Category: Books and Film

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Incarnational Humanism and "The Passionate Intellect" — Book Review

The Passionate Intellect: Incarnational Humanism and the Future of University Education

By Norman Klassen and Jens Zimmerman
Baker Academic (2006)
ISBN 0-8010-2734-9

This book is explores the themes of whether, and how, Christians can develop a rich and passionate life of the mind. Although it is written for Christian students bound for university, it is useful for any Christian who is serious about the intellectual life.

One of the authors’ goals is to defuse the “warfare” mentality concerning faith and “secular” learning that some Christians, particularly those who are not very mature in the faith, often seem to develop. They propose to do this through the model of “Incarnational Humanism.”

“Incarnational Humanism” takes the incarnation of Christ as a starting point for a Christian approach to learning. “In Christ,” the authors state, “all fragmentation ends and a new humanity begins, a new creation in which all knowledge is united (or taken captive, as Paul puts it) under the lordship of Christ because in him the divine and the human are firmly joined forever.” The pattern of the incarnation suggests that we should expect to find that truth is not “an abstract, timeless concept,” but rather is mediated through human language, culture, and tradition. Therefore, Christians should not be afraid of truth located outside the hermetically sealed world of our particular religious subcultures.

In short, the authors place a Kuyperian notion of “common grace,” as mediated for generations of Christian college students by Arthur Holmes’ famous dictum that “All Truth is God’s Truth,” into the postmodern context. While the authors thus acknowledge the postmodern turn, they firmly deny the destructive Nietzschean postmodernism, evident in figures such as Michael Foucault, that rejects any notion of classical humanism in favor of a heuristic of power relationships.

The answer the authors suggest to Nietzsche and Foucault, however, is not a resurgent Christian rationalism dusted off from the fundamentalist-modernist controversy. Rather, they hearken back to the sort of humanism that is evident in many of the Church’s great minds, such as Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, and Calvin, prior to the Enlightenment. In this classical Christian humanism, truth is more than power – indeed, truth in many ways is the antithesis of power – because the divine Truth became man and gave himself for us.

There are many riches in this book. The phrase “Incarnational Humanism” is a beautiful one that deserves broad attention, and it is high time that “All Truth is God’s Truth” be given a postmodern reading. There is also, however, a glaring weakness in the authors’ arguments: they do not deal adequately with the effects of sin. A model of truth that hearkens back to Augustine, but that glides over any reading of Augustine’s thoughts on sin, will not present a thoroughly Christian humanism.

I wish the authors had acknowledged the tension between the incarnation and human sinfulness, and had contextualized it, as scripture and the Christian humanist tradition do, within the “already / not yet” of the Kingdom of God. Nevertheless, this is a valuable addition to the literature on the intellectual life as a Christian vocation. Let us hope that a holistic, incarnational understanding of faith and learning once again infuses the Church, rather than the rationalist, atomistic, confrontational approaches that so often seem to dominate our thinking.

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Books and Film Science & Technology

Francis Collins and Design

I recently read Francis Collins’ new book, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief in God. There is much to admire in this book, but also much that is frustrating. In this post, I’ll focus on just one aspect of the book: how Collins handles cosmological and biological design arguments.

It’s difficult to understand the distinction Collins makes between cosmological/moral and biological design argments. On the one hand, he says the appearance of fine tuning, the emergence of mind and reason in humans, and the human moral sense are not explainable only by naturalistic causes, and support belief in a creator-God. On the other hand, he says that arguments from the appearance in design in biology are merely worthless God-of-the-gaps arguments.

I can’t see the principled distinction here. In fact, the argument from human mind, reason and the moral sense is a type of biological gap argument.

I suppose the cosmological/moral arguments can be seen as teleological. The point is not so much that there are gaps in our understanding of how naturalistic processes alone could result in the finely-tuned cosmological constant or in the emergence of human mind and morality, but that, even if we were to understand all those naturalistic processes completely, the extraordinarily low probability of how they played out suggests an intelligent purpose beyond mere chance. But the same could be said of biological design arguments such as the argument from irreducible complexity. And even the probabilistic-teleological argument itself is a sort of gap argument — we can’t conceive of how something of such a low probability could have occurred in nature, so we fill in our inability to grasp that happenstance with God.

I also don’t understand Collins’ criticism of some ID / design / OEC arguments on the basis that they present an inept designer who was forced to repeatedly intervene in the creation. The same can be said of any TE view that retains any concept of God as a sovereign creator. If God sovereignly superintended ordinary evolution, then he repeatedly and constantly “intervened” (and still “intervenes”) in the creation, making myriad trial-and-error adjustments, arguably at great cost in terms of “wasted” organisms.

The answer to this criticism of TE, of course, is that God is perfectly good, wise and knowing as well as perfectly sovereign, that his direction of evolution was fully in accordance with His goodness, wisdom, foreknowledge, and that it accomplished exactly the purposes He intended, even if we as humans don’t always fully understand them. But that same answer applies to Collins’ criticism of the “meddling” ID God. There’s no reason to assume God was “fixing” some kind of “mistake” if He intervened in the creation apart from the working of natural laws. His intevention is equally consistent with a perfectly good, wise, previously known and established plan by a sovereign creator-God. (Likewise, the same criticism and answer applies to criticisms of the Atonement — why did God have to “fix” human sin by becoming incarnate and dying on a cross?) (The other answer to this criticism is open theism, which Collins doesn’t seem to espouse. But again, that would equally be an answer in the case of an ID / OEC paradigm).

So what am I missing?

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Books and Film

Book Review — Transcendent

What do you get when you mix global warming, an artificial intelligence named Gea (instead of Gaia), German idealist Friedrich Schelling, Catholic mystic Teilhard de Chardin, Russian Orthodox mystic philosopher Nikolai Federov, and a guilt-ridden far-future post-human networked mind in need of atonement? Apparently, you get reams of turgid telling-not-showing exposition followed by soporific sermons about how humans can transcend themselves to become gods (or, as in the case of the net-mind Transcendence, a sort of Godnet 2.0).

The soul of Stephen Baxter’s latest sci-fi novel, Transcendent, is the Catholic Priest character, Rosa (of course the Vatican has lightened up on that male Priest thing), who tells us Federov drew on “Marxist historical determinism, socialist utopianism, and deeper wells of Slavic theology and nationalism to come up with a ‘Cosmism,’ which preached an ultimate unity between man and the universe.” As you can see, Rosa has the soul of a GRE question writer on a bender at the Burning Man festival.

I love a rip-roaring space opera. I also love mind-bending far-future speculation. Unfortunately, this book is neither rip-roaring nor mind-bending. Take a pass.

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Books and Film

I'm on Amazon!

I was surprised to learn today that something I wrote is available for sale on Amazon. It seems that First Things bundles collections of letters to the editor and sells them as mini e-books. A letter I wrote is part of an exchange on the Dover ID decision. Where’s my royalty check?

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Books and Film

The Kingdom of Christ — Part I

This is a first in a series of posts that will review Russell D. Moore’s important book The Kingdom of Christ. In the course of the book review, I’ll reflect a bit on how a robust theology of the Kingdom is important for cultural engagement.

A theology of the Kingdom of God is vital, and difficult, because how we answer the question “what is the Kingdom of God” determines how we answer questions such as “how should Christians relate to culture and society” and “what is the Church’s proper relationship to the State.” Anyone who wishes to develop a Christian perspective on law, culture and society must first develop a theology of the Kingdom. In fact, the “Kingdom of God” arguably is the central concept in Jesus’ teaching as recorded in the Gospels. And yet, Evangelicals have long had a complicated relationship with the Kingdom of God.

Continue reading “The Kingdom of Christ — Part I”
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Books and Film

Book List — Faith, Law and Public Policy

I’ve been working on an idea for some “book list” pages. Here’s a list I’ve started on good books concerning the intersection of faith, law and public policy. Some of these are more about the theological foundation for thinking about law and public policy, others are specifically about the place of faith-based claims in the public square.

Continue reading “Book List — Faith, Law and Public Policy”
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Books and Film Science & Technology Theology

Book Review — David Snoke, A Biblical Case for an Old Earth

In this book, David Snoke, a professor of Physics at the University of Pittsburgh, presents a case for a “day-age” view of Genesis 1. Snoke’s twin goals are to establish that the “day-age” view is a valid alternative for Christians who hold to Biblical inerrancy and to argue for a concordist understanding of the Genesis texts and modern science. He succeeds admirably at the first goal, but is less persuasive concerning the second.

The book is organized into nine chapters and includes an appendix with a “literal” translation of Genesis 1-12. The first two chapters identify Snoke’s underlying assumptions and recite the scientific evidence for an old earth. Snoke does an excellent job of explaining why and when extra-Biblical evidence can be used to interpret the Bible, and provides a calm, concise summary of the physical evidence against the young earth view. These chapters are particularly useful and admirable because they avoid the argumentative tone that so often creeps into this sort of discussion.

After laying this groundwork, Snoke responds to two key objections against the old earth view: the problem of death before the fall and the relationship between the creation week and the Sabbath. His insights concerning animal death before the fall are particularly helpful. In particular, he suggests that the wild, untamed aspects of creation, including things such as carnivorous animals, may have served before the Fall as a reminder to Adam and Eve of God’s power, and as a sort of warning about life outside the protected confines of Eden. Just as Aslan in C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books is not a “tame Lion,” he notes, these aspects of creation that don’t seem “nice” to us remind us that God is also a “dangerous” God.

After presenting his Biblical case for an old earth, Snoke turns to the case for a concordist view of science and scripture. He defines “science” as “nothing but a way to organize and analyze the things of the world around us,” and concludes that since the Bible also makes observations about the physical world, there should be areas of overlap where “things in the Bible are open to scientific investigation.”

Many readers will take issue with this definition of “science,” as well as with the expectation that the Biblical text is presented in an objective, narrative form that can be correlated with modern scientific propositions. Many readers also will question why Snoke discounts Darwinian evolution based on an a priori reading of the creation story concerning Adam and Eve, while remaining willing to consider alternative interpretations of related texts that superficially seem to suggest a recent creation. Nevertheless, on the question of the age of the earth, this is a fair and well-balanced book that deserves a wide reading, particularly in the evangelical community.

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Books and Film

Inspiration and Incarnation

Peter Enns’ book Inspiration and Incarnation: Evangelicals and the Problem of the Old Testament, is a vital contribution to the discussion about how Evangelicals should understand the Bible. I believe anyone with Evangelical commitments who is interested in relating the Bible to modern science and postmodern epistemology will benefit greatly from Enns’ perspectives.

Enns is a Professor of Old Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary. Westminster is a Reformed seminary with a commitment to Biblical inerrancy. Thus, Enns writes from within a Warfieldian concept of Biblical authority and a Reformed epistemological stance.

Enns tackles several difficult questions for Evangelicals who take the Bible seriously but who also recognize that “all truth is God’s truth.” These include the stories of creation and the flood and their similarity to ancient near eastern (ANE) myths, the sometimes imprecise, non-linear nature of Biblical history, and the way in which the New Testament Apostolic authors often took Old Testament passages out of context and infused them with new, spiritualized meanings. Contrary to many popular efforts at addressing these problems, however, Enns avoids the temptation to propose strained harmonizations that purport to explain away tough questions.

Continue reading “Inspiration and Incarnation”
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Books and Film

Da Vinci Humor

Daniel Henninger’s entry in today’s Wall Street Journal Opinion section (sorry, WSJ.com doesn’t allow deep links without subscription) is hilarious. He suggests some plot lines using Dan Brown’s crazy consipiracy theory theme:

Bill Clinton is directly descended from Henry VIII; Hillary is his third cousin. Jack Ruby was Ronald REagan’s half-brother. Dick Cheney has been dead for five years; the vice president is a clone created by Halliburton in 1998. The Laffer Curve is the secret sign of the Carlyle Group. Michael Moore is the founder of the Carlyle Group, which started World War I. The New York Times is secretly run by the Rosicrucians (this is revealed on the first page of Chapter 47 of the Da Vince Code if you look at the 23rd line through a kaleidoscope). Jacques Chirac is descended from Judas.

Too funny!

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Books and Film

DaVinci and Da Gospel

I haven’t posted about the DaVinci Code yet, mostly I guess from apathy. I haven’t read the book, though it’s laying around the house somewhere and I generally understand the plot. There are some churches in my area running sermon series or offering books and tapes debunking Dan Brown’s story. I guess I sort of understand what they’re trying to do. The picture Brown paints of the historicity of the Gospels, the development of the Biblical canon, and the veracity of the gnostic gospels certainly is false. Many naive people might read the book or see the movie and think there is something to this radical revision of Christian history. It’s good to present a clear picture of who Jesus is and how the Church developed, and to explain why gnosticism was considered heretical and excluded from Christian orthodoxy early on. My own Pastor just did a wonderful sermon on the Bible’s high view of women, in contrast to the DaVinci Code theme that Christianity has supressed a secret relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene as part of a campaign against women.

On the other hand, I’m a bit uncomfortable with what seems to be the undercurrent of some of these reactions. Are these books, tapes and sermons motivated by a sense that the popular interest in the DaVinci Code presents a missional moment, or is it more of a defensive manuever? Do we see this as an instance where “Christ Transforming Culture” can apply, or do we see it as “Christ Against Culture”?

I’m afraid some of what’s out there is in the latter category — primarily defensive, reactionary, an exercise in fortress-building. I don’t think the DaVinci Code is a frontal assault on Castle Christiana, such that we must man the ramparts and dig in for a siege. I do think the ideas underlying the DaVinci Code are demonic, in that they reflect an age-old heresy about the nature of Jesus, but there are more facets to it than that. The DaVinci Code phenomenon also reflects our culture’s hunger for spiritual truth and its continued fascination with Jesus. So I agree with those, like Ed Marcelle and Jeff, who see the DaVinci phenomenon as an opportunity for missional engagement.