CADRE Comments

C. Stephen Evans opens his new book, Natural Signs and the Knowledge of God , with a puzzle familiar to anyone who has read widely in natural theology and apologetics: [A]rguments for God's existence are frequently criticized and declared to be conclusively refuted, yet the arguments continue to be presented. Some people, including well-trained, well-educated individuals-philosophers, scientists, and other intellectuals-find the arguments convincing. Many others, equally well-trained and well-educated, find them to be without merit. The arguments never seem to convince the critics. However, the refutations never seem to silence the proponents, who continue to refine and develop the arguments. (pp.1-2) There are several conceivable explanations for this impasse. One is that either the proponents are simply blind to the deficiencies of the arguments, perhaps because of some ulterior, psychological need to believe in God, or the critics conversely are blind to the cogency of the argum...

Before the rise of historical criticism, one of the most widely used arguments in support of Christianity was fulfilled prophecy. In the apostolic and patristic period this was not limited to direct predictions from the Hebrew Bible of the Messiah's origin and activities, but included typological foreshadowing of the life of Jesus in biblical narratives: the story of Isaac carrying the wood for his own sacrificial fire, for example, anticipated the time when another 'beloved son' would carry his wooden crossbeam to the place of sacrifice. Before the so-called 'grammatical' or 'plain' meaning of the biblical text came to be privileged as a result of the Reformation, readers of the Bible had no problem believing that the texts carried additional, divinely inspired meanings that could be uncovered through careful (we would say imaginative) investigation. As James Kugel elegantly shows (see How to Read the Bible , pp. 1-46), this approach to the interpretation o...

A few years ago I blogged about the book Inferno , by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Here, I review Escape from Hell , the 2009 sequel. Spoilers from both novels are discussed. Written in 1976, Inferno is an updated version of Dante’s Inferno. Instead of Dante traveling through hell, however, we have an agnostic science fiction writer – Allen Carpenter -- who dies ignobly while drunk at a party. He ends up in the first circle of hell and – guided by “Benny” – travels deeper and deeper into the inferno, becoming exposed to more and more of its horrors. Carpenter struggles mightily to rationalize all that he sees and refuses to seriously consider that he is in hell. His own explanations become so bizarre that he is finally forced to accept his station. Benny, however, claims to know the way out and the two travel through all the circles of hell, pondering the nature of sin, punishment, and judgment. At the end, Benny indeed escapes -- the way out is to suffer all the circles of he...

I have added my review of Geza Vermes' The Resurrection: History and Myth to the CADRE site's Reviews of Books about the Historicity of the Resurrection article. The article contains reviews of 15 leading books on the resurrection of Jesus, from many different perspectives. It may be one of the most comprehensive collection of reviews of resurrection books on the internet.

I have never read a book quite like Edward Feser's The Last Superstition . It is presented as a response to the 'New Atheists' (Dawkins, Harris, Hitchens, et al) and one expects something along the lines of the recent manifestos by Keith Ward , John Haught , Alister McGrath , David Myers , Chris Hedges and others. But it is so much more than a retort to the new self-appointed high priests of unbelief. Because while the above writers more or less take for granted the modern framework of thought we inherited from the likes of Descartes, Hobbes, Hume, Locke and Kant and try to rebut the New Atheists on their own terms, Feser argues that modern thought itself is the disease of which their arguments are a symptom. His aim in The Last Superstition is nothing less than to rehabilitate the classical philosophical project that began with Plato and Aristotle and was refined and advanced by Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and the Scholastics. According to Feser, abandoning Aristotelianism ...

Conquistador Hernan Cortes, King Montezuma, and the Last Stand of the Aztecs , by Buddy Levy, covers the Cortes expedition, from the landing along the Mexican coast through the destruction of the Aztec capital, with a short wrap up of the featured players. I was glad that the author resisted the temptation to go on and on and on. He found his ending point and took it. For those wanting more, there is extra information about the important characters and chronologies in several appendices at the end. Levy writes in a readable style that is befitting the book's popular audience. It is a narrative account more than an academic treatise. Although Montezuma gets equal billing in the title, the book is largely written from Cortes' point of view. No doubt his person is better sourced, but it is also a choice of the author. It is Cortes who drives the action, landing in a foreign land basically on the run from the authorities in Cuba. His courage, determination, diplomacy, and charisma ...

Through the Amazon Vine program I received a review copy of Churched , by Matthew Paul Turner. The subtitle is "one kid's journey toward God despite a holy mess." Part of the description on the back reads, "He spent his childhood trapped within the confines of countless bizarre, strict rules. And lives to tell about it." It ends describing the author as "a young man who, amidst the chaotic mess of religion, falls in love with Jesus." As you may have figured out, the author was "trapped" in a fundamentalist church. To be specific, an "Independent Fundamentalist Baptist" church. His family left the Methodist church when he was four and joined an IFB church where he attended until his graduation from high school. The author writes from the perspective of his younger self, immersed in a fundamentalist church. This is a clever way to make the church he attended and his family and friends look more bizarre and clueless than they l...

Geza Vermes is one of the top scholars on the life of Jesus and perhaps the leading scholar on the Dead Sea Scrolls. In this book, he turns his attention to the resurrection of Jesus. Unfortunately, the book lacks depth and fails to grapple seriously with alternative scholarly perspectives. References to other works are few. There are no footnotes, though there are a few non-referenced endnotes. That is not to say that Vermes is not an accomplished scholar. He surely is and because of that I was interested in his conclusions. But the conclusions of even a respected scholar cannot be divorced from his reasoning and interaction with other scholarship. Vermes covers the usual bases, albeit briefly. He discusses the development of resurrection belief in early Judaism, the interim period, and then during Jesus’ time, including the New Testament. Few of his conclusions are beyond the pale, but time and again Vermes reaches them with little discussion and almost no interaction with ...

I was drawn to this book because one of its endorsers compared it to F.F. Bruce's invaluable The New Testament Documents, Are they Reliable? Published decades ago and now in its sixth edition, The New Testament Documents is a masterpiece of condensing a wealth of scholarly knowledge into a readable guide for the layman. Mark Roberts' Can We Trust the Gospels is a different kind of book. Although Roberts has respectable academic credentials and writes with extensive knowledge, his approach is more pastoral. The fusion of academic knowledge and pastoral insight makes this a different kind of book than most apologetics works. It is not an extended argument for the most conservative positions possible about the Gospels. Although arguments for conservative positions are present, they are not the unique focus of the book. Can We Trust the Gospels? is really a collection of FAQs as one might find on a website (which Roberts states is intentional). It addresses the usual issues, bu...