This is a quote that’s quoted in the book Against Apologetics: Christian Witness in a Postmodern Context. It struck me as noteworthy and definitely meaty:
If you follow Jesus and don’t end up dead, it appears you have so explaining to do.”
-Terry Eagleton
Should that be so “much”?
Explaining to God or Eagleton?
“[I]s it that hard to explain what Eagleton’s up to? The prolificness, the self-plagiarism, the snappy, highly consumable prose and, of course, the sales figures: Eagleton wishes for capitalism’s demise, but as long as it’s here, he plans to do as well as he can out of it. Someone who owns three homes shouldn’t be preaching self-sacrifice, and someone whose careerism at Oxbridge was legendary shouldn’t be telling interviewers of his longstanding regret at having turned down a job at the Open University.”
I do wonder the context the quote came from. I imagine Eagleton, a Marxist, is no friend to Christianity, but I don’t think this is a recommendation, either. He might be referring to living what we preach.
If nothing else, I thought the quote was thought-provoking.
What? Are there Christians don’t expect to? There’s always the occasional few that ignore Jesus’ words about the day and hour and pretend to know, but then they’re not following Jesus, are they. (Of course we’re not talking about anyone’s ultimate destiny.)
…it is all too easy for humans to fall into the cognitive trap of assuming that an entity that can use language fluently is sentient, conscious, or intelligent.
…they are trained on essentially the entire internet.
Maybe some remarks over on the humor thread would be appropriate. 
The human brain is hardwired to infer intentions behind words. Every time you engage in conversation, your mind automatically constructs a mental model of your conversation partner. You then use the words they say to fill in the model with that person’s goals, feelings and beliefs.
Yes.
Hehehe… imagine what they could learn on a religion board.
And yeah, I’ve never been without a small surprise in meeting someone face to face who I first built a casual friendship while doing company business. Every time the image I have, which can be formed over long periods of time and through some intense problem solving, does not even come close to what they look like.
I imagine something similar happens to how we form images of a person’s character, and these are people who we could see every Sunday for 20 years.
I remember a sense of disbelief and concern watching one of these AI videos from last year. In it there was an AI talking to a young person, and the AI made a surprisingly insightful compliment to the young person about how mature they were. The person seemed to blush and I thought that is a real foreshadowing of what’s coming.
Another quote referenced in Against Apologetics: Christian Witness in a Postmodern Context, by Myron Penner. Penner uses Lewis’ poem to express the way our limited understanding of God would make even our prayers idolatrous, if God did not exercise the mercy to translate our limping metaphors for us. This reflects my limitations and failings very well.
Footnote to All Prayers
C.S. LewisHe whom I bow to only knows to whom I bow
When I attempt the ineffable Name, murmuring Thou,
And dream of Pheidian fancies and embrace in heart
Symbols (I know) which cannot be the thing Thou art.
Thus always, taken at their word, all prayers blaspheme
Worshipping with frail images a folk-lore dream,
And all men in their praying, self-deceived, address
The coinage of their own unquiet thoughts, unless
Thou in magnetic mercy to Thyself divert
Our arrows, aimed unskilfully, beyond desert;
And all men are idolators, crying unheard
To a deaf idol, if Thou take them at their word.Take not, oh Lord, our literal sense. Lord, in Thy great,
Unbroken speech our limping metaphor translate.
“Footnote to all Prayers” from Poems by C. S. Lewis, 1964, 1992. Bookshare edition.
Hi Kendel, I poked around the reviews on Amazon to get a sense of the book and I find it intriguing. Before I get to what I like, I must bring to your attention what one reviewer noted,
"As I finished chapter 5 something happened. While I had been sympathetic with Penner’s concerns (and still am) it dawned on me. “What would this book be like if Penner had done for Craig what he says we should do with others? Has Penner “understood” Craig and sought to “be at his disposal” or has he just done an “objectifying”, “violent”, and “modernist” take down of Craig?”
As for what I like, anything that questions classical apologetics feels to me like an open door to bring up the problem with the deductive ‘god’ arguments, aka classical apologetics, and Craig is a prime example of a classical apologist. Personally, I was closer to Sproul than the Geisler/Craig camp.
The postmodern twist is that the arguments work, they just don’t prove God apart from oneself. They disprove atheism, and they don’t prove theism. This is the inevitable synthesis.
As for Christian philosophers, James Smith is one of my favorite ones alive today. I think you will like him on the subject of postmodernism.
This essay of his is personal and passionate:
“I think we will convert people from below, from the imagination up. Philosophy doesn’t “speak” imagination. The logician speaks a tongue that’s foreign to the heart. Poetry and literature and painting are a glossolalia that the imagination hears in its own language. And in our imagining, we may learn how to be human again, learn how to be empathetic and live with one another, just to the extent that we see one another again, in all our fractured complexity and mixed motives and dogged hopes.”
Hi Mike,
Thanks for looking out for me.
If you would like to read and dicsuss the book (available open to read online at Internet Archive) in the Forum, I would be glad to. I am about half way through. It’s an intense read the requires more time and focus than I often have. So, I’m not going fast, and I plan also to review the book again, once I have finished.
This is not the kind of book one can grasp easily by a blurb or a review. I do not recommend attempting to form a judgement about it based on blurbs or reviews. Penner develops his theory and arguments carefully and well. This level of care requires more attention.
I think I had read the review you mentioned, or 2 or 3 like it. Clearly traditional apologists, and those who are advocates, were offended by the book. They also misread the book and are attempting to misapply Penner’s thesis. He has no interest in throwing out logic, reason and objectivity, but rather indicates that those tools (and the trappings that go with them) are inappropriated for the goal of demonstrating the existence of God or the believability of the Christian faith. Apologetic methods and theories are not equivalent to faith and are, therefore, subject to objective, rational, logical, distanced analysis.
Also, Penner is far more critical of modern apologetis, pointing to them deconstructing faith itself. This is a carefully constructed argument that I think he makes well, but I will need to spend more time with it to make sure I understand all of his steps well enough to decide if he makes his case or not.
I am not concerned about engaging with Postmodernism. I have done years ago in a completely secular, yet rich and wonderful, university setting. At that point I had to deal with any spiritual issues that arose to me regarding Postmodernism on my own. My professors were unprepared to talk about the theory we read in conjunction with spiritual matters. My pastors and friends were utterly unprepared to talk about the theoretical matters in conjunction with faith. I was on my own. It was bruising. But I’m not afraid of this stuff.
Years ago, after I had finished the program that included theory, I read Doug Groothuis’s Truth Decay hoping for some insight. It was the bandaid I thought I needed at the time. But with distance, I recognized that Groothuis knew a lot but was also not accurately represented the concerns of Postmodernism. So that bandaid was off.
I recently saw Penner’s book at a bookstore and read around in it. He seemed to be addressing, perhaps indirectly, many of my Postmodern concerns and questions that have had to lie dormant for decades. And he does. His grasp of and commitment to faithfully work with postmodernism is exceptional and refreshing among any Christians I have read or heard on the matter. He also deals with apologetics, a broad category I have learned to treat with suspicion, because of the tactics and pride that often are part of the process. I felt the book was one I needed to read for my own puposes.
Regarding Smith, I may someday get around to reading somethng by him. I think I’ve seen a number of titles by him that looked possibly interesting, although I can’t recall what they were or were about. Right now, my nightstand is near to collaps as well as the “Stick it here to get it off the kitchen table “ bookshelf in the living room. So, I’m not committing to any specific reading right now.
That being said, regarding the quote you pulled out of Smith’s article: this sounds potentially consistent with part of Penner’s ultimate thesis. Penner as well as postmodernism are intensely person-oriented, specifically regarding the person’s subjecthood within the context of relationship, and it seems that Smith may be indicating that as well.
Kendel
Very nice to read your reply. I would like to read the book and thank you for the invitation to do so with you. I’m an inconsistent reader, but once and awhile a book really grabs my attention and I stick with it.
I was thinking about the history of apologetics in the church from Justin Martyr to Augustine to Aquinas and had a question. Do you think Penner’s book could also be named Against Polemics?
“Against polemics?”
I don’t think that’s part of his landscape, at least as far as this book is concerned. I am in the middle of his descussion of what he calls “prophetic speech” in conjunction with irony. Polemic speech has not specifically been discussed, but we certainly see prophets saying and embodying polemical messages. So, at this point in the book, I am not equipped to say one way or another.
Thanks for the article from Smith. I enjoyed that a lot. I would be interested in hearing Smith and Penner in conversation. They are saying different things, but I believe they are not incompatible.
Yes, that sounds like a great conversation! We don’t get to see that often enough.
And when or if you come around to reading Smith, I think his latest book is the best place to begin as it culminates his previous work and as with many writers expresses the most mature thinking on their life’s work.
One reviewer captures it well:
To Smith, we are liturgical animals “whose orientation to the world is shaped by rituals of ultimacy: our fundamental commitments are inscribed in us by ritual forces and elicit from us orienting commitments that have the epistemic status of belief”
I started the book, and not wanting to get too far ahead, it would be nice to read in a group.
So I started Penner’s book and so far I really like his tone and obvious learning.
The comparison between being down the rabbit hole or on the bridge of an intergalactic starship is perceptive. However, I would take it one step further, as the difficulty of interpreting our world is compounded by there being bits that are true of both worlds in this one.
What reason can and cannot determine about the world.
As far the enlightenment, whenever that word is mentioned, I enjoy remembering the sound of Ken Myers’ voice reading John Betz:
“The Enlightenment proposed a doctrine of reason that required no faith, a vision of society that required no tradition, and a politics that required no God, the source of all light and being.”
Definitely would love to hear smith and penner converse. I think they would have much to discuss in an expansive and edifying discussion.
Sounds like an important book.
So interesting to see Penner take Kierkegaard as the third way or synthesis between Nietzsche and Aristotle. I wonder what anyone of them, Penner included, would think about how reason tells there is an infinite being but not an infinite number of things. And I think Kierkegaard would especially like how the rational possibility of solipsism evidences our fallen nature. And also how the triune God would not have suffered being alone, until he became that in the person of Jesus Christ. Admittedly, there is a sharp divide (of opinion) in how the dual natures participate through his suffering.
For I am convinced that neither death nor life, neither angels nor demons, neither the present nor the future, nor any powers, neither height nor depth, nor anything else in all creation, will be able to separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus our Lord.
I have no idea. I’m not sure that the book addresses these questions. They certainly are not questions I am in any way prepared to discuss.
If you are interested in working through the book and discussing it, I will set up a separate public thread, so we don’t clog up this thread with discussion, rather than quotes. I propose we set a schedule to keep the discussion on track. A chapter a week would give us time to be thorough in reading and consideration of what we find worth discussing. It would also give anyone who needs/wants it a chance to find definitions and background explanations.
Reading one book that references Kierkegaard and Rorty, plus Aristotle, Derrida, Lyotard, and many others, along with concepts like premodernism, modernism, postmodernism, irony, edification, genius, and witness hardly makes ME conversant in this vocabulary. Others who may be also interested, may need time for reference reading as well.
I would post the link to the Internet Archive online book, in case anyone needs a copy right away or would rather try before they buy. I have found a few good resources that deal with concepts relevant to the book as well. I 'd post those links for anyone who needs/wants them
What do you think of such a plan?
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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