Thank you for creating a means to discuss these ideas. Getting into this apologetics book has been intellectually enlivening for me.
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So the Psalmist was lamenting the fact that no one believed in any gods?
The psalmist was David. What do you think?
Another argument against that premise is from the New Testament.
And without faith it is impossible to please God, because anyone who approaches Him us must believe that He exists and that He rewards those who earnestly seek Him.
Hebrews 11:6
So at least it certainly was not unheard of, and the fact that that it is there tends to make one think it was more than that.
I know who the Psalmist was.
No doubt in my mind that he was lamenting the lack of belief in Yahweh.
So, is atheism “the lack of belief in Yahweh” or is “the lack of belief in any god” atheism?
Are there two kinds of atheism? Atheism A and Atheism B? or are there more? Such as:
- Atheism A, “the lack of belief in any god”;
- Atheism B, "the lack of belief in an Abrahamic god’ and
- Atheism C, “the lack of belief in Yahweh”.
If I’m not wrong, Calvinist Presuppositionalists say: “Anyone who does not believe in Paul’s God is an atheist”, no?
So what’s my point?
My point is,
- I start with this:
- “Paul defended the Gospel on different terms than modern apologists do. And while he used logic, the basic understanding of the world was different. Perhaps the most important difference is that there was a nearly universal foundational understanding that God or god/s existed and were active in some way in the universe. Paul never had to start his defense with establishing the very possibility of the existence of God.”
- Then you say, in effect: “No, that’s not right, his “defense” starts with Athenian atheism.”
So, were the Athenians atheists or not? It seems to me that the answer depends on how one defines an atheist. Would Paul have said: Athenians don’t believe in any god, or would he have said that the Athenians don’t see that "the Unknown God that they (or their ancestors) were willing to acknowledge is "God the Father who sent Jesus Christ?
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Nice to see some cool headed thought about what atheism entails. Nice to see some get past the idea that an atheist is one who believes no gods exist or, worse, one who hates God. Definitionally I prefer to think of it as not believing that gods are a class of being capable of causing great effects in the cosmos but only detectable by divine intention. In other words it doesn’t make sense to sort people by what they do or don’t believe without clarifying what exactly the belief entails. If we define the domain of effects of gods as being primarily intra psychic with secondary effects evidenced in the thoughts, words and deeds of those who believe, then there would be fewer atheists. But by trying to express the definition in purely rational terms wouldn’t we be gagging the enthused from making the absurd but ironic claims which issue from God - where ever He may be? The overly ardent admirers of rationality seem to want a playing field which rules out the sort of Christian practice which Penner describes.
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Interesting thoughts. It came up yesterday that despite our glamorization of how Paul took it to the Athenians, he actually left with his tail between his legs, with little accomplished. His venture into apologetics and arguing God as an intellectual proposition had little success, and he moved on to making tents at Corinth. While I have not studied it, the pastor I was discussing it with said there was a different direction to his ministry after that, with a greater emphasis on the living the Christian life. So, perhaps Paul would support Penner as result of his experience.
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That’s an interesting reminder of Paul’s humanity. We’re usually so busy venerating him to infallible status as an author of so much of our New Testament that we tend to forget he would have had his small and big “oopsy” moments too. And we read of his actions through that “infallibility” lens so that even the Mars Hills account must have been just yet another victorious occasion for Paul because, through our lenses, what else could possibly happen? No doubt the spirit does make use of whatever we try, even if converts are few or not to be seen at the time.
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From around p. 91-92.
I find Penner’s distinction between subjectivity and objectivity to be striking. We are accustomed - not just here on a scientific site, but in our western culture at large - to seeing ‘objectivity’ as a superior quality and ‘subjectivity’ as an inferior one. Because the former to us indicates a reliable grasp of reality while the latter has become synonymous with “whimsical, opinionated, non-reliable.” And our history of experience with the sciences bears this out. How often have we heard and repeated on this site that “common sense is not reliable” or that we need scientific methods to keep us from “fooling ourselves.” Our own isolated perspectives have proven over and over again to be less than dependable. With all that weight on the pro-objectivity side of our balance, no wonder there is a rush to adjudicate, live, and to witness primarily in that ‘objective’ context.
So it is a refreshing, if startling challenge to see Penner turn that on its head, and show what all else we’ve also imbibed with our objectivity-focus as we bring it to bear on our world of witness to and edification of each other. When we try to remove the subject (which is what Penner insists that objectification attempts to do), we lose something important. As I’m re-reading ch. 3, I hope to get clearer detail on what that something is, since I only have a vague notion right now that he’s right, but that I’m still having trouble articulating what that is. My sense, though, is that it is like me looking at a certain door labeled “Unreliable”, and science warning me “you don’t want to use that door - use mine instead”, and Penner is saying “Yes - reclaim that door and use it freely! There is much of genuine life to be had and shared there.” And yet I’m fairly certain that Penner is not an anti-scientific person, not one who denies objective reality, and the efficacy of science toward helping us understand its physical dimensions better. But in our world of relationship and witness, he seems to turn that modernist wisdom on its head.
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I took genuine delight in this distinction as well. In everyday speech we don’t think of the terms “objective” and “subjective” connected to the concepts of “object” and “subject”, as we see in grammar, for example.
In fact we often confuse subject and object conceptually, when we say things like “The subject of this thread is apologetics,” meaning, “The thing we are talking about is apologetics.” It feels like the word “subject”, the thing we are talking about, is acutally the “object” of our action.
Penner’s description here, though, (and also way back in OUNCE) is exactly what I was teaching 14-year-old high school German-language novices: The subject of the sentence is the one doing something. The object of the sentence has something done to it. Penner’s distinction is crystal clear, when we look at the concepts through the lens of first semester high school German. Then we are open to understanding terms like “subjecthood” (which MarkD gave me a while back), “subjective,” ”object,” “objectify,” and so on.
These concepts are hugely important in postmodern theories. The human, the person, the self are seen to be of paramount value. This is both a source of deep, deep criticism of postmodernism, as well as one of its greatest boons. The recognition of the value of the individual human as a person seems to me to be perfectly in line with the Gospel. Jesus spoke to and touched and healed and rebuked and restored individual persons. He had relationships with inividuals. If you accept the Gospel of John as valid, he told his discipes he wanted them (individuals sitting with him) to be with him. Jesus did not treat people as bugs under a microscope or tools or any other kind of object.
This distinction between subject and object is probably the thing I have most been aware of and hated about apologetics as I’ve seen them in action. This distinction is at the heart of some of my greatest criticisms of the expression of christianity as I see it lived out where I live as well. The concept of “the world” as something for “the church” to act upon is off kilter. The world we see as so problematic is comprised of all sorts of individual humans valued by God, but we in the church so often see “them” as a massive something we need to fix or condemn or or or….
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Plea for help understanding this bit:
(Page 95, top) This is connected to the life of faith as a kind of “second immediacy” or another naivete, for in the negative space of irony we create room (again) for the possibility of faith.
This is one of several passages that Penner is relying heavily on to support an important point, but that I am just not getting it (after many goes over). Like at the top of the next paragraph:
Irony is the only way to express the kind of truth prophets wish to communicate—the kind of understanding that produces self-understanding and expresses actual Christianity.
In spite of my desire to believe Penner, its hard to believe or trust what I can’t understand. I’d value the group members’ thoughts on these. Thanks.
Also, here is the full poem from Lewis (referenced on pg 94).
Footnote to All Prayers
He 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
I was unaware of Lewis’ poetry. This one is worth reading and thinking over. It does well, reminding me of the ease with which we confuse our object of belief with our expression of belief. Penner’s choice to include it is fitting as it bridges well the challenge for Christians to understand in a practical way what theology and doctries actually are and are not, and the critical theory of semiotics, with which Lewis seemed to be familiar:
“ Semiotics (also called semiotic studies ) is the systematic study of sign processes and meaning making. Semiosis is any activity, conduct, or process that involve signs, where a sign is defined as anything that communicates something, usually called a meaning, to the sign’s interpreter.
Lewis expresses briefly here the most basic concept of semiotics and makes valuable application of it in the life of a Christian— another Christian brother, who is taking to heart some of the valuable, practical challenges that critical theory offers Chrisitans, who are willing to consider it. This poem is an unusually beautiful poetic and clear statements of one small aspect of critical theory. It’s no surprise Penner used it.
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Just before your p95 quote I’d noted this passage toward the bottom of p94 as significant and I think they serve the same point.
Christianly speaking, irony is a lived awareness that the “rules” of Christian speech or discourse (e.g., doctrine, creeds, councils) and the particular vision of the Christian faith of one’s community are less than ultimate—that they are not God’s but are instead our fashioning of what he has revealed to us. All our theologies and verbal confessions of Jesus Christ as Lord fail to encapsulate the essence of Jesus or express fully the life of faith. The irony of Christian talk about God is nicely captured by C. S. Lewis in his poem “Footnote to All Prayers,” in which he insists our words always fail to express adequately who God is.
I took him to be saying that the inadequacy of language to render who or what God is explicitly nonetheless is to serve the purpose of sustaining a naive state in which you do not allow your understanding to foreclose down to what literal sense you can make of the words. Faith is possible where you accept what you cannot know but sustain trust that what knows better has you in it. It is standing down rationality from pursuing what cannot be caught and understanding that it is neither your responsibility nor anything which rationality is suited to illuminate. It is to accept a supportive but dependent role to an inborn capacity which requires no conscious deliberations to ground it in rationality but only trustful reliance.
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Thank you, Mark. Yours is a description to study and savor. Penner’s use of “irony” has been something I have not been able to hang on to, as it seems to have so many referents. It’s like a slippery fish for me. In one sentence, I feel, “Finally, I get it!” and then drop it by the time it appears to lines down on the page.
Lewis’s poem and thinking of it semiotically has helped a bit, but then I read a bit farther, and dropped the fish again. Gaps, wounds (references all the way back to the intro I think) don’t help. And then negative space, immediacy and naivety. More murk.
I’ll take your description and think on it some more. Thanks a lot!
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And then there is artful double-talk. Our faith has objective content to hang on to, and supportive reality to reinforce it. (Don’t take that as detracting from the truth in Lewis’ poem, or even Penner necessarily.)
Sometimes that happens to me, too.
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I had similar feelings over the heavy use of the term ‘irony’. I felt like I was hovering a bit in and then out just along the edges of understanding it - just enough to sort of “feel” that I’m there (sometimes), but not well enough that I could articulate it well and get it really pinned down. But actually - I think that may be something of the point! [and maybe part of what Penner wishes us to understand about it!]
Think about it like our concept of “humor”. We all recognize humor (most of the time - if it’s at ‘our level’) when we hear it, but if we try to define it exactly, we find it’s a slippery fish to catch - or trying to nail jello to the wall, so-to-speak. I recall a sci-fi novel I read decades ago (“Stranger in a Strange Land”) in which somebody was trying to explain to the visiting Martian what humor is, and it was quite a struggle to help him make that connection when he didn’t “just know” due to shared cultural experience.
I feel like “irony” is a bit in the same boat. I can use the word correctly - I recognize quite clearly when I’m being ironic or when something else is ironic. But to know why that should be a significant category for us, or why it should amuse us - that starts to get harder to pin down. And it seems that Penner is recognizing something even yet more significant in it: a kind of “freedom space” to deliberately allow for varied or even opposite reaction. And I’m not sure I came very close to following him in all that either.
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One thing that’s a common element in all humor is an unexpected incongruity, like marvelously spherical pill bugs having rectangular to squarish poop. XD (At least I think that’s pretty funny. I laughed out loud when I became aware of it. ; - )
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I’m not sure I’m buying Penner’s esoteric use of [prophetic] irony. P. 93:
But in reflecting on prophetic speech, one must take careful note of the nature of the prophetic speech-act. As we mentioned…, apostles or prophets are not speaking on their own and delivering messages they take responsibility for; they are speaking on behalf of God and by God’s power or Spirit.
Prophetic irony disavows all human attempts to justify the message while maintaining its authority over us and its ability to speak truly to us. The form of the message—its human messenger—belies prophetic speech as an authoritative word from God.
If we look at the Gospels, Jesus is accompanying his message with concrete evidence supporting it, and so too the disciples:
Then the disciples went out and preached everywhere, and the Lord worked with them and confirmed his word by the signs that accompanied it.
Mark 16:20
And from the parable of Dives and Lazarus – it also mentions evidence:
“He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’”
Luke 16:21
Paul as well. His preaching and arguments were accompanied by his life. It’s a little difficult on an internet forum for us to demonstrate the latter, but I’m quite confident that most of us would help a stricken person by the roadside, à la the Good Samaritan and then some.
Irony in prophetic speech has been in my thoughts, and perhaps ironically, it seems that is the point. Irony demands an element of participation on the listeners part. Rather than a prophet merely proclaiming a point, by using irony they bring the listener into the midst of the message.
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