mary and Joseph and Baby Jesus and the Magi. A bathrobe and a towel on the head? So 1975. Preschoolers dressed as sheep? Been there, experienced the trauma as a kid, done the counseling. A gaudy Herod costume, and ostentatiously dressed Magi? Puh-leeze.

No, none of the old and busted Christmas programs for us, thanks. We need something fresher, something more accessible to today’s churchgoer, something more in touch with popular culture. Problem is, as Kenneth Myers has explained, popular culture tends to be an inadequate container for much of the Gospel message. Its highest value is easy consumption; as such, it can never give to its participants more than they bring to the table themselves. It can never really challenge, it can never really fertilize, it can never really expand the minds of its participants. It can never contain the message of the Gospel without altering in important ways.

Now, I’d happily stipulate that the Christmas story can be expressed as a fairly simple narrative needing a less capable vehicle than is required by the whole apostolic kerygma, and in so doing bypass this whole criticism. But punched-up modern children’s Christmas musicals typically boast of their “strong evangelistic message.” They don’t want merely to be retellings of the story of Christ’s birth. Having no church calendar to speak of, non-liturgical evangelicals feel nervous if they celebrate only the birth of Christ on Christmas. There is an urgency to work Good Friday and Easter into the celebration of Christmas; after all–and this is accurate, as far as it goes–Christmas never saved anybody.

Combine this with a heaping helping of semi-pelagianism–whose antibodies, although congregations like mine might explicitly deny them, are yet in our evangelical blood–and a Christmas play for kids can’t simply be a Christmas play. It can’t just tell the story of the birth of the One we are celebrating; it has to rush into a Gospel presentation. We can’t trust God to build his kingdom through each little plank of a well-thought-out schedule of celebrations, even if some of them lack an obvious altar call at the end. Please don’t get me wrong: gospel presentations are very good things, but discomfort with the “mere” telling of the Christmas story is surely a symptom whose underlying disease we ought to cure. We will deny feeling any of this discomfort, but our cultural artifacts betray us.

Enter the refreshingly refined aesthetic of our own talented publishing magnate Stephanie Nelson. To be fair, she did not create some paragon of high culture in this year’s musical. I’m the first to admit that I am insufficiently trained to be able fully to appreciate that kind of thing, and the cross-section of southwest suburban Denverites that attend Southern Gables are on average no better prepared than I. That might be the real antithesis of the TV Show Knock-Off Christmas Musical, but the fact remains that I mostly wouldn’t get it if we did it.

Instead, our pageant was unabashedly classical in an approachable kind of way. It wanted to be old-school, and it was not sorry about it one bit. An angel choir, shepherds (and shepherdesses!), Magi, Mary, Joseph, The Baby, Gabriel, a donkey, Herod…we told the story of Luke 1 and 2 with easy costumes and timeless (to us) songs. The kids were cute. There was no pretense and no attempt to be hip or trendy. We could do this every year–creatively, innovatively, and skillfully–and I wouldn’t get tired of it. Kudos to Stephanie and the team who put it all together. (It is not just a coincidence that this team includes Mrs. Berglund. Especially big kudos to her.)

Whatever, Tim. Can you just show us the pictures of your kids?

Why, yes; yes I can. So, enough of this pseudo-intellectual cultural criticism! Let’s drop down to shameless exploitation of my children for the full cuteness effect.

My four-year-old as a part of the multitude of angels who were praising God and saying, “Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to men on whom His favor rests.” Her version of events: “I got to go on the stage!”

The Sunday morning preview of the full event. My seven-year-old is on the left, and the lovely Mrs. Nelson can be seen directly behind the two singers.

Same duet, same girls, only in costume the night of the performance. Thank you for asking, but no, they don’t get cuter.

My son the urban shepherd [best photo available]. It struck me that his droopy headdress looked something like a backwards ball cap. Combined with his zip-off nylon pants, his anachronistic footwear, and his easygoing posture, he really brought an intercultural feel to the pageant that is normally all too rare in the 80123 ZIP code.

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¹No, really! Last Friday on the way to the Blogger Bash. Weird, man. I’m not the kind of guy who normally attracts that kind of attention, but combine sufficient quantities of eggnog with a big crowd of people going downtown to see the Parade Of Lights, and there’s no telling what will happen.

Biology professor Dr. Paul Myers (scroll down) has weighed in on the prayer debate. Dr. Myers’ rhetorical style seems more closely to resemble mockery than debate, but maybe I just need to get to know him better. Also, although he holds a Ph.D. and enjoys an bona fide academic appointment, presumptive amateur Raving Atheist ironically did a better job of confronting the ideas in the original post than he did. I suspect this is just due to impatience with theists rather than lack of ability.

I’m judging from his post that he thinks its real substance lies in his treatment of my methodological criticisms of the original study. This would be understandable, since he is a bona fide scientist who applies scrupulously designed methods to tests things, all day, every day (in an idealized world with no undergraduates and no need for grant applications). Actually, I’m not terribly interested in discussing my first two objections further, since they were offered merely as a reductio (informally, “crazy talk”) in the first place. I could respond to his suggestions that I have made “childish excuses,” that I suggested a “ridiculous experiment,” or that I am hypocritically suggesting better tests when I generally denying the propriety of scientific testing of prayer in the first place, but space and time are at a premium, and it would be better to pick our issues more strategically.

Cutting through his overly-lively rhetoric, he does raise a helpful point that could use some clarification:

The idea that the efficacy of god cannot be evaluated simply doesn’t hold up. When you read the testimonials of the religious, they are full of praises for the power and wonder and glory of god. Some estimation of his performance is implicit in such descriptions. I don’t think people actually mean, “God seems to be great, although I can’t really see any difference between the results of his actions and random chance…” Is it just that god is mathophobic, and gets all queasy when people start measuring and calculating and doing statistics?

To clarify: if I have said that all effects God causes are un-testable and unobservable, then I retract the statement forthwith. My point was that we have reason to believe that prayer ought not to be testable in this way, nor indeed in any formal way that I can think of. I am not undertaking the task of trying to design a theologically valid prayer experiment, nor to circumscribe the whole boundary between what can and cannot be known about the being and activity of God, and how we should go about learning it. I would like to leave the door open to all kinds of theologically meaningful tests, just not on prayer, at least not like this, and probably not at all. Anyone trying to extend my remarks beyond those modest boundaries is simply wrong.

Dr. Myers describes my proposed theology of prayer as “long-winded,” “bizarre,” and “six mostly incoherent paragraphs.” I regret that when we get to the meat of the argument, he apparently runs out of enthusiasm for the discussion. I would point out again that Raving Atheist seemed to be able to wade through my putatively impenetrable prose fairly well, even going so far as to identify what will probably turn out to be a key assumption in the debate (the nature of freedom) that will keep him and me from being able to reach any consensus. Now, I don’t mean to convey that I was extremely pleased with R.A.’s response, but at least he was able to interact with the more complicated theological and philosophical ideas and offer a response that was on balance intelligible.

Exasperated with me but still willing to take a stab at it, Professor Myers says:

[The description of the relational dimension of prayer] is just a variation on his excuse #1, that the scientists didn’t do the experiment correctly, but prayer really does have an effect. All he’s doing here is adding additional, baseless conditions (postulating a vague “relationship” with invisible, unobserved entities is nothing but an ad hoc complication) to shoo away a result he doesn’t like.

If “prayer” means something like what I have suggested it means, then the relationship with the invisible entity is central to the question at hand. Considering prayer without considering how the faithful relate to God seems much like taking fish eggs out of water. It would be silly to label Dr. Myers’ criticism that “These Danio embryos were dried out” as an ad hoc complication, even if the experiment was not intended to test anything about water itself.

Most tellingly, he says:

Either prayer has a measurable, material effect, or it doesn’t.

Actually, I see a glimmer of hope here. Just as Raving Atheist touched on the question of freedom, Dr. Myers may have touched on a just as consequential an axiom. My original question might fairly be rephrased, “Should prayer have measurable effects in the way that the laws of physics and chemistry do?” which clearly would disqualify his statement from being offered as a premise in any counterargument. I suspect that a commitment to metaphysical naturalism (which commitment Dr. Myers would have to express; I am not intending to make one for him) would require that one view prayer in the way he does. A commitment to theism (or any compatible metaphysical system that is reasonably distinct from naturalism) wouldn’t necessarily predicate a property of “testability” to prayer, and indeed might recommend against it, as I have attempted to explain.

If Professor Myers wants to say, “Yes, I’m a metaphysical naturalist, and I insist that anything that has being is testable in any way I can think of testing it, subject to engineering limitations,” then I’ll be perfectly satisfied. We’ll disagree, but I’ll understand why. If he wants to call me long-winded, bizarre, or other pejoratives again, I’ll be disappointed.

UPDATE: Dr. Myers strikes back; I judge life to be too short to continue this.