10AR15-24

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Apologia Report 15:24 (1,029)

June 30, 2010

Subject:  Taking Philip Jenkins to task

In this issue:

ATHEISM - new atheists come under fire from "the father of Intelligent Design"

CHURCH HISTORY - long overdue criticism of Jenkins' Lost History of Christianity

COMPARATIVE RELIGION - Stephen Prothero gets chewed out in Christian Century for God Is Not One

ORIGINS - SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence) researcher breaks away, says its "satellite-dish approach is batty"

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ATHEISM

"Atheist Crusaders" by Phillip E. Johnson -- the emeritus U.C.

Berkeley law professor and Intelligent Design visionary responds to the "new atheism," reporting that "What is new about these atheists is not their arguments, which will be familiar to anyone who has read the classics of religious skepticism. The new element that has made these writers famous or notorious is their insistence that it is time not just to stop believing in religion, but to stop treating religion with any respect whatsoever."

  Christopher Hitchens "has two besetting faults: He does not define his terms carefully, and he does not know where to stop. ...

  "Looseness with definitions helps Hitchens blame whatever is wrong with the world on 'religion.'" Johnson uses Hitchens' treatment of Communism as an example of where Hitchens confuses ideology with religion.

  "One point Hitchens makes that I do appreciate is that the worst

totalitarianisms often stem from a desire to perfect the human species in this world, under human rulers. And yes, at some times and places, priests have provided ideological justification for utopian projects and oppressive governments. The ideologues of Communism are materialist priests of that sort.

  "Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens are materialist priests themselves, with their own vision of a perfected world, one in which everyone turns away from God and worships at the altar of human reason. If the true believers in that vision become rulers, I shudder to think how much coercion they would have to employ to achieve the godless society they envision." Touchstone, Mar/Apr '10, p9. <www.tinyurl.com/2f6hz2g>

  Johnson's new book, Against All Gods [1], expands on this and more.

CHURCH HISTORY

The Lost History of Christianity, by Philip Jenkins [2] -- this review

offers the most insightful critique we've seen. Thomas Carlson

acknowledges that "A book like this needed to be written. Most

Americans consider Christianity a Western religion and the Middle East as the 'Land of Islam.' In his 2002 book The Next Christendom [3], Philip Jenkins argued that Christianity would not long remain a predominantly Western religion, and in this book he argues that for most of its history Christianity has not been a predominantly Western religion. Coupled with his historical and sociological analysis of non-European Christianity, Jenkins also challenges theologians to grapple with the fact that large, vital portions of historic Christianity have vanished."

  It is about this last segment that Carlson provides his most

significant criticism. He explains that Jenkins "describes each

position in the ancient christological debates through antagonistic

polemical caricatures and he erroneously equates medieval Asian

Christian theology with primitive Semitic theology and Gnostic

theological diversity, while bypassing theological continuities among major medieval Christian theologies which distinguish them from Gnostics and Muslims (such as the Trinity or the deity and atoning death of Christ). Many evangelical readers will oppose his rejection of doctrinal criteria for evaluating other Christian groups. When Jenkins asserts that most Christians no longer think Jews need to be evangelized, and calls us to reevaluate Islam's validity as well, many evangelicals will disagree. His theological discussion is consistently inaccurate and simplistic.

  "The volume is a fascinating, challenging introduction to a world

too long unfamiliar, that of Eastern Christianity, but his claims,

especially regarding theology, need examination." Trinity Journal,

31:1 - 2010, pp164-165.

COMPARATIVE RELIGION

God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World—and Why Their Differences Matter, by Stephen Prothero [4] -- reviewer Leo D. Lefebure opens: "The tradition known as the perennial philosophy has long argued that all of the world's religions lead ultimately to the same goal. As expressed by the so-called Traditionalist or Perennialist School of René Guénon, Frithjof Schuon, Huston Smith and Seyyed Hossein Nasr, this approach distinguishes the exoteric level of religious expression and belief, where there are obvious and important differences, from the esoteric, mystical dimension, where the differences are not of decisive importance. It does not deny differences but argues that all paths converge toward the same end. In recent decades, the discipline of religious studies has seen a sharp backlash against these sweeping claims. So great has the skepticism been that many scholars have questioned the merits of any broad comparative efforts at all.

  "Stephen Prothero attacks the perennial philosophy, but he passes over the entire scholarly debate in silence and leads his readers to believe that the field of religious studies today is predominantly represented by perennialists. ...

  "Prothero never presents a serious theory of religious difference;

nor does he engage the arguments of the perennialist philosophers; nor does he explain how these religions run the world. ...

  "Prothero ends his discussion by writing: 'Any genuine belief in

what we call God should humble us, remind us that, if there really is a god or goddess worthy of the name, He or She must surely know more than we do about the things that matter most. This much, at least, is shared across the great religions.' Unfortunately, Prothero never fulfills the promise of his challenging title." Christian Century, Jun 1 '10, pp37-38. <www.tinyurl.com/2a6s8ac>

ORIGINS

The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, by Paul Davies [5] -- the unnamed reviewer notes that "Fifty years after a West Virginia astronomer first pointed a radio telescope toward the heavens, hoping to pick up a message from space, Davies is breaking with his colleagues at the international organization known as SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence). He points out, among other things, that their satellite-dish approach is batty." Nevertheless, "Davies won't rule out the possibility that intelligent life exists elsewhere in the universe. ...

  Davies just wants "less sky-watching and more efforts to detect

whether life on Earth was just a one-off stroke of luck. But Davies'

hypotheses get 'stranger and stranger' as his book proceeds, something he himself acknowledges. He wants geologists to consider whether they've ever seen hints that, in prehistory, an alien culture may have drilled for minerals, and for biologists to muse on the possibility that visitors have encoded messages into our genome."

  Davies "worries that the spontaneous creation of even rudimentary life on Earth might have been an unrepeatable fluke. ... Davies, curiously, pays little attention to how vast an evolutionary leap was needed to go from crow or even chimpanzee smarts to human-level brainpower. Given the actual odds, 'there are probably plenty of dumb animals scattered across the universe, but nobody worth talking to.'" The Week, May 7 '10, p24.

  It is ironic how closely this sort of reasoning can parallel

creationist concepts without the light going on.

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SOURCES: Monographs

1 - Against All Gods: What's Right and Wrong About the New Atheism, by Phillip E. Johnson and John Mark Reynolds (IVP, 2010, paperback, 128 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/2feo498>

2 - The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia -and How It Died, by Philip Jenkins (HarperOne reprint, 2009, paperback, 336 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/25ud9hw>

3 - The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity, by Philip Jenkins (Oxford Univ Prs, Updated ed., 2007, paperback, 336 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/2a8v9hv>

4 - God Is Not One: The Eight Rival Religions That Run the World - and Why Their Differences Matter, by Stephen Prothero (HarperOne, 2010, hardcover, 400 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/yjfppww>

5 - The Eerie Silence: Renewing Our Search for Alien Intelligence, by Paul Davies (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010, hardcover, 256 pages) <www.tinyurl.com/2dehs7r>

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