Tag Archives: Christianity

Michael Licona debates Dale Martin on the divinity of Jesus

Dr. Michael Licona and Dr. Dale Martin discuss the question “Did Jesus Believe He Was Divine?” The second evening of the 2012 Religion Soup discussion took place Oct 19, 2012 at Acadia University.

Michael R. Licona (PhD University of Pretoria): is Associate Professor in Theology at Houston Baptist University. He was interviewed by Lee Strobel in his book The Case for the Real Jesus and appeared in Strobel’s The Case for Christ. He is the author of numerous books including The Resurrection of Jesus: A New Historiographical Approach.

Dale B. Martin (PhD Yale University): is the Woolsey Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University. He specializes in the New Testament and Christian Origins. His books include: Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity; The Corinthian Body; Inventing Superstition; and Sex and the Single Savior: Gender and Sexuality in Biblical Interpretation.

The video is here:

Here is the MP3 file. (79 Mb)

I did not summarize this, but I watched Licona’s opening speech. It was awesome! Both speakers are easy to listen to.

Dale Martin is openly gay, so he’s not conservative on what the Bible teaches, for sure, and strikes me as one of these postmodern Jesus Seminar people who uses religious words, but is a naturalist who believes in a liberal Jesus as a nice idea, but doesn’t believe in the conservative historical Jesus at all. He seems to be more like these John Dominic Crossan / Marcus Borg types. I looked at some of his publications, and I think it’s a situation where the liberal sexual practices he advocates constrain his theological and historical views. Sort of like John Dominic Crossan’s atheism and pluralism and political liberalism constrain his historical work. Still though, smart guy and in a debate he addresses the evidence, so it’s good to hear another voice.

The one annoying thing about this is that you should skip ahead about 7.5 minutes to get to the start of the debate. I would like to see churches get involved in doing these sorts of events. We need to get used to discussing these things with evidence.

What North Korea teaches Christians about the importance of politics and economics

Christian apologist Frank Turek writes about it at Townhall.

Excerpt:

When I hear Christians saying we ought not get involved in politics but just “preach the Gospel,” I show them this satellite picture of the Korean peninsula. Here we see a homogenous population of mostly Koreans separated by a well-fortified border. South Korea is full of freedom, food and productivity—it’s one of the most Christianized countries in the world. North Korea is a concentration camp. They have no freedom, no food, and very little Christianity.

What’s the primary reason for the stark difference between these two countries? Politics. The South politically allows freedom, while the North does not.

Ironically, Christians who shun politics to supposedly advance the Gospel are actually allowing others to stop the Gospel. How so? Because politics and law affects one’s ability to preach the Gospel! If you think otherwise, visit some of the countries I have visited—Iran, Saudi Arabia and China. You cannot legally “preach the Gospel” in those countries—or practice other aspects of your religion freely—because politically they’ve ruled it out as they have in North Korea.

In fact, politics affects virtually every area of your life through the laws made by government. So if you care about your family, business, church, school, children, money, property, home, security, healthcare, safety, freedom, and your ability to “preach the Gospel,” then you should care about politics.

Politics affects everything, which is why leaders throughout the Bible—including Joseph, Moses, Daniel, Nehemiah, Mordecai, Esther, John the Baptist, and Paul— “went political” to influence civil governments to govern morally. Even Jesus himself got involved in politics when he publically chastised the Pharisees—the religious and political leaders of Israel—for neglecting “the more important matters of the law.”

[…]But what can Christians do? After all, we can’t legislate morality, can we? News flash: All laws legislate morality! Morality is about right and wrong and all laws declare one behavior right and the opposite behavior wrong. So the question is not whether we can legislate morality, but “Whose morality will we legislate?”

[…]When we fail to legislate morally, others impose immorality. For example, totalitarian political correctness is already imposed in states such as Massachusetts where the implications of same-sex marriage override the religious liberties of businesses, charities and even parents. As documented here and illustrated here, same sex marriage prevents you from running your business, educating your children, or practicing your religion in accord with your Conscience. And soon, as is the case in Canada, you may not be able to merely speak Biblically about homosexual behavior. That is because those who say they are fighting for “tolerance” are often the most intolerant.

Unless Christians begin to influence politics and the culture more significantly, we will continue to lose the very freedoms that enable us to live according to our beliefs and spread the Gospel all over the world. That’s why you should not vote for candidates because of their race or religion, but because they will govern morally on the more important matters of the law—life, marriage and religious freedom.

Dr. Turek says that some societies make it easier for us to carry out our responsibilities as Christians, such as evangelism. That’s true. But I want to make a different point from Dr. Turek related to the point that he made.

I get a lot of e-mails from people complaining that I spend too much time on fiscal issues, and especially on foreign policy. But I really think that Christians need to branch out and read widely about these issues, too. The more we know about everything, the better we will be able to connect what the Bible says to every area, and the smarter we will be at laying out plans for our lives and achieving the good goals we set for ourselves as part of our relationship with God.

It’s always better to know how things work. What good is it to say that you want to achieve some aim like helping the poor or making the world more peaceful unless you first study economics and foreign policy so that you will know how to achieve it? Many people try to achieve these goals by embracing policies that sound good, but they actually achieve the exact opposite ends that you set out to achieve.  If you want to drive a car to get somewhere, you must first learn how to drive a car. Why should faith be any different than anything else? Don’t take positions based on feelings or peer pressure, get informed and make a right judgment.

If God wanted us to believe in him, why doesn’t he give us more evidence?

Have you ever heard someone say that if God existed, he would give us more evidence? This is called the “hiddenness of God” argument. It’s also known as the argument from “rational non-belief”.

Basically the argument is something like this:

  1. God is all powerful
  2. God is all loving
  3. God wants all people to know about him
  4. Some people don’t know about him
  5. Therefore, there is no God.

You may hear have heard this argument before, when talking to atheists, as in William Lane Craig’s debate with Theodore Drange, (audio, video).

Basically, the atheist is saying that he’s looked for God real hard and that if God were there, he should have found him by now. After all, God can do anything he wants that’s logically possible, and he wants us to know that he exists. To defeat the argument we need to find a possible explanation of why God would want to remain hidden when our eternal destination depends on our knowledge of his existence.

What reason could God have for remaining hidden?

Dr. Michael Murray, a brilliant professor of philosophy at Franklin & Marshall College, has found a reason for God to remain hidden.

His paper on divine hiddenness is here:
Coercion and the Hiddenness of God“, American Philosophical Quarterly, Vol 30, 1993.

He argues that if God reveals himself too much to people, he takes away our freedom to make morally-significant decisions, including responding to his self-revelation to us. Murray argues that God stays somewhat hidden, so that he gives people space to either 1) respond to God, or 2) avoid God so we can keep our autonomy from him. God places a higher value on people having the free will to respond to him, and if he shows too much of himself he takes away their free choice to respond to him, because once he is too overt about his existence, people will just feel obligated to belief in him in order to avoid being punished.

But believing in God just to avoid punishment is NOT what God wants for us. If it is too obvious to us that God exists and that he really will judge us, then people will respond to him and behave morally out of self-preservation. But God wants us to respond to him out of interest in him, just like we might try to get to know someone we admire. God has to dial down the immediacy of the threat of judgment, and the probability that the threat is actual. That leaves it up to us to respond to God’s veiled revelation of himself to us, in nature and in Scripture.

(Note: I think that we don’t seek God on our own, and that he must take the initiative to reach out to us and draw us to him. But I do think that we are free to resist his revelation, at which point God stops himself short of coercing our will. We are therefore responsible for our own fate).

The atheist’s argument is a logical/deductive argument. It aims to show that there is a contradiction between God’s will for us and his hiding from us. In order to derive a contradiction, God MUST NOT have any possible reason to remain hidden. If he has a reason for remaining hidden that is consistent with his goodness, then the argument will not go through.

When Murray offers a possible reason for God to remain hidden in order to allow people to freely respond to him, then the argument is defeated. God wants people to respond to him freely so that there is a genuine love relationship – not coercion by overt threat of damnation. To rescue the argument, the atheist has to be able to prove that God could provide more evidence of his existence without interfering with the free choice of his creatures to reject him.

More of Michael Murray’s work

Murray has defended the argument in works published by prestigious academic presses such as Cambridge University Press, (ISBN: 0521006104, 2001) and Routledge (ISBN: 0415380383, 2007). The book chapter from the Cambridge book is here. The book chapter from the Routledge book is here.

Michael Murray’s papers are really fun to read, because he uses hilarious examples. I should mention that I disagree with his view that God’s work of introducing biological information in living creatures has to be front-loaded.

Here’s more terrific stuff from Dr. Murray:

Is there any evidence of God’s existence?

Yes, just watch this lecture by Dr. William Lane Craig. It contains 5 reasons why God exists and 3 reasons why it matters.