Chapter 10: History

[bookhobbit]

This is the last content chapter, but don't worry: we still have the conclusion to get through! I may need to split that into two parts as my spork of it is 9000 words and change long and I'm thinking of going back and adding a bit. Anyway, for this chapter there's going to be a lot of Islamophobia again and of course Noebel's definition of "history" is not going to have much of a lot to do with the academic discipline. 

 

We start off with another quote from Ronald H. Nash, but it's a different book this time. Noebel can read more than one book! But only from fundamentalist authors. Then the opening paragraph:

The basis for the Christian worldview appeared in human history about two thousand years ago in the person of Jesus Christ. While "Christ died for our sins" is solid orthodox Christian theology, "Christ died" is history. Shattering Christianity's historical underpinnings would surely shatter its doctrine and thus the entire worldview.

So, I'm highlighting this because it's essentially the entire justification for Biblical literalism. The idea is always, always that if anything in the Bible is not literally historically true, that compromises the whole text and means that the Christian worldview is built on a falsehood. I was taught this again and again -- I think I mentioned that I went to a whole Answers in Genesis Bible study based on this principle -- but nobody ever explained...why. And I'm not sure that I understand, now that I'm out of it. If Jesus used parables to reveal deeper spiritual truths, why can't the Garden of Eden be a parable, etc.

Either Christ is a historical figure and the Bible is a historical document that describes God's communications with humanity and records events in the life of Christ or the Christian faith is bankrupt (1 Corinthians 15:14).

Fundamentalists of all stripes are very prone to black-and-white thinking, and this is a great example.

The first subsection in this section concerns the historicity of the Bible. This part I remember because I found it fascinating; the history of the Bible is still very interesting to me, and much more so now that I'm not trapped in the Christian fundamentalist "the only acceptable sources are Biblical literalist sources" hell pit. And because of this, I am aware of the flaws in what Noebel is saying.

Today's scholars have little doubt that the books of the Bible were written largely by eyewitnesses. William F. Albright, a leading twentieth-century archaeologist, writes, "In my opinion, every book of the New Testament was written by a baptized Jew between the forties and the eighties of the first century (very probably sometime between about A.D. 50 and 75)."^

Hmm, let's look at that source. It's called W.F. Albright, "Toward a More Conservative View,"

Christianity Today, Jan. 18, 1963. Albright was very respected in his day, but his methods are now being heavily called into question, and he was a self-proclaimed Biblical archaeologist. So, his conclusions here are not necessarily representative of an objective view; he really wanted to find that result. We should take his view with a grain of salt, and look for other information about this topic.

Even H.G. Wells, a confirmed atheist, acknowledges that "the four gospels... were certainly in existence a few decades after [Christ's] death."'' The evidence concludes that the historical accounts in the Bible were written by men living in that historical period.

Okay, so first of all, this quote just regards the Gospels, not all the historical events in the Bible. Second of all, you're quoting noted science fiction author H.G. Wells instead of any actual Biblical scholar? The book this quote is from is H.G. Wells, The Outline of History (Garden City, NY: Garden City Publishing, 1921), 1921! I didn't pull this at the time, but earlier on, Noebel said this:

Most of the negative criticism of the Bible, as Norman L. Geisler says, "is pre-archaeological based on unproven philosophical presuppositions that have subsequently been antiquated by archaeology."

He says this and is only citing sources from the first half of the twentieth century. Once again, projection.

However, a second objection arises. Perhaps, say the critics, the Bible was an accurate historical document as it was originally written, but inevitable mistakes made by copyists over hundreds of years have rendered it inaccurate and unreliable. At first glance, this objection seems plausible. But one archaeological discovery made nearly half a century ago shattered this theory. Gleason L. Archer, Jr. explains: "Even though the two copies of Isaiah discovered in Qumran Cave I near the Dead Sea in 1947 were a thousand years earlier than the oldest dated manuscript previously known (A.D. 980), they proved to be word for word identical with our standard Hebrew Bible in more than 95 per cent of the text. The 5 per cent of variation consisted chiefly of obvious slips of the pen and variations in spelling."* That is, a manuscript one thousand years older than the oldest copy of the Bible previously known to exist proved the transmission over that time span to be virtually error-free.

That's fine for Isaiah, but you certainly can't extend that to the New Testament, which hasn't been passed down through the same kinds of Jewish traditional scribal practices aimed at keeping the text error-free. I don't know for sure if you could even extend it to many other books of the so-called Old Testament. Gleason Archer Jr. is again someone whose views accord perfectly with Noebel's and his book is from 1964. I keep linking to wikipedia because it's good for the kind of brief writeups I want, but here's its article on the scroll in question, and it goes into some of the differences and their historical implications. It's sourced so you can read the actual places the information is from if you want. I also recommend the article on the Masoretic Text (the so-called "Hebrew Bible", which I don't think we should call it that, it seems really mean to impose our terminology on other people).

By the way, Noebel doesn't talk as much about the Gospels as I was expecting he would, but there was a DVD extra about how the Gospel accounts match perfectly allowing for differences in eyewitness. This is so wildly untrue that there's an entire like subfield of Bible studies just about the differences between the Gospels and what they say about the textual history of the Bible. I did not learn about this until university, where Michael White came to talk to our honors society about his book Scripting Jesus. 

Nelson Gluck says, "It may be stated categorically that no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a biblical reference." Harvard's Simon Greenleaf (the greatest nineteenth-century authority on the law of evidence in the common law) believes "that the competence of the New Testament documents would be established in any court of law."

Nelson Gluck's text: 1959. Simon Greenleaf: died in 1853. Now I don't want to discount useful things purely on the basis of age, but archaeology and law are evolving fields and Noebel isn't taking that into account at all. A statement like "no archaeological discovery has ever controverted a Biblical reference" can't end at 1959 because uhhhh more discoveries are still happening. Anyway, here's one contradiction, which is a big enough deal that Ken Ham wrote a huffy article about how the Bible Wins This Debate. I won't link it bc fuck Ken Ham but if you google camels carbon dating answers in genesis it should get you there.

If the Bible is a reliable historical document, then we cannot intellectually deny that a man named Jesus actually lived and taught at that point in history.

"If the Bible is accurate, we can't deny that Jesus existed. If Jesus existed, we can't deny that the Bible is accurate." Circular. Another problem: establishing the accuracy of one part of the Bible doesn't establish the accuracy of another. Isaiah being copied totally flaw-free for thousands of years doesn't guarantee that the Gospels are historical accounts. 

So then he tries to establish the historicity of Jesus. He cites Josephus, whose evidence on Jesus is somewhat disputed and who in any case was writing about 60 years after Jesus died -- certainly potentially within the lifespan of people who could have spoken to Jesus, but not especially contemporary. He also cites Cornelius Tacticus, written in 112 C.E., almost 80 years after the death. So this isn't a lot of evidence or very contemporary evidence. 

I'm not saying Jesus didn't exist because it seems like one of those situations where it would probably make more sense for someone to have existed to build the myth on rather than people just totally making up a fictional leader after the fact. But just stating these two sources without any historical context or other arguments or anything isn't really good enough.

These references and others provide sufficient evidence for the historicity of Christ, even if we ignore the New Testament.

What others? If there are others, you should definitely talk about them, even just tossing off a name or something.

Also, like...if Jesus existed, it's a leap from "he was a real guy" to "everything in the whole Bible about him is true". 

More than 500 people witnessed the resurrected Christ (1 Corinthians 15:6), including Mary, Peter, and ten other apostles. These witnesses were so moved by the resurrection that they committed their lives to it and to the One whose divinity and righteousness it vindicated. The disciples did not abandon Christ, but were willing to die for the gospel they were proclaiming.

You can't use the Bible to prove the historicity or truth of the Bible.

If the disciples did not consider Christ's resurrection a historical event, would they have been willing to die in order to maintain a lie?

This was a major gotcha in my education, but there's a major grey area between "concrete historical event" and "a lie", you know? There's a lot of room in the world for "well, I'm personally convinced this happened, but I have no physical evidence of it". He backs himself up with apologetics writers like Josh McDowell and N.T. Wright, not any historians.

The faith of Christians today should be no less secure than that of the apostles—it is grounded in historical fact. 

You see, he says things like that to make you think he's actually proven something, when he has not done so.

Through the resurrection, God reveals His plan for humanity by conquering sin and guaranteeing a just end to human history. D.W. Bebbington says that, since Jesus won the battle against evil on the cross, "The outcome of world history is therefore already assured. God will continue to direct the course of events up to their end when the outcome will be made-plain."'

History isn't predictive or prescriptive. Like. What.

While the course of history may seem tragic to some people. Christians understand that all history is working together for good. Because God became man and died for our sins, the final chapter of history will conquer sin for the rest of eternity. Thus, Christians are prepared to face a difficult, sometimes pain-filled life, because we understand that the sin that causes death has been erased fi^om our future. Christians hold no unreasonable expectations for our earthly lifetime—in fact, we anticipate persecution and trials—but we do expect to be triumphant in the end because God has come into history to save us from our own sinful inclinations.

This is super important because it underlies everything about the fundamentalist worldview. Anything you find sad, upsetting, painful, or bad, is just Persecutions and Trials, which you should have expected and which you should move gratefully through. The now doesn't matter -- you're building up rewards in heaven. Just deal with pain. Don't work to mitigate it.

Then there's a Pop Culture Connection with additional footnotes that makes me very angry.

The Pop Culture Connection Amistad (a 1997 film directed by Steven Spielberg)—retells the true story of fifty-three Africans who mutinied on a slave ship in 1839, ending up on the shores of America to stand trial. Evangelical Christians had a major role in helping the slaves win their freedom, yet in the film these Christians are depicted as hypocritical and indifferent to the

lives of the Africans. Brian Godawa writes, "The historically dominant force of liberation [for slaves], the 'Quakers, are relegated to the role of kooky protesters in the background chanting irrelevant slogans and remaining blatantly unconnected to their modern world." But in spite of the revisionist history, Amistad contains one of the most thorough descriptions of the gospel from Genesis to John that has ever been shown in a movie." 

For additional material on black slavery, see Thomas Sowell, Black Rednecks and White

Liberals.

I don't think I'm going to be able to adequately address how much is wrong with this snippet, so I apologise in advance. I won't talk about the film itself; I would recommend looking it up and seeing criticism of it for yourself so you can understand it fully. What I'd like to address is the fact that Noebel again chooses to portray "evangelical Christians" as the unsung heroes of abolition. Quakers were, as I"ve said before, pretty hot on abolition, and some of them are evangelical now. But the people who were keeping the slave trade alive and well were also Christians, and if you could call any Christians "evangelical" at this stage, many of them were too. This is a debate within Christianity, not a debate between good wholesome abolitionist Christians and slave-owning sinful atheists. Christians were hypocritical and indifferent to the lives of the Africans they were importing to use as labor in their home. People used the Bible to justify slavery.

And then there's the footnote. For additional material on "black slavery" (not chattel slavery, and for some reason that hits me bad) he cites a book of essays, only one of which is actually about slavery. This essay argues that actually slavery was a universal human institution (apparently not taking into account the difference between the Atlantic slave trade and other historical forms of slavery, among other issues) and so we shouldn't blame white people for it! So rather than actually redirect his readers to any historical material about chattel slavery, he gives them a book that's NOT EVEN BY A HISTORIAN.

I guess I should be grateful he's citing a book written by a Black man for a change, although it feels very token-y, as Sowell is one of those people who says things like "it's Black culture that causes economic disparities, not racism". He also apparently does not think that Trump was racist.

Moving on. The next section is mostly about how Life Has A Purpose and History Has An Ultimate End Result. It's pretty much all apologetics and has nothing to do with actual history.

Christians believe that human history had a specific beginning (creation) and is being directed by God toward a specific end (restoration), and that historic events follow a nonrepetitive course toward that end.

I think what we're actually dealing with here is philosophy of history.

Most of Western society has a linear view of history, a view founded on the Judeo-Christian perspective.

Is the Jewish view of history linear? Don't assume it is just because Christians' is.

There's some stuff about the linearity of Christian history giving history meaning, which I find somewhat ethnocentric. You're assuming that because you find no meaning in, say, the Classical cyclical view of history (which is what he contrasts it with). But how do you know how proponents felt about it?

Onto Islam. We start off with a description of the beginning of Islam, Mecca and the the Hiraja and so forth. For some reason, he then starts talking about denominational splits in Islam. That's fine but...why here, dude? You don't talk about Christian denominational splits at all let alone in the history section. He DOES say "Islam is a religion and worldview as diverse as Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, or Hinduism" acknowleging that denominational splits are normal, but I find this very funny because he has not talked even a little about Judaism, Buddhism or Hinduism as actual religions. Beyond that, this section is mostly okay, for Noebel.

Then he talks about how Islam Is A Worldview, which seems redundant. You've already quoted the stuff you're quoting here, dude.

In concert with historical determinism is the Muslim hope that Islam one day will span the globe with all peoples and nations being Muslim. 

Naturally Noebel uses this as proof that Islam is violent, ignoring that he very much hopes the same thing for Christianity. Then he redefines jihad AGAIN!! I assume just to reinforce his view of Islam as inherently violent.

While there are many opinions within global Islam regarding the definition of jihad, it would be naive and deadly to deny the record of history. On the one hand, many Muslims express a moderate view in which the aggressive nature of Islamic teaching and practice has been curbed by such realities as the western value of civic tolerance and pluralism.

Once again Noebel portrays Muslims as brutes who are only "civilized" by exposure to Western values.

While it may be that only a fraction of Muslims are expressive militants, a much larger number manifest emotional, vocal, and monetary support of jihad. The negative reaction expressed by some Muslims when witnessing the collapse of the World Trade Center towers is unable to erase doctrinally engrained and historically buttressed Islamic hope that arises from the fall of the infidel.

Oh fuck you, fuck you, fuck you. This is an incredibly low blow.

The next page is bad, it's really bad. It narrates the events of September 11 in the most American militant terms possible, and then it talks about the film Munich in the most Islamophobic terms possible.

Tibi, a Muslim, distinguishes between what he describes as the religion of Islam, as a personal and corporate practice, and what he called "Islamic fundamentalism," which he believes opposes worldwide security and stability.

I feel this way about Christian fundamentalism also. It's interesting how he quotation-marks "Islamic fundamentalism", like he's skeptical of that particular term. I think this is part of the general resistance to identifying fundamentalism that Christian fundamentalists have, but there may also be some "how dare you say that violence is fringe in Islam" or something.

I thought the 9/11 things were over, but they're not. It's about three pages just talking about this event, and I'm not going to recap it. It's so fucking unfair and feels so gross. "Oh, let's use the people who died in this attack for emotion points to convince you to hate every Muslim. Oh, let's use an event that result in widespread hatecrimes against Muslims to convince you to do more hatecrimes". Christ. It's really viscerally disgusting to me. I remember what the country was like after 9/11 and it was a very violent and dangerous mood and I can't stand to see that painted as "look, we were innocent martyrs". I'm sorry, I'm getting very emotional here, but it's just so upsetting.

His conclusion is basically a blatant call to arms:

Islamic countries are among the most vociferous persecutors of Christians, presenting probably the greatest missionary challenge to the Church and exhibiting the most prominent external threat to the biblical values of freedom, justice, and order. The Christian response must be one that embodies the grace of the gospel of Christ coupled with an eternal and vigilant defense of the truth.

What can I even say?

On to Secular Humanism, which Noebel describes like this:

Assuming an atheistic stance, Secular Humanists must view history as a bumbling, uncertain, often immoral enterprise, with little hope for improvement in the future [...] Humanism claims to take a realistic view of history, but this is belied by statement after statement reflecting an insistence that our future will outshine our past.

Hm. I think what he's trying to say is that if you're an atheist you HAVE to think that humanity has no hope, but Secular Humanists do have hope so they're stupid. That seems like it would require a lot of unfounded assumptions.

If, as Humanists believe, all reality is an evolutionary pattern that moves upward step by step to create rational thought and morality in the highest species, then our history also must be a progressive march toward a better world.

Not how evolution works, and honestly a fundamentally culturally Christian viewpoint. It's basically the same linear view of history that Noebel was trumpeting earlier but he disapproves of it now because it's not from Christians.

Secular Humanism sees the whole process of history as the evolution of people, cultures, and civilizations into more advanced people, cultures, and civilizations.

That's deeply imperialist, and if Secular Humanists care at all about either biology or the social sciences, it's a bad look. However, we have to remember that Noebel's apparent frame of reference is, like the 60s, so I don't know if any Humanist still thinks this or not.

The second reason Humanists adhere to an optimistic view of history is because they deny the existence of God.

You literally just said that atheism = pessimism about human history???

Then there's a bit where he's like "and they don't BELIEVE in the BIBLE". Like, yes? Obviously? Then there's a bit about how humanists believe that humans respond to social conditions but also have free will and also ideologies, not people, are what shapes history. And then more stuff about how humans Shape Their Own Destiny and Will Be Their Own Savior.

When Secular Humanists speak of human beings controlling their own evolution, they are not speaking of common humans, but of elite humans, called "the Conditioners""" by C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man.

What does C.S. Lewis have to do with this...he's not a humanist...He also doesn't cite the claim that secular humanists are talking specifically about "elite" humans.

In the Secular Humanist worldview, history is not only about the past; it also concerns a future heaven on earth.

I wish you would cite these things, dude. Because none of the quotes you gave about people talking about how we have to shape our own destiny and how we have to create a better society referenced history. They were like. Philosophy and ethics.

Marxism now.

Marxists-Leninists believe their historical perspective is based strictly on a scientific view of the world, incorporating the science of evolution and the dialectic path of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. Marxist evolution shapes its view of history based on the belief that humanity, as well as other living things, is constantly improving and will continue to do so.

The Marxist view of history is termed historical materialism, meaning that only matter exists, so history is merely the account of matter in motion. In this view, neither God nor angels nor human souls act as the basis for the working of history; rather, matter obeying specific laws is the source of progress in the world.

So how is this different from Secular Humanism?

He then goes on to discuss economic determinism. It's stated too forcefully and not with enough nuance, but it's as good as you can expect from him, I guess. He thinks there's a "contradiction" between "economics is the only thing that shapes history" and "humans have free will". Now, I am not a big fan of the tendency to reduce all power dynamics to economics, BUT there's no contradiction between free will and the idea that social factors shape us (this is something he implies in Secular Humanism as well). And I really don't understand how there could be a contradiction. "We are part of a system and we react within the system, but we still have the ability to make choices" is not contradictory.

But if we may not choose our society, its superstructure, or its mode of production, and if these things in turn determine our mode of thought, then what can we choose? It would seem that our only option is to follow the flow of history as determined by the economic structure.

This is wild. Firstly, that's not how it works. The idea is that the economic system shapes everything else about the society, not that it like, irrevocably determines every nuance of the path of action of each person. Secondly, "we can't choose our society and our society influences our mode of thought" isn't exclusive to Marxism. 

This conclusion seems even more inescapable in light of the Marxist belief that history is governed by certain scientifically discoverable laws.

I don't think that's something most Marxists believe anymore. There was a period in the mid 20th century where social scientists and humanities folks were trying really hard to come up with concrete definable laws for social phenomena, but that's just not the trend anymore. Since Noebel seems to have stopped learning anything around 1965, I'm not surprised he thinks it's still a Thing, though.

The belief in such laws has a sinister implication—it allows Marxists to abandon both morality and reason because they can justify whatever they do as being predetermined by the "hidden laws" that govern historical events.

Um. He quotes Stalin for this. I don't think you can use just Stalin as a source for the most universal, general Marxist theories. In fact, most of this section is just him quoting Marx, Lenin, and Stalin, again with no sense that there have been other Marxist theorists that could matter to the modern "practice" of Marxism.

The rest of the section is just him talking about the dialectic and the inevitability of communism. I expected some kind of Issues With Communism here, but again this was probably from the teacher, not the textbook. (We also had supplementary DVDs that we had to watch and take notes from, and that may have been there too.) 

Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky are also described as "radical Marxist personalities" in the pop culture connection. Just for the record, they're both Jewish. Once again, Noebel describes his own views as "Judeo-Christian" and yet actual Jewish theorists are characterized as the enemy of Christianity.

Onto Cosmic Humanism.

In the Cosmic Humanist worldview, history is progressive because of the force of evolution. Even the Second Law of Thermodynamics does not discourage their optimistic view of history. 

WHAT.

The New Age movement is quick to ascribe a number of faults to Christianity. Its most serious failing, of course, is its dogma—the Christian insistence that Christ is the only Savior (John 14:6). Various Cosmic Humanists also attack Christianity on the grounds that it is nationalistic, racist, or promotes feelings of guilt.

Oh, it ain't just cosmic humanists, David. Also it's possible to be Christian without being any of those things, but not really possible to be fundamentalist Christian, so I suspect this is another case of Noebel representing criticisms of fundamentalism as criticisms of Christianity as a whole.

I'm sorry to descend to this level, but this sentence appears in the pop culture connection:

in the hear-and-now or the future.

I checked in the JPG copy and yes. It says hear-and-now. Now, I don't like to pick at this sort of thing normally because it's natural to make mistakes and I don't believe in mocking people's language, but I think it's worth noting because it speaks to the very cursory editing I think the book must have recieved.

There's more Evolution Does Not Work That Way, but it's repetitive of Secular Humanism, so I won't go into it. In fact, this whole section is basically just What Secular Humanists Believe Only There's Spirits And Stuff. As usual, the section is short, and there's not much to go over.

Finally, we come to postmodernism, and at last we're back to a discipline where postmodern critical theories actually have relevance.

He says basically that Postmodernists are fundamentally nihilists in that they see no ultimate point in history and that they think we can't ever truly know what's happened in the past. He also says that this is "radically different" from the other worldviews, but I don't think it's an unusual view in academia and it's not limited to people who specifically do postmodernism. 

I have to tell you...the pop culture connection is A Knight's Tale, which the author fumes makes no attempt at historical accuracy so it's "postmodern". Noebel keeps acting like every piece of media that's ever been made is equal levels of serious and is equal levels of trying to send a specific message and the results are quite jarring.

In 1948 Michel Foucault attempted to commit suicide. He was at the time a student at the elite Parisian university, the Ecole Normale. The resident doctor there had little doubt about the source of the young man's distress. Foucault appeared to be racked with guilt over his frequent nocturnal visits to the illegal gay bars of the French capital. His father, a strict disciplinarian who had previously sent his son to the most regimented Catholic school he could find, arranged for Michel to be admitted to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation. Yet Foucault remained obsessed with death, joked about hanging himself and made further attempts to end his own life. This youthful experience of himself as homosexual, suicidal and mentally disturbed proved decisive for Foucault's intellectual development.

Noebel provides this quote to show that Foucault was sick and shouldn't be trusted, which I find pretty offensive as a depessed queer.

There's a lot of stuff about "truth and knowledge are constructions" that Noebel says "provide a challenge to the norm". When they were new, yes. They're mainstream ideas in academia. In fact, I'm finding this section quite hard going, because he keeps saying things like that and I'm like....yeah.....? Obviously? 

He also claims that postmodernists historians think that history should be used to promote an agenda, but the actual position is "no one is free from bias, so you have to be mindful of what agenda you're promoting". As usual, he doesn't understand how this actually works because he can't step out of his mindset to imagine a more relativistic one. Then he fumes for a while about "revisionist history" giving every oppressed group a chance to have their story told, which he seems to feel is a bad thing? And then he talks some more, AGAIN, about the links between Marxism and postmodernism.

A distinct residue of Marxist critique remains in their work, providing them with the dichotomizing perspective so blatant in the Marxist vision of class struggle.

You're one to talk about dichotomizing perspectives, Mr "Either everything in the Bible is literally true or Christianity is built on a complete tissue of lies".

And then basically some complaining about identity politics by other names, which is so mainstream Republican I'm not going to bother to address it.

Because ideas have consequences, we cannot afford to overlook the consequences of the more radical Postmodern approaches to history. If history is mere fiction, or even largely so, then those who deny, for example, the Nazi holocaust are validated in their attempts to diminish the numbers of Jews imprisoned, tortured, starved, shot, cremated, or buried in mass graves.

This feels very hypocritical from the man who was willing to use the Holocaust as a gotcha against Woody Allen. It makes me feel like Noebel does not in fact care about the Jewish lives that were lost during the Holocaust and is mainly interested in using it to make his own personal point.

Indeed, if history is (largely) fiction, then Mother Teresa and Adolph Hitler cannot be used as examples of good and evil. 

Funny thing about Mother Teresa, actually...

That's the note we end on. This is the last content chapter, but we have the conclusion still to go, so I won't do wrap-up type notes here. I'll just say that this was pretty much completely incoherent in terms of actually making any kind of point. Let's leave it there.