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Resuscitating Paley - 26 June 2009
About 10 years ago I had the privilege of meeting Bruce Winter, the former warden of Tyndale house in Cambridge.
You know how it is when someone says something that sticks with you?
Well, we were talking about science and Christianity, and Bruce said something like this: ‘I think William Paley’s work on design in nature would be worth another look. I have a feeling there’s more to it than some people think.’
William Paley was an 18th-century theologian and naturalist, who argued that the appearance of design in nature implied the existence of a Designer, just as the intricate engineering of a watch implies the existence of a watchmaker. He has been criticised – ridiculed even – by many modern scientists, who have argued that evolution can account for the apparent ‘designed-ness’ of the natural world.
Well, finally someone has brought Paley back to life. And would you believe it, the caricatures painted by unbelieving scientists are, well, caricatures. Paley’s argument from design is just a little more sophisticated than you might think. A lot more sophisticated, actually.
God’s Undertaker, pp. 78-84.
No rational explanation…? - 24 June 2009
The rational intelligibility of the universe implies that a rational Mind lies behind it (John C. Lennox, God’s Undertaker, pp. 58-62).
Accordingly, many unbelieving scientists who spend time thinking about such matters cannot explain why the universe should be intelligible at all. Here’s Eugene Wigner (yes, that’s right, that Wigner – let the reader understand), for example:
The enormous usefulness of mathematics in the natural sciences is something bordering on the mysterious, and there is no rational explanation for it … it is an article of faith. (God’s Undertaker, p. 60, italics added)
Nobody knows - 23 June 2009
The first 4 chapters of John C. Lennox’s God’s Undertaker cover some fairly well-trodden methodological and philosophical ground, though with glittering clarity and fresh insights on almost every page.
Chapters 5 to 7 focus more specifically on evolutionary biology – conceding ground where appropriate while simultaneously asking some probing questions – on the fossil record, irreducible complexity, and especially the origin of life (as opposed to its subsequent development). Here’s Stuart Kaufmann, for example:
Anyone who tells you that he or she knows how life started on the earth 3.45 billion years ago is a fool or a knave. Nobody knows. (p. 126)
Mind-broadening - 18 June 2009
Some highlights from the first 4 chapters of of John C. Lennox’s God’s Undertaker.
- the roots of science in Christian theism (pp. 19-22).
- crystal clarity about the distinctions between naturalism and materialism (pp. 27-28)
- scientific method (pp. 31-34)
- materialism’s talent for begging the question (pp. 34-37)
- Laplace (pp. 44-45)
- against the ‘God of the gaps’ (pp. 46-47)
- God as Creator, and primary and secondary causation (pp. 47-51)
- the utterly mind-boggling improbability of our universe coming into being by chance (p. 70)
Keep your nose out - 17 June 2009
John C. Lennox’s God’s Undertaker recalls the well-known encounter between Napoleon and the French mathematician Laplace, which is ‘constantly misused to buttress atheism’ (p. 44):
On being asked by Napoleon where God fitted into his mathematical work, Laplace, quite correctly, replied: ‘Sir, I have no need of that hypothesis.’ Of course God did not appear in Laplace’s mathematical description of how things work, just as Mr Ford would not appear in a scientific description of the laws of internal combustion. But what does that prove? That Henry Ford did not exist? Clearly not. (pp. 44-45)
Austin Farrer puts it wonderfully:
Laplace and his colleagues had not learned to do without theology; they had merely learned to mind their own business. (p. 45)
God’s undertaker - 15 June 2009
Too many reviews describe books as ‘vital reading’ – obviously an overstatement, because we get along perfectly fine without almost all of them.
But just occasionally a truly remarkable book appears. To my mind, John C. Lennox’s God’s Undertaker falls into that category.
A long time ago I used to be a scientist. Yeah, a long time ago. But, still, I quite often get asked to speak on ‘Science and Christianity’ and similar subjects, so I’ve read a fair bit on the subject. This one is something really special. Every chapter manages to say something new, and existing arguments are re-stated with greater clarity and cogency than I’ve ever seen before. With this book, John Lennox stomps into the heavyweight division of this rather tired old debate and flattens the opposition.
Any scientifically-minder Christian who doesn’t read this book is missing out. Any unbelieving scientist who hasn’t read it can safely be ignored.
Short-sighted - 9 June 2009
Yesterday I spent a very illuminating few hours at a study group hosted by London Theological Seminary discussing John J. Murray’s Catch the Vision: Roots of the Reformed Recovery.
One widely-held conclusion was that it is very difficult to write such a history of a ‘movement’ so soon after the event, when it’s far from clear what events/people/etc have had long-term significance. Consequently, such histories tend to overestimate the significance of the author’s own (small?) circle, practically ignoring other (possibly very significant) parts of the ecclesial landscape.
For example, the main text mentions John Stott three times, each time only in passing, and twice in relation to his public disagreement with Lloyd-Jones in 1966. Lloyd-Jones, on the other hand, is the focus of two entire chapters. Obviously, the great Doctor had a massive (and wonderful) influence in 20th-century Reformed evangelicalism, but one wonders whether Murray has got the balance quite right.
There’s an important lesson here for all of us contemporary evangelicals. We must not identify the growth/strength/fruitfulness of Christ’s church solely with those (socially defined?) streams of evangelicalism that we happen to be familiar with. Too often we get stuck in our own small corner, vastly overestimating our own significance and vastly underestimating the wondrous work the Lord is doing far beyond the circles represented by alumni of our University Christian Union.
The fact that yesterday I was introduced to a number of godly, wise, experienced ministers in thriving evangelical churches that I’d never heard of served to underscore this point. Thankfully, the Kingdom of Christ is larger than, and is growing faster than, any of our little networks.
Books on Hebrews - 28 May 2009
William L. Lane, Hebrews (WBC; 2 vols). Pretty technical. Surprisingly useful (for this series) in sermon preparation. Keeps the development of the argument clearly in focus. Helpful exposition of the development of OT themes (e.g. in 3:1-6). Evangelical. Pick of the bunch so far.
Paul Ellingworth, Hebrews (NIGTC). Lots of technical detail. Hard to read. Sometimes hard to see the wood for the trees. But, on the other hand, trees are often helpful.
F. F. Bruce, Hebrews (NICNT). Useful, though less detail than Lane and Ellingworth, and sometimes a bit more help with the flow of the argument would be useful. Evangelical.
John Owen, Hebrews (7 vols). Vast, slightly (!) overwhelming. Preterist reading, which may be unfamiliar to some. But I dare you to dismiss his interpretation without reading it. All of it. Or else he’ll not be happy when he catches up with you…
No one ever drifted into maturity - 12 May 2009
In 1 Kings 12, Rehoboam rejects the counsel of the ‘old men’ (v. 6) in favour of the advice of ‘the young men [hayladiym, lit. 'the boys'] who had grown up with him’ (v. 12). Rehoboam is 41 years old when he becomes king (14:21), so the description of his contemporaries as ‘boys’ is ironic, and deliberately insulting.
They are boys … in their youthful folly and adolescent bravado … Rehoboam’s folly is a characteristic folly of a ‘boy,’ a young man who chooses advisors full of youthful pride, cockiness and crudity, the type of companion against whom Proverbs warns repeatedly (13:20; 28:7; cf. Ps. 119:63). (Leithart, 1 and 2 Kings, p. 92.)
Christian men must heed this warning, or we shall very likely repeat Rehoboam’s stupidity. Unless we pay careful attention to our godliness, it’s possible to still be boys in our early forties, being ‘men’ only in the sense that we’re now big enough to do damage. Boys will be boys; men must not be. But the example of Rehoboam and ‘the boys’ reminds us that this won’t happen automatically. No one ever drifted into maturity.
A finished work of art - 2 May 2009
More on Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative:
Chapter 4, ‘Between Narration and Dialogue’ explores how the biblical writers do their business ‘when the narrative tempo slows down enough for us to discriminate a particular scene’ (p. 63). In contrast to ‘Greek epics and romances and … much later Western literature’ (p. 64), the Hebrew writers make extensive use of direct speech. Just read some Austen, then read 1 Samuel 21. Weird.
Chapter 5, ‘The Techniques of Repetition’, explores an oft-cited feature of the Bible, whose presence is generally obvious, but whose significance is often missed.
Chapter 6, ‘Characterization and the Art of Reticence’ shows how the Bible manages to say so much by saying so little.
Chapter 7, ‘Composite Artistry’, explores the conundrums arising from apparent or alleged ‘internal contradictions’ (p. 135) in the biblical narrative. Alter is less pessimistic than most scholars about the number of such ‘insoluble cruxes’ (p. 133) in Scripture. Personally, I’m less pessimistic still – I don’t think anything in the Bible is ‘insoluble’ in principle, though I readily grant that there are plenty of things that are ‘hard to understand’ (2 Peter 3:16). Credit to Alter for at least throwing a spanner in the works of liberal OT scholarship; shame he didn’t go all the way.
Chapter 8, ‘Narration and Knowledge’, explains how and why the biblical narrator keeps us in the dark about something he knows, or tells us something the characters in the story don’t know, or plays some other trick on us. Shame he keeps banging on about ‘fiction’. Sigh.
Interesting, though. For example, at what point in the story of Ehud are we supposed to realise that Eglon is going to meet a messy end (Judges 3:12-30)? Dunno, but we certainly find out before the King’s attendants – much to their embarrassment, and our amusement (vv. 24-25). Again, why don’t we discover that Adam was standing right next to Eve until after the conversation with the serpent had finished (Gen 3:6)? And so on.
Finally, Alter devotes an entire chapter (9, ‘Conclusion’) to helping the man in the street work out how to make practical use of the book in reading and understanding Scripture. Now there’s a rare thought.
Marrying a foreign woman - 2 May 2009
The pace of Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative hots up in chapter 3, ‘Biblical Type-Scenes and the Uses of Convention’. Observing ‘the perplexing fact that in biblical narrative more or less the same story often seems to be told two or three or more times about different characters, or sometimes even about the same character in different sets of circumstances’ (p. 49), Alter sets about uncovering some of the conventions followed by the biblical authors. He takes the example of ‘the betrothal’ (p. 51) type-scene, drawing attention to the skill of the biblical authors in narrating the betrothals of Isaac and Rebekah, Jacob and Rachel, Moses and Zipporah, and a whole load more besides.
Did you notice how all the action seems to take place at a well in a foreign land?
‘We must keep in mind’, he insists, that this is ‘not merely the technical manipulation of a literary convention for … sheer pleasure’; it is also intended to convey ‘a larger pattern of historical and theological meaning’ (pp. 59, 60). The Bible is beautiful; but beauty does not exclude utility.
It’s just a shame Alter wrote as a non-Christian. A believer might have recalled another account of a Man meeting a foreign woman at a well. And before long they, too, were talking about marriage.
The most beautiful story in the world - 1 May 2009
There’s always a fly in the ointment. At at the risk of overstating the case (and mixing metaphors), chapter 2 of Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative (’Sacred History and the Beginnings of Prose Fiction’) is a real bluebottle in the honey.
It would be unfair to suggest that Alter denies the historicity of the Bible. His discussion is more nuanced than that. There is, however, an underlying methodological issue that I want to take issue with.
Alter seems to assume that there is a trade-off between a narrative’s literary artistry and its historical accuracy. The more a writer seems to embellishes details, portrays the psychological features of the protagonists, draws attention to word-play and repetition, alludes to other narratives and so on, the more (it seems) we are forced to concede that he has fiddled the facts. We can admire his elegance and subtlety, we can be drawn my them more deeply into the story, but we cannot finally believe that it all actually happened this way. Literary beauty and historical veracity is a zero-sum game.
This assumption evaporates completely once we step back for a moment and ask ourselves who the real storyteller is. God can not only write a story with the literary beauty that Alter describes; he can make it all come alive. Men and women write books; God creates worlds. Why should the literary beauty of the Bible not be a precise reflection of God’s sovereign power?
Spread it around - 1 May 2009
Apparently the Australian evangelist John Chapman has ‘a secret fear of witnessing’. At least, that’s what it says on the back cover of his wonderful Know and Tell the Gospel.
I find that strangely encouraging.
One of the best things about this book is Chappo’s sheer infectious enthusiasm. Here’s one of my favourite moments:
Several years ago we in the department of evangelism for which I work considered making some television programmes. The cost of the proposal was so high that our budget for the whole year would have been used in the first month.
We sought the advice of a specialist in marketing, and were told: ‘No one who had the manpower which you have available would ever spend money on television advertising. They would use the money to train people to talk to other people about the product.’
What a good idea.
The Master Storyteller - 1 May 2009
Chapter 1 of Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative is an introduction to his topic, entitled ‘A Literary Approach to the Bible’.
Beginning with an illustration from the account of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38, Alter loses no time in showing the riches that may be uncovered through literary readings of Old Testament narratives. Alter expounds much of his theory through such examples, making the book a delight to read.
The second half of the chapter is a historical survey of the present state of the field, amply justifying the author’s contention that (in the early 1980s, at least), ‘literary analysis of the Bible … [was] only in its infancy’ (p. 12).
Setting the agenda for the rest of the book, he concludes the chapter with the claim that:
What we need to understand better is that the religious vision of the Bible is given depth and subtlety precisely by being conveyed through the most sophisticated resources of prose fiction. (p. 22)
God is the Master Storyteller, and we need to learn how to read his story.
The Art of Biblical Narrative - 30 April 2009
Robert Alter’s The Art of Biblical Narrative is truly fabulous. Original and insightful – indeed, genuinely groundbreaking in many respects – it still manages to avoid the technical jargon sometimes found in books on biblical interpretation.
But it’s not all wine and roses. Alter is a Jewish scholar, not a Christian. He therefore doesn’t call the Old Testament by this name, preferring the description ‘Hebrew Bible’, or even just ‘Bible’, because the term ‘Old Testament … implies that the Old is completed only in the New and that they comprise one continuous work’ (p. ix). Understandable, perhaps, but it rather begs the question.
Furthermore, it’s not clear how much Alter respects the historicity of the OT narratives, which he describes ‘as historicised prose fiction,’ or at best ‘fictionalized history’ (pp. 24-25, italics original). He emphasises that he does ‘not mean to discount the historical impulse that informs the Hebrew Bible,’ but nonetheless claims that ‘under scrutiny, biblical narrative generally proves to be either fiction laying claim to a place in the chain of causation and the realm of moral consequentiality that belong to history … or history given the imaginative definition of fiction’ (p. 32).
The historicity issue looms large in many of the best works on narrative art in Scripture, partly, perhaps, because evangelicals have been absent from the forefront in this field. Fortunately, V. Philips Long’s The Art of Biblical History has gone some way towards setting the record straight here. There’s no reason why the Bible’s literary subtlety should call into question its historicity.
Just trying to please all the right people - 20 April 2009
In the epilogue to her March of Folly, Tuchman tries to uncover the underlying reasons for the catastrophic stupidities that have occupied the preceeding 400 or so pages. At bottom, she concludes, lies pure, naked self-interest:
Above all, lure of office … stultifies a better performance of government. The bureaucrat dreams of promotion, higher officials want to extend their reach, legislators and the chief of state want re-election; and the guiding principle in these pursuits is to please as many and offend as few as possible. (p. 386-387)
Consequently, normally intelligent people abandon the dictates of reason in pursuit of self-aggrandisement, self-advancement and protection of vested interests by attempting to please those thought to hold the keys to power. In the process, they bring disaster both on themselves and on the institutions under their governance.
‘I am so sorry…’ - 20 April 2009
First, a moment of classic British comedy – the moment when Basil Fawlty finally admits, ‘I am so sorry I made a mistake’. Well, almost:
Sadly, the phenomenon has all too often found its way onto the political stage, which is largely why Tuchman’s account of America’s ’self-betrayal’ in Vietnam runs to almost 150 pages. In short:
For a chief of state, admitting error is almost out of the question. The American misfortune during the Vietnam period was to have had Presidents who lacked the self-confidence for the grand withdrawal. (p. 384)
Study guide to Mahaney - 19 April 2009
Neil Robbie, Minister of Holy Trinity Church, West Bromwich, has applied his considerable pastoral nous to producing some study notes for C. J. Mahaney’s Living the Cross-Centered Life. If you’ve enjoyed these snippets of Mahaney’s fabulous little book, Neil’s study guide would be well worth a look.
How many times must I forgive my brother? - 17 April 2009
C. J. Mahaney on forgiving others:
When I become bitter or unforgiving toward others, I’m assuming that the sins of others are more serious than my sins against God. The cross transforms my perspective. Through the cross I realize that no sin committed against me will ever be as serious as the innumerable sins I’ve committed against God. When we understand how much God has forgiven us, it’s not difficult to forgive others. (Living the Cross-Centered Life, pp. 154-155)
A sneaking suspicion - 17 April 2009
Too many Christians feel guilty, unable to get over the sneaking suspicion that they’re just too bad for God to deal with.
Some insightful questions from C. J. Mahaney’s Living the Cross-Centered Life, to help us diagnose the problem:
Do you relate to God as if you were on a kind of permanent probation, suspecting that at any moment He may haul you back into the jail cell of His disfavor?
When you come to worship to you maintain a ‘respectful distance’ from God, as if He were a fascinating but ill-tempered celebrity known for lashing out at His fans?
Are you more aware of your sin than you are of God’s grace, given to you through the cross? (p. 125)
And finally, a quick reminder:
« Previous Entries Next Entries »Don’t buy the lie that wallowing in your shame is pleasing to God. (p. 126)