Following the publication of Schweitzer's Quest for the Historical Jesus,

The majority of leaders in the American church embraced these academic trends. These were the mainliners, and they were in the majority. The only other choice in American Christianity was fundamentalism, and this was the backwoods, snake-handling, poison-drinking, Bible-thumping version of fundamentalism.

This is the informed opinion of Tony Jones as preserved for us in The New Christians, page 12.

Savor the ignorance.

I am picturing in my mind a small room in Philadelphia. I'm thinking somewhere on Chestnut Street, not a ten-minute stroll from City Hall. The year is 1929. In that room are four men: J. Gresham Machen, Oswald T. Allis, Cornelius van Til and Robert Dick Wilson. They are passing a snake amongst themselves, and each man sips consecutively from a common chalice containing a beautiful green liquid. They exchange anecdotes about gastric lavage and discuss possible locations for a new seminary.

Allis suggested some property along the Schuykill which was suitable for mass baptisms, but Wilson favored a tract of land north of downtown and closer to the Baker Bowl in honor of Billy Sunday who had been traded by the Pittsburgh Alleghenys for two players and a thousand dollars 39 years earlier. Van Til argued less persuasively that a school located some distance west of town (near Upper Darby) would help encourage the struggling bus ministry. Machen was trying to tie the snake in a Clove Hitch knot and wasn't much following the arguments other than to take strenuous exception to the mention of any kind of Darby, Upper or otherwise.

Edmund P. Clowney (as I'm sure Tony well knows but fails to mention in his estimable volume) was the first president of Westminster, the seminary funded largely from the proceeds of their gratifyingly lucrative tent-meetings. His messages are still available on the internet today. Look him up. Unless my mind is playing tricks on me, I recall during my childhood hearing Clowney himself preach a sermon entitled, Snake-handling, Persuasive Bible-thumping and a Few Thoughts on Infant Baptism.

I don't know if that particular sermon has made it into the archives of the worldwide web, but I recall feeling strangely moved to consider a missionary call to Africa where the snakes were large and plentiful and where one could extend an altar call from the roof of a Land Rover.

Come, crown my brow with leaves of myrtle!
I know the tortoise is a turtle.
Come, carve my name in stone immortal!
I know the tortoise is a tortle.
I know to my profound despair-
I bet on one to beat a hare.
I also know I'm now a pauper
Because of its tortly, turtly, torpor.

With turtly torpor Willow Creaky Community Church advances with the times. It is following through on its cutting-edge study:

After modeling a seeker-sensitive approach to church growth for three decades, Willow Creek Community Church now plans to gear its weekend services toward mature believers seeking to grow in their faith.

Reflect with profound despair: if you were twenty years old when you began attending this hot, promising, relevant church, you would now be nagged with junk mail from AARP, and finally somebody got the clever idea to do a study on the effectiveness of its work. Now that your grandchildren are off in college, your local fellowship of the saints has decided to crack open a Bible.

Showers of blessing, Send them upon us O Lord;
Grant to us now a refreshing, Come and now honor Thy Word.

And there's Mark Galli, one of Christianity Today's in-house philosophers asks if this concern for spiritual maturity is not a bit too self-centered.

Which brings us to those "fully devoted followers of Jesus Christ." They are not "being fed," they say. They are not getting enough in-depth Bible teaching. They are so discouraged about the church's inability to help them grow, they are ready to quit. Does it strike anyone else that these followers have missed a crucial part of what it means to be fully devoted to Jesus?

And with an irony that truly satisfies my deepest hunger, I read that Bill Hybels is preaching [May 31-June 1] a sermonette entitled "Have You Died Yet?"

What a shepherd of souls. After thirty years of starvation.

Have you died yet?

You wouldn't know this if you were studying serious theology when you could have been dabbling in pop psychology, but:

Deep within the American psyche is a longing for convertive piety. We are a nation and culture of extremes and polarities: The [sic] Saturday night drunk who weaps [sic] in repentance on Sunday morning; The [sic] Sunday night holy man who leaves his ethical convictions at the door of the church when he steps into the office on Monday morning; Lips [sic] that sing the halleluah [sic] chorus opening to display the forked tongue and nasty sting of our gossip, fears and anxieties. As a culture we [sic] are literally haunted by God- the preacher, the church lady, the tortured backslider, the agnostic and the atheist. Religion, and our strange reactions and repulsions to [sic] it, reveal more about us than the nature and character of any divine being. What is revealed in our convoluted spiritual pursuits is the beauty and ambiguity of our common humanity. We are people who can imagine what love is, but can never quite make it to be "on earth as it is in heaven."

In this haunted America everyone is converting to something, and there is no better American archetype than the revivalist. (And I was hoping it would be the robber baron.)

For people who don't yet have it all together and for admirers of inclusive theology, theirs is a pretty aggressive jeremiad. So Larry, Curly and Moe are taking the scam on the road to illustrate something or other related to their insights into preachin' and convertin'. They wear special costumes and they got their pitcher took in front of a microwave and everything.

Children like to dress up.

Clearly conversion is a sore spot with these guys. It's hard to make sense of Tony's ideas, but apparently he gets converted every day, preferably in the morning. But other people's conversions are different and very suspicious.

It is ironic that the people with such keen insights into the defective American psyche are the same illiterates who sit around on couches, compare hypocrisies and listen for the voice of God. Their contempt for the pulpit ranks right up there with their contempt for the English language and rational discussion.

I'm betting their theater ranks right up there with fundamentalists' Wilde.

You really should listen to this. It may be helpful to you if, at about 30 minutes into the interview, you keep repeating to yourself the words "conversation", "inclusive", "fullness of the Christian tradition" and "generous".

I think it may help clarify certain points currently in dispute throughout the land.

As they say at Journey Church:

Our task is not to seek full agreement on all things but to dialogue respectfully and listen for God's voice. We welcome people from all spheres of life to join us on this journey to become whole people of God.

This is Doug dialoguing respectfully.

Actually, according to my scientific calculator and precise computations, roughly 31% of the interview was spent trashing other people.

Very interesting.

Jack:  Let me return the favor; I owe you a cup of coffee from last time.

Jack set down the cup and dragged over a chair from another table and straddled it.

So if these guys are as dim as you say, how do you explain the success of this movement?

Nat:  Well first, I don't see it as a success. Not yet. The spokesfolks are, wisely, I suspect, not in a big hurry to offer any meaningful measures of success. None of the cohorts I've seen are encouraging. If you were to compare the typical indicators of success, I think you would find a pretty sad picture. They certainly fall short of the standards set by real churches. Their operations could easily be funded out of the pocket change that falls through the theater seats at Willow Creek. One pastor I spoke with excused the shabbiness of their accommodations by suggesting that their priorities were more noble. But that just made me wonder how many bags of flour could have been shipped to Burma for the price of their sound system and their framed eyesores.

One of the groups I visited split in two when the founding pastor left, and the hard feelings certainly have left a musty smell; not that this is unknown in branches of Christianity, but it is especially ironic among those who claim to bring us restoration, acceptance, inclusivity and generative friendships.

The future of their Emergent Gatherings is threatened and that, I imagine, will affect esprit de corps and contribute to differences they can't seem to resolve even now. They seem to have worked out that these roll-your-own denominational conventions require "budgets, pre-event planing meetings, and evaluation-the very habits and institutional ruts that the event was designed to supplement." Might as well be a Southern Baptist.

Real life has a way of intruding.

Anyone can charge people 90 bucks a pop to chin-wag at a seminar. A website is next to nothing to throw onto the web, and the quality and volume of their writing suggests there is the fervor of weekend activists but very little indication of the progress of an idea. Check out The Ooze or Geez Magazine: they appear to be moribund enough to start filling out some toe tags. Personal blogs are far more lively. The artwork is very tired, very commercial and very stale. There are private and amateur artists out there doing far more interesting things on the web.

The external facts do not suggest vitality.

Jack jotted down the names.

Ooze is dot com, Geez is dot org. What we are looking at here is not Reformation; it is bafflegab, indoctrination, re-education without the guard towers. You should read up on them, and I would suggest you start with Wikipedia—not because it is a reliable source, but because Emergence has introduced itself as being "open-source" and Wikipedia is often cited as illustrative. I should be embarrassed by that claim if I were them.

Jack:  So you think they are dead in the water?

Nat:  Oh no. On that account it is too soon to tell. I'm just saying this is not 1517 and these are not Reformers. The errors they embrace are significant enough to justify the criticism they provoke. Unfortunately their critics are not arguing from a position of strength. This is one of the main reasons I find the movement fascinating. It's not that the movement is muscular, it's that everyone on the playground is in casts, on crutches and carrying inhalers.

Second, it is a very friable movement. People can get together to moan, but the more they moan, the wider the cracks get. Wimmin's issues, gay marriage and ordination, condom distribution, "Make Affluence History", the food crisis battle...it looks like the Democratic Party on campus: the van backs up and placards are passed out to the most compassionate generation in history and a good time is had by all. But they seem, as a group, to be about as cuddly and collegial as fundamentalists.

But most importantly, an idea doesn't have to be true and it doesn't even have to be cogent to gain a following.

Jack:  What is their idea?

Nat:  No one knows.

Jack:  Surely they say something!

Nat:  Oh, they say enough, but when you are touting things like free-form, open-source, profanity, ambisexuality, category-defying characteristics...it is very hard to know what their words mean. Soccer moms will be irritated. Businessmen will be aggravated. Children will be annoyed.

What they say is that there are three characteristic things: disappointment with modern American Christianity, a desire for inclusion, and a hope-filled orientation.

Jack:  What do those things mean?

Nat:  Ah! Not exactly the solas, are they?

Jack: Solas?

Nat: There were five solas that articulated the essence of the last Reformation: sola Scriptura, sola fide, sola gratia, solus Christus, soli Deo Gloria. Latin for Scripture alone, faith alone, grace alone, Christ alone and the glory to God alone. They precisely articulated a very real departure from Catholic doctrine on the questions of authority, manner of justification, means of salvation, the singularity of a mediator and the glory of God as an end. It was clear to everyone. Even people who poked sheep for a living could understand it.

To compare this reformation to the last one is a cruel joke.  Sloppy ideas, cheap art, shabby music, crummy sanctuaries, mindless conversation on chintzy sofas...

A fool can ask a question a wise man can't answer.

There is a new book by David Wells, The Courage to Be Protestant, which probably merits your attention. I have not seen it yet but there is a brief related interview in Christianity Today with Collin Hansen.

It seems clear to me that Hansen doesn't know what is going on and his questions are typical of the bookblather CT heartlessly inflicts on its readers. I say that to warn our readers that what looks to me like a somewhat feeble argument by Wells might be Hansen's fault. A series of questions which represents the state of evangelical thinking are followed by a series of answers which I hope were intended to be a polite response aimed at thinking pastors standing behind unthinking editors.

I do have one early misgiving: Wells says that our capacity to think about ourselves, our churches and our world in biblical ways is disintegrating.

Ok, that much isn't in dispute. Clearly there is a lack of proper thought. But for one who thinks, as Wells does, that guys like Hybels are sincere religious innovators working from best motives, it is a bit frightening.

We think as we do about truth, God, self, Christ, and the church, because our thinking has been corrupted, and I suspect we can't nuance our way back to clear thinking. The fact that Hybels and McLaren and Jones are transparently bad thinkers only makes it seem so.

As Eliot said, it is not that we can't believe as we should, it is that we cannot feel as we ought.

I look forward to getting Hansen out of the way and reading Wells for myself.

For those of you who may have been catching up on the hard times Darwinism has fallen on and the maledictions of Dawkins & Dennett, you might want to read this. There is another bad actor out there: Edward O. Wilson.

Tom Wolfe anticipates a funeral.

You might want to send your black suit out to the cleaners.

Nat:  Hey, Jack. Have a seat and let me buy you a coffee.

Jack shot out his left arm, cocked his elbow and checked his watch.

Jack:  Sure, if you don't mind my leaving in the middle of something; my ride is due shortly.

Nat:  I don't see a major problem with that.

Jack:  I did want to tell you about my experience at Riddance Gathering.

Nat smiled.

Nat:  What did you learn?

Jack:  Well, I'm more confused than I was the first time I went. But I did learn that ignorance is not the end of life as we know it, and it actually qualifies one to be an emergent-in-good-standing.

Nat:  So public stupidity is a growth strategy; who knew?

Jack:  If I talked like these guys at work, Security would be following me back to my desk and helping me out to the car with my office kaboodle.

Nat:  This is clearly a movement of credentialed buffoons, I don't think anyone challenges this.

Jack:  You don't like this movement.

Nat:  These guys are charlatans and carpetbaggers. It might be possible to view them with some sympathy if they just sat there in their sofas with a dumb-and-desperate look of earnestness on their faces, but they really are a gang of intellectual junior flyweights. I saw Tony Jones embarrass himself on a video the other day. He clearly crossed the line between stupid and criminal, and this is typical of the movement. I think they must be having some sort of competition to see who can be the first to win a Darwin Award. I'm taking out a loan to bet on Tony.

Someone trying to peg his theology asked him if he had been born again, to which Tony said, "Yes. What does that mean?"

What the guy should have said was, "Well, Tony, what did it mean to you when you said Yes?" Or he might have asked what Jesus meant when he talked about being born again in John 3. But Tony chuntered on about how when he was five he was pressured into confessing to an experience at camp when his body whooshed. I can well imagine how easily led someone like Tony would be at five seeing how pathologically naïve he is now. I'm sure this boy lost a lot of lunch money at school. But the grim inanity of characterizing a second birth as nothing other than an exercise in manipulation is too pathetic to accept. There has to be dishonesty here. Stupidity can take someone only so far.

Jack:  If these people are this dumb, how can they survive in a world full of seminaries and evangelical theological societies.

A beamer tooted its horn.

Nat:  Ah! That is a question I would like to answer, but I think your coach awaits.

Jack:  Hold that thought...

As topics change and as readership adjusts, it is possible that new Remonstrans readers could benefit from an orientation class. We'll give some thought to that. Meanwhile we should remind everyone of the environment we find ourselves in. (You are all as concerned about the environment as I am, right?)

"This is a country with all too much civility...especially on important issues." I think Berlinski is essentially right. I wouldn't quite say he has the authority of an Apostle, but he does have a sense of proportion religious folk now lack, and besides, religious people don't seem to have much regard for Apostolic authority anyway. Issues of orthodoxy were never more important, never have the clerics so quickly abandoned their flocks, never under more frivolous pretexts, and never with such impunity.

Elsewhere someone posted Ephesians 4:1-6. This would have been a slightly more effective reprimand if the speaker had not already told someone to go masturbate, effectively ending the "dialogue" altogether. To defend the normal meaning of theological terms and to question inane doctrinal fancies is to be, in this person's mind, a demagogue.

And what we have reviewed recently are assorted carpetbaggers, interlopers and dilettantes pretending to know theology and instructing the church on its obligations. We have read moral failures who preach at us about global responsibilities never mentioned in the New Testament. We have dabbled in views of how sexuality aims at the eschaton. We have heard threadbare pleas for "a conversation" from the very same person who creates YouTube videos wherein he accuses others of heterodoxy.

Clearly this is conversation of an extremely low order.

We are at a moment in church history where it can be suggested that the perfect church is one where people can sit around and say whatever they want.

What should be our attitude toward these wolves?

If these pretenders were consistent, if they were honest with the facts of church history and theology, if they showed a willingness to converse with the MacArthurs, Mohlers, Carsons, and Driscolls, Remontrans might welcome "dialogue". Dialogue can be illuminating and enjoyable. (It rarely is, but it can be. I think it happened at the Algonquin Hotel on occasion.) But most of us have grown up observing that this kind of cheap "dialogue" is merely war by other means. These chatterboxes are not after conversation, and nothing could be clearer. We are not obligated to consider your heresy just because you call it a conversation.

This alleged dialogue, this bogus conversation is not aimed at understanding, it is to insinuate error.  I will give you a simple case in point. Find a bookstore or library with a copy of The New Christians, turn to Appendix B, page 229, and read the fifth point—top of the page—which purports to be a "response to our critics".

Fifth, because most of us write as local church practitioners rather than professional scholars, and because the professional scholars who criticize our work may find it hard to be convinced by people outside their guild, we feel it is wisest at this juncture to ask those in the academy to respond to their peers about our work. We hope to generate fruitful conversations at several levels, including both the academic and ecclesial realms. If few in the academy come to our defense in the coming years, then we will have more reason to believe we are mistaken in our thinking and that our critics are correct in their unchallenged analyses.

In other words: it may be apparent to you that we are talking rubbish, but before you tell us we're talking rubbish, talk to other academics, and if in the coming years they say we are talking rubbish, then we will reconsider our position.

Now there is the bracing wind of a Reformation is it not? Imagine that sentiment rife among the Wycliffes, Huses, Zwinglis, Luthers, Melanchthons, Knoxes, Calvins....

If few in the academy come to our defense in the coming years, then we will have more reason to believe we are mistaken in our thinking and that our critics are correct in their unchallenged analyses.

Like a mighty army moves the church of God.

Contrary to what Doug Pagitt tells you, this is not how theology was done in the past; this is not a continuation of a venerable Christian tradition.

This is malarkey.

This last Wednesday the evangelicals (or some evangelicals anyway) produced a manifesto. They called it a Declaration of Evangelical Identity and Public Commitment. I don't know what further proof we need that evangelicalism is not a force to be reckoned with.

It's a little sad, really, but evangelicals periodically cobble together some statement of their importance, relevance or existence. ⁱ   So this would be the manifesto for 2008 in case you are collecting the entire set. You can get a copy here. Actually you can get two copies, the abbreviated six-page embarrassment or the full 20-page humiliation.

On page 14 they want to rethink their place in public life, and to do so they repeat that now widely recognized falsehood that

...fundamentalism was thoroughly world-denying and politically disengaged from its outset, names such as John Jay, John Witherspoon, John Woolman, and Frances Willard in America and William Wilberforce and Lord Shaftesbury in England are a reminder of a different tradition. Evangelicals have made a shining contribution to politics in general, to many of the greatest moral and social reforms in history, such as the abolition of slavery and woman's suffrage, and even to notions crucial in political discussion today, for example, the vital but little known Evangelical contribution to the rise of the voluntary association and, through that, to the understanding of such key notions as civil society and social capital.

Don't I wish fundamentalism was thoroughly world-denying?

So this document intends to a) reaffirm evangelical identity and b) make a public statement of evangelicalism's intention to reform its own behavior which, as is common knowledge, ranks right up there with other equally obnoxious moral lepers in the public eye.

"We confess that we Evangelicals have betrayed our beliefs by our behavior."

You don't say!

They admit to having replaced biblical truths with therapeutic techniques, worship with entertainment, discipleship with growth in human potential, church growth with business entrepreneurialism...and all too often they have "set out clear, high statements of the authority of the Bible, but flouted them with lives and lifestyles that are shaped more by our own sinful preferences and by modern fashions and convenience."

What a pretentious way of admitting not only hypocrisy but abysmal judgment and incompetent leadership, and now they want us to trust them as moral guides.

Yes, last month we lost 46 people up on the mesa, and in March there was that unfortunate incident in the canyon, and before that, it's true, we lost those kindergartners at ChuckE Cheese's....

Just who requires these moral guides, I wonder. Maybe Frank the suicidal Trucker.

"All too often," we read on page 12, "we have prided ourselves on our orthodoxy..." which is a Houdini-class trick because, as we all know, evangelicalism hasn't even produced a consensus let alone an orthodoxy. What could it possibly have been proud of?

Anyway, our readers' knowledge of current events can provide the appropriate backdrop as they read these pompous camera whores.

But before you leave, along with these two pathetic documents there is a third, a Study Guide. Can you believe it?! They have a 20-page remembrance of sins and sighs and a 29-page Study Guide.

Talk about chutzpah.

If we were to discuss this travesty amongst ourselves (which they are inviting us to do), we would do well to think it through at four levels [page 3]:

1. Understanding (What is being said here?)
2. Agreement or dissent (Is what is said here true-most of it, all of it, or none of it? Why?)
3. Implications (What of it? What should this mean for my/our lives?)
4. Action (If I/we embrace this vision, what needed changes and practical next steps will I/we take?)

Ok, since you asked.

1. Nothing is being said here; this is political theater. How dumb do you think we are? How many crooks, addicts and buffoons have we watched cry their way back into the limelight? We learned all about these stunts years ago when we were still playing with our Cheerios.
2. Tough call but I'm guessing you should put me down for dissent.
3. Implications? Be serious, wouldja? One salient implication is that no one believes you anymore, and you have discredited evangelicalism at an astonishingly unpropitious moment in Western history. You are leaving people better than your sorry selves at the mercy of men like Hitchens, Dawkins...
4. Personally, I plan to take no action. I took no notice of you before and I don't anticipate any change in that policy. And if I find others taking notice of you I will warn them off with threat of locust, frogs and blood.

You cannot succeed in simple morality and you want to preach about justice? You wallow in obscene wealth and you wish to speak to us of poverty? This is just me thinking out loud here, but I think you ought to reconsider your place in private life. Very private life.

Secluded life.

Make like Amelia Earhart and never be heard from again.

_______________
ⁱ It is important to evangelicals that we capitalize evangelical. It is conspicuously less important to them that they capitalize fundamentalist.

Sensing the need for a break from the rigorous philosophical demands of Emergence, semantic plasticity and clichéd innuendos, I retreated into some light reading of ID, black holes, singularities, the Standard Model, bosons, fermions (both quarks and leptons), hadrons, fields, forces and symmetries.

Some of you may remember Shane Magee, thinker, theologian and giggling sidekick to the pastor without raiment. I've watched with the patience of Job for the next installment of FakeNaked which was to deal with hermeneutics. But here instead he speaks softly about William Haley, Richard Dawkins, his god, and education.

As something of a counterweight I also read Berlinski.

David Berlinski got his Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton and was subsequently a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics and molecular biology at Columbia University. He has written in the fields of analytic philosophy, differential topology, the philosophy of mathematics, systems analysis, and theoretical biology. He's taught at the City University of New York, Rutgers, Stanford, and the Universite de Paris.

Berlinski claims to be an atheist.

I can't speak to Magee's qualifications, if any qualifications there be. I think you will find his lecture instructive in a most perverse way.

Magee claims to be a Christian.

Berlinski discusses the following questions with some sense of humor and irony:

Has anyone provided a proof of God's inexistence?
Not even close.

Has quantum cosmology explained the emergence of the universe or why it is here?
Not even close.

Have the sciences explained why our universe seems to be fine-tuned to allow for the existence of life?
Not even close.

Are physicists and biologists willing to believe in anything so long as it is not religious thought?
Close enough.

Has rationalism in moral thought provided us with an understanding of what is good, what is right, and what is moral?
Not close enough.

Has secularism in the terrible twentieth century been a force for good?
Not even close to being close.

Is there a narrow and oppressive orthodoxy of thought and opinion within the sciences?
Close enough.

Does anything in the sciences or in their philosophy justify the claim that religious belief is irrational?
Not even ballpark.

Is scientific atheism a frivolous exercise in intellectual contempt?
Dead on.

Spencer Burke laments the tone and tenor of blogs and the media. He fears the fundamentalist movement might try to reinstate a nostalgic view of what the "Church" is, and he fears a certain amount of intimidation. He fears ad hominem attacks and what he calls "clichéd innuendos" [by which he means terms like un-Biblical, un-orthodox, un-Christian, and even heretical]. These words he thinks will threaten lasting dialogue.

It's regrettable that Tony Jones has not allowed Burke's fears to inform his own ministry.

The third of the advertisements for The New Christians has been released for our amusement. It includes a profound and scholarly discussion of the meaning of skubalon, and contains no small irritation that bookstores will therefore not carry his book.

In the discussion [mark: 6:00] Jones flings charges against those, such as John Hagee and Benny Hinn, who are "clearly preaching heterodox doctrine". That sounds a tad judgmental to me; I wonder if Spencer Burke was invited to sit down on a sofa and discuss this properly.

Maybe Spencer Burke did have something to worry about.

Webisode One dealt with the calling of a divorced and suicidal prophet and exemplar of the New Christian.
Webisode Two dealt with the church's heart-rending rejection of a misbehaving girl.
Webisode Three deals with a Christian bookstore which requested that employees not fraternize with Trucker Frank.

If you were the spokesbloke for a reformation in the 21^st Century, is this the gospel you would be spreading? We keep hearing about being on the cusp of a new century and on the brink of a new reformation, but all we see are these less-than-inspiring advertisements about the socially inept venting petty resentments toward established religion.

I wonder when we will see something less trivial?

We consider the trivia of Emergence not because it is true or reasonable or helpful. I personally don't care to respond to its proponents, at least until they start showing some regard for church teachings and traditions.

And language. Not language in its semantic plasticity; language in its precision. Richard Mitchell's kind of language.

So if it is not true, not reasonable, not helpful, (or not civil) why bother at all? I think it is important to consider their thoughts because they are instructive. Like every movement, reaction, reform, idea or school of thought that preceded it, it will leave a mark. You can't be wise as a serpent and ignore the environment. You certainly cannot minister to people without knowing something of what is floating around in their heads.

I recently had reason to think about the relationship between Jesus and the teachers of Israel, and a lot of preachers have speculated about what Jesus taught the lawyers and separatists when he was 12. I have often wondered what he learned. Certainly their questions betrayed their presuppositions, their tendencies, their loyalties, their priorities, their prejudices....

I think that is probably the historical conversation I would most like to have witnessed. Surely that informed his ministry and shaped how he confronted ideas.

And how one contends in this world of ideas is important.

David Berlinski probably couldn't care less about emergence, but he does care about silly ideas and ideas in their ascendency, and he has written a book, The Devil's Delusion. I just got a copy yesterday afternoon and have read only the Preface and first chapter (No Gods Before Me).

But to introduce the book I will quote the last paragraphs of the preface and then one small slice from the first chapter to give a taste of his writing.

While science has nothing of value to say on the great and aching questions of life, death, love, and meaning, what the religious traditions of mankind have said forms a coherent body of thought. The yearnings of the human soul are not in vain. There is a system of belief adequate to the complexity of experience. There is recompense for suffering. A principle beyond selfishness is at work in the cosmos. All will be well.

I do not know whether any of this is true. I am certain that the scientific community does not know that it is false.

Occupied by their own concerns, a great many men and women have a dull, hurt, angry sense of being oppressed by the sciences. They are frustrated by endless scientific boasting. They suspect that as an institution, the scientific community holds them in contempt. They feel no little distaste for those speaking in its name.

They are right to feel this way. I have written this book for them.

And from page nine:

After comparing more than two thousand DNA samples, an American molecular geneticist, Dean Hamer, concluded that a person's capacity to believe in God is linked to his brain chemicals. Of all things! Why not his urine? Perhaps it will not be amiss to observe that Dr. Hamer has made the same claim about homosexuality, and if he has refrained from arguing that a person's capacity to believe in molecular genetics is linked to a brain chemical, it is, no doubt, owing to a prudent sense that once that door is opened, God knows how and when anyone will ever slam it shut again.

____________________
The Devil's Delusion: Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions
David Berlinski
Crown Forum, 2008
ISBN: 978-0-307-39626-6