Posted by Anthony on January 29, 2010
A reader of Gilbert Magazine has forwarded to me an article in their latest edition that cites yours truly! The article author stumbled upon my brief review of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy that I posted on the ChristianPost.com. In a discussion on the resurgence of all things Chesterton, the author quotes me saying,
[P]eople will instinctively dismiss the writings of a man that are a shade over 100 years old. The truth, however, is that nothing he confronted then has actually gone away. He confronted the materialistic view of Man in his own life, determining finally that Christianity offered the truest account. He stood against the Darwinists, the eugenicists, the relativists, and the liberal theologians. All these are still here and with us. The only difference is that they have been re-packaged and re-presented.
Maybe I’ll have to subscribe to their magazine. 
Posted by Anthony on April 15, 2008
In my last post I made a reference to Dorothy Sayer’s assertion that a ‘well informed Zoroastrian’ could- or at least in principle, should- be able to explain what Christianity is all about. This was in context of my pursuit for a book that lays out in simple terms just what the historic orthodox Christian faith is. That pursuit exists because it is not uncommon to run across nonChristians who have rejected Christianity who seemingly have precious little understanding of just what it is they are rejecting. Frankly, you run across Christians who don’t understand what they’re accepting. Well anyway, I haven’t yet found such a book to recommend, but I did find Peter Kreeft’s Handbook of Christian Apologetics to be terrific for what it sets out to do.
Now, me telling people that they haven’t a clue about theism and Christianity in particular has often been met, quite predictably, with indignance. “Hey,” says the skeptic, “I went to Sunday School. Who are you to say I don’t understand Christianity?” Sure, like the 8th grader in algebra has exhausted all there is to know about math. I get into these discussions every now and then, and it is some comfort to know that CS Lewis, Dorothy Sayers, etc, had the same problem. So, now with all the preliminaries aside, let me provide the quote that I was referencing in regards to the Zoroastrian bit.
Courtesy of this site. The entire preface is great and so is the book it is attached to.
This book is not an apology for Christianity, nor is it an expression of personal religious belief. It is a commentary, in the light of specialised knowledge, on a particular set of statements made in the Christian creeds and their claim to be statements of fact.
It is necessary to issue this caution, for the popular mind has grown so confused that it is no longer able to receive any statement of fact except as an expression of personal feeling. Some time ago, the present writer, pardonably irritated by a very prevalent ignorance concerning the essentials of Christian doctrine, published a brief article in which those essentials were plainly set down in words that a child could understand. Every clause was preceded by some such phrase as: “the Church maintains”, “the Church teaches”, “if the Church is right”, and so forth. The only personal opinion expressed was that, though the doctrine might be false, it could not very well be called dull.*
Every newspaper that reviewed this article accepted it without question as a profession of faith-some (Heaven knows why) called it “a courageous profession of faith”, as though professing Christians in this country were liable to instant persecution. One review, syndicated throughout the Empire, called it “a personal confession of faith by a woman who feels sure she is right”.
Now, what the writer believes or does not believe is of little importance one way or the other. What is of great and disastrous importance is the proved inability of supposedly educated persons to read. So far from expressing any personal belief or any claim to personal infallibility, the writer had simply offered a flat recapitulation of official doctrine, adding that nobody was obliged to believe it. There was not a single word or sentence from which a personal opinion could legitimately be deduced, and for all the article contained it might perfectly well have been written by a well-informed Zoroastrian.
*That article would be The Dogma is in the Drama.
Posted by Anthony on
This isn’t a formal review by any means but I did recently complete this book and thought it was so fantastic it deserved a quick mention. The book was suggested to me in my quest for a ‘basic Christianity’ book to give to skeptics that would lay out in easy to understand but documented detail precisely what Christianity is, the kind of thing that Dorothy Sayer’s ‘well educated Zoroastrian’ could produce. Kreeft’s Handbook is not that book. (It is, however, the book I was looking for to serve as the apologetics text book for the certificate of apologetics for my ministry’s online academy.)
Despite not being ‘the book’ I was looking for when I bought it, it represents a fine set of arguments for the defense of Christianity as understood for thousands of years and which we call ‘orthodox.’ Given that, it is clear then that if someone wanted to learn what Christianity essentially is, this book can only help.
I especially enjoyed Kreeft’s approach to apologetics. This would be because most of his approaches are remarkably similar, often identical, to my own. There are several reasons for this, I think. The first is obvious: despite protestations, there really is such a thing as orthodox Christianity, and as such it will produce a limited range of approaches among those who really seek to understand it and promote it. The other is less obvious unless you know me and read Kreeft’s book. Namely, we share a common spiritual heritage… in particular CS Lewis, but also GK Chesterton and George MacDonald playing important parts in the way we understand things and phrase things.
All told, I bet there aren’t more than 20 paragraphs of the book that I had any problem with and out of some 400 pages, that’s really impressive. I can without hesitation and with much enthusiasm recommend this book to anyone, Christian, atheist, seeker, Mormon, agnostic, high school teacher, youth director, pastor. The book is excellent and provides plenty of sources but is geared to be readable while covering nearly all the relevant claims of Christianity, why they are true, and then dealing with the common objectives.
As a final note, Kreeft is a devout Catholic but he does an admirable job focusing on the things that really constitute ‘mere’ Christianity, even making a number of overtures to you Lutherans out there that I think you’ll appreciate.
Without further ado, here is the link to this fine book: Handbook of Christian Apologetics: Hundreds of Answers to Crucial Questions
Posted by Anthony on March 30, 2008
Anne Rice’s “Road to Cana.”
Reviewed by Anthony Horvath
Buy on Amazon.com: Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana (Christ the Lord)
- Hardcover: 256 pages
- Publisher: Knopf (March 4, 2008)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 1400043522
- ISBN-13: 978-1400043521
Book Description:
Anne Rice’s second book in her hugely ambitious and courageous life of Christ begins during his last winter before his baptism in the Jordan and concludes with the miracle at Cana.
It is a novel in which we see Jesus—he is called Yeshua bar Joseph—during a winter of no rain, endless dust, and talk of trouble in Judea.
Legends of a Virgin birth have long surrounded Yeshua, yet for decades he has lived as one among many who come to the synagogue on the Sabbath. All who know and love him find themselves waiting for some sign of the path he will eventually take.
This review is a bit longish- 4 pages, so if you want to download and print it, you can use this link:. Here is
my review of her ‘Out of Egypt.’
| UPDATE: Anne Rice became aware of this review and liked it enough she had it published on her web page. That is quite an honor. It is the same as what is below, but if you want to read it there, it’s on this page here. |
My Book, Fidelis was reviewed on WorldnetDaily.com! |
I have been intrigued by Anne Rice ever since hearing that the atheist-turned-Christian author was going to write first person accounts of Jesus’ life. Think about that: first person accounts. That means writing from Jesus’ perspective. That’s a ton of courage right there. Hubris, almost.
When her first book, “Out of Egypt” was released, I was extremely impressed. She did a fantastic job. I wrote a review of that book which you can read here. I note that I was honored that she found the review and left a comment. You can read that, there, too.
So now we have book two. Titled “The Road to Cana” it picks up where “Out of Egypt” left off, more or less. I wondered to myself how she was going to get another book out of Jesus’ pre-ministry years, but sure enough, she did.One of the things that will catch people’s attention right from the start is Jesus’ attraction to a pretty young Jewish girl. What with that whole ‘Last Temptation of Jesus’ mess, I can see how Christian readers would recoil at the very thought. The attitude and approach makes all the difference. Anne Rice handles it with delicacy and reverence… and this is key… she handles it.
There is no hint anywhere in any of the documents available to us that Jesus had any feelings towards women and even attempts to read into Gnostic literature is unsuccessful at raising that possibility. Why would anyone even dream of including such a plot line then, especially if they are devoutly Christian? The answer is orthodox Christianity essentially demands it. Either Jesus was fully human and fully God or he was not, and if he was fully human- that is, a man, then such feelings almost certainly would have occurred.
I feel that our reverence for Christ often looks the other way concerning his humanity. Do we not realize that he ate, slept, drank, cried, and yes, even urinated? A disturbing thought to some. The whole glory of the thing to others.
Let us consider what it might mean that Jesus did not encounter such feelings. It is written in Hebrews 4:15 “For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but we have one who has been tempted in every way, just as we are- yet was without sin.”
It is on account of this fact that the writer continues, “Let us then approach the throne of grace with confidence, so that we may receive mercy and grace to help us in our time of need.” (vs 16).
Either Jesus was tempted in every way or he was not. Upon it appears to hinge how we approach the ‘throne of grace.’ If he was tempted in every way, we can be sure that sexual desire, which is built into the human being, was present in Jesus. We can also be sure that the Enemy tried to exploit it. For those who can’t imagine that it is possible to have sexual desire without sin I ask how you thought Adam and Eve were going to get along before the Fall of Man. If you don’t believe in that, well, I guess I got nothing to say. The point is that Jesus, being a real man, would have experienced such things, but unlike us, was the Master of them.
As I said, Rice handles the whole subject reverentially and I suspect that even if the above thoughts are ones that you as a Christian find uncomfortable, you will find that Rice resolves the issue admirably.
This leads into another area that I was wondering how Rice would handle. There is a lingering question as to how much Jesus knew of his own nature. As a one month old child did he recount to his parents how he had created the universe? Or did he sit there and kick his legs and feet and coo and cry? Rice already began laying out her answer in “Out of Egypt” and she continues in “The Road to Cana.” I think I might have a different answer then her, but not too different.
The great value consists in raising the question in the first place. Christians don’t tend to think all that deeply about that which they say they believe. Such thinking might seem to go beyond speculation and into heresy. How dare you question what Jesus, since he was God, could know? But then we have Jesus himself saying “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son, but only the Father.” (Matthew 24:36).
These discussions center around Jesus’ ‘kenosis’ and involve also what Jesus’ relationship as a man is to divine attributes besides omniscience. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosis
The point is that even though Jesus was God, as a man and bound to time the way Men are, there were things he didn’t know. Rice does a fantastic job of talking over such issues in a way that orthodox Christians can enjoy and respect, even if they might disagree in some ways.
As in “Out of Egypt” this book is thoroughly researched on the historical details. 1st century Palestine is the background to the New Testament but it is easy for believers and skeptics alike to forget that we know more about that century then just from what we read in the New Testament. Having this background can help us greatly in understanding what we read in the New Testament, unless of course we are in the camp that scoffs at the New Testament by virtue of the fact it mentions miracles. When you know that there no God you know there can’t be miracles. But if you don’t know if there is a God or not then if miracles really happened then that helps answer the question. The miracles in the New Testament apparently occurred in a real historical context, and so understanding that historical context can dramatically affect your investigation.
There is a tendency, for example, to dismiss Christian theism as just one more fantastic mythology out of dozens that existed. This forgets, however, the Jews. The Jews were fiercely monotheistic. Fiercely. Violently. They were not opposed to miracles, of course, but the notion that a man could be God is literally the last thing a God-fearing Jew would have ever conceived of. Such a thing was blasphemy, and they knew it. It is amazing, then, that out of the very last group that could be expected to believe God had become man- the Jews- that very doctrine emerged. Nearly all of the first Christians were Jews.
CS Lewis expands on this point in his essay “What Are We to Make of Jesus Christ” found in God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics
:
“[One approach to explaining the rise of Christianity is to say] that His followers exaggerated the story, and so the legend grew up that He had said them. This is difficult because His followers were all Jews; that is, the belonged to that Nation which of all others was most convinced that there was only one God- that there could not possibly be another. It is very odd that this horrible invention about a religious leader should grow up among the one people in the whole earth least likely to make such a mistake. On the contrary, we get the impression that none of His immediate followers or even of the New Testament writers embraced the doctrine at all easily.”
That is the historical reality to which skeptics tend to dismiss with hand waving as though it were not something that needs to be explained on other grounds if one rejects the explanation that Jesus really was God. The more you know the actual history of the Jews the more you realize just how significant this is and how much it demands an explanation. Those ignorant of that background can be dismissive. Those who know the background know they can’t dismiss it.
Now, I don’t know if Rice plans on making that argument or not, but she draws on some historical events and puts them in “The Road to Cana” that certainly paves the way for an appreciation of CS Lewis’s point.
For example, the arrival of Pontius Pilate and his move to put ‘ensigns’ in the Jewish temple caused a Palestine-wide riot. This is recounted by the Jewish historian Josephus. Rice drops bits and pieces of this famous story, including how it was resolved: thousands of Jews kneeling on the ground, deliberately exposing their necks to the Roman soldiers that Pilate had sent to ‘disperse’ the crowd. When Pilate saw that the Jews were willing to die by the thousands without even putting up a fight just because of some silly (from his perspective) banner hanging in Jerusalem, he relented.
It is from out of a people with this sort of fervor and passion for their monotheistic religion that Christianity emerged.
Rice also helps set the stage for how dangerous life was by pointing out how brigands roamed the hills and those who claimed to be Messiahs were about.
In my opinion, atheists, seekers, and Christians alike should read Anne Rice’s books just so that they can see historically how the whole narrative put together might have looked. When all we know about the context in which Jesus moved and breathed is the New Testament we rob ourselves of critical information that would help us understand what we are reading in the New Testament.
Now, just a few final notes.
One of the things I noticed in “Out of Egypt” was a robust understanding of how different languages would play out in this region, this crossroads of Empires. She continues to show insight into that subject in “The Road to Cana.”
The animosity that Jesus’ own relatives show to Jesus as seen in the New Testament is given a compellingly believable back story. It is my view that something very much as Anne Rice described is what it was like.
Rice is sensitive to the dispute about whether or not Jesus had any actual brothers, that is, through Mary, and not just Joseph. She comes down on the Roman Catholic side of things (ie, Mary had no other children, etc), which I can’t blame her for since she is, well, Catholic. I have no problem with her approach so long as she doesn’t conclude her series on the Christ the Lord with a final book with the Perpetually Virgin Mary as the Intercessor. I don’t expect her to do that.
As I sat back and thought about Rice’s series to this point, I contemplated how courageous it was to try to write something from Jesus’ perspective but upon reflection realized that in fact writing accounts of Jesus’ life where we don’t really have as much material is actually much easier than the task that is now set before her. With “The Road to Cana” completed, Jesus now enters his life of ministry and this is much more thoroughly documented and people are much more familiar with that documentation. I am deeply curious about how she will weave her narrative through well known and treasured stories of the New Testament.
If her first two books are any indication, she will continue to root her accounts on solid historical data. She will continue to be reverent and respectful to orthodox Christian teachings even as she creatively tries to imagine how those doctrines played out in real life. I plan on picking up each book just as soon as I can.
I suggest you do, too. I would even go so far as to say that the books to this point could be useful reading to children, since they often have questions about Jesus’ early life. While you will have to point out that some of it is impossible to prove, you will be able to provide a framework for understanding the context of what is going on. You will also have the opportunity to point to the historical nuggets that abound in the books and thus help them see that Christianity is no mere ‘ancient mythology’ but rather rooted in history. Either it happened, or it did not. And you can find out if it happened by examining the historical ‘fossils’ that are left behind. And if you conclude that it did happen, then we live in a world where God became man, lived, died, and rose from the dead. If true, that changes everything.
Posted by Anthony on March 28, 2008
Why We’re Not Emergent: By Two Guys Who Should Be
Book Description: “The Emergent Church is a strong voice in today’s Christian community. And they’re talking about good things: caring for the poor, peace for all men, loving Jesus. Kevin and Ted are two guys who, demographically, should be all over this movement. But they’re not. And Why We’re Not Emergent gives you the solid reasons why.”
Like the authors of the book, I am sympathetic to the Emergent Church, but cannot be Emergent. That said, I value much of what the Emergent church is talking about and find myself struggling with the traditional and mainline churches. This review is not about me, however, so if anyone wishes to know where I stand they’ll have to ask.I had the opportunity to sit down and meet Pastor Kevin Deyoung and writer Ted Kluck while I was traveling through Michigan on my way back from some presentations I was giving. At the end of this review I have transcribed (and gently edited) some of our conversation for your reading pleasure.
The Book
WWNE is not just a series of arguments for why the authors prefer traditional churches. It also spends a fair bit of time analyzing the writings of Emergent church proponents. The authors present two different perspectives reacting to the Emergent church. Kevin is a pastor at a church in Lansing, Michigan, while Ted is your normal layman in the pews. Kevin brings to bear many of the theological objections while Ted approaches the Emergent church as an ‘Everyman,’ so to speak.
I like this approach, but I confess I labored to figure out which part was written by which author. In the final edition, the table of contents tells you, but it isn’t fun to flip back and forth as you’re reading.
Kevin and Ted live in East Lansing, which is not far from the Mecca of the Emergent Church, Rob Bell’s “Mars Hill” in Grand Rapids, Michigan. It is easy to see how this close proximity has made the challenges from the Emergent church hard to miss for them.
The book begins (wisely) with a discussion of just what the Emergent Church is (Wiki) and lays out the methodology behind the book. Following this is a survey of the doctrinal positions of the Emergent Church… or more precisely a chapter where the two men practically beg the Emergents to tell all just where they stand on certain historic doctrines of the church. Somewhat autobiographical chapters follow where the authors examine some of the assertions about the Emergent church that the Emergent apologists do seem to agree on. The book doesn’t leave you waiting with how the gentlemen feel about those assertions. The authors give their response on the spot.
Certain areas of contention get worked over pretty good: the ‘virtue’ of tolerance, the doctrines of hell and punishment, the Gospel, Dogma in general, modernism and post-modernism, and differing perspectives on Jesus- who he was and what his goals and chief accomplishments were.
Throughout these chapters, the authors bend over backwards to make it clear that they actually agree with some of the criticisms that the Emergent Church has made. They aim to refrain from what might seem to be personal attacks on certain spokespersons in the movement. Despite the obvious fact that they are writing to criticize the Emergent movement, they still offer plenty of signs that they think there may be something of value in it.
That said, I have to imagine that the leaders in the Emergent Church won’t enjoy reading the book. For that matter, your average person ‘on the street’ who is ‘Emergent’ won’t like it either. The authors perceive that there are massive flaws in the Emergent movement. Though I did feel like at times it was assumed that the reader would be aware of some of the bones of contention, this book might be helpful to the person who is new to the Emergent church and wants to hear ‘both sides.’ The book allows Emergent church writers some time to present their case in their own words. For those who want to go deeper, there are plenty of citations and most of the big names in the Emergent movement are covered such as Brian McLaren and Rob Bell.
My Reactions Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on January 12, 2008
One of the main lines of attacks that skeptics have employed is along the lines of language. For example, ‘Intelligent Design’ should be a redundancy, but today evolutionists talk all the time about organisms being ‘designed’ but insist that design was done by natural processes. This gives them the advantage of being able to admit that the evidence of design is undeniable while simultaneously denying the obvious implication. They call this Science. This is but one example of how atheists equivocate on the meanings of words. Few words have been bastardized like the term ‘Christian.’
Cults like the Mormons and the Jehovah Witnesses desperately try to appropriate the term and this despite the fact that in both cases their teachings are dramatically contradictory to the historic understanding of the term. Atheists let them get away with it: if someone self-identifies as a ‘Christian’ who is anyone else to stop them. For this reason I have often called myself a Christian atheist in order to lampoon such silly reasoning, often receiving the rebuke that that is a contradiction in terms. Oh, now they care about contradictions of terms!
Ironically, atheists will bend over backwards in their dogmatic assertions of just what an atheist is while they themselves dismiss any attempt to clarify just what is meant by the term ‘Christian.’ You can make the Scriptures say anything, they say. Well, at least with Christianity there is some sort of standard at all that could be treated as objective. There is no such transcending standard by which authoritative assertions of what constitutes an ‘atheist’ could be measured against. An ‘atheist’ is whatever the individual atheist asserts it to be and no other atheist can say otherwise.
Such conversations have driven me to defend the proposition that there is a historic understanding of the term. I think it would be helpful to post material from such a defense on my blog. The truth is that as atheist Bertrand Russell acknowledged there really was a time when saying one was a ‘Christian’ meant something and one knew what it meant. But it is also true that despite the constant perversions of the term, there are literally hundreds of millions of people who abide by the very same doctrines that Russell and most modern atheists believe are largely ancient history asserting basically that today there is a free-for-all, prompting smug atheists to say: “You want me to believe in God? Which one?” As though the variations were limitless.
While it is true that it took some time for the Christian community to clarify itself against a series of opponents, they did succeed in doing so. The creeds are the result of that process, and were completed no later than about 400 AD. After that, there was very little change in the meaning of the term until the Protestant reformation- more than a thousand years later- and even then the core teachings enshrined in the creeds are still upheld… to this very day.
That’s right. More than a billion Christians today uphold the same doctrines upheld in explicit terms since 400 AD and less codified terms since 50 AD. More than a billion. I don’t mean to minimize the fact that there are often wide and important divergences, but those who wish to escape the claims of Christianity by disputing that there are any have no legs to stand on. Below I have gone through and cataloged where and referenced where numerous groups who ’self-identify’ as Christian stand in relation to the core orthodox doctrines. There is much more commonality than skeptics would have us believe. It is culled from the thread already linked to above. Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on October 17, 2007
I have in hand C. Vaughn Doner’s book “The Late Great Evangelical Church: How an Age-Old Heresy is Killing the Modern-Day Church and How it Can still be Saved.” It is set to be released soon, but you can pre-order it through their website and it is listed on Amazon.com: The Late Great Evangelical Church
Doner aims to diagnose the ailments of the Evangelical church and comes to the conclusion that Gnosticism is the chief culprit. Gnosticism was repudiated by the early church but Doner argues that it was actually re-introduced by many church fathers via Plato and Philo and others. Gnosticism continued to arise under different guises and often succeeded because of its ability to adapt and employ arguments based on the Christian Scriptures, thus making the Christian Church itself the primary source for new Gnostics.
Tracing this pattern, Doner finds that it leads to a pack of Catholic mystics who in turn influence and infect early founders of the Evangelical church such as John Wesley before given real life under Charles Finney and D.L. Moody, and then generating real power when armed with the Dispensationalist teachings promulgated by Scofield’s Reference Bible which came out in 1909. Making the matters worse, the Evangelical churches abandoned the heritage handed down by the Apostles through the church fathers and set aside the principles of Calvin and Luther which aimed to reform the catholic (universal) church and do so while recognizing the weight of the historic orthodox Church.
The result, Doner argues, is an America filled with Christians who do not act like Christians, at least and especially outside the homes and the local church building. After all, Gnosticism holds a dualistic view of the world where matter is evil and our quest is to set aside such inferior entrapments and pursue true reality, the spiritual. Why try to engage society when you think it is all crude and inferior, anyway? Doner argues that this attitude also led to an emphasis on nothing more than individual salvation as being the goal of church activity. The net result is Christians who don”t know anything about their historic roots (orthodox or heretical) who focus only on their own personal piety (thou shalt not drink, smoke, or dance) who in the American tradition are contemptuous about ecclesiastical authorities such as the clergy or scholars and who do very little to affect society, to “disciple all nations.”
That is the basic argument. Doner’s book is well-researched and there are plenty of references. Doner makes it clear that he himself shared this background and was actually a leader of the Evangelical church operating on the same principles he is now rejecting. Before I go on to add some of my own reactions to his book, let me state in no uncertain terms that this is a book that should be read by millions. If you are a Fundamentalist Dispensationalist you will not like this book, but you should read it. Those from traditions that remain more in line with Calvin and Luther will find it intriguing to say the least. I would say that even Roman Catholics would be helped.
This review goes on for a ways. Read on.
Read the rest of the entry… »
