I don’t know Mark Driscoll. Nor, for that matter, do those who make up the disturbingly enthusiastic crowd of stone-bearers who wait in the wings, apparently hoping for his downfall. They’re calling him a thug, alleging that he suffers from mental illness, calling him a slime ball, a heretic, an “ass,” a “jerk,” and worse.

Genuinely committed evangelicals, who in other contexts would actively condemn hatred and vilification (and would probably never think of themselves as taking part in the like) are lining up on social media websites and blogs to insult, ridicule, belittle and attack Mark Driscoll, and to basically give a pat on the back to their friends who do likewise.
Interested? Read the rest.

Several months ago a Catholic friend of mine made a comment about a church. It was an Anglican church that every year seeks attention by putting up potentially offensive posters that have been known in the past to mock tradition Christian theology (the church has a reputation as being theologically liberal). My friend did not suggest that this showed that Anglicanism itself was wrong (it’s important to add that).

In a rather unfortunately display of something I see far too often when churches and their mistakes are being discussed, a fellow came along and suggested that (my paraphrase) this is what happens when churches abandon God’s true church that Jesus founded, the Catholic church, and they don’t follow the papacy, which is the true repository of apostolic teaching.  Then the argument was clearly stated: Without the English Reformation and the Anglican Church, the above incident would not have happened, and hence the Anglican church shouldn’t exist and the Reformation was a mistake.

So I replied to this stranger:

Greg, maybe a course in philosophy would help here, but the fact that A would not exist without B, and A is bad, does not mean that B should not exist. Sex abuse by Catholic priests would not exist if the Catholic Church did not exist. But clearly that does not mean that the Catholic church shouldn’t exist. Your partisanship is clouding your reason. Put down that hobby horse.

Of course the same is true of any church: Anglicans, Presbyterians, Baptists and so on. Churches, just like any organisation, provide a place where people can do the same bad things people would do no matter where they were. But this fellow was Catholic, so the above example was more appropriate.

Now what happened next? Was I offered a reason to re-think the logic of this counter-example? No. I received a message from Mr Matheson telling me that he didn’t “like” my comment, and asked that it be removed. Naturally, I declined. The only reasons to dislike the above statement might be that one sees that it undercuts their argument but can’t think of a good way to respond (as I believe was the case here), or one misunderstands the statement to mean its opposite, namely that sex abuse in the Catholic church does show that the Catholic church shouldn’t exist – although I struggle to see how anyone could honestly believe that this is what was meant.

Imagine my surprise then, when I logged into Facebook today and saw this:

There’s no recourse to this – no way of appealing or objecting to this bizarre decision, so that’s really the end of the matter – not that I mind. It’s just a Facebook conversation after all. You can read Facebook’s community standards here, where I think you’ll see that in fact my comment doesn’t get close to violating any of them. As far as I can see this is nothing more than a case of intellectual cowardice in the utmost: Running scared from a rebuttal and then having it hidden from public view so that nobody sees how one’s argument was completely undermined.

But if this incident highlights anything, it offers advice to my Catholic friends: Don’t argue against Protestantism (or anything else) this way. Yes, the Reformation, like the counter-reformation, like Vatican II, like movements within medieval Catholicism, like movements within Protestantism, the scientific revolution, and indeed like the very existence of the Catholic church itself, may have made some unfortunate things possible. But that never, by itself, shows that something is wrong, that it should not exist, or that it should not have happened. If you do, you may end up with somebody offering a response that you really wish the world couldn’t see.

I’ve never been coy about the fact that I’m looking for academic work. Through the blog, the podcast, publications and public speaking I’m trying to raise my profile in the hopes that all these things will help me to make that contact, get the right person to notice, land that job, get that title, improve finances, and set me off on a rewarding career. Of course I wouldn’t shun any of those things. I’m not stupid. But I’m not just an academic and a Christian. I’m a Christian academic. That doesn’t mean that the only subjects that interest me are overtly about God (although given that my subjects of interest are philosophy and theology that is certainly a common theme in the subjects that do interest me). It means that I do academia as a Christian. My goals and my attitudes need to be continually shaped into goals and attitudes that are not just compatible with a Christian outlook, but which are an integral part of it.

One of the things that this means is that it’s not about me. What if I could pass on knowledge, stimulate interest in the greatest questions life offers, questions about right and wrong or what’s really real, challenge people to engage the world in a more reflective and just way, present a Christian worldview as credible to critically minded people, address objections to the Christian faith, and achieve all the ends that I set out to achieve that benefit other people without benefiting myself in terms of my profile, job, status, position in life or financial wellbeing? Would it be worth it? Would I still do it? Facing real world concerns, frustrations, disappointments, disenchantments and ambitions, it has often been easy for me to lose sight of the right answer to that question. Of course it would be worth it, and I’ve got to work on not measuring the worth of an endeavour in terms of me. It’s not about me – it was never supposed to be. Think about all those goals: passing on, stimulating, challenging, presenting, addressing. Those goals are all about doing things for others, getting a job done. If I can speak in terms of having a “calling,” those things (as far as I can tell) are my calling. Crazy though it might sound to people who don’t share my most fundamental beliefs about things, I actually believe that when I do those things I am serving God as he wants me to serve him.
Interested? Read the rest.

In the New Testament in Mark chapter twelve (paralleled in Matthew chapter twenty-two), we read about an encounter between Jesus and some Sadducees. Sadducees, as you may know, were a group of Jews who denied the resurrection of the dead, as well as the existence of spirits (in the sense of departed spirits), angels and demons. This life is all there is, they believed, and when you die, that is the end of you forever.

In this passage the Sadducees were trying to reduce the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead to absurdity by showing that it led to bizarre consequences. What if a woman’s husband died, so she remarried a number of times, with each subsequent husband dying (!!!). At the resurrection of the dead, who would she be married to? Their implied answer was: “Surely not all of them. So the resurrection leads to unacceptable consequences, and you should really just give it up.”

Jesus gave two answers, and I’m going to focus on the second. His first answer was to say that actually at the resurrection of the dead there won’t be any marriage, so the issue won’t even arise. His second answer, however, is an unexpected foray into the Hebrew Scripture in verses twenty-six and twenty-seven:

And as for the dead being raised, have you not read in the book of Moses, in the passage about the bush, how God spoke to him, saying, ‘I am the God of Abraham, and the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob’? He is not God of the dead, but of the living. You are quite wrong.

What is particularly significant about this quote from Scripture is that Jesus is referring to an account in the book of Exodus. The Sadducees only accepted the authority of the Torah, the first five books of the Bible (often called the five books of Moses). They didn’t accept the other books of the Hebrew Scripture and they didn’t accept the oral traditions and other writings. As far as they could see, the Torah contained no references to the resurrection of the dead (unlike, for example, the book of Daniel), so they didn’t accept it. For Jesus to draw support for the resurrection from the book of Exodus, then, shows an approach that is happy to meet with opponents on common ground where possible.

While the question of the Sadducees, along with Jesus’ answer (“And as for the dead being raised…”) make it clear that the intention of the author was to capture a dispute concerning the resurrection, some have sought to find more here, arguing that actually this passage shows that Jesus believed in a conscious intermediate state of the spirits of the departed. Since God is said to be the God “of the living,” and since Abraham, Isaac and Jacob were physically dead when those words were spoken, Jesus must surely have meant that the dead are really alive, conscious in the intermediate state.
Interested? Read the rest.

In light of the millennia of the history of philosophy that we have behind us, it was only recently – setting the last few decades aside – that the moral argument slipped out of the mainstream. In the first half of the twentieth century C. S. Lewis could refer to the moral argument with some confidence, and it may well have been the most common of the major arguments for God’s existence at the time.

While today most Christians philosophers might look favourably on the moral argument (with the occasional noteworthy exception like Richard Swinburne), it has certainly fallen out of favour among the philosophical community – in spite of what I take to be its strength – bearing in mind of course that in the English-speaking world the general population outside of academia was once much more Christian than today. Where did it go? Why, in the mid twentieth century, did the moral argument slip out of sight?

Here it is, the last podcast episode for 2011. This time I’m looking at “the “evil god challenge” as posed by Stephen Law in a fairly recent article by that name. Isn’t the evidence for a good God really no better or worse than the evidence that an evil god? In short, no. Here I explain why I think (as I suspect many may think) that the evil god challenges has major philosophical shortcomings, in spite of being an argument worthy of our attention.

Episode 045: What if God Were Really Bad? [ 58:52 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

The end of the year is almost upon us, and here are my favourite blog posts for 2011. I could just list the ones that have the greatest number of actual hits (traffic wise), but that wouldn’t tell us much because some posts have been accumulating hits since January and some just started in December. So, you’re left with my favourites instead. I haven’t included any podcast episodes, and I’ve chosen no more than one from each month.

January: Deal Breakers and Christian Essentials – Although I identify as a relatively conservative Evangelical Christian, I cop a bit of flack from those who think that whatever they happen to believe counts as the boundary markers for evangelicalism, and anyone who falls outside of that is either suspect or already in the garbage chute to hell. Here I offered some reflections on the kinds of things that I think should really “make the difference” when considering another person’s point of view and whatever it’s acceptable from a Christian perspective.

February: When God attacks: Trying to make sense of God in natural disasters – Written shortly after the Earthquake that devastated Christchurch, here I offer some of my thoughts on reconciling the God revealed in Christ with the suffering we see in tragedies like this one.

March: Yeah, OK, so March was pretty average.

April: It was really hard to pick just one in April, there were a few that I like here. Maybe you should just check out the whole month. But if I’m going to pick one, I’ll pick a fairly geeky one: Does John 1:3 rule out uncreated abstract objects? – Here I offer my thoughts on William lane Craig’s claim that the idea of uncreated abstract objects is at odds with the view that God is the creator of “all things,” and that it is specifically at odds with John 1:3, contrary to the view of Peter Van Inwagen. While it’s not a hill I would die on, I side with Van Inwagen and claim that actually John 1:3 is compatible with the existence of uncreated abstract objects.

May: Richard Carrier on the Resurrection part 1 – Compiling this list has reminded me that at some point I should complete part 2 of this series! This post was the first of several that will dissect the arguments of Richard Carrier on why the doctrine of Christ’s resurrection that we know of was not the original view of the early church, and that it represents a mutated view that crept in very early in the history of the Christian faith. Like most readers, I think his arguments are considerably less than compelling.

June: An open letter to my traditionalist friends – This one is an open letter to the many evangelicals who feel that they must perpetuate the crucially important doctrine of the everlasting torments of hell, and who find themselves called to combat the rising tide of annihilationism (the view I hold). Here I offer a public explanation of why, quite frankly, they are failing and ought to fail.

July: Jesus: The Cold Case – This was a collection of my thoughts on the TV documentary in New Zealand, Jesus: The Cold Case, where, in essence, a tiny selection of theologians and New Testament scholars with views that fall well outside mainstream biblical scholarship were called on to offer the authoritative view that most of hat the Gospels say about the death of Christ is creative anti-Semitic falsehood.

August: Christian employers and the hiring process – I wrote this post at the risk of arousing animosity towards myself in the community of Christian colleges, but I thought – and still think – that this needed to be said. Christian institutions that care about excellence need to purge themselves of the nepotism that many of them are familiar with.

September: Not sure really…

October: Divine Command Ethics: Ontology versus epistemology – Here I attempt to explain a very common confusion when people criticise the idea that morality might depend on God.

November: Brief thoughts about God’s freedom to command - Sometimes (!!) I can admit when I’m wrong. Here I explain how I improved (in my view) my view on the relationship between God’s nature and divine commands.

December: The conditional premise of the moral argument – Here I say a thing or two in defence of the claim that if God did not exist, then moral facts wouldn’t exist either.

Remember folks, the blog has been here since May 2006, so there are plenty of old blog posts to browse through in the Archive over on the right.

The next podcast episode will be out during this week so you still have that to look forward to in 2011, but otherwise, I hope you’ve enjoyed another year of Say Hello to my Little Friend!

Best wishes to all

Glenn Peoples

Greetings all – For those of you who missed her Majesty’s 2011 Christmas message, here it is:

Merry Christmas everyone!

All is quiet on the blogging front at the moment, I’m taking a few days’ rest and recuperation (long story), but there will be a new podcast within the week.

Whatever you’re doing, have a safe and happy Christmas. Enjoy yourself, spend time with people you love, and to those of us who appreciate what Christmas is all about, make sure that the main thing remains the main thing. Christ is at the centre of Christmas.

It’s bad taste to say unpleasant things about people when they’re dead. Well, no it’s not actually. Kim Jon Il just died and just today they were mocking him on the radio. Wartime songs were sung about Hitler after his demise, and so on. But in polite society, it’s not done. Christopher Hitchens lost his battle with Cancer recently, and Christians are coming out of the woodwork to say nice things about him.

He may have been a good journalist and writer, but in the arena he became notorious in – attacking religion, he was a prat, and deliberately so. And not just a prat, a pretending, smug, arrogant (certainly more arrogant than was warranted by his ignorance), belligerent prat. He – along with his equally vapid adoring fan base – was quite taken by the idea that you’ve offered a sensible critique of Christianity if you just describe it in scornful terms with a serious look on your face, or that a deep Oxford educated voice and some dirty innuendos made a point all that more logically compelling.

Christopher Hitchens, aside from having a presenter’s (and a writer’s) flair, contributed nothing of value to public discussions around religion. His circus antics only served to egg on the very worst intellectual element of atheism (frankly giving more respectable non-believers a bad name), and to undermine the academic virtues of his Alma Mater (the University of Oxford). In spite of – as far as actual arguments go – hands down losing his debate with Alister McGrath on the value of religion, the fact that he made his comments in a sassy tone and threw in a questionable joke or two warmed people to him, turning them away from analysing the intellectual merits of what was said and towards an analysis of “who gave the best burn.” In this he certainly resembles his company among the so-called “four horsemen” of the new atheism, especially Richard Dawkins, whose ostensible tribute to Hitchens is essentially a slightly less well written version of a Hitchens tirade against theism. Dawkins would have us think that Hitchens’ death shows us the dignity of atheism. No it doesn’t. It shows us what’s wrong with smoking and drinking to excess. Hitchens took the advice of Job’s wife, “curse your God and die.”

Hitchens left a lasting message for his adorers: Screw reason, just go for the shock value of a thumped podium, fake outrage, showmanship and some naughty words. It’s not much of a legacy. That said, he was a man who certainly spoke what he believed and had integrity that would allow him to do nothing else. This being the case, the last thing he would want, I am sure, is a pretentious tribute about what a sad loss of a great fellow this is. It’s sad for him, his friends and family of course, and they have my condolences for the personal loss. But as for this “here lies a worthy opponent” nonsense, forget it. He lived as a fool, played to the lowest common denominator, encouraged a generation of sloppy, angry argument makers and committed his career and a good chunk of his life to hostility towards his maker. His life was one of genuine tragedy.

Glenn Peoples