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AR 24:17 - How Jordan Peterson surprisingly bridges the gap
In this issue:
APOLOGETICS - responding to the Jordan Peterson phenomenon
CONSCIOUSNESS - "study adds substantial weight to the evidence linking cannabis to the onset of psychosis"
NEW TESTAMENT RELIABILITY - better-attested accounts than those of the most famous person living at the time of Christ
Apologia Report 24:17 (1,425)
April 24, 2019
APOLOGETICS
Esther O'Reilly <www.bit.ly/2KF7VDx> makes good use of her <patheos.com> platform. She begins: "In the past year, I have been writing extensively about the Jordan Peterson phenomenon and what the Church can take away from it. As I and friends of mine have observed, Peterson's rise has been sparking a surprising and heartening renewal of interest in spiritual things generally and Christianity specifically. Pastors all around the world have reported that people, young men in particular, are literally wandering into their churches for the first time at a shockingly accelerated rate. By any standard, this is good news for Christians." She asks if the response to Peterson implies that apologetics has failed in some way, and she does so using a significantly broad application.
O'Reilly emphasizes that "context matters, and the answer to our main question will vary depending on which context we choose. ...
"For years, people have tended to view apologetics as primarily Christians trying to keep each other within the in-group - hence, by this metric, a failure. ... Because I actually happen to think Christianity is true and rational, I regard maintaining stasis within the Church as a worthy goal in and of itself. ...
"It's true that apologetics has never catalyzed a clearly definable 'hot spot' of renewed interest in church and Christianity on the scale of what we are currently observing with the Jordan Peterson phenomenon. ...
"It takes ignorance ten seconds to ask a question that requires careful scholarship ten pages to answer....
"Those of us who are familiar with such tactics from long experience have learned to recognize them for what they are and give them little serious attention. Unfortunately, not everyone has, and this is where the trouble begins. The sheer amount of ink spilled on the skeptical side of the topic, some of it by people with an alphabet soup of letters after their name, can catch a wavering young person like a deer in the headlights.
"[N]ot everybody is ready. Some people need a push. When they won't listen to their mom, they'll listen to the teacher who sits them down and tells them to clean their room. When they won't listen to the Christian apologist or the pastor, they'll listen to the psychology professor who says, 'No, but really. You should read your Bible.'"
When one young man O'Reilly uses as an example "encountered Peterson, his atheistic arrogance was brought up short. Peterson's sharp words of tough love about confronting the ugliness within your own heart and setting your house in perfect order convicted him."
At greater length with another heartening story, O'Reilly relates some of the background of Paul VanderKlay's YouTube channel <www.bit.ly/2IzAijH> "to answer the question we began with. Has apologetics failed? To ask such a question is to make apologetics into something it is not. Who can trace [our] path" but the Creator alone? <www.bit.ly/2Deh8wg>
Well done, Esther. I've (RP) yet to find a better overview of "the Jordan Peterson phenomenon."
For more on Peterson from back issues of Apologia Report, see <www.bit.ly/2GpAMaT>
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CONSCIOUSNESS
"Strong Pot Is Hot: Raising the risk of psychosis" (no byline, The Economist, Mar 3 '29, p74) -- reports that "regular use of cannabis with a potency greater than 10% increases the risk of developing psychosis five-fold, according to a study <www.bit.ly/2UBan2x> published this week by the Lancet. It also found that using less potent strains daily increased the risk three-fold. ...
"The study adds substantial weight to the evidence linking cannabis to the onset of psychosis. It also suggests that differences between varieties and how often they are used could help explain why rates of psychosis among cannabis users vary across Europe."
Further, "a growing body of evidence makes it likely that cannabis use is triggering mental-health problems in Europe. This may be particularly true in London and Amsterdam where high-THC weed is prevalent. In London, 30% of new cases of psychosis in the study were estimated to be tied to strong cannabis - or an additional 13.8 cases per 100,000 people every year."
This past January, Imprimis (the impressive monthly of Hillsdale College) featured "Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence" by Alex Berenson <www.bit.ly/2UjOEa4>
For more on drugs and consciousness in past issues of Apologia Report, see <www.bit.ly/2GfdtPC>
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NEW TESTAMENT RELIABILITY
Rebecca McLaughlin opens her Christianity Today (Jan '19) discussion: "How to defend the gospels with confidence," by example of a "laughable" argument introduced by Harvard psychologist and atheist public intellectual Steven Pinker. His error? Pinker highlighted a source that was "self-published by someone without the relevant scholarly credentials" arguing Jesus never existed. In this case, shallow efforts such as Pinker's "reinforce the popular idea that Jesus is a flimsy, semi-mythological character - wearing sandals for sure, but without any clear historical footprint."
In response, Mclaughlin enthusiastically reviews Can We Trust the Gospels?, a new book from Cambridge University Bible scholar Peter J. Williams [1]. "Williams begins by mining early non-Christian writings [showing] how these sources attest to the key facts of Jesus' life, confirming that he was worshiped as divine, that his followers experienced persecution, that Christianity spread far and fast, and that 'some of the early Christian leaders would have known of Christ's family origins.'
"Turning to the Gospels themselves, Williams argues that Jesus' life produced more detailed and better-attested accounts than the contemporary Roman emperor Tiberius, 'the most famous person in the then-known world.' While the earliest surviving manuscripts describing Tiberius' life date from the ninth century, the earliest surviving incomplete copies of the Gospels are from the second and third centuries, and we have complete copies of all the Gospels from the fourth."
Williams explains that "The four Gospels were not chosen as a result of political power, but rather they became accepted by early Christians as the best sources for information about Jesus' life without any central authority pressuring others to accept them.
"Further, he shows that by at least 'the late second century and early third century, the four Gospels were a recognized group.' ...
"Williams [also] turns to the common idea that the Gospels present a mythologized Christ, loosely based on a historical figure but with supernatural features gradually snuck in. He argues that the presence of family members in the early Christian movement would have made it hard for additional beliefs about Jesus (for example, his virgin birth) to be fabricated early on, and he critiques the idea that 'novel beliefs arose later' on the grounds that 'by then, Christianity had spread so far and so fast that it would have been difficult to introduce innovations.' ...
"He acknowledges that the miraculous claims of the Gospels make them unpalatable from a secular perspective. But the supernatural elements of Christianity, including the Christian belief in the deity of Christ, seem to have been there from the first.
"What about the reliability of Jesus' own words, as recorded in the Gospels? Williams makes this bold claim: 'Arguably, we have greater knowledge of what Jesus said than of sayings from any other ancient person who did not write a book.'" <www.bit.ly/2UAfUpU>
McLaughlin's own book, Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion [2], was released this month to enthusiastic reviews by Os Guinness, John Lennox, Russell Moore, Sam Allberry, and other evangelical thought leaders.
For more on the reliability of the New Testament in past issues of AR, see <www.bit.ly/2v3eSDQ>
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SOURCES: Monographs
1 - Can We Trust the Gospels? by Peter J. Williams (Crossway, 2018, paperback, 160 pages) <www.amzn.to/2UCDMJN>
2 - Confronting Christianity: 12 Hard Questions for the World's Largest Religion, by Rebecca McLaughlin (Crossway, 2019, hardcover, 240 pages) <www.amzn.to/2UTnuMv>
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