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Contending with Christianity's Critics (part 3)

January 31, 2010     Time: 00:14:20
Contending with Christianity’s Critics (part 3)

Summary

Conversation with William Lane Craig.

Transcript Contending with Christianity's Critics (Part 3)

Kevin Harris: The book is available at ReasonableFaith.org: Contending with Christianity's Critics: Answering New Atheists and Other Objectors, edited by yourself, Dr. Craig, and Dr. Paul Copan. Part 3 is “The Coherence of Christian Doctrine.” As you put this book together, you dealt with the existence of God, the Jesus of history, and now the coherence of Christian doctrine. It would seem to follow once we establish that God exists and that Christ is who he claimed to be then we can get into some of the finer points of doctrine I would assume.

Dr. Craig: Exactly. And deal with the alleged inconsistencies or incoherencies that critics sometimes lodge against traditional Christian doctrines.

Kevin Harris: Chapter 13 opens up part 3 – “The Coherence of Theism.”

Dr. Craig: This is a chapter by Charles Taliaferro who is a very fine Christian philosopher. He examines the principle attributes of God like omniscience, omnipotence, eternality, necessity, omnipresence, and deals with the criticisms that you often hear of these attributes that are floated in popular culture. For example, we all heard the one, “If God is all powerful, can he make a stone too heavy for him to lift.” This is the kind of thing that Taliaferro examines in his chapter.

Kevin Harris: One popular atheist speaker has something like twenty-five of these that he throws at Christians and believers in God. It is all things like that. So an important chapter even on the lay level.

Dr. Craig: Yes, I think so. Again, this will give a Christian reader, I think, a deeper understanding of the nature of God, who God is, what his attributes are, as well as making one’s doctrine coherent and immune to these sort of popular attacks. It will also, I think, deepen your appreciation of God and his person.

Kevin Harris: Paul Copan does chapter 14, and it is on the Trinity. He asks, “Is the Trinity a Logical Blunder?” This will help us in dealing with everyone from Muslims to Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Dr. Craig: Exactly, both cultists and Muslims alike reject the doctrine of the Trinity and especially with our increased consciousness of Islam in the world today, we as Christians need to be able to articulate and explain the coherence of the doctrine of the Trinity. Paul shows that the Trinity is not the self-contradictory doctrine that three gods are somehow one god or that one person is somehow three persons. But the claim that God is three persons is a coherent and defensible claim.

Kevin Harris: We’ve emphasized in the past, and I think we should emphasize again Dr. Craig, that we don’t have to explain the Trinity in a comprehensible way. That may not be possible. But we can explain and understand the doctrine of the Trinity.

Dr. Craig: What we can do, I think, is show that it is not logically incoherent. We may not be able to explain how God can be three-in-one, but we can provide models of the Trinity that will show that there is no contradiction as alleged by the critics. So this kind of apologetic is, if you will, defensive in nature. You ward off attacks by showing that the attacks fail. You don’t try to provide a proof of the Trinity, so to speak, but what you do is a defensive operation that shows that no incoherence has been shown in the doctrine of the Trinity when it is properly articulated.

Kevin Harris: It is not contradictory.

Dr. Craig: Right.

Kevin Harris: He also (Paul Copan) defends the incarnation. Chapter 15: “Did God Become a Jew?”

Dr. Craig: Right. This is a defense of the classic doctrine of the two natures of Christ – that Christ is one person who has two natures: a human nature that is complete and authentic, and he also has a divine nature which is unattenuated and undiminished in the incarnation. So Christ is truly God and truly man. Paul tackles here both of these classic doctrines of the Christian faith in this book – the Trinity and the incarnation.

Kevin Harris: We find in the Scriptures often in areas like the incarnation, Bill, kind of an outline or a sketch of a doctrine. Then philosophy in using the minds that God gave us can often fill in some of these blanks within biblical perimeters.

Dr. Craig: That’s correct. The Christian theologian, the systematic theology, or the Christian philosopher of religion, works within the limits set by the data of Scripture. [1] But those limits are fairly broad, and therefore there is a good deal of theoretical construction that can go on here in crafting adequate models of what God is like, how he can be three-in-one or how Christ can be one person with two natures. So there is room within biblical parameters for legitimate theological construction and speculation.

Kevin Harris: I, for one, am glad that these chapters are back to back on the Trinity and the incarnation because there is a certain amount of overlap, and certainly those are the number two things that our Muslim friends will throw at us. They have rigorous complaint against the Trinity and they have rigorous complaint against the incarnation.

Dr. Craig: Oh yes. They regard these doctrines as blasphemous, as you know. They are literally blasphemous doctrines. So it is very important in an increasingly pluralistic society where we will be rubbing shoulders with Muslims that we be able to explain to them in a gentle and sensible way why we are not blasphemers, why this is a perfectly coherent doctrine that makes good sense.

Kevin Harris: I often begin with my Muslim friends that we both believe there is only one God. We both believe that there is no equal to God and that God has no associates, and so on. They are often surprised at that. Now when you get into the finer points of doctrine, they are a little more open, I think, because they see some common ground immediately that we don’t think God has an equal. We don’t think God has any associates equal to him. We believe that there is only one God.

Dr. Craig: That is absolutely right, Kevin. I think what our listeners need to understand is the difference between monotheism and unitarianism. We are (like Muslims) monotheists who believe there is only one God. But very often when the Muslim talks about there being one God he is thinking of unitarianism which is the idea that there is one person that God is, whereas as Christians we are trinitarians not unitarians. We believe that God is tri-personal. But we think there is only one God – there is only one being who is God. So, as you say, he is without peer. We don’t commit the sin of association.

Kevin Harris: Chapter 16 – I love the title of this: “Dostoyevsky, Woody Allen, and the Doctrine of Penal Substitution” from Steve Porter.

Dr. Craig: Right, that is a wild title! There he is defending the classic doctrine of Christ’s vicarious death for the sins of humanity. Christ’s redemptive death. He moves from the person of Christ that Paul Copan discusses to the work of Christ in defending this penal theory of the atonement.

Kevin Harris: This is a biggie – chapter 17 on hell. I’m so glad that you included it. “Hell: Getting What’s Good My Own Way.” Who wrote this chapter?

Dr. Craig: Stew Goetz. He was a friend that Jan and I met, gosh, back when I graduated from Wheaton College. Jan and I met when we were on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ at Northern Illinois University right after my graduation from Wheaton. Stew came on staff there as well for a year. We got to know each other. He became avidly interested in philosophy. After Jan and I went to Trinity and onto University of Birmingham to do my doctoral studies in philosophy, Stew went to Trinity and then went on to Oxford University to do his doctoral studies in philosophy. He is now teaching at Ursinus College in Pennsylvania. He defends a view of hell here as God’s giving to people what they ultimately want; that is to say, complete autonomy, separation from God. They don’t want to be with God, they don’t want to be with the redeemed, and so God in a sense gives them what their ultimate desire is and that is complete autonomy. He leaves them alone.

Kevin Harris: We have to really dig these important issues out when it comes to hell because the focus is on superficial elements, caricatures, cartoonish aspects of what hell is going to be like. We miss (even in the Christian church) what really is going on here with this doctrine quite often.

Dr. Craig: Yes, this notion of separation from God and all that is true and good and beautiful – that, I think, is the real horror of hell. It is separation from God.

Kevin Harris: You are separated from the only source of love and life.

Dr. Craig: Yes. Ultimate goodness.

Kevin Harris: I can’t imagine what it would be like. By the way, don’t go there. [laughter] Go to ReasonableFaith.org, and we’ll show you how to stay out. Chapter 18 wraps up the book. This addresses something internal to the Christian faith. [2] There was a movement within even evangelicalism called “open theism.” David P. Hunt takes on this – “What Does God Know? The Problems of Open Theism.” You might want to explain a little bit.

Dr. Craig: Yes. David Hunt is a Christian philosopher of some prominence who teaches at Whittier College. Hunt is a person who himself, I think, was tempted by open theism, he explored it honestly as something that he might embrace, so his chapter on this has a kind of objectivity and non-partisan quality to it that makes it all the more credible when he argues that open theism really has no good grounds for it and that it involves a doctrine of God which is deficient and inadequate and one that we really ought to reject.

Kevin Harris: Just in case someone is not familiar with open theism, in a nutshell . . .

Dr. Craig: Yes, sorry, I should have defined the terms. Basically open theism is the view that God doesn’t know the future – that all that God knows is the present and the past, and therefore God is a god who gambles on the future. He takes risks because he doesn’t really know what’s going to happen.

Kevin Harris: Wow. Now, why did this even develop? Was it in answer to the problem of evil and suffering?

Dr. Craig: Part of that is true, Kevin. People like Gregory Boyd, for example, who is an evangelical pastor and scholar, I think, is partly motivated by the problem of evil. He thinks, “How could God permit these things to happen if he knew that they were going to happen?” If he foreknew it, why didn’t he stop it? So the problem of evil motivates it to some degree. Also, there are passages in the Scriptures where it seems like God doesn’t know what’s going to happen. He says, “I am going to go down and see whether or not these reports are true.” He repents of certain actions that he said he was going to take. Things of that sort. There are some indications in Scripture that the open theist can use to support his view. But in doing so he has to just run roughshod over a host of other texts, particularly prophetic texts, that I think indicate very clearly that God does foreknow the future.

Kevin Harris: So when you take them all together, we just notice that there is some anthropomorphisms about God that are more in story form rather than rigorous philosophy.

Dr. Craig: I think that is absolutely right. The Bible is not a treatise in systematic theology or philosophy of religion. It is a book of stories. It is stories about God that were told. They have all of the art and the color that you would expect in a storyteller’s narrative. So they will often portray God in what we’d call anthropomorphic ways – that is to say, human ways – that if you were doing sober systematic theology in the seminar room, you wouldn’t take as being accurate depictions.

Kevin Harris: Contending With Christianity’s Critics: Answering the New Atheists and Other Objectors. It is available at ReasonableFaith.org. Just wrapping it up today, Bill – this book can answer a lot of the questions that are being asked right now.

Dr. Craig: I think it does give a very good survey of contemporary criticisms of Christianity and provides really rock solid answers to those questions. [3]