Thinking Christian

Christian Carnival CCXXXIV is up at True Believer’s Weblog.

Posted by Tom Gilson under Miscellanea |  Email This Post | No Comments »

Kate Muir, writing in The Times (London) absolutely fawns over Richard Dawkins, who is releasing his new three-part series Dawkins on Darwin on British TV. I fairly fell over when I read this—even though I was sitting down:

In these barren, thoughtless times, Dawkins gives people something substantial to chew on.

[Link: Richard Dawkins slaps creationists into the primordial soup - Times Online]

Something substantial to chew on? Hardly. In The God Delusion he doesn’t address, doesn’t even demonstrate awareness of, any genuine theistic scholarship. Instead he serves up for himself several easy, empty arguments for a vaporous version of God that he himself invented; then, having savored and swallowed them, he burps them back up, pronounces himself satisfied, and expects us all to feel the same. Challenged on his utter avoidance of opposing scholarship (here, for example), he takes up P.Z. Myers’s “Courtier’s Reply” and insists it would be silly to give genuine theistic thinking any more attention than he has.

Is this indeed a corrective for barren, thoughtless times? I think not. There are better assessments out there; this one, for example, from Not Even Modern:

I think I mentioned the [Courtier's Reply] argument before. I detest it, because it is basically a license to intellectual laziness….

The “Courtier’s reply” move is astonishingly poor, to the extent that it’s baffling that Dawkins is actually using it. As it is, it is equally open to rhetorical deployment by Creationists (why read anything about biological evolution, as it’s nonsense anyway?), Flat Earthers, and so on. I really think there’s a hubris thing going on here. To wade into an area which has more than two thousand years of extremely bright believers making cautious and complex arguments and extremely bright disbelievers making equally cautious and complex arguments, and to think all one has to do is to ignore all that and point out the emperor is naked, one needs a pretty high opinion of oneself.

In a similar vein, David Heddle says,

The Courtier’s Reply is license to wallow in ignorance–in fact it justifies, rationalizes, condones, encourages, celebrates, and rewards ignorance, simply by declaring the subject at hand (theology) is not worthy of study. I see that as laziness, not brilliance.

In a masterpiece of oblivious self-parody, Dawkins himself, in his interview with the Times, explains the problem with the Courtier’s Reply. The topic is different but the principle is the same:

“I don’t like giving [Darwin skeptics] the oxygen of respectability, the feeling that if they’re up on a platform debating with a scientist, there must be real disagreement. One side of the debate is wholly ignorant. It would be as though you knew nothing of physics and were passionately arguing against Einstein’s theory of relativity.”

Knowing nothing of real theology, yet being quite content in his ignorance, nevertheless he passionately argues against God.

Such intellectual laziness is apparently all too fitting for our day. Consider this from Karen Muir in the same Times article:

For final proof that Dawkins, rather than God, is everywhere, you need only to have seen the most recent series of Doctor Who, in which Dawkins played a cameo as himself.

Need I spell it out? Am I being ungracious, or is that not evidence that speaks for itself of “these barren, thoughtless times”?

Now, I will grant her points for this nifty bit of verbiage: “slaps creationists into the primordial soup.” That’s a real nice piece of imagery. We writers congratulate ourselves when we come up with lines like that. It’s a fine example of her own graciousness, too….

Hat Tip: Barry Carey, Al Mohler

Posted by Tom Gilson under New Atheism & Origins and Science & Unfiled | Tags: Dawkins |  Email This Post | No Comments »

Book Review

My generation grew up saturated with scientific optimism. I was born just a few months before Sputnik took man into space for the first time, and I can vividly remember watching the TV broadcast of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the surface of the moon. Science—both physical and behavioral—was succeeding spectacularly. There was just one major world conflict to worry about—the Cold War—and it seemed that if we could just get beyond that, nothing could halt our progress toward a marvelous future of cooperative abundance based in human rational prowess. In the process, everyone knew, superstitions like religion would be supplanted by scientific understanding. We didn’t need God. Man would figure everything out on his own, through his autonomous reason (we said “man” and “his” that way then, oblivious to issues of sexism).

This was the modernist hope and dream. It was wrong.

We were the last American generation to grow up with such rationalist optimism (the last one in Europe was probably earlier). Even for us, that attitude was already under severe pressure. Science had not prevented the Holocaust, and someone like Josef Mengele could even operate under its banner. In the Soviet Union, psychiatry was being criminally employed against dissenters. The atom bomb was metaphorically hanging over all of our heads. When questions of civil rights came to the fore, science and other rationalist approaches had virtually nothing to offer in answer. The ’60s generation began asking “Who am I?” “What’s my purpose?” “Why should I bother with my parents’ morality?” Hallucinogenic drugs, the ultimate in anti-rationality, had their heyday. Religion was beginning its resurgence around the globe.

In short, modernist rationality failed in its promise, and its failure paved the way for postmodernism. How shall I summarize postmodernism? Very carefully, gingerly, and with a strong disclaimer: this brief paragraph will distort as much as it explains. Postmodernism is an attitude as much as a philosophy. It recognizes the failure of modernist, autonomous rationality to explain meaning, value, and truth; and it concludes that any attempt at explanation must be empty, at best an exercise in power. Language is not for representing reality—there is no reality to be represented—but for playing domination games. Religion in particular is about power, not truth. Not just that, but because of many religions’ arrogant confidence that they hold the truth, they represent some of the most dangerous handlers of power.

Now if I were putting that forth as anything like a full description of postmodernism, I’m guilty of a terrible irresponsibility. If on the other hand I have hinted that there is something important in postmodernism, something crucial for Christians to be aware of, to understand and study further, then I may hope I am contributing something positive thereby. For me, born in the mid-1950s, postmodernism is virtually a foreign world. It is the world I live in, however. It is missionaries’ responsibility to understand the culture in which they minister.

Where did today’s relativism come from? What is the real source of “identity politics” (politics of race, gender, etc.)? Why do gay-rights advocates take conservative Christians’ disagreements as “hate language”? How can present-day theologians come up with such disparate interpretations of the Bible? Why do

Christians, we are all missionaries. We have homework to do.

The question is, how to understand this philosophical and cultural current? Postmodernism is infamously confusing. How does one go about learning more about it? Heath White’s Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian (Brazos Press, 2006) is a great place to begin.

It’s well named: it is indeed a 101-level book; very clearly written, with virtually no technical language and hardly any five-syllable words (unless you draw “ism” out to two syllables!). Yet it’s thoughtfully written. I never felt I was being talked down to.

Professor White, who teaches philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Wilmington, tells us his background is in the “evangelical wing of Protestant Christianity.” Coming from that standpoint, he is clearly not afraid to identify both strengths and weaknesses in postmodernism. For instance, on page 155:

Postmodernism blows the whistle on the many false promises of modernity, which puts its faith in reason and progress rather than God. Postmoderns are remarkably clear-eyed about the failures of modernity and about the sickness, oppression, and death that pervade our world. Their multiple alternative accounts of history have the merit of bringing these evils to our attention. Postmodern though, however, is critical, skeptical, and deconstructive, without any new remedies to offer. It often engenders a worldview of deep hopelessness.

In the face of this pessimism, however, Christianity offers not cheery optimism but divine promises.

He elaborates on those promises, and especially how they relate to modernism and postmodernism. In short, they don’t fit well with either. Neither modernism nor postmodernism proves to be satisfying or coherent in the end. But these are not our only two options. Before modernism there was premodernism, which took human rationality as useful and reliable if applied under the direction and within the guidelines of revelation. Something much like that seems to be the best way forward even today, when modernism’s failures are evident, and where the situation for postmodernism is likely to be along the lines White describes on pages 160-161:

Postmodernism may [someday, eventually] collapse from its own contradictions and its inability to account for historical events, the way many aspects of modernism have. September 11, 2001, may do to postmodern moral relativism what the Holocaust did to modern ideas of moral progress. Alternatively, postmodernism may be sidelined into irrelevance, especially from a Christian point of view. By 2025, two-thirds of Christians will live in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, cultures where the history and guiding ideas of Western civilization—the springs of postmodern thought—are simply much less important than they are in North America and Europe.

It is a fairly safe bet that the general distrust of truth and knowledge that marks postmodernism is temporary. This skeptical syndrome flares up at intervals throughout history; it is a response to intellectual exhaustion and often portends something remarkable and new…. Postmodern doubt is a frame of mind in the same mold, a response to the fruitlessness of modern approaches. Because a new way forward has always manifested itself before, we can expect that it will do so again. The shape of that intellectual revolution to come, however, is not yet clear.

I recommend this book to youth pastors and campus ministers; indeed to anyone in ministry who seeks to understand the last several decades’ cultural changes, and the attitudes of those who are a product of those changes. It’s also good material for interested college students and advanced high school students. Readers who regard themselves as postmodern may see that theirs is not the only cure for modernist failings. Those of us who look on postmodernism as deeply confused will better understand how that confusion arose—and we may be warned against accepting modernist (autonomous) rationality as the only or best alternative.

Postmodernism 101: A First Course for the Curious Christian by Heath White. Grand Rapids, MI: Brazos Press, 2006. Amazon.com Price US $12.23. Paperback, 176 pages, including annotated bibliography.

Posted by Tom Gilson under Thinking Christianly | Tags: Book Review, Postmodernism |  Email This Post | 1 Comment »

Christ Church Unity, Kansas City, MO, says, “We honor all faiths.” This affirming and inclusive statement stands near the heart of a minor social movement: the Complaint Bracelet (”21 days to a complaint-free life”), invented by the church’s pastor, Rev. Will Bowen. Bown has been featured on The Today Show and Oprah, and, more than 5.5 million people have reportedly worn one of these bracelets. I found out about it from a friend of the family who is wearing one this week. Every time she catches herself complaining, she shifts the bracelet to her other wrist. The goal is to keep it on the same wrist for 21 days.

I can see some value in that, but more on that another day. Just now I want to think about this statement, which I ran across while researching the bracelet’s background. “We honor all faiths.” Why do they say that, and what could it possibly mean?

I would be interested to hear from someone in the Unity Movement on this. Their own online literature provides information, but also raises more questions.

First. why would they say it? They have their own doctrine. The name Jesus Christ features prominently in it, but their understanding of Christ diverges markedly from historic Christianity and from the Biblical understanding of who he is. Why would they want to honor all faiths when they have their own, which they apparently consider to be true?

And what does it mean? Could it mean, perhaps, that they honor persons of all faiths? Are they saying they acknowledge the universal brotherhood of humanity, all created in the image of God, or something of the sort? That would be a fine statement, but it’s not what it says; it says “we honor all faiths,” not “persons of all faiths.” The Unity movement’s website includes a diversity statement, but it’s about diversity within the Unity movement.

Could it mean that they honor all beliefs? That interpretation closer to what the words actually say, and it would be in keeping with the tenor of a tolerant, pluralistic world that sees truth in all religions. But this is problematic, for religions disagree. To genuinely honor historic Christianity as a belief, as trust in an actual person who lived in history and who had an actual identity, one must honor not only the Christian’s life of trust, but also the things Christians believe about the actual person of Christ. Likewise to honor Islam as a belief, one must not just honor the Muslim’s way of life, but also what Muslims believe regarding Muhammad and his writings.

Beliefs have content, propositions some of which are regarded as right and others as wrong, some things to be believed and some things to be rejected. The content of a faith cannot be separated from the acts of a faith. If this church’s statement means they honor all beliefs, it must mean they honor the content of all beliefs. This is problematic, however. Is it possible to honor Jesus Christ the way historic Christianity has honored him, and at the same time to honor Muhammad as Muslims do? No; for Christians see Jesus as the Second Person of the Trinity, God in the flesh, born of a virgin, who died on the cross to redeem us of our sins, who rose again, and whose apostolic followers completed God’s authoritative revelation to us in the words of the Bible. Muslims say no to just about all of that, and they say that Muhammad said no. If you honor (support, give high regard to, or encourage) the Muslims’ belief about Jesus, you dishonor Christians’ beliefs. And vice versa.

More to the point, if you honor (support, give high regard to, or encourage) Unity’s beliefs about God, you dishonor Christians’ beliefs, for they too are not in agreement; Unity’s beliefs are much more in line with New Age pantheism than Biblical Christianity. To affirm the faith of Unity is to say that historic Christianity is really quite wrong about Jesus Christ, the central person of our faith. Is that the kind of thing they mean by honor for all faiths?

Maybe, though, they disagree that there actually is disagreement between faiths after all. Unity’s doctrinal statement says,

Unity honors the universal truths in all religions and respects each individual’s right to choose a spiritual path.

I think we’re coming closer to it here. Unity sees universal truth in all religions, and that is exactly what they honor. There’s our answer! But we must chase this down, too: Just what truths do all religious universally agree on? The nature of God (or the ultimate)? The nature of reality and its relation to God or the ultimate? Where the world came from, and where it is heading? The explanation of the human condition? The ideal spiritual state? The way to achieve that ideal spiritual state?

What looked like an answer leads to questions with no answers. I still don’t know what it means to honor all faiths….

They “respect each individual’s right to choose a spiritual path.” This, finally, does make sense. If there is one thing that virtually all religions agree on, it is that there is a spiritual path for individuals to walk. It seems Unity may be honoring something like the religious impulse. But hasn’t that religious impulse been directed into all kinds of violence? Timothy Keller has convincingly explained (mp3) how this religious impulse needs a proper grounding and channel of humility, found through the way of Jesus Christ, or else it turns deadly sour.

At any rate, it’s quite a long descent from “we honor all faiths” to acknowledging merely that humans everywhere have some kind of religious impulse. Examined closely, “we honor all faiths” seems not to mean much at all. So I return to my question, why would they say it?

I suggest two reasons. The first is that they haven’t examined it that closely, and/or they don’t expect anybody else to do so. Its meaninglessness matters little if it can give the right impression, produce the right effect.

That effect or impression is the second reason. In a world of relativism and pluralism, where tolerance is the one cardinal virtue, to be regarded as tolerant is better than to suggest that your beliefs are what you actually believe, and that you don’t believe what you don’t believe.

Posted by Tom Gilson under New Age | Tags: Complaint Bracelet, New Age, Unity Church |  Email This Post | 5 Comments »

I’m installing a fix for the comment editor plugin, which has been broken for a few days. Please let me know if it works for you.

Posted by Tom Gilson under 21st Century Faith |  Email This Post | 4 Comments »

PETA is based not far from here, in Norfolk, Virginia. A few years ago their director, Ingrid Newkirk, wrote a letter to the editor responding to a guest column I’d written. She was objecting to the way I had referenced her infamous phrase, “A rat is a pig is a dog is a boy.” As I recall, I interpreted it at face value: that she thinks there is no essential difference between them all. She said I had misunderstood it. But now look at this from PETA, defending their absolutely reprehensible ad campaign for sterilizing pets.

“It’s irresponsible to let your children have unprotected sex and it’s irresponsible to not spay and neuter your animals when we’re in an animal overpopulation crisis in the United Sates.”

Teen sex (unprotected, of course) and pet reproduction are morally equivalent? No difference, says PETA. They’re on pretty much the same plane. And a rat is a pig is a dog is a boy. All of which is a rather mundane, logical conclusion to draw from the premise of undirected Darwinian evolution, by the way.

That’s not even the worst of this ad campaign, but the rest is too obvious to dwell on here. It’s described well enough in the following link. I don’t think I’ve ever seen or heard of a more outrageous commercial message. If shows in your market, I urge you quite soberly to call the TV station and scream.

At the same time, grieve. Grieve for those who don’t know what it means fully to be human. And pray that they might discover it while they can.

[Link: FOXNews.com - PETA Expands Ad Campaign That Uses Teen Pregnancy to Push Pet Message]

Hat Tip: The Point

Posted by Tom Gilson under Life and Choices | Tags: PETA |  Email This Post | 1 Comment »

I laughed when I saw this: “Please help clarify the article.” To anyone who tries, I wish you lots of luck!

Posted by Tom Gilson under Just For Fun | Tags: Deconstruction, Postmodernism |  Email This Post | No Comments »

Nathan Schneider emailed me today about his response to William Lane Craig’s recent cover article in Christianity Today. I mentioned that article briefly here on July 4, which was a day for family and not for blogging. Nathan’s article, Rumors of God’s Death are Greatly Exaggerated, provides a timely opportunity to say more.

Craig spoke in CT of a striking resurgence in evangelical scholarship, especially in philosophy. He illustrated this with an an all-too-brief summary of several apologetic arguments. Probably the one sentence in Schneider’s article that best sums up his view of the matter is:

Whispering to his coreligionists in Christianity Today, to his subculture, Craig does not do justice to what the revolution is up against.

To Schneider, this resurgence of Christian scholarship is visible only from inside the culture. In other circumstances I might have acknowledged an element of truth to that. Christian readers, think of our “heroes:” Chuck Swindoll, John Piper, Billy Graham; or musicians like Mercy Me, The Newsboys, or Kutless. You can add your favorites to the list. Here’s the sad fact: other than Billy Graham and Mercy Me, the rest of the world has mostly never heard of them.

I think Schneider is saying something like that is the case with Christians in academia, and that the situation is nowhere near as rosy as Craig presents it. He dismisses Craig’s view of “bygone atheism” as “a straw man,” noting the continuing crop of atheistic bestsellers in the bookstores. He complains that Craig did not inform Christianity Today readers of objections to the arguments for God he outlined. It is with open disdain that he describes Craig as “almost cheerful about intelligent design theory, though he fails to mention its lack of support among credible biologists,” and he goes on to offer a rebuttal of the fine-tuning argument Craig had mentioned in his CT article.

And then in a way he almost recognizes what Craig was really doing:

Again, I do not mean to insist that these arguments are categorically wrong. Only that atheists and theists alike will never quite prove their “intellectual muscle” until they stop misrepresenting each other and misinforming their readers. Admittedly, Craig has limited space in the magazine format and cannot be expected to cover everything.

As I read the Christianity Today article, it was never Craig’s purpose to properly represent the arguments, certainly not in all their substance and nuance. He was trying to make readers aware of the discussion, and to illustrate the kinds of things that are being debated. To complain that he has not addressed the major objections is to miss the point. The article was not a work of apologetics, but a work of journalism about apologetics, with brief examples and a suggested reading list. Craig obviously recognizes the reality of the debate:

Of course, there are replies and counterreplies to all of these arguments, and no one imagines that a consensus will be reached. Indeed, after a period of passivity, there are now signs that the sleeping giant of atheism has been roused from his dogmatic slumbers and is fighting back. J. Howard Sobel and Graham Oppy have written large, scholarly books critical of the arguments of natural theology, and Cambridge University Press released its Companion to Atheism last year. Nonetheless, the very presence of the debate in academia is itself a sign of how healthy and vibrant a theistic worldview is today.

It seems to me in view of this that Schneider is being singularly uncharitable with respect to Craig’s treatment of the arguments.

Regarding the cultural ghetto Schneider thinks Craig is mired in, he may simply have missed this brief reference Craig made to a source well outside Christian culture. It was early in the CT piece:

In a recent article, University of Western Michigan philosopher Quentin Smith laments what he calls “the desecularization of academia that evolved in philosophy departments since the late 1960s.” He complains about naturalists’ passivity in the face of the wave of “intelligent and talented theists entering academia today.” Smith concludes, “God is not ‘dead’ in academia; he returned to life in the late 1960s and is now alive and well in his last academic stronghold, philosophy departments.”

You can read Smith’s article for yourself at Philo Online. Before you do that, though, read Philo’s self-description:

Philo is published biannually at the Center for Inquiry ["A Global Federation Committed to Science, Reason, Free Inquiry, Secularism, and Planetary Ethics"] with assistance from Purdue University. Its goal is to publish original, conceptually precise, and argumentatively rigorous articles in all fields of philosophy. Although not devoted to any specific branch of philosophy, Philo encourages the submission of work that examines philosophical issues from an explicitly naturalist perspective…. Philo is the publication of the Society of Humanist Philosophers.

That’s not exactly the monthly mimeograph newsletter from Chigger Creek Baptist Church (begging J. P. Moreland’s pardon—Chigger Creek Church being a favorite phrase of his). And what does Quentin Smith say, that Craig did not have space to quote more fully? Things like this:

The secularization of mainstream academia began to quickly unravel upon the publication of Plantinga’s influential book on realist theism, God and Other Minds, in 1967….

Naturalists passively watched as realist versions of theism, most influenced by Plantinga’s writings, began to sweep through the philosophical community, until today perhaps one-quarter or one-third of philosophy professors are theists, with most being orthodox Christians.

Elsewhere Craig actually says he thinks the “one-quarter or one-third” estimate may be high. He is by no means breathlessly and blissfully unaware of what’s going on in the wider world, as Schneider seems to think he is. In view of his concern over theists and atheists “misrepresenting each other and misinforming their readers,” Schneider may want to re-examine how he has treated William Lane Craig’s work of journalism on a scholarly topic.

Posted by Tom Gilson under Evidences | Tags: Apologetics, William Lane Craig |  Email This Post | 15 Comments »

This website went dark for a while on Wednesday evening due to a power failure at the webhost. A transformer was struck by lightning.

Posted by Tom Gilson under Unfiled |  Email This Post | No Comments »

Dallas Willard writes in The Divine Conspiracy (p. 335),

“God,” Paul said, “makes clear the greatness of his love for us through the fact that Christ died for us while we were still rebelling against him” (Rom. 5:8).

The exclusiveness of the Christian revelation of God lies here. No one can have an adequate view of the heart and purposes of the God of the universe who does not understand that he permitted his son to die on the cross to reach out to all people, even people who hated him. That is who God is. But that is not just a “right answer” to a theological question. It is God looking at me from the cross with compassion and providing for me, with never-failing readiness to take my hand to walk on through life from wherever I may find myself at the time.

God’s deep, gracious love is proved in the price he paid in love on our behalf. Christ died for us. He died in love, to bring us to God, to break down the sin barrier between us and God.

One could go into explaining how the cross of Christ accomplished that: how sin separated us from God, earning us death, and how Christ paid that price for us. Let’s not dwell there this time, though. For now, let’s consider this fact in its simplicity: the price that God imposed, God paid. The price was death (Romans 3:23). God made the payment through the death of God the Son, Jesus Christ. He was the one the Father called his beloved, who often proclaimed his own eternal unity with the Father (John 10:30, John 17). He died by crucifixion, among the most torturous methods of execution ever practiced by a government on earth.

As Willard recalls the love of God that led God to do this for us, he throws in that terrible cultural hand grenade, the word exclusiveness. He had, to, though. It’s really quite inescapable. If the Christian message is at all true, then it is exclusively true. It cannot be one of several options. It is either exclusively true or it is thoroughly wrong.

Though this may be difficult, in an age when pluralism and inclusivism are considered among the chief virtues, I think anyone might be able to see this necessity. It is impossible to include Christianity—the kind of Christianity that centers on the life, death, and resurrection of Christ—in a list of ways to know God. Even if one doubts Jesus ever said what he did about being the only way to God (as in John 14:6, for example), it should be clear that he cannot be one of many items on a spiritual menu.

Let us consider what it would mean if he were. Suppose Eckhart Tolle and Oprah and the Bahá’ís and all the other inclusivists are right. Suppose Christianity is one of many paths to God, to enlightenment, fulfillment, Nirvana, or whatever the real goal is.

Then the universe offers us many ways to reach our best destiny. Whatever reality is at its core, there’s something about it that gives humans a real place, a real direction, a real destiny. Somehow in some personal or impersonal (and therefore metaphoric) way, the universe has us in mind, and it offers us all kinds of ways to flourish for now and for beyond. We just have to pick one of those ways off the universe’s spiritual menu. Let’s see, will I have the t-bone or the tofu?

Reality isn’t too picky. It’s nice to us, in a way. It wants us to be free to choose. You can follow any number of paths, many of which really are rather nice ideas. Experiencing the Now (per Tolle) is a nice idea. New Age spirituality of all kinds fits well into the “nice” category. The Secret says everything will go well if you’ll just think more positively. Those are a couple of attractive options. Let’s just make sure we include Jesus. The cross of Christ is another nice thing on the spiritual menu. Wasn’t that sweet of God the Father to offer his own Son’s torture and death as one of our options?

No!

When Jesus faced the cross it was in agony, with sweat dripping as blood. This was even before he was arrested—he knew what was coming! Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

His friends and followers deserted him–as he knew they would do. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

He was cruelly tortured and mocked. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

He hung on that infamously cruel cross, dying in excruciating pain while they laughed at him. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

He was stabbed in the side, so that water and blood flowed out. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

His body was wrapped up, entombed in the dark. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

There is nothing nice about the cross. It is unthinkable that this was an item on some spiritual menu, one choice among many, something we could feel free to pass over in favor of positive thinking (or any other supposed path to God). 

Christ’s resurrection makes manifest the glory of both his death and his life. It redeems the loss of his death. It makes its greatness even greater. But it does not make it nice. And it hardly supports anyone’s view that Christ is just one of many enlightened ones!

C.S. Lewis said in another context,

But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Neither did he leave open the possibility that he might be just one of many spiritual options. He did not intend to.

Posted by Tom Gilson under New Age & Thinking Christianly & Worshiping Christian | Tags: Cross, Exclusivity, Jesus Christ, New Age, Worshiping Christian |  Email This Post | 2 Comments »