Castle Church Discussion on Hitchens / Roberts Debate

Law and Gospel Types DO Believe in the Third Use

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 22:47:41 GMT

How's that for insider code?

By "law and gospel" I'm referring to the debate between those of us who hold to the historic and confessional distinction between those places in Scripture where God command and those places where he promises. Historically, Protestants have described these two ways of speaking in Scripture as "law" and "gospel." There are some, perhaps many, in the Reformed community who, because they were raised in congregations where this way of speaking wasn't used or because they associate this language with "Lutheranism," or because they are moralists who think that making such a distinction will cause Christians not to obey God's law, reject this distinction.

By "third use" I'm referring to the historic Protestant and confessional distinctions between the way the law is used in Christian speech and by God as he brings his people to faith and sanctifies them. The first use is the "pedagogical" use whereby sinners are driven to Christ. This is the first part of the Heidelberg Catechism. The second use is the civil use, i.e., the enforcement by the magistrate of the second table of the Decalogue. The third use is the normative or moral use of the law whereby it serves as the norm for the Christian life. This is the third part of the Heidelberg Catechism.

It is alleged by the Federal Visionists and other moralists that, unless one makes law-keeping a part of justification, unless one's justification is somehow contingent upon sanctification (good luck with that one!) that there's really no incentive to keep the law.

Hello? How about "gratitude?" It's good enough for the Heidelberg Catechism but apparently it's not good enough for the smarty-pants moralists.

All that brings me to this. John Fonville has started a series on how Christ by the Spirit, through the means of grace (word and sacrament), enables his people to keep the law. It's worth a read.

At the heart of Reformed Theology

Sat, 23 Jun 2007 06:15:58 GMT

"At the heart of Reformed Theology, at the heart of Luther and Calvin's struggle, and in Knox and Jonathan Edwards, were men who were awakened to the greatness, to the majesty, to the holiness, and the sovereignty of God. By contemplating the holiness and sovereignty of God, they were driven to develop their doctrines of the grace of God. Because until you meet a God who is holy and is sovereign, you don't know what grace means. I don't think we are ever going to see a healthy evangelical church until the evangelical church is solidly Reformed, where it takes biblical Christianity seriously with a right concept of a sovereign God.

That's because unreformed Christianity has failed in our culture. It has been pervasively antinomian (no law, no Lordship), and has been pervasively liberal in it's trends and tendencies away from scripture, because there's been no real basis in the sovereignty of God.

Today's evangelicals are never amazed by grace, because they don't understand sovereignty. They don't understand God. The evangelical church today is sick, more sick than it has ever been. We need a style and a variety of Christianity that is not a religion, but is a life and a worldview, where at the heart and foundational structure of it is a sound and deep biblical concept of the character of God."

R. C. Sproul - from his series "A Blueprint for Thinking."

Gospel Contradictions?

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 15:50:06 GMT

If the Bible contained contradictions then that would be a fair argument against their inerrancy, and possibly their divine inspiration. However, it wouldn't necessarily make them unreliable historical witnesses. That would depend on the extent of the contradictions.

But what many critics call contradictions aren't contra-dictions - that is, saying the opposite or accounts that cannot be reconciled. Reconciling variant but compatible accounts is something historians and juries do everyday.

Clearing up the misuse of this term was a good point Mark Roberts made in the debate with Christopher Hitchens earlier this week. I suspect Hitchens used the term cavalierly because he believes the case against the Bible and God are self-evident such that any rational person can't take these pre-scientific superstitions seriously.

Mark furthers his point about this overstatement and the actual agreement among the Gospels on his blog today:

Hitchens writes that the “multiple authors” of the Gospels “cannot agree on anything of importance.” This is plainly wrong, unless, I suppose, we allow Hitchens to fill in the blanks of what counts as important. He might say that nothing of importance at all is addressed in the Gospels. (Later he will say that “Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, [religion] no longer offers an explanation of anything important.” [282]). Be that as it may, his point on page 111 is that the Gospels are full of disagreement, especially about the things that matter about Jesus, as the context makes clear.

This is simply not true. Though it is true that the New Testament Gospels show considerable diversity in their portraits of Jesus, they agree on many, many things, including matters that are most important both to the Gospel writers and to Christian believers.

In my book, Can We Trust the Gospels?, I devote two chapters to this issue. Chapter 8 is called “What Difference Does It Make That There Are Four Gospels?” Chapter 9 is called “Are There Contradictions in the Gospels?” I do not at all try to minimize the genuine differences among the Gospels. Any careful reader can’t help but see them, whether in the stories of Jesus’s birth or in the stylistic differences between Mark and John. In fact, the early Christians celebrated the unique qualities of the different Gospels. But I also show in considerable detail the extent to which all four Gospels agree on much of what pertains to Jesus, including the most important aspects of His ministry and message.

Some thoughts on the Dr. Mark Roberts and Christopher Hitchens Debate Part 1

Fri, 08 Jun 2007 10:55:04 GMT

I think that in a debate it is important to point out the untenable nature of your opponent's position and to present a positive case for your own (or at least defend your position from misrepresentations by your opponent). Roberts did neither, in my opinion. I understand that it wasn't the best environment for a debate but there was too many times that Christianity was misrepresented and

The Great God Debate Redux

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 12:10:13 GMT

Mark D. Roberts is posting a series with more analysis of Christopher Hitchens' book.

Extraordinary Evidence

Thu, 07 Jun 2007 12:10:09 GMT

Christopher Hitchens asked for extraordinary evidence for the extraordinary claims of the Bible. The philosopher Hume posed this question in his essay "On Miracles" in Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. Hitchens is very well read so I wouldn't be surprised if he drew this from Hume.

The request actually has an equivocation and can be responded to in two ways. I remembered Dr. Garry DeWeese of Talbot School of Theology answered this in a philosophy class I took from him, so I contacted him to refresh my memory.

"Extraordinary evidence" can be understood in two ways: extraordinary with respect to quality, or quantity.

If the former, then our evidence E is extraordinary, and the obtaining of E itself is an extraordinary event which demands extraordinary evidence, and a vicious regress ensues. But then the condition can never be met, and begs the question against extraordinary events in an unfair manner.

But if the latter, then the question is, how much ordinary evidence is necessary for the total to be considered extraordinary? This is perhaps a sorites problem, where there is no determinate solution (at least epistemically, if not metaphysically determinate).

A second alternative would be to allow that there is some multiple n of the amount of evidence needed for establishing the probability of an ordinary event. But then, the fact that we find n times the ordinary amount of evidence is either a case of evidential over-determination or is itself an extraordinary event.

A third alternative recognizes that very extraordinary events happen all the time, if the co-occurrence of several features in a state of affairs is evaluated probabilistically. (That an American high school kid from Seattle would be at a Halloween party in Tel Aviv and there met an American high school girl from Pensacola and later marry her is highly improbable; in fact, Barb [Mrs. DeWeese] and I might be the only two people in the whole history of the human race who fulfill that description!) So no matter how extraordinary the event, no explanation is needed. (In philosophy of science it has long been recognized that given a relevant law and certain initial conditions gives a high probability to the occurrence of some event is really no explanation; even small probabilities can have explanatory value.)

And I would challenge Hitchens on meeting his own demand because he makes some extraordinary claims of his own.

Non-material properties, such as morality and rationality, which he values, have apparently derived from purely material causes. He's a materialist. He believes something (the physical universe) came from nothing - with no viable scientific explanation. He also believes in evolution, and even committed evolutionists admit to the high odds, the extraordinary nature, of the appearance of biological life. These are extraordinary claims Hitchens himself believes happened I would ask him to offer the extraordinary evidence within his view of reality, materialism and evolution, that can account for them.

I'd say that Christianity has better explanatory resources for his demand than his own view does.

And Amy weighed in on this same challenge at the A-Team blog. Sometimes it becomes evident that there is no evidence, quality or quantity, that can satisfy the challenge because the objection is a guise for a presupposition against such claims.

Dr. Mark Roberts and Christopher Hitchens Debate on Hewitt

Wed, 06 Jun 2007 10:20:08 GMT

It was pretty interesting. If you missed it, you can listen here. You can read the transcript here. Tags: Mark Roberts, Christopher Hitchens, Hugh Hewitt

Thoughts on the Great God Debate

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 23:15:07 GMT

Listening to Hugh Hewitt's program today, here are some comments.

Hitchens makes the claim in his book and in the debate that the graves opened and the dead walking around at the time of the crucifixion reduces the extraordinariness of Jesus' resurrection. First, I'm not sure that's true, but there's a fundamental difference in Jesus' resurrection that he misses: The Scripture says that Jesus raised Himself. No matter how many of us will be raised, none of us will have raised ourselves. We are all dependent on the Lord for that.

I'm not sure why Roberts didn't respond to the dating of the Gospels that Hitchens asserted is quite late, long after the eyewitnesses were gone. That is a contested claim. Just as Hitchens relies on a very narrow slice of New Testament scholarship for his assessments, he has done so here. I think that was a major issue to contest.

Hitchens relies heavily on Bart Ehrman's scholarship and said that he didn't know of any responses to him by conservative scholarship. I don't know why he's not aware of the responses since they can be found quite easily with a Google search. (To find links to some of these, use our search on this blog.) The response might not be as numerous as Hitchens would expect if Ehrman's claims are controversial, but that is likely because most of the evidence Ehrman musters for his thesis is old news, as Roberts identified with one example. What is new is the importance of what he cites and the implications Ehrman draws from the evidence.

I didn't know that Ehrman is an atheist now, as Roberts said. I didn't know he'd completely lost his faith.

Hitchens said that the Gospel of Judas is valuable in that it offered a rationale for Judas' betrayal of Jesus, how we reconcile Judas being held responsible for what he was needed to do for God's plan. I don't know why Roberts seemed to agree, though he did take issue with the historicity of the Gospel of Judas. God worked out His plan for Jesus' crucifixion through Judas' own free actions, so he's responsible for what he did.

Hitchens claimed unchallenged that the canon of the New Testament was debate and decided quite late. That's just not true. The canon was set in practice in the second century. The church used a criteria for determining the books considered authoritative for teaching very early. It wasn't debated at the later council that formalized the canon; they simply recognzied what had been so in practice. F. F. Bruce's book Canon is an excellent resource.

Hitchens pointed to the difficult "immoral" things that are cited in the Old Testament. I agree that many things in the Old Testament are difficult. But an important point Roberts didn't point out that makes the Old Testament coherent is that the nation of Israel, the tribes they fought were guilty and God used the temporal events to issue His just judgment. That may be rejected, but as internal coherence issue that is vital to understanding the difficult things. It may not be our place to judge as the judgment are exacted, but it is God's perogative.

Which One?

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 23:15:06 GMT

Thoughts on the Hewitt debate:

Hitchens, fairly asked, if God does exist then how to we evaluate competing religious claims. As I mentioned in my review of his book, we agree that if there is truth value to religious claims they are objective claims, not subjective. All religious claims can't be true because they contradict and represent very different views of reality.

Hitchens, however, believes there isn't the kind of evidence that would help us do this. First, if he was willing, even for the sake of argument in the debate, to consider that God exists, then that's a major concession on his part that should have been pursued. Second, this is where the historicity and the dating of the Gospels is critical. Very few religions make historical claims. Among those that do, the Bible is unique in the kind of manuscript evidence that makes it a historical document that should be taken seriously. I would contend that there is evidence to adjudicate among all the religious claims and Christianity offers it. No other does. And more so, Christianity, the Bible properly understood, offers a view of reality that can also explain morality and value, is compatible with scientific inquiry, all of which Hitchens values.

Sleight of Hand

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 21:15:03 GMT

The first question Hugh Hewitt asked Christopher Hitchens was how he derives moral values from a purely material world. Hitchens did what atheists often do, he changed the question. He described how he could and did behave morally; he didn't answer how moral value derives from a material world that has no resources to explain it. It's a feature of the world that is so natural to us, it seems obvious it exists. Hitchens draws from this extensively in his moral tirade against religion in his book. But that something is obvious doesn't mean that it's explained. The question is not why does an atheist behave well? The question is how does morality exist in a material world?

Hitchens also brought up a point he made in the book - that the moral law was created, instituted at Sinai. Of course, that isn't the case. It's the the Biblical teaching. The moral law predates Sinai. It was simply codified for, a government for the people of Israel as a nation.

Hitchens vs Roberts

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 20:19:08 GMT

Just a reminder about Hugh Hewitt's show today, featuring Mark D. Roberts discussing God and religion with Christopher Hitchens.

The A-Team points us to some links: "You can listen live here from 3:05pm to 6:00pm (PST) or download each of the three hours here anytime after they have posted." Hugh also posts transcripts incredibly fast. I'll link when I see it.

Tuesday! Tuesday! Tuesday! It's Hitchens vs. Roberts!

Tue, 05 Jun 2007 19:15:11 GMT

All three hours of Hugh Hewitt's radio show this afternoon will be devoted to "The Great God Debate" between Christopher Hitchens (author of God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything) and Mark D. Roberts.

You can listen live here from 3:05pm to 6:00pm (PST) or download each of the three hours here anytime after they have posted.