Archive for the ‘Higher Criticism’ Category
Nietzsche vs. Christianity: Part 3
Lecture 3 focused on four things: 1. The intellectual backdrop to Nietzsche 2. Nietzsche’s 3 main objections to Christianity 3. Nietzsche’s positive affirmations in place of Christianity 4. The Nietzschean Catechism. Audio is available here.
I. Intellectual Backdrop
19th century Western (Continental) Europe was unkind to Christianity. Some of the major works floating around were:
– The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin
Replaces need for God in cosmology
–The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Inherently atheistic
– On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers by Friedrich Schleiermacher
Book basically splits Protestantism in two
– Origins of the History of Christianity by Ernest Renan
The New Testament is essentially myth. This revisionist history was seminal in classic liberalism and influential in the later Jesus Seminar.
– The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig von Feuerbach
Christianity is superstition that will soon be replaced by humanism
– The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud
Humanity has invented God and this delusion is a kind of mental illness.
– Prolegomena to the History of Israel by Julius Wellhausen
Wellhausen espouses that the first five books of the Old Testament were not written by Moses but by editors from four schools of thought. A flood of Bible criticism followed Wellhausen. Tubingen.
–History of Materialism and Critique of its Present Importance by Friedrich Lange
Atomistic Materialism and Darwinism.
II. 3 OJECTIONS:
1. Intellectually impossible (this is assumed a priori without argumentation)
2. It demeans humanity (herd mentality, Dionysianism…)
3. Its morality is fatal to life (slave morality, Dionysianism…)
Nietzsche is more concerned with assessing the damage that Christianity has done rather than tearing it apart limb from limb. Nature was determinant and all metaphysics are to be rejected.
III. Nietzsche’s Positive Affirmations
1. Be a free-spirit
2. Be curious
3. Be nomadic (as well as will to power, master morality…)
IV. The Nietzschean Catechsim
Nietzsche ends book 3 of The Gay Science with 8 hypothetical questions and answers (see page 142):
1. What makes one heroic?
To approach at the same time one’s highest suffering and one’s highest hope
2. What do you believe in?
In this, that the weights of all things must be determined anew.
3. What does your conscience say?
You should become who you are.
4. Where lie your greatest dangers?
In compassion
5. What do you love in others?
My hopes
6. Whom do you call bad?
He who always wants to put people to shame
7. What is most human to you?
To spare someone shame
8. What is the seal of having become free?
No longer to be ashamed before oneself.
Nietzsche vs. Christianity: Part 1
Here is the AUDIO for the first lecture.
I was struck by a few things in doing my research on the life, thought, and influence of Nietzsche. First, I am struck at how dark, bleak, and sick was Nietzsche’s early world. Second, I was struck by the damning affects of the poison that flowed from the Tubingen School, particularly in the thought of Strauss, Feuerbach, and Schopenhauer (Tubingen was the school that started all of the criticism of the Bible that eventually led to the splitting of Protestantism into its conservative and liberal branches). Third, I am struck by how different Nietzsche’s thought changed over time and how he moves beyond all of his influences. Fourth, I am struck by both the radicalness and the consistency of Nietzsche’s atheism, he is the one atheist who says that morality is contingent on the existence of God. Fifth, I am struck that Nietzsche is really a kind of Greek thinker in the vein of Dionysus and that the goal of his whole philosophy is life affirmation. Sixth, I am struck by how much I agree with Nietzsche both in what bothers him and what he affirms. Finally, I couldn’t agree more with David Hart when he says, “The only really effective antidote to the dreariness of reading the New Atheists, it seems to me, is rereading Nietzsche.”
Below is the outline and audio from the first lecture:
I. Biography and Psychology
A. Death
B. Boarding School at Pforta
C. Chronic Illness
D. Bonn/Leipzig
E. University of Basel
F. Franco-Prussian War Medical Orderly
II. Intellectual Influences
A. David Frederick Strauss – Das Leben Jesu
B. Ludwig von Feuerbach – The Essence of Christianity
C. Friedrich Lange – History of Materialism and Critique of its Present Importance (Geschichte des Materialismus)
D. Dionysus
III. Nietzsche’s Thought
A. “The Death of God”
B. Nihilism
C. Master and Slave Morality
D. Übermensch
E. Will to Power (der Wille zur Macht)
F. Eternal Recurrence (ewige Wiederkunft)
IV. Nietzsche’s Influence
C. Albert Camus
F. Martin Buber
G. Adolf Hitler (sort of)
3 Month Introspective
Introspective
So, I’ve been blogging consistently for three months. This is the week of Christmas and I’ll be all over the place. I thought I would briefly summarize the 3 months of blog series on here:
Blaise Pascal: We took a look at Blaise Pascal’s thinking, its use of aphorism and its relationship to both tri-perspectivalism and presuppositionalism. We also looked at his use of aphorism and his warnings against deism and atheism.
Thoughts on Evangelicalism Past, Present, and Future, Parts 1-7: We defined the term evangelical. We looked at its historical roots in the First Great Awakening, Second Great Awakening, and its ties to celebrity culture, democritization of knowledge, and modernism. Then we looked at the roots of liberalism, the Protestant split and suburbanization, and defined and outlined evangelical populism and their game plan for reaching America. Finally we assessed the current status of American evangelicalism and then made some predictions of future trends.
Introduction to Apologetics, Parts 1-7: We looked in broad strokes at the various schools of apologetics. We then took a more in-depth look at: Classical Apologetics, Evidentialist Apologetics, Presuppositional Apologetics, and the specific apologetics of Blaise Pascal and Alvin Plantinga. Finally, we employed the three phases football as an analogy for the different apologetic schools and I likened Tim Tebow to the presuppositionalists.
Thoughts on Evangelicalism Moving Forward, Parts 1-10: We looked at some analysis of some shifts evangelicalism will need to make moving forward: Doctrine, Worldview, Urbanization, Globality/Mobility, “Post-Modernism,” American Culture(s), Contextualization, Balance, and Final Analysis.
Top ~10 Books by Topic:
Top 10 Systematic Theology Texts
Top 10 Books on Science and Christianity
Top 10 Books on Christian Biography
Top 15 Books on Status of American Evangelicalism
Top 10 Books on Church History
Top 40 Books to Read While in College
Top 10 Books on Missions, Discipleship, and Evangelism
The 25 Most Destructive Books Ever Written…
Top 10 Books on Divine Sovereignty and Human Responsibility
Best Creeds, Confessions, and Catechisms of the Christian Church
A Comprehensive List of Top 10 Book Lists of 2009
Up Next: We will be looking at some thoughts on the economy and investment and then delve into the mind of Friedrich Nietzsche…
The 25 Most Destructive Books Ever Written…
Darwin: Origin of Species
…and why you should read them (or at least be familiar with them).
These are books that have had a deleterious affect on humanity (almost exclusively Western in their thinking). Some of them had “good intentions”* but fell flat on their face with horrible unintended consequences. The Christian has the responsibility to defend the truth of the Gospel. One part of defending the truth is refuting all untruth. We need to be reading primary sources of the things we are seeking to deconstruct – not summaries, the wikipedia article, or a blog post about it.
*1. The Origin of Species: By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin
I do not think Darwin would agree with half of Neo-Darwinianism or macroevolution. He makes massive concessions that geology and microbiology would need to corroborate his thesis. He was a good scientist who followed the evidence, I think he would be in the intelligent design camp (perhaps this is a controversial statement, but read Origin for yourself). I have listed this as #1 as this work was critical in pretty much all of the destructive thoughts of the past 150 years: Eugenics, Scientific Naturalism, Nietzschean atheism, New Atheism, Liberal Protestantism, and Communism.
2. Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant
This book is probably the most influential book in philosophy since the ancient Greeks. Kant seeks to synthesize the great debate of the history of philosophy: Being vs. Becoming aka Plato vs. Aristotle. In the process, Kant comes to the conclusion that our minds cannot have knowledge of things that are not physical – ie. God and many other absolute truths. In defense of Kant, his thinking did begin to change in his third work as he makes some wiggle room for faith as being a legitimate pathway for knowledge (but almost no one reads his third volume).
3. The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
20,000,000 dead under Stalin, 6-8,000,000 dead under Lenin, 40,000,000 dead under Mao Zedong, 1,700,000 dead under Pol Pot… case and point.
4. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers by Friedrich Schleiermacher
This guy birthed liberal Protestantism. His ideas split Protestantism and millions think they know Jesus when they don’t.
5. Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche
Nietzsche decries how humanity has killed God through our apathy. He then espouses why humanity needs to move beyond God, morality, truth, and the good, in favor of embracing exerting power and control over the weak.
*6. Meditations on First Philosophy by Rene Descartes
Descartes had every intention of proving through pure axiomatic reasoning that God existed. In short, his arguments for God’s existence were awful and his arguments for doubting everything were excellent. His legacy is solid argumentation for skepticism. Epic Fail.
7. Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
11-17,000,000 dead. Hitler sees Judaism, capitalism, and communism as the three major threats to Germany. The Final Solution means purging all associated with these things and the result is the Holocaust. Awful.
8. Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity by Richard Rorty
In my view, this is the most important book to be read today for the Christian. For an explanation why, read my previous blog post on post-modern-pragmatism.
9. The Prince by Niccolo Machiavelli
In order to be successful in life you must exercise control through power and manipulation. Morality hurts your ability to exert your will.
10. Origins of the History of Christianity by Ernest Renan
The New Testament is essentially myth. This revisionist history was seminal in classic liberalism and influential in the later Jesus Seminar.
11. Discourse on the Origin of Inequality Among Men by Jean Jacques Rousseau
Society is corrupt, man is good.
12. The Pivot of Civilization by Margaret Sanger
Sanger promoted sexual liberation and then birth control, abortion, and eugenics. 39,000,000+ babies dead worldwide… this year from abortion.
13. Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes
Humans are immoral, therefore only Leviathan is the solution… Leviathan is a strong and aggressive central government.
14. The Essence of Christianity by Ludwig von Feuerbach
Christianity is superstition that will soon be replaced by humanism.
15. The Future of an Illusion by Sigmund Freud
Humanity has invented God and this delusion is a kind of mental illness.
16. Various Writings by Pelagius
Denial of the doctrine of original sin, denial of efficacious grace, and the denial of the sovereignty of God. 1600 years later his teachings still plague the church.
17. Sexual Behavior in the Human Male by Alfred Kinsey
This was just painful to read (and I was unable to finish) and I am not endorsing actually getting a copy (hence no link). Kinsey basically says that no sexual behavior or orientation is immoral. All is permissible.
18. The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
Some bit of gnosticism had to make this list. I wrestled with what to choose here. Pagels is your run of the mill critic who says that the gnostic “gospels” are the real story and history. These ideas are ridiculous due to their pseudepigraphic nature, date of writing, and mutually exclusive theologies.
19. Prolegomena to the History of Israel by Julius Wellhausen
Wellhausen espouses that the first five books of the Old Testament were not written by Moses but by editors from four schools of thought. A flood of Bible criticism followed Wellhausen.
20. Why I am Not a Christian by Bertrand Russell
Russell is one of the few atheists other than Nietzsche that I respect. His thoughts are well ordered and argued. The New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens…) wish they could hold a candle to Russell.
21. Process and Reality by A.N. Whitehead
Whitehead argues for Process Theology. Read about Process Theology here.
Justification by faith alone is anathematized. Veneration of Mary and saints upheld. Transubstantiation upheld. I love my brothers and sisters who are Christians in the Catholic church despite the Catholic church. Trent had the opportunity to listen to the Reformation and return to God’s Word for truth. It did not and left in its wake countless eternal casualties.
23. His Dark Materials Trilogy by Philip Pullman
Pullman sought to write the opposite of Milton’s Paradise Lost. He seeks to commend humanism and ultimately atheism as the commendable life path. His Dark Materials is aimed at young adults and has been recently popularized by the Golden Compass film.
24. Protagoras by Plato
For clarity sake, these are sayings ascribed to Protagoras and not Platonic thoughts. The famous quote is “Man is the measure of all things.” Protagoras is the first person to espouse a kind of moral relativism.
25. Coming of Age in Samoa by Margaret Mead
The logical consequences of naturalism and Darwinianism applied to anthropology and sociology. What is primitive is good, therefore the sexual inhibition she evidenced in primitive Samoa ought to be writ large.
Some thinkers who nearly made this list:
Leon Trotsky, Mao Zedong, Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Victor Gollancz, Lillian Hellman, Cyril Connolly, Norman Mailer, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bertolt Brecht, Johann Fichte, Georg Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer, John Dewey, Joseph Smith, Percy Shelley, Henrik Ibsen, Edmund Wilson, James Baldwin, Kenneth Tynan, Jean-François Lyotard, Claude Levi-Strauss and Noam Chomsky.
What did I miss?
Thoughts on Evangelicalism Past, Present, and Future… Part 4a
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Essentially the ideas of two German men split American Protestants in two: Friedrich Schleiermacher and Ferdinand Baur. Schleiermacher started exploring something called Higher Criticism*. Higher criticism is a kind of literary analysis that seeks to figure out the origins of a text. Specifically, higher criticism looks at who wrote a text, to audience whom the text was written for, and the time the text was composed. Higher criticism as applied to the Bible has its roots in rationalism. In rationalism, reason alone is the source of knowledge… hence, the rationalists ultimately reject Scripture. They reject Scripture because they see things in the Scripture that do not seem to fit their rational framework. Baur comes on the scene after Schleiermacher, influenced by both Schleiermacher and Hegel. Baur was the leader of the Tübingen school of theology at the University of Tübingen. Baur and the Tübingen school of theology were highly influential in the 19th century. These ideas eventually crossed the Atlantic and Protestants were divided on how to handle the criticism of the Bible.
One cannot underestimate the impact of the thoughts of these isolated German nerds. American Protestants split in two over higher criticism. At issue was whether the Scriptures were without error or inerrant. Half of Protestants followed the critics denying the inerrancy of Scripture and formed the liberal half of Protestantism called Mainline Protestantism (United Methodist Church, Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, Presbyterian Church USA, Episcopal Church, American Baptist Church, United Church of Christ, and Disciples of Christ… and a number of smaller denominations). In reaction against the liberal Protestants, the other half of Protestants formed the conservative branch, at that time called, Fundamentalists. The fundamentalists were influenced by the writings of the conservative Old Princeton theologians reacted stating five fundamental positions: 1. Inerrancy of Scripture 2. Virgin birth of Christ 3. Christ’s death as atonement for sin 4. Bodily resurrection of Jesus 5. Historical reality of Christ’s miracles. One can see how reading the Bible rationally, like a science textbook, would lead one to doubt miracles like virgin birth, penal substitution, and resurrection of the dead, leading one to conclude that the Bible had error.
Next we will continue to look at the split of Protestantism and its monumental impact on evangelicalism today…
*Eichhorn and Spinoza are also critical in the establishment of Higher Criticism. But if we mention them, then we have to mention the influence of Kant on Schleiermacher and Hegel on Baur. We can go on ad infinitum talking about the influence of Hume on Kant. I am obviously being selective here.
Modern Pensées 