And Now for Something Completely Different: A Moderate Voice on Abortion

I’m both a feminist and a prolife advocate, and I mourn the almost total loss of the early linkage between those two movements (e.g., guess which babies, once their sex is ascertained, are more likely to be aborted?). So I am delighted to come across a thoughtful, fairminded interview with a thoughtful, fairminded prochoice scholar who advocates regard and respect for the prolife movement as a genuine heir to the civil rights movement. And in The New Yorker—a magazine I enjoy, but one not noted for its patience with a prolife outlook.

Taking the Cross Out of the Classroom

Here’s my most recent contribution to the National Post’s religion blog: I’m defending the recent European Court’s direction to the nation of Italy (!) to remove crucifixes from public schools.

(This may be the first time I’ve disagreed with a whole country, but I suppose it was inevitable.)

Partnering with Non-Christian Organizations: Is Compromise Okay?

A friend recently wrote to me (and I’ve disguised the situation a bit to preserve his privacy):

“My wife and I have been approached by The Kids Help Line to help raise funds.  The Kids Help Line is a national organization to help kids with various problems from simple friendship and parent tensions to issues of abuse, suicide, bullying, teen pregnancy, contraception, sexual orientation and dating.

“Their job is to provide information and help these kids through their problems.  They have a website where there are chat lines and you are able to see how the counselors handle situations.  For the most part I am impressed with their care and attentive listening.  On most inquiries they ask the teen good questions in an effort to get them thinking about the issue from other perspectives.  On pregnancy they offer all the options and while they define abortion as ‘an interrupted pregnancy,’ they do say that there are people who believe abortion is wrong and that there are spiritual, emotional and psychological consequences that need to be thought out.  For a child questioning his or her orientation they refer them to the gay and lesbian society, which upsets me, but I also can’t think of who else they ought to recommend instead.

“So our dilemma: There is an overall good going on, especially regarding abuse and suicide, and there are also issues where their handling would be inadequate from a Christian prospective.

“So can I make out  the trees from the woods and make a wise decision?  I can argue that working with this organization opens opportunities for us to work alongside people who we would never otherwise meet,  people who want to do to good for others.  We may offset stereotypes of judgmental Christians by accepting them into our home and that we will be helping children in many difficult and some very serious situations.

“But I can argue instead that I am partnering with an organization that would be neutral, or worse, on ethical issues such as abortion, sexual orientation and promiscuity, and by helping fund them I appear to be endorsing their stands on these matters.  As a church leader I am leaving myself open to being criticized by Christians who would believe we have ’sold out.’ So what do you think?”

Best Hallowe’en Costumes Ever?

We take a brief break from our usual seriousness to ask this timely, topical question: What’s the best Hallowe’en costume you’ve ever worn?

Define “best” any way you want (most witty; most hideous; most likely to get you a kiss by the evening’s end; most spiritual). And, if you simply must, you can describe someone else’s instead. But special kudos if it’s your own you describe.

Mine?

We went to a theme costume party to which we were to come as a famous hero or heroine. I was deep in my Ph.D. program in those days (always risky to ask such people to any party) and so, in a complete break from my normal pattern (see above re being in deep in my Ph.D. program), I put on blue body paint, found some ersatz Oriental stuff to wear (take that, Edward Said!), and completely baffled everyone at the party.

“Am I blue?” I would sing the old jazz standard, and that helped no one guess my identity.

“I’m Krishna!” I finally announced, and sulked the rest of the evening. But it was a cool costume, I (alone) thought.

And you?

Atheist “Refutation” of the Cosmological Argument? Not Here, Not Now

A reader asks: “Professor Stackhouse, Do you have any comments on The Apostate’s post about William Lane Craig?

I reply:

I stopped reading The Apostate’s first post after he made such a hash of “refuting” the cosmological argument. I’m not saying he doesn’t raise good points later on: I just don’t have time to read everything, and the opening is so bad it doesn’t give me good grounds to keep reading. Here’s what I mean.

His first argument is to cite mumbo-jumbo about cosmological theories that are, to put it kindly, in very early days and (to his credit) the Apostate doesn’t claim they have a lot of empirical verification because they don’t. (I figure if even I know that, and I’m no scientist but have a lively amateur interest in such things, then everybody talking about such matters should know it, too!).

Eckhart Tolle: Does the Mask of “Stresslessness” Hide a Deep, Bitter Anger?

In a new article in Canada’s national newsmagazine, Maclean’s, Ken McQueen tries to walk the journalistic tightrope between appreciation and credulity as he interviews New Age guru Eckhart Tolle.

Your servant is quoted in the article along with friend Prof. James Beverley, as evangelical critics. (Funny: I’m almost always described in mainstream Canadian media as teaching at “evangelical Regent College” while I never see a qualifying adjective attached to, say, the Vancouver School of Theology or the like.) Jim and I are quoted accurately about Tolle:

“He gives a certain segment of the population exactly what they want: a sort of supreme religion that purports to draw from all sorts of lesser, that is, established, religions,” says John Stackhouse, a professor of theology and culture at Vancouver’s evangelical Regent College. “In fact [he] so chops, strains and rearranges the bits that it borrows that it ends up as a nicely vague spirituality that one can tailor to one’s own preferences.” James Beverley, a professor of Christian thought and ethics at the evangelical Tyndale Seminary in Toronto, has read Tolle’s books “in gory detail,” and finds Tolle denies “the core” of Christianity by claiming there is no ultimate distinction between humans and God and Jesus. “From a Christian perspective, Tolle misquotes the Bible to assert his strange mix of Hinduism, Buddhism and New Age pop,” he says. “He misrepresents the teaching of Jesus about the self and ignores the clear claims of Jesus as Saviour, Lord and Son of God.”

It is telling how Tolle replies to this criticism in the next paragraph of McQueen’s piece:

“Yes, there is a certain interpretation of the Bible that people have where every word is literally true and anybody who doesn’t share that particular interpretation actually becomes an opponent,” he says. He calls it a throwback to the bloody Crusades of medieval times. “Five per cent of his beliefs are different so he’s evil, you must burn him,” Tolle says with a chuckle. “It’s completely insane and so we still have remnants of that, unfortunately.”

Why Christianity Is Believable: Part Four

Two data: That’s all I need.

The two facts are (a) an empty tomb, and (b) enthusiastic disciples. Let’s see what might follow.

After his death by crucifixion Jesus was buried in a tomb owned by a secret follower, Joseph of Arimathea.  Jesus’ tomb was a cave sealed with a rolling rock of some sort.  The four Gospels record many other such details of Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection.  For the present purpose, however, almost all of these details can be set aside as we focus on just one: the empty tomb.

Why Christianity Is Believable: Part Three

One might well object to the foregoing thus: “The New Testament is our only record of these events, and it’s hopelessly biased and therefore unreliable. So we can’t know what really happened.”

Let’s begin by acknowledging the obvious: the New Testament is, indeed, biased. It is strongly biased, in fact: written entirely by devotees of Jesus, each of whom writes according to the tenets of orthodox Christianity (or his writing wouldn’t have been accepted by the early church into the canon–the approved group of scriptures).

But so what? Most (all?) historical writing is biased. Who devotes himself or herself to a careful historical accounting of a subject in which one has no interest and about which one has no strong opinion? Pick among the famous historians of the ages: Herodotus, Thucydides, Livy, Tacitus, Eusebius, Bede, Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Beard, von Ranke: they’re all conspicuously biased. Pick your favourite historian today: same deal.

The serious historiographical question is never that of bias. People who don’t know much about history-writing fret about bias, but no historian and no experienced reader of history does. The question instead is whether bias interferes with veracity.

Why Christianity Is Believable: Part Two

Fun as it would be to argue over various perennial questions in the long, long debate over the intellectual credibility of Christianity, we’re all busy people. So let’s proceed to the core question of this religion that, after all, takes its name from an actual claim about Jesus of Nazareth, namely, that he was (and is) the Christos or “Messiah” (Anointed One) of God: the Lord and Saviour of the world.

How would a reasonable person begin to make up her mind about such a stupendous claim?

Helpfully, the earliest Christian preaching stands ready to assist.

Why Christianity Is Believable: A Reply to Dawkinsians and Their Ilk (Part One)

A couple of posts ago, I replied to Richard Dawkins’s charge that theologians don’t do anything useful. I replied in a couple of respects to that charge, but under friendly pressure from some of you it emerges more clearly that there are at least two more kinds of things to be said and argued.

First, is there something there that theologians describe? I argued the other way: If there is a God, and theologians know something about that God, then their/our work is useful. But of course many people wonder about the premise: Is there indeed a God and is that God the God of the (Christian) theologians?

Campus Ministry That’s Not for Every One

I’m just back from several days on the University of Ottawa campus in our nation’s capital. I had a blast working with David Robinson (a recent alumnus of Regent College) and his team, who work out of St. Alban’s Anglican Church to serve students and professors at U of O.

David is an unusually capable person: superb academic record, extraordinary organizational ability, articulate speaker, and fine networker. But what I liked the most about working with him in producing several events on campus is that he is trying to reach the people most campus groups don’t: the thoughtful, and perhaps even threatening, inquirer, the smart student or professor who has been asking hard questions of Christianity perhaps for years and hasn’t found even a safe place in which to ask them, let alone a place to encounter satisfying answers to them.

What Good Are Theologians?

Richard Dawkins has been quoted to me recently as such (without a citation, alas: Can anyone supply it?):

“What has theology ever said that is of the smallest use to anybody? When has theology ever said anything that is demonstrably true and is not obvious? I have listened to theologians, read them, debated against them. I have never heard any of them ever say anything of the smallest use, anything that was not either platitudinously obvious or downright false. If all the achievements of scientists were wiped out tomorrow, there would be no doctors but witch doctors, no transport faster than horses, no computers, no printed books, no agriculture beyond subsistence peasant farming. If all the achievements of theologians were wiped out tomorrow, would anyone notice the smallest difference? Even the bad achievements of scientists, the bombs, and sonar-guided whaling vessels, work! The achievements of theologians don’t do anything, don’t affect anything, don’t mean anything. What makes anyone think that ‘theology’ is a subject at all?”

Now, the very last question is different than the point made in the bulk of the quotation. Whether theology is a “science,” whether it is indeed a body of knowledge about aspects of reality, is a good question. But let’s suppose for now (since one blog post ought to be about one thing, no?) that it is at least possible that theology does what it says it does. What good would it be?