Biblical Scholar and UNC Professor Bart Erhman was on Fresh Air last night discussing his new book: Jesus, Interrupted: Revealing the Hidden Contradictions in the Bible (And Why We Don't Know About Them). The whole interview is very interesting, and while it is clear that Erham takes a secular perspective on the Gospel, he can hardly be said to be sniping or have a bone to pick. Erhman was a devout Evangelical Christian and biblical fundamentalist before his academic study of the Bible led him to abandon that belief and other factors in his life eventually led him to agnosticism. Particularly relevant to us here is the section of the interview in which he describes his unfounded fears that abandoning religion would lead him into a life of meaningless indulgence and vice. It did not.
This is relevant to my point of view because I cannot imagine a loving God creating a system in which particular beliefs are needed to avoid damnation and also in which a rational, faithful and diligent scholar could be led astray by intellectual honesty, curiousity, and scholarship. Obviously Erham could be wrong in his conclusions - that is besides the point. He reached them in good faith. That he would be punished for that good faith seems inconsistent with the described structure of Christianity. The combination of this internal inconsistency and the simplicity and power of a materialist worldview to describe what I see around me (and the many confusing, mysterious and odd results of trying to describe the cosmos in Christian terms), Christianity seems like a poor hypothesis to base my life around.
Link to the show.
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4 comments:
And here he is on the Colbert Report.
Vincent,
I don't think that you "can't imagine a loving God creating a system in which particular beliefs..." I know you to be very imaginative. I think that you don't like a God that rejects people on particular bases. But as we know, whether a particular kind of thing appeals to us is not any kind of foundation for its truth or falsehood. You don't like the idea of a God who rejects people who "did their best" but came to a different conclusion "in good faith". That is good and well. I could give you many examples of people who God rejects who gave their best (Cain, Esau, The rich young man, etc), but I don't think that is what you are looking for. You are looking for God to be other than God.
So I think my take away message here is:
(1)don't place an expectation on God to be a certain way because you think he ought to be that way
and then
(2) Justify yourself because God is other than you wanted.
The best you can do (when arguing with me) is to use a biblical picture of God and conclude that it is consistent reasonable and true, consistent reasonable and untrue, inconsistent.... etc.
Incidentally, I think that one would use this technique with a Mormon or Buddhist or a Muslim... To identify God exactly as prescribed by their teachings and to accept or reject on that basis.
All that I get from this post is that you don't like how God is as understood from the Bible. Perhaps I could take you to be saying, "God ought to accept people's best efforts", and since God only accepts Christ (and those who Christ has covered) that you think God is unfair, and yet God should be fair (being God and all) and thus God is inconsistent with all goodness and so we can safely conclude that the God of the Bible is not real or not to be followed. But you see how many words I had to put in your mouth there...
Also, if that is your argument then I disagree for reasons I have previously articulated about Holiness, Justice, and the rest of God's attributes. This gives me an idea which will be the next post....
It is more like "It appears from Christianity's description of God found in the Bible and Tradition that the design of the cosmos, morally and physically, is at the very best necessarily mysterious rather than manifest and obvious and that, given the effort the religion claims God has made to rescue us, this essential mystery seems by my reckoning (see below), to be inconsistent since it virtually assures that some humans will fail to appreciate the design of the cosmos because of the mystery. Note that Christianity also implies that my reckoning is not utterly without value since presumably my ability to reckon is God-given and one part of a consistent plan of creation which has at least in part the goal of leading me to salvation."
In other words when I hold Christianity up in my mind, as I must do any hypothesis which I am to decide whether to believe or not, my faculties tell me that it is not consistent and the fact that Christianity implies that my faculties would likely tell me otherwise, my confidence in rejecting this hypothesis is doubled.
Does this ultimately depend on my judgments about the nature of Christianity, good and evil, God, etc? Yes, of course - but your belief also depends on your judgments. No one believes anything without first judging it to the best of their abilities. I can't see how I could make any decision without an appeal to my judgmental faculties.
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