Chapter 1: Theology

[bookhobbit]

In which I spend half the post analyzing the very last section, because Noebel thinks he understand postmodernism much better than he actually does.

We start this chapter off talking about Christian theology. It's pretty boring at first, just establishing basic facts like "what is theism" and "what are special and general revelation" -- in other words, mainstream Christian things, not fundamentalist things.

There is this:

Without faith that the Bible is God's Word, you are left adrift—forced to trust your own (unfounded) thought processes as the ultimate criteria for discerning truth.

The thing is, as humans we filter all of reality through our thought processes. We always have to trust our thought processes as the ultimate criteria for discerning truth because we cannot experience reality without reference to our brains. Even the Bible, if you choose to accept it, has to be read and interpreted by our thought processes. There's no way to remove uncertainty from the equation. 

For example, the unity of teaching in the Bible is startling in light of the fact that its books were authored by different men in very different circumstances over many centuries. 

There's no explanation given for this alleged unity. Even the Gospel accounts don't match. I was taught that they don't match because eyewitness accounts never do, but that doesn't support the idea of "startling unity". 

Further, the astounding ability of the Bible to metamorphose the lives of individuals (for the better) who accept its authority strengthens its claim to be special revelation from God. 

This is the sort of claim that you really need some sort of support for, because it's trying to make a statement about concrete proof without providing any testing. Because I think you could likewise make that claim for many other things, both religious and otherwise. I bet lots of people have converted to Islam, for example, and likewise found their lives transformed for the better. Personally, my life was deeply, powerfully, profoundly changed for the better by rejecting Christianity. That's not a story I was ever told while in fundamentalism. 

The degree of moral truth contained in the Bible also supports its divine inspiration. 

Combined with the first bit, this is engaging in some circular reasoning when you actually unpack the assumptions. "The Bible is divinely inspired because it is true; it is true because it is divinely inspired."

All these arguments support the belief that the Bible is God's Word; however, the most convincing witness for divine inspiration is the Bible itself. Those hesitant to accept Scripture as God's special revelation are most often convinced by a thorough, open-minded study of the Bible.

"The Bible is divinely inspired because people who study it believe that it is true that it is divinely inspired." Based on what? This requires buying into the initial assumptions. Also, note "open-minded". This doesn't actually mean "open-minded" because when you point to people who studied the Bible and don't believe it was divinely inspired, people tend to say "It's just because they're close minded and skeptical!" There's no way to be branded open-minded and come to different conclusions than fundamentalists because if you come to different conclusions you are definitionally "close-minded".

There's a lot more of this kind of thing. Noebel argues at length and in different words that the Bible provides the foundation for special revelation and that special revelation proves the Bible is true.

There's some watchmaker theory mentioned. Noebel gotcha-y states that Darwin admired William Paley's theories about intelligent design, as if that invalidates the entire theory of evolution. Darwin wasn't an atheist; he probably believed in intelligent design. That doesn't mean we have to because his work is not infallible and his personal beliefs don't have to match other people working in this field.

He quotes a lot of other apologetics. I'm going to pull out some C.S. Lewis:

Suppose there were no intelligence behind the universe, says Lewis. In that case nobody designed my brain for the purpose of thinking. Thought is merely the by-product of some atoms within my skull. "But if so, how can I trust my own thinking to be true?" asks Lewis. "But if I can't trust my own thinking, of course, I can't trust the arguments leading to atheism, and therefore have no reason to be an atheist, or anything else. Unless I believe in God, I can't believe in thought; so I can never use thought to disbelieve in God."

I don't follow the line of logic involved in "if the brain isn't designed, I can't trust thought to be true". Why? If God designed the brain, maybe I can't trust my thoughts because maybe I can only think about what He allowed. You could make any argument of the same kind and they would all be equally logically valid, I think. 

A true understanding of God's absolute goodness leads us unerringly to the conclusion that each of us has an acute need for a Redeemer.

Does it? Why? Maybe a true understanding of God's absolute goodness would lead us to conclude that, having made humans in his image, there is no need for a Redeemer, just for us to try and be the most godly we can. Now, obviously, other parts of the Bible contradict that, but you can't just look at the goodness itself and say "clearly we need to be fixed".

The chapter finishes with a bunch of things about the nature of God that I'm not going to dispute because I'm not interested in poking holes in mainstream Christian theology, just in Fundamentalist manipulation tactics. 

Now we're onto Islam -- first discussing the source texts. It starts off okay, just discussing the Qur'an and the Hadith and what they are. The it talks about the five pillars of Islam. So far, so basic, nothing too bad.

Then we get to jihad. Which they describe as the sixth pillar. From what I can gather this is true of only some denominations, and not either of the most populous ones. The textbook says that "some people" recognize it as one, not talking about denominational uncertainties. Noebel says "First, it is the battle against temptation and sin for the sake of self-control. Second, it is the battle against any and all who oppose Islam."

Just...I think "don't decide to tar an entire religion with millions of people in it by the actions of a few extremists" is so obvious as to be tired, right? But it's still true. There's a huge double standard at play. Historically, many Christian societies have persecuted, been to war with, and killed people who don't conform to Christianity.

Anyway. They go a bit through the central tenants of Islam. I don't know for sure whether they're accurate, but they're not overtly Islamophobic and they roughly match what I learned at university.

And then we get the sting in the tail. Noebel says that the idea of jihad as just spiritual struggle or even just self-defense is a "minority view" historically and that Islam spread by conquest, not mentioning that you could say as much of Christianity as well. 

Many contemporary Muslims understand "defense" as the response needed against anything or anyone who would seek to inhibit Islam from becoming a global civilization. 

You know, unlike Christian fundamentalists who...oh right...think that anything that keeps Christianity from being the ONLY religion in the public square is oppression. The projection here is staggering.

Additionally, since Muslims believe that the world originally was Islamic, and that every person is bom a Muslim, they can easily move toward holding any and all non-Muslims as inherently in opposition to Islam.

The way you hold all non-fundamentalists and non-Christians as in opposition to Christianity, Noebel?

Then more descriptions of Muslum theology, again nothing too spicy. But they do describe things in very othering terms, never drawing comparisons between Christian and Muslim theology or religion even when they're obvious. It's hard to spork it much, though, because it's done in a relatively subtle way that's sprinkled throughout the text.

Unfortunately, many Muslims are quite confused about the doctrine of the Trinity. This is probably due to how the Qur'an misrepresents it.

OH, YOU MEAN LIKE HOW YOU MISREPRESENT THE CONCEPT OF JIHAD, NOEBEL? Sucks, doesn't it?

Because these misrepresentations are encased in the Qur'an, and Muslims attribute absolute authority to the Qur'an, despite our appeals to Scripture

"They don't believe us even though we say our text is true and their text is false!"

And now we get THIS massively hypocritical bullshit:

One of the most profound Islamic claims is that Islam fulfills Christianity as Christianity fulfills Old Testament religion. Yet if one religion is to fulfill another, there must be significant continuity between the two. In other words, essential elements of the first must not be denied by the second; there must be continuity of essence, though not necessarily of form.

By "Old Testament religion" you mean Judaism, a still-living religion with massively different approaches to theology and philosophy than Christianity? So when we're talking about continuity are we talking about the fact that those rules for behavior in the Old Testament (e.g. dietary precepts) typically don't get followed by most Christians? Are you kidding me? What objective measure makes Christianity the "fulfillment" of Judaism (which is what "Old Testament religion" has to mean) by Islam not the "fulfillment" of Christianity?

There's a whole section that just expands this argument plus combines it with the idea of Biblical inerrancy. I'm not going to recap it because it's repetitive. I expected to spend a lot more time on Islam for this section, but he really doesn't present that much new information or new argument. My vague memory of this textbook suggests that in sections where Islam is represented as broadly matching Christianity, he just quotes the Qur'an without pointing out the similarities, and sprinkles in a few scary quotes about ~violence~. In sections where it's represented as not matching Christianity, there's a lot more argument to deconstruct. That may be wrong, though, so we'll see.

Now onto Secular Humanism! We start off establishing that Secular Humanism is atheistic, which I think overall is an assertion that most Secular Humanists would broadly agree with. But he notes when describing a popular humanist writer:

While eighteen might seem a tender age to determine whether or not God exists,

That's fucking rich, given that fundamentalist children are expected to be saved and baptised well before adolescence. 

Among other things, Prometheus publishes atheistic children's books, including What About Gods? by Chris Brockman. This book is designed to indoctrinate children with dogmatic atheistic sentiments

As opposed to fundie literature, I guess. No way that Bibleman was designed to indoctrinate me with theistic sentiments. The part where Bibleman looks at the camera and starts talking about God is just an opinion.

 Lots of moralizing about atheism and how sad it is. Blah, blah, blah. There's a bit about philosophy professor Anthony Flew, who gave up atheism for deism at 81 because he felt like the science best supported it. This is trotted out triumphantly even though Flew is not a Christian. No explanation is given for why this revelation, if truly put forward by God, did not result in him becoming a Christian.

Secular Humanists continue to stress that science and reason will drive one from the Christian point of view of creation. Dr. Flew more than answers this claim. As it turns out, biology and science in general are not confining the supernatural to any dustbin of history, as Dewey claimed.

There's a bit of jiggery-pokery going on here. Secular Humanists stress that science and reason will drive one from "the Christian point of view of creation". To Noebel this means young-earth Creationism because anyone who doesn't believe in young-earth Creationism isn't "a Biblical Christian" (we'll get to this later, but it's very widespread in fundie culture). It is true that if you believe the majority opinion in astronomy, biology and geology, young-earth Creationism just doesn't work out. 

But Dr. Flew isn't claiming to be a young-earth Creationist. He's a deist. He probably still holds to evolution. So there's a false connection being drawn here. Studying science doesn't support young earth creationism. It might support theism for one person! Theism and atheism cannot be scientifically proven or disproven because there's just no way to test that claim empirically. 

Noebel is using one former atheist's conversion to deism to support the idea that the fundamentalist Christian perspective on the creation of the world is correct.

Now onto Marxism-Leninism, which I'm going to call Marxism because Noebel does this interchangeably anyway. Most of it is similar to the Secular Humanist stuff: all Noebel does is talk about the fact that most prominent Marxists voices tend to be atheists. Again, mostly reasonably factual-ish stuff, like quoting Marx's own work. There is this, though:

While some attempts have been made to minimize atheism's role in Marxist theory (especially in recruiting naive Christians and other religious people to participate in Marxist-Leninist activity, such as the Liberation Theology movement), Marxists are privately aware of their fundamental need for an atheistic foundation.

Recruiting NAIVE Christians. See how this portrays Marxists as dishonest, sneaky betrayers who hide their real beliefs to dupe innocent Christians into their sinful viewpoint? There's no sense that there's division among Marxists, or that Marxism is a theory that can be employed in both theistic and atheistic contexts, or that sincere Marxist Christians can exist. Liberation theology is a movement generated by Christians (and, specifically, Catholics) for Christians (ibid). There was no "recruitment" involved. It's very, very deeply Christian and very, very deeply theological. But it's Catholic and from Latin America, which makes it suspect.

Then some stuff about the Soviet Union and China. It's pretty bog standard for Americans talking about communist countries, so I won't quote it here, because it's not really specifically fundamentalist. It pretty much finishes off on that note.

Cosmic Humanism!  

Like every other worldview, Cosmic Humanism's theology forms the foundation for all other aspects of its worldview.

I disagree with this statement. For example, I don't think theology forms the basis for Marxism. It rests on economics. Noebel assumes this has to be so because it's true for Christianity.

Anyway, a lot of this chapter is about pantheism and the idea that there's no one true spiritual truth but that all religious paths contain some truth as a cosmic humanist doctrine, which is okay-ish as far as it goes. There is this, though:

Virtually every "orthodox" adherent of the New Age movement

There is no "orthodoxy" of the New Age movement because it is not centralized.

Everything has divine power in it," says Roman Catholic New Ager Matthew Fox, and this divine force is what gives the planet its "sacredness."'

Note that this man doesn't get counted as Christian. He's a New Ager, even though he's also Catholic, because he's not the right kind of Christian. My experience of fundies is they're sort of okay with evangelical Catholics but are very quick to disregard others. For some reason, they only use the phrase "Roman Catholic" when they disapprove of the Catholic in question. There's probably distressing reasons for that that I don't know about. Anyway, the point is, if you're not the right kind of Christian (a fundamentalist), Noebel doesn't count you as a Christian, regardless of what you say about yourself.

There's also a footnote about A. C. Bhaktivedanta Prabhupada's theological theories. He's the founder of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness, which is based on Hindu scriptures. Which Noebel said he wasn't going to address because it wasn't influential enough. When I first wrote that part of the intro, I assumed he was lumping all East and South Asian religious traditions into the Cosmic Humanism bin, because he does this a lot. He says he won't talk about them and then just throws them in as a sidebar to a discussion that primarily centers white writers. Hm.

Some scaremongering about "cosmic humanism" in Star Wars, and then the conclusion.

Finally, we come to postmodernism. Noebel contends that postmodernism is atheistic, which I broadly disagree with. I think it's quite possible that many postmodernists may be atheists, but the nothing-is-true-nothing-is-false nature of postmodernism means that that atheism and theism are both true and neither are true also.

Noebel's source for postmodernism being atheistic is Kevin J. Vanhoozer. Who's that? Well, he's theology faculty at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. So this is not a postmodernist critic talking about postmodernism, but an evangelical talking about it.

There's some stuff about the history of postmodernism linking it to Marxism, as both attached to Marxist ideas and a reaction to Marxist ideas. True of many movements. It DOES have this description:

A sympathetic critic defined Postmodernism as Marxism-lite dressed in a French tuxedo, sipping French wine in a French cafe on the campus of the College International de Philosophie.

That makes it sound so glamorous.

In the pre-modern era God, revelation, and the clergy were the ultimate sources for truth about reality.

The pre-modern era where? Let's really dig into that, Noebel. Europe and its cultural descendents are not the center of the universe. 

He quotes Charlotte Allen in the National Review (an American conservative publication), who says that most postmodernists are "militant atheists" with the "intolerance and totalitarian tendencies of that breed". Let's get that full quote, which is from a review of a book written by a Christian author called The Twilight of Atheism:

McGrath properly celebrates the passing of secular modernity but goes on to give too much credit to the postmodernist theorists who helped push modernity over the edge. He seems to forget that Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and their epigones are also militant atheists, with all the intolerance and totalitarian tendencies of that breed, and that academic postmodernism rests upon a Marxist substrate as surely as did Stalinism. 

So Noebel's citation for "postmodernists are atheists" is not a postmodernist text, but a conservative journalist reviewing a book by a Christian about secular thought.

The academic rigor is stunning, isn't it.

What he quotes actual postmodernists saying:

Derrida: "I rightly pass for an atheist." However, when asked why he would not say more plainly 'I am an atheist,' he replied, "Maybe I'm not an atheist."'

Rorty: atheism (objective evidence for the nonexistence of God) is just as untenable as theism (objective evidence for the existence of God)

That's all. So he's doing a really bad job of proving that postmodernists are atheists. In fact, he's proving that they tend to be allergic to straight answers or definitive statements.

Some more painful misunderstandings: 

If God is dead, the belief that there is no ultimate reality or eternal truth becomes a philosophical necessity. A firm believer in this, Derrida concluded further that words and sentences have no inherent meaning. 

THOSE TWO THINGS ARE NOT LINKED. "Words and sentences have no inherent meaning" is a basic principle of LANGUAGE. We talk about it in linguistics. It's not philosophical, it's about the arbitrariness of connection between form and meaning. It's just a basic semiotics thing.

He insisted that human beings construct reality through their use of language. 

A third, completely different concept, not linked to either of the above.

In other words, as you read this page, you will construct your own meaning shaped by your culture and life experiences. The author's meaning is thus "deconstructed" or altered by the reader. 

This is true. It's also not really strongly linked to the statements above. They sound like they're linked, but they're not really.

Noebel says that deconstructionism is a bad thing: 

For example, according to Derrida's theory of deconstruction, the Bible is merely a book written by men who were locked in their own culture, experiences, and language. Thus, the Biblical authors were writing about their own subjective experiences, not communicating objective or eternal truths about God and humanity.

Which obviously doesn't square with the fundie view of things. But:

The theory of deconstruction can thus be used to explain how some cultures can read the Bible and proceed to slaughter another race, while other cultures reading the same Bible build hospitals, schools, orphanages, and homeless shelters.

So is it good or bad? He can't seem to decide whether he agrees or disagrees with the existence of deconstructionist interpretations of literature.

Also note "cultures" here. "Cultures" don't read the Bible, people do. There's no acknowledgement that two people sharing the exact same culture can do very different things -- one can kill other people, and another can build hospitals. Not that those two things are.....opposites? really? I mean one is bad and one can often be useful but they're not actions that have anything to do with each other really. Anyway, this reinforces Noebel's thesis that "cultures" are moral or immoral, not people, which gets back to his whole "some cultures are just immoral" flavor of subtextual white supremacy.

He also quotes the Twilight of Atheism author:

Many Postmodern writers are, after all, atheist (at least in the sense of not actively believing in God).

That's not really what atheism means, though. I mean, I'm not going to be prescriptive, but a lot of people who don't actively believe in God call themselves things other than atheists. Absence of belief is different from presence of disbelief, for many people. 

This gets at something else I've been thinking about since the intro, which is the fundie tendency to refer to all non-Christians as "atheists". Sometimes they mean anyone who doesn't subscribe to an organized religion, but just as often it can encompass all non-Christians. The word is used very differently in secular culture vs fundie culture, which I think is where this disconnect is coming from. Postmodernists are not atheists in the sense that they hold the definitive belief that no god exists, but they are atheists in the sense of not believing in the fundamentalist Christian God.

Derrida also supposed that the Western powers, because of their belief in the existence of God, went off the edge toward violence. However, this notion is far off base. The three "isms" of the 20th century responsible for the slaughter of tens of millions' (Communism, Nazism, and Fascism) were not exactly bastions of theism and Christianity. As a matter of fact, all three were grounded in atheism, evolution, and socialism—the very stuff of Postmodernism.

We've already covered that Nazism was not atheistic, nor was it ultimately socialist. Facism is also not socialism. And Mussolini, for example, forged a working relationship with the Catholic church. The relationship between 20th century authoritarian governments and religion is complex, and depends a lot on the particular country you're talking about. It's completely inaccurate to say that they were all "grounded in atheism, evolution, and socialism". There's no actual proof given of this claim, either.

Also, I disagree that atheism, evolution, and socialism are "the very stuff" of Postmodernism. They're only those things insofar as they are all popular among the secular Left in the cultural context Noebel is talking about, and Postmodernism is sort of part of that whole conversation.

The Postmodern idea that religious beliefs are private preferences has filtered down from the academy to the "unenlightened" commoner, many of whom now embrace pluralism.

Note: "religious beliefs are private preferences" is not atheism. But you can see how Noebel draws the line, because to fundamentalists, not having the "freedom" to force your religion on others is suppression. I also can't get over the use of the word "commoner" here.

A problem arises when certain religions claim to go beyond personal preferences and convey objective truth, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. But making exclusive truth claims runs counter to the Postmodern condition. For that reason, the only religions not tolerated are Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

Okay....where to even start. There's so much to untangle here. Judaism doesn't proselytize, which means that it's kind of weird that it makes claims about conveying "objective truth". Jewish people generally do not expect you to adopt their religious views?

It's also not true that Christianity is "not tolerated" in Postmodernist circles. They just tend not to agree that the truth claims a religion is making are more true than any other truth claims. Fundamentalist Christians view this as "intolerance".

I also don't know whether it's true that Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are the only religious groups that make claims to convey objective truth even if you assume all three do. This feels to me like it's rooted in Noebel's assumption that the Bible is inherently true and Jewish and Muslim teaching are just distorted or outdated versions of Biblical teachings, so no other religion could possibly claim to have any truth whatsoever. Not positive though.

There's some talk about postmodern Christianity as well, which Noebel disagrees with:

On the other hand, several troubling traits are also emerging: (1) a denial of the Bible's inerrancy (2) a skepticism of foundational knowledge and (3) an orthodoxy that is perhaps too generous. 

"Too generous" is not defined. Suspect this is code for "liberal politics".

We recognize that some individuals become atheists because they think Darwin solved the question of life's ultimate origins.

No...no...no. Darwin is not the Jesus of evolution.

Postmodernists offer no new rationale for defending their brand of atheism.

Because that's not what Postmodernism is about doing.

In response to religious pluralism, we contend that the problem with this system in particular is the problem with Postmodernism in general—namely that neither our perspectives nor our preferences can dictate reality. Real people may end up in a literal Hell regardless of whether or not they prefer the doctrine of eternal punishment. For example, many may not prefer a number of Christianity's tenets— creation, fall, salvation, judgment, abstinence, sobriety, etc. However, our preferences about Christianity or even reality itself cannot change the true nature of reality.

Note that Fundamentalist understandings of Christianity are painted as "the true nature of reality". No doubt, no questioning. They just are. This is why it's so hard to break away. If you've been taught this from birth, questioning it seems almost impossible.

Also, this is important for understanding Fundamentalist behavior. To them -- to us, because I was taught to believe this deeply at the time -- things that would seem rude to outsiders are acts of heroism. Telling someone they're sinful and they're going to hell is GOOD, not bad, not rude, because you're saving them from hell. You're doing "tough love". You're riding over their "preferences", yes, but you're rescuing them from eternal damnation.

In the final analysis, atheism is a belief system of the intellectual elite ("the people of fashion") because only they possess enough faith to believe in it.  The common, everyday working man cannot believe that everything in the universe is a result of random chance.

No citation given. This is a testable claim, so he should be showing that it holds up to testing if he wants it to be plausible. Also, if this is so, why all the hand-wringing about duping naive Christians into Marxism? Shouldn't these beliefs be self-evident?

This is another point that has to be carefully balanced. At one and the same time, fundamentalist Christian beliefs so obvious and self-confirming that anyone with a brain would conclude they are true. On the other hand, they are under so much fire that good, innocent people are constantly being led away from the ultimate truth. There's no way to disprove it, because it's making no attempt to choose an argument.