The "New Atheism" as "Good News"
While the new atheism has generated worry among Christians, perhaps it isn't warranted. One gets a sense of growing worry among atheists as well, and for good reason.
The last few years have seen the rise of the so-called “New Atheism”. a loose coalition of vociferous atheists who have denounced Christianity and religion generally in a number of high profile, bestselling books including Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion
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While the new atheism offers little new by way of argument, it conveys the erroneous impression that orthodox Christianity is on the ropes intellectually speaking. On the contrary, Christianity has experienced renewed vitality through recent work in New Testament scholarship and philosophy of religion.
With regard to New Testament studies, just a few short decades ago it was widely assumed that the historical Jesus was all but inaccessible to critical scholarship. However, today works like N.T. Wright’s monumental The Resurrection of the Son of God (Augsburg Fortress, 2003) defend an orthodox picture of Jesus Christ on solid historical and evidential grounds. (Indeed, such is the evidence that even Pinchas Lapide, a Jewish scholar, has concluded on wholly historical grounds that Jesus was resurrected!)
..., the new atheists, to their credit, acknowledge that Christianity makes factual claims about the world, and thus that it is disingenuous to consign it to the realm of private feelings. Not only have they returned the question of factuality to discussion of Christian faith, but they have thereby placed discussion about God at the center of national consciousness and serious public debate. As such, they have unwittingly provided a golden opportunity for Christians to enter the public discussion and set the record straight. And that, it seems to me, is good news indeed.http://www.christianity.ca/NetCommunity/Page.aspx?pid=5307
1 comment:
Wright's work is so monumental that he cannot find time to quote the author of 1 Peter writing 'All flesh is grass'.
I thought Christians were transformed by the news that the flesh of Jesus had not seen corruption.
And Wright never explains how people converted to Jesus-worship and still scoffed at the idea that God would choose to raise a corpse.
Wright emailed me to say it was 'very unlikely' that these people had heard stories of Moses returning from the grave to speak to Jesus.
This was Moses returning!
If that sort of story was not common knowledge among converts to Jesus-worship, then where is this 'oral tradition' that was supposed to exist before Mark wrote his Gospel?
Why didn't the Christians in Corinth know all these stories about their Lord and Saviour that they worshipped 'proving' the resurrection?
Why couldn't Paul find one single detail of eye-witness testimony to tell these people what a resurrected body was supposed to be like?
Instead he works entirely from general principles.
In fact, Paul simply trashes the idea that resurrected beings will be made from the dust that corpses dissolve into.
Paul goes so far as to plead in Romans 7:24 to be rescued from his body of death.
Paul knew what happened to corpses, and did not want to be in that body of death when it decomposed.
And guess what? Wright doesn't quote that either in his 'monumental' work...
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