Thinking Christian

Book Review

The book is titled Choosing Your Faith In a World of Spiritual Options. Thankfully Mark Mittelberg, who wrote it, knew where to begin, for the first question that’s bound to come up is, Why choose any faith? It’s a good question, but I won’t take credit for it; I borrowed it straight from the title of his first chapter. Why write about choosing a faith? Is it any more relevant than a book about, say, Choosing Your Sword in a World of Knighthood? Well, yes, of course it is. Mittelberg cites evidence that religion’s influence remains strong in North America (if he had ventured into the rest of the world he could have shown the same, even more so).

Faith is a fact of life apart from religious belief. Mittelberg says of atheist extraordinaire Richard Dawkins (p. 11),

Whether the chances are large or small, the important thought to catch here is that Dawkins doesn’t know there is no God—and he even concedes the possibility that some kind of God might actually exist. Rather, he takes it on faith that there actually is no God….

That’s just the way life is. We all live by some form of faith. Which leads us to the central question: Is ours a well-founded faith? A wise faith? A faith that makes sense and is supported by the facts? One that works in real life and is worth hanging on to?

More personally, is yours a faith you’ve really thought about, carefully evaluated, and intentionally chosen—or did you just slide into it at some point along the way?

That question is directed at all of us, Christian and non-Christian alike. The next six chapters expose common ways people choose their faith: pragmatism and relativism, tradition, authoritarian sources, intuition, the mystical approach, and “logic, evidence, and science,” with an emphasis on “I’ve gotta see it to believe it.” Chances are you’re going to find yourself described in one of those chapters or some mix thereof. Chances are especially good if you’ve never given your faith much thought. Faith, after all, is a synonym for belief; and how many of us really pay attention to why we believe what we believe?

So it behooves each of us to reflect on where we’ve come from in choosing our faith. Mittelberg prefers a version of the logic, evidence and science path, renamed the Evidential path in chapter eight:

It’s the one path that tests—and ultimately supports or undermines—all the others. Its two key elements, logic and sensory experience, are God-given tools we must use to gain the vast majority of our information, to test truth claims, and ultimately to decide what to believe.

The other faith paths do not necessarily lead to the wrong destination, but within them there is little or no means of testing, nothing to correct us if, for example, we rely on tradition for tradition’s sake. (“Your parents could be wrong,” he says. I suppose that even applies to my kids’ parents.) Going on,

The Evidential approach tells us logically and empirically that there is one set of truths—based on actual, what is reality—that we need to discover and let inform our choice of faiths. We can use these tools to test traditional teachings, religious authorities, intuitive instincts and hunches, and mystical encounters, so we can know which ones are worth believing and holding on to.

On another thread I’ve been debating whether it’s conceptually possible for God to reveal himself to us just through direct impressions (the sensus divinitatus) such that we could reliably know that the encounter we’re having is with God. Clearly if there’s a God, it’s unreasonable to assume that he could not do that. I’ve had many experiences I would describe that way. For purposes of that discussion, it’s logically sufficient to establish that if there is a God, then God could do that. But that’s a very limited point, for a very limited purpose. (I wouldn’t have brought it up here except I knew it would be brought up for me if I didn’t.)

The fact is that even though I know God can convince me of his reality any way he wants to, nevertheless when I have an experience that seems like God, I want some way to check whether I’m getting it right or if I’m mistaken. We’re not left only to our impressions, as it turns out, nor are we stuck in a morass of doubt where we have nothing to turn to besides tradition, authority, feelings, or the science of the laboratory. All of these have checks and balances coming from a most useful source: objective reality. Mittelberg explores logical, scientific, and historical criteria for choosing one’s beliefs, along with ways to assess the biblical and historical evidences for Jesus Christ.

Like his friend (and author of the foreword to this book) Lee Strobel, Mittelberg writes on a very accessible level. I recommend this book highly for the seeker in your life (including yourself, if you are that seeker). For church study groups, it could provide good discussion material for assessing various worldviews. (Mary Jo Sharp recently recommended this book for the same purpose.) I especially appreciate that Mittelberg emphasizes how to think about spiritual questions rather than telling us what to think. Of course he lands on his own solid conclusion: that faith in Jesus Christ is an excellent choice, the only one that makes good sense. But he gets there through a thoughtful path that should help readers think thoughtfully about their own paths.

Choosing Your Faith In a World of Spiritual Options by Mark Mittelberg. Carol Stream, IL: Tyndale House Publishers, 2008. 254 pages plus endnotes. Amazon price US$13.59 hardcover.

Book Review

Brian Auten of Apologetics 315 has just posted a telephone interview we did together recently. Brian’s website is one of the best for an abundance of resources and training in apologetics. I really appreciate his taking time to do this interview.

One of our main topics was strategies for apologetics. It seems to me that the apologetics enterprise (the apologetics industry, so to speak) is well advanced in its answers to questions about the faith, but that when it comes to connecting that to everyday needs of church and culture, it has some catching up to do. We have good answers, but we’re not delivering them effectively. I’ve been working on this with pastors and worldview ministry leaders for the past year or so, and what we’re hearing from pastors confirms what I’ve been sensing.

There are exceptions. The Truth Project is the finest example I’ve seen. William Lane Craig, though one of the most academic of all apologists, has nevertheless set up a structure for groups to study and learn together in local communities. BreakPoint has its Centurions program. Summit Ministries and Wheatstone Academy have excellent conferences for young people. Ratio Christi, out of Southern Evangelical Seminary, is on an excellent track.

There are others like these, more than I could list here. I want to focus on one of my favorites, though: Gregory Koukl and Stand to Reason. Koukl hosts a weekly talk show on KBRT radio in Los Angeles, reaching nationwide through the AFR network and by podcast (all accessible from that last link). The show is about current issues in philosophy, theology, and ethics; but there’s a subtext. Listening to Stand to Reason, you don’t just learn answers; you learn how to answer. Rush Limbaugh famously warns his listeners, “Don’t try this at home!” Greg Koukl says, “Do try this at home—and in your workplace, the restaurants you visit, in fact, everywhere you go!”

Better than that, he has published a very strategic book on how to do it. It’s titled Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions. Now, I admit to a bit of awkwardness saying Tactics is strategic; the terms are supposed to mean different things. Here’s how it makes sense: the tactics in the book are tactical; the book itself is strategic.

It’s also highly entertaining, readable, and informative. Wait—scratch all that; too many syllables. The book is fun. It’s filled with stories—both successes and failures—from the author’s own experience. I’m making the book required reading for my teenagers this summer. I have no doubt they’ll enjoy it.

Tactics is strategic in that it makes practical apologetics accessible to any Christian. It isn’t primarily about the answers. If you’re old enough to remember the TV detective Columbo you’ll instantly connect to Koukl’s main model: you don’t have to know all the answers if you know how to ask the right questions. There are just three kinds of questions, two of which are easy: What do you mean by that? and How did you come to that conclusion? The third category of question, the kind that can lead a person toward a logical conclusion, takes a bit more study and practice, but it’s an accessible sort of study and practice, as Koukl presents it.

His advice is intensely practical for real-life situations. One example: what do you do if you’re a college student and the professor puts you on the hot seat to defend your faith? Koukl’s first rule is as strategic as you could ask for:

Never make a frontal assault on a superior force in an entrenched position…. The man with the microphone wins. The professor always has the strategic advantage. It’s foolish to get into a power struggle when you are out-gunned.

So what do you do? Cower? Duck and run? Pray for the bell to ring and end class? Not much hope there; I’ve never heard of a college with bells. No, you turn the question back to the professor. How do you do that? I’d rather let the author answer that question; he can do it much better than I. Register on the Stand to Reason website, then go here and look for the January 29, 2006 podcast. Better yet, buy the book.

What I’ve been talking about so far is the first half of the book. The second half is a guide to logic. Maybe that sounds rather academic. Not the way Greg Koukl handles it, though. There’s just one tiny trace of Latin in there: “reductio ad absurdum.” He explains it in English, though, even giving it a new name: “Taking the Roof Off.” It goes like this:

Some points of view, if taken seriously, don’t actually commit suicide [his term for internally contradictory positions---another example of his speaking English when he discusses logic], but they work against themselves in a different way. When played out consistently, they lead to unusual—even absurd—conclusions….

This tactic makes it clear that certain arguments prove too much. It forces people to ask if they can really live with the kind of worldview they are affirming. Those who are intellectually honest will think twice about embracing a view that ultimately leads to irrationality….

The key to dealing with moral relativism, for example, is realizing that for all the adamant affirmations, no one really believes it, and for a good reason: If you start with relativism, reality does not make sense. It is significant that those who want to practice relativism never want relativism practiced toward them.

The “roof” he refers to is a cover the person erects “to protect himself from considering the consequences” of contradictory attitudes within. Do you think you could learn how to take the roof off? I think you can, with guidance from a book like Tactics. It will take practice, of course; the author is honest about his own fumbles and stumbles along the way. It will take some study, too. Koukl’s “Ambassador Model” includes knowledge, wisdom, and character. Though this book (quite appropriately) focuses on just one of these—handling interactions wisely—his overall message includes all three.

There’s a DVD/CD-based training series available to go along with Tactics. I haven’t obtained a copy yet, so I can’t comment on its quality or effectiveness. I certainly support the concept, though: making apologetics accessible. Tactics is good strategy.

Tactics: A Game Plan for Discussing Your Christian Convictions by Gregory Koukl. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2009. 207 pages. Amazon Price US$10.19.

Book Review

As if the Sermon on the Mount and the Prophets weren’t disturbing enough, now I’ve gone and read Richard Stearns’s 2009 book, The Hole in Our Gospel: What Does God Expect of Us? The Answer That Changed My Life and Might Just Change the World.

I don’t know whether to recommend you read it. It will bother you. You’ll find out things like what would happen if every churchgoer in America would tithe. (I know, I know; Stearns apologized for talking about money, too; but it’s really unavoidable.) A true tithe in the church would release $168 billion new dollars to helping the world each year—about four times what the U.S. government spends on foreign assistance. It would take just 40% of that $168 billion, says Stearns, to lift a billion people out of extreme poverty. Another $28 billion would bring universal primary education to all the children of the world, clean water to most of the world’s poor, and basic health and nutrition to just about everyone in the world.

That’s what about half a tithe through the American church could do.

But I don’t know if you’ll want to read this book. You’ll find out about a church in South Africa with a staff of 10 and an annual budget of $300,000—not counting its 147 staff members leading in ministry to AIDS/HIV patients, at $1.2 million per year. It’s called Fish Hoek Church, named for the small seaside town in which it’s situated;, except around Fish Hoek it’s known as “the church that cares.” I don’t know if your church is known around town as “the church that cares.” I don’t know of any churches where I live that have that reputation.

So I don’t know if you’ll want to read this book. If you do, you might want to skip Chapter Twenty-One: “Why We’re Not So Popular Anymore.” It’s not just about sex scandals. It’s about the good we could be doing and haven’t been. It’s about massive numbers of young Americans who aren’t quite sure the church is for real, and (far worse) aren’t sure God is real because of that. The problem with Chapter Twenty-One, if you’re like me, is that it will make you weep.

I suppose there’s not much anyone could do about all this, is there? Except Stearns highlighted a shoeshine man who talked with his customers about world needs, and raised awareness and funds to supply fifteen clean-water machines to the poor in South America. Or take the other extreme: Stearns himself. He was CEO of Lenox, the luxury china company, when God tapped him to lead the mission and humanitarian agency World Vision. The book is his own story, wrapped around the message of what you and I can do about the needs of the poor, and why in God’s name we ought to do it.

I’m not sure I should have read this book. Now I’m going to have to do something about it. I’m working in missions, but there’s a hole in my mission, shaped like a needy person or population God wants me to help.

Which brings me back to Jesus and the Prophets, who said it all (all that really matters) before Stearns did. Here’s the hard part and also the shining, gloriously beautiful part: they spoke truth. Stearns certainly doesn’t regret taking a 75% salary cut to move to World Vision. I’ve never met any believer who regretted giving sacrificially in the Lord’s name. I’ve never met any believer who regretted aligning his or her life to God’s truth.

Maybe it’s not so bad that I read this book after all. It might not be so bad for you to read it, too.

The Hole in Our Gospel: What Does God Expect of Us? The Answer That Changed My Life and Might Just Change the World, by Richard Stearns. Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 2009. 303 pages with notes. Amazon price (paperback) US$10.11.

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Book Review/Podcast

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I had the opportunity to talk with Dr. Stephen C. Meyer by phone on Monday, January 11, about his powerful recent book Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. The book’s main argument, if I may be so bold as to summarize 600+ pages into one sentence, is that (1) materialist explanations (involving only natural processes) for the information present in the first life have never been found and are nowhere on the horizon, (2) that information is known to come from one source and one only, which is mind, (3) that mind is therefore the best explanation for that information, and (4)  it is artificial and arbitrary to rule out mind as an explanation.

My first question to Dr. Meyer was something I don’t think I have seen discussed by ID proponents. ID opponents talk about it frequently but usually not in any satisfying way. The question was, “for those of us who are not specialists in the technical fields under discussion—biochemistry, biology, and even geology and cosmology which are not the topics of this book—is it reasonable for us to come to any conclusion on these questions? Can we know enough to make an informed decision of our own?”

ID opponents’ typical answer is, “There is no controversy, so there is no question. Why are you even asking?” For his answer, Dr. Meyer focused just on the origin of life and the information that it must have contained and expressed. The scientific facts are presented in the book for those who want to dive into them. For those who are not so equipped or inclined, the key point is that the basic facts are not in dispute: materialistic explanations are not working—at all—nor are there any prospects that they will in the foreseeable future. So the question is not whether there is or is not some materialistic explanation to be compared with proposed Design explanations. The question is whether one is allowed to entertain Design as an explanation; and if not, then why not?

Scientific rejoinders to this argument have been few, and none of them have addressed the core argument of the book: the origin of the first functional biological information. Not that there haven’t been negative reviews, but that they have lacked substance where it counts most. One of the better ones, by Darrell Falk at Biologos, touches on miniscule details and not on the fundamental point Meyer is making. Another review there, by the very eminent biologist Francisco Ayala, is much more theological in nature than scientific, and weak at that, in my view.

Reviews at Amazon, as I have already analyzed and reported (and discussed in the interview), turn the usual complaints against ID upside down: it is the negative reviewers, the ID antagonists, who have displayed dogmatic theological anti-intellectualism.

Meyer is not an experimentalist. Is his argument therefore not science? He offers two answers: one, does it matter if it’s science if it’s the best explanation? And two, if his is not science on that basis, then ID opponents will be embarrassed to find out who else they have thereby declared to be non-scientists. I suggest you read the book (especially Chapter 4-6 and thereabouts) to find out who; but you can hear the short answer in this podcast interview.

More than six months after its publication, it’s hard to find any effective scientific response against it. One Amazon reviewer called this book a “game-changer.” Time will tell if that’s going to be the case or not. But I have a strong feeling that if you don’t read this book, you’re not even going to know what the score is.

Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design by Stephen C. Meyer. New York: HarperOne, 2009. 624 pages including extensive endnote material. Amazon Price US$19.13

(The content of the podcast is copyright 2010 by the participants. I edited my portion of the conversation to improve my sometimes slow conversational pace and upgrade your listening experience. Dr. Meyer did not need that kind of help.)

Book Review

When I picked up Cornelius Hunter’s Science’s Blind Spot: The Unseen Religion of Scientific Naturalism, I expected the “unseen religion” of the title to refer in some way to atheistic naturalism itself. Whether naturalism is a form of religion depends on definitions. If religion is defined as a system of beliefs involving the supernatural, then naturalism certainly doesn’t fit the description. Some, however, define it as any system of belief regarding where we came from, what is ultimately real, and what is finally important  or (per Paul Tillich) of ultimate concern. That definition’s wide scope could certainly include naturalism.

I was expecting Hunter to argue that naturalism was religious by the latter, looser definition. I was wrong. His claim was bolder than that, more potentially controversial—yet at the same time more founded in fact, and less in loosely controllable preferences regarding meanings of words. Scientific naturalism, says Hunter, was explicitly born from within the family of Christian theology, and dwells even now in buildings erected on the same ancestral property. We think of naturalism as rejecting religion, but it was actually historically rooted in it, and it seems to have difficulty running away from it.

Hunter traces two streams in intellectual history, rationalist and empiricist. Aristotle was the rationalist above all other philosophers. In early modern philosophy, Descartes supremely represents that stream. Francis Bacon, considered by many to be the founder of scientific methodology, represents empiricism—not that anyone is a pure example of either rationalism or empiricism, for no person has ever occupied the extreme endpoints of the continuum between the two.

How are the two distinguished from each other? I’ll come back to rationalism in a moment. Empiricism (in this context) is an approach which lets empirical evidences rule over scientific conclusions, with as little regard for metaphysical preconceptions as possible. Hunter’s attitude toward empiricism is perhaps best explained through his depiction near the end of the book (p. 137), in a section titled “An Alternative to Rationalism:”

The empirical approach is much less certain about the form of the result. And at the end of the investigation, it is less certain about the truthfulness of the result. Problems are complicated, and humanity is not always up to solving them completely. The empirical approach is not as tidy as the rational approach. But it also does not constrain itself to predetermined notions. It is more amenable to new and unexpected results.

All of this sounds like standard scientific reasoning. It echoes Intelligent Design opponents’ voices calling us all not to rush to conclusions, not to be in a great rush to fill in the gaps with God. Intelligent Design, they say, is built around a predetermined belief in God, and marshals all its evidence only toward that end.

But just as the empirical approach is not as tidy as the rational approach, so the history of ideas is not as tidy as many mistakenly think it is. Hunter introduces rationalism with this (pp. 11-12):

The assumption of naturalism in science is … a consequence of metaphysical reasoning, and the implications for science are profound…. naturalism provides science with well-defined universal criteria to which it conforms. Instead of merely following the data wherever it may lead, science already has a framework in place. The answer, to a certain extent, is already in place. This is a move toward rationalism and away from empiricism. The result is that science has a powerful philosophy of science, but as we shall see… it does not come without cost…. naturalism brings with it a blind spot.

The rest of the book is about what I left out in the ellipses in that quote. Bear with me a moment before I fill in the blanks. I want us to think about the part of this that I have already quoted. Is it true that science is guided, even controlled, by an assumption of naturalism? Let’s acknowledge that there is no such thing as “science” to be monolithically governed by one stream of thought. Nevertheless it is still true that many of the most prominent spokespersons insist that science treat the natural world as if it is all that exists. God and the supernatural, they insist, either do not exist, or if they do, they are useless or irrelevant as far as science is concerned.

If this is the case, as Hunter says and I think we all must agree, is it a “move … away from empiricism”? Of course it is. God’s non-existence has not been and cannot be proven in the lab or the field. Or is naturalism a necessary assumption for science—that the scientist must at least be a practical atheist? Some would say so, but this is just not at all the case. It’s based on completely mistaken or ad hoc assumptions about God. Any person who says that all knowledge should come by way of science, and that he or she is quite sure there is no God at work in the world, speaks a contradiction.

This is all fairly familiar. What Hunter surprisingly adds to it is the historical roots for the naturalism that is common within science. Let me fill in some of those ellipses now, with emphasis added:

The assumption of naturalism in science is neither a result of atheistic influence nor an empirically based scientific finding.

Theological naturalism provides science with well-defined universal criteria to which it conforms.

Theological naturalism brings with it a blind spot.

Do you see now why I chose to introduce the topic at a gradual pace? Things could get confusing here. What on earth is “theological naturalism”? Isn’t that a self-contradictory concept?

No, it’s not, for though the naturalism that reigns in science today may be atheistic, it is unabashedly theological in nature. And in its historical beginnings its theology was even Christian, in a way. It wasn’t good Christian theology, but it was certainly theology in a Christian tradition.

In 1671 the Anglican chaplain Thomas Burnet wrote that the world was filled with majesty and grandeur yet also with “incredible confusion” and (as Hunter adds in his words, page 52) “lack of symmetry and proportion:”

From a distance the mountains were awe inspiring, but up close there were irregular rocks, moraines, and valleys. Maps and atlases portrayed well-ordered and symmetrical mountains, but Burnet found them to be “shapeless and ill-figured.”

To Burnet this did not seem like the kind of thing God would design. In fact, in 1681 he wrote (Hunter, p. 20),

We think him a better Artist… that makes a Clock that strikes regularly at every hour from the Springs and Wheels which he puts in the work, than he that hath so made his Clock that he must put his finger to it every hour to make it strike.

Hunter goes on to explain,

In other words, special divine action should be minimized. It is better for God to make a self-sufficient machine than to make one needing divine intervention.

This Anglican writing more than 300 years ago sounds astonishingly similar to Francisco Ayala today, who insists that God must be absent from nature, or else evil has no explanation. Or to Ken Miller, who cannot believe God would want to take credit for the mosquito. Or to Ian Barbour, who said (p. 120),

There seem to be too many blind alleys and extinct species and too much suffering and waste to attribute every event to God’s specific actions.

Or even to Darwin, who could not understand why (p. 121),

the supposed creative force produced bats and no other mammals on remote islands? … Facts, such as these … admit of no sort of explanation on the ordinary view of independent creation.

It sounds like Douglas Futuyma today, who (in Hunter’s paraphrase, p. 135) cannot believe God would have created nature so “full of useless features, inadequate design, shoddy workmanship, and harshness or cruelty”? Or evolutionary biologist George C. Williams who thinks a real God would have made better use of the sun (p. 133):

Why, then, would it be so far away, and why would it be enormously larger than the earth? This makes for a wasteful design…. Williams suggests a precisely shaped and brightly polished reflector mounted behind the sun to reflect wasted light upon the earth. As it is, the real earth-sun system “shows no such evidence of purposive engineering.”

One could easily ridicule a sentiment like that, but it would be grossly unfair to do so without having the context in which WIlliams said it. Instead we need to focus on this: Are these not theological arguments? Do they not presuppose a certain view of God? From whence within science does such a view of God come? The answer, of course, is nowhere; it does not come from within science. Historically it came from theologians in the Christian tradition: Thomas Burnet along with Ralph Cudworth, John Ray, Thomas Wolleston, Peter Annet, Charles Kingsley, and others, all of whom taught a view of God that they thought was Christian, and which required God to keep his hands off of his creation. This was not a Biblical view, but it was a view about God, propounded by men who actually believed in such a God. Naturalism was born in theology. Its parentage remains evident.

The “blind spot” spoken of in the title is scientific naturalism’s unawareness of its theological heritage. And it is also its diseased inability to see the possibility—not the certainty or proof, which Hunter does not consider to be in the purview of science, but the possibility—of a designer involved in nature. His arguments for design are well stated, yet they are also familiar, so I will not spend time on them here. More important is the gentle way he opens the philosophical door to the possibility of thinking of design. The alternative to rationalism Hunter espouses is aptly named moderate empiricism. We have met it already, in the first quote I provided near the beginning of this review. It’s a humble approach to knowledge. Unlike naturalism, it does not assume it sees all there is to see. It does not blind its eyes to the possibility of unexpected ultimate explanations.

There are flaws in this book. Several sentences and paragraphs in the early chapters could have used a copy editor’s review (which is surely often the case with my blogging, too, but a blog post just can’t go through as many cycles of review and revision as should be done with a book). Somehow that all seemed to diminish in the middle and end of the book, and I found myself less often needing to re-read, or wishing I could re-write something Hunter had said. The overall structure and flow could be more logical. There is a reason I started this review by quoting from near the end of the book.

Still I’m glad I pushed on through the awkward constructions and the somewhat strange sequence of topics. By the end of the book, Hunter had made his argument superbly clear, and along the way he provided persuasive evidence. If he is right, then naturalism is not just a blind spot: it is an inescapably theological blind spot.

Book Review

A few weeks ago when I had lunch with Bradley Monton, his colleague and friend Robert Pasnau came along as well. Pasnau introduced himself to me as a philosopher specializing in medieval philosophy. I tried to think of something intelligent to say to that, and I have to admit nothing came out. It wasn’t that I don’t know anything about the Middle Ages; it was that I had no idea where to start with someone who was so vastly more qualified than me. I joked about it a few minutes later, and he replied in all good humor, “I’m used to it; I get a lot of blank faces when I tell people what I do.” We ended up having a good talk in spite of my embarrassingly slow start.

I thought about that after I read James Hannam’s book, God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science. I worry that a book with both “philosophers” and “medieval” in its title will elicit blank faces among potential readers, like my initial response to Robert Pasnau. It would be a shame if it did; for Hannam, a Ph.D. historian of science with degrees from both Oxford and Cambridge, knows how to write readable history — and the tale he tells is truly fascinating.

It is the latest entry in a controversy with a history of its own. Hannam speaks of the myth that “there was no science worth mentioning in the Middle Ages,” and “the Church held back what meagre advances were made.” These beliefs took flower as late as the 19th century with Thomas Henry Huxley, John William Draper, and Andrew Dickson White, who tried to paint religion as the enemy of science. Their story has been told often; Hannam himself has blogged on it.

A.D. White’s part is particularly unfortunate, in that he produced a highly influential, heavily footnoted, apparently scholarly tome on the historic warfare between science and religion. Hannam assesses his work this way:

Anyone who checks his references will wonder how he could have maintained his opinions if he had read as much as he claimed to have done.

Others have treated White less gently than that.

Hannam situates these myths in historical context:

The denigration of the Middle Ages began as long ago as the sixteenth century, when humanists, the intellectual trendsetters of the time, started to champion classical Greek and Roman literature. They cast aside medieval scholarship on the grounds that it was convoluted and written in ‘barbaric’ Latin. So people stopped reading and studying it…. The waters were muddied further by … Protestant writers not to give an ounce of credit to Catholics. It suited them to maintain that nothing of value had been taught at universities before the Reformation.

This is no simplistic apologetic for Christianity as the root of scientific thinking. Hannam summarizes the church’s relationship with natural philosophy as one of “creative tension.” Nevertheless it’s impossible not to notice who led the way in medieval natural philosophy:

• A mathematician Pope at the turn of the last millennium.
• A monk in 1092 who used an astrolabe to construct the lunar calendar.
• St. Anselm and Peter Abelard, clerics who elevated the role of reason and logic in philosophy and theology.
• Cathedral school scholars who taught that “God is loving and consistent rather than capricious and arbitrary” paving the way for the study of a consistently operating world of nature.
• The universities, products of the Church.
• The influential bishop of Paris who condemned certain (not all, especially in view of the work of St. Thomas Aquinas) Aristotelian-based dogmas. It was an act that remains controversial, yet one which clearly opened the door for experimental study, rather than restricting natural philosophy to Aristotle’s pure reasoning.
• A Polish clergyman, Copernicus, who challenged Aristotelian and Ptolemaic views of the heavens.

I could go on, but you get the point; and I am on the verge of conveying a false impression about the book. It’s a narrative, not a list of arguments. It’s a story showing that the tension between religion and natural philosophy was indeed a creative one: it led to new technologies (improved plows, the stirrup, clocks, the compass, eyeglasses, mills, and more), new theories (impetus/momentum, theories of acceleration), new observational tools (observatories, telescopes), and new institutions of learning (cathedral schools and universities).

And as the author states in his conclusion, it also produced the metaphysical cornerstone for modern science:

We take it for granted and we do not worry about why people began studying nature in the first place….

To understand why science was attractive even before it could demonstrate its remarkable success in explaining the universe, it is necessary to look at things from a medieval point of view. The starting point for all natural philosophy in the Middle Ages was that nature had been created by God. This made it a legitimate area of study because through nature, man could learn about its creator. Medieval scholars thought that nature followed the rules that God had ordained for it. Because God was consistent and not capricious, these natural laws were constant and worth scrutinising. However, these scholars rejected Aristotle’s contention that the laws of nature were bound by necessity. God was not constrained by what Aristotle thought. The only way to find out which laws God had decided on was by the use of experience and observation. The motivations and justification of medieval natural philosophers were carried over almost unchanged by the pioneers of modern science.

I am still not an expert in medieval philosophy, but I think there is little risk in being confident in what Hannam has to say. (This is no scholarly fraud, á la A.D. White.) It’s a straightforward account of the development of important ideas and inventions, in the context of a continent dominated by Christian thinking. One segment of the story does get convoluted: Galileo gets a full three chapters. Nevertheless the conclusion is clear: the roots of modern science go down deep into Christian culture, theology, and practice.

God’s Philosophers: How the Medieval World Laid the Foundations of Modern Science by James Hannam. London: Icon Books, 2009. 342 pages plus index and additional back material. Not yet distributed in the United States but available through Amazon, US$26.65 and up.

Book Review

I should have anticipated it from the title, but N.T. Wright’s The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is presented me with an unexpected personal challenge. Wright is an historian of the New Testament era, and in this book heset out to accomplish two historical purposes. The first was what one might call an attempt at time travel: to help us understand the way first century Israelites would have experienced Jesus among them, and how they would have understood his message. The second purpose was to establish reasons to believe the New Testament accounts—especially of the Resurrection—can be trusted historically.

His apologetic for the Resurrection was a new one to me, creative and (I think) compelling, and I would recommend the book on that basis alone. The first part of the book had a deeper, not entirely comfortable impact on me, though. That is where I will dwell for this review.

Even Christ followers can go off track, Wright says, by misunderstanding the context of Jesus’ times:

We have to make a journey as difficult for us in the in the contemporary Western world as that taken by the Wise Men as they went to Bethlehem. We have to think our way back into someone else’s world, specifically the world of the Old Testament as it was perceived and lived by first-century Jews. That is the world Jesus addressed, the world whose concerns he made his own. Until we know how Jesus’ contemporaries were thinking, it will not just be difficult to understand what he meant by the “Kingdom of God”; it will be totally impossible.

Is he saying Christianity has Jesus all mixed up? No and yes. Wright takes Scripture to be historical; he regards it as trustworthy. The message of Christ in it is true. But most of us probably do not understand quite what he meant by his central message: “Repent, for the Kingdom of God is at hand.” Like the tables in the Temple, he turned upside-down Jewish expectations regarding the Kingdom. In fact, “repent” in this context (which in the Greek is metanoia, change of mind) did not mean, “stop sinning,” though that would certainly be one effect of what it meant. At a deeper level it meant to change one’s entire way of thinking about the Kingdom of God in the world.

Much of Jesus’ ministry was to overturn the Temple system itself, preparing to establish a new way of relating with God. This was more radical than most of us realize. The Temple was the heart of Israel’s national life, not just its religion. It was the center of power for some Jewish leaders—the ones who would ultimately have him killed.

This is what Wright wants us to see, and to see it through the eyes of a first-century Jew. For me, his time-travel purpose succeeded. He enabled me for a while, to a deeper extent than ever before, to see Jesus as many of his contemporaries must have seen him: the son of a carpenter, youngish, probably not at all outstanding in his physical appearance, walking the countryside with a small group of followers, teaching wisdom, demonstrating truth and love—and leading a revolution that would change not just one nation at its heart, but the whole future history of the world.

But wait. They wouldn’t have seen him as leading a revolution that would change the nation and the world. Not clearly, and certainly not until much later. He would have appeared to them as what I’ve already described: a youngish carpenter’s son, who had taken up the role of a wandering rabbi. We know of him as the leader of an historic revolution. To them, how likely would that have seemed? I’ll come back to that question in a moment.

To be sure, Jesus stood out among rabbis. He performed miracles, including healings, exorcisms, feeding large crowds with little food to start with, and raising the dead. He taught unique wisdom of a life of truth and love, and he taught it from his own authority (Matthew 7:28-29). More remarkably yet, he lived by his own teaching, consistently setting the highest example of how to live a life.

Still, how likely would it seem, to someone watching him teach in the synagogue or debating in the marketplace, that this one youngish (apparent) carpenter’s son, without benefit of microphone, megaphone, or public relations officer, with no head-start by way of family money or reputation, lacking the right degrees from the right schools, and gathering such a strange assortment of followers, would be the one to overturn the whole way God interacted with humans and humans with God?

Wright actually had me thinking for a while, “you know, this is just so implausible.” It wasn’t because he said anything to indicate it might not be true (quite the contrary). It was because I was seeing Jesus, I think, the way many people would have seen him at the time: the youngish carpenter’s son turned into a wandering rabbi with a strange set of followers. He was in those ways a very ordinary man. Israelites at the time thought that when God sent someone to change the world, it would be someone a lot less ordinary-looking, doing something a lot more spectacular. I caught myself thinking, “Yes, that’s how God would have/should have done it. Not this way.”

And then it hit me: it had to be this way.

It had to be this way because of what Jesus came to do, especially in his earthly ministry before the cross. Jesus’ purpose was not to make a spectacle of himself. He even asked people to keep some rather spectacular things quiet for the time being (Mark 8:27-30; Matthew 17:1-9; Mark 3:7-12; Mark 5:21-43). His purpose was to show how to live a life God’s way. More specifically he came to show you and me, and ordinary people everywhere, how we can live life God’s way. As much as possible, he had to do it as an ordinary person, so that we ordinary people could see his example and follow, in our ordinary lives.

Of course he had other purposes besides this: to display the Kingdom of God through his miracles, and ultimately to make it possible through his death and resurrection for us to be reconciled to God and enter the Kingdom with him. His life in those ways was not at all ordinary, and not what we are called to do.

Much of his ministry, though, was about praying and teaching, loving others, affirming the outcast, comforting the hurting, and confronting purveyors of falsehood and hypocrisy. These are things we can do as he did. These are ordinary kinds of things, for ordinary people in God’s Kingdom to do.

To do them as lovingly and consistently as he did—now, that’s far from ordinary. If you haven’t ever done it read the book of Mark or Luke (start at Mark 1 or Luke 1 online if you don’t have a printed version handy). See how extraordinarily he lived out the ordinary things of life.

Pick up a copy of Wright’s book as a companion to your reading, too. Perhaps you’ll see as I did that when God sent someone to change the world, it had to be this way.

The Challenge of Jesus: Rediscovering Who Jesus Was and Is by N.T. Wright. Downers Grove, IL: IVP Academic, 1999. 204 pages including endnotes and index. Amazon price US$12.24.