This feels partially directed at my position, and while I don’t believe the deductive arguments prove God, they do establish an infinite being exists, but not an infinite number of things. Unless persuaded otherwise I promise to stick my attention back on Penner’s book.
I was thinking an outline of his introduction would be helpful, and maybe there’s a way each one of us can contribute as a kind wiki project.
Quantum indeterminacy and the relativity of simultaneity are true. In nature and supernature, in God. He cannot perceive objective reality any more than we can. It does not exist. Period. It means there is no judgement. No condemnation. No damnation. What for? For what doesn’t, does not, can not exist physically and superphysically doesn’t psychologically, morally, judicially. If God were to damn He’d have to damn Himself, like Christopher Ecclestone in the shocking conclusion of Second Coming. The only Christian witness can be that God is so because He walked the Earth as an ANE Jewish carpenter. And it is an inferior witness, i.e. from below. It implores. Begs. It reaches a desperate open hand up from the gutter. It actually has a decent proposition. Life is better with God. Being that that is a grasp beyond our reach, it says behave as if there were. A decent God. A harmless and fair God. So be harmless and fair, above all be fair as unfairness is the first harm.
Okay. Sure. If you say so.
Are you true, Klax? I’m inclined to think you are - and if so, I’m infinitely more impressed with that. Even despite the fact that you claim you don’t exist - but I’m inclined to take your claims of nonexistence as highly exaggerated, and reply to you anyway.
No, they say so. They are prevenient of any God. They are logical. Abstract. Independent of reality. Of concretization. Of instantiation. Which can’t not follow them.
And you’re doing it again Merv : )
Arrogant, defensive apologetics is not apologetic.
So I’m informed - by no less than Penner himself. I’ll cease and desist. My apologies.
I like this. Thanks.
That sounds like it is unaware of its action, but we are aware of ours?
A subjective period, right?
Sorry @MarkD and @Mervin_Bitikofer, I missed this post earlier. Modern is a technical term in the area of criticism, literature, architecture, etc. Depending on the context, it has slightly different meanings. In arts and literatures it starts around the time of WWI or the beginning of the 20th century, and you will hear artists and writers from the period refered to as Moderns. In these areas, the period ends roughly about WWII. In broader cultural history the early modern period actually begins much earlier: Kierkegaard places the beginning (from what I’ve understood from the video I posted in Slide 9) with Socrates. The Late Modern period (in this context) begins roughly before the enlightenment.
To speak of things happening right now, the term is “contemporary,” that is “happening at the same time we are.”
If we don’t make this distinction, talking about these challenging topics becomes even more difficult.
POSTMODERNISM
Yep! We’ve established it. We have different understandings of and views of PoMo based in those understandings of it. Some of us want more information. Some of us may feel we know enough or too much. Excellent. I think some questions will be answered a bit more in the book, but not all of them. For some of us, the research will continue after this book. Maybe we can step away from our views on PoMo for a bit and move to …
APOLOGETICS
Penner has stated there are problems with contemporary apologetics. Whether you see your views in any way connected to PoMo or not, do you see problems with the contemporary model of apologetics as you know them?
Thanks, everyone, for keeping this discussion lively and interesting, while I have not been able to participate much. However, I find your input far more interesting than anything I can bring to this table, except maybe the book in the first place.
Don’t you dare! This is the game Mervyn. Iron to iron. And I am ruthless. I hide (HA!) my arrogance behind brute facts. The brute facts of existence.
And the apology is mine if you back off. Back off to regroup, like paras (members of the parachute regiment, 2 para in particular) in Hell, yes. And come back fighting. Laterally. Subversively. Like the guy born in a stable on His way to becoming a refugee grew up to.
If this is how you play ROSHAMBO then you will always lose to paper. I am enveloping. 
Chapter one, Apologetic Amnesia, is an eye opener. My initial questions after a quick first read are:
Is ‘natural theology’ really more primitive than Christianity and the other Abrahamic traditions and something that precedes them? Or is the idea of natural theology an abstraction of these life traditions as seen from the modern viewpoint?
Is its being rational the best reason for having faith? If so what exactly is it one has faith in for such a rationale?
Natural theology and metaphysics (which may have originated with the Greeks) have often be confused.
It’s a good test case for understanding ideology, self-deception, and all that.
Thanks for the clarifications on ‘modern’ vs. ‘contemporary’. Now that you spell it out - yes - that makes sense!
The problems Penner lists are certainly expressed in dire terms. Take this from his p. 9
Defending Christian belief is not an unqualified good; it may actually be counterproductive to faith. There are times and ways in which a given “defense” of the faith does more harm than good to the cause of Christ.
Stackhouse certainly points us in the right direction, but my un-settling proposition above forces us to radicalize his conclusion: not only can apologetics curse; it actually is a curse. Here I take my cue from Soren Kierkegaard, the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher and theologian, who stipulates that the one who came up with the idea of defending Christianity in modernity is a second Judas who betrays the Christ under the guise of a friendly kiss; only, he adds, the apologist’s treachery (unlike Judas’s) is “the treason of stupidity"?!
So … if Penner was ever being kind or gentle about it before, the gloves certainly came off now! Delving into his reasons for this ‘take no prisoners’ rejection of (certain?) modern flavors of apologetics is a needed task. Because this is a frontal assault on an entire industry - and practitioners from that industry have certainly noticed by now, judging from the existence of rebuttal texts (whether attempted rebuttal or successful rebuttal remains to be seen) such as @heymike3 brought to our attention already.
I wonder if this interview of Penner by Pete Enns might lure our friend @Randy into this discussion. I’ve only just discovered it and am off to read it now. Haven’t figured out when the interview happened yet.
And to delve just a bit into at least one of Penner’s reasons for rejecting modern apologetics, he ties it (his comment I quoted above) into a fideist misreading of Kierkegaard.
Penner again…
The trouble I have with the fideist reading of Kierkegaard—in addition to being an inaccurate rendering of what the Kierkegaardian texts actually seem to say—is it continues to treat his thought under the categories of modern philosophy, which he so obviously labored to oppose. Kierkegaard’s rejection of apologetics (and its use of reason) is to be seen as part and parcel of his rejection of the modern conception of reason—not of reason altogether. This signals a Kierkegaardian way forward that does not entail going back to Aristotle.
Tthe accusation of “stupidity” (even worse than 'betrayal to modernist ears?) seems pretty strange coming as it does with all the rest of Penner’s thesis about modernity intellectualizing faith way too much and making it more about geniuses than apostles.
But I guess what Penner hears Kierkegaard claiming is that modernity has just become so tunnel-visioned within its own paradigm that it efffectively became ‘stupid’ with regard to anything outside of that, which is where I gather Penner hopes to lead us.
I will stand at a distance and watch and listen.
And wince.
And learn.
I often feel as if I have inadvertantly wandered into the men’s locker room. I will shield my eyes.
You read him right.
It is absolutely a frontal assault on the entire industry and everything that goes with it. Penner’s arguments subsume the entire kit and caboodle, because of the catastrophe of modernism that we talked about earlier, the divorce of faith in God and Jesus from talk about them (except in the most abstract ways) and the entire separation of ways we talk about Christianity from the actual practice of it.
I read a few reviews of Penner’s book by people who favor modern apologetics. (They may have been important in the industry, but I don’t know it that well.) They clearly misread Penner’s thesis and didn’t understand the claims of PoMo well enough to recognize the difference between using reason to critiquue a method and using reason to defend supernatural matters of faith. This is similar (just in a different key) to what I saw when I read Doug Groothuis’s book Truth Decay to try to make sense of my experiences with PoMo. I eventually concluded Groothuis didn’t really understand it as well as he thought he did. Ultimately, he didn’t answer my most important questions, either.
Uhhgg! That’s heavy and way more severe than idolatry.
It’s hard to accept given Penner’s blanket view of pre-modernity, and I’m uneasy without there being any consideration of Aquinas or the synthesis I’ve heard he accomplished.
I hope you don’t mind that I took the liberty of editing your quote of me in the post above … so it would be clear that those words weren’t mine (though I reserve the right to still agree with them - or not - as our quest through Penner’s book continues.)
Thanks, Mark for your link to the Enns interview which must have been back closer to 2013 when the book was still fresh on the market? In any case, perhaps the following snippet, lifted from that interview will help soften the “body blow” that defenders of apologetics generally might feel from Penner. When Enns asks Penner if he is against all apologetics, here is [part of] Penner’s response:
No, I am against a specific way of thinking about faith – and really an entire way of imagining the world, including God, ourselves, and other people – not the act of responding to specific questions about Christian belief or practice. So I am not against what might be called “mere apologetics.”
I am not a fideist who thinks Christian belief negates or is against human reason, or that faith is opposed to any critical reflection on its beliefs whatsoever. I object to an exclusive emphasis on the modern form of reason because it empties faith of its Christian content and robs it of its authority. In this way Kierkegaard’s genius/apostle distinction suggests modern apologetics is itself a symptom of the nihilism (or meaninglessness) that is at the core of modern thought.
And then Enns also asks (my shortened paraphrase here): So what about all the apologists up and down the centuries then (including Aquinas) … did they all get it wrong then?
Penner’s response:
No, I am not against all apologetic discourse – just the kind that tries to imagine the foundations of Christian belief in terms of modern epistemology. As I suggested above, we continually forget or ignore or suppress the fact that the way we see the world and our assumptions about human reason and the way it relates to faith is just one way to think about those things.
Ancient and medieval Christian apologists thought of the world and God and human reason in very different ways than we do. They literally could not imagine that our reasons for believing things conform to the dictates of modern secular reason. When, for example, medieval theologians engage in “natural theology” (arguments for God’s existence) they do so from within a specific set of assumptions, practices, and beliefs of a community of faith.
Many months ago I was warned off invoking Kierkegaard, publicly by a moderator. What changed?!
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
This is a place for gracious dialogue about science and faith. Please read our FAQ/Guidelines before posting.